TheStandard.com: Searching for Revenue
Yahoo and other “portal” sites are beginning to charge companies to be listed (within a reasonable amount of time, anyway). This is an important shift away from the get-lots-of-traffic-sell-ads model which can’t really work long term.
A Message to Web Designers: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
“In the end…users want a site that is designed to help them find what they want, not what the marketing department wants to promote.”
More on the as-yet-unrealized dream of personalization.
Internet Companies Learn How to Personalize Service
A bit more optimistic, this article from the NY Times says: “That said, the industry is gradually catching up to the hype surrounding personalization, as a growing number of companies have installed tools enabling them to present customized Web pages–if not to a single individual, then at least to groups that have been identified as having a similar profile. This trend is going to raise the ante for companies doing business online, both in terms of investors’ and customers’ expectations.”
Another buzzword begins to bite the dust. At least as far as its hype is concerned, personalization is beginning to tank, both with industry analysts as well as with those companies trying to implement it. Amazon has always been pretty good at it, and even then:
“Personalisation technology understands consumers poorly. Amazon.com, the poster child of personalisation, will start recommending needlepoint books to you as soon as you order that ideal gift for your great aunt. At this point, even the thickest consumer is apt to realise he and his online bookstore aren’t that close.”
For my daughter, of course.
Holy Shit. Nielsen Norman Group hires Tog and Laurel (Straight Face 08-15-2000)
That’s actually the title of the column by Mike Pell, but it’s also exactly what I said when I heard about it.
Some, ok most of the folks on the CHI-WEB list are a lot smarter than me. Take this quote for example:
Which is to say that you favour a rigid application of the strategy of
fitting every site’s content into a hierarchically organised space. For
contextually sensible deviations from this model to be labeled
‘serendipitous’ speaks volumes about the dominance of this approach.
(though perhaps I overstep the mark in characterising what you are saying)
This strictly hierarchical model does have its strenghts as you point
out. It’s important though to understand that it is not the only
approach, and that it comes with inherent problems. It is utterly
dependent on second guessing which way the user wants and expects to go
next. It is not particularly scalable in the face of massive
heterogeneous information collections targetted at a wide variety of
users with different interests in the items in the collection. While it
commonly does not concern the designers of small sites, this is the norm
on the internet as a whole, and within the scope of almost any substanital
repository of information.
What the hell did he say?
Amazon fires up their new navigation interface.
Kudos to Amazon for getting rid of the old stacked-tab nightmare. The directory method of organizing lots of information, ala Yahoo, has always proven effective. The directory tab on Amazon’s site is a very welcome addition. Time for all of the Amazon copycats to get to work (let’s hope they hurry.)
Guardian Unlimited | Second sight
“Thanks to the profit-driven motives of big businesses, the internet is cheaper to use. So now it is our turn to exploit them, like they have exploited us”