Sally Falkow has an enlightening post on the nature of social media traffic. A lot of people come quickly and then leave. There’s no commitment or stickiness. She cites Scott Karp comparing Digg traffic to a “pack of wild dogs.”
Archive for January, 2007
Wild dog traffic
January 31, 2007Maybe we’re not yet ready for digital democracy
January 28, 2007I’ve always been a big believer in digital democracy, but companies like Diebold make me wonder if we’re really grown up enough to handle it.
Princeton professor and info security legend Edward Felton has been a thorn in Diebold’s side. Last fall, he and two graduate students demonstrated how they could easily introduce vote-altering viruses into Diebold’s electronic voting machine. Diebold responded by adding a hinged, locked door over the memory card reader. Diebold was so proud of the solution that it boasted about it on its website.
In a wonderful post from last week, Felton’s graduate assistant, Alex Haldeman, describes how he was able to deduce from photos on Diebold’s site the type of key and ridge configuration needed to unlock the door. He made three keys to look like the ones in the Diebold photograph and, amazingly, two of them worked. So Diebold’s clever solution was undone by its own promotion. All Diebold machines use the same lock, by the way. It’s one used in hotel mini-bars and apparently pretty easy to pick.
Online advertising still off the mark
January 26, 2007Dave Morgan of Tacoda has a thoughtful opinion piece in Media Post today about the failure of online advertising to live up to its potential to target viewers’ interests. He points to a compelling statistic from a 2005 Roper Public Affairs study: “only 21% of people said that advertising adds to their enjoyment of the Internet, versus 47% for magazines and 47% for newspapers. “
Wow, that’s backwards, isn’t it? In theory, online advertising should be more useful and enjoyable because it’s more relevant. But as Morgan points out, advertisers are still stuck on banners and buttons and leaderboards. Most efforts to make ads more effective have so far just made them more intrusive. Does anyone else get offended when they go to a website and an audio ad starts playing? Nevertheless, the online ad market continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Imagine what would happen if advertisers got it right?
Personally, I’ve had fun recently looking at the ads that show up in my Gmail box. I find Google’s choice of what ads to show me based upon the content of e-mails is entertaining and often funny.
Advertising free-fall at the L.A. Times
January 26, 2007The L.A. Times, in what is perhaps a precursor to the problems brewing at other newspapers, has announced a strategy to revamp its editorial profile to lead with online reporting. When you look at the numbers, though, you have to wonder if it’s too little, too late:
MediaPost quoting Editor James O’Shea: “‘In 2004, automotive print advertising at the Los Angeles Times totaled $102 million. And what will it be this year? $55 million.’ While the company made up some of the difference in Web ads, O’Shea said the paper was losing more in print ads than it was recouping online.”
Omigod! The paper lost 46% of its automotive advertising in a single year? How can you change your business model fast enough to make up for that??
Hanging around
January 25, 2007No matter how the social media market develops, you can be sure there’ll be a robust business for outdoor advertising. Just try this on your blog!
Marriott (Bill) joins the conversation
January 17, 2007Hats off to Bill Marriott who, at 75, is diving into the blogosphere. He ‘ll dictate his entries to a secretary, who’ll type them into the blog authoring system. Hey, it’s a start! Why don’t more CEOs do this?
http://www.blogs.marriott.com
Learning Mambo by trial and error
January 16, 2007I relaunched my website as well as a new site for my forthcoming book the other day, having moved both to an open-source content management system called Mambo. A year ago, I wrote about my own (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to install Mambo on a local server. This time I did it the smart way, using the Metropolis service provided by GoDaddy to its hosting account customers. Metropolis offers several 
free software packages for your server and is a nice resource that I’ll bet few GoDaddy customers even know about.
Mambo installed in just a few minutes and a few clicks. I then spent the next two weeks trying to figure it out. There are a few tutorials on the Web but none that I found prepared me to understand the logical structure used by Mambo. That was trial and error and it took a long time.
I’m a big fan of content management systems. My website was previously built on Microsoft FrontPage. While that gave me plenty of flexibility to play with look and feel, the pages were basically locked in stone once they were created. You couldn’t easily share content between sections of a site, move things around, expose and hide sections or move your site to a new template. Also, your page designs were stored on a local machine, meaning you couldn’t easily access them from another computer.
With a CMS, everything is in a database on the server and the content is stored separately from the page templates. Changing the site design is a snap, and content items can be displayed in a variety of ways on different sections of the site. For example, it’s simple to have an article display on the home page and also an inside page. In FrontPage, you’d need to have two copies of the article to do that, which creates all kinds of problems.
Mambo’s hierarchy uses a concept of sections, categories and content items. This structure made little sense to me when I first encountered it and I’m not sure it even makes sense now. Every content item must belong to a category and a section. You can display all items in a category or a section, which is very powerful. But I’m not sure why you need both containers.
There are basically two types of display: blog and table. A blog shows items in reverse-chron order (you can change that) with a snippet of introductory text and a “read more” link. A table displays an index of content items in rows. It’s nice being able to switch back and forth and try different styles. Mambo gives you lots of options for hiding or displaying titles, icons, navigation devices, ratings systems and other goodies. The problem is just keeping track of it all. Unless you set your global defaults carefully, your pages can all end up looking slightly different from each other.
The content editor that came with my package is MostlyCE Admin, a very nice WYSIWYG editor. The performance frustrated me until I realized you could turn off a bunch of resource-hogging features and improve speed dramatically.
There are a couple of hundred free Mambo templates. Once you set up your site, it’s fun to download a few and applying them to your site. The process is fast and easy and it’s one of the best ways to see the value of a CMS approach.
My sites are still works-in-progress and I’m sure there’s plenty about Mambo I have yet to discover. If I had it to do over again, I’d take the time to buy a book. I also wish I knew more about the PhP scripting language and how cascading style sheets work. I’ve been frustrated, for example, by the size of the headline type on my site but have been unable to figure out how to change it. There’s also a nav bar at the top that appears to be hard-coded into the design but which I can’t seem to modify or delete. I’ll figure this out eventually, but for now it’s just frustrating.
Now I have to figure out what to tinker with during the NEXT holiday season!
