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Podcasts are powerful online marketing tools.  Plus, they’re easy to make and similar to – but infinitely better than – gum on your shoe.

Podcasts are just like other audio and video content on the web, but with one big-fat-marketing-jackpot of a difference:  People SUBSCRIBE to them.  And not just any people.  These are people who are really, really interested in learning more and hearing more and thinking more about what you have to say, show or teach.

People watch (or listen to) podcasts everywhere: at home on their PCs, on their iPods at the gym, on their way to Lake Tahoe and walking around Costco.

The ultimately cool and useful thing about podcasts is that – like gum on a shoe – they’re STICKY.  Podcast subscribers use personalized readers (RSS aggregators) like Google Reader and iTunes that automatically update them when your new podcast is available.  So getting someone to subscribe to yours is like having them add your tv or radio show to their personal cable package.

The first thing to decide is what podcast format is right for you: audio (only) or video. If you have questions about how this might work in your company, give us a call.

And there you have it.  So better than gum.

Lot’s of unbelievibly cool apps have been created with the Google Map API. Here’s one that’s cool AND timely – go to DrivePricing.com and fill out the simple form.

Enter the start and end address, the zipcode where you buy gas and the average MPG of your vehicle.

Whamo, it calculates the gas cost and displays the trip on a Google Map!

Not that anyone’s talking about gas costs these days, but DrivePricing should be called DriveTraffic.  What a simple, clever way to get eyeballs to a web site – and sell a boat load of AdSense advertising too.

The only thing that would bum me out about this site is if I found out it was owned by some billionaire oil dude like T. Boone Pickens.

In “Crash Into Me”, Dave Matthews sings, “Hike up your skirt a little more and show the world to me.”  We can dig where Dave’s coming from, but are pretty legs enough to get site visitors coming back in 2008?  Sure. Maybe. Well. Hmmm.

Put into historical perspective, here’s a brief timeline of the web we live in:

1998:
Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” topped the charts. Web sites that didn’t crash and that loaded the same day were hot.

2002:
Justin Timberlake’s “Justified” was a hit. Web sites that looked nice got plenty of hits too.

2008:
Pretty isn’t enough. Sites that rule have found ways to be both pretty AND social.

The list of social web technologies grows daily and encompasses such things as user profiles (the bigger, fatter, more preference laden the better), forums, polls, reviews, ratings, quizzes, wikis, blogs, webinars, social graph exchanges, widgets/gadgets, chats, ad infinitum.

So what’s a “social” web site? It’s about as easy to define as what’s “pretty”. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are sites that often come to mind. Here are some lesser known sites that exploit the social aspect of the web very effectively:

Lance Armstrong’s livestrong.com – This site engages visitors in creative ways, giving them plenty of reasons to register and keep coming back.  There are how to videos, forums, support groups, food journals, challenges, and featured experts that yap and give links to their blogs. If you’re into health and fitness, Lance makes this site hard to resist.

Threadless.com – Threadless entices consumers and designers with a format of show it, critique it, vote it, buy it, model it. Kind of American Idol meets custom t-shirts online.

Is social networking right for your site? Good question and one that only you ultimately can answer.  If you’d like to brainstorm with successful web developers, we invite you to contact us. When you get to the “comments” part of the form, just type in “Takes More than Pretty Legs”.  We’ll know what you mean.

Got divisions around the globe? Want to Internationalize and Localize your web presence to other countries and languages? Maybe you’re just looking to address a non-English speaking audience right here in the U.S.

Here are eleven things to consider:

1. Language/country combinations – which ones will you support?
2. Accurate translations – think about building a company process that ensures accurate and eloquent translations for the populations you’re targeting.

   Here’s an example of what you don’t want: “Localization support in .Net Framework 2.0 become much more easier and brings fun during localization process.” Ironically, this was pulled from a site about building multi-language sites. Yikes!!

3. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Determine the fonts you’ll need to accommodate in your CSS. For example, most Latin based languages require special characters (Spanish, German, French, etc.) ; Chinese and Japanese require symbol support, and Arabic is written right to left.
4. Design Standards – Corporate site design templates should anticipate content size differences. Size disparity can be significant from language to language.
5. Video, Audio, Image Content – country/language specific versions are often required. Develop this content with an eye towards localization when possible.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – country/language specific sites should be tagged with localized meta data, titles, images, links, video, etc.
7. Content Management Systems (CMS) – make sure your CMS supports all the languages you’ll be maintaining and that user authorizations can be assigned and managed by country if necessary.
8. Ecommerce Solutions – does your shopping cart offer the necessary languages and currencies for product browsing and checkout? Can product descriptions be maintained in different languages and assigned to the appropriate countries?
9. Site Navigation – can navigation text be easily customized by country/language?
10. Store Locators – will your U.S. solution support users in other countries? Will the integrated map still work overseas?
11. Site and Product Search – will search solutions still work for non-English sites?

The list above should get you started down the right path. More questions?  Contact topLingo…

1. Moving too fast
   There’s a natural cadence to developing relationships. Sites that violate that cadence suffer. If you want a user to subscribe to your newsletter, make it as easy and unthreatening as possible. Remember, it’s early in the relationship. Determine the minimum information you need, and just ask for that. Do you really need their full name and address or just their email? Once you’re communicating with them regularly – through a newsletter or other shared experience – you’re likely to get whatever additional info you need.
2. Publishing a badly designed website just to get noticed.
   Sounds counter intuitive that a company would publish a site that makes them look bad just to have a web presence, doesn’t it? Yet we’ve all seen ‘em. Publishing a badly designed, amateurish site is just dumb. Websites are the first impression many people get of a company. Don’t have the budget or time or where-with-all to publish a professional looking site? Then don’t.
3. Posting “under construction” anywhere on the site.
   On the internet, where instant gratification is hardly fast enough, the under construction notification is irritating at best. Websites by nature are works in progress. Great websites are developed iteratively over time. If a function or aspect is not ready, publish it when it is.
4. Rabbit hole clicking
   How many times are you gonna make me click to get what I want? Remember, the one with the fewest clicks wins. Check out the domain search site Domize.com for a good example of minimum clicks.
5. Fat, slow Flash
   Who’s got the time or patience for a 30 second Flash intro? Worse yet, a site completely developed in Flash? Search engines ignore them and visitors click them away, so save a bundle and forego the impulse to bathe in the perfume. A lite spritz is more attractive than rolling around in it.
6. Browser incompatibility
   Sites that work fine in one browser but not another alienate and confuse users. Public facing, commercial grade sites should be compatible with IE (6.2 and 7), Firefox, Safari and Opera at a minimum.
7. Poor navigation
   We’ve all been on sites where we’ve hunted for what should be absolutely unmistakeable. Navigation should be clear, consistent, always present.
8. Too many graphics
   Eyes full, head empty. Unless your Flikr, Google Images or a stock photography site like iStock, you probably should use graphics sparingly. Use them like spice on the food rather than the food itself.
9. Too much text
   Eyes empty, head gorged. Too much text is almost as bad as too many images. Like Aristotle said, “moderation in all things”.
10. In your face ads
    Don’t let the ads on the side of the arena interfere with the main event. Case in point: a user zooms the text so they can read the small print, only to have the enlarged text hidden by an ad.

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Music broke out today.  It happened without warning. A C# developer with an acoustic guitar started playing Bang A Gong. Softly at first, then stronger, with some heavy base lines. After a few bars another guy blended in with some high seventh notes. The silence in the coding pit cracked, then shattered. The deadline intensity that had hung in the air all week began to drop away. The office began to pulse. A .NET developer, who fronts for a punk rock band on weekends, tapped in.  Dirty and sweet, dressed in black, don’t look back… That wicked T.REX backbeat drove it home.

Creative environments feed off chill time. So now we’re all loose and cool. And ready for more slammin’.

Everyone’s talking about it. Few are doing it.  Fewer still are doing it right. 

We’re talking about the text that makes up web pages.  It’s integral to most web development projects and the source of what Pepi Renolds calls “Content Delay Syndrome” in this must read article.”

Don’t blink, because “Apps” is a constantly changing beta release. Here’s what we like and don’t like about it at the moment:

We Like:

• Price (free or $50/yr per user)
• User collaboration (this is huge)
• Easy to learn
• Easy to exchange data with MS Office apps (word, xls, ppt, outlook)
• Google hosts, so no maintenance hassles
• Includes the apps users use most (email, word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, contacts, presentations)
• Finding stuff is super fast and easy (Doc Search, Email Search, Calendar Search)

We Don’t Like:

• Slow to load docs
• Offline work feasible but with holes and rough edges and awkward workflows
• Must search docs and email and calendars separately
• Learning curve for MS Office users
• Need high speed connection – don’t try this on a dialup
• Browser window overload: lots of browser windows open as you use more and more APPS functions

If you have something you’d like to add to either list, tell us here.

Sometimes simplicity isn’t immediately obvious… but it’s always remarkable. Here’s what I mean: Go to Domize.com and check out their “As-you-type domain name lookup”.

It’s so simple the eloquence might take a moment to sink in. Or then again, maybe not.

Into the mosh… Everyone’s doing it: Email. Word Processing. Calendaring. Spreadsheets. Presentation slides.

But everyone’s doing it in a different pit: The office. The conference room. On a plane. In a hotel. Out in the field…

• Can’t access that blinkin !@#$%! email because it’s back on the desktop.
• Can’t pull up that stinking proposal because Word isn’t installed on the conference room PC.
• Can’t get a quick answer from a colleague because the Mac has Yahoo! Messenger and you need Windows IM.

Whaddaya use when you’re users are moshed all over the place?

In 2008, one smart answer is Google Apps for business. Available anywhere – online or off* – Google Apps lets companies achieve levels of office app sophistication previously available only to the very big guys. (*offline functions are limited as of now)

It provides collaborative access to documents in ways that PC office suites can’t – and takes care of all the attendant housekeeping and security so you don’t have to.

Businesses and employees will want the Premier Edition for $50 per user per year. This gives you branded, ad free screens – and enormous storage quotas that defy even the most neurotic email hoarders amongst us. Users get emails branded with @yourDomainName.com not @gmail.com, and 25gb of storage each. When you add up the annual cost of maintaining Word Processing, Calendaring, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and Email Apps for each user’s PC (desktop and laptop in some cases), $50 is a complete steal.

And just when you’re thinking this sounds cool, it gets better: Teams can collaborate on documents across the web, eliminating the need for emailing large attachments to each other and playing the “can you name the latest version” game. (Okay, we’re jumping up on stage now)

But in case this isn’t enough to get you downloading Google Apps right this instant, recently announced integration with SalesForce and the Google Apps Engine will surely stoke the fire.

Here it is. Check it out.

Now we’re on the stage, arms up over our heads, looking down at the undulating mosh, smiling wide… and now we’re diving in…

Hi! I’m a recovering .MP3aholic!

Endless gigagbytes later, I was buried like a collector with just too much damn stuff … then along came internet radio.

Originally it was MusicMatch, until Yahoo bought and buried them, now it’s all about Pandora.

A browser based, web 2.0 and absolutely FREE internet radio app, Pandora allows you to create a radio station and teach it preferences by selecting “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Then, over time, these preferences kick in and Pandora plays more of what you want to hear.

To quote the company “Pandora has a single mission: To play music you’ll love – and nothing else!”

www.Pandora.com

Used to be easier to be a pretender on the web. Just take the visitor counter off your site and voilà!: pretend you’re a “General” like Motors or Electric. Google Benchmarking bodes a new day.

Today it’s all about transparency. Smart companies from Google to Zillow to Kelly Blue Book are making – what used to be insider only – information readily available in the browser of your choice. Instead of hiding their nuts, the winners are working hard to lay them out in the open.

Google Analytics Benchmarking (in beta) is optional and free. Benchmarking shows how your stats compare with other industry verticals. Yours or another.

It’s not the total transparency that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wants to see, but it’s a step in the right direction. (psst, Michael, pass the cashews)

Spam email chafes. It’s like wet sand in your bathing suit. It’s the electronic version of a freeway driver flipping you off – not with gestures – but with daily offers of stuff you don’t want – or worse – things that offend you.

We’ve all received ‘em: solicitations for Canadian drugs, cheap software, implants, enlargements, and the list goes on ad nauseum – leaving the email reading public irked and in extreme cases “spam enraged”. Still, good people are often surprised to discover that their own websites may be unwittingly contributing to the problem. Contributing how, you ask?

One way is by publishing email addresses in plain view on their sites. Bots (robot programs) crawl the web constantly, harvesting addresses that are sitting on websites screaming to be hijacked. To the naked eye, these addresses look something like this: john.sales@mycompany.com. To bots they look like this: mailto: john.sales@mycompany.com.

For the uninitiated, Mailto: is html code that instructs the browser to open a window in the users default email client – e.g. Microsoft Outlook- and insert the address from the web page. So by searching for mailto: on your web pages, bots can easily harvest your stuff.

How do you defend against email harvesters? One way is to use forms instead of email addresses. Forms can be filled out by the visitor and submitted to one or more email addresses without ever revealing the recipient addresses. Two other advantages are that one, user information can be saved to a database for later use and that two, forms work regardless of whether the user has an mail client available on the computer they happen to be using at the time.

Don’t have the resources or knowledge to implement forms? There are other strategies that can be used:

• Replace the email address text with an image of the address. This is effective but has the drawback that the user cannot simply click the image and send an email. Cut and paste doesn’t work either. Unfortunately, the user has to manually open their email editor and hand type the address.
• Another strategy is to use email address text that can be interpreted by a human but not so easily by a bot program. For example, john.sales@mycompany.com becomes john.salesATmycompany.com. This has the advantage that the user can cut and paste the address into their email client, but he or she must still edit the address by replacing the red text with “@”.

Another way spammers spam is by creating programs that automatically complete and submit web forms – forms like contact us, feedback, tell a friend, blog comments and user registrations.

So how can you defend against the form bots? The best and most widely used defense is a technology called CAPTCHA and it’s a process that’s designed to distinguish humans from computers. CAPTCHA comes in many styles – for example the “reCAPTCHA” API from the inventors of CAPTCHA technology at Carnegie Mellon University:

CAPTCHA solutions like the one above are easy to implement on most blog sites. For example, the reCAPTCHA plugin for WordPress, developed by Ben Masters, is free and simple to install. To the contrary, implementing CAPTCHA solutions on regular websites usually involves some code twiddling and is probably best left to coder types.

There’s volumes more that can be written about spam defense, but if this post has at least heightened the awareness of site owners to the risk of exposed e-addresses on their sites, and has succeeded in providing some practical strategies for protecting against “the dark forces of spam” we’ll chafe less here at topLingo, knowing we’ve help someone somewhere avoid spam rage.

Now you can schedule Google Analytics to automatically email site statistics. Schedule reports to be generated and sent at the interval that works best for your situation: daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Reports can be generated in PDF or other formats, and sent to one or multiple email addresses.

Most web builders are familiar with Google Analytics. It’s something every web site should run and that every web builder should make their clients aware of. Not just because it’s FREE, but because the reporting and dashboard functionality is just plain awesome. Google could easily charge thousands of dollars for this functionality and get paid for it because the ROI is there, so why would you NOT use it?

Learn more here: Google’s three minute video tour.

Top Companies

Only surprise on this list is Facebook and since Microsoft just invested $240 million their numbers are still to be determined.

Source and full article: Tech Crunch

Top Social Networks & RSS Readers

MySpace is still king for now, but for how much longer. Facebook is climbing up the ranks quickly.

Source and full article: Tech Crunch

Top Social Bookmarking & RSS Readers

WOW! Google dominating del.icio.us and My Yahoo was a surprise.

Source and full article: Tech Crunch