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E-Consultancy mention a move by Daily Blog Tips to raise awareness of RSS:

The number of people using the web is increasing every day, but the adoption rate of RSS as a technology is still way down at 5%.

I personally love RSS (really simple syndication) and I love the idea of what it can do. But, then again, I am a bit of a geek. Obviously the everyday Internet punter doesn’t get it or can find easier ways of getting information - like e-mail for instance.

As much as I would love more people to adopt RSS, perhaps it’s still not simple enough for people to understand, or use?

That may sound a little patronising, but I think about my own situation with recording TV programmes and the fact that I have a DVD recorder I have never used. Why? Because I got used to Sky Plus so now I need it to be that easy otherwise I won’t bother.

Food for thought, perhaps?

The BBC report today about how the value of internet advertising will overtake TV adverts by 2009 in the UK, following a report by The Internet Advertising Bureau .

Online advertising grew 38% in 2007 to be worth £2.8bn ($5.5bn), taking its market share to 15.3%, up from 11.4% in 2006, the report showed.

The report also highlights how the paid-for-search advertising market is “not slowing but maturing” as marketers become more sophisticated in the way they use the medium.

Brands are now using search more intelligently, getting a greater return on investment through ‘key phrases’ and more accurate targeting that reflects consumer behaviour.

I found this blog post today on alpha blog designs outlining the “101 Heinous Website Sins To Really Freakin’ Annoy Your Visitors” and I have got say I could not agree more. Some of my personal favourites are:

1. Use unnecessary Flash
2. Have “Site best viewed with…” somewhere in the page. Especially IE6.
3. Have a huge header, especially of yourself.
4. Have 40 ’socialize’ icons at the bottom of each post.
5. Ignore optimizing images for the Web.

So anyone out there who wants to know how to make a user experience more pleasurable I highly suggest having a read.

It looks like we could we be memorising fewer of them in the future when using our favourite websites and online services in the future.

Open ID is a foundation formed last year to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community.

Some of the big boys have joined the board - Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo - and the aim is to streamline login systems across the web.

Follow the story here.

In the modern world of web standards there is no room for the poor implementation of javascript that had swept the web during the days of ‘Ive got a dodgy copy of Dreamweaver, and now I am web designer’, which led to the increase of Dynamic HTML download sites that allowed web masters to copy and paste code into there websites to make text fade in and out and scroll (The best ones where always the big clocks following the mouse around. Superb! I am as guilty as the next programmer).

When it seemed every mickey mouse website was a mixture of animated gifs and random fading text that made you feel that you where on some kind of acid trip. Javascript then entered as Obi Wan would call it the “Dark Times” everything went back to being basic or to the overuse of bad Tweening in Flash.

Javascript has recently gone through some kind of resurgence of late with the emphasis being on “unobstrusive javascript”. What’s this? I hear you cry.

Well, if you were to think of a website as a cake (nicked this analogy from Gaz and Keith): The base of the cake would be your HTML. If you want it to taste nice then it needs to be made correctly using the right ingredients. This means semantic markup using tags that are relevant to the content i.e. using <UL> tags for lists and <DL> for definiton lists, headings in the right place and all that jazz.

When you have finished with your base and you’re happy all the ingredients are there, you can then begin to decorate the cake. Decorating the cake in this case would mean using CSS to apply styles, colours and the general design giving you something that not only tastes good but looks fantastic.

Now this in itself would be enough for 9/10 web programmers / designers. However, we could go really overboard and add a cherry. The cherry, as the title of this article would suggest, is Javascript.

Using the ingredients in place we can add the cherry to enhance the cake and make it look that little bit sexier. The beauty of adding the cherry at the end is if no one likes the cherry (i.e. if the visitor to your website has javascript turned off) then they can take it off and crack on with the rest of the cake.

There is nothing worse than taking the cherry off and finding the whole cake crumbles in to mush because the cake was reliant on the cherry holding it all together.

So in summary where am I going with this?

I am a stickler for web standards although alot of other people out there may not be and there is nothing worse than coming across a web site that relies on the end-user having Javascript or indeed Flash installed to view the content.

Javascript and Flash should be layered on top of the content of a web site to sex it up or to make the end user’s experience more enjoyable.

Scrabulous is an online version of the game Scrabble, written by two brothers, that has risen in popularity of late as a Facebook application.

The joint owners of Scrabble, Mattel and Hasbro, launched an action on Tuesday saying that the Scrabulous game was a “gross copyright and trademark infringement”. The companies asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous. (ref. BBC)

This in itself is a fair enough point, but are they missing the point? Games become popular because they get played. On the INternet, they are easy for programmers to recreate… and spread, especiallyu when they encourage a viral attitude. IE. you have to play with someone else, so you tell you friends.

For instance, Scrabulous has grown to regularly get more than 500,000 users a day playing. The interesting thing about consumers (and especially younger generations) is that they don’t understand why they shouldn’t be able to play this game online, and for free.

Subsequently, over 18,000 people have asked the same question through Jason Madhosingh’s Facebook Group - Save Scrabulous.

Surely, a more positive [brand] approach would be to agree a licence fee with the people who wrote the application?

I completely agree that they own the copyright and have rights, but they will miss out on brand recognition (500,000 users a DAY) and a passive income stream that could be utilised.

If it were me, I’d actually buy the application and create additional cross-selling.

The thing is, a bnit like file sharing platforms, it won’t be long before someone else creates a new version, and when they get shut down, someone else….

When I first discovered the Internet back in about 1994/5 I used the iconic Netscape Navigator. But, just over ten years later, it’s sad to say that it’s faded out.

The good news is that it’s not Internet Explorer that is the cause. More likely Firefox - my now web browser of choice - which is home to many of the old Netscape developers anyway.

(via BBC)

and it’s quite frustrating. I’ve got a million excuses for not remembering to do it. It poses a problem when I know I found a page once before that I’d like to view again. Today I discovered Google Web History. If like me, you have a Google account, (and it’s dead simple to create one) this nifty Google tool will give you a complete run down of the sites you visited, not just in the last week, not just last month but for the whole of this year.

I love Google.

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements PDF files. (BBC)
The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

Two conflicting thoughts:

1. I hate in your face adverts and this is just another way to interrupt me.
2. This kind of advertising pays for (and fuels) a lot of free stuff.

So, as much as I hate it, it’s possibly a good thing - especially if the adverts are contextual.

One in four small businesses has concerns over whether they made the right choice when picking their web address and one in three believes they could bring in extra revenue by changing it to something else, reports New Business.

I’d have to agree. I come across some right stinkers. Although there are very few available names to go around, my personal pet hates are:

Bad TLD (top level domain) choice

To get the right name, many companies move into the massive grey void of the alternative domain choices (.uk.com, .eu, etc.) If you are in the UK, selling to the UK, you should be getting a .co.uk. A person will try and find you automatically trying .co.uk or .com.

You also have to think about the perception that your TLD gives off. For example, I discussed .biz with a group of people recently and the consensus was that it comes across as very Mickey Mouse.

Initials

Back in the early days people had the impression that your domain name had to be short so people could remember it. If you think about random letters, how many can you remember and get the letters in sequence. How about next week, or next month? Isn’t it easier to remember a longer but more memorable name? www.basingstokebusinessnews.co.uk. Another advantage of these domain names is the potential use of keywords in your name - good for SEO.

Hyphens

Tricky one this because there is good and bad use. We have “the-escape” and it does bother me sometimes because when I am telling people my address it sounds like this, “the escape dot co dot uk with a hyphen in, t-h-e-hyphen-escape-dot-co-dot-uk”.

Example of both hyphens and initials: www.m-a-m.co.uk

What To Do

Firstly, I wouldn’t rush into a decision, especially if you have an established domain.

Secondly I would look for variations of your company name and come up with a few options. escapeonline, escapedesign, escapeweb, etc.

Then, test them on people. Leave the names with them to mull over. One may become a grower.

Lastly, if you do change your domain to a new address, you must make sure the proper redirecting is in place so you may transfer your existing domain weight.

Final thought. It may be worth spending the money to buy a good domain name. It may cost a few thousand but it is an important asset. Sedo have lots of names for sale, I’ve just bought one myself.