Many people who use the internet daily run into the term web 2.0 and many of those people don’t know what it means. This is actually very understandable considering that for most people the internet does not seem any different than when they were first exposed to it. In order to truly understand web 2.0, it is necessary to understand the difference between the internet as it is today, and as it was back during the first internet boom of the late 90’s.

 When the dot.com boom first started, it was driven by investors who saw the potential of the new frontier of the web. As companies started pouring money, other companies quickly followed suit in an attempt to stay even with their competitors. Unfortunately, as we all know, this didn’t work out the way many people envisioned which led to the dot.com crash. However, there were several companies that learned some valuable lessons and would become part of the framework ofweb 2.0

If someone were to analyze most of the successful sites that are on the internet today, there are a few factors that they all have in common. Chief among these factors is the fact that they are user driven; meaning that use of the website is the primary motivation for visitors not shopping. Even large shopping sites include a high amount of user interaction through forums, blogs, and reviews. By providing this usability these sites ensure sticky visitors, which is the holy grail of any successful internet business.

The second common factor that most successful sit/> [...]

Mon Apr 12, 2010 11:45 am

Anyone who has been using Facebook for a few years knows that even minor changes to an interface design can cause a wide variety of reactions from a loyal user base. When the popular social network has made design tweaks in the past, there is always some portion of their users that are upset, if not enraged, by the changes made. A couple of weeks ago, we told you how your registration process could be driving potential users away, and a large part of that has to do with the design.

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These days, the look and feel of a website or product is just as important as the features that it provides. One product with one of the hottest new interfaces available is the new Boxee Beta software which allows for streamlined local and Web media viewing. Whitney Hess is the user experience (UX) designer behind the framework of the Boxee interface, and recently on her blog Pleasure and Pain she described the systematic process she went through to design it.

When Boxee hired Hess to overhaul their UX, she began by interviewing eleven people, some of which were current users of the software, and others who weren't. She asked them a variety of questions about their use of multimedia, including "Have you ever played music at a party you were hosting?" and "Have you ever displayed your photos on your TV?" among several others. Hess then held usability tests with five participants and gauged how they navigated around the software when asked to complete a series of tasks.

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Thu Jan 28, 2010 16:55 pm

I still love the linkfromdomain command on Live.com. Like MSN / Live (perhaps Kumo?!) search platform, it’s often forgotten about. But actually it still has much value for SEO. Here are 3 quick reasons why -

1) Check Your Outbound Links – You can’t always control who links to you, but you can control who you link out to which means it’s a fantastic indicator of trust to the search engines. We have seen time and time again when sites start linking out to poor neighbourhoods or spam (hacked sites or the DP network as extreme examples) your rankings die. So use the linkfromdomain command to see if you are linking out to anything you shouldn’t be.

You can use the excellent free Xenu link sleuth for this but with the linkfromdomain query you can add the usual spam queries to the end to narrow your search down.

For example for this blog with viagra. They all seem fine, although Yahoo still has some of it’s old hacked pages in the cache.

If you want to find out exactly what page you are linking to the site from use this command on Yahoo.

2) Identify Authority Hubs – Ok, so we believe that Googles trust algo was built around an initial hand picking of ‘tier 1′ authoritative trusted sites initi/> [...]

Thu Nov 12, 2009 18:55 pm

Twitter slipped a new option into users' settings earlier today that hinted the service may soon display images and video inline with users' 140-character updates, much like Facebook does in its News Feed. Moments after it was seen and reported on, it was gone again.

With Twitter keeping mum, questions abound: What will this feature look like? Will it slow Twitter's already-taxed servers? And will people use it?

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Twitter is keeping quiet about the possible new feature, first publicized by Mashable, but sent media this vague statement:

"We're constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps."

So, Twitter, here are the top questions in our minds about the "potential" new feature.

5 Questions About The New Tweet Media

Twitter's servers have enough trouble keeping up with text tweets - will including photos and video in streams on Twitter.com result in even more Whales?

The answer will depend on the display size of the photos and video and whether Twitter is hosting the media. It will be easier for Twitter to scale if it displays only thumbnail-sized images, as it does in its iPhone and Android apps, and relies on third parties to host the media - TwitPic has a thumbnail API, for example. [...]

Mon Jul 26, 2010 20:05 pm