SiteSpindle.com Blog

It's True! People Really Don't Know What a Browser Is!

Bonnie Gibbons — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:11:32 +0000

Quoted in a Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo about the agenda behind Chrome Frame, Google's Brian Rakowski offers a surprising reason why Chrome has captured only 3% of the browser market.

Firefox's four-year head start has already siphoned off developers, and users who were actively looking to dump IE. That leaves what we might call the ordinary user -- someone who doesn't really care what browser they use. In theory, these users have no reason not to try Chrome, but the reality is they have a no reason to stop using their system's default browser. In some cases it's simple inertia, but in other cases, it's that they actually don't know what a browser is. Here's the proof, found via the Slate article.

Videos like this are a crucial reality check. I've been involved in website creation since 1997, when "The Browser Wars" forced us into aggravating, antediluvian cross-browser coding practices. Next came the late-Clinton-era lawsuit against Microsoft for "bundling their browser with their operating system." How could the term browser have failed to sink in over the past 15 years?

Then I remembered the recent day we opened my husband's new laptop. John would score better than some of the folks in the video, because he'd answer "Firefox!" if asked how he gets on the Internet. But he looked at me blankly when I asked him what default browser he wanted to use. Ironically, this laptop (a Sony Vaio) did come preloaded with Chrome. But to my knowledge he has never clicked the icon.

On my personal blog

Bonnie Gibbons — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:30:27 +0000

Iberia's Hidden Stopovers - An Unwelcome Surprise at Check-In

Over on my personal blog I recount a surprise airline stopover that went unpleasantly awry. It was nothing like one of those epic tarmac delays such as the recent Rochester, MN fiasco. But it was exactly the kind of risk we all try to minimize by prioritizing direct flights. The takeaway here is that these little points of data really matter to people, and it's unfair to present it inconsistently as Iberia did in this instance.

Move over, Bing: Hunch is New Decision Engine in Town

Bonnie Gibbons — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Less than a week ago we were all told not to consider Bing (Microsoft's new search engine) a search engine but rather a "decision engine." As of today, Bing as a decision engine is already, like, totes fifteen minutes ago. Hunch launches today.

Hunch mixes collaborative filtering with machine learning to build an algorithm for answering the kinds of questions co-founder Caterina Fake once helped faciliate at Yahoo Answers. As great as Yahoo Answers can be, it has a significant limitation -- a human being has to answer your question (or perhaps pretend to answer your question while really advertising some service). Hunch will attempt to answer your question algorithmically by asking you ten questions or fewer and comparing your answers to its "taste database."

Anil Dash Was Wrong - Facebook Username Already Hailed As Disaster

Bonnie Gibbons — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:58:20 +0000

I'd barely finished reading Anil Dash's hilarious sendup of just about everyone from the social media echo chamber to the mainstream tech press to the lone, heroic tech savvy guys that don't get paid attention to by the rest of their Hollywood entourage. Then I checked what was new on Sphinn and -- ahead of cue -- a story called The Facebook Vanity URL Fiasco had already gone hot by dawn this morning. That post addresses the important topic of protecting registered trademarks from being grabbed by Facebook users when vanity URLs become available.

Squarespace Tweets 30-day iPhone Givaway

Bonnie Gibbons — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:04:25 +0000

As a user of Squarespace hosted blogware/sitebuilder I'm delighted to see "#squarespace" topping Twitter trends today. I'm even more amused at all the folks joining in with posts like "WTH is #squarespace?"

To brief the uninitiated I might call it a TypePad competitor, but Squarespace is much more than that. It is hosted hosting, if you will and so there are limitations. And sometimes the supercool interface is more bewildering than beguiling. But what you can do with SQSP is amazing -- even for the money, which is a step up from TypePad. For SEO, Squarespace is very good, especially if you're starting a new site. Based on their track record in the two years since I launched my first Squarespace site, I am confident that the remaining refinements are already being dealt with.

Anyway, here's what's going on. Squarespace is coming out with an iPhone app to update sites with. To generate buzz, they're giving away one "iPhone" (Actually a $199 gift card to the Apple store) every day till July 7. At 5pm Eastern they'll do a "drawing" from among the tweets containing the hashtag #squarespace. Here's the explanation.

If you're looking for a reliable place to host a blog, with beautiful templates out of the box, consider a Squarespace free trial. (And yep -- that's an affiliate link -- if you actually become a paying customer I get the small bucks.)

Google's Split Personality?

Bonnie Gibbons — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:18:24 +0000

The announcement of Google Wave has occasioned something of a tirade on Google's "arrogance" from GigaOM's Jordan Golson.

Old-School Blackhat Tactics Still Out There?

Bonnie Gibbons — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Today on a user forum for a certain web application I had the occasion to provide a little free SEO advice. This is nothing unusual, for the application attracts users at many levels of technical and design expertise.

The user had some basic SEO questions, including a request for advice about getting body text onto a homepage that was mostly images. What mystified me -- and prompted an immediate ALL CAPS response -- was whether "transparent text" would do the trick.

The user was an admitted newbie, so I took that into account and suggested some learning resources without presuming any nefarious intent. But in a sense, that puzzled me more? How would a user who knows nothing about seo find blackhat suggestions so easily? Wouldn't the most obvious, popular, mainstream seo information be considerably more findable at this point than trickery, especially to a newbie who doesn't know the terminology ("black hat," etc.) to search for? Or is this a testiment to the fact that once something's out there on the web, it's out there indefinitely?

Disclaimer: it's possible the newbie was interested in the visual effect of transparent text overlaid on his images, which would be moot in terms of search-engine-friendliness. But I made the assumption that, since he was trying to get readable body text onto the page, he was talking about hidden text using CSS tricks of the sort that had become useless long before I ever did SEO.

Lesson from #amazonfail: Tags aren't "Set It & Forget It!"

Bonnie Gibbons — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:50:00 +0000

A Twit-storm the like of which I haven't noticed since #motrinmoms broke out yesterday. The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog has a fine single-page reference to the #amazonfail fiasco. In some circles the unfortunate event is being portrayed as "Amazon decides to block gay and lesbian books" but that's overstated. In fact, all that happened (which is bad enough) is that non-explicit books about gay and lesbian issues were somehow flagged as adult material, making them harder to find on the site. It's critical to note that other topics, such as rape, were affected as well as SOME straight sexuality-related titles. Amazon told Publishers Weekly it was a glitch, causing #glitchmyass to join #amazonfail as today's hot Twitter tag.

The problem with the immediate assumption of intentionality on Amazon's part is selection bias. The twit-storm focused almost exclusively on the glitch's impact on gay subject matter, because an author in that community brought the issue to light, and the community response, accordingly, focused on gay material. In fact, the glitch affected many topics that all have in common the frank discussion of sexuality, issues tangentially related to sexuality, or (more below) certain individual or subcultural biases that are inconsistent with Amazon's intended policies.

At this point, it's easy to believe the glitch story -- although I would describe it as a taxonomical glitch rather than a technical one. And an interesting discussion not taking place is the overlap of gay-related (and other affected) categories and keywords in family-friendly and adult contexts. The confusion this can cause may be ideologically neutral -- or not. I'm reminded of Olympic hopeful Tyson Homosexual, whose last name (guess what it is) was auto-replaced in news feeds by an "inappropriate language" filter on a conservative website. One can certainly infer an attitude toward gay people by a preference for the term homosexual (as if it were still a medical disorder), along the lines of what happens when you Google "Jew" as opposed to "Judaism."

Update April 14: Interestingly, a language-cultural barrier may have contributed to Amazon's glitch, which they've now attributed to a change to adult flagging made on the French Amazon site.

But something like that could just as easily happen by an effort to filter out any colloquialism. On my first web job, at a software company with worldwide reach, we tried to avoid American slang because so many of our users weren't American or even native English speakers.

What got people thinking about the possible role of tagging in the glitch was the discovery that gay and lesbian authors were also affected, regardless of book content. A list of wrongly-flagged authors and books grew quickly, courtesy of that part of the outraged blogosphere not attending family events yesterday. Along with the books containing G-rated, gay-related subject matter were books in which the only gay aspect seemed to be the sexual orientation of the author -- but Amazon users had tagged them with gay-related keywords anyway. It suggested that someone over at Amazon had adjusted the adult filter to cast a wide net specifically for gay-related keywords and many concluded that Amazon as a company (in their Seattle office, no less) had decided gay=dirty. I'd prefer to confine my ideological quarrels to users who tagged an Ellen Degeneres book with "exhibitionism" and a book about one gay adoption with "gay love," since an adoption memoir by a straight couple would simply be tagged with "adoption."

It's unlikely that tagging would be used for a purpose that had such real financial consequences as loss of sales rank and invisibility in best seller lists -- that's putting too much trust in crowdsourcing.

Did I mention crowdsourcing? Among measures like blog posts, petitions, open letters, etc., a retaliatory tagging campaign was launched. On Amazon, the tag #amazonfail appears on affected books (which, by now, are no longer flagged as adult). And in a variation on Google-bombing that I find guiltily amusing, check out the user-submitted tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. This work of science fiction, adding insult to injury, was one of the few "gay" books that avoided the adult tag. "Hmmmm," mused the Twittersphere and went to work vandalizing the book listing.

Tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality as they appeared on the morning of April 13, 2009. Click picture to enlarge.

The moral of the story: Tags are an easy way to allow users to participate in your site organization. But they aren't "Set It & Forget It!" Now Amazon will need to decide what to do about a) #amazonfail as a tag and b) the tags and off-topic reader reviews now appearing on the Parent's Guide page. For all my ideological sympathy, I can't condone the gesture on user experience grounds, however half-hearted my disapproval must be.

37 Signals v. Get Satisfaction: The Screenshots!

Bonnie Gibbons — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:37:00 +0000

Get Satisfaction provides a social media-y customer service platform for businesses wishing to outsource their customer care. GS also allows anyone to create an unofficial page about any company and set up an ad hoc user community.Jason Fried of 37 Signals took on Get Satisfaction in a March 31post, arguing that current GS treatment of these unofficial pages makes them look like official support channels rather than the glorified message boards they actually are.

Jason's concern touched on misappropriation of brand and reputation management. He first became aware of an unsanctioned, unmonitored "37 Signals page" at GS when an irate GS member wrote to him to complain about never getting a response to the issue s/he'd posted at GS. This, in itself, is a serious concern. And this concern should be solvablewithout the target company being coerced into joining GSto rescue these customers.

Adding insult to injury, GS was running AdWords units on these unofficial pages, allowing GS tosiphon off search engine users looking for 37 Signals support and thencollect ad revenue from 37 Signals competitors.(And who wouldn't click, after failing to get support from 37 Signals?)

A day later,Jason was back with a) appreciation of GS's quick response, as far as it went and b) some compelling screenshots to demonstrate exactly how Get Satisfaction's user experience confuses users as to whether a "Company X support community" hosted at GS is sanctioned and monitored by Company X.

I believe Jason's screenshots DO show an official-looking customer experience:

Eight mentions of 37 Signals versus two subtle GS logos
Calls to action to “Ask a question about 37signals and their products” (ask whom?) and "Report a poblem" (again, to whom?)
Numerous examples of on-page search engine optimization connecting the 37 Signals brand to the concept of customer support

Does this prove intentionality? Can we state for the record that GS intentionally confused users -- specifically to pressure companies to sign up? I have to recognize plausible deniability here. It's entirely plausible that GS designed their pages for paying clients, and then made token tweaks to act as disclaimers for the unofficial pages. It's entirely plausible that this was done to get it out the door, period.

On the other hand, suspicion is entirely reasonable. What Jason's screen shots demonstrate is that suspicion can be reasonable, even if it'sunfounded. If GS were knowingly pushing the envelope to help out the sales force, this would be a great way to do it (except for the eventual outcry).As a 37 Signals commenter called dm offered, "When smart people appear to be doing dumb things look for alternative goals." With that user interface, no matterhow it came about,GS asked for suspicion.

To wrap things up, GS's latest blog post concedes pretty much all of Jason's UX objectionswhile giving no ground as to intentionality -- and professing gratitude to Jason for all the free UX consultation. Most substantial -- Get Satisfaction has committed to removeads from unofficial pages.This neutralizes most of the "blackmail" concern Jason raised in his initial post.

Check Your Keywords: Clever Query Warns of Comment Spam

Bonnie Gibbons — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:23:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that every post on our classical music site HoldeKunst.com (that's German for "gracious art" or similar) was getting one comment, always to the same apparently Italian mp3 site. This blog, currently hosted on Squarespace, accepts comments without registration and posts comments immediately unless Squarespace's system gets suspicious andholds it for moderation.

At the same time I started noticing the following query in my keyword analytics:

 site:.com inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" 
-"you must be logged in" "music"

The link takes you to the SERP on Google Indonesia. It's pretty clear from most the query that the searcher was looking for blogs about music, to make the comments appear relevant to our site. By subtracting "comments closed" and "you must be logged in," s/he filtered the search for blogs with comments open to unregistered users.

The following comment is typical: a vague mention of music to appear legit and slip by Squarespace, but without engaging the topic at hand (in this case, Bartok's first two piano concertos).

Old music is like a treasure of the olden times which is priceless.
mp3melhor (link removed)

This isn't that bad. It's not a special quality-of-life-enhancing medicine. The wording is perfectly polite. But every post was getting one such comment, with a link to this one website -- and with a different username every day. Clearly it's the same person trying to be sneaky. I'm willing to let some of this slide, but it can be annoying when a comment is just so obviously not real. Take a look at this one, on a post announcing my husband's upcoming music classes:

Well I can says that all sounds great my kids will be going for sure!
(linked to a musical instrument affiliate marketing website)

The classes, at the University of Chicago extension program,are for adults, and are generally given on weekday mornings when the "kids" will be in school. They cover the very kid-friendly topics of Grand Opera, Romantic Piano, and Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik). The kids can learn all about Holocaust-era musicians who suffered career setbacks, forced exile, and/or imprisonment in concentration camps. Somewent all the way to the gas chambers, including a group of children who performed in Theresienstadt.

But I digress.

I have various options for dealing with spam, and what I choose right now is to leave them unmoderated.I subscribe to the comments RSS, which allows me to see every comment without having to log in and moderate.We don't have numerous comments, but the few enthusiastic commenters is skewed toward an older demographic and some have reported confusion with various anti-spam measures. (That's another story, for the user experience files.)

I don't rush to remove these comments. I do do at my convenience because, ironically,Squarespace nofollowsthese links.

So my tip for today is that if you want to leave your comments open, be alert to queries like "-you must be logged in" in your keyword reports.