Tag Archives ⇒ web

Banking on reputations

September 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I was referred to a web­site the oth­er day that bare­ly exists, at least
in the way that I see sites. It’s home­page was built entire­ly in Flash, was com­plete­ly invis­i­ble to search engines and bare­ly func­tioned in Fire­fox. Domain​tools​.com gave it an SEO score of zero (out of a scale of one hun­dred). It’s Google PageR­ank was three out of ten, mak­ing it less vis­i­ble that my kid pages.
But this was a web­site for a high-flying web devel­op­ment house, a
com­pa­ny that works with some of Philadel­phi­a’s most promi­nent and
well-endowed cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. Their client work isn’t quite as
invis­i­ble, but their web­site for Philadel­phi­a’s relative-new $265
mil­lion per­for­mance arts cen­ter has a PageR­ank equiv­a­lent to my
per­son­al blog – youch!

I think there’s a les­son here. Promi­nent cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions don’t look at Google (and SEO-friend­ly
devel­op­ers) because they’re big enough and well-known enough that they
assume peo­ple will find them any­way. They’re right, of course, but how
many more peo­ple would find them if they had well-built web­sites? And
what’s the long-term vision if they’re rely­ing on their established
rep­u­ta­tion to do their web marketing? 

It’s per­haps impossible
for a net-centric start-up to repli­cate a hugely-endowed cul­tur­al icon
like an orches­tra or bal­let, giv­ing some degree of insu­la­tion to these
insti­tu­tions from direct inter­net com­pe­ti­tion. But if these nonprofits
saw them­selves in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness, com­pet­ing for the limited
atten­tion and mon­ey of an audi­ence that has many evening-time
pos­si­bil­i­ties, then you’d think they’d want to lever­age the inter­net as
much as they could: to use the web to reach out not only to their
exist­ing audi­ence but to nur­ture and devel­op future audiences. 

Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?

Talking like a Quaker: does anyone really care about schism anymore?

September 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on my design blog I’ve just post­ed an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ur­al web pub­lic­i­ty – there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­i­ty. The sites do get vis­it­ed, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cif­ic func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing with­in Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­ment­ed on Johan Mau­r­er’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing’s report on Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuak­er, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larg­er issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuak­er link by a light­heart­ed call for an Inter­na­tion­al Talk Like a Quak­er Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m hap­py to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­i­ty vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tion­al schism? For all my brava­do I’m as much an insti­tu­tion­al Quak­er as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tion­al pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Year­ly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quak­er gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my year­ly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­al­ly pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to year­ly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quak­er pub­lish­er com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­er­al Friends’ most wide­ly read intro­duc­to­ry book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a total­ly made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after pub­li­ca­tion – even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quak­er insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­i­ty to influ­ence the Quak­er cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they real­ly so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­i­ty of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­i­ty? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or camp­ground – fac­tor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tur­al forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quak­er mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?

Baltimore and FUM from sessions to the static web to interactive discussion.

September 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

One thing I love about the inter­net and blogs is that they’re open­ing up dis­cus­sions in the Quak­er world. Infor­ma­tion and dia­log that was once con­fined to a small group of insid­ers is opened up to what we might only-half jok­ing­ly label “the laity.” The lat­est few entries to Quak­erQuak­er show this in operation. 

Last mon­th’s annu­al ses­sions of Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing (the region­al body for Friends those parts) were marked by an impor­tant report from its rep­re­sen­ta­tives to Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing, an inter­na­tion­al body of Friends that Bal­ti­more belongs to but has a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with. Atten­dees at the year­ly meet­ing ses­sion heard the report, of course, and news trick­led out in var­i­ous ways (one vis­i­tor IM’ed me that day with the briefest sketch). 

Enter the inter­net. At some point Bal­ti­more put the report up on their web­site. The infor­ma­tion was there but there’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty for dis­cus­sion as the BYM web­site has no com­ment­ing fea­ture. I post­ed the report up to Quak­erQuak­er and with­in a few hours, Johan Mau­r­er was on top of it. Johan used to be the chief exec­u­tive of Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing and a wide expe­ri­ence with Friends from across the Quak­er the­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al spec­trum. He’s also an active blog­ger and he post­ed a reply, What is real­ly wrong with FUM, part two: the Bal­ti­more YM report, that I find par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. His blog has com­ments. I’ve put Johan’s post up on Quak­erQuak­er and we now have a forum to try to tease apart the range of issues in the Bal­ti­more report: lead­er­ship, the­ol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, etc. How cool is that?

PS: I linked to the Wikipedia arti­cles on Bal­ti­more and Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. Has any­one else noticed Wikipedia makes a much more acces­si­ble intro­duc­tion to Quak­er bod­ies than their own websites?

The new aggregators

October 13, 2006
· Martin Kelley

A look at the new class of “Sin­gle Page Aggregators.”

Way back in 1997 I was one of dozens of lots of web design­ers trying
to fig­ure out how to bring an edi­to­r­i­al voice to the inter­net. The web
had tak­en off and there pages and links every­where but few places where
they were actu­al­ly orga­nized in a use­ful man­ner. As I’ve writ­ten before,
in Decem­ber of that year I start­ed a week­ly updat­ed list of annotated
links to arti­cles on non­vi­o­lence, a form we’d now would rec­og­nize as a
blog.

About
eigh­teen months ago I start­ed a “links blog” of inter­est­ing Quaker
links, incor­po­rat­ed as a side­bar on my pop­u­lar “Quak­er­Ran­ter” personal
blog. I even­tu­al­ly gave the links their own URL (Quak​erQuak​er​.org)
and invit­ed oth­ers to join the link­ing. I always stum­ble when try­ing to
tell peo­ple what Quak­erQuak­er is all about. The best def­i­n­i­tion is that
its a “col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly edit­ed blog aggre­ga­tor” but that’s a horribly
tech description.

The rise of blogs is cre­at­ing the neces­si­ty for these sort of theme-based aggre­ga­tors. This morn­ing I stum­bled on Orig­i­nal Sig­nal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called Pop­URLs does the same for “the lat­est web buzz.” A site called Solu­tion­Watch has writ­ten about these in Track­ing the web with Sin­gle Page Aggre­ga­tors. We’re all on to some­thing here. I sus­pect that some­time this fall some clever per­son will coin a new term for these sites.

The Wonders of RSS feeds

August 11, 2006
· Martin Kelley

RSS
Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are small web files that sum­ma­rize the lat­est posts
to a par­tic­u­lar blog or news site. They’re a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry of
basic infor­ma­tion: title, author, post date, a sum­ma­ry of the post and
some­times the whole post itself. You can open these files direct­ly (here’s the raw file for this blog) but you’ll see there’s a hier­ar­chy of cod­ing that makes it visu­al­ly uninteresting.

Syn­di­ca­tion
feeds are the lin­gua fran­ca pow­er­ing all the cool new web­sites. It
does­n’t mat­ter what blog­ging plat­form you use or what oper­at­ing system
you’re on: if your soft­ware pro­vides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in con­tent to my site.

Exam­ples 1: Pho­tographs: I email all of my adorable kid pic­tures to the pho­to shar­ing site Flickr,
which then pro­vides a syn­di­ca­tion feed (“here”). I use a lit­tle fancy
patch of cod­ing on my web­site to pull in the infor­ma­tion about the
lat­est pho­tos (loca­tion, cap­tion, etc) so that I can dis­play them on my
home­page. When­ev­er you go to my Theo age you’ll see the lat­est Flickr pho­tos of him. 

Exam­ple 2: Book­marks. I also use the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem with the odd name of del​.icio​.us.
When I find a page I want to book­mark, I click a Deli­cious but­ton in my
brows­er, which opens a pop-up win­dow. I write a descrip­tion, pick a
cat­e­go­ry or two and hit save. Deli­ciouis then pro­vides an RSS syn­di­ca­tion
feed which I can use to pull togeth­er a list of my lat­est book­marks and
dis­play it on my web­site. Wave a few mag­ic wands of com­pli­ca­tion (pay
no atten­tion to the man behind the cur­tain!) and you have the main
trick behind Quak​erquak​er​.org.

I’ve sim­pli­fied both exam­ples a bit but you prob­a­bly get the point. Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are the secret behind blog read­ers like Blog­lines and email sub­scrip­tion ser­vices like the one’s I pro­vide for quak​erquak​er​.org.

New to me is the con­cepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Don­ahue
“The lay­man’s premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will
have drill-down feeds — a top lev­el feed, item spe­cif­ic feeds, and so
on.” What this means is that you don’t just have one sin­gle RSS feed on a site (your lat­est ten posts) but RSS feeds on every­thing.
Every cat­e­go­ry get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about
web design) and every post gets its own unique feed track­ing its
com­ments (e.g., this feed of com­ments from my “Intro­duc­ing Mar​tinKel​ley​.com” post).
It cer­tain­ly seems a bit like overkill but com­put­ers are doing all the
work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to
pull all sorts of neat things together. 

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

August 8, 2006
· Martin Kelley

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web mar­ket­ing fol­lows the rules of any oth­er mode of
pub­lic­i­ty: iden­ti­fy an audi­ence, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your cus­tomers and their needs. A sucess­ful web
cam­paign uti­lizes print mail­ings, man­u­fac­tured buzz, gen­uine word of
mouth and email. Finances can lim­it the options avail­able but everyone
can do something.

One of the most excit­ing aspects of the inter­net is that the most
pop­u­lar sites are usu­al­ly those that have some­thing inter­est­ing to
offer vis­i­tors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can com­pete with giant cor­po­ra­tions. A good strat­e­gy involves
find­ing a niche and build­ing a com­mu­ni­ty around it. Per­son­al­i­ty and idio­syn­cra­cy are actu­al­ly com­pet­i­tive advantages!

It would be cru­el of me to just drop off a com­plet­ed web­site at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more inter­est­ed in build­ing sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of pub­lic­i­ty, from design to launch and
beyond to ana­lyz­ing vis­i­tor pat­terns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want some­one to vis­it your site once, click on a few links
and then dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We want to give your vis­i­tors rea­sons to
come back fre­quent­ly, a qual­i­ty we call “sticky” in web par­lance. Is
your site a use­ful ref­er­ence site? Can we get vis­i­tors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a com­mu­ni­ty of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to vis­it our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the com­pa­nies that will reg­is­ter your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by includ­ing the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay any­one to get the atten­tion of the big search engines. 

The most impor­tant way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audi­ence in mind. What are the key­words you want peo­ple to
find you with? Your town name? Your busi­ness? Some spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to high­light those
phras­es. Here too, being a niche play­er is an advantage. 

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine start­ed attract­ing four times the vis­its after its pro­gram­mer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get vis­i­tors search­ing for
the odd­est things. We can actu­al­ly tell when vis­i­tors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re search­ing for! Google
appar­ent­ly thinks I know “how to flat­ten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you won­der “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your impor­tant search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!

Quak​erQuak​er​.org, new home to the blog watch

January 3, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I’ve moved the Quak­er Blog Watch mate­r­i­al to a new web­site, Quak​erQuak​er​.org. It’s more-or-less the same mate­r­i­al with more-or-less the same design but the project has become pop­u­lar enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of mak­ing it more col­lab­o­ra­tive in the near-future.

You can sub­scribe to the Quak­erQuak­er Watch via Blog­lines or to the dai­ly email by fol­low­ing the links. If you’re already fol­low­ing the Watch in a sub­scrip­tion read­er, you should change the source of the feed to http://​feeds​.quak​erquak​er​.org/​q​u​a​ker if you don’t want to miss out on any future inno­va­tions. If you have the Watch cur­rent­ly list­ed in your blog’s side­bar you won’t have to change anything.

At some point when the dust of the move has set­tled (and I have the new Quak​erfind​er​.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philo­soph­i­cal about the evo­lu­tion of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the mean­time, let me know if any­thing is bro­ken, con­fused or gram­mat­i­cal­ly mangled.
A kind of ret­ro­spec­tive his­to­ry of the project is avail­able on the “quak­erquak­er thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.

Random updates

December 22, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Just a quick note to every­one that I haven’t post­ed more late­ly. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keep­ing up with arti­cles and links to the “Chris­t­ian Peacemakers”:/quaker/cpt.
I’ve also been doing some free­lance sites. One is launched: “Quakersong.org”:www.quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Pat­ter­son and Peter Blood of _Rise Up Singing_ fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an inter­est­ing site.
Geek-wise I’ve been inter­est­ed in the Web 2.0 stuff (see “this Best Of list of sites”:http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm, link cour­tesy “C Wess Daniels”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/). I’ve talked about some of this “back in June”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/i_dont_have_anything_to_say_either.php but it’s get­ting more excit­ing. In the Fall I was asked to sub­mit a pro­pos­al for redo­ing the web­site of a Quak­er con­fer­ence cen­ter near Philadel­phia and it was all Web 2.0‑centric – maybe too much so as I did­n’t get the job! I’ll post an edit­ed ver­sion of the pro­pos­al soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will under­gird a fab­u­lous new “Quakerfinder.org”:www.quakerfinder.org fea­ture that will allow iso­lat­ed Friends to con­nect to form new wor­ship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new “Quakerbooks.org”:www.quakerbooks.org site.
In the mean­time, I encour­age every­one to order “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 888305-38‑x, the new book by New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing’s Bri­an Dray­ton (it arrived from the print­ers yes­ter­day). It’s being billed as a mod­ern day ver­sion of “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions” and if it lives up the hype it should be an impor­tant book for the stir­rings of deep­en­ing faith­ful­ness we’ve been see­ing among Quak­ers late­ly. While you’re wait­ing for the book to arrive in your mail­box, check out Brook­lyn Rich’s “Test­ing Leadings”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/12/testing-leadings-part‑1.html post.