Linux-based GUIs

I bought an ASUS EEE sub-notebook a couple of months ago. In fact I’m writing this on the EEE, connected to a 19 inch monitor and a regular keyboard. The interface is suprisingly simple and functional and I did not need to know anything about Linux to get started. It’s a custom-made interface for the EEE built using parts of a full-fledged Linux interface and applications. Here are some screenshots to give you an idea:

I don’t miss Windows at all. Really. Granted, I just use the machine for web browsing, email and document and spreadsheet editing, but I would have never guessed I would be saying it was a good enough substitute to Windows for me.

Adobe Air

In other news, Adobe has just launched a cross-OS application development platform called Air. I honestly haven’t done a lot of research into it, but essentially it allows developers to easily, quickly, and cheaply create internet-rich desktop applications that will run on any OS, including Macs and Linux.

Alternatives to Windows

If Adobe Air really takes off, the applications created with it will work on any OS, allowing users to easily migrate to a new OS (say, from Windows to Linux) without sacrificing their use of applications they’ve come to know and love.I think it can now truly be said that with the emergence of these kinds of accessible technologies that true alternatives to using Windows are just a stone’s throw away.

I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Politics Online conference next Tuesday (register here) on the topic of “Does Good Design Matter” in the context and political/advocacy websites. The panel was put together by Colin Delaney of e-politics and will also feature Margaux O’Malley (Grand Junction Design) and Susan Finkelpearl (Free Range Studios).

In thinking about this topic, one example from our work on the Fred Thompson campaign where good design didn’t matter immediately jumped to mind.

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Last week on Thursday, February 21, a 6.0 earthquake rocked northern Nevada and was felt in Idaho and Utah as well.  In response, the Salt Lake Tribune wrote a traditional article about the event.  However, its coverage didn't stop there.

The paper decided to ask readers who felt the quake to describe what they noticed and where they were at the time.  These responses were mapped on a MapBuilder map to give a graphic representation of where people felt the earth shake. 

In Monday's E-Media Tidbits column, Amy Gahran of The Poynter Institute highlighted this nifty map.  Kim McDaniel of the Tribune explained to her that this map wasn't originally designed to examine the quake; it was originally used in November to show where holiday lights were located in the Salt Lake area.  After the quake hit, she and her team had a great idea and implemented it.

It is very important to note that newspapers of all sizes can launch great interactive tools.  This ability is not reserved for large papers like the New York Times that can create sexy flash presentations like the one about box office data that Todd mentioned yesterday. 

Granted, it is easier said than done, but creativity and fast thinking — sometimes coupled with services like MapBuilder — can go a long way for any newspaper trying to report better and connect with its audience in meaningful ways.

So while reaching the $21 billion plateau for the first time sounds great, the growth of internet ad revenues is also slowing down.

The data, collected by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, suggests revenues grew an estimated 25 percent last year, up from $16.9 billion in 2006. That’s a whole 10 percentage points lower than the previous year’s growth.  Even the dollar figure was lower, with a $4.2 billion increase compared to $4.3 billion in 2005.

The increasingly torpid growth was forecasted by many analysts though. As the internet continues to soak up more of the advertising stream, this has meant less money for traditional outlets like newspapers. Still, the internet only occupies about 10 percent of all American ad spending, which means plenty of room for growth, albeit slower.

There are some variables that may contribute to the slowdown in growth not accounted for IAB's figures. We’re arguably in a recession, and one of the first things companies do when the pockets get thin is cut ad spending. Some of the big boys like MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL are even having a rough go of it lately.

A full breakdown of the numbers is expected to be released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in May.

One thing I am seeing more and more of on newspaper websites are interactive features that provide rich ways to look at otherwise flat data. Today, Gary forwarded me a great example from the New York Times website. Check out The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 - 2007, an interactive piece that shows box office receipts by month/movie for the last twenty years. This Flash piece is really well done, and is definitely the kind of thing that will get past around and get eyeballs to the Times website. It also provides ways to discover other Times content, as when you click on the movie names you get a little pop up window that provides a summary of what the movie is about and a link to a full review.

I was excited to see Tina Fey host Saturday Night Live over the weekend since the episode basically marked the return of new scripted TV after the writers’ strike ended (further, it is helping me stave off the cravings for new 30 Rock). After laughing during most of the skits, I visited the SNL site on nbc.com to watch the “I drink your milkshake” skit again, and that’s when I noticed the official SNL wiki.

Of course, there are already other SNL wikis — like the one on Wikia — but I was a little surprised to see one on NBC’s site. Don’t get me wrong, I see the value of such a feature for a popular TV show website, but it seems to me that SNL doesn’t attract a crowd that is inclined to use wikis like the audience of a science fiction show like Star Trek. Granted, a wiki doesn’t need too many people to thrive, but why does NBC think that SNL needs a wiki before another show like ER or one of the Law & Order series? (more…)

My post yesterday about the use of images in email got me thinking about what the best days or times are for doing bulk email sends. There really isn’t one answer, as each list is unique and finding the best times is a matter of trial and error. But I’ll take a shot at providing some general guidelines.

Based on my own experiences and everything I’ve read, for business to business emails (or any list that consists mostly of work addresses) the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

The rationale for this is pretty simple. Most people don’t check their business email accounts on Saturdays or Sundays. On Mondays people tend to be in heavy delete mode, as they try to clear all the email that has accumulated over the weekend. On Fridays, people tend to be less focused, as they look forward to the weekend. Friday is also an extremely popular day of the week to take off, meaning your email could end up not being seen until Monday.

In terms of time for business-focused email, it is best to send email out during normal business hours. If you send your email before or after work hours, there is a good chance folks won’t see the email as they try to clear their email queue first thing in the morning and go into delete mode. Assuming you are trying to reach a US audience, I think between 12:00 and 4:00 EST is the best time, as you’ll catch people at work in all time zones.

For business to consumer emails (or any list made up mostly of personal email accounts), the situation is more fluid. Some studies show that these audiences tend to be more responsive to emails sent after work hours and on Fridays and weekends, as this is when people tend to check personal email accounts.

It makes sense - lots of people with desk jobs might not check their personal email accounts during the day and others don’t even really use email in their jobs. Just as importantly, business to consumer email tends to be about action. You want users to buy something or enter your contest or whatever. Most people are more comfortable performing those type of activities on their personal computers during their off hours.

My sense though is that there is more room for error for business to consumer emails in terms of time/date. In my experience, volume to personal accounts is lower and spam tends to be less of a problem. So I don’t think people get as delete happy as they do with their corporate email accounts.

Ultimately though, every list is different. Email Labs suggests looking at when people register for your list and trying to send during the days/time you get the most sign ups. But the best way to figure out when to send is through trial and error. Try sending out messages on different days at different times and see when you get the best open and click through rates. This will allow you to figure out your own best practices for your list.

We’ve written a bit here about how some of the Presidential campaigns this cycle have embraced stripped down emails that don’t include a lot of images or fancy formatting. In that previous post, the focus was on how this format can make emails seem more personal, and not on the technical reasons to avoid using a lot of images. Josh Levy’s post yesterday about John McCain’s email mistakes inspired me to look at the issue from a more technical perspective.

The most compelling reason to limit the use of images in HTML emails is that tons of people are never going to see them. Some people actively turn off images. Others don’t see them because their email programs turn them off by default (Campaign Monitor has a great chart showing a breakdown). Some people work at companies that block images in emails to save bandwidth/stop porn. And yet more people are accessing email on cell phones that can’t read images. I have yet to see a percentage I trust completely, but it is estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of email users block at least some images in HTML emails. That is a lot.

Speaking anecdotally, I’m a lot less likely to see images in email than I did a year ago. At work we upgraded recently to Outlook 2007 which has images blocked by default. I never changed the setting and now follow the process of opting in to see images based on whether I trust the sender. I use Gmail for my personal email and follow the same procedure. (You really should check out that chart breaking down default settings for major email clients.)

So what to do. Stop using images altogether? Use them sparingly? Although a bit old, the useful Campaign Monitor blog provides a great guide to email design. Here are their six tips on how to send emails that actually gets to the recipient in a readable format:

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail and always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
3. Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
4. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
5. Test your design in a preview pane, full screen and with images turned on and off before you send it.
6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.

Anyone that has sent bulk emails out knows that it is a really stressful thing. Even if you do your job perfectly (no typos, valid web links, good HTML, etc.), your email is going to be garbled for at least a small percentage of people who have weird settings or are using funky email clients (Hello Lotus Notes). And those small percentage of people will inevitably complain to your boss’ best friend from high school and you’ll hear about it.

Given the high probability for mistakes, email is really a format where you need to keep things simple. If you have to use images, design the email so that it will degrade gracefully if images are turned off. The emails we design that use images typically look like an online version of letter head, with a single header image. If you keep it simple, you’ll get yelled out less for supposed mistakes and your click through rates will increase since more people will be able to actually see the content of your message.

Note: I just saw this post from Michael Whitney at Tech President that looks at the use of email by Presidential candidates and expands on Campaign Monitor’s tips. Great minds. Give it a read, as it goes into things in a bit more depth than my post.

My friend David Cohn has written an excellent post about social bookmarking sites.  His aim is to coax journalists into using these sites to better research, report, and reach out to their audience.  Although the post has a journalistic focus, it does an excellent job of explaining the differences between the user bases of several major sites that virtually anyone interested in social media will learn from.

As someone who has spent some time on sites like digg, reddit, and Newsvine, I know how different these sites — and perhaps more importantly, their users — are.  That’s why reading David’s post can help the uninitiated since he explains the specific appeal, audiences, and objectives of the sites he spotlights.  The fact that he explains the objective and niche of these sites is really valuable since this helps the uninitiated more efficiently select a site that best meets their needs.

Although I’ll admit that at times I feel overwhelmed by the seemingly endless list of bookmarking sites that pop up, I do see utility in the major ones that David features. 

Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

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As the 2008 Presidential Election progresses here in the United States, scrutiny of Democratic superdelegates grows.  Since Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in a tight race for their party’s nomination since they have both earned roughly the same amount of regular delegates who are assigned by their respective state’s primary or caucus popular vote results.  With this tight of a race, many fear that the candidate who wins more of the regular delegates representing the general populous may still lose if enough superdelegates side with the other frontrunner.

With this concern, some people are launching sites to monitor these superdelegates and provide their names and which candidate they support.  In her article “Crowdsourcing Puts Crucial Superdelegates Under a Microscope” from last Friday, Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland profiles a few sites that are tracking superdelegates. 

For instance, bloggers at 2008 Democratic Convention Watch are compiling and updating a detailed list of superdelegates who support Clinton or Obama. The Superdelegate Transparency Project on SourceWatch.org, a collaboration between a variety of organizations, also collects a wide variety of information to hopefully hold the superdelegates accountable to the will of their “constituents.”  It also hopes to enlist the help of citizen journalists who will also keep tabs on these influential delegates.

I personally find it fascinating to see people harness the power of the Internet to keep track of politicos in situation like these.  It’ll be interesting to see if these sites will help influence how superdelegates act.

The Future of Web Apps Conference will be held on the East coast for this first time ever this year, hitting the beaches of sunny Miami February 28th. It’ll be interesting to follow the developments that emerge from this year’s event. Speakers and participants are slated to discuss everything from startups to social networks.

Also on the agenda is a “Launch a web app in 40 minutes” feature, which will be led by a moderated panel of some of the smartest web developers.  You can vote for what kind of application the panel will attempt to assemble through TechCrunch.

Wordpress and Google will be represented among the 14 speakers confirmed thus far. Various workshops will also be available for those in attendance, including a “Making Money From Your App” session.

The Future of Web Apps Conference comes to a close March first.

<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog> 

Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.

As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.

(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.

But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.

(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.

If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.

The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.

For awhile now CNN has used its iReport campaign to collect viewer generated media that it uses in its newscasts and on its web site.  While this content doesn’t always pass the muster of professional standards, TV news does have use for raw footage and images.  Regardless of the quality of submissions, CNN clearly has had success with this initiative. 

Today CNN launched iReport.com, which it purchased the URL in January for around $750,000, to collect and highlight all the content submitted to CNN.  Unlike in the past where only some (likely, a small percentage) of submissions made it to air or online, this new site will feature all iReport content.  Of course, when visiting the site you’ll notice that submissions used on CNN or its web site are featured. 

The site also other features that enhance the iReport experience and fosters a sense of community.  Each user (iReporter) has a profile in which site visitors can learn more about them, choose to track their submissions and activity on the site, and send private messages to them.  Beyond this visitors can sort submissions by what CNN has used, highest rated by site members, most comments, most recently submitted, etc.

The site is still in its beta stage, but it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

Hat tip: Mediabistro’s TVNewser

ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold blogged last week about how Reuters is trying to help organize all on the Internet — including its own content — by launching its API — Open Calais.

As complex as programming and APIs can get, the idea behind Open Calais is rather simple.  Reuters simply wants to find a better way to easily identify important bits of information in an article or on a web page.  For instance, a news article has the who, where, when, where, why, and how in it; thus, finding a way to pull out the people, organizations, location, etc. in an article would help file the article in vast sea of information.

Hopefully, this will make it a lot easier for people to find articles about events that occurred at a specific time, involved an individual or organization, took place in a certain city, was caused by a specific issue, etc.  Needless to say, anyone who deals with information — which should include virtually all of us — will benefit from more enhanced technology to sort through the large amounts of information that we literally have at our finger tips through the Internet.