Everything Else

Here is the new address of Everything Else Blog.

If you are subscribed to the Feed Burner rss feed you do not have to change any settings as I have already switched the feed over to the new site.

Thanks.

Did you ever notice Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan & Co's newish search engine news blog has no site search? Seems rather ironic to me. Still the coverage is excellent, but finding old stories is a bit of a pain. SEL needs a site search so I can find old stories easily and link to them and not have to rely on one of the commercial engines to index them. I know SEL will someday get so big that most site searches will be overwhelmed but it is not that big yet, however it is big enough to need a site search. Pssst! Danny, FDSE is still free.

Nick Wilson is podcasting and blogging about tech stuff and web development again. Nick Wilson (NickW) is the founder of Threadwatch.org and co-founder of Performancing.com.

I've listened to his podcasts and they are quiet good and worth a listen. Nick talks just like he writes so if you were a fan of his forum and Threadwatch posts you will probably enjoy his podcasts. When Nick sold Threadwatch and opened Performancing.com he never really quit blogging. However while his posts on Performancing were always very thought provoking and helpful, they always felt very corporate and constrained by the narrow focus of Performancing. Nick has a lot of interests and it is good for him to have a venue to comment on broader interests.

Good luck Nick.

I've decided I have to expand my website promotion reading to encompass more internet marketing with SEO as a subset of that. It is very apparent to me that meaningful posts about both marketing and SEO have shifted away from the forums and to the blogs.

So I spent a few hours last night pruning and adding RSS feeds to Bloglines. I pruned out some search engine news blogs, I had too many of those all reporting the same news, but I kept a few voices I like and respect, especially those that not only report the news but give me thoughtful insight and commentary about what the SE news means. I also pruned out dead wood while keeping a bunch of SEO blogs I have always enjoyed. Now I'm adding marketing blogs and some SEO blogs and I'll see who sticks before I add them to the blogroll.

I recently joined Yahoo's 360 on the invite of a good friend. In some ways I really like the concept of Yahoo 360, it allows anyone to blog and interact on the web with no knowledge of HTML. In this respect it is even easier than Google's Blogger. I think a 360 site is perfect for somebody that wants to stay in contact with friends and relatives via journal, email, IM photos and groups. The local reviews feature is also nice and I hope to actually try and write some local reviews.

Two impressions right off the top: 1) I instantly felt constrained by it - where can I put links to other sites?; 2.) I get this feeling of a walled garden.

Still, as an easy site for a personal journal and a place to post pictures of the kids so grandma and grandpa can see them it is pretty cool. And there is demand for this, there are a heck of a lot of people that want to spend no time on design and just want to use their time posting content and not writing HTML code and spaces like 360 is perfect for that. The limitations are also what keep it simple to use.

I often think this about marketers.

Cre8asite forums has new forum software and a new look, or should I say 'looks' in the plural because you can choose from about 7 different 'skins'. That is a nice feature because there is something for everyone looks wise. Although it has to be a pain to administer that because for any changes by the staff to navigation has to be done on each skin (like 7 times).

The admin staff pulled off one of the smoothest transfers to a new, completely different forum script that I have ever seen. Darn near everything worked from about the first minute. Good stuff.

But laying down compliments is not the reason for this post. What interested me the most, was observing both in myself and other members, through their comments, how we get used to one interface and don't really want to have to learn a new one. It's not a bad thing, just human nature. But you can see how the resistance to change can build up in any system be it an online forum community, a shopping site or even politiical systems in the real world. People tend to be predisposed to like that which is familier to them. It's not just technology that makes change incremental, it is human beings. If you try to change to much to fast (which Cre8 did not change to much too fast) you will have people rebelling against the changes.

So back to Cre8 - one thing I noticed right off is how with one skin the placement of the member's name makes the name stand out to me when I am scanning a thread, while with a different skin the Avatar becomes the visual identifier of the poster. This really jumped out at me so much that for the first time ever since I had joined Cre8 I had to upload an Avatar for myself. Hmm. maybe these usability people know their stuff?

My other self test is that I am forcing myself to use one of the more radically new skins, albeit one with a traditional blue/gray color scheme (the change of both color and template simultaneously was too much change for me to deal with comfortably) - and what I am finding out about myself is how quickly my brain (okay at least I thought it was quick) remaps itself so that I pretty quickly learned where all the new buttons were.

I'm not sure what all this means, but the observations are interesting. I think there are also lessons here for sales too but I'll save that for future posts however here is a hint - I think it's all about inertia.