All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.”

From Wired. There are a number of great engines to check out based on this article. Collecta looks useful for companies who want to find out what is said about them online while ParkingSpots can help you find a parking spot.

This article highlights the search trend away from generic search to topic specific search and action specific search. My guess is that some of these new search engines will be bought up by the bigger players like Google.

From the Groundswell blog at Forrester Research. While the topline is “Social Media isn’t just for teenagers,” it is striking how many business people currently read and participate in social media, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter, to connect with other businesses to do business. Social media has become mainstream.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.”

From the New York Times (free registration required; stories available free for short time).  Part of this article is typical feel-good roundup. But it also highlights the key reasons smaller businesses should set up a blog, especially if one or more people in the company like to write. I slightly disagree with one of their sources who says companies with a product have less of a reason to blog. In fact, many people who use products are very interested in how a particular product is created, how it evolves, how it is maintained. More important, blogs allow customers and prospects to comment and engage the business. That’s always valuable.

From GrokDotCom. This is a really excellent discussion about the possible reasons businesses rely on instinct rather than hard data to make business decisions.

I believe it is culture: people start and run businesses based upon interacting directly with customers, in person and on the phone and by email. The quantitative skills required for optimization and testing typically are found in the accounting department and possibly a marketing research department. Most staffers don’t have an analytic background and so don’t necessarily think in terms of data and testing for marketing materials. They get that through customer contacts. The quantitative research function, if it exists at all, is part of business planning, not necessarily day to day marketing, which is what this article argues is needed.

From my client experience, aside from the cultural issues, the big problem is what to measure. I tell clients to start first with what they want to accomplish. It can be a small goal, for example, to get a site visitor to click on a button or signup for email. Or retweet their tweets. That tells you what to measure. And also to limit what you measure to one or two things to start. And to keep some sort of log file so you can measure results, recheck your assumptions and goals, and all the good stuff that comes from tracking your online marketing.

But this process does not have to be terribly complex. Indeed, complexity in measuring online marketing is the kiss of death. The best results come from incremental changes and optimization based on testing different ways to incent and motivate people to interact with your marketing.

Photo courtesy of Jon Clark’s Flickr stream.

From a Marketwire report posted on iStockAnalyst. Based on a press release about recent research from the Aberdeen Group. The Marketwire piece has more detail than the Aberdeen summary. If you want to figure out if any business is recession-proof, it looks like internet marketing will suffer less than traditional marketing, mostly because the cost structure is less and reach is potentially greater than, for example, direct mail. However, what works always depends on the needs of a particular business.

From AllFacebook. Amazing fact: 41% of people in Iceland are on Facebook. So if you have a product geared towards Icelanders… Equally interesting is that the US penetration is only 14%. That argues for a lot of future growth. It’s also clear the service has become more a utility like the phone company and the internet itself. In fact, it may rival eBay in creating an online ecosystem that supports hundreds of thousands of businesses and jobs.

But I hear less about the “why”: Why use Twitter at all, when there are already so many other distractions to your workday, or your home life? Why bother talking to people you won’t ever meet, when you have real-world friends to keep up with? What kind of relationship can you hope to form on Twitter, anyway? Is there something wrong with you? Do you have ADD? Are you lonely, anti-social, weird? Or are you just needy?”

From Marketing Profs. Her four reasons are good for individuals and businesses. Plus the comments are equally interesting. Mostly this is a good case study for how businesses can use Twitter to gauge interest and value of their offerings.

“The evidence we found was absolutely shocking,” researcher Dr Vinesh Oommen from the Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said.

“In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.”

From News.com.au. But then we all know this based on experience, don’t we? The trick is to balance private and public spaces based on the activity.

From GUUUI.

While I’m a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side software. And ways of thinking about web page and web site publishing. These paradigms don’t work, unfortunately.

One solution is what we’ve done with Red Wrangler, breaking out the web site publishing problems into three parts: content, templates, and navigation links. The latter is sometimes dynamic, sometimes hard-coded in the templates. Typically templates are created by people who know HTML and CSS and we provide support to make it all work easily. Non-technical people typically work only with content using the WYSIWYG editor. When you do create a page, you link to that page either by updating the navigation links and/or linking from other pages. It’s not a perfect solution but it avoids the confusion you see in this video.

The only solution I’ve seen work that is similar to Corel’s is Google’s publishing product. You can drag and drop pages and the functionality is fairly intuitive. I believe, for example, that Google’s product updates any navigation links dynamically based on how you order pages.

However, like Corel, Google’s product thinks of web site and web page publishing as a silo. In fact, publishing web sites is part of a larger process. Red Wrangler is unique, so far, because we make it easy to corral in one place all the other related internet marketing activities that go with publishing a web site or a web page. For example, most business sites have a Contact Us page that generates leads and those leads must be gathered for follow-up and marketing with direct mail and email.

In any event, if you’re interested in watching paper prototyping, this is an interesting video.

URLs:

http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=2119

As if Mac owners need more proof of their creative superiority, this report describes a test where people exposed to the Apple logo found more creative uses for a brick than people exposed to the IBM logo. Well, duh. From Science Daily. Found through a short but interesting status on the Apple logo in general and Steve Jobs’ fixation with the New York City’s new logo, at OpenLeft.

URLs:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080328085918.htm

http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5019

From Rubicon Consulting. Their research shows the iPhone is the first real threat to laptop computing. And that the only weakness of the iPhone is the web browser: it crashes often on major sites because it is a Safari browser, not a solid tested browser like Firefox.

In terms of web design, my experience is that the iPhone requires little or no adjustments to web page designs. Average or big fonts read better on the iPhone than small fonts. And fixed widths for the content area work better than fluid widths. (Why? Because fluid widths are greater and require horizontal scrolling to read a single line.) Otherwise, the iPhone makes it easy to browse online with a web browser.

URLs:

http://rubiconconsulting.com/insight/whitepapers/2008/04/the-apple-iphone-is-easily.html

Since getting far too obsessed with SEO and Pay-Per-Click over the last few years they agreed that their next ‘big project’ would be to increase the number of visitors that actually buy from their websites…

…and they quickly became far too obsessed with conversion rate optimization instead.”

Get their free report that shows how to optimize Google’s Website Optimization tool which is an amazing, addictive tool. They also link to other optimization services. Plus they have a cute squirrel mascot with a very funny email signup privacy notice.

Found through the MailChimp blog which has it’s own cute monkey mascot. Between cute monkeys and squirrels and our Cowboy Bob as company mascots, the animals probably win.

URLs:

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/testing-tips-from-conversion-rate-squirrel/

In other words, a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time. (Mathematically inclined readers will note that this increase is linear, not exponential.)”

From UseIt.com, Jakob Nielsen’s site. There are a lot of links to sell, sell, sell their reports but the article is still worth a read. And worth thinking about if you have clients whose sites attract middle-aged visitors.

Fully half of adults have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology. Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them; and some is rooted in people’s inability to afford or their unwillingness to buy the gear that would bring them into the digital age.”

Interesting report (PDF here, Press summary here) from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. In addition to this sort of data, they also distill the information into 10 different types of people who use the internet. (I’m a cross between a Lackluster Veteran, Productivity Enhancer, Connected but Hassled, and Indifferent. Go figure.)