Blog at andreas.com

Chrome: I gave it a week. Too buggy. Chrome lacks many basic features. I gave up and went back to Firefox. Google released Chrome without basic testing. It doesn't even work with YouTube and Google Adwords, which are Google's biggest properties. Google is using user feedback to find bugs and add features. This may be a good idea for a little startup, but Google? They want to take on Microsoft and they do this as a weekend project? I'll check in again in a few months. 1 comments

So that's how they did it? Google's Chrome was built by a 20-person team. What did they leave out? Well... testing. Does the thing work? Not very well. Try YouTube. The videos freeze within a few moments. At many sites, there is no audio. There are many minor bugs with Google Adwords and Google Analytics. Google released their browser without even testing it with the top ten websites, including their own sites. If this is how Google wants to beat Microsoft, well, Microsoft doesn't have to worry. 0 comments

Google Chrome: It's a new browser, yes, but it's more than that. We don't need yet another browser: there is IE, Firefox, and Opera. Chrome is faster and has a few clever things. But it's not just a browser: it's the beginning of the next generation of software. Open Chrome and create a few tabs. Grab a tab and drag it away from Chrome. It pulls off and opens like a new window. For web browsing, this is cute but not really useful. But... if that tab had a program in it, such as a text editor or a graphics program, you've effectively turned a web page into software. Click the "page" icon (next to the wrench icon). One of the items is "Create Application Shortcut". If your new web page is a tool, this item lets you turn that page into a clickable icon on your desktop. For example, open Google Adwords or Google Analytics and use the "Create Application Shortcut". Bingo. You now have Adwords as a clickable icon on your desktop. Adwords is now a program.

Chrome is Google's platform to run software within browsers. No more standalone software in a box or on a CD. This will have huge implications for the way software is released and distributed. And of course, it's a major threat to Microsoft (and, yes, Apple); a computer doesn't need a large operating system. It can have a simple desktop, only big enough to run a browser. That's exactly what the Google phone will be: a portable device that can run Chrome and all of Google's applications within Chrome. If a gPhone can do it, then desktop computers can do it. Goodbye Windows and Apple. 0 comments

SES SJ 2008 is the main trade show for the SEO/PPC industry. It was held last week in San Jose. Save yourself $2,500 and four days: Here are summaries of all sessions: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four. The insider's view? Most of these presentations talk about trivial issues or they are based on ideas from one-to-two years ago. Only the presentation on Quality Score is up to date, but the speaker said too little to be useful. 0 comments

Okay, you know about analytics. Here's another item. Evidence-based marketing uses "best available scientific evidence" for decision-making. It's marketing based on facts, not gut feelings. It's now very easy to get data about your customers with analytics. For our new book Search Engine Marketing (McGraw-Hill, 2008), I worked with Roslyn Layton, MBA to develop the KPIs (key performance indicators) that measure the value of multichannel marketing. Roslyn continues to work in the field to refine the measures even further. Check out RoslynLayton.com. 0 comments

Coming soon! Insider-SEM.com 0 comments

Google/Yahoo/Microsoft (GYM) can now index Flash files. Adobe created a tool for the search engines that allows them to index the text content in Flash. 0 comments

Google Ad Planner is a media research tool. You enter demographics and sites that match your target audience and the tool will show more sites that your audience is likely to visit. You can also see the demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites to make your media plan. Ad Planner also lets you create and export media plans to a .csv file. Free to use at www.google.com/adplanner/ (This is currently (June 2008) in beta testing. They will open it up to the public soon.) 0 comments

Why does Wall Street make such huge mistakes? Why do PhDs in economics and mathematics (incl. some with Nobel Prizes) cause banks to collapse? It's not what they don't know; what they know is wrong. Fascinating interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (his blog is at FooledByRandomness.com). What does this mean for Google? Hmmmm... 0 comments

You can get free webpages at Google. Go to pages.google.com/ and make a page. No HTML required. Just write! Here's an example: Cuz Layton. 0 comments

The End is Near: NPR reported the other day that gasoline prices may reach $6 per gallon within six months and may rise to $10/gallon by next year. That's bad news or good news, depending on your view of SUVs: 36% of the people who tried to trade in a large SUV in May owed more on the vehicle than it was worth. The value dropped by $2,000 to $3,000 compared to May 2007. General Motors will close four of its SUV plants, expand production of fuel-efficient cars, and finally move forward with electric vehicles. They may also get rid of the Hummer (8 miles per gallon).

The Department of Energy estimates it costs 20 cents per gallon for every 5 mph over 60 mph.

Yesterday, I wrote down my car mileage for the month. I do this every few months. For 2008 so far, I've driven an average of 40 miles per day. My car (Miata sports car) gets 25 miles per gallon, so that's 1.6 gallons a day. At $4.20 per gallon (California prices), that's $6.72 per day, or $200 per month. It'll be really interesting to see how the USA deals with $10 gasoline. For the average American household, they may need to spend up to 50% of their monthly income for gasoline. 0 comments

Ever thought of living in a Victorian on a park in San Francisco? $3.45m and your dream comes true. See what such a house looks like. 2737Clay.com. 0 comments

If you're using Google Adwords, pay attention: the page's load speed is now a factor in the Quality Score. If your page opens slowly, you lose points. Visitors don't like to sit around and wait for pages to open. Get rid of Flash, shorten the pages, etc. 0 comments

Google + Yahoo? Microsoft + Yahoo? I was asked at a conference what I thought about Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. I said "Irrelevant." Google has 90% market share. Yahoo has 6% and Microsoft has 3%. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, they have 9%, but Google still has 90%. It won't affect Google. What if Google buys/takes over Yahoo? Again: Irrelevant. Google goes from 90% to 96%. Not much of a difference. 0 comments

Have you ever noticed the White House warnings of "possible terror attacks" come whenever there's bad news about the Republicans? Warning? Or distraction? Here are five years of Bush's fake terror warnings. 0 comments

Larry and Sergei forgot to feed the meter. Google Adwords earns around $20 billion per year, but they forgot to pay $35 to renew their security certificate. Shall we set up a Paypal donation box to help out Google? :-)

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I made a List of Breakfast Places in Silicon Valley. 0 comments

If you see a car with a broken exhaust pipe, you can report it to the California Air Resources Board. If the car is smoking, it creates smog and air pollution. See andreas.com/faq-smog.html for a link to their form. 0 comments

What happens when your doodles get out of control? 1 comments

Indeed.com has jobs listings, plus two useful tools:

- Table of Salaries: See trends and comparisons of salaries for your job. Add multiple jobs and compare the salaries (e.g., "blogger vs. webmaster vs. journalist"). This will give you serious ammunition when you demand your raise :-)

- Trends in Job Listings: In a dead-end job? Try "blogger, webmaster, journalist" and see which one is dropping! 0 comments

Free Google Analytics Debugger. SiteScanGA.com will check your site to see if the Google Analytics tracking code is set up correctly. 0 comments

Time to refresh your website's look? Does your website's design look like 1997? Are your webpages fraying around the edges? Web design is much easier now. You can buy templates for $25-50 at sites such as HyperTemplates.com and TheBestDesigns.com. Get ideas at a huge collection of website designs CoolHomepages.com. Your webmaster should be able to implement these. 0 comments

Microsoft Analytics: Not to be left out, Microsoft is releasing their own analytics tool. It's free. I signed up for it and I'm trying it out. It's in beta and still a bit buggy. It looks very cool. More in a few days. 0 comments

From a Google blog, I read Craigslist has RSS feeds for their pages. Another site Oodle.com is a collection of classified ads from the entire USA. This means you can use an RSS reader to notify you of new jobs. You select the type of job and it gives you a fresh list of new jobs. Learn How to Use an RSS Reader. 0 comments

Google ABM: finally released an ABM tool. This has been one of the most requested tools for several years. This tool is as significant as the release of Google Analytics. ABM (Automated Bid Management) tools automatically adjust your bids for optimal results. Instead of manually adjusting bids (time-consuming and mostly on a rough guess), ABM tools can adjust bids literally every few minutes in increments of one cent. And it can adjust bids based on location, so there can be different bids for ads in NYC and Palo Alto. You get the best possible bid at that minute, for that day, for that city. Best of all, Google's ABM tool is free. Other ABM tools can cost several thousand dollars per month.

To qualify for this tool, you must have campaigns with 200 or more conversions within the last 30 days. If so, go to the campaign's settings and look under budget options. 0 comments

"What Goes Up...": The House Bubble has finally burst. In the chart, we see the historic trend for house prices. It has shot up out of proportion. As we know from all bubbles, the price always returns to the base. House prices are projected to fall 40% (Paul Krugman) or 38% (Eric Janzsen). See Krugman's article (with more graphs, etc.). There is also a very good article about bubbles in Harpers Magazine (Feb. issue, not available online).

All of this is bad news: expect a severe recession that will last several years. Large corps have already begun to prepare for recession: they are cutting costs by laying off workers, reducing inventory, etc.

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HDR Photography: There is a new way of taking photos to create some very nice images. "HDR photography" produces photos with a wide range of tones. The eye can see far more tones than a camera (a camera captures 300 tones, but the eye can see 30,000). By adjusting your digital camera, it can take a set of photos, which you then open with a software tool that combines the photos. The result is one photo with a broader range of tones. It looks remarkable. You can take photos in fairly dim light and get great results. This is actually pretty easy to do. In fact, there's a great tool for this, and it works better than Photoshop. Here's another example. The HDR tool is Photomatix at HDRSoft.com (free, unlimited trial version).

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Looking for Breakfast in Silicon Valley? Here's a list of Silicon Valley Breakfast Places. 0 comments

Have you seen the little taxi in your Treo PDA? Every once in a while, a little taxi cab races across your screen. "Easter Eggs" are jokes inserted by the engineers when they wrote the code. I called Verizon about this; they had never heard of it. Here's a pix. 0 comments

Looking to sell your Palo Alto house? Or buy a house in Silicon Valley? Two of the top SV realtors have been sending out a research newsletter for years, and they've finally gotten onto a blog. If you're in the house market in Palo Alto or Los Altos, keep up with real estate at JeffandSteve.com's Blog. 0 comments

Use SMS Google: When you're in a store, use Google on your cell phone to compare prices. SMS the product name (e.g., "price mp3 player"), ISBN, or UPC number ("price 1591841410") to GOOGLE (466453). Google will give you comparison prices. You can also enter a type of restaurant and a city (e.g., "pizza, dallas") and get a listing. Try it at SMS.Google.com. 0 comments

Facebook caught up to MySpace and is passing them. The chart shows their percentage of daily web share. Each of them gets about 6% of the daily traffic on the web. In late 2006, Facebook opened up their site to everyone. That resulted in steep growth. The graph comes from Alexa.com (click for a larger image.)

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Okay, here's the video of the song of the bubble of the boom. You gotta watch this. Very funny song about the Web. 2.0 Bubble 0 comments

Here's how to block Facebook's Beacon by adjusting your privacy settings. 0 comments

I saw this and just had to take a photo. 0 comments

Firefox Shortcuts: Many people still type out the whole URL in a browser ("w, w, w, andreas, ., com"). There's a faster way: type just the domain name (e.g., andreas), hold down the Control key, and press Enter. The browser automatically adds the www. and the .com part (this also works in Microsoft IE).

If you hold down Shift, you get .net and if you hold down Ctrl+Shift, it adds .org in Firefox. 0 comments

Analytics: Two years ago, people asked us "why should we use analytics?" This year, analytics has become the main tool in SEO/PPC. It answers two questions: "What are visitors doing?" and "What can I do about it?", namely, how you make changes to get more conversions, leads, and sales. An improved Google Analytics came out in the spring; if you have a website, add Google Analytics. It's free and it's good. In the new book, we'll show you how to configure and use it.
Analytics tools don't just track PPC conversions; they can track all conversions: SEO, links, banners, email, etc., including offline conversions (newspaper coupons, radio ads, TV, etc). You see what works; you improve it. What doesn't work, you shut off.
Stephanie has agency-certification with Clicktracks Analytics, plus she can install and configure WebTrends and Omniture. We are in the process of getting agency certification with Omniture.
There is also the Web Analytics Association. Stephanie is on the Exams and Certification Committee. She is writing the exam questions. 0 comments

SEO Book: 3rd Ed.: We're writing the next edition of our SEO/PPC book. Last week, we signed with McGraw-Hill. They are launching a new series and our book will be part of this. The new book comes out in summer 2008 in all major bookstores in Europe, North America, and Asia. Visit our current book at Insider-SEO.com 1 comments

Add Forms to Your Website: Do you have forms on your website? Do you want a form to collect registrations, contacts, etc.? Forms are much easier now. No more programming. Several companies have created tools that allow you to put forms on your web pages. Create the form with their editor and add a line of JavaScript on your page. I set up this up for a client a few weeks ago. It took five minutes. No more CGI! It can validate email address, telephone number, etc. Web-Form-Buddy.com ($40 per year). 0 comments

RSS Readers: Do you follow multiple blogs or news sites? You need an RSS Reader. It's much easier. See my FAQ about RSS readers 0 comments

Green Energy: In Palo Alto, we can switch to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). This increases my electric bill by a mere 66 cents per month. If you can, switch to renewable energy. By supporting this, it becomes more viable and we can all switch over sooner. 0 comments

How to Allow Comments at Your Website: Lev Walkin, an engineer at Cisco, wrote this for his wife. She wanted to allow visitors to add comments to her website. The result is a simple: just add a line of JavaScript to your website and your visitors can write comments. You can also assign star-ratings (visitors can vote on products, pages, pixs, items, etc), vote in polls, or write reviews. All of this increases visitor participation. There's also a dashboard, where you can view all the comments at your site (and moderate/delete) and see usage statistics. The tools are free and if you can copy and paste, you can add this to your website so you'll have the tools that the big Web 2.0 social networking sites are using. I've added a number of these at andreas.com. Visit JS-Kit.com 0 comments

There's a comet in the skies. It's very easy to see. I went out and found it right away. You can see it without a telescope. With binoculars, you see a big fuzzball about the size of the moon. Here's a map: How to find Comet Holmes 0 comments

andreas.com = $12 million? An analyst writes that each unique user on Facebook is worth $300, thus Facebook has a $15 billion dollar valuation. If that's true, then andreas.com is worth $12m. And my cat's page is worth $105,000. But c'mon, we know that isn't real. The analysts are exaggerating Facebook's numbers to drive up the value to make money on the IPO. 0 comments

Google Analytics finally turned on Site Search. This lets you track what your visitors are searching in your website's internal search (you do have an internal search box, no?). Various studies show that visitors who use internal search will convert 3X more than other visitors. So... add internal search and turn on Site Search (Here's how...) 0 comments

"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." 0 comments

Over the weekend, we made a video ad. One of our clients sells pre-lit Christmas trees (just take it out of the box, fluff it up, and you have instant tree). So we set up the tree in my living room and wrapped up a bunch of empty boxes as presents. I also had two large halogen lights from a previous photography project. Stephanie bought a Sony tripod that includes controls for the video camera on the tripod's grip. I shot the video, she edited it, and we added it to Google ads on Sunday night. We will make another video this afternoon to post to YouTube and various other places, along with the client's website. 0 comments

Does your cat wake you up in the morning? Here's a very funny animated cartoon.

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Silo, internal architecture, theme structures: it's the same idea. Restructure your website so the pages are clustered in relevant groups. If you're rebuilding Ford.com, all the pages about Ford Mustangs go in one group, pages about F-150 pickup trucks in another group, and so on. This lets Google's spider identify the theme of the clusters so it can index and rank the pages better. I did this for andreas.com (avg. 30,000 unique visitors per month) a few months ago: traffic has increased to 39,000 unique visitors (the last 30 days). 0 comments

Thinking of building websites for PDAs? Want to see something new on your Treo or iPhone? Use your PDA to visit my website design tips for PDAs.

I was looking at my analytics this morning and noticed that my PDA site was very popular. I found that it's one of the very few pages at Google on how to do PDA web design, so I updated the site this afternoon and tested it on my Treo. Now I'll add Google Adwords for mobile devices to see how that works. For our clients, we'll do advertising on PDAs. 0 comments

Two Screens: I added a second monitor to my computer. It's now a 27" wide monitor :-) I can move windows from one screen to another. To do this, you put in a graphics card ($80-$150, depending on quality) that has ports for two monitors. Just add a second monitor. Very useful for work. 0 comments

Can you fool Google just a little bit? A client called us; one of his websites disappeared from Google. It didn't show up anymore for his top keywords. I searched at Google with site:www.NameOfClientSite.com; that showed that his site had been removed entirely from Google. The webmaster and the webdev team assured me they had not added spammer code to the site. So I opened the site's code and began to look for the problem. First, I checked the CSS. It was a simple CSS. No problem there. I looked at the index page. I began going through the site, page by page. In the sixth page, in the middle of the code, I found it. Someone in the webdev team used the ol' absolute:position trick to hide text in the website. By positioning the text ten inches to the left of the monitor and five inches up, the text was "displayed" outside the monitor. Visitors couldn't see it, but Google could. Thus Google blacklisted the entire site. The webmaster now knew what to search for, so with a global search, he found all instances of this code and removed them. The next step is to ask Google to review the site and add it again. Google however takes their time to do this (it's part of the penalty), so it may take 2-3 months, if he's lucky, to be in Google again. That's three months of lost sales. By the way, Yahoo also bans this trick, so he could have been booted out of Yahoo too. Don't fool Google, not even a little bit. 0 comments

On Sunday, a group of us went to Point Reyes. We had a picnic on the beach (very sunny, great weather). We left our stuff on the beach and walked down to the surf. A seagull took the opportunity to raid our picnic and flew off with a Ziplock bag of peanuts (click on pix for a larger image; note the bag in her mouth). We chased her for a bit, but she calmly glided down another 100 yards. She knew we couldn't catch her. 0 comments

Are you running out of space on your digital camera? Memory full? Maybe you have the image size set too high. Consider how you will use the photos. If they will be displayed on your computer or on the web, then 1280 is sufficient; there's no need to take images at 2048 or 2560. By using too-high resolutions, your memory fills up. With lower resolutions, you'll get more pixs on a memory card. 1280, by the way, is still quite large. Here's a photo in 1280 pixel width (Warning: cat pix). 0 comments

Search Engine Market Share for USA, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, UK, and Italy:

USA: Google 89%, Yahoo 6%, Microsoft 3%, Other 2%. US population is 303m with 211m users.

Germany: Google 95%, Yahoo 3%, MSN 1.5%. Germany population is 100m with 50m users.

Russia: Yandex 49%, Google 23%, Rambler 17%, Search.Mail.RU 5%, Microsoft 1%, Yahoo 0.4%, Other 3%. Population is 145m with 28m users.

China: Baidu 62%. Google 20%, Yahoo, 13%. Other 5% (Sina.com and Sohu.com). Population is 1.3 billion with 162m users (10% of the population) (USA 211m users). China is growing fast and will soon be the largest number of users.

Japan: Yahoo is the market leader (but I don't have market share numbers). 86m users.

UK: Google 79%, Yahoo 8%, Microsoft 5%, Ask 5%, Other 3%. UK population is 61m with 38m users.

Italy: Google 54%, Alice Search 13%, Microsoft 11%, Yahoo 10%, Libero Ricera 9%, Other 3%. Italy population is 56m with 31m users.

Numbers for USA is based on stats from our clients. Look at your stats: Google is 90%. Numbers for other countries are from "Search Marketing Standard" (Fall 2007). 0 comments

Summary of SES San Jose 2007: Here are summaries of each session for each day: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. 0 comments

I was at Google tonight and talked with one of the engineers from the RSS Reader team. Someone asked me a few days ago how to add an RSS feed into a webpage. So I asked and he said you can use a Google Gadget for this. So I fooled around a bit and made this: my own newsfeed

You can create news topics in Google News on anything you like: people, your company, your company's products, etc., and then create an embeddable feed to put into your website. Very cool, no? 0 comments

SES San Jose 2007 starts on Monday. It's the main tradeshow for the SEO/PPC industry. The sessions that I'll attend: Monday: Universal Search (11a). Tues: Analytics (10:30), Site Architecture (4:45). All other hours, I'll be at our booth (10a-7p). Wens: At the booth (10-3:15), Ajax (3:15), SEO Reputation Problems (4:30). Thurs: Analytics (9a), More Analytics (10:45). Next week, I'll post my usual summary of SES. SES SJ 2007 0 comments

Coffee Without the Coffee Maker: 1-2 teaspoons of ground coffee, add boiling water, and stir. After a few minutes, give it another stir. The grounds settle to the bottom. Works well with a car travel mug. Just dump in coffee & water, stir, and by the time you're on the road, it's time for coffee! Tip: Use coarse grind, not fine. The coarse grind falls to the bottom. 1 comments

A technical illustration of an SEO/PPC/Analytics process (click for a larger image!) 0 comments

I wrote reviews of three books on Web analytics: Web Analytics an Hour a Day, by Avinash Kaushik. Web Analytics Demystified, by Eric Peterson. Actionable Web Analytics, by Jason Burby and Shane Atchison. 0 comments

Google Radio: You can use Google to advertise on local AM/FM radio for only $2.14 per radio play.

Via Google, you can get a list of voice talents (people who do the voice for the radio) to do the ad between $100 and $1000. You listen to the result, ask for any changes, and then upload the result. You select the radio markets by city, genre (rap, classical, jazz, talk, etc.), demographics (age, sex, income, education), and other criteria. Use a unique URL so you can track the visits. Your ads will play on the radio.

We've been doing this for several clients. It works great; they get more business. The ads cost only $2.14 to play on the radio. 0 comments

Every day, I read 24 blogs to keep up with my industry. How to do this easily? Use an RSS reader. No ads. No popups. You can review headings of only the new items in dozens of blogs. If an item is interesting, you click it.

Blogs and many sites have RSS feeds, which means the content is sent out to RSS readers. You get an RSS reader (such as the free Google Reader at www.google.com/reader ). Open your favorite blog and click the orange tab in the URL bar. Or in the reader, add the blog's URL in the Subscribe box. Or, in the reader, use Search and find blogs that use RSS.

In Google Reader, you can set View to show only headings (click on List View). Instead of all items, see only new items (click New Items). Click on Feed Settings and assign the feeds to categories (these are like folders).

Throughout the day, the reader refreshes itself. New items show up.

This lets you collect all of your favorite blogs into one interface. The reader shows only headings, so there are no distracting photos or ads.

For your company, you can encourage customers to subscribe to your blog and use an RSS reader. When you have product updates, just post to the blog and your customers will see it. 0 comments

Q. Okay, Google Maps has satellite images. With a good monitor, could I actually see people?

It depends. For some cities, Google has high-resolution images. For countryside and most areas, the images are low resolution.

In Google Maps, go to Palo Alto or San Francisco. Find a sports field at a high school or college and zoom in. You can see people on the track or standing around. Las Vegas has very high resolution images. You can easily see people walking around, laying by the pool, and so on.

Microsoft Virtual Earth has higher resolution than Google, but fewer locations. People are easily visible at the beach. Switch to bird's eye view and zoom in. You can see very good detail. In Microsoft Earth, you can see Stephanie sitting in my backyard. She loves to sit in the sun in a particular spot, and you can see that someone is sitting there. I think this may be the only case of an identifiable person in a satellite image.

These high resolution images has caused trouble: a few countries are furious that their oh-so-secret military installations can be seen by anyone. In some cases, Google has blurred the sites or lowered the resolution. A few months ago, I used Google Earth to find the North Korean missile launch site. North Korea may not like the photos, but Google is bigger than them. Check out Bermuda. Lots of details, boats, etc.

But why just stay on Earth? Go to the Moon! Google Moon And to Mars! Google Mars. 0 comments

Facebook is growing extremely fast now. 1.5 million per month. People are switching from LinkedIn to Facebook. It has more features and it's free. Link to me at Facebook.com

For more about Facebook, here's an article by Jeremiah Owyang. 0 comments

Free online games at Kongregate.com. People create games and share them. Try Fancy Pants. Cute game. Try Desktop Tower Defense. Funny little game. 0 comments

I'm reading Casanova's diaries. A new edition was published a few months ago. His diary is an endless series of anecdotes and stories of his adventures in business, politics, affairs of the heart, and so on, told in a very charming and witty style. One of his most famous adventures was his jail break. He was imprisoned in the Doge's Palace at San Marco Square in Venice. Nobody had ever escaped, but he didn't care for prison life, so he broke out. Read some of the Comments at Amazon. 0 comments

Where do B2B decision makers look for information to make decisions? 83% always look in Google. 14% use Yahoo and 5% use MSN. Wow. You'd better be findable in Google. (Data from a Marketing Sherpa report, June 2007). 0 comments

One of our clients just released a new type of help desk. The company is led by people from Remedy. It's web-based help solution, both for internal and external help, with a knowledge base, search, tickets, resolution, tracking, and reporting. We're using it. It's free for internal support. PathworksSoftware.com 0 comments

Wrike has a new collaboration tool that's different: it works entirely within email. No new tool to use, no additional tools. It's done via email (Outlook, GMail, etc.) Check it out. You can use this for your business projects, personal projects, etc. First accts are free. Wrike.com 0 comments

Cheap International Flights: Be careful with online travel sites: The prices range wildly. Some give you much better flight times than others. They also often don't tell you the real cost (they hide the taxes, which can be $200-300). The following numbers includes taxes.

- Kayak.com: $1,116. 4 flights. Pick 6am, 8am, 10am, 11am. Very nice.
- CheapTickets.com: $1240. 4 flights. But poor web design; the site is nearly unusable.
- Hotwire.com: $1285. 8 flights. Very nice.
- QIXO.com: $1,286. Only one flight available.
- Expedia: $1,500. Too expensive.
- Travelocity: $1800. Very expensive.

And there's a new kid: Vayama.com. They promise to undercut everyone.

I also built a website in Chinese for my brother's law firm. 1 comments

Every few days, someone asked me "What is Web 2.0?" They usually have a second question "How can I use Web 2.0 to get rich?"

Here's a guide to Web 2.0. First, let's look at the various types of websites.

Let's call the first websites "Web 0.0". These were informational sites (also called "brochureware") from 1994-98. They offered information, such as andreas.com or NewYorkTimes.com. Most importantly, the information was on a one-way street from the author to the reader.

In 1998, ecommerce turned websites into online catalogs, such as EddieBauer.com or Amazon.com, where you can browse an online catalog, add items to a shopping cart, and carry out a credit card transaction. We could call this "Web 1.0". This was also one-way communication from the company to the customers.

In both types of sites, the visitors were passive readers. The relation between the creator and the visitor was one-way. There was no contact among the visitors.

Web 2.0 changes this relation. Web 2.0 became a clear concept in Summer 2006. Parts of Web 2.0 tools have been around from the beginning of the web, but the general concept is different from the previous web:

Here are the main features of Web 2.0:

- Functionality, Not Informational: Instead of websites that are a resource for information, the websites are tools that run within browsers. You don't read the site, you use the site. This is also called RIA (Rich Interactive Applications) which use Ajax, Flash, or Adobe Flex. For example, GMail runs inside a browser window (more examples: Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, Google Maps, and so on). This moves away from the operating-system-and-software model (which is a problem for the Microsoft/Intel desktop computer monopoly). (This will also be a problem for LINUX and Apple desktop computers.) Browsers can run on just about any OS and digital device: laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and so on.

andreas.com: FAQs & Stuff

Welcome to andreas.com