Richard Filing

From Jens Meiert
Excerpt: Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance and quality assurance as important process ingredients which have to be applied continuously. But let’s see what this really means for our work.
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Great story in INC Mag’s March issue about Blogger.com and Twitter founder Evan Williams
Excerpt: Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”
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This is welcome news from Milissa Tarquini at Boxes and Arrows.
Excerpt: Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice.
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A little off topic but such a great post that I can’t help pass it on …. Kevin Kelly’s ‘Better than Free’ posting is right on the money. Here’s an excerpt:

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.  I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

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From McKinsey
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information
 

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

1. www.example.com
2. example.com/
3. www.example.com/index.html
4. example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

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Important Concept: Distributed - Web Marketing no longer is limited to your corporate site. Let go of the concept of ‘driving traffic to your website’ as a sole measurement of success. The web, it’s message, and your battles are now fought on the open and distributed web. Trusted decisions between prospects and customers are made on these social communities and networks, savvy executives need to go there.
from Web Strategy by Jeremiah

                                                         Excerpt: ‘…. increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.’

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Read the full Hinchcliffe article here