The Web 2.0 Transformation

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Back in the 90s, the web simply delivered information to people who passively accessed it. It’s a Web 2.0 world now, where people interact, contribute, and connect.

When you look at the power of the Web 2.0 trend in the Internet economy, most people point to the success of Facebook, or the influence of Web 2.0 on business and e-commerce, but the most dramatic example was the political campaign of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, dubbed “Obama 2.0” by some:

• According to the Washington Post, Obama raised about a half a billion dollars from online donations.

• Obama’s email list has more than 13 million addresses, and his aides sent out 7,000 messages during the campaign

• On Facebook, Obama has more than three million friends, compared with about 600,000 for McCain.

• Obama’s campaign videos on YouTube have been viewed an estimated 100 million times, more than triple the number for McCain.

Still, many people are unclear about what “Web 2.0” means. Some see it simply as a new style of web design — simple layouts, bright colors, tabbed navigation, larger font sizes, and boxes with rounded corners. Others equate it with social networking because of the use of Facebook and text messaging in the Obama campaign. Some people see it as just another Internet “meme” — a catch-phrase or idea popular in cyberculture.

But whatever the perception of it, Web 2.0 is a transformational wave that has already taken us from the original World Wide Web we once knew (there was no official “Web 1.0” — in this case the egg came after the chicken) to a new attitude about the Internet, which is: it belongs to the people who use it. This may seem too simplistic, but the truth is that for the most part, the old web was a world where some people published websites and other people passively accessed them. Now, people are less interested in sites that simply deliver information — they want sites with functionality, sites that are actionable, sites where they can interact with the site, contribute content, or connect with other users. The ability to interact, contribute, and connect is at the heart of Web 2.0’s success.

For example, in the ancient days of the web (the 1990s), many sites offered you a way to create a personal homepage (e.g. Geocities) or a blog (Blogger.com), but Web 2.0 sites, such as the pioneering MySpace and the newcomer Facebook, offered a personal homepage that also included a blogging tool, photo galleries, and a way to find and add a network of links to other users. While email and instant messaging had been around long before that, the Web 2.0 sites integrated different tools for interactivity and connectivity.

Where did the term Web 2.0 originate?

The term Web 2.0 first became popular in 2004 after an O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference (O’Reilly is a highly respected publisher of technical books). Even at that time, though, there were websites that offered interactivity and connectivity, and blogging had already been around since the late ‘90s. Facebook had just been launched that year, but it was only intended for college students, not all Netizens. Photo-sharing site Flickr was also launched that year in Vancouver, so it really was a watershed year for Web 2.0 in many ways.

Sites like Go2Web2.0 (www.go2web20.net/) list hundreds and hundreds of Web 2.0 sites. Web 2.0 is not just about social media, though. There are many types of Web 2.0 sites ranging from blogs to wikis (see the list of examples on page 55). As well, many British Columbia companies (and several on Vancouver Island) have developed Web 2.0 sites, such as Flickr, Flock, Udutu, Sitemasher, and DailySplice.

How can businesses benefit from a Web 2.0 strategy?

A recent article in BusinessWeek titled “Why Web 2.0 has Corporate America Spinning” lists the following reasons Web 2.0 is becoming such a popular buzzword in the business community:

• Corporate blogging. Executive blogs, such as those by General Motors and IBM executives, give companies a channel for informal dialogue with their grassroots customers and also provides a way to offer another perspective on what people are hearing in the mainstream media.

• Problem-solving. Web 2.0’s emphasis on social networking can create opportunities for collaboration and outside-the-box thinking in larger organizations. Wikis offer a way to share information and also track how that information changes as people add to it.

• Staying young. Older executives know that Web 2.0 attracts younger employees who are already interacting and sharing information online outside of work. It’s good for recruiting and retention and helps create a more youthful culture in a company.

Web 2.0 is also changing the thinking behind e-government

Over the past few years, the big buzz in public sector organizations was about how to use technology to transform government into e-government. But the popularity of Web 2.0 has started the public sector talking about something that’s being called “Government 2.0.” From the government of Canada right down to municipalities, governments are interested in how they can use social media, such as blogs and message boards, to engage the public, create citizen-centric e-services, and share information.

The city of Toronto’s Web 2.0 Summit, held on Nov 26 and 27, 2008, was held to share ideas about how Web 2.0 and social media (such as wikis, blogs, and social networking profiles) can increase civic engagement, reach all communities, and improve city services, as well as learn new ways for elected officials to engage communities on the services that affect their quality of life.

Here are some different types of Web 2.0 sites and specific examples of each type.

Blogs

• Blogger is one of the original free blogging services, now owned by Google.

Bookmarking

• StumbleUpon is an addictive software that you add to your browser to “stumble” on random websites, but you can also indicate your preferences with a rating tool or suggest sites that should be added.

Chat

• Meebo is the web messenger that lets you access instant messaging from anywhere, such as MSN/Live, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk (Gtalk), Gabber and ICQ.

Education

• Udutu was created by another Vancouver Island company and provides a free tool for authoring e-learning courses that can also be downloaded and distributed for free.

Emails

• Gmail is one of the most popular of the free webmail services, created by Google.

File Sharing

• Mediafire is a free tool for easily sharing files of any type or size over the Internet.

Games

• Trendio is an online prediction game.

Images & Photos

• Slide.com is like Flickr or PhotoBucket, but Slide.com makes it easy to link your slideshows to other social media accounts, such as Facebook.

Micro-blogging

• Twitter is a leading micro-blogging site that allows people to post short updates about what they’re doing, called “tweets,” and follow other people’s tweets, too.

Music

• Odeo is a kind of YouTube for audio files… users can browse, download, and share audio files.

News

• NewsGator allows you to read all of your favourite news, websites, and blogs all in one place.

Office Tools

• Zoho Office Suite is a growing suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools that range from a simple word-processing tool to project management and customer-relationship management tools.

Podcasting

• DailySplice.com is a social media company created by yet another Vancouver Island start-up.

RSS

• FeedBurner helps bloggers, podcasters, and commercial publishers publish RSS news feeds or offer mailing list subscriptions.

Social networking

• LinkedIn is a kind of Facebook for business users, a social networking site for connecting with other businesses and professionals and is also used for job searches and hiring.

Video

• YouTube is the most popular free video-sharing web site and lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

VOIP

• Skype is voice over IP (VoIP) software that’s free to download and offers free-to-call long distance numbers.

Web Development

• Sitemasher.com is a development and hosting platform (created by a Vancouver company) that includes integrated content management and search engine optimization. Sites can be designed for free, and developers only pay subscription costs after they publish the site.

Wikis

• Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet with content created by its users.

Article originally published in Douglas Magazine.

Usability Differences between Web and Print Media

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Web professionals often talk about the challenges of repurposing content, creating Web-friendly content, and adapting content for the Web. This chart outlines some of the differences in a succinct way.

Do you have any other points you’d add to this chart? Let me know and I’ll credit your ideas on this blog if you want.

Download PDF (72 Kb): Usability Differences Between Web and Print Media

Mothers: A Usability Review

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1. Arms extend fully around body when giving hugs.

Rating: 10/10 Notes: Somehow this feature still functions effectively when children are adults, and regardless of their expanded height or girth.

2. Visual acuity and sightlines

Rating: 10/10 Notes: Most subjects seemed to have 360-degree vision (“eyes in the back of their heads”), could spot micro stains on shirts from 12 yards away, and had the ability to discern the difference between lying eyes and eyes that were telling the truth.

3. Heart responds to physical, emotional needs of children.

Rating 10/10 Notes: Tests have found that mother’s heart was fully scalable as it expanded easily to accommodate needs of higher number of children or children with exceptional physical and emotional needs.

4. Ability to process information and carry out tasks efficiently.

Rating: 10/10 Notes: Stress tests such as combining one wailing infant with a second child who needed his lunch packed for school resulted in high efficiency ratings. The ability to assist in math homework calculations while sorting laundry or talking to a client on the phone also impressed our analysts.

5. Recovery and reset capability.

Rating 9/10 Notes: Our observers noted an extremely high resiliency under long durations and task overload. However, many mothers lacked the ability to conduct effective self-care and general self-maintenance. We recommend that children enable mothers to have at least one annual 24-hour period where mothers can reboot or at least undergo defragmentation at a salon or spa.

6. Fully integrates with second and third generation systems.

Rating: 10/10 Notes: Over-the-shoulder tests found that mothers functioned perfectly with grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, although analysts noted that purchases of chocolates, toys and savings bonds seemed to be markedly increased from that of the first generation. We recommend that those with grandchildren and great-grandchildren be titled “Mother 2.0.”

OVERALL RATING: 100%

Comments: Happy Mother’s Day to my Mum and to mothers everywhere!

(We welcome additional data from other usability tests conducted on mothers, too!)

Twitter links are a major phishing risk…and a usability issue, too.

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Have you ever been concerned about security on Twitter? You should be.

I’ve tweeted this before on my Twitter pages @usabilitydesign and @socialmediamash, but I have to expand on this issue here because I think it’s going to be something that is going to become an issue for Twitter micro-bloggers.

In case you’re new to Twitter, or not familiar with how it works, when you post a 140-character-or-less micro-blog on Twitter that includes a link to something you’ve referenced, Twitter will either handle that link one of two ways. If the link is not too long, Twitter will convert it to a clickable link and leave the URL as it was when you entered it.

The usability issue

If your combined text and URL is greater than 140 characters, Twitter won’t convert the URL to a TinyUrl then count your characters based on the length of the shortened URL. You have to either provide a shorter URL yourself OR shorten the text part of your tweet, which is a usability issue. Why should a URL count in the 140 characters you’re allowed?

However, your post is less than 140 characters long, but the URL itself is quite long, Twitter will automatically convert it to a “TinyUrl,” (see http://TinyUrl.com), which is a shorter format link that redirects to the link you had specified. Nice of Twitter to do that for you, but here’s the problem.

The security issue

Anyone can set up a Twitter account if they have a valid email address, and unscrupulous people who are phishing for your personal data or trying to install a virus or worm on your computer can use TinyURLs to mask what URL they are sending you to. You don’t know what the URL is until you click on the TinyURL version and open the site. By then it could be too late for you,

The TinyUrl.com site actually offers a more secure way to share a link that is being rediercted by a TinyUrl. It’s called “Preview,” and if you use the Preview version when you are manually creating your TinyUrl, then people who click on your TinyUrl link are first redirected to the TinyUrl.com site where they can see the actual URL and decide whether they feel it’s safe to click through and go to the site or not.

When Twitter automatically shortens URLs to TinyUrls, however, we don’t have a way to let people review the link before they visit the site.

A reasonable solution for both issues: embedded URLs

Here’s a solution that Twitter could implement, if they really care about this issue.

If Twitter gave their users the ability to embed a URL in the text of their tweet… e.g. instead of entering a long link such as http://digitalpractices.org/2009/04/15/twitter-links-are-a-major-phishing-risk that Twitter will shorten into a TinyUrl, the message could simply refer to this blog post that I wrote, and thus Twitter users wouldn’t have to use up so many of their allotted 140 characters to include an URL. This would solve a usability issue on Twitter.

As for security, Twitter followers and browsers could simply hover their cursor over the link to see what it is. That way, they can at least have a fighting chance at finding out whether the link looks like it point to a legitimate Website rather than a creepy phishing site or some shady IP address spreading malware.

What do you think? Are you concerned about phishing or malware attempts when you click on TinyUrl links in Twitter posts?

Does SaaS makes sense?

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Why buy the milk when you can rent the cow? Many businesses find that software subscriptions may be more economical and efficient than endless cycles of software purchases, upgrades and customization.

Only a few years ago, most businesses felt the pain of being software licensees. The cycle went something like this:

  1. Issue an RFP, then pay big bucks for proprietary software.
  2. Pay annual service agreement fees so the software company will provide tech support.
  3. Assign IT resources in your company to install, configure, and customize it.
  4. Pay for trainers from the software company to train staff how to use it.
  5. Endure endless installs of patches and upgrades.
  6. Find out, a year or two later, that another company has a better software product now that wasn’t available when you purchased the other software. But now you’re too invested in the original software to switch to another.

Sound familiar? That’s why Software as a Service, or SaaS, has become so popular over the last few years. Also known as Cloud Computing, ASPs (application service providers) or On Demand Software, some say SaaS is just a trendy new tech term for something that’s been around as long as the Web has been around. In the last coupld of years, however, there has been a cultural shift in the way businesses evaluate their software needs. And SaaS is looking like a better option, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the IT resources and infrastructure of larger-scale enterprises.

The principle behind this is an application service provider can take advantage of economies of scale to offer cheaper, more reliable, and often better applications than companies could afford themselves.

One example of this is Web content management systems (CMS, which provide a platform to make Web content changes less technical and more manageable. Typically, large companies who want to purchase enterprise-level CMS software pay capital costs of anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000, not to mention implementation and training costs, followed by ongoing operational costs for support, training and enhancements.

A Vancouver-based company A Vancouver-based company (with offices in Miami as well), Sitemasher (www.sitemasher.com), offers an attractive and award-winning alternative. Their Sitemasher platform enables companies to design, develop and host a Website on Sitemasher, which has an integrated content management system that makes it easy for even non-technical staff to make content changes to the site. And it’s all offered for a basic subscription price of $99 a month for three seats (users).

Kevin Kinghorn, Director, Website and New Media with the Vancouver Canucks, says Sitemasher was a clear choice for the redesign, hosting and management of their GM Place site (http://generalmotorsplace.com/), which will be completed later this year.

“We’re very excited about getting our hands on (Sitemasher) and really figuring out new ways to leverage the power of the SiteMasher environment, and possibly developing some new features with the team.

“It was easy to see how Sitemasher would help us in an environment where several different users of various skill levels are relied upon to maintain a corporate website.”

Of course, one of the challenges with SaaS can be the level of support you receive. Some services provide real-time chat on their Website, a toll-free number, a peer-to-peer forum for users to post questions and get answers from other users, or an email address where you can send inquiries. But with some SaaS providers, levels of service can be, shall we say, less than desirable.

Not so with Sitemasher, says Kinghorn. When asked what advantages they saw in using an SaaS instead of buying content management software and running it on their own servers, he cited their customer service experience.

“That’s easy: the support and the development,” says Kinghorn. “The SiteMasher team has really gone out of their way to help make the transition easy – including conducting on-site training. And where a purchased CMS might fall short of our needs, they’ve developed the product to suit. Not only that, but their hosting environment is second-to-none, which takes a lot of strain off our IT department.”

Although the Canucks team Website can’t switch to Sitemasher because all NHL teams are being hosted on the NHL’s CMS, Kinghorn says there are several different applications for a product like SiteMasher within their organization

“The SiteMasher team has been unreal. We’ve got very specific needs on this project. Whenever we’ve run into an issue, they’ve simply developed the product to accommodate them. It sounds like a line from a marketing brochure, but they’ve really blown us away.”

The main risks in going with an SaaS provider are when a company’s IT systems require extensive integration with an SaaS application, when a company requires a large amount of customization from the vendor, and also when an SaaS company becomes financially unstable i.e. what happens if the system you’re relying on goes out of business overnight? Or is sold to another company? Or what if subscription prices go up drastically when it comes time to renew the contract? Each SaaS provide should be evalulated with these risk factors in mind.

SaaS applications are usually priced on a per-user basis, often with a small minimum number of users and scalable plans for additional users and extra bandwidth and storage. The types of SaaS applications available on the market right is very broad (see this site to look up SaaS providers by category: www.saas-showplace.com/saasproviderdirectory/saasapplicationcategory.html), and here are some examples of popular SaaS applications in some of those categories.

Office productivity and tools: Zoho (http://zoho.com/) is a reputable SaaS company based in India that provides a wide range of office applications online at cheap or reasonable prices. There’s an online Word processor, spreadsheet application, document management, customer relationship management, project management, business intelligence…the list goers on and on. Free versions are available with limited features, and prices for additional service levels start from a few dollars up.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com/) bills itself as “the world’s favorite CRM,” and it is indeed one of the leaders in providing a customer relationship management database to organizations for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations. The company offers a full-featured CRM for as little as $9/month per user for their Group Edition.

Online Invoicing: Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/) takes the challenge of invoicing off your desktop and onto the Web. It can create, manage and send invoices, track time and expenses, and even accept payments through PayPal. There’s a limited free version and after that pricing starts at $14 per month.

Media Monitoring and Collaboration: DNA13 (http://www.dna13.com/) helps companies manage their communications, public relations and media management processes online. It was recognized last December by IDC as “One of 10 Canadian New Media Companies to Watch.” It’s used by RBC, Westjet, Scotiabank, City of Calgary, L’Oreal and Nestle, to name a few. Prices for the service are not available on their Website.

Internet Payroll: Ceridian Canada’s Powerpay Web (http://www.ceridian.ca/) is an Internet solution that allows employers to input payroll data and process payroll on the Web. Pricing details are not available on the Website, but there is a base charge per payroll run plus a nominal fee for each payment produced.

Performance Management and Compensation: Salary.com (http://www.salary.com/) offers on-demand software for talent management and compensation data for personal use, small business and enterprise level organizations. Prices are not available on the Website.

This article was originally published in Douglas Magazine. Garth A. Buchholz (Garth@DigitalPractices.com) is the President and Chief Usability Analyst at DigitalPractices Media Inc.

How to win at the name game

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Here are 5 quick tips on naming your business, from the experts at BrandNewPerfect.Name:

1. We want the perfect domain name.

In the beginning, everyone pined over what seemed to be the perfect domain names – the obvious ones like realestate.com, entertainment.com and internet.com (how would you like to own the ‘internet’?). Then some creative upstarts such as Amazon.com came along and proved what everyone in the advertising world knew already…it’s not what your name is, but who knows your name. So if your brand came first before the Internet you’ll want to maintain that as your domain name (e.g. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer is MGM.com), but if you’re a new company, why now develop your brand with an original name, the way Twitter.com and Zoosk.com did (visit http://www.go2web20.net/ to see the names of new Web 2.0 companies). Coining a new name often makes it a lot easier to get the dot com you want, too.

2. Hey, that’s our name!

In many cases the “perfect name” for your company is already being used by another business, or else they’re using a similar sounding name. Before you even try to register a new business name or domain name, do a thorough search of the Internet, which can help you determine whether there are similar names being used anywhere on the planet. Check different spellings of the name, too. And even if they are being used, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to use your version. Find out if the name is trademarked. Are they in the same business as you? If not, it may not be a problem for you to call your business Purple Rose Florists if the only other similar company is Purple Rose Tattoos. You can also do a variation in the spelling of the name, or include other words in the name to distinguish it or make it more specific to your business, e.g. Great West Technology can be turned into Gr8 West Tech, or Halcyon Communications can be turned into Halcyon Wordsmiths International. Avoid trademark issues by consulting a lawyer so they can do a search for you in your own country and other countries as well, where the laws may be different.

3. We wish this weren’t our name!

Sometimes your current name and brand is a liability when it sounds too similar to something with negative connotations. Imagine if you ran a store in New York City called Twin Towers Photography? In a real life case, Greenleaf Marketing in Springfield, Missouri, decided to rebrand itself as Red Crow Marketing because their original name sounded too similar to Greenleaf Companies, a real estate company being investigated by state agencies. In those kinds of situations, it makes sense to go through the effort, expense and even risk of rebranding under a new name.

4. We need something that sounds edgy, contemporary.

Rebranding yourself with an edgy, Webby-sounding name doesn’t usually work unless you completely re-style your entire company, and even then it might just seem blatantly superficial and disingenuous to customers and business partners. If you’re a drycleaning company and you re-brand yourself as “e-Clean”, you’d better find a way that people can order drycleaning pickups online or some other Web-related services, otherwise you’ll risk sounding foolish. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to style yourself after what you want to be and where you want to be rather than where you are now. Should a name say something about what your business does? Not always. It helps if the name is intuitive to people so they can tell what you do, but once you build a brand you don’t need any further descriptors. For example, does the Coca-Cola Company need to be called Coca-Cola Carbonated Beverages? Instead of simply describing your company by what it is, e.g. American Glassworks, try creating a name that describes its qualities, what it does for the customer or client, or what kind of impact it will have. As a name, Yahoo! didn’t literally describe what the company was offering, but it did describe the exciting experience of finding new sites on the Internet.

5. We want to see our name up in lights.

Not every name will have a symbolic or visual quality, but that’s an important consideration because when it comes time to develop your brand expression – e.g. your corporate colors and logo – how would you like your graphic designer to depict your company. And is that going to be the right image for your company? The name Lion Security lends itself to an instant visual, and it suits that kind of company because it portrays power and strength, but would the same visual suit a retail story selling baby clothes? Perhaps, if it were visualized as a cartoon lion sitting beside a lamb. The point is that the way your name will be visualized is also important in the selection process, not simply the originality or availability of the name. Let’s not forget that a product or service can have its own unique name and sub-brand, too. Rather than just calling your new product “Digital Widgets,” to use a hypothetical example, find out whether your marketing experts or consultants suggest creating a sub-brand with a distinctive name (e.g. Widgetmania) that can be promoted both together and separately from your corporate brand. There are pro’s and con’s to sub-branding…but that’s another topic for another post.

Disclaimer: This article is offered for informational purposes as a free public service and should not be construed as legal advice. Consult your lawyer on all legal issues relating to domain names and trademarks.

A Comparison Chart of Web Governance Models

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Establishing a Web Governance model can be daunting and fraught with internal politics and maneuvering. Once a major Website project is in operational or “steady state” mode, a governance model for content management should also be part of your overall Web strategy and governance planning.

For the operational side of Web governance, the following three models are compared side by side in chart format. Some of the details are generalizations, but nonetheless help illustrate the differences between fully Centralized, Decentralized and Federated (Distributed) models for larger organizations.

Download: Comparison Chart of Web Governance Models

10 quick tips to help you find unique domain names

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Here are 10 general tips on domain names for organizations to consider when shopping for a good domain name to register. Keep in mind these are rules of thumb, and there are often some exceptions to these, but if you research your domain names well before you register them or use them, you’ll spare yourself unnecessary time, money and aggravation.

1. NAME LENGTH

Remembers the basics – some usability studies have found that more than 16 characters is too long for a domain name. But it depends on how you’re going to use it, too. If your intended users are likely to search for it using a long word or combination of words rather than typing out the URL, then a long domain might be the best thing in some cases.

2. TOP LEVEL DOMAINS

Consider most TLDs (top level domains) including .net, .biz, .name, and country domains, but .com is still the best. Dot org domains are for non-profit organizations, and even though this isn’t a requirement in order to register at dot org, people will assume your site is a non-profit if you use that TLD. Many country-specific domains require that you are a resident of that country in order to register a domain with that TLD, e.g. Canada’s .ca

3. TRADEMARKS

Be careful that your domain name doesn’t sound too similar to that of another company on the Web, ESPECIALLY if their name and domain name is trademarked, and ESPECIALLY if you’re in the same line of business as them. Do a few Google searches using the proposed domain name and some variations on it to see who else is using them, if anyone.

4. BRAND NAMES

Your domain name doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as your organization’s name, but it can get confusing for people if it isn’t. If the name of your organization or brand appears to be unavailable in its most obvious format, e.g. “TheNameofMyCompany.com”, look at the possibility of using other TLDs (see #2). Another possibility is to name a domain based on what the company is trying to achieve online. For example, if your name is ABC Plumbing and abcplumbing.com is already taken, try registering a domain name such as “abconline.com” or even the more spunky “virtualplumber.com.”

5. DOMAIN NAME VARIATIONS

If you own other domain names that aren’t linked to a site, and you’d like people searching for those names to hit your site, then you can always redirect them to your main Website. One caution: be careful of this, because sometimes search engines will index your site under one of the other domain names not the main domain name the site is hosted on.

6. DOMAIN NAME BLOOPERS

Before you decide on a domain and register it, consider that it may not read the way you want it to when it’s read as one word, all lowercase. The Web has many funny examples of this, e.g. the travel site ChooseSpain.com” can be read as “ChoosesPain.com”

7. HYPHENATION

Many hyphenated versions of names may be available, but that doesn’t mean they’re desirable or even legal. You won’t get away with trying to register mic-rosoft.com, for example. Also, people will become confused about whether the domain name requires a hyphen or not, and if they type it in without the hyphen, they may end up on the wrong site.

8. SEARCH ENGINES

Something else to consider. In many ways, domain names don’t matter because most people are now using Google to find sites rather than typing in a URL or finding it in their Favorites/Bookmarks.

9. DESCRIPTIVE NAMES

On the other hand, sometimes it helps your search engine ranking to have a descriptive domain name as search engines will index it accordingly, e.g. “DeliciousDonuts.com.” There can be several search engine optimization considerations when researching domain names.

10. NEW WORDS AND SPELLING

Finally, you can always coin a new domain name by using a different spelling for a commonly known word or words, or by combining commonly known words, but remember that people may forget the unique spelling or the coined term if it’s not intuitive enough, or not marketed well enough.

As a brief footnote, don’t ever forget to renew a domain name if it’s important to you, or you may never be able to reclaim it again except at a high cost. While there is nothing wrong with reserving names (as long as you’re not reserving a name that was trademarked at the time you registered the domain), many Internet “cybersquatters” buy up domains to resell rather than to use for themselves.

They may contact you to offer to sell a domain name of interest, or you may even contact them if the site appears to be for sale. Let’s just say these domain names are offered at vastly inflated prices, and if you negotiate, they will usually drop their price but rarely to its true market value.

Disclaimer: This article is offered for informational purposes as a free public service and should not be construed as legal advice. Consult your lawyer on all legal issues relating to domain names and trademarks.

A ‘DailySplice’ of social media for businesses

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When most businesses hear about the rise of social media – i.e. blogging, podcasting, social networks such as Facebook – their reactions can be paraphrased as “Interesting, but how is that going to help our business?” or “I don’t want my employees wasting their time socializing on the Web.”

With social media, the emphasis is on interaction, collaboration, and user generated content. Unlike broadcasting or publishing an ad, getting your corporate message out via social media requires an understanding of the technology, an embrace of creativity and innovation, and a willingness to launch your corporate message and your brand identity into the blogosphere (as the world of blogs has been called), then wait to see where it lands.

There are all kinds of “social media consultants” out there selling seminars and books about how your business can benefit from it, but businesses need to look no further than DailySplice.com, a one-year-old social media software startup in Victoria, British Columbia.

Founded in 2007 by a group of business and computer science students at the University of Victoria, the company has developed a product called Splice Station that makes it easy for organizations to record podcasts (a digital recording of an audio or video broadcast delivered over the Internet or downloaded to an iPod) then deliver them on their own websites.

The University of Victoria has two two Splice Stations, one for business podcasts and one that plays Software Engineering podcasts. Vancouver Island’s AbeBooks, recently acquired by Amazon.com, is also using Splice Station to channel audio and video content through a specialized player on its website.

“It’s innovative and easy to use.” says Richard Davies, PR Manager for AbeBooks.com, a Victoria company that was recently acquired by Amazon.com. “Book lovers can find the world’s most interesting book reviews and interviews by visiting the AbeBooks.com website and looking for the Shelfsound logo.”

As if those examples from the world of business and the world of academia weren’t perfect enough illustrations of how social media can be used, another type of organization in Victoria Island has also started podcasting using Splice Station.

The Saanich Police have become perhaps the first police service in Canada to use audio and video podcasts on their website at saanichpolice.ca. Click on “Podcasts” on the homepage and you’ll find links to news and information as it happens (such as a live report about Pat Bay highway traffic) to crime prevention, safety tips, unsolved crimes, media releases and media clips.

The department’s public information officer, Sgt. John Price, says “Podcasting is the fastest growing communication medium in history…the Saanich Police want to be part of that medium.”

This article was originally published in Vancouver Island Business. Garth A. Buchholz is the President and Chief Usability Analystof DigitalPractices Media Inc. (Garth@DigitalPractices.com)