Last posts on web 2.0

The Good and Bad Things about Flash Based Web Designing

2009-12-02T09:44:00+01:00

Flash based websites are being widely used all across the web world by web designing agencies for creation of websites and this is predicted to increase in numbers too. But there have also been a number of disputed discussions on the usability and applicability of these flash based web desiging. Here are some of them which will tell us how useful or how unnecessary are these Flash based websites. Lets begin with some Good aspects of Flash Based websites- Flash action scripts have the ability to make websites interactive and lively. Many designers have done flash web designing for websites in order to make them more user friendly, interactive feedback forums to flash games, all can be added in the websites to make them appear human. One advantage of flash web designing is that it does away with the fear of browser compatibility. Several web designers face the problem of browser compatibility, what looks good in one browser sa IE, might just clutter the look of the website in other websites like Firefox or Opera. But if your website is created in flash it shall be visible in any browser provided you have installed the flash player on to your machine. As we all know, it is better to express ideas and thoughts across to people if they are rightly expressed. And this conveying of expressions is possible only with flash. The creatively constructed flash animations make message exchange easier. Now for some drawbacks of flash web designing a website created in flash will be visible on a computer only if it has a flash player installed. If parts of your web designing is done in flash and the remaining are in HTML, and you do not have a flash player installed, then the sections on flash will appear blank. Many websites provide an option to download flash onto your website, but that again is an additional wastage of time. One major drawback of flash websites is the inability of the search engines to read flash content. The search engine crawlers are designed to read only text matters, places where the web designing firms have used flash to show articles will go unread by the search engines. This results in incomplete optimization of the websites. Flash files are huge in size, hence take a longer time to downloading. This might result in your visitor getting impatient and moving out of your website, finding it nonfunctional.Author: Naman JainFor more info orRequest your free quote nowhttp://www.rcginfotech.com/a.garg@rcginfotech.comhimanshu.gupta@rcginfotech.com

The 5 Biggest Mistakes of Web Design

2009-12-02T09:37:00+01:00

Your business needs a website. Here's a quick primer on how not to screw it up. Anyone who faces the challenge of having a website built faces a very daunting task, indeed. You know your business needs a web site, or perhaps you need to rebuild what you've already got. Getting is right is a delicate balance of business objectives, usability for the web, and search engine promotion. Getting it wrong is what this article is designed to help you avoid. Here are the five biggest mistakes you must avoid. 1. Not establishing objectives Without a thorough plan to kick things off, what are you building? It's kind of like showing up at the airport one day and saying, "I'm going on a vacation." Where are you going? Where will you stay when you get there? How long will you go for? Can you afford it? Did you ask your boss for the time off? Did you shut off the oven? To start, figure out what you want the benefits of your website to be. Forget about the bells and whistles required to make it happen; that's the job of your web designer. Establish what you want your website do for your business. Some examples: generate leads, sell your products/services right on the website, reduce administrative tasks, brand your company, pre-qualify prospects, recruit employees - the things a website can do for your company are virtually limitless. Establish your objectives and ensure that you and your web designer understand them fully. 2. Ignoring your customers We're talking about your messaging here. It's so easy to write your content from an internal perspective. What you want to say, what you think is compelling, what you think matters. What about your customers? Don't forget that you need to convince them to do business with you. The key to writing good, customer-centric content is to understand the "why". Why should your customers buy from you? You might think you know, but a good dose of objective research will uncover the truth. Capitalize on your unique selling proposition from the perspective of how it benefits your customers. You will also need to use proper web style in your writing. Your content should be well organized, highly scan able, easy to digest, and to the point. If you can organize it in a "pyramid" style, even better. This is where the most important, compelling information is presented first, and deeper information follows (such as technical specifications). Depending on your strengths this may be difficult for you to produce, so you may consider hiring a professional writer or copywriter. 3. Forgetting the marketing There is an old Kevin Costner baseball movie that has an analogy that is so clichéd I simply cannot bring myself to repeat it. In the realm of baseball and the afterlife it may be true, but in the world of the web, it sure ain't. When your website is built, it is an island; and a deserted one at that. Your customers don't know about it and neither do the search engines. You need to tell them. You need to market your website. Getting your website noticed by the right people is key. You're not actually marketing to search engines here. Search engines are simply a means to an end. You need to market to your customers. You must understand that your customers use different online methods to find what you sell; and this most likely includes search engines. You may also consider newsletter advertising, email advertising, PR campaigns, social networking, etc. The exact approach you need to take depends on your objectives, how your target audience looks for what you sell, your budget, your industry, etc. 4. Not measuring the results So, how did you do? You built a great web site and marketed the heck out of it. How many people came to your site? How many became leads? How many leads did you turn into customers? How much were they worth? What content did your visitors like and not like? {Insert your own redundant questions here} Just like any marketing venture, you must measure the results in order to find out if it was successful. I'm talking about things like: A tracking plan. Your leads might call you instead of buying online or using your contact form. You need a plan to track them, and how they found you. If you're running offline marketing campaigns, setup a separate domain name, create a unique web page, or use a separate 800 number. Online forms specific to a marketing campaign can be really useful as well. Statistics and reporting. Good statistics can tell you a lot about how people use your website. Google Analytics is a wonderful package, easy to install, and totally free. More than this, you need to understand the numbers, and draw conclusions. This takes quite a lot of practice and understanding. A professional web design or marketing company can help you with this. Adapt. Use your results, don't just read them. This will invariably require consulting with an expert again, but you need to act on your results to improve them. This is an on-going process. Forever. 5. Getting Paralyzed A lot of web design projects never see the light of day because they get mired down in perpetual planning. There comes a time when you need to act. You won't get it perfect the first time out (or ever), but you've got to move. If you aim, re-aim and re-aim forever, you'll never actually get off a shot. Aim - shoot - repeat. A quick caveat: I'm not telling you to put up a poorly written and poorly constructed web site just to have something; that can be very dangerous. A bad website can turn customers away and, even worse, have them poison your business through negative word of mouth. What I am telling you to do is to not get paralyzed trying to perfect your plan. Hiring the right team of experts can get you on track, and get things moving. Hopefully this article helps steer you away from the most common (and dangerous) pitfalls of web design. Whether you hire a professional, create your site internally, or do it on your own from start to finish, keep these tips in mind. In Summary By avoiding these five common mistakes you can ensure that your website has a fighting chance. Let this article serve as a map so you can avoid, at a minimum, some of the bigger and more costly detours.Author: Robin EldredFor more info orRequest your free quote nowhttp://www.rcginfotech.com/a.garg@rcginfotech.comhimanshu.gupta@rcginfotech.com

Social Media counts

2009-10-29T08:34:00+01:00

Tips to Create a Great website

2009-10-23T17:21:00+02:00

While the design and desired goals of not quite each snare put are diverse, nearby are various for all elements so as to move out into creating a huge snare put so as to will appeal to your visitors and the spider-bots of search engines willing to key your pages.1. Live descriptive with call out titles and on-page section headings. Your snare site's focal call out be supposed to by no means be aristocratic "Home". Use titles so as to express exactly come again? The call out or put is going on for so as to the search engines and humans who envision your put listed in search results will know come again? Clicking the link to your call out will offer them.2. Keep your graphics and other media to a lowest amount, and march sizes as small as likely. Obviously this have power over doesn't apply to image galleries or other parallel pages, but used for the ordinary snare call out nothing can concentrate visitors away closer than obese media collection so as to take too long to load. With images so as to you prepare work, be positively to include a descriptive "alt" tag. This has two purposes, used for visitors who are viewing (or listening to) your snare call out in text-only mode, it lets them know come again? Your media march represents, and used for search engines it gives their spider-bots more in sequence to rate your pages on.3. Use suitable XHTML coding. There are an increasing add up to of relatives browsing the snare on mobile procedure and you'll tell somebody to more acquaintances (and recur visitors) with them if your pages load correctly and fast used for them. Unless you contain the expertise or money to provide a special mirror of your snare put so as to is designed specifically used for mobile devices--which is the greatest option--by using suitable XHTML you will by smallest amount insure so as to your pages are optimized as much as likely used for the widest range of mobile device users.In vogue addition, as a rule search engines seem to promote snare sites so as to are using suitable XHTML more and more, so it is to your benefit all the way around to work it.4. Don't stuff your text with keywords now as you've heard so as to can raise your search engine rankings. First, the search engines are getting better and better by recognizing this tactic and imprisoning sites so as to work it. And back, all of your SEO production is supposed to be ended with the goal of increasing your put traffic, but come again? Gain is getting lots of traffic if the stuffed content on your pages no more than turns your visitor’s birthright away? Create your content used for individual visitors, next develop your SEO strategies around it. Not the other way around.5. Avoid trend-scripting. By this I mean so as to utilizing the most up-to-date snare technologies and scripting techniques is fine once it improves your user's experience on your snare put, but don't add daydream do-hickies now used for the sake of having them.If you run a snare put going on for Goldfish, visitors will be development to bargain in sequence on Goldfish nearby, not to be impressed by your fondness used for AJAX and Web 2.0 functionality.Give your visitors exactly (and only) come again? They expect and like from your call out, and they will say you've fashioned a huge snare put.

Crowdfunding for science

2008-09-17T11:20:00+02:00

I and my colleague Giuseppe Riva have just published a letter in Science, where we propose crowd-funding - a form of crowdsourcing applied to finance - as a possible strategy to cope with the lack of investments in research.

The full text of the article is available here: gaggioli_riva_science08.pdf

Video (Italian only)

What the Heck is Social Media?

2008-01-16T09:12:08+01:00

People have largely been immune to being spoon fed information. We turn on the radio and the news is being fed to us. Though we have a choice in what station we listen to, we are still be handed information. This is also true when we turn on the television. Yes, we have channels to choose from, however, we are still being fed a the end of the day by large conglomerates with an agenda.

Over the last few years social networking sites have popped up everywhere. You have probably heard of MY SPACE or YOU TUBE or FACEBOOK by now? These are good examples of social media platforms. These portals give the average citizen a place to carve out an opinion, steer a rating and toss a vote.

What does this mean? This means that we (you, me and the guy on the corner) have a voice. We are writing the reviews. We, yes, you and I, are leading word-of- mouth marketing campaigns, sometimes without even knowing it. Ever tell someone they must go and see the latest movie you just saw or visit the latest and greatest watering hole? Yup, this is what I am talking about!

It use to be that we turned to "experts" to find out what to buy, where to eat, what movies to see, where to travel and you get the idea. Now, we rely on our community. The communities that we in essence design. With tools like MY SPACE, we are able to communicate en mass, speak up, speak out and even communicate with people without even knowing them, often, meaningfully.

I get the question all the time "Isn't MY SPACE for the teenagers?" This makes me chuckle. The answer is, why, it is for everyone! The beauty of these platforms is we can utilize them exactly how we choose. We can use them for business, networking, dating, making friends, politics, fundraising, educating, the list goes on. The possibilities are really endless.

The early adopters understand the power of citizen marketing. People who are savvy enough to plug in to these alternatives are the ones gaining the most from what they have to offer. Did you happen to notice who the 'Person of the Year' on Time Magazine was in 2006? YOU!

We can research information at the speed of light. No longer do we need to digg throug card catalogs and search for ISBN's to find our answers. This is archaic. We can look for what we want and we can apply our findings, our knowledge and our expertise in so many ways! It is very exciting and gives the expert and the novice all a place to play co-exist equally. How cool is that?

Wiki Definition of Social Media:

If you really want to delve deep check out some of these reading options: Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything ASK DAVE TAYLOR: This is an endless site for information that goes well beyond the Social Media frame.

Don't be afraid to surf around on some of these websites. Look at what people have created. Spend some time envisioning how you can create a campaign that can transcend any other campaign you have ever done using only social media. The possibilities will keep you awake all night with excitement. Oh, wait. That is why you HIRE ME! This is what I do for my clients! I would love nothing more than to take your campaign onto the social media road to show you and your target audience the endless possibilities!

Prediction markets web 2.0 tools

2007-09-24T14:10:00+02:00

How will be the Future ? bet on it and harness the wisdom of the crowds with prediction markets tools.

About Internet

About the economy and general news :

FT predict (Financial Times)
The market-based game where the FT provides the exchange and you make the trades. FT Predict is like a fantasy stock league, but instead of trading stocks you trade contracts that place a value on the likelihood of future financial, political and news-driven events taking place.
Inklingmarkets
NewsFutures
Trendio

About Medias

Video ipo

....

Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 - York, UK

2007-06-24T23:19:47+02:00

Via Usability News

Event Date: 5 September 2007 to 6 September 2007
A 2-day event is being organised by the Social Informatics Research Unit (SIRU), Department of Sociology, University of York in collaboration with the Taylor and Francis Journal Information, Communication & Society (iCS) and the ESRC e-Society Programme.

Keynote speakers include Andrew Keen (author of 'The Cult of the Amateur') and Charles Leadbeater.

The conference will cover the full range of Web 2.0 resources that fall into the categories that include wikis, folksonomies, mashups and, especially, Social Networking Sites (SNS). So if you are involved in social scientific or cultural research on Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Flikr, Second Life, Del.icio.us or other similar applications then please consider coming along.

The aim of the event will be to develop critical, theoretical and empirically informed accounts of Web 2.0 not just as a business model but as a complex, ambivalent and dynamic phenomena laden with tensions and of increasing social and cultural significance. The event is intended to provide opportunities for those working on a social science of Web 2.0 to discuss their ideas and to begin to work through the processes and possible consequences of its rhetoric of ‘social participation’, ‘communal intelligence’, and ‘collaborative cultures’.

• How can social science deal with Web 2.0?
• How can Web 2.0 applications be used as research tools?
• How can we conceptualise the heterogeneous spaces of Web 2.0?
• What terminology can we find to account for Web 2.0, should we even be labelling it as such?
• How can the fast and ephemeral cultures of Web 2.0 be captured by the rather slower processes of academia and the policy process?
• Does Web 2.0 allow for methodological innovation?
• What are the implications of Web 2.0 for welfare and citizenship?
• What are the implications for privacy and surveillance?
• What are the consequences for localities, senses of belonging, and everyday connections?
• What linkages can be made between Web 2.0 and other social and cultural shifts of recent times?
• How will the inclusion of GPS and other technologies shape social behaviour?

Web 2.0 is burn out, but it’s spirit remains

2007-02-13T00:14:11+01:00

All along 2006, we have seen Web 2.0 hungry VCs racing to invest in web community startups. They were all trying to replicate YouTube supposed easy cash out. Anything with some Ajax, mashups, open API or User Generated Content would be called Web 2.0 and was supposed to be very hot.In beginning of 2007, it looks like Web 2.0 is no more a phrase to put forward to attract VCs attention. They have eaten too much of this buzz word and get afraid to get stuck with some lagers who have missed the wave.However, it’s not because a catchy phrase is no more fashionable that the underlying concepts are dead. Open APIs, mahsups and UGC remain a major key of Internet’s future. Many innovative and powerful business models are still to emerge in this field. Some of them have the potential to overtake the traditional way to do e-commerce and media.But as for the first Internet bubble, only savvy investors who are smart enough to invest against the crowd will make tremendous leverage in a couple of years on these emerging players.

Web 2.0 directory

2007-01-25T14:15:00+01:00

Quelques nouvelles ressources pour composer son ecosysteme 2.0- Dexly répertoire + de 2500 "Web services 2.0". - Programmable Web pour les "Mashups" ou encore Mashable

The second life of large e-retailers

2007-01-23T19:10:20+01:00

Despite the fact that traditional e-commerce assets are becoming a commodity, it does not mean necessarily that all large e-retailers will be excluded from the game. As a matter of fact, it might be quite the opposite. In this new web 2.0 ecosystem, mainstream large e-retailers will have a key role: to become the trusted third party for a given category. In any case, this is the fascinating bet of Amazon which is reinventing its business with at an impressive pace (still badly understood by the vast majority of financial analysts). The underlying idea is the following: in two or three clicks, I almost always manage to find a certain Joe who will offer me a book $3 lower than my usual e-bookseller. The only thing which retains me to deal with this Joe (unknown to me), it’s the fear (perfectly justified) that Joe will badly perform (or worse will cheat on me) this very transaction. Now if Joe is registered on Amazon market place, the picture is very different. Amazon’s brand should guarantee transparency, effectiveness and reliability of the transaction. As a result, I can now buy Joe’s book with very little to worry about. And of course, Amazon prefers to gain a 5% commission on the transaction between me and Joe that nothing at all. The idea of Amazon is simple: better to integrate all the Joes in Amazon’s ecosystem rather than let them develop out of control in the cyberspace. With this trusted third party role, Amazon hopes to stay in the financial transaction loop. Eventually, it is the only important thing for Amazon. In this frame, Amazon took two years ago an amazing decision: to offer free of charge of its entire product catalogue (through Web services) to the developers’ community. When one knows that for a retailer, its product catalogue is supposed to be one of its main assets, one measures how radical this decision was. But the logic is always the same: better to have all the Joes developing their revolutionary merchandising concepts using Amazon catalogue, rather than with others. This open API concept opened to all kinds of mashups is clearly one of the main features of these new Web 2.0 sites. Still, it remains extremely rare for e-commerce sites. This shows that e-commerce 2.0 is still lagging well behind Web 2.0 in general. For this reason, 2007 is likely to be a crucial year where the most dynamic e-retailers will widen the gap with their followers.

What will change tomorrow in e-commerce?

2007-01-19T11:00:00+01:00

The Wal-Mart type large big retailers built up their amazing success mastering three key functions: sourcing, merchandising and logistics. This combination of factors allowed them to crush down traditional mum and dad retailers and to impose a new model. The first generation of e-commerce sites adapted this wining model on line. After a difficult start in the late 90’s learning the specificities of the Internet channel, large on line retailers today successfully master the three key area of expertise: sourcing, logistics and merchandising. Thanks to a critical mass of increasingly mature buyers, most of them now experience high volumes and attractive profitability. With a 30% growth per annum which does not seem to slow down, e-commerce has a bright future. However, this nice picture is likely to break into pieces in the coming years. First of all, in the flat world of the Internet, the fortress of sourcing is disaggregating with an amazing speed. The most obscure manufacturers are increasingly easy to spot on line. With little work and a good vertical specialization, almost anyone can source the best product in the most remote place of the virtual world. Regarding logistics, the growth of Fedex, UPS and other large shipping companies also makes it easy for any individual to send anything anywhere, being as reliable as any big corporation. Furthermore, the growing maturity of many Internet technologies (which belongs to the Web 2.0 wave) is combining with the collapse of band-width and storage costs. This opens the door to an exponential growth of innovative e-merchandising concepts. New tools make it possible to create on line shops are indeed becoming so simple and powerful. Any single individual entrepreneur can unleash his marketing creativity for a very low investment. As a result, new innovative merchandising concepts are launched every day on the web at a extremely rapid pace. Without saying that price comparisons are so easy on Internet. This makes it is much more difficult for an e-merchant to replicate a classical tactic of brick and mortar retailers: lure customers with some huge discounts on a couple of very visible products, and generate fat margins derived from impulse purchases. The combination of these strong trends has a crucial consequence: selling on the Internet has become a commodity. We see the rise of a huge world ecosystem of small entrepreneurs who invest into all possible e-commerce niches. This army of anonymous Joes whose cost structures are close to zero, represents a very serious threat for the large e-retailers. This had made the fortune of an eBay, but the phenomenon goes today well beyond auctions. Nevertheless, in this second e-commerce revolution, the large e-retailers have a very smart card to play. I will get back to this in my next post.

HR2.0 : Social Competence Network Representations

2007-01-18T10:20:00+01:00

Following our last post on expertise taxonomy, we can now link Skills to People, for a "Competence Network".. Using an Eyetree (see Tricot site), you would select one skill and you would have the list of the people who have this skill .

If we consider the inverse problem, linking People to Skills (in term of capacity), then we would use for instance the Radial Tree representation, to position one People into an elementary graph/network of functions, roles, competences, skills, tasks or expertises.

...Social Networks can now be described as Competences Networks . It is also an extension to WebServices like (mybloglog) and a beginning into Social Revolution ?

5e Journee des projets KM ENSAM 2006

2006-06-19T08:55:00+02:00

Cette annee encore, un programme allechant : nouvelles technologies, travail collaboratif, web2.0, ... des reflexions de marc de Fouchecour a celles de jean-pierre Corniou, cette rencontre a permis de faire le point sur un certain nombre d'applications et de possibilites liees au KM.

N'ayant pas pu y participer cette annee, j'ai vecu "en asynchrone post-temporel" et a distance quelques moments inedits grace a jean Mariotte qui a publie quelques videos sur son blog. Merci Jean ..!

Shut Down

2006-02-24T04:40:38+01:00

I had a conversation last night about the creation of 'evil' within organisations. Is evil-doing part of the organisation's foundations or does it develop as they grow? Can evil-done be reversed with change? Obviously the Olympics exclusion of women came up, and we both agreed that with organisations that have a history of unethical or inequal standards, the only way to rectify the situation completely is to dissolve and re establish fresh and new. Yes women will be able to ski jump soon, as they are now allowed to compete in other previously denied areas of the games, however this does not help us. It is humiliating to beg to be allowed to join something everyone else is allowed to join, and to be grateful when they 'let you'.

This brings me to another point for anyone following the emergence of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is meant to be the new generation of the web, while the exact definition is left undefined, the foundation of the movement is open standards, low barriers to entry, and equal playing field. However the market has just shut down.

The web 2.0 movement has a few key players, they got in early and control the airspace. These people have blogs that have readerships upwards of 10,000 a day, they are very knowledgeable. However time has passed and there are more and more people in the space, however, what you notice soon enough is that the same names crop up. Even names that don't have much more to add than their reputation, these 'A-listers' appear to be colluding to keep others out. This small group, founded on the basis of web freedom are tending towards web domination. I think a lot of people are beginning to talk about this, I just thought I'd mention now, while we are in the early stages, that this is how it happens. Good intentions, followed by excitement about success, followed by ambition to remain successful at all costs, followed by abandonment of initial intentions.

It's sad to see it happening again.