I’m not sure about the stockings on the fireplace mantel, but one thing I know to be full during this holiday season is my email inbox. It contains lots of mass emailed holiday greetings. By and large I’m not a fan of email holiday greetings and here’s why.

Happy Holidays from Whom?

Who is ADX and why are they sending me a holiday greeting email?

Thank you ADXDirect for your gracious holiday greetings. It is great hearing from team@adxdirect.com but exactly who are you and why are you sending me greetings? I don’t think we’ve ever done business. And if there is really someone that I know personally at your company, it is not apparent from your incredibly anonymous greeting card.

Happy Holiday to Whom?

So its “happy holidays to all of you from all of us” is it? I shot a look over my shoulder. Nope, no one behind me. So who is “all of you” since it is just me here reading my email all by myself. Sure, you may be sending out a blast to your closest 10,000 friends downloaded from your client relationship management system, but email is a one-to-one medium.  If you’re going to send me email, even if it’s the same email you send to the other 9,999, send it to ME.  I’m special, you know.  And I expect you to treat me that way.

Sudden Death
Every time you send me an email you take my active subscriber life in your figurative hands. When you send me stuff with good value, I welcome you in my inbox. But slip up just once and my finger quivers over the unsubscribe link. You do have an unsubscribe process, right? It’s the law.

Just an Ad
In the end, your holiday greeting is just an ad. Oh, sure, once in a while I get something truly cute, imaginative or (gasp) personal. But more often than not your best wishes are tinged with your pitch.

Send me an email holiday greeting and guess what?  Click. Unsubscribe. Bah. Humbug.

Yesterday, I sat down with my 5 pounds of Sunday New York Times, as much an enjoyable habit as well as a source of news and insight. Re-organizing the sections in my preferred order, I wondered if my newspaper shuffling was not only a fading experience but one that I was actually helping to bury. A couple weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor chose Duo Consulting to implement its new Web-first strategy by Spring 2009. When we launch the new site, the venerable Christian Science Monitor will cease printing a daily paper.

Newspapers, we know, are on the ropes. This month, alone, Cox News closed its Washington DC news bureau.  And, of course, another publishing institution, The Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy. Although the Tribune’s problems may be complicated by more than its publishing business model, even my trusty NYT reported October ad revenue at its newspapers dropped by 17.2% and classified sales dropped nearly 35%.  And these trends are expected to continue well into 2009.

Incongruously, it’s not the news that’s not in demand.  It’s the newspaper.  When I started Duo in 1999, we were involved in some pretty unusual online business ventures. They were unusual in the sense that they were disruptive technologies.  Few of them worked.  And the market dismissed the entire initial online venture with the infamous bubble burst. But, as we now know, from the ashes of these twenty-first century disruptive initiatives have grown the 800 pound gorillas of today’s economy. And the products of the 800 pound gorillas of the twentieth century are, in many cases, lining the floor of bird cages.

Now what’s different about the Christian Science Monitor’s initiative is that their move to a web-first strategy has been a two-year process full of thoughtful consideration by the Monitor’s board of trustees, senior management, editorial and publishing staff. Rather than merely fleeing from the apparent hopelessness of a print edition, the leaders of the Monitor seem to be aware of a great opportunity here and are willing to take advantage of it.

Two people that we are working with in this transition, Monitor editor, John Yemma, and managing publisher, Jonathan Wells,  have put their thoughts together in this video. Clearly, rather than escaping, they see a tremendous opportunity to “reach people increasingly where they are,” and allow world-wide news to essentially be reported as it happens.

Moreover, the Monitor is not abandoning its readers who value a printed paper.  In a note to subscribers, Wells tells readers how the daily web publication “will be combined with the launch of an attractive new weekly print publication that looks behind the headlines and helps readers understand global issues.”

Now, almost 10 years since starting Duo Consulting it is fascinating to be helping industry leaders like the Christian Science Monitor truly disrupt their own industries. Our task is to provide interaction design and implementation to the Monitor to provide a powerful platform that uses content as a core strategic asset to their online efforts. They want csmonitor.com to be a website where you feel you are getting a trusted source of news in which you can both imbibe, react and interact with it. Those are our marching orders.

The Monitor has never missed a day of publishing-except one day a year designated by the founder. As their site developer and host, that’s a legacy in which we are honored to participate.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/) is billed as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”  Amazon’s intent with the service is to connect tasks with workers who can perform the task.  Frequently the task is one that is simple for a human but complex to program.  One of the better examples is Amazon’s own iPhone application that allows you to take a picture of something, then creates a Mechanical Turk job to pay a person $0.10 to find a link to that thing (or the closest possible to that thing) on the Amazon store.

Other people have used Mechanical Turk for interesting little side projects, such as Andy Baio (of Waxy.org) who used Mechanical Turk to supplement data from Wikipedia in his quest to map out the years represented in the samples from this year’s Girl Talk release, Feed The Animals.  Later, Andy wondered how much it would cost to get Mechanical Turk workers to take a picture of themselves and post it to the site.  Someone else used Mechanical Turk to write a book about cats.

The particular problem I wanted to solve was testing the availability of a site from a wide range of locations.  There are services that will let you do this, but they tend to be geared towards long term testing or simple screen captures from a limited range of IP addresses.  I wanted to see proof that the site had loaded from 25 different locations around the world.  My budget was $30.

First I set up the Mechanical Turk job.  You can do these as “one-off” jobs or have code use the API to spit out repetitive jobs constantly.  I went the one-off route and created a simple webform that asked 4 questions.  The form looked like this:

Once the form was ready to go, I added $30 in funds to our account and told the Turk to offer the job out for people at $1 each, with each person only able to complete the task once, and with a 2 hour time limit.  The time limit was because I was simultaneously capturing all the internet traffic sent to the website during the test, in case anyone reported an error.  If so, I’d have a little more insight into exactly what problems were occurring.  When the batch was finished, 16 people had taken me up on the offer.  The results are delivered in spreadsheet format.  An excerpt is below.

What we were able to show from the test is that people from 16 different IP addresses (spread all over the world) were able to hit the target website without problem.

Teenagers do think differently than the rest of us - you probably knew that already or could have guessed that. But did you know that the way teens develop their skills online is actually being studied by the MacArthur Foundation? They have released the results of their study from three years of interviewing young people and their parents. From the article, they conclude, “America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online, often in ways that adults do not understand.” The two page summary report is a great read, and I was excited when I found danah boyd in the list of authors.

What does this study mean for your web content strategies? You may already have made assumptions about your web visitors, but in three to four years, these teen agers will have entry-level jobs everywhere you look. And some of the students in the study are no longer stdents and have already entered the workforce. So if your content is for working people, consider taking some time with the longer white paper.

Also, the social aspects of learning and learning how to be social (not quite the inverse of each other) are important to learn about when studying your web visitors. The summary report states, “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration…” Social media may be risky for some businesses, but as this youth population grows up, we can learn a thing or two from their online habits.

For anecdotal evidence, look no farther than this great story from Alan Porter, dad of a teenager, in Move Over DITA - Chaos is Coming!

Then she got on Facebook and YahooIM and started using messaging to ask friends who were online for recommendations. These friends were literally from all around the world, so she was given access to resources that gave totally different perspectives than those given in the classroom. As I watched she soon had six different windows open on her iMac and was pulling information from multiple sources into her own document. Building the structure and narrative as she went.

One friend suggested going to a social bookmarking site and searching using a variety of user applied tags. Instead of taxonomy she was now applying folksonomy.

So, what’s a parent or web content strategist to do?

• Adults do have a role to play by facilitating engagement online, modeling good behavior, and setting a young person’s learning goals while online.
• Educational institutions should attempt to keep up with the fast pace of change in digital media.

Not easy, certainly! But all worthwhile goals to achieve.

The Christian Science Monitor, the first nationally circulated newspaper to shift to an online publication with a weekly print edition , has chosen Chicago-based web consulting firm Duo Consulting and Norway-based eZ Systems to implement its new Web-first strategy by Spring 2009. eZ Systems is the world’s largest Open Source web content management system software vendor while Duo Consulting is one of the world’s leading web development firms.

“One of the key reasons we selected Duo and eZ was because of the ease of use,” said John Yemma, editor of the Monitor. “Our reporters need to be able to quickly post stories online from around the world – and the combination of eZ Publish software with Duo’s implementation and hosting services is an important next step in our Web-first, multi-platform strategy.”

“The Monitor’s decision to use eZ Publish was based, in part, on our other successful media implementations, as well as our adaptable and proven open source software model” said eZ Systems co-founder Bård Farstad. Duo Consulting’s CTO Fred Salchli added, “With eZ Publish, the Monitor will have the capability to pre-plan content publication schedules, support revenue streams with advertising, and support rich multimedia content.”

eZ Publish and Duo Consulting were both founded ten years ago with a focus on creating scalable solutions that make it easy to create, manage and re-purpose content online. eZ has since become one of the most respected open-source software providers with more than 200 thousand installations and registered users in more than 130 countries, while Duo Consulting has become one of the leading interactive agencies in the content management field.

With unique functionality for magazine and newspaper publishers, eZ Publish has established a leading role in powering the online efforts for many of the world’s largest media groups. The combination of eZ Publish software and Duo Consulting’s interaction design and implementation provide a powerful platform for organizations that use content as a core strategic asset to their online efforts.

About The Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor is renowned for its in-depth, comprehensive, and unbiased coverage of events and issues worldwide. During its 100 year history, the Monitor’s adherence to the highest standards of journalism has earned seven Pulitzer Prizes and hundreds of other awards. With 18 bureaus worldwide, the Monitor strives to cover both major news events and stories from every corner of the globe. In 1996, the Monitor launched its award-winning Web site, CSMonitor.com, featuring the complete contents of the print edition, video and audio interviews and stories, daily blogs, and electronic archives back to the first issue, and original material written for the site.

About Duo Consulting

Duo Consulting is one of the most reputable and established web development firms with Professional Service, Non-Profit, Government, and Business clients in the US and Canada. Duo Consulting is a trusted advisor to its clients on web strategy, interaction design, technology, and marketing. The firm is the originator of the Web Content Conferences (www.webcontentconferences.com)

About eZ Systems

eZ Systems, headquartered in Skien, Norway is the creator of award winning eZ Publish, With an enterprise Open Source business model, eZ Systems combines enterprise software with Open Source code and total product responsibility, providing the openness and sharing of the eZ philosophy with a sustainable business model.

Some days it seems like an invite to a particular network spreads like wildfire. First you get a smattering of invites for LinkedIn, and then Spock invites spread, and then, out of nowhere, Naymz appears in your inbox, telling you to worry about your personal brand management. It’s enough to give anyone social media overload.

Now that we are nearing the end of 2008, has the BusinessWeek projection citing Facebook Fatigue as one of “Ten Likely Events in 2008,” in fact come true? A year previously, ZDnet’s blogger Steve O’Hear asked on his blog, The Social Web, Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue? I don’t suppose we’re really nearing a death march or depletion of social media sign-ins. Then again, the announcement of the shutting down of Pownce, one of the first microblogging sites, seems like a sign of the beginning of the end (or the start of consolidation).

Aggregation to the extreme

There’s also a trend of aggregation - collecting and gathering your content contributions whether it’s a video, picture, link, or blog entry. Check out Profilactic offering the ability to update 190 social sites at once. One hundred ninety. Their tagline is “preventing an online identity crisis since 2006″ which I like better than the name. Come on, was ProfileAddict.com taken? In the How to Manage Your Social Profiles and Create Virtual Business Cards entry on Mashable.com, one of the commenters gives a three step method for managing all your online profiles, starting with Profilactic to create all the accounts, then update those services supported by Ping.fm and Posterous.com, and finally use FriendFeed.com, Lifestream.fm or Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all the data. Whew.

Networking strategically

Let’s find some strategies for the time you spend and the activities you do with social media.

In a TechSoup article, Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking, Beth Kanter gives great guidelines for determining when and where to create that social profile and what to do with that profile once you’ve created it. Her guidelines for online networking are related to those you’d use in real-life networking. To summarize her secrets:

• Invest time in your network.
• For an organization, try an individual profile before setting up a group.
• Establish a routine, and realize that crossover on different sites means you can target just a few selectively.
• Recruit others to help with your efforts.
• Keep it personal and network selectively, avoiding random reach-outs or connections that aren’t meaningful.
• Lastly, her eighth tip is full of good technology ideas for making the most of your time online such as using RSS feeds to fill in content on multiple sources, and mobile technology timesavers.

Protecting your time investment

So if you invest all this time into your social profile and online brand, how can you protect your investment? Is there an open social profile that is portable to different sites? Google rolled out the OpenSocial API over a year ago, partnering with MySpace. Speculators said the move was to take on the Facebook walled garden. From where I sit though, your best protective measure is to export regularly. As a “lazy” user I want my photos and blog entries safe in the cloud but also would love to pick up and leave when necessary.

What do you think? How are you protecting your investment of your time online?

Bling is usually characterized as offering a special extra “punch” to an ensemble or outfit. Bling is an accessory, which is how I would describe sidebar widgets on your website or blog. Accessories can enhance the main site but can also offer eye candy or a shiny bauble to help the main site gain more attention at the social web party. Coco Chanel is quoted as saying, “Before leaving the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.”  Do you need to examine your website to see if it has one or two too many widgets that may detract from your site’s main messaging?

Can widgets sell?

If your site is for online commerce, selling products, services, or event registrations, think of how handy the related items lists can be for someone shopping online. Better yet, let your online catalog show “read wear” to others online. A well-browsed print catalog might show dog eared corners or coffee-mug circles on favorite pages. Similarly, your popular online catalog can remain neat but feature widgets that display related popular choices of prior visitors. Take this example from the Eagle Optics web site, which supplies birdwatching optical tools.

Are there authoritative widgets?

If your site exists mostly as an informational or authoritative source of information, you might want to show your experts’ comments or punditry in other areas of the web, such as a Twitter RSS feed with their latest “between the blog posts” micro-posts, or report web visitor or authoring statistics.

What about lead generation widgets?

If your site assists in lead generation, you can use widgets to draw visitors’ attention to the best ways to contact you. There may be metadata you can report to your visitors to help convince them to get in touch. Also consider the mobile phone user and make a widget that makes their lives easier when getting in touch with you through your site.

What does your website offer visitors visually?

I’ve been reading “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures” and something that stuck with me was the use of our “mind’s eye” - that we all have images we carry around with us. Also, apply the visual analysis we all use to figure out what we need to accomplish and how to accomplish it when we walk into a room - but consider what visitors need when they “walk” up to your website.

What are your favorite examples of sites with well-done widgets or sites with over-done widgets?

(Here’s the cool link to the visualization!)

Until someone invents something new (and I’m sure it’s already being done) social media is the best communication tool we’ve got going for us. If you don’t believe it, you might be interested in how our world looks according to Facebook.

As part of the hack-a-thon series of events Facebook engineers came up with Project Palantir (’that-which-looks-far-away’ or ‘one that sees from afar’ for Lord of the Rings buffs). The project allows us to visualize Facebook data as it appears across the globe.
The team created a video of the project where each action is geolocated and visualized using “java and open source jme framework.” Not only can you see individual actions of facebook users, but interactions such as pokes, wall postings, and friend requests.

Poking, friending, and posting

According to facebook blogger Dan Rose, “Over 100,000 small businesses now have their own Pages on facebook.” Dan recently shared the story of a specialty chocolate store, TCHO, owned by Wired Magazine founder Louis Rossetto in San Francisco. ”Within 24 hours of creating a Facebook Page, TCHO already had dozens of fans on the site.”

And as the fourth most visited sight in the world with over 120 million active users, if you don’t have a facebook page that highlights your product or services, now might be a good time to get one. Like we’ve mentioned in previous posts, many companies are increasing on-line presence during this economic crunch. Moving into social media is a cheap and easy way to accomplish this.

Some of this action could be yours.

I’m worried that in the not-to-distant future, regular people will lose interest in social media sites like Facebook and Myspace and we’ll only be left with companies talking to each other. But for now social media sites could be the best low-cost place to reach customers you never knew you had.

Watch the entire Palantir Project video demonstrated by Facebook engineer, Jack Lindamood on the Facebook blog.

Want an easy way to hear what all your competitors are talking about? Think of the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki as a dedicated channel for listening in on what they are saying and what customers are saying back. It’s also a good place to get free advice on what makes a good company blog and what doesn’t.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki started as an idea of Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson back in 2005. He wondered why some companies were blogging and some weren’t. One theory he and fellow tech expert Doc Searls were toying with was if companies started blogging as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship. So they began compiling a list of Fortune 500 company blogs they defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products” to compare against the companies’ previous 12-month share performance. They also wanted to see if blogging made a difference in performance moving forward. In October 2007 their wiki combined with the Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (“another wiki project that sought to review all the Fortune 500 companies that blog”) in an effort to expand both projects. You can read the whole story on Chris Anderson’s blog.

In the early days of the wiki a scant 4% of F500 companies were blogging. Though they still lag way behind the Inc. 500 (blogging at a rate of 39% according to a recent study), the Fortune 500 Business Blog wiki has tracked an increase to 12.8%  of F500 companies blogging by November15, 2008.

At Southwest Airlines interns are cool

So F500 companies are starting to catch up for all the obvious reasons, but their blogging approaches vary greatly. Some use lots of widgets and links to other cool tools (like twitter and flickr) and some don’t. Some get lots of comments and some get none. Some blogs even think interns are cool and let them blog right along with marketing managers and CEOs.

You might think nothing is more uncool than an F500 company. I have visions of guys in suits running around placating stock holders, too. But you might be surprised by what they are doing on their blogs and what types of communications they dispatch. It’s not all mea culpa posts about product recalls and poor customer service. Knowing what makes for good F500  blogging (if you don’t already) is a good way to know what’s good for our own blogs. After all, they remain on the F500 list for some reason.

There are lots of reasons to visit the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki that I will write about in a future post. But one of the biggest reasons is that visiting often can help you make your own blog better. It’s the only place (that I know of) where F500 blogs are viewable from one location, are always current, and are routinely reviewed by other bloggers. So you can easily pick from any of the more than 130 blogs listed (companies such as Microsoft and IBM have multiple blogs) and do some informal research.  See what pulls you in and makes you want to stay for a while. What are the posts talking about? Are they all about product-speak? Which blogs are actively engaging in conversation? What kind of feedback are they getting from your mutual (or potential) customers?

While you are on the wiki take some time to read the assembly of reviews by other bloggers. The ones I read were thoughtful, constructive, and use what reviewers call “businessandblogging.com’s methodology for reviewing companies.” Though I couldn’t find reference to the methodology on the businessandblogging.com web site, it apparently rates blogs according to ease of finding, frequency of posts, engaging and relevant writing, and perceived honesty, among other things.

A good example of one review discusses the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts about Southwest. Not only is Southwest blogging, they are Twittering, Flickring, YouTubing, Linking In and Facebooking.

You might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several comments on each post. So they must be doing something right. You can read a review by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden to see what else they (or you) might be doing right.

Uh, BTW, that's a dumb name

In some cases even if the company is talking, no one is talking back much. But at least they are trying to engage in the conversation. For example Johnson & Johnson’s blog, JNJ BTW (Am I the only own who thinks that’s a dumb name?) has some interesting posts, but they rarely get any comments. Is that because they rarely reply to them when they do come in? You can read a review by Richard Young on his Whole Nine Yards blog.

Fortune 500 companies couldn’t ask for better, free, feedback on their blogs than this. Really, they should have to pay for it, and maybe they will some day, but that’s not the intent of the wiki. In the meantime the rest of us can use it for our own amateur research. Being better able to see what is or isn’t working on other blogs gives us some precious insight into what may or may not work on our own.

Have you ever stopped to think about all the signs, infrastructure, access, and coordination it takes just to get people to work each day in a major city? World Usability Day gives us a chance to do just that. The day itself was Thursday November 13. I hadn’t stopped on that day to take notice of what the day is all about so I thought I’d take some time now to look into it.

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA) created the initiative of taking a day a year to increase awareness and support making transportation easier and safer to use while also supporting a more energy friendly approach for our environment.

I work in software, so most of my usability focus is on user interfaces on a computer including desktop applications, web applications, and website usability. I was fascinated to think instead about the usabilty of transportation this year. Being a mom of young children and driving a stroller all around town has opened my eyes many times to the difficulties of using wheels for your ambulation rather than your stair-climbing legs. Visiting the Texas state capital in Austin with my two kids involves some lifting and struggle with the stroller since I don’t want to use the retro-fitted wheelchair ramp for my 28-pound two year old. But it does give me some limited perspective so I immediately thought of accessibility for transportation usability.

Another area of making transportation friendly to both users and the environment is considering your carbon footprint while traveling. I use Dopplr to share my trips with others, and just this year they integrated a web application that calculates and displays your carbon footprint. Somehow my trip to Philadelphia in June outpaces my driving trip to Houston and flying trip to Columbus this month. One trip was for business and another for family, but it is helpful to compare the two months. With the information in front of me, I can choose to ride my bike to work to make up the difference.

Another aspect of World Usability Day and Transportation is signage. Let’s take for example the failure of the signage on this London Bus - Break Glass for Hammer next to Use Hammer to Break Glass. I guess the moral of the story is to always travel with a hammer.

It seems a little unfair to usability professionals to take a day that might points out the difficulties and foibles of travel and usability. But awareness is a good start, and I hope your holiday travel plans involve useful signs, accessible paths, and a low carbon footprint.