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June 18, 2009
The camera world just got more interesting
It’s been building up for months or years now. People have been predicting the end of the DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) dinosaur with the advent of the EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) digital camera. And yes, the Panasonic G-1 and GH-1 have led the charge, with strong support from those who have been fans all along. As well as various thumbs down from people who love the OVF (Optical View Finder) of the classic DSLRs. About yesterday, Olympus released a retro model PEN EP-1. Whilst a smaller company in a camera world dominated in numbers by Canon and Nikon, Olympus has always been a maverick, not afraid to take a tilt at conservatism. Fans may still remember the Yoshihisa Maitani – with his retirement, we thought that his mantle of innovation and willingness to take a gamble had been left to some hand fumbles in the current generation of Olympus engineers. Be that as it may, the PEN EP-1 arouses for those same fans, a feeling of spring and light again. It may not have to sure fire success of something like the OM-1, or the XA, but Y. Maitani didn’t always make surefire successes either.
With the EP-1 now on the scene, and hopefully to spawn a new genre of digital cameras, the camera etymologists will have a fun time classifying camera types. The non photographer layman, however, may just prefer to ask - “How big is it” or “How much does it cost?” and leave it at that. (The latter is often uttered by long suffering spouses (spice?) of camera fans. Let’s review some camera mis-categories…
The DSLR
Or more dyslexic-ally, the DLRS or DLSR. Why does one call it a Single Lens when we can fit any / many lenses on the same body? Hmm… Is it because we once had a genre of cameras called Twin Lens Reflex (TLR)? Try and point a young ‘un to a TLR on any high street. Can’t find one? Not even a Lubitel? Well, then why pursue the DSLR abbreviation? Is it because people who used to shoot an SLR still need a mirror to look at themselves through? Maybe they should be more aptly called Interchangeable Lens Reflex Camera. Could you come up with more modern, more descriptive acronym?
The Point and Shoot
For several years now, I have been holding out that “Point and Shoot” is an activity, not a camera. One can just as easily P&S with a Nikon D3X as with a Panasonic Kodak instant-disposable-film-thing-from-Safeway. Aching wrists and elbows notwithstanding. Really, I’d love to see this term go away, but camera marketers will be too enthralled by it’s mental pictorialisation to discard it.
The Compact Cam
Now, for me, that’s an apt title. Either you have something as thin as a ladies cosmetic compact or you have something as large as the EP-1 – both, you would expect to be aggressively flat and chic.
The Bridge Cam
The Bridge to what? The River Kwai? Originally meant as an in-between camera, something that has more semi-manual features than a cheap digital camera but lacking the mirror box mechanism of the DSLR. Or is that more semi-automatic features. How can you tell? It’s just a bridge.
The Ultra Zoom (UZ) or the Mega Zoom
That conjures up a biggish camera, with a 10x zoom or 12x or 16x or 24x zoom. El Macho – even outzooms the DSLR. But then. Even semi-compact cams like the Ricoh R8 do 10x now. When the lens retracts, the camera is indeed slim and svelte.
The DSLR like camera
Now, that appellation stings. You do know that “DSLR like” cameras don’t actually work at all or perform at all like DSLRs? They don’t have a Reflex optical path, they don’t use Phase Contrast Autofocus so they don’t click very quickly? They only thing DSLR like is that they have a hump.
The EVIL
Recently coined, EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) cameras were supposed to knock out the DSLRs. Like yesterday. Except that they haven’t yet. And the Olympus PEN EP-1 is pretty much in the spirit of an EVIL – i.e. anti-DSLR. Except that the EP-1 doesn’t have an Electronic Viewfinder. You can clip on a specialised viewfinder into the hotshoe, but that is single framed, Optical Viewfinder (OVF).
Aiyaiayai. How is all this jargon going to help me convince the spouse that I need to save up for an EP-1? Instead of getting that BlendTec Blender?
Posted by Anandasim at 06:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Let Telstra get on with screwing Australia
I like Kenneth Davidson. Really I do. I don't always agree with him, but quite often he makes me think. I wonder though, if he has the slightest understanding of telecommunications deregulation, monopoly practices and the realities of competition.
His attitude seems to be that Telstra owns the customers in perpetuity; that it's the only body capable of building a network; that it ought to be left to the business of screwing the community, its competitors, the ACCC, the Government etc., which it has done so well, for so long, at everybody else's expense.
That seems to be the point of his column, "Let Telstra get on with what it does best". Or am I missing something?
He claims that the people who are running telecommunications policy are Luddites, that the declaration of telecommunications services is a rort, that advisers on the Government's NBN policies are on a gravy train etc., etc.
I can't see any difference between Telstra's view and Kenneth's view. They're equally myopic and tendentious. Which tends to undermine my opinion of Kenneth Davidson.
Posted by cw at 05:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 11, 2009
Pursuing PageRank
What excitement there was in the Bleeding Edge cave recently when we discovered that the Web site for which we assumed responsibility in April - after our promotion to advertising executive for the spouse's small business - had gained a Google PageRank of 3.
The average Web user probably isn't aware of the significance of the Web analysis algorithm developed by Google co-founder Larry Page, and the increasingly manic fixation of an entire industry of search engine optimisation and marketing experts on understanding and honestly (and in some cases dishonestly) exploiting it.
You could remain entirely unaware of the existence of the PageRank universe unless you installed the Google Toolbar and started observed the movements of a tiny green band in the toolbar's central white slot, as you navigate from one site to another.
It's a long way from our paltry 3 to the maximum PageRank of 10, but that sudden elevation from zero was enormously encouraging, if symptomatic of an increasingly obsessive state of mind.
We're beginning to wonder, in fact, if OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) isn't an inevitable consequence of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, which was revolutionised by Larry's eponymous rating system, and Google's multi-billion-dollar AdWords system.
We're the first to admit that we've become obsessed by PageRank and Google's other analytic tools. We don't have time for television these days. Instead we read books like Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, now available in a second edition for $44.95. If you're paying $1 per click to Larry Page's enterprise (and many businesses pay a good deal more), it's an insignificant sum.
All those hours with Steve influenced us to change many of the elements of our Web page which were influenced by the elements of conventional graphic design, but unfortunately made it highly unlikely visitors would easily find what they were looking for, and stay around long enough to become customers.
We've also had to drop everything we've learned in a lifetime of professional writing, and develop a different way of communicating. Our guide in that area has been linguist Janice “Ginny” Redish, through her book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works ($55, Morgan Kaufmann).
Her advice helped us to let go of at least half of the words on the site and hold readers' attention longer – facts which we confirmed by installing the code for Google Analytics. We used that extraordinary free tool to discover where our visitors came from, and analyse statistics like bounce rates (immediate exits by visitors), time spent on the site and the response to different pages.
We've also spent hours learning the intricacies of Joomla!, the CMS (Content Management System) that manages our Web site.
The results have been gratifying. Aside from the improved PageRank, we've increased the Click Through Rate on our AdWords more than ten-fold – admittedly from a tiny base.
Managing AdWords campaigns is a tricky business. You have to choose the right keywords – the search terms your prospective customers use when looking for the services you provide – and construct three-line text ads with no more than 95 characters that will perform well against your competitors' efforts.
You can learn a good deal about the black arts of AdWords if you're prepared to buy services like those offered at perrymarshall.com. A relatively modest investment in one of Perry Marshall's products helped us immensely in our early days.
But the process requires constant monitoring, testing and refining. Because we also have columns to write, and Google PageRanks to improve, we're leaning towards outsourcing the responsibility to an expert.
There's no shortage of people with dubious pretensions to expertise in the world of Web design and online marketing, and it's essential, in our opinion, to obtain a recommendation from a trustworthy source … preferably after you've done enough homework to understand the principles.
In our case, we had a conversation with Adam Blake, who runs a home nursing company called Kinder Caring. His business was spending around $100,000 a year on Yellow Pages advertising. He spent another $70,000 with a marketing consultancy that failed conspicuously to contribute to the bottom line.
Eventually he signed up with search engine marketing expert Philip Shaw, at CleverClicks.com. He's transferred his ad spend to Google AdWords, and in the process cut his expenditure in half, and increased sales by 25 per cent.
Shaw is a former accountant and investment banker who worked with Woolworths and the National Bank, before re-educating himself and establishing CleverClicks as a project-management consultancy that looks after the complete mix of online marketing, including Web design, search engine optimisation and online advertising campaigns.
We've committed some funds to developing a more complex campaign with CleverClicks, and we'll report on the results. In the meantime, we're doing some heavy reading on the art of turning a PageRank of 3 into a PageRank of 5.
Posted by cw at 09:22 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 08, 2009
Bridging the gap
I was reading Leon Bambrick’s blog entry on the difference between programmers and communicating – it got me to thinking about how “IT” people relate to “normal” people. I guess an example would illustrate:
Point: You might speed up Firefox if you reduce the the history cache.
IT person’s response: Ok, let’s do it now and check out the effect.
Considered “normal” responses:
If I change that setting could my machine worse?
Where is it in the menu again? Do I need to write this down? What if I forget how to switch it back? Is it in the manual? Does it have a manual? Can I ring you if it doesn’t work?
I wonder whether MYOB will go faster?
Do you think it will work on all my machines? Even the one that my cousin’s son has? You know, the one who just came back from London and is backpacking with around Australia…
I don’t use Firefox. I use the one with the blue e. Do you think it will work the same way?
Why can’t Microsoft have come out with this discovery? I mean, we pay them enough.
Note to self: make an effort, bridge the gap.
Posted by Anandasim at 03:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 05, 2009
iCyte: Building a library on the Web
The Bleeding Edge Research Library would be ever so much more efficient were it not for the fact that so many of our books suddenly take it upon themselves to disappear from the shelves.
We are speaking figuratively here. Most of our “books” aren't printed and bound volumes. They're Web pages that don't have a physical presence on a bookshelf, and they can spontaneously de-materialise in a way that printed books generally do not, taking with them a good deal of research effort.
One study suggests that the half-life of a Web page is less than two years. And even if the information isn't abruptly removed in a re-design, they can sink in the Google index to the point where they are impossible to track down ever again.
The Bleeding Edge Research Library has had more teeth-gnashing experiences with wandering Web sites than we care to remember, and we have made several attempts at developing a fool-proof retention system. We quickly abandoned bookmarks or “favorites” as a tool. They seem to breed in much the same way as coathangers; they're difficult to organise; they don't provide sufficient detail for easy back-tracking and they have the same regrettably brief life span as the average Web page. Clicking on a bookmark or “favorite” and arriving at a 404 “Not Found” error code can mark the beginning of a tedious and untilimately unsuccessful bout with Google and profound despair.
Too often the browser history sparks another adventure in time-wasting for anyone but the most casual of Web users.
The fact that some researchers apparently default to cutting and pasting to Microsoft Word or PDF documents suggests to us that these people have a level of patience and spare time that is vastly superior to our own.
The flatfile database Info Select (miclog.com) is a much better solution, allowing you to highlight a page and hit a Quick Launch “transporter” icon to save all the links and images. But in recent years InfoSelect has accumulated ever more not-entirely-useful features, and become increasingly costly, to the point where, at $320, we're finding it hard to recommend it.
Enter iCyte, a free service that organises and prolongs the life of Web-based research, and simplifies collaboration and information-sharing.
The man behind iCyte is Stephen Foley. When we last saw him, in the late 80s, he was running a small shop on the ground floor of Owen Dixon Chambers in Lonsdale Street. Ostensibly, the shop was selling the first of the so-called portable computers from Toshiba (we bought a T5100 from him, with an 80386 processor and an orange plasma screen), various peripherals and software. In fact Stephen was teaching the Melbourne law profession how to use technology.
From there, he went on to develop transcript analysis and annotation software, before joining the developers of the market-leading LiveNote Technologies in the UK. Now based in New York, he and his iCyte team , backed by former LiveNote chief Graham Smith, are intent on extending the functionality lawyers use to manage enormous piles of documents to the Web. They just might change the way a lot of us work with information.
Download and install iCyte on a PC or Mac in either Firefox or Internet Explorer and you gain a new toolbar button in your browser. It's an impressive button which completely eclipses bookmarks and history tools.
Click on it, and it will save whatever Web page you're viewing, with any highlighted text, as a public or private project. You can insert tags and attach notes and annotations (called “cytes”). You can share projects with friends and colleagues. For families, it could completely replace the refrigerator door as a project management device.
Before he discovered iCyte, Jared Osborne, a local government community planner on climate change, found it difficult to sustain his workflow. “I had a whole bunch of bookmarks for important pages, and I'd copy information into a Word document, then go back and copy the link, paste the title and the author, find a critical bit of information and add it to the document. It was a stop-start operation, and when I was reviewing my research, it was a constant puzzle having to work out what bit of information on a page was important.”
He was also increasingly frustrated by disappearing information, particularly on government Web sites – the result of regime changes and departmental restructuring.
He's found iCyte allows him to keep track of his information, and his thought processes.
Over the past few months he's been watching the iCyte interface take shape. “I really like the way they've set it up. When you search on users or a project, it all comes together. It reminds me of the simplicity of iTunes.”
It reminds Bleeding Edge of a library.
Posted by cw at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 03, 2009
Your IT advertising executive
Bleeding Edge has been ever so much busier since we became an advertising executive.
Our sudden rise from being an IT person to a position where we're making decisions about promotional resources might seem a dramatic departure from the script written by Madison Avenue advertising types, but it's rapidly becoming a well-trodden path in the world of small business.
You can blame it on Google. As Australians increasingly use the search engine to track down products and services, a Web site has to be more than an idle billboard. We advertising executives are aware that these days, a business Web site should be a vital, dynamic marketing tool, carefully and constantly tuned to at least keep pace with the performance of competitive sites.
If a business has the financial resources, it can hire experts in what is known as search engine optimisation (SEO) to do the work. It will probably also have to hire another expert to develop and manage Google Adword campaigns. But for small businesses like the Bleeding Edge spouse's psychology practice, these responsibilities tend to fall either on the owner, or an advertising executive like ourselves, whose principal qualifications are having more technical know-how than the boss.
Consequently, Bleeding Edge has spent the past couple of weeks tangling with concepts like “metatags” and “keywords”, “impressions” and CTRs (Click-Through Rate), CPCs (Cost Per Click), CPMs (Cost Per Thousand) and QS (Quality Score) – the sort of jargon that didn't exist before the world started moving from “interruptive advertising” to “interactive advertising”, and Google came on the scene.
We're pretty sure that throughout the developed world, untold thousands of newly-minted advertising executives are nervously watching the hit rates on Google AdWords campaigns, and trying to discover how, in two lines of 37 characters or less, to woo a prospective customer into a mouse twitch.
Google tries to help. It has developed and distributed a selection of powerful, and completely free tools including an array of diagnostic instruments for AdWords customers, among them a campaign optimiser, keyword tools, and a traffic estimator. There's also a particularly useful device called Google Webmaster Tools, that can help Web-site owners improve their search engine performance. All one has to do is work out how and where to upload metatags or html files, and master some surprisingly complex concepts.
One of the first executive decisions we took in our new role was to move the spouse's site from its overseas Web host to an Australian host. Overseas hosting is much cheaper, and for a less critical site like a personal blog it's perfectly adequate. But if you're running a business online, a good local host can mean faster page loads and local phone support if things go wrong.
There are a number of factors to consider in choosing a Web host. The first is to make sure that it meets the specifications for your applications, and that it has a good uptime and support record. We make it a point to check out the feedback from customers on the Whirlpool Web Host forum. While we suspect there's a touch of self-promotion and rival assassination in some of the threads, a little research gives you an idea of customer reaction.
Perth-based Ilisys has a good reputation, but it was more expensive than we could justify. We settled on a shared hosting plan from Sydney-based Net Logistics, at $19.95 a month. Their support proved to be very helpful indeed when we struck some problems transferring files from the US host, and they also sorted out some difficulties transferring the domains.
We found they were quick to answer phone calls and respond to emails, unlike some local Web hosts and domain registers we've tried in the past.
We've also been impressed by the speed with which our pages load. Online customers tend to be impatient creatures, and the less time you give them to hit the back button, the better it's likely to be for your business.
We've also been impressed with a new tool we've been using for ftp transfers between Net Logistics and our PC. FireFTP installs into the Firefox browser, giving you all the features of an ftp client in your browser.
That's particularly useful, for instance, if you add some files to your Web site. You can immediately see any changes in the pages by clicking a browser tab and refreshing the page.
It allows you to open an account for each of your servers, and then choose Connect to log in, which is the sort of convenience we busy advertising executives appreciate.
Posted by cw at 02:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack