Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

There has been good media coverage of the new web browser Google launched yesterday but most of the articles I’ve read focus on the user interface - like tabbed browsing (ho hum) and an integrated search / URL bar (a little confusing but ok I guess). With talk of a renewed browser war heating up the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Netscape v. Internet Explorer it’s important to understand what is at stake this time around.

The first browser war was essentially about server software sales. The thinking at the time was that if consumers used the Netscape browser to access the internet that corporate IT managers would purchase Netscape server software to handle those browser requests. Microsoft won that round and today its Internet Information Services package powers a significant chunk of the internet servers online (pretty good considering the competition is FREE).

The next round, Internet Explorer v. Mozilla was more of a grudge match. As a non-profit, open source contender Mozilla really sought to improve the internet browsing experience since Microsoft’s own browser development seemed to have stagnated. Programmers from all over the world contributed to the project and put out a pretty great browser that made designers and programmers alike rejoice for its web standards compliance. This effort has basically been about taking back the keys to the web and giving them to the people - a noble effort for sure but so far it’s been a losing battle as Microsoft continues to dominate the market.

In the latest round, Google, unlike Mozilla, is a private, for profit company that is seeking to overthrow the Internet Explorer dynasty. The real innovation in Google’s browser (called Chrome) is what it can (or will someday) do when it’s NOT connected to the internet. You see, in order for things like Google Docs, Gmail, and other web apps to work a user typically needs to be connected to the internet. But with a browser like Chrome users could potentially run web apps without an internet connection and upload their work to ‘the cloud’ the next time they’re connected. In order for this to work a web browser needs to include the ability to execute scripts, database calls, etc. - basically it needs to be a local version of an internet server. Whether or not this is the case with Chrome, only time will tell. Perhaps this feature (if it exists) could simply be a hedge to Google’s other goal of Internet access everywhere.

I’ve already downloaded Chrome (on my PC - sadly no Mac version yet) and it’s definitely zippy. Whether or not this and the other incremental features offered will be enough to get folks to switch is another question entirely - just look at how many people still use Internet Explorer despite the HUGE advantages offered by Mozilla…

If you think iTunes is the Web 2.0 way to find and listen to new music think again. Instead of simply delivering music to consumers in a new way, Last.fm uses the crowd to deliver targeted, streaming tunes for free.

Admittedly I didn’t get it at first. I had installed a precurser to the Last.fm software called ‘Audio Scrobbler’ that tracked which songs I listened to in iTunes and created online lists of the tracks and artists I played the most. Interesting but not terribly useful. After Audio Scrobbler was merged into Last.fm the website gained some social features that allowed members to view profiles of other members who had similar musical tastes. This meant if I found another member who liked Josh Joplin I could browse to see what else that member listened to in hopes I would like that music as well. Again, interesting information but not addictive by any means.

But the feature that I initially dismissed as useless is actually the reason I use Last.fm now: streaming stations. With the free Last.fm player you can listen to ’stations’ made up of artists similar to the artist you search for. For example, if you listen to the New Pornographers similar artist station you’ll hear the lesser known Mates of State, Destroyer, and Camera Obscura. The similar artists are determined by other members’ listening patterns and a tag-based system that is frighteningly accurate. Since becoming a Last.fm addict just a few weeks ago I’ve already purchased several CDs of artists I had never heard of before Last.fm.

Of course the streaming music player is limited in that you can’t rewind songs and can only skip forward (you can’t get everything for free, now can you?). The player even integrates information from Amazon, iTunes, and the Wikipedia to give you artist and song information in one location - how’s that for a mashup?

I’ve pretty much stopped listening to my iTunes library at work altogether in favor of Last.fm - now that’s disruptive!

Once your website is up and running it’s important to get feedback on aspects of the customer experience that just can’t be quantified by analytics alone. An online survey is even a great tool for folks thinking of starting a business to gain important market intelligence before jumping in. We run surveys on our sites from time to time when we have specific questions - like what our paid members think of our service offerings or user interface tweaks - and our tool of choice is Surveymonkey.

You can use Surveymonkey to create simple to complex online surveys and it’s free if you have less than 10 questions and 100 respondents. Otherwise most businesses can get by with the $20 a month plan that lets you send unlimited surveys to a predetermined number of respondents. Unfortunately there’s no ala carte option so if you run surveys infrequently like we do you’ll want to cancel your survey subscription once you’ve gathered your responses.

Surveymonkey even provides email tools to help you send out a survey link to you customers - just upload an excel file with your email addresses and it’s done! The analyticial tools provided online are adequate but if you want to do in depth statistical analysis I recommend popping your data into Excel. Even the online interface at Surveymonkey.com is superb - one of the best we’ve used.

A well designed survey is a great way to gather market intelligence that can give you a leg up on the competition while improving your online business. With powerful and easy to use tools like Surveymonkey anyone can get results quickly and cheaply.

If you’re serious about building a business online you need a good web analytics package. In the past decent analytics packages were beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized web operators but today you can get professional level reporting from Google Analytics for FREE.

I won’t be able to cover all the things you can do with web analytics in this short post but suffice it to say if there’s anything you want to know about your visitors, Google Analytics can help you figure it out. Here are just a few things we’ve used our analytics to determine:

• Where should we focus our marketing efforts? Google Analytics helps us understand which traffic sources generate the most pageviews per visitor so we can apply our marketing dollars appropriately. A couple months back we decided to give Facebook ads a try and saw that our Facebook-referred visitors viewed 50% more pages than similar campaigns. Since we saw the ads were more effective we increased Facebook spending while decreasing spending on our other campaigns.
• Where do our visitors live? With Google Analytics you can drill down to a country / state / city to see how many visitors you site receives from a given location. We use this information to guide our new content creation and tweak ad campaigns to target certain geographic regions.
• What keywords are visitors using to find our site? This is super important and informs our search engine optimization strategy. Often the results can be surprising and can lead to new insights into your market or industry.
• How is our site performing in terms of transactions? With Google Analytics you can set up various goals to track such as purchases, new user registrations, etc. We look at these closely and make changes to the site to see how they affect our goal metrics. Not sure if the new checkout page on your site is an improvement? Consult the analytics to see how your conversion rate has changed.

Using an analytics package is crucial if you want to better understand and grow your online business. Just remember, analytics alone won’t get you to your goals - it’s just another tool to help you make decisions.

Google Analytics helps you visualize your online traffic with a simple to use interface.

Feedburner is a great tool for managing your RSS feeds, and lucky for you, it’s free to use! I admit I was a little late to the RSS/newsfeed party but I started using Feedburner a few months back and now I use it literally every day.

What does Feedburner do? For starters, it helps you track the number of folks who are reading your blog (or other RSS items). Typical analytics packages aren’t able to capture your feed readers since they don’t always visit your site through a traditional web browser. Feedburner also helps you understand which articles or items your readers are clicking to help you guage reader reactions - something that can be complicated using analytics alone.

The other great thing about Feedburner is that it organizes and simplifies your feeds into a single link. No need for the fruit salad approach to providing feeds (RSS, RSS2, Atom, etc.) with Feedburner - just let Feedburner do the necessary formatting to fit each reader’s needs.

Since Feedburner is owned by Google they are able to offer seamless integration with Google Adsense which helps you monetize your feeds. This is huge since folks reading your news in a reader typically aren’t seeing the ads that are on your site; Feedburner makes it happen. There are even tools for helping your optimize and publicize your feeds which can really help build up your subscriber base.

Feedburner is an amazing (free!) tool that any webmaster can use to manage RSS feeds with ease. Now if it could only write my blog for me, then it would be perfect!

As more and more software applications are migrating to the web it’s interesting to consider the various interface styles designers are using. Unfortunately it seems like many application designers making the move from desktop to browser interface are attempting to mimic Windows on the web. Others, however, are using the switch to rethink the idea of a user interface with great success. Some of our least favorite we based software interfaces that feel a little too Windows:

Joomla

The open source content management software is, like Windows, powerful software. Too bad it’s no fun to use. The Vista-style icons are a little too cutesy and the drop down menus are painful to use online. Some may not agree with me but I have never seen a javascript drop-down menu implementation that I liked - they are all awkward and mainly useless. If you have so many navigation links that you absolutely need drop-down menus I’d argue that your navigation is probably overly complex.

Volusion (click the thumbnail to see the full size images)

Back when I was shopping for an e-commerce solution the admin interface was a very important factor in making my decision. My partner and I ended up choosing Volusion partly because it had one of the best admin interfaces around - but it still has plenty of room for improvement. Like most other packages, the color scheme is clearly Windows inspired with lots of blues and grays. In an attempt to make the product editor form more ‘user friendly’ most of the form fields are hidden by default (much like the way MS likes to hide unused menu options in Office apps). Once you expand all the form fields to finally find the one field you wanted to change you realize you’re in way over your head - how many fields do you need for a single product listing!?

phpMyAdmin

First, let me say I love phpMyAdmin - I honestly couldn’t function without it on a daily basis. It’s a solid tool that does what it’s supposed to do and for the most part it’s easy to use. My biggest complaint is that the interface seems to drastically change with each new revision. The version I’m using now has gone to using icons to represent actions which is almost never a good interface decision. I always forget which little icon means ‘browse’ and which one means ‘properties’. Database administration software is rightfully complex but the constant interface changes and use of icons adds unnecessary frustration for users.

In a later post I plan on talking about some of the web software interfaces that are getting things right. Surprisingly the number of good interfaces I use on a daily basis outweigh the bad ones - stay tuned!

One of the more specialized forms of data ranching is the consumer review website where users are asked to post their opinions about various subjects and items. Everyone has an opinion and it is quick and easy for members to add their thoughts and ratings to consumer review websites.

Consumer review websites use the wisdom of crowds to create a resource that simply could not exist without the internet. Forums and IM simply offer new ways for individuals to communicate; e-commerce websites are catalogs with a few new bells and whistles; blogs are simply magazines produced by the masses. But aggregating opinions and packaging the group consensus is a new idea altogether, made possible almost entirely through the distributed nature of the internet. Consumer review websites add transparency to industries that were previously closed to outsiders, tap the powerful wisdom of the crowd to create new knowledge, and give a voice to previously unheard consumers.

A base of information is needed to kick start any consumer review website. That is, the basic info about which your users will be adding reviews will need to be in place

These days even e-commerce websites are getting into the data ranching game by soliciting user reviews of their products. Sites like Amazon.com have amassed millions of reviews on everything from books to bicycle tires. Amazon even allows users to upload their own product shots while sites like VintageVantage post photos of actual customers sporting VintageVantage t-shirts.

For the most part customers find these reviews to be helpful in making purchasing decisions but retailers have an incentive to suppress negative reviews while promoting more positive ones. In fact review management is very common on most e-commerce websites and this is really a breach of trust between review submitter and review aggregator. If product reviewers or potential customers recognize review management this can be very damaging to the image of the retailer in the minds of its most passionate customers.

Photos, on the other hand, are a great way to grow content on any e-commerce website with little risk of alienating users. Unfortunately photos are not easily indexed by search engines so this type of content, while useful, generally does not generate increased traffic to an online store.

In this age of user-generated content the lines between online catalogs and data ranching are being blurred all the time. But does it make sense for retailers to get into the publishing business? Stay tuned for our analysis of consumer review websites as data ranches!

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of and even used Wikipedia to find information about a subject. Wikipedia is a tremendous resource and a great example of using collective intelligence and effort to build a truly useful data ranch. The name Wikipedia alludes to the fact that the website is built on a software package called a ‘wiki,’ Hawaiian for ‘fast.’

Wikis are great at encouraging user participation. Rather than simply viewing static information like on a blog, users are encouraged to help write new articles and enhance those that already exist. Wikipedia in particular has seen its data ranch grow entirely through the contributions of its readers.

Wikis are also extremely flexible in that they allow users to quickly and freely create and link online articles. This flexibility even allows other users to update articles with additions and deletions, in theory keeping articles entirely up to date through the collective intelligence of many individuals.

The flexibility of wikis can also be a drawback in some cases. Because users are allowed to edit existing articles, there is the chance that data can be updated with malicious or inaccurate content. Readers of wikis usually understand this and therefore view them through a skeptical lens. Wiki administrators must constantly monitor content to ensure that important information is not altered or removed by unscrupulous users.

Another drawback to current wiki software is that the resulting web of content can be difficult to navigate. A wiki is well suited to something like an encyclopedia since users are generally searching for information on a particular subject and can enter a query to find what they need. On the other hand if a user were looking for a list of the best restaurants within 10 miles of his or her house a wiki would not be helpful unless someone (who lived nearby) already created that list in the wiki. And even if that list did exist, how could anyone trust it since it is difficult to see how many users have contributed to that article?

Wikis work well in controlled environments (such as intranets) and for specific online applications but for many data ranching needs, they are simply not the right choice.

Forums are all over the Internet, covering topics ranging far and wide - and they are data ranches. An organizer opens forums on a particular topic and waits for users to show up and join the conversation (and hopefully add data to the ranch).

The great thing about forums is that they are so ubiquitous. Almost everyone knows how to use them by now and they’re generally very accessible. Just enter your screen name and email address and you can become an instant contributor. Forums are generally easy to organize and to navigate and these days most users are pretty savvy about posting photos, videos, and even HTML.

More importantly, forums are one of the better “data ranches” at creating a virtuous cycle of data growth. That is, the more data and information that is posted, the more data and information a forum will attract. The bigger your ranch gets, the faster it grows.

Forums are not the ideal way to organize answers or knowledge on a particular topic due to the free-flowing nature of conversations. A great answer to your question may be posted halfway through a discussion but you’d have to read the entire thread just to find the single nugget. As such, forums can be time consuming to navigate. It’s as if your ranch allows pigs, cows, and horses to roam freely into one another’s pens - so you never know where to look for your prize sow!

And while forum members may have “status markers” denoting their levels of expertise, users generally view all posted information through a skeptical lens. Likewise, new members often find themselves the subject of “flames” for posting a question that has already been answered elsewhere – as if users are expected to read the entire complicated, crudely organized knowledge base before seeking help. Poor information organization is frustrating to knowledge seekers and knowledge owners alike.

Data ranching with forum software is an excellent idea, particularly when the goal is community interaction. For building a knowledge base of fact-based information, however, consider a data ranch alternative to forums.