:Web Application Usability

The report on Gator Advertisements by Ben Edelman got lots of blogs and media discussing about Gator and Popups. Most people think that pop ups stink and Gator has taken it a step further and is helping your competitors post stuff to the user when they come to your site.
First Q, why is this looking unethical? Showing the user lots of options, which are in context, is good, right? When Google puts ads related to the users search on its site, it seems good, but when Gator does it, everyone shouts “Stink”. One reason is that it allows my lesser competitors persuade my users using different persuasive tactics. Google counters this by ranking the ads for a keyword by the ad popularity, which cannot be controlled by the companies.
Second Q, why don’t we like pop ups? Since the first time Popups have been used to show which are not context specific to what the user is doing, so we have lost interest in them and have learnt not to click them. Showing users irrelevant stuff through Gator will bring their own demise, it not already brought by the bad PR it got due to this article. Their algorithms should not be targeted in figuring out when the ad should be shown to the user, but if the ad is useful to the user.

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Evolution has taught us that we should seek news to be informed about new things. Marketers on the other hand have been targeting users whenever they want. Tivo and the Internet is making us look back on this stratergy of popping up ads to the users when ever the marketer wants. Integrating ads with news will make the user happy. So what about deals and coupons, etc? There will be a news site that concentrates on these, like GujuDeals. This is what weblogs do, right, giving “one” place where users can access the information they want. There is one missing link here, how do weblogs make money and still remaining neutral? The online marketing sites are just figuring out this and are becoming partners to different weblogs. Web advertising is also moving towards changing consumer attitudes, rather than clickthro emphasys.

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Are you one of the people who say silly mistakes dont’t count and could have done it if you were more careful? Then give this fairly easy game a try.

Fairly Easy Game: …

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Want to know where flash came from? Charlie Jackson, “He did SuperPaint and SuperCard, then sold out to Aldus for huge money. He retired from the software business to pursue his other passion — building a great Olympic shooting team for the US. Along the way Charlie was the primary backer of Wired Magazine.” From DaveNet. The guy behind Futuresplash was Jonathan Gay, the current Vice Prez of tech at Macr.

Humble beginings of flash …

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“Screenweaver is an extension to the Macromedia

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Running low on flash effects any time, use these for ideas .

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Most common cycle: Mainstream media (Article) -> Opinion -> Vote -> Reacton posts -> Summary. So the different types of posts according to this article are, opinions, voting, summary and reaction (voting + view point). Can you find more categories of posts? It also brings out an interesting point that stories with out a keyword get lost. Also when people are explicitly asked to give opinions, they don’t and blog stories are appreciated in aggregate. A blog post structure view?

How does a story develop on the net? …

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A Hypersonic Sound Speaker has been previously discussed many times. But this article proves that the more number of use-cases you provide for the product, the more useful it seems.

Directional speaker : (HSS) …

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The weblogs are presently lacking a directory view. Each weblog post falls into different topics. The topics are the same as search words in google. Google has separated the web into a structure for us. What google can do currently: If you give a topic, it can give all the posts falling in that category. But it cannot show all the topics a post belongs to. As a solution to this, we can build a directory structure and google search for each of the topics and see which other topics the posts fall into. If we consider only the weblogs from weblogs.com and blogger, we will have a directory of blogs.
PS: Dave was not implimenting this particular idea, but this is an effective was to prevent spamming of weblogs.com.

What I think Dave is doing: …

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Metadata: Users won’t enter meta data for the purpose of entering it. The trick is to put metadata extraction into the process, not making a seperate step out of it.
Deep web: All pages on the web are 0-1 steps from google. Googles’ job is not to give the answer, it is to give the path to the answer. What is an effective way of showing the path to an answer?
P2P web search: A very important part of googles’ act is keeping their algorithms a secret. More trust from the users and making google look complex and great from outside. Theres no point in giving in backdoors to these algorithms.

Popular Myths and Googles Rebutal: …

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