O`Bannon's Leap

Is “The Conversation” Online Myth Or Reality?

Posted on November 18th, 2008 by Scott

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If you follow the news or blogs talking about social media and networking online then I’m sure you’ve read terms describing the interactions between web sites and visitors as “conversations” and “discussions”.

It stems from the idea that the web has evolved from an Information Superhighway full of billboards–those static sites of old which simply allowed the site owners and webmasters to blast their brand and pitch to the masses–into a two way medium where site visitors are no longer guests but rather participants.

The idea is nice and a bit lofty in some ways, but is it true?

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Technorati Tags: conversation, social media, web 2.0

Posted in Social Web | 7 Comments »

Unclutter for Productivity

Posted on November 17th, 2008 by Scott

This is one of those things that we all know, yet often overlook. I’m guilty of it myself and often allow my desk, filing cabinets and PC to become overloaded and overflowing with tons of disorganized crap.

Friday afternoon I got into a bit of a cleaning mood though, so wen through all of the papers and notes on my desk, filing cabinets and the table I keep in my office.

It took hours to sort through it all, decide what to keep and what not to, and then to organize what I was keeping in a useful manner.

Then I tackled my PC. I download tons of garbage. From Music to videos, PDF files, presentations, documents and software.

Usually I download stuff, try or review it, and unless it blows me away I tend to forget about it. Which leads to a massive build-up of junk on my hard drive.

In all I removed over 30 GB’s of junk from my PC Friday evening. Then I ran a registry cleaner because that crap always leaves little useless entries in the Windows registry–and then I defragmented my hard drive (which took about an hour).

So, Yay! I’ve got all kinds of free space in my office and on my PC again, but that’s not the point of this post.

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Technorati Tags: clutter, productivity

Posted in General | No Comments »

Product Catalog Search - A Problem For Some Shopping Sites

Posted on November 14th, 2008 by Scott

If you run an eCommerce shopping site built from affiliate data feeds (and many of us do) then you’ve probably encountered that giant obstacle we often face with this “easy to use” catalog building architecture… the lack of ability to create a comprehensive inventory search feature for your visitors.

Since data feeds aren’t actually databases, and most CMS systems that import products from data feeds to build your site pages for you don’t do any sort of conversion on the data which would lend itself to creating a decent site search index, giving your customers the simple (and expected) ability to search your catalog can be a tough task even for those of us who program regularly, for the non-programmer it’s near impossible.

There are some 3rd party options, and Google’s site search service has been a long favorite in cases like this, but they’ve all basically been less than spectacular in performance.

Mainly due to the fact that only the pages of your site which were indexed by the search engine or service would be available to searchers, so some old and most new pages on your site wouldn’t appear in any results for your shoppers. Not good.

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Technorati Tags: eCommerce, Google, site search

Posted in eTailing | 1 Comment »

Clarity on What to Blog About

Posted on November 13th, 2008 by Scott

In yesterday’s post, What to Blog About?, and in the later comments I used an example of content researching for someone starting a blog about acne just to illustrate that even topics which you might not normally think would have a lot of online active communities likely do if you just search for them.

My intention was not to say anyone should go and use the personal sufferings of people afflicted with any medical condition to simply build profitable niche sites about. One reader’s email contact questioned me on this, so I wanted to be sure I was clear on that.

Honestly, my posting yesterday had nothing to do with “what to build sites about” for anybody, it was just a sharing of existing resources for anyone who might be starting a site on any topic at all.

It doesn’t matter if your site is about remote control toys or breast cancer, that just wasn’t the question I was addressing. The point was to show that whatever you may be starting a site (or blog) about, you can find good communities online already where the existing conversations can help to spark content ideas for you.

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Technorati Tags: Blogging, internet marketing

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »