I said “You look fat in those pants”

Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?

On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.

The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.

We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.

Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.

What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.

Does your dog bite?

Consolidating analytic applications into a centralized corporate metrics initiative can make anyone feel “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. Most organizations start the journey with an evaluation of the applications being utilized in the corporation and concentrate on a laundry list of features and requirements. The process generally consists of scoring each application’s strengths and weaknesses and when the process is complete, a winner is selected and the implementation begins.

Unfortunately, catering to the metrics needs of a diverse set of individuals and divisional requirements can be a challenge for any single reporting mechanism. Many metrics initiatives actually fail because the personnel they are intended to help can’t figure out how to get the data they need to make their business decisions from. Interestingly, the needs are usually a specific set of performance results not easily aligned with the corporation’s laundry list of application features.

The other night I was watching an old Peter Sellers movie and couldn’t help drawing an analogy. Clouseau was in the lobby of a hotel when a lady with a dog approached. He kneels down to pet the dog and politely asks, “Does your dog bite?”. The lady softly replies, “No, my dog doesn’t bite”. Suddenly, the dog digs into Clouseau’s hand and he quickly backs off. He exclaims, “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite”, to which the lady explains, “This is not my dog”.

As I watched the scene it reminded me of how important it is to ask the right question and how easy it is to misinterpret the answer. Over the years, we have been involved with many corporate analytic implementations and there are two major headlines that have emerged for me. One: everyone wants something different, and two: the process has to be clear and simple for everyone.

Clearly, consolidating corporate metrics into a single application can remove ambiguities, streamline processes and reduce overall costs. Ironically, as the number of users increase, so does the inherent complexities of fulfilling the unique needs of each user in a single “one size fits all” application.

To institutionalize analytics and business intelligence applications more effort needs to be focused on the process of how individuals receive the information they need, instead of the actual features and usage of the metrics application. Today, most major metrics applications can answer the majority of questions we need to know, even some that are free. The challenge is to provide each individual with their unique answers in a consumable way for all.

Marketing is from Venus and IT is from Mars

Behind the scenes of any good web site implementation is a solid marriage between Marketing and IT. There’s really no playbook here, every company seems to have a little different process for how the two departments should work together and it’s really interesting how the interactions between the two have a lot of similarities to a real world marriage.

Let’s not kid ourselves; every marriage has issues, the ones that last for a long time just figure out how to make the best out of the ups and downs. The ones that don’t, move on and start the process all over again. I actually got married when I was 19 and divorced at 24, we were just too young. I remarried when I was 40 and we are still going strong. Now my parents, they have been married for over fifty years.

I think the things that make a good marriage can be found in similar beliefs, goals and a genuine friendship for one another. Some people say that couples that last a long time have a lot in common, others say that opposites attract; in either case, there needs to be mutual respect from both parties in the relationship.

In business, vendors often work with only one side of their client’s house and it sometimes feels like there is a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in affect. Many companies, as odd as it might sound, actually utilize vendor services because they can remain “under the radar” for some period of time.

The Marketing folks think that IT doesn’t understand their business goals and the IT folks think that Marketing doesn’t have any long-term technology vision. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that this can put the vendor in a rather precarious position.

In a real world marriage, this sort of extracurricular relationship seems to begin in a similar way. You can easily imagine someone confiding with a friend on how their spouse doesn’t “understand their needs”. This innocent discussion could progress into a relationship when the acquaintance tries to help out their friend. Eventually, the outside faction is exposed and often made out to be a rogue charlatan.

To avoid this sort of situation in business, I guess the vendor could insist that their activities be fully disclosed to all other parties in their client’s company, but can this really up to the vendor? In many cases, to win the business the vendor needs to present assets not currently available from inside the prospective company and that might directly compete with other parties involved.

This brings me back to the marriage metaphor. My observation is that good chemistry between Marketing and IT is rare and the exception, not the rule; afterall, the relationship isn’t built upon the same underlying principles as a real world marriage. Still, it may be said that “Marketing is from Venus and IT is from Mars” or vice versa of course.

Obviously, it is important for Marketing and IT to have clear communication paths, but sometimes the biggest problems are solved by the most minute details. This morning I got up and ask my wife to be my Valentine and I can tell you that even with all life’s ups-and-downs this small gesture confirmed that we are in our marriage together.

Who you know, what they say and reciprocality

Search engine crawls are kind of like meeting your cousin periodically. When you meet there is always a tendency to exaggerate your recent accomplishments in an attempt to impress them. Everyone likes positive information to propagate about them throughout their family. Unfortunately, search engines (like cousins) aren’t easily fooled and embellishments can sometimes work against you.

You see, search engines (like cousins) have the ability to quickly verify your claims and tell you “who says what” through their links and contacts. This makes the whole experience a bit uncomfortable since your comments are not necessarily what you say you know, but whom you know and what they say you know.

This reminded me of a story someone told me about a famous celebrity they met and how the encounter changed their perception within their family, ultimately making them a legend. It was a monthly reunion of sorts; the individual was having dinner with his cousin. The conversation consisted of repetitive anecdotes on recent events when my friend excused himself for a quick biology break.

While in the restroom, my friend ran into a famous celebrity. He pleaded his case and asked the celebrity if they would mind acting like they knew him and saying something nice to his cousin. The celebrity thought it might be fun and reluctantly agreed. My friend went back to his table and continued to converse with his cousin, suddenly her eyes got as big as oranges when she recognized the celebrity approaching.

The celebrity put his hand on my friend’s shoulder and said “How are you, I haven’t seen you in a long time, is this the wonderful cousin you’re always talking about?” My friend turned to the celebrity and abruptly told them “Get lost, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something!” Now at first glance this might seem incredibly rude, but in terms of impressing his cousin it was remarkable.

This brings me back to search engines and how they seem to work in a similar way. You see, a link and recommendation from a highly ranked “celebrity” type site is more valuable when the link is not reciprocal. Of course, now my friend has become a legend, if not in his own mind, ours.

Tournament Draws and Search Linking Algorithms

This year I turn 55! Quite a milestone when you think about it. I can tell you a number of things go through your mind when this event occurs and I’m guessing everyone goes through some sort of “right of passage“. Having been a tennis player most of my life, I decided that 55 was my opportunity to join the 55-and-over tennis tournament circuit. I imagined filling my trophy case with hardware from my triumphs.

In my first tournament, the draw had me play a first round match late in the evening, followed with a meeting with the number 2 seed early the next morning. This didn’t seem fair, but as a newcomer I didn’t feel it was my place to complain. Well, the good news was that I won my first match, but the bad news was that I resembled a pretzel the next morning. Needless to say, I went down in defeat, but on my drive home I had a bit of an epiphany on tournament draws and search linking algorithms.

What I realized was that search algorithms actually use a similar process. You see, as an unknown, the tennis tournament directors could not credibly seed me; similarly, search engines don’t rank newly found URLs very high in their listings. Now, if I would have won my match against the number 2 seed, I’m sure the Colorado Tennis Association would gladly seed me in the next tournament. Likewise, search engines start recognizing URLs when other prominent (seeded) sites point to you.

The lesson here is that “talk is cheap” in both sports and web search. I plan to continue my quest for Colorado tennis stardom, but in the meantime we’ll plan to get as many valuable links (from seeded websites) to Viewmark as possible.

With international SEO, a little goes a long way

I have been fortunate to have traveled internationally rather extensively in my life. Early in my career I worked for a very small company that was acquired by a very large one. At the time, there was no such thing as video conferencing or the internet and we (the product marketing staff) were asked to visit a lot of different areas in the world to discuss 3D modeling technologies.

It’s ironic because the intensive traveling actually inspired me to start Viewmark. It was just a coincidence that new digital delivery platforms emerged, like CDs and the internet, that helped solve the intrinsic burdens associated with global product marketing. In essence, the new digital communication mechanisms allowed anyone to “have their cake and eat it too” by making it easier to sustain professional relationships around the globe without sacrificing significant time with family and friends.

Still, I can tell you from personal experience that there can be a lot of value in immersing yourself in a foreign country. Any American who has worked in Europe for an extended period of time will tell you that making an effort to speak the language of the country you are in goes a long way, but I readily admit that many of the responses to my attempts came back in English.

This reminded me of an experience I had in Sweden many years ago. It was in the late 80s and I was on one of those whirlwind marketing tours of Europe. I arrived in Stockholm after a long week on the road and decided to take a quick swim. The solarium was on the top floor of the hotel and when I entered I found that everyone was swimming naked. This is not commonplace in the States, but I said to myself, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”. After taking a short swim, I settled near the entrance, then several Americans walked in. Stunned with my appearance, they ask me, in English, if there was a sauna in the area. All I remember was responding with the only words I knew at that moment “Krona, Krona, Krona”.

In some ways international search works the same way. We have found that regional search engines like, Baidu, Naver, Yandex, etc. favor results for web pages where the titles and descriptions can be easily deciphered in the native language of the search engine and the major search engines have country specific sites where the results focus on links that are written in the country’s main language.

There are published reports that show the US percentage of global search traffic at 22% and if we add ~11% for countries around the globe that use English as their first language (UK, Australia, Canada, etc.), we can surmise that only one third of the world uses English when searching on the internet. Note: This is not to say that only one third of internet users will read English content. We feel this is significantly higher.

When a user arrives on your web site you can easily detect their language preference. Translation firms use spreadsheets or APIs to integrate content into their systems for localization and the costs for doing so are relatively low. At the same time, content management systems give you the ability to seamlessly provide the localized content on your web site.

International SEO is not one size fits all, but a little can go a long way! We have seen double-digit percentage increases in a company’s overall search volume by simply localizing page titles, meta descriptions and message bundles. The question to ask is: How global is your company and how well are you prepared to leverage the international search opportunities that are currently available?

Web Site: Is that one word or two?

For years I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to use one word or two when spelling web site. Often, I use Google’s search box as a spell checker and as the deciding factor in such cases. Well, when you type in “web site” as a two word phrase you get 1.8B matches, the one word spelling “website” gets 1.3B matches. So, it looks like the general population uses “web site” as two words more often.

I guess I’ve always gravitated to using one word since it just looks cleaner and feels right to me, but the debate got me thinking of other words that are sometimes used in the same way and I found that in some cases the meanings can be entirely different. Clearly, whether you use web site or website your reader knows what you are referring to.

This topic reminded me of a joke. It is somewhat crude, but does bring out some of the nuisances of English and I’m not sure it can be translated to other languages. Be careful telling it at the water cooler though, I believe there was a case where an employer fired an individual for discussing the Seinfeld episode about Jerry only knowing his girl friend’s name rhymed with a part of the female anatomy.

So here it is: One night, a lonely gentleman was having a wonderful conversation with a member of the opposite sex. They were really having a great time and both felt very comfortable with each other. A bit premature, the man asks her if she would consider marrying him. Not knowing him very well, she let him know that there were several things that were very important to her.

First, she let him know that she really liked cars. He was very happy to tell her that he did too and that he had many new and collector type cars. She was delighted with his answer and then told him that she had always been fond of real estate too. He mentioned that he had numerous houses in several different regions of the world and he would be happy to have her tour them.

She wondered if he could be the one since no one else had ever answered those questions to her satisfaction. She was a bit shy and had a hard time asking her last question. “So, what about sex?” she asked. He replied, “infrequently”. Scratching her head, she then asks him to clarify, “Is that one word or two?”

Fortunately, we no longer need to worry about the correct usage of the term “website” since the AP Stylebook recently clarified their position to use one word versus two. This might not mean much if you’re not writing a tech blog, but the AP stylebook is the standard for all things grammar and punctuation in the news world.

It’s the same old wine in a brand new bottle

I’d never given much thought to the expression about seeing a glass as half full or half empty, but the other night, as I was enjoying a glass of wine, I couldn’t help observing that it appeared to be at that critical point in time.

My first inclination was to grab the bottle and fill it to the top again since this would indicate that I saw the glass as half full and by most accounts this is considered the more positive approach. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the expression might mean that by seeing the glass as half empty I should moderate my consumption accordingly. If I saw the glass as half full then I would continuously consume and probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

In these tough times ad spends are being closely monitored and it seems like understanding that the glass is not bottomless is important. When you see the glass as half empty you tend to savor each sip more and in the advertising world that equates to utilizing your advertising dollars as effectively as possible.

On the other side of the coin, growing up my mom used to always say “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” and this expression has always been a mantra for me. Could you imagine your advertising firm saying “Today is the last day since the beginning of my life”.

In either case, knowing what “full” actually means indicates that your expectations have already been set. I like to think of it as just a glass of wine that comes from a bottle that comes from a barrel that comes from a vineyard.

So whether the glass is half full or half empty, enjoy what you have and try to facilitate a way to maximize it’s full potential. After all it’s the same old wine it’s just in a different bottle.

Does size really matter?

It’s pretty cool how Facebook has connected me with a lot of old friends from my college days back in southeast Ohio. My guess is that this is not an isolated event and many people are experiencing a reunion of sorts. For me, the phenomenon generated a renewed interest in those idealistic days and even prompted me to digitize some old content in an effort to bring the pictures and sounds online for us to reminisce the memories together.

When embarking on this sort of thing, I always seem to come across a plethora of issues from both an organizational and technological perspective. In this case, I was hoping to bring our college music recitals online. Encoding them as MP3 was easy enough, but getting them online using the same approach I had used for other media files was another story. Here’s why:

Over time, I have become more comfortable using online tools for storing and maintaining various types of media. Most portals offer functionality to limit the access to personal information such as family celebrations, but I have generally felt okay with placing this type of content online anyway. What I struggle with is coming to terms with the best strategy for using and managing the data for the long run.

I’ve been using Picassa to store our family photo albums, YouTube for videos and Facebook, Blogger and Google Sites for content and navigation. We do use WordPress for our corporate blogs, but let’s table that discussion for some other time since we are talking mostly about using tools that don’t require any IT support.

Placing large media files on a hosted solution has 2 major advantages: First, the hosting provider is responsible for the delivery of the bits and bytes and there is typically no cost involved for the extra bandwidth associated to rich media files. Second, these companies must provide the archival and redundancy needed to assure your data won’t be lost over the long haul. So, as long as they are in business, things should be fine. I guess I’m betting that Google is going to be around for many years to come.

So here’s what happened when I tried to place our college music recitals online. First, YouTube doesn’t seem to provide a mechanism to add audio files like MP3s. To get around this, it appears that most people just combine several pictures with the audio file using video editing software and upload it as a video. Unfortunately, YouTube restricts the length of your video to 10 minutes and audio files like interviews, seminars, training courses and in my case musical recitals can be much longer than this.

The sizes of these files are rather small since the majority of the data is related to the audio track and easily falls under YouTube’s data size limit of 1GB. To put this in perspective, if one (1) minute of audio in the MP3 format is equivalent to 1MB of data you could place over 1,000 minutes of audio on YouTube based on the size of the file alone.

Ultimately, I was able to upload the video files of our music recitals to Blogger and Facebook since neither of them have a restriction for a video’s length and my files were well below the 1GB size limitation. Unfortunately, this threw a wrench into my overall strategy of placing audio and video files in the same place online. It sure would be convenient to have a single online media repository where people could store their large media files and link to them using gadgets. To date, I’ve been using Picassa and YouTube in this way, but now I have another location for audio files that are longer than 10 minutes. I guess you could say “size really does matter”.

Binduboline, web fuel for Internet conspiracy theories.

With all the dependencies we are building to the Internet, I wondered if we should take a moment to address a potential point of failure. Could the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) be a loophole? There are conspiracy theories out there that say “yes”, but with simple Internet Protocol (IP) decoding schemes anyone can memorize their most important IP addresses.

In my lifetime, I’ve observed increased activity and usage of distributed protocols. The mentality of past governmental monarchies and corporate “tops-down” type organizations seem to be giving way to more prevalent use of progressive decentralization.

It’s easy to draw an analogy to Internet infrastructure and packet routing since data can reach its destination in a multitude of ways, but this phenomenon has been in practice for quite some time now. For example, President Eisenhower championed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The highway system was built to provide different routes for military supplies and troop deployments in the event of an emergency, but it’s now routine for commercial truckers to use the system to modify their course based on traffic patterns.

This got me thinking about DNS servers and the inherent risk associated to the system overlay. At a high level, the purpose of DNS is to provide users of the world-wide-web with an easy to remember naming convention, but it is important to know that there is more to a domain name than meets the eye. Each name has an IP address (set of 4 numbers separated with dots) associated to it and the numbers are used by the mechanism routing the data you see.

For years we have used the phone book in much the same way and people often use this metaphor when describing DNS. Take a moment to imagine being in a situation where you weren’t able to access your electronic contact list or even a phone book. How many telephone numbers would you be able to remember?

Some conspiracy theories describe the government takeover of the DNS servers running the web. They point out the vulnerability of the system and show how an entire country could be removed from the web by merely deleting a suffix like (.de) from the name servers. So if the DNS servers or a subset of domain names were to disappear tomorrow what would you do? Could you remember any given IP to access your favorite news sites for emergency response instructions? If the answer is no, here’s an easy decoding scheme to use.

Have you ever used a vanity phone numbers like 1-800-got-milk? If you apply the same methodology you can sometimes come up with names that correlate to a specific IP address. Here’s an example:

The IP address for Viewmark is 216.38.205.162. This is not an easy number to remember, so let’s see what happens when we use the letters provided on a standard telephone to create a vanity name. We quickly realize that we’ll need to specify letters for the numbers 1 and 0, so let’s assume that (i=1) and (o=0) and all other numbers correspond as shown.

Here are two possible vanity names for the Viewmark IP. The first name is a yet to be invented fuel named Binduboline and I understand that it can be safely used as lip gloss, another idea is to generate a hypothetical video file structure for AOL called (aim.dv.aol.inc). I like the first name, but admit the latter contains the exact spacing of the IP address.

Now this article isn’t to say that we subscribe to any government conspiracy theories; however, in the event you ever find yourself offline because the DNS servers are not working properly, remember either Binduboline or bin.dv.aol.inc and you can be assured we’ll post links for you to relevant information on the internet using IP addresses.