DISQUS

Hmm, subdomains for products are human friendly? While at the same time wanting to remove the www.? Don't agree there to be honest.

I don't know about other people, but I don't tend to guess that sites have subdomains to goto areas of a site. I don't type in books.amazon.co.uk, I type in www.amazon.co.uk and click the link. And I'm quite happy doing that.

In order to go typing subdomains, you need to kow that they are using them, and know what they are....

Considering the number of people who type full url's into search engines, I hardly think there's a universal understanding of subdomains.

And for the same reasons I'm quite happy with www.
Sure it's a bit redundant, but I think it gives people a visual clue, and is something a lot of people expect.

Even here in the office, someone will ask where a site is, and they will start of going "OK, so www., then?", and we probably say "No, no www.", because it's setup on a subdomain for building. And that's people involved in the web world.

On printed stuff, it's often quite easy to find the web address of the company by looking for the tell tale www. and going from there.

Overall though, I really don't think using www. or not is that big an issue, and tend to go along with Google, just be consistant.
Even if you decide to drop the www., you'd be mad not to have a redirect from www. anyway, to catch all those people who expect it.

So why aren't they all making it?
Well, are they that good?
Do that have that wide an appeal?

The point with the Artic Monkeys was that the music they were giving away got spread around places like MySpace, and people liked it, so spread it around some more.

If people don't like it, or maybe don't like it enough to share it, yeah, you're gonna struggle to hit the big time.

I'd be interested to see a filter based on actual popularity, rather than a filter based on marketability and money....

I imagine a number of good bands have already missed their potential due to not having the money to market themselves, or not getting a break from a record company that could give them that boost.
There are enough stories of bands who only made it by the skin of their teeth, either nearly not being signed, or being taken on without any expectation of them getting as big as they have.

I'm not saying it's deffinately the way to go, so we need some bands like Radiohead to test the water a bit, and see how it actually pans out.

Artic Monkeys managed it. They gave away CD's of their music free at the little gigs when they were getting going. That music got shared around, people liked it, they got written about in NME, they got some radio time, and their first, very limited release, single sold out long before it was actually released.

At which point they had record companies effectively bidding for their contract, and Arctic Monkeys being able to dictate some of the terms, rather than the other way round.

That worked because they were/are actually a pretty decent band. There are a lot of 'artists' around now, and in the past, that got there due to record company marketing, not due to being any good. Those are the ones who will get hit harder.

Is downloading In Rainbows via any kind of P2P system, or copying it off a mate illegal considering you can download it off the official site for free?
My impression is 'no'. But if they want me to only get it via the official site, they should make an effort to make the process work properly.

The process of 'ordering' the album through the web site sucked.

I went to check it out. I'd not heard anything of the album previously, so actually I opted to not pay for it to start with. If I then liked it, I would've been willing to go back and pay £5 or so for it.

But, in order to simply download the file, you had to enter all your details, and even though I'd entered '0' for the amount, I was still asked for my CC details.

Lots of hassle just get some 'free' music, so i went and downloaded it via Bit Torrent instead.

Wish they'ed spend a little of that on customer service instead.... Then they might be able to keep my custom, instead of spending huge amounts on getting new customers.

If that does happen, it'll be interesting to see if many magazines start bricking it, and perhaps what it would mean for sites like Flickr or Photobucket.

If members of the public can sue Google for displaying their pictures, what about celebs who get plastered all over magazines? Or magazines where people send in their own pics with random people in them?

Would it be different if Yahoo maps linked up to Flickr geotagged images? (they might already for all I know). I took some pictures down at the beach on Sunday, there were lots of other people in them as it was a very busy day. If I upload them to Flickr, could those people sue me/Flickr? Is it different if I geotag them and they appear on a map?

Quite a can of worms that could be opened....

Yep, got that on 2 little sites I have running GA.
One site recorded 1 page view on Sunday, the other recorded none. While Saturdays page views looked in the normal kind of range. So thinking nothings been recorded since fairly late Saturday, UK time.

If a company is serious about web analytics, I find it hard to believe they are going to be satisfied with something like GA for long.

If they are new to it, then something like GA is a cheap, easy way to get into it, providing some good general stats to let you know where you are. But if they get into it, and see the value of it, it won't be that long before they want more than GA can provide anyway.

GA IS great value. What it does for free (some people might say that it's not 100% free considering you're giving all your data to Google, but that's another matter...) is pretty good. It's just that if you use the tools well, a more advanced analytics app will provide better ROI in the longer run.

But then an obvious question to ask is why are they using free analytics tools?
Probably because they don't have the interest, time, money, resources, or whatever to go for something more advanced.

Analytics ends up not being a huge priority for them, and a free one can provide the general stats they are after.
They might be happy with the level of their site/sites (regardless of what improvements a good analytics app could show them) and so $800 for ClickTracks, say, is not just a waste of money, but waste of time, as they wont see the benefit of it.

I've never heard of a big company using a term like webmaster, instead you'll find things like web architect, or new media manager, or some other managerial title like that.

Sorry Barry, I don't agree with those 3 points.

They are issues that need addressing, but the absolute number 1 reason they aren't embracing the web as they might, is down to revenue.

With a magazine, there's an obvious revenue stream. You write content, people pay for the magazine, and can't read your content otherwise. Along with the relatively easy advertising style where companies can just buy pages and make it look however they want etc....

On the web, it's a lot more difficult to charge for access to content. They see this as dissolving their little empire, each magazine in the company I work for has its own little area that it feels it's responsible for, and few of them understand how to embrace the web and make it work for them. Most try and avoid it, put the bare minimum up.

Advertising on a web site is a lot trickier, they want all the visual control of print design, mixed with the interactivity of the web. People don't flip through pages of a web site, you can't very easily just have separate pages of adverts that people see as they are browsing, you've somehow got to work it into the pages as they are.

The company I work for seem to want to do a lot of advertising, and a lot for communities. The problem is, they skip straight to that part, and kind of leave blanks where the description of how they will do that should be.

When Opera switched the built-in search in Opera Mini to Yahoo OneSearch from Google recently, a lot of people seemed a bit pissed off.

Seems they weren't too impressed with what Yahoo! had done....

Odd, I've heard of less than half that list, and though I've previously subscribed to Scoble and Jeff Jarvis' blogs, I don't read any of them now.

I do tend to see bits about Jimmy Wales and Seth Godin in other places, as their writing spreads around, but I don't see much of the others.

I can see it being a bad idea if it actually catches on.
I managed to create a new account, find a Dell UK listing, and edit it to be less than complimentary about the support they offer.

It was quick and easy to do. Maybe now I should go and do the same for my competitors? While making my own listing look glowing. Or making sure it's not on there, so no one else can make it look bad.

The site does have this disclaimer
"If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here."

So therefore what I just did to Dell UK's listing was fine? if they don't want it edited, it shouldn't be submitted....

I tried listening to some podcasts when I was catching the train to work. An hour and a half journey, with no net access, perfect for Podcasting?

Well no. I found podcasts excrutiatingly boring to listen to while on the train. I was much happier listening to music and reading a book.

It also required a lot more preparation. I had to download the podcasts and get them transferred to my mp3 player. Which I usually couldn't be arsed doing.

Until my mp3 player can connect to the internet and download podcasts itself (without an extra cost), I probably won't bother with it. Most of the podcasts I have listened to, have been on my PC.....

Podcasting is always going to ahvea smaller niche market than text RSS feeds.

IMHO, blogs are more about the language used, than the technology. Most news sites have direct links to articles, doesn't make them a blog....
A news site can have RSS feeds of articles, doesn't make them a blog.....
Any CMS can be easy to publish to, Drupal for example, doesn't make it a blog....
Discoverability is a nothing to me. I don't use technorati or anything to find blogs, though there are arguements about whether some 'blogs' listed on there are actually blogs. Again, Apps like drupal can ping those sotes about updated content.
And a lot of blogs disable trackbacks because of spam.....

I don't see that any of those things really make a site a blog.

To me, it's about the language used. A blog is written from a more personal point of view than a professional journalistic site.

Ya know, I'd quite like to test an Aston martin DB9, I'm fed up with my 2nd hand small car, I want to see what the other side of the fence is like, a big beefy car, with a big beefy engine. They only sell for around £110,000, not a lot at all really if a very small percentage of the worlds driving population donate me £1 each.

Any takers?

No, thought not.....

I have a job, this job pays me wages, I decide what I can and can't buy based on those wages and the other things I have to buy. I don't expect free computers from people just because....

Earn some money, get on ebay, buy something...don't ask me for handouts for luxury items.