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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.

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.

I was reading SEObook’s blog regarding marketing lessons from Google and particularly enjoyed the suggestion that you should strive to “become a verb.”  Google, of course, has entered the vernacular as almost synonymous with search engine.  And the act of “Googling” is simply searching for things on Google. Thus Google has become a verb.

Therefore, it was with great excitement that I learned the other day that we had been “Duo-ed” Or said differently, somebody was “Duo-ing” us. OK, it doesn’t have the same ring as “Googling” but the concept is the same.  If mimicry is the highest form of flattery, certainly having someone bid on your firm name in search engines is second highest in the flattery department.

We have the greatest regard for Greenfield Belser, a leading branding and design firm in Washington, D.C. In fact, we are even working jointly with them on a web project. Greenfield Belser has chosen to use Google AdWords to bid on our firm name. Eight years ago when we entered the same law firm marketing arena in which they compete, I doubt that we were a blip on their radar. Today they are paying hard coin to be found when people are searching for us. We’ve been “Duo-ed.” We’ve become a verb. Watch out Google, here we come.

Ever wonder how the social media gurus got to know so much? By making mistakes just like the rest of us. But thanks to a revealing guest article by David Sparks on Mashable.com the rest of us can spare ourselves some embarrassment.

The Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus airs the confessions of  mavens like Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, who admits to using too many bells and whistles on her site without finding out from customers what they really wanted.

Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.

David Sparks and Dana Gardner, blogger for ZDNet, both own up to spending way too much time answering all the negative comments posted on their blog sites until they each realized they were wasting their time fighting a war that couldn’t be won against geeks drinking espresso all day and angrily chattering on all night.

“Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content than appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.

However, ignoring negative posts and annoying people can be a mistake, too, as Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, found out.

“You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.”

It’s a balancing act, really, staying engaged with readers without the conversation degenerating into an on-line (and very public) argument. There is a debate among experts on the value of even allowing commenting on company blogs, but that’s a discussion for another post. One mistake I have made is not reading the post carefully before commenting. I didn’t bother to notice that the post was a month old and the topic had digressed into something else and long since died. So my comment just made me look late for the meeting and off-topic. All I could do at that point was hope no one cared enough anymore to read the post—but I would never count on that. Darn permalinks.

There are some mistakes pretty much everyone would agree should never, ever, be repeated. At least two of them Sparks mentions are Stalking women on Facebook–one of the top ten signs you could be a loser (though Stuart Alsop mentioned in the article seems okay)–and Accepting friend requests from people you barely know. Sometimes even perfectly nice people have way too much time to spend online and if you don’t know that before you become friends, there’s no way to “de-friend” them nicely later.

You can read more mistakes from the experts at Mashable.com. And feel free to share some of your own with us–just don’t forget about the permalinks.

One of the speakers at this year’s Web Content Conference proposed that Web 1.0 was about connecting people to content, Web 2.0 about connecting people to each other, and Web 3.0 will be about connecting content to people. While everyone feels differently about “Web 3.0,” and some think we should just do away with the versioning altogether (the Web is the Web is the Web), it is undeniable that content is important and will be even more important as the Internet continues to evolve. Google’s Dick Costolo talks about “hypersyndication” – a world where all content is shared, remixed, socialized and distributed everywhere. For that scenario to be possible, there has to be quality content.

Even media conglomerate Time Warner realizes the importance of quality content – its strategy is now to focus more on “content creation.” According to Time Warner’s new CEO, Jeff Bewkes, “in a digital age, content becomes more valuable, not less, because it’s becoming cheaper to deliver.”

As the headline of the New York Times article boldly proclaims, “content is back.”

I’ve been harping on the importance of fully integrating social media tactics with your company’s marketing strategy and business goals for awhile now. This week, I came across two examples that illustrate my point.

Apparently, Cartier is the first luxury brand to market itself on a mainstream social network – MySpace. My first reaction was: why MySpace?! It’s interesting that out of all the social networks to choose from, Cartier had to choose the one that had a reputation for being: creepy, sketchy, sleazy, and full of perverts, pedophiles, predators and porn. The article talks about how Cartier had to police the people who were friending the brand in order to “respect the brand’s objectives” (if you have pictures of yourself drinking beer at a party, sorry, you can’t be a friend of Cartier). Again, why MySpace?

Taking a step back – why market on a social network in the first place? How does that fit with Cartier’s business goals or branding strategy? It’s true that the current recession has hit luxury brands hard, with people cutting down on spending across the board. Even Louis Vuitton advertised on television for the first time. But is having an official presence on a social network to reach a younger audience worth the risk of diluting the brand? (Unofficial fan pages created by users are a different story for another post.)

At the other end of the spectrum, there is Threadless, a company that grew organically from an online community and is built on a social network. Users submit their T-shirt designs, vote for their favorites, and those favorites are produced and sold. Unlike most retailers, Threadless doesn’t have an inventory problem – and why should they? The T-shirts that are produced are the ones the community has already indicated a desire for. It is the pipedream of every retailer – to be able to know beforehand exactly what consumers want.

In the case of Threadless, the social network and community aspects are so fully integrated into the company that “the Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience,” writes Max Chafkin. Jeff Lieberman, quoted in Chafkin’s article, goes so far as to claim that “to say it’s just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas.”

Not every company will be able to achieve the level of integration of social media that Threadless has. In fact, most probably won’t. The point is that social media tactics need to be part of something bigger – part of the business strategy and goals, and part of the company’s culture, from top to bottom.

With the recent release of iPhone 3G and the launch of Apple’s App Store, location-aware social networking applications will be making their way into the hands of more people than ever before.  The ease of use and simplicity in downloading new apps means that Apple has virtually removed the tech know-how barrier to participation.  Many of the launch day applications are free iPhone versions of popular social networking web sites.  Just about every major player has an app available for download either now or in the near future – Facebook (links open in iTunes if installed), MySpace, Twitter (via a third-party), Pownce, Flickr (via Exposure, by a third-party), and Loopt, who presented their app during Apple’s keynote announcement.  Most of these apps use your location in some way, opening up some exciting possibilities for extremely localized search, directions, and more applications hitherto unimagined.  All of these location-based apps are opt-in due to a restriction in Apple’s iPhone software development kit – the phone will prompt you if the application wants to gain access to your current location.

Of those mentioned above, Loopt has created a bit of a debacle and garnered a great deal of ill-will this week by broadcasting your phone number and current location to everyone in your contact list.

The point of Loopt is to be able to let your friends know where you are so you can get together (without having to actually communicate with anyone via text message, phone, or email).  I for one am a bit reluctant to constantly reveal my current location, even to friends, but by sending SMS text messages to everyone whose phone number you’ve ever added to your contact list, Loopt breaks a social contract by violating their users’ privacy.

Even without installing the Loopt app on my iPhone I’ve been barraged  by text messages from others who have installed it and unwittingly been sending out scores of SMSes without knowing it.  Aside from privacy concerns, sending and receiving text messages costs both the sender and recipient money.  I pay for a 200 text message plan, but after that texts are $.20 to send or receive – imagine the costs involved if you have a lot of contacts in your contact list!  Since contacts are one of the easiest things to sync to my iPhone, I have a lot of contact info for people that I don’t necessarily want to spam with text messages asking them to join a service so they can spam other people with costly SMSes.

Given the backlash on the Internet, it will likely be just a matter of time before Loopt corrects this issue, but in the meantime, be very, very careful which networks you trust with your sensitive information, including your current whereabouts.

UPDATE (16 July): Loopt has announced that they will disable the feature that automatically sends invites to everyone on your contact list in their next update.  No word yet on updates to their SMS service that will respond to the industry standard “STOP” message so non-subscribers can stop receiving spam from them.

Last week IBM’s developerWorks ran an article about The Future of PHP about the upcoming PHP 5.3 and 6.0 releases. While the new features in PHP6 may be underwhelming in terms of sheer quantity, the release marks a major milestone for PHP: Unicode support. Since Unicode recently surpassed other character encodings on the web, having every PHP function support Unicode will greatly improve the ease at which content may be managed within an application. There are numerous other efficiencies and optimizations added as most of PHP’s built-in functions have been overhauled, which should increase performance for existing code, as well.

What’s in a name(space)?

The biggest gain in PHP’s upcoming releases, however, is the addition of namespaces to the object model. Because class names must be unique, we’ve previously had to use naming conventions as workarounds to avoid naming collisions (which could be common when you include third-party class libraries), writing classes named such as:

class DuoConsulting_WebService_Xml_Parser

With namespaces, you can specify a namespace to keep class names shorter and saner:

namespace DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml;
class Parser
{
...
}


Then when you use these objects the code is more readable and less error prone. You can also use aliases to assign a shorter keyword to a long namespace:


use DuoConsulting::WebService::Xml as xml;
$parser = new xml::Parser();


You can read more about the PHP 5.3 implementation of namespaces in the CVS repository.

What’s Missing?

Nearly all of the features that have been removed in PHP6 were already deprecated in PHP5, which means you probably shouldn’t have been using them for the past three years anyway. Most PHP5-only code (such as the Zend Framework) should require no modifications, whereas some code ported from an older PHP4 codebase may need to be updated to run in PHP6. Since it was bad practice to use the vast majority of removed features even in PHP4 (such as <code>register_globals</code> which automatically created new variables based on GET and POST parameters such as those passed through a URL or web form) their removal should only reinforce better coding practices rather than break existing applications.

The near future looks bright for PHP, and since the biggest changes to the language are going to be coming in the next major point release, I suspect it may not be long before 5.3 is the de facto minimal version under which a number of applications will run.

If you wanted to know the absolute latest information on what was happening in the nail biter Democratic Primary in Indiana, there was only one source. And it wasn’t CNN or FoxNews. It was a blog from The Times in Munster, Indiana. And Google returned the blog as the second choice for the search “Indiana Election Results”

One commenter’s opinion:

Melvin Says: May 6th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

“BTW- I have definitely switched from both CNN.com and FoxNews.com to your website- much much faster updates! Kudos!”

We felt aftershocks in the office at around 10:15 this morning. The search term “chicago earthquake” is “spicy hot” right now according to Google Trends. Search activity peaked about 6 hours ago … what’s interesting (and note that the timescale is P.S.T. and we are in C.S.T.) is that search activity picks up immediately after the earthquake occurred. I experienced an earthquake in 1988 while living in upstate NY and we had to wait an hour, glued to the radio, to learn whether or not I was hallucinating. I’m not sure how quickly official news of the quake was posted, but many turned to Google for information as soon as the event occurred.

Surfing around I found this great USGS user contributed data earthquake experience map. If you felt the quake post your experience.