Posted by Milan Vrekic

I have to state my displeasure with the Webby Awards and I will start by looking through the latest list of nominees.

Seeing companies like ‘The New York Times’ or the ‘The Guardian’ makes me think that the judges are completely mainstream oriented and as a result there are many good and deserving companies and websites that didn’t get nominated.

Secondly, I wonder, does anyone really care about categories like ‘Insurance‘ and ‘Real Estate‘, these categories are so trivial. The Webby has become far too corporate, I guess for some people web is all about marketing - promoting their companies and businesses. Personally, I want to see the sites I’ve never heard of - I don’t need The Webby’s to tell me how  good the The New York Times website is, I KNOW that it’s good and we don’t need to give it another award. I want to be introduced to new concepts, new designs and I’m sure there is an upcoming Newspaper out there that has something excellent to offer readers - why not help them get exposure?

Back in 1999, I remember the Webby’s having only three categories; now, with 70 categories, the Webby’s have just become too bloated, too mainstream, and too corporate. Maybe we should register The Netty Awards and start hosting independent web awards. If The Webby’s wants to keep its fame and importance - it has to include more edgy and new companies - I understand that there HAS to be mainstream media involved, but I don’t see anything wrong in dropping some of the useless categories (ex. Pharmaceuticals) and including an independent category like the movie industry has done.

On the side note, Kevin Rose of Digg - whom I’m a huge fan of - won the People’s Choice Webby award for the ‘Best Practices‘. I have to wonder what does that even mean?

Posted by Jenn Lowther

I don’t hate Microsoft or at least I don’t currently - that may change with the user experience that I’ve had as of late. I have plenty of friends that curse Microsoft and every move they make. And I am beginning to understand why. There are a multitude of reasons to hate microsoft - Vista, Zune, their corporate anti-trust issues to name just a couple.

Hotmail is my personal email carrier. This has more to do with the fact that I’ve had this email address since 2000 than my actual email preference. I would forward this address to a gmail account, but I can’t seem to find an easy way to do this. They let me forward the email, but it seems that it has to be to another Microsoft email property. I can live with this. It’s super annoying since hotmail is not supported by my iPhone, but if this is the only real issue I have with it, I can overlook this transgression.

Having said this, for my personal IM client, I use Windows Live Messanger. In order to sync my work email chat client with my personal IM, I use pidgin. I find that this works wonders (props to the open source community for this - I love you guys). This is great when I’m at work, but when I’m at home, I just use MSN.

I am a bit of an internet junkie. I am addicted to checking my email, twitter, facebook, digg, you get the idea. When I find something I particularly like, I share it. I’ll add it to my FaceBook, twitter feed, etc. This is also true for funny youtube videos. This is why what happened next really bothered me. I was MSNing with a friend this weekend and wanted to share a youtube video that I found particularly amusing. I send him the link and what do you know, the link wouldn’t work.

A quick search on Google and a trip to digg found that I wasn’t the only person experiencing this problem - an entire forum thread had been devoted to this new issue with 110 entries at the time of writing this post. My upset over this really rather trivial issue gets me to the point of this post. Below is just a couple of the comments left on the digg post.

• Welcome to the world of CENSORSHIP! So who’s up for a horde of angry emails to Microsoft? I’m writing one now :D”

• URL for complaints: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey= … Digg! Unite! Complain!
• not just youtube. Deviantart.com, googlepages.com and xanga are also affected. -_- Anyone found other urls?

• I’m about to boycott MSN and start using AIM. I suggest people to do the same.

• Wow, I usually stand by Microsoft, but this is unprecedented censorship. Unbelievable, time to change clients.
• http://www.betadaily.com/2008/05/10/microsoft-star …”This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on messenger.”This is why it isn’t affecting me in the UK and many other countries.

This is just a couple of the hundreds of comments you can find on this issue. But, they get the point across. A company really needs to consider and understand why its consumer uses its services. Microsoft by changing the way people can use their product are upsetting their customer and alienating their core user base. And absent of any announced reason for the issue, the users are coming up with their own reason for the issue. It is actions like this, that will drive people from using a companies product straight into the arms of their competitors.

The next time I have a choice between using a Microsoft product or that of one of their competitors, I will remember the extremely poor user experience I’ve had with their apparent censorship and will more than likely choose that of their competitor. So keep this in mind when you are changing the way that your product works on your consumer…or it may come back to haunt you.

**Update:

It appears that the issue has been fixed, but the damage has already been done.

Posted by Jenn Lowther

An unnamed numerically branded online gambling company inspired me to write this post. It maybe slightly off topic, but in reality it relates to all of your marketing initiatives.

The first call I received on my cell phone from the spamtastic company was on a Saturday afternoon. They *HAD* to let me know of a special offer they had just for me to enable all of my online gambling needs. At this point I asked them really nicely to take me off their call list, as I have absolutely no interest in gambling online. I have no idea how they got my cell phone number, but that’s another post. If they had left it at this, you’d not be hearing about it now.

The company decided to absolutely get me furious with them and inspire me to tell the world what sort of spammy company they really are (not that this should be too surprising as they are an online gambling company). On Monday, they spam called me again. Again, I asked them to take me off their call list as they were calling during the day and I have to pay for calls by the minute - and if you could see my cell phone bill, you’d know that I need all of the minutes that I can get. Again, if this is where they left it, I’d not be writing this post.

The very next day, they had the gall to spam call me again!!! That’s it, I’d had it with them. I actually feel a bit for the spammy telemarketer on the other end of the phone. I ’sternly’ informed them that this was costing me money and that I’d report them if they continued to spam call my cell phone. This got the attention of my coworkers as they were calling me in the middle of the day.

At this point, I’d had enough. Now not only had they p*ssed me off, but I was now intent on letting everyone I know how p*ssed off I was. Given what I do for a living, this amounts to quite a few people. I have now blogged, stumbled, twittered, and facebooked the experience I’ve had with the company. Given the sheer number of online gambling sites available on the interwebs, my hope is that I’ve turned at least a couple users off of the company and onto one of their competitors. So now instead of having a new customer through their direct marketing initiatives, they have lost current of potential new customers. The exact opposite effect they were planning on when they first called me. Now keep in mind that none of this would have happened to me if they had just listened to me on their first phone call.

This brings me to the point of my post/rant. Permission marketing. When planning/executing a marketing campaign, it is always in your best interest to respect your target market. The most effective marketing campaigns are ones where your demographic have chosen (or given you permission) to send them your marketing message. Your campaign conversion rates will be significantly higher and the likelihood of p*ssing them off is significantly lower. Or at the very least…if you don’t get their permission…listen to them when they tell you that they aren’t interested and you won’t get angry bloggers doing their bit to try and ruin your brand.

**Just so you know that we had a pool going in the office to see how many times I could use the word spam in relation to 888 - Nadia you have officially won the pool:)

Posted by Jenn Lowther

Every year, New Media BC hosts the PopVox awards to showcase the best and innovative technology products in the market. This year, there are 11 categories in which companies were nominated and memelabs has been nominated for the best User Generated Contest Site. We’re really excited that memelabs has been recognized and we are up against some great companies.

So this is where you come in. The winning company is chosen by popular vote. So give us a vote and spread the word to your friends, family, and pet dog! Create a user account and vote for us here. The voting process is more than a bit convoluted, so I’ve broken out the steps for you below or if you already have an account, just follow this link.

1. Click the register icon in the upper right-hand corner
2. Fill in your user name and email
3. Check your email and click the link in your confirmation email
4. Return to the site and login
5. Click ‘Gallery’ in the top level menu
6. In categories, click the box labeled ‘Usergen Content Site’
7. Scroll down to Memelabs and click on the title.
8. FINALLY, you can vote by clicking the VOTE FOR ME button

Posted by Milan Vrekic

Optimizing your website load time can be an important factor when it comes to overall potential for your websites success. Todays average web surfer is impatient and needs to have an interaction with your website within seconds.

From my experience, around 70%-80% of the ‘waiting time’ is spent downloading all the components on the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Thus, reducing the number of these components on the page reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

The easiest way to achieve this is by taking the ‘less is more’ approach and simplify the site design. However, sometimes a client will insist on media and feature loaded pages. Here are some tricks to minimize the impact of this on the page load time. Remember, the final goal is to decrease the number of HTTP requests.

1. Combine files - There is no need to have 10 separate style sheets or a separate Javascript files for your menu items, form evaluations… instead, combine them all into one functions.js file. Do the same with CSS.
2. No tables please - Most browsers (ok, let’s say most browsers that matter) will display a <table> element only once it’s fully loaded and rendered. And that can result in a prolonged load time especially if your table contains a lot of images. HTML Tables are blast from the past so learn how to use CSS element positioning. Besides better load time you will also solve a lot of cross-browser incompatibilities.
3. Image Maps - Use image maps instead of a bunch of small images. The combined size of the images will stay the same (even smaller since your one big image will have only one file header) while the number of HTTP requests will be reduced. Avoid using image maps for navigation components.
4. Use a content delivery network - A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. Remember how we said that 70%-80% of the ‘waiting time’ is the time spent downloading page components? This means that the geographic location of the user in relation to the geographic location of the server is important. Using a CDN such as Amazon AWS or EdgeCast to host your media files will greatly improve the overall experience of user.
5. Put style sheets at the top of the page - Now this does not sound THAT important but it is. While working on a web kiosk project I noticed that when the style sheet is found anywhere other than in the header, it causes the browser to refresh and re-render the page before displaying it and then if the browser finds another CSS reference below it, it will then re-render the page once again and so on. ‘Nuff said.
6. Put JS scripts at the bottom - The HTTP/1.1 specification says that browser cannot download more than two components in parallel per hostname. The idea behind this suggestion is to display the visual elements first and then load the JS behaviors. Now, this is not always possible, especially when you are using document.write for example to control the layout of the page.
7. Reduce DNS Lookup requests - For those who don’t know, DNS server is like a phone book for the internet, when you type in google.com for example, the DNS server will match that domain name with the correct IP address and send the browser on it’s way to download the content. Your browser cannot download anything before it resolves the DNS name. It typically takes 20-120 milliseconds for the DNS to lookup the IP address for a given hostname. Reducing the number of hostnames will reduce the number of DNS lookups, thus reducing the amount of parallel downloading that takes place in the page. Another thing most people don’t know is that if you perform too many DNS queries in a really short period of time most DNS servers will penalize you with 100-500ms pause.
8. Use <link> instead of @import - this will enable progressive rendering rather than waiting for the component to be loaded and then render the page.
9. Optimize images - this is the most obvious one and probably the one that can have most impact on the page loading time. Most of the image editing software supports saving images ‘for the web’ or with optimized color palette.
10. Split components over multiple sub-domains - We said above that you can download only two components at a time from a single hostname in parallel. So splitting components over multiple domains will result increase of parallel downloads (for example, you can use images.yoursite.com, images2.yoursite.com…)
11. Designing for iPhone? - Safari on iPhone simply wont cache components over 25k in size. Keep the size of your components below 25k or if you have to, split them into two or more files where each is smaller than 25k.