So here is an idea i’ve been toying with for a while. A colleague at Jufa Intermedia and I drew it out on a whiteboard over lunch one day. Should we develop it?

The idea is developing a CMS that treats pages as stand-alone pieces of micro-content. Here is the gambit: the navigation structure is dynamically created, and the pages are easy to find using search tools. So you can both explore and/or search for specific elements. If you don’t know what you want but know the topic you explore, and if you do know exactly what you want you can narrow your search down rapidly. But wait, there’s more…

People don’t usually consume whole websites, they use parts of it at any given moment of need.  Search boxes are the second most used navigation element within most sites, yet most site-specific search functions… well, frankly suck.

One of the biggest problems client’s have is
how they will structure their IA:

copy the organization’s operational structure

or

discover how the user  consumes the information provided.

The answer is sort of obvious from an effective marketing stand-point - you design for the user. But it’s not that simple, because in larger organizations, the workflow of how content is published does not usually correspond to how the world consumes that information. So if you can’t create good content, then your “effective” user experience is for naught.

So instead of publishing to an area that you are responsible for maintaining, you simply publish for various categories (to seed the choice), you tag it and you tell it who your intended audience is from pre-loaded user-profiles. So you don’t publish to a part of the site, you publish to the TYPE of person you want to read the content.

The CMS will dynamically generate menus based on traffic patterns for each pre-determined user type.

It will guess at what a particular user is looking for based on what the user is looking at and how long they spend looking at it. That’s the first part. Second, is that each page must standalone. So you publish a page so it can be found using an onsite search engine. You can categorize and tag, as you may a blog entry. So instead of a site of pages linked together through a man-made and stagnant architecture, you effectively create a catalog of the content.

Imagine surfing a large site
(1,000+ pages) like you would looking for a book on Amazon.

You have recommendations based on previous experience, you have recommendations based on others experience, you have categories you can browse, and you have simple and advanced search functions for narrowing your results. If the content contains “web 2.0″ user-generated features such as comments, ratings, etc. then they can be integrated into the CMS as well, by helping rank search results, and offering new navigations methods.

So, any VC’s out there want to fund this project?

Bruce

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In less than 5,000 days, the Web has gone from the linking of a few computers in a lab to satellite images of the earth at our fingertips. Today, the Web has 100 billion clicks and 55 trillion links and carries 2 million e-mails per second. There are 1 billion PC chips in use, 65 billion phone calls made per year, and 600 billion RFID tags being used. Every second, we move the equivalent of half the Library of Congress across the Web. All that in less than 5,000 days.

So what will the next 5,000 days bring?

In the same inbox I just received an invitation by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle for the Web 2.0 Summit taking place in San Francisco Nov 5-7th. So what’s next indeed..!? Hopefully I’ll find out at the Summit and share it with you.

Bruce

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“Sea-saw reduction/offset” - by this I mean if you work on both reducing your carbon footprint AND off-setting the stuff you can’t or don’t want to reduce by paying/building/planting something that removes carbon from the atomosphere, you’re actually accelerating environmental success. Cause let’s just be honest… no one is going to give up all carbon-generating aspects of life just ’cause the world is dying. So the point of Mad Monkey bamboo t-shirts is to make it easy to be cool and be green.

This is a for-profit company. I endorse the theory that environmental causes are accelerated if they have commercial viability. If there is a profit centre in it, investment money will flow. If investment money flows, innovation and consumer adoption will accelerate. You want to speed up the formula? Focus on innovative for-profit investment-backed start-ups.

mymadmonkey.com

Buy a t-shirt!

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Here are highlights from my notes, but the best parts I wasn’t writing or Twittering, so below my highlights is the link to the full transcript.

Where are we finding all this new “extra” time for playing with Social Media sites (Facebook, etc)? Well… “Human’s now have a cognitive surplus that TV has been masking for 50 years..”

We spend “200 billion hourrs of thought per year in the USA watching TV”. Or to put it another way “now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television…”

Web 2.0 is developing an “architecture of participation” - best, and most succinct Web 2.0 definition yet, this is quoted from Tim O’Reilly actually, so he gets the cred.

“The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here…those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.”

“… someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, … enough of the collective goodwill of citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.”

On speaking to a TV producer about World of Warcraft, “I could see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.” At least they’re doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? Yeah, I saw that one too….However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, from personal experience, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter..”

Traditional media was about consumption, the new paradigm is about consumer consuming, producing and sharing; so if it is “targeted at you but does not include you, it is by definition broken.”

Transcript:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

[addendum] Video:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/web2expo-clay-shirky.html 

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What do you think? Which of the last three do you think will draw the most interest? (see the last two posts for the other proposals)

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What do a 19^th century Italian economist who accidentally defined a pseudo-law of nature, a post World War II American statistician who is responsible for today’s dominance by Japanese car manufacturers, and the 80’s poster boy for glam rock Boy George, have to do with Web 2.0?

Better yet, how can these diverse individuals help your organization leap frog the competition, create consistent and constant innovation, and drive your marketing so hard and fast that your operational people hate you?

So many questions! Come, listen, and participate. I may not have your answers, but I do have tools for you to use to come up with your own. Learn lessons exemplified by popular Web 2.0 successes (and failures).

Who should come: you are a bricks and mortar organization selling products on shelves, you are selling services at the boardroom table, you are a non-profit raising awareness, you are a pure Web company trying to manage its meteoric success, you are a corporation trying to find new ways to be nimble. Everyone can take something away and apply it immediately to their organization.

This talk can be personalized to use the audience to provide examples of how Web 2.0 success principles can be applied to your organization. If you’re interested in having me personalize the talk for your organization, please email me ahead of time with your organization’s background and I’ll see if I can fit you into the presentation. Take advantage, this is free consulting!

Tags: Business Strategy Innovation Audience Participation

Technical expertise: Low

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Total Mash-Up Web Design and Development

There is no point in starting from scratch anymore. This talk will show you how to create a web architecture for your organization that takes advantage of world-class applications. Mash and grind up together the best the web has to offer to create an enterprise class web presence so you can spend your budget on content and marketing instead of re-creating the wheel.

These websites:

• Are fully scalable; they will grow as your organization’s needs do.
• Are easy to administer – they are designed to be user friendly.
• Allow you total flexibility over design, layout, look and feel.
• Are Search engine friendly.
• Are primed for all sorts of marketing tactics.
• Can be constructed iteratively; get pieces up as you need them.
• Are cost-effective to build and design.
• And much much more!

Your project can range from a simple small business web page to major corporate rollouts supporting client log-in support, customer service ticketing systems, e-commerce, fund-raising, and many other applications.

Stretch your budget and impress your stakeholders – come and learn how to mash and grind at Web 2.0!

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People are Googling your organization and keywords related to what you do. Are they finding you? Once they find you, they Google you to learn more about you from other sources. What are they finding there?

This talk is about building more (higher quality) traffic and ensuring that traffic converts through establishing the expert presence with a golden reputation.

Your reputation is priceless – don’t let it be left to chance. Experts are respected, experts who are validated and recommended by others, receive more business. It’s that simple.  The perception of your online reputation is critical and you must learn how to take ownership of it.

Learn how to use on the Internet to dominate search engine rankings for your keywords and your organization’s name at the same time.  This talk will expose the powerful concepts of Web 2.0 – where giving more means getting more – to market your site. You will learn how to position your organization as an expert in its industry/sector and dominate search engine visibility using wikis, blogs, forums, social bookmarking, and other Web 2.0 sites.

Who should attend: Corporate, Start-ups, Government, Non-Profit, and Small and Medium sizes Businesses; any organization looking to the internet for marketing and communications – that’s you!

Tags: SMO, PR 2.0, SEO, SEM, Authority Engineering

Technical Expertise required: Low

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I did make it a priority last night for an hour between the web audit and e-marketing plan due last night and a database of members missing critical information (um.. usernames) for a huge site launching last night, anyways, I submitted 3 proposals to Web 2.0 conference in NY Sep-08.

Today I met with a new client, and while sorting schedule meeting times for the next few weeks, I found out one of them will be at Web 2.0 in SF later this month. I mentioned the talk proposals and they asked me what the topics would be. So I pitched them, and they wanted to hear the talks immediately! So that is a good sign.

So here’s what I’m going to do - put up the pitches over the next three days to get your input.

But before that, I’d like to get some advice on something else. You may notice that my diagrams are.. well.. sketchy at best. I have no artistic talent, but I tend to use whiteboards extensively to draw out sticks, boxes and circles for clients, and they love them. But I guess putting up online is a different game.

So to my point - what do YOU think of my diagrams? Unprofessional? Too ugly to make a point? Comments please!

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Let me tell you , i was shocked, SHOCKED!, at the cost of food. On an enclosed resort with no competition, they can charge whatever they want. So I forked out $20/meal on average. Good food, fine, I can take it. But then I went into town. It was the same damn thing. Seriously, I paid more for a cab ride in Cancun, Mexico than I did in Manhattan. Nonetheless, how can food and service be the same cost? $75 for a 60 minute massage. $6 for a mojito. Come on..

Then I walked one block up from the beach. Massage, $33 for 60 minutes, mojito $4, meals $10.

2 blocks up, massage $10, mojito $2, and meals $4-5.

I didn’t venture further away…

But this is what the cost of pretty much anything in Mexico looks like:

Essentially the further you are from the beach, it’s an exponential decay in cost. Things get cheap fast the further you are from the beach. From food, drink and service to real estate.

So how does this relate to web usability?

Well let’s take the same graph, but this time, let’s replace the horizontal scale to the # of clicks it takes to pull your prospect into your funnel and close them on whatever it is you ar trying to get them to do (buy, sign-up, click an ad, etc).

So the further you engage your prospect from your home or landing page, the less likely you are to close that individual.

Lesson?

Get them intruiged fast.

Answer their questions faster.

Get them into your sales/action funnel ASAP.

The longer you let them drift on your site, the less likely you get the results you want.

Questions? Drop me a line.

Bruce

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