The Stairwell

After using the very handy and well built Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac Beta 2 for the past few months I was only left frustrated by one thing - the Beta expiration message every time you launched the app! Microsoft has finally released the full Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac 2 on their Mactopia site. Thank you Microsoft for this great free software.

I've never used iChat much, mainly because it displays an error to the effect that I've tried to log into the AIM/AOL server too many times... A co-worker told me the solution today: go to iChat > Preferences > Server Settings and use port 443. It works for me!

There's a lot to learn from Tim Ash about online sales conversion and effective landing pages. His latest book, Landing Page Optimization is a treasure trove of hard-learned facts about maximizing site exposure and, more importantly, maximizing conversions once someone has 'landed' on one of your site's pages. Published this year, it also goes deep into the Google AdWords account program and how small web site managers can take advantage of it without spending fortunes on key word purchases.

For our readers and clients, however, the one thing that seemed especially prescient, as everyone grows ever more nervous that they're not doing / spending enough to elevate their site the rankings, was this:

"...the main contributors to your high ranking are all off-page factors that have nothing to do with the text, design, or appearance of your page. Such off-page factors include authority of your domain name (including how long it has been active), the number and quality of inbound links to your page from other respected web sites in your industry, and the presence of keywords in your page title. If you will have properly addressed these factors, you will gotten 80-90% of the potential SEO benefit."

This might be helpful as 2009 web site marketing budgets roll around and tempers begin to flare.

One of our friends is in the news recently - Scott Hemmeter is the founder of a company called Arrowpointe Maps, www.arrowpointe.com. For the past 3 or 4 years Scott Hemmeter has been investing his company's resources into developing software that allows users to visualize Salesforce information on interactive MapQuest maps. If you are a salesforce.com user, this is a must-have. The story is here.

Scott Hemmeter is formerly of the Chicago area, and now resides in sunny California.

From our front-end web developer, Steve:

The potential power of web applications has grown a considerable amount in recent days with announcements like 280 North's Objective-J and Cappuccino javascript frameworks. Demonstrations are available at 280 Slides - a wonderful online slide presentation app. 280 Slides feels so much like a desktop app that one forgets they are on the web at all. on the web. We even started using interactions like 'command-z' for undo and all the copy, cut, and paste keyboard shortcuts without even realizing it.

Another framework that has come into the spotlight is Sproutit's Sprout Core. Its a full MVC javascript framework that was used in the recently announced Mobile Me web applications at Apple's WWDC. These apps are also being marketed as a desktop experience on the web and the video tour of the applications certainly supports that claim.

Admittedly none of these frameworks really offer anything new that hasn't been done before, they're just being packaged differently. They put the javascript at the core rather than just add some splashes of animation and functionality here and there. They also make all of the "magic" happen independently of the server. This brings an interesting twist to Safari 4's new "Save as a Web Application" feature which allows web application developers to build an app using all web technologies and run it on a Webkit framework as a desktop app. The user would not know the difference between these Webkit applications and regular desktop applications. Moreover, they would be cross platform, working on Mac as well as PC by default.

Pretty cool.

It has been some time now, but this story can finally be told.

Late at night and over the weekends, holidays and any other days, Ted and I worked on a side project that inspired us all last year. We didn't publicize our work even to our friends and clients because we didn't know how it would turn out or where it might lead.

This idea grew in many surprising and ways and soon came to take even more of our time than we anticipated. But the results was worth it. What came of our efforts with our partners, AH and DV, was he world's first on-demand, comprehensive browser and operating system exploratory testing software available by subscription. With it, a web or other applications developer could explore and record their web site's presentation and functionality in every browser and operating system known to man, with tools like side-by-side views, onion-skin comparison overlays and even sight-impaired simulator filters. One could even record a live session on a web site and save the video for documenting errors to others. What's more, this application allowed for detailed reporting of all results in a media-rich environment that could be shared with fellow testers. We loved how it helped us in our web work - it was the tool we always wanted but never had - and we were very pleased with how it turned out.

We named it meer|meer.

As a subscription-based software offering, it was so popular in its beta phase that we attracted the attention of a very large software media company based in San Francisco which, after weeks of discussions, and for an undisclosed amount, purchased the entire application. Soon we hope this versatile and fun-to-use testing tool will be an every day necessity for millions of web developers around the world, resulting in better code and design for all users across all browsers and platforms and thus, just maybe, a better internet.

We wanted to thank here all the people who helped this barn-burner become a reality - you know who you are! JH, DV, EV, PT, BA, SD, Helen, Kate, AH, RN, PS and TC. And best of luck to our friends in San Francisco as they work to take the product global.

The Google Technology page is so simple that you have to read between the lines:
http://www.google.com/technology/

Here's the original paper at Stanford (fascinating!):
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Or, you can try to figure out the algorithm and break it down:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

We're happy to announce that we've moved our offices. The world headquarters of Billups Design is now located at 650 W. Lake St., Suite 260 in Chicago. We are thrilled to be in one of the city's hottest commercial districts with plenty of good food, clubs, and fellow creatives. Our office is only a few feet from the Green Line train and the I90 'Lake St.' exit. Thank you so much to all the team at Billups Design for helping make this move possible and reasonably effortless. The new windows, breezes, rooftops and kitchen/private conference area are well deserved! To all of our clients, we hope to see you here for a visit soon.

I like to keep myself current with going salaries, mostly in the web design and development industry, but I found myself looking up some local and national teacher salaries and comparing the two. Wow, what a contrast:

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/home

We just completed for highschoolsports.net a new series of banner ads and Flash-rich video promotions for their clients that include such national brands as Nike and U.S. Army, adapting their existing marketing campaigns for online audiences serviced by highschoosports.net. The banners we developed contained a nifty Flash code that allowed for a chronometric countdown to registration deadlines, regardless of where the ad was being displayed. And the U.S. Army promotional contained some state-of-the-art video viewers. Even better, BD turned these requests around in under a day and one weekend respecitvely. Thanks RN, AH, TB, and DM.

While Hilary Clinton complains that she gets all the hard questions, the country's top technology CEO's continue to be pelted by one hard question at most of their public appearances: What is Web 3.0 going to be? Tim Berners-Lee has offered that Web 3.0 is going to be all about the Semantic Web (or a web based on markup code like RDF or OWL that can be read by machines, not just people, allowing machines to deduce and infer what data is important and share it in real time). Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, stated that he believed Web 3.0 would be defined by applications (api's) that are distributed virally and that work universally with the 'cloud' of data that is retrievable from anywhere. Jerry Yang, found of Yahoo!, sees a Web 3.0 where consumers will create software that services their needs and the division between software producers and consumers will blur.

These visions of a future web have their critics, and many of the models they have talked about over the last several years have failed to materialize in any broad way, but several notable instances of their feasibility are well documented.

My favorite summation of what Web 3.0 might be in the next decade comes from Nova Spivack, founder of Radar Networks, who defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously, including:

* transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;

* network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;

* open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);

* open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;

* the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;

* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and

* intelligent applications, natural language processing.[13], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents

What effect this third decade of the web will have on interface design / engineering will be a topic for next week...

Great idea: Convince 10,000 digital artists to create a tiny piece of a US treasury note, then assemble it into a collage and sell the prints. Each artist received a penny for their time, and each print costs about $100. It is vaguely reminiscent of the widely publicized site "Million Dollar Home Page" of 2007. But Google isn't amused and they've removed "Ten Thousand Cents" from their legitimate ecommerce vendor list.

The project can be found here:

http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html

In their words this is a bold experiment:

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

Perhaps. But a good experiment is one that can be replicated, and we can't imagine anyone boondoggling 10,000 busy people to work 3 minutes for a penny - twice. Even Marx and his gang couldn't pull that off for very long. Perhaps this has merit as a structure for 'crowd-sourcing' and 'virtual economies' if its profits are channeled into deserving charities. And try something besides legal tender next time. Then we might see it become a popular means for fundraising on par with more old-fashioned bake sales and lemonade stands.