www.twanalyst.com

My first reaction was to laugh. The second was to frown. The third response was: “Damn it! Since when have I been described as bloody UNREMARKABLE?!”

My excuse is that I’ve been onboard for only 2 weeks. So there.

Once I was over my fit of apoplexy, I went back and Twanalysed a few other well known peeps, celebrities, friends and random. I don’t feel so bad now considering some of the descriptions that @aplusk, @oprah and others have got and most importantly the recommendations which were offered are actually relevent, useful and pertinent.

	PERSONAL INFORMATION:
	Name:	TheCultureMind (Colin Yeung)
	Location:	Melbourne, Australia (Time zone: Melbourne)
	Description:	Active – mountain biking, digital at www.areeba.com.au, house renovating + family: wife / baby son.
	URL:	http://www.theculturemind.com
	STATISTICS:
	Account Created:	09 Apr 09
	Status Updates:	38
	Followers:	19
	Following:	39
	ANALYSIS:
	Tweets per day:	2.7
	Readability index: (?)	10
	% conversations:	24
	% links:	14
	% content:	62

(This page for theculturemind has been viewed 7 times)
Your Twitter personality (click to tweet it!)
Personality: ordinary sociable unremarkable Style: chatty coherent VOYEUR

Tips for your tweeting…

• Work on making your tweets more interesting to attract more followers
• If you retweet others, hopefully they’ll retweet you back
• Use hashtags to join in popular discussions or online events

Google shows analytics API

I can see this announcement by Google in recent days about releasing the Analytics API to developers creating a whole new cottage industry overnight:

• Custom tailored and tracked analytics targetted, triggered and monitored at discretion by customers directly.

The dev team at the Areeba offices think this is very cool, as it opens up whole new ways to metric user behaviour and monitor site statistics in meaningful ways which have business relevence. Watch this space, we’ll have it connected to RedDot errr Open Text Web Solutions Suite, Umbraco & Drupal in a flash.

• Desktop widgets will start appearing that are designed to communicate when pre-determined benchmarks have been met i.e. number of visitors post a campaign period; number of transactions in a period; average period of time for the website as a snapshot. A refinement of this could include a summary of the most visited pages of a particular type i.e. latest product, product support, legacy products; service type; location.
• tailored search result presentation will come to the fore, based on prior user data influencing the representation of search results and its relevence.
• Connecting to the cloud inversely, you could run a search of the terms in your particular industry and then compare it against your own website to see if your competitors have the jump on you for particular marketing drives, campaigns etc. In effect, it would be RSS on steroids because you could set up alerts which actively scan for terms you yourself are marketing for and be much more intertwined with the data being fed back to you, which would allow immediate response to market conditions…..

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/attention-developers-google-analytics.html

How cool are Google for allowing direct access to the API? Heh – 50 years from now, there will be churches and a religion for Google, in tribute to their data mining philosophy. They own it all. Or will. Soon.

#1 iPhone App in the world

Hats off to the team over at Firemint in Richmond, Melbourne, Australia. Working on the Walmart principle of “Stack them high, watch them fly”, they have created a polished game with a simple premise and extremely well suited to the iPhones touch screen technology whilst being addictive and thought provoking – but not too much so – all at once. For the reasonable sum of $2.99 USD, Flight Control has become the most popular iPhone application in the world. And to celebrate this achievement, they have at time of writing cut the price to 0.99 cents. Whilst this is obviously to seed the way for their new and upcoming titles – so what? It works, it’s fun and it’s good value.

Go buy it here: http://www.firemint.com/flightcontrol/index.html

Watch the The Age Media report here: http://media.theage.com.au/technology/tech-talk/aussie-iphone-app-flying-high-485451.html

Independent review of the application here:

The Age: How much did THAT cost?

The Age Online tonight has ventured outside the square and opted to start showcasing outside border advertising in sky blue and with nicely styled creative, promoting Telstra’s BigPond broadband network. In all the years I’ve had The Age Online as one of my Home pages, I’ve never known them to yield such a large (and noticible) advertising space. Whilst simple, to regular visitors like myself, it is an effective and pleasant change. The technology used here is (without knowing exact details) likely to be Eyeblaster – as you can imagine, it isn’t exactly cheap, but hell if you want to smack your audience between the eyes, it’s pretty darn effective.

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 1

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 2

The Age Online - Telstra BigPond Wireless Screen 3

What every “404 Error” Page should have

404 Error Pages are a necessary part of the web and you just have to accept they crop up from time to time. However we should be mindful of helping our site visitors gain the information they seek as efficiently and painlessly as possible.

1 – Brand Recognition?
Design the page so that it is recognisably the business/website the user is looking for and is consistant with the brand. Keep the Primary navigation in place – don’t hide it. This will aid those who clicked an expired URL in an email or referenced an outdated publication to navigate back to your home page, key product or services pages. The below page from www.thefwa.com represents a standard Windows IIS Server 404 Error page and realistically isn’t really useful to anyone – the second Apache Server page is even less useful. In both instances if you are navigating around a website and hit a snag, you have to hit the back button on your web browser – to many users this is very disorientating and many might not be even sure if they are on the correct website or not.

Standard Windows IIS Server 404 Error Page

2 – You were looking for?
The small step of actually displaying what the users typing efforts inputted into the URL address bar assists in the user being able to validate their typing – and desired destination. Representing the URL in the window can allow a second inspection to take place by the user, as it could reveal a typo in a link supplied in an email. Remember, not everyone has the address bar visible (Full screen F11 browsing) all the time.

3 – Key site areas:
People visit websites for specific reasons – you can identify key areas of interest by way of your site analytics package. Offering a breakdown of these key site sections into a neat array of alternatives on a 404 Error page is an excellent way of  guiding your users to their chosen area of interest. The www.apple.com website is very well setup in this regard.

Apple - 404 Error Page

4 – Search:
If your website has a search facility, placing this within the framework of your 404 Error page will allow users to start looking for what they are after within your site. Particularly if you have predictive search enabled, then this will further assist wayward site users in finding what they are after. Highlighting it like the www.dailymirror.co.uk is a nice and visually subtle way to draw attention to the facility.

5 – Offer Instructions, Tips & Guidance:
Don’t be shy – offer instructions about what a site visitor can do to improve their search, including use of operators like “and”, “or” and use of “quotations” to help put into context word groupings etc. On that, direct people to the search e.g. “Site search is located in the top right hand corner of this page” – it doesn’t hurt to state the obvious.

6 – Offer access to your Site Map::
A general layout, again as illustrated by the Judicial College of Victoria website below will prove useful in guiding your users to finding the appropriate area of the site they are interested in.

7 – Be open to Feedback:
The nature of modern web systems is that many people may be involved in the day to day maintenance and management of the environment. It is entirely feasible and plausible that those tasked with looking after the site might not even be aware of the error in missing content in the first place. Offering the immediate ability to offer feedback by way of a feedback/contact form is a great way to defer the responsibility of site content management. Many people  are quite conscientious about reporting small errors to site content.

8 – Most recently searched items:
If someone is visiting a website, chances are they actually are looking for something they have either heard the business does or they want to find out something they heard recently about the business. Offering the 5 top search items, generated by popularity is a helpful way to offer possible relevance to the site visitors.

9 – News/Cross Promotion:
Just 3 headlines will do. It won’t hurt search engine ranking and page update relevance. Based on the idea that someone is specifically looking for information in relation to your organisation, the fact that the latest news is presented, increases the likelihood of engaging users directly with what the business is currently communicating.

10 – Offer some light-hearted humour:
People can take things too seriously at the wrong times. Consider injecting some humour into your 404 messages. Obviously this approach needs to be treated with care and consideration to the end user audience and the representing website.

mUmBRELLA: Everything under Australia’s media and marketing umbrella

mUmBRELLA has been operating since the start of 2009 and is ostensibly a place to pass commentry about Australian new media and traditional media. Recently Simon van Wyk of HotHouse passed comment about the state of play of the interactive industry in Australia.  In his own words, it was a rant, but if had removed the odd expletive and lightened up on the caning of AdLand, it would have become a whitepaper. The facts that remain are that his viewpoint and observations whilst requiring the odd appraisal and scan with the Politically Correct meter here or there are so close to the mark, it’s not worth worrying about. The guts of it is that he has proposed an Industry code of practice for us boffins who profess to be a part of interactive. Brave moves, one which you must and are obliged to tip your hat in respect too and more importantly, we should follow, because they make good old fashioned common sense.

This caused a stir within the Areeba offices, as there are many experienced and veteran practitioners of the art who I rub shoulders with. The one which Simon & I had revisions on was point 8 – we think it should be reworked to be: “Our job is be enablers.  Our job is to enable our clients to better sell product to their customers”. Splitting hairs really, but none of us wanted to be caught on a Saturday selling product down at the local at the front line. I’ve been there before and it ain’t pretty. We’d prefer to be (pick one): 1/ out on our bikes 2/ playing the PS3 3/ down at the pub 4/ with the family. Or in my case, all of the previous. At once.

Guest post: Interactive agencies need to stop being advertising agencies
Simon van Wyk, MD of HotHouse, is over advertising agencies

Industry Code of Practice:

1. I will always propose the least expensive, simplest solution to any problem.
2. I understand Google is the homepage and I will ensure everything I do is sensitive to this fact.
3. My job is to facilitate business. When I start talking brand dialogue it’s only because I can’t find a way to really add value.
4. My job is to help you with the interface between your company and the customer on the web. They are using the web for utility; my job is to find that utility wherever it may exist.
5. We’ll be clear about the returns.
6. We have a chance to do things better to improve from our learnings.
7. The Internet has changed the world; let’s make sure we treat it with the respect it deserves.  It took us many years of TV to develop the technology to skip ads.  Let’s not clutter our communities and forums with useless messages that add no value. Consumers want to hear from companies who are relevant to their circumstance; let’s work with that.
8. Our job is not to sell our ideas to the client.  Our job is to sell the clients product to their customers.