New to reading me and want a hundred word summary? Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has compiled tag clouds of 10 bloggers he reads and has done a quick and dirty analysis of what we frequently talk about.

What’s a tag cloud? It’s a collection of terms or keywords found in content or vernacular. It looks like he’s using IBM’s many eyes software to compile the cloud, which shows the heavier weighted or frequent terms in larger font. The cloud is comprised of words that aren’t necessarily in my wordpress categories, so it appears to be crawling and analyzing text.

While tag clouds certainly are interesting, not everyone agrees they are helpful such as expert Thomas Vanderwal, Brian has the story.

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The job of a Marketer is to connect products with customers.

While it’s often native for marketers to know their products, they often fail at truly understanding their customers. Today, customers are much more than just recipients of messages, they create their own messages, share with their peers, and in some cases, are working very hard to keep marketers out of the picture.

Demographics
In business school, I learned about understanding your customer, we learned about the concepts of Demographics (people’s lifestyles, habits, population movements, spending, age, social grade, employment). The goal was to create a model to understand who these people were, where they live, and what they do.

Psychographics
We also learned that beyond understanding the who, we needed to understand the why, therefore understanding the psyhcographics (lifestyles and behaviors, what interests them, what they hold valuable and how they behave) became of importance.

Technographics
I first learned of Technographics from Steve Rubel’s blog, he was reviewing a report from colleague Charlene Li, who describes it as “Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies”. It’s important that before a company use a social media tool, they understand which tools their customers are using. Update: Julie Katz of Forrester has left a comment showing how the scope of Technographics is used beyond Social Media, and also see a brief history on Wikipedia

Sure, some of the really savvy marketers out there already know your audience, you’re involved in conversations with them all the time, or at one point you were a customer, but for many, that’s not enough.

How about me? How well do I know my community on this blog? Judging by the analytics, I know I have a lot of readers in North American and then in UK. I can tell who some of the readers are by the comments that they leave, but that’s only a small amount. When I announced that I’ll add anyone who ads me back in Facebook, I ended up really getting to know my community, it really brought a depth that I didn’t have before.

Some of you are saying, “that’s a lot of marketing mumbo jumbo”, but if you can’t define who your customers are, then how can you possible connect your products to people who you don’t know.

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Enterprise Intranets are an often overlooked corporate asset. These powerful tools represent the knowledge, relationships, and processes of a company, yet for the most part they go under-resources, under-appreciated, and given third-class citizenship to the public site and customer or partner extranet. We know they are important as they are a direct reflection of your corporate culture.

If a company’s competitive strength is it’s employees and how they work together, the intranet is a valuable tool. Secondly, with many baby boomers in the United States retiring in the near future a great deal of corporate knowledge will be lost, how will you capture and distribute this tacit knowledge?

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The Challenges of the Enterprise Intranet:
There’s a few major reasons why the intranet is not fully utliized, it really comes down to corporate prioritizies and resources.

1) Leadership not employee focused. Web strategy is often owned by the Marketing department, or a dedicated web team, they have specific business goals to hit, and they are often aimed at marketing or customer focused –not employee focused.
2) Little love from IT: IT often owns the infrastructure, systems, and applications that the Intranet sits on top of, and they often are focused on ERP project and leave the intranet in a ‘maintaince and manage’ mode.
3) Value not recognized: The intranet management team (if you have one) is perceived as a corporate cost as it can’t directly generate revenue further perplexing the problem
4) Too many cooks in kitchen: Many constituents from Marketing, HR, IT, and every business unit make decisions at an enterprise level difficult, unwieldy, and often not worth the effort.
5) Decision makers oblivious: Management and decision makers don’t use the intranet, they rely on administrative staff for scheduling, sometimes emails, and any intranet tasks, the pains and opportunities are rarely seen.

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Evolution of the Enterprise Intranet
Intranets have a variety of stages as it evolves, I’ve listed out the natural growth pattern that I’ve seen.

1) Disparate: The early stages of an intranets birth often lies in the hand of a forward thinking rogue that sets up a server beneath their desk and initiates the first behind-the-firewall website. Later, many others follow his lead and create their own intranets on modified workmachines, and then finally they are put on servers and supported by IT. These often horrific looking and abandonded websites have a disparte user experience, look and feel, and content. There is little or no consistency resulting in a fragmented experience for users.

2) Common User Experience: As the company realizes the importance of sharing information on a web repository that’s available globally and 24/7 (unlike email) the push to unify the disparate intranet into a common user experience occurs. Outsourcing to a design firm or to marketing will yield a look and feel, navigation and information architecture form. Likely, hopefully the birth of a dedicated intranet team occurs, who manage the ongoing program. They provide direction, strategy, processes, and styles for content and the experience.

3) Unified Content Management System: Unfortunately, just because the front end of the website and the processes are starting to solifidy this doesn’t mean the right tools are in place. For the intranet team to manage all the content updates, create versions, and obtain reporting becomes unrealistic. As a result, the need for the right tools are needed. In the past, these webpages may have been static created and managed by tools like Homesite, Dreamweaver, or raw HTML, the need for what you see is what you get software is a requirement. The Intranet team needs and wants to empower business owners to manage their own content within the framework of the enterprise intranet. Typically IT is resourced to obtain the CMS tool, which will likely glue into existing architectures and systems, sometimes without the consent of the experience of the user base.

4) Personalization and Enterprise Search: With the access for business groups to publish at will with their CMS system, massive content is created and documents of every flavor are uploaded. The intranet begins to progress to a great deal of information, but leaving a very unwieldy experience for users, as a result the push for ‘portal’ type of personalized homepages may emerge, where content is delivered based on team, location, and rank. More difficult than easy, this undertaking is often not completed to the full enterprise. Enterprise Search, a tool that looks at all internal documents and data repositories emerges and starts to scan, index, and serve up information for users.

5) Collaboration: Popular in the last few years, businesses started to realize that employees needed to work together on knowledge projects and the right tools to span distance and time were not available. A large influx of collaboration tools invaded the enterprise, allowing teams to share and work on documents together and in near-real time. While helpful to many, the promise of ongoing collaboration isn’t for every user, as the complexity of features can be mind-boggling.

6) Socialization: Fast forward to today, the enterprise intranet are starting to see social features, (some call this Enterprise 2.0, but I prefer to focus on outcomes) where employees can go beyond collaboration on ideas and start to tell others about themselves, connect with others, and share information. The social capital of a company (the contacts and influence within a company) starts to become realized and the need to share contacts, knowledge across the enterprise (regardless of location or team) starts to emerge. There are many challenges that come with this, as the data starts to move to application service providers if IT doesn’t respond and data, security, and personal information leave the firewall. IT departments that are too slow to keep up end up doing clean up as business units can easily deploy their own intranet using tools like blogtronix, ning, and a variety of others.

7) The future: It’s sure difficult to peer into the next 5 years, expect rich smart phones to start to access the intranet for secured users as collaboration and communication occure on the road, at home, and during weekends –the workplace (along with the intranet) goes with us.

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Success Factors for Successful Enterprise Intranet

1) A centralized body that controls the User Experience. A group that can define the design, look and feel, user interface, navigation, taxonomy, and information architecture of a site. They are also empowered to enforce this regardless of polical structure.
2) Business and personal users have freedom to publish: Although the constraints for consistency are setup, the business teams are empowered to control their own content, to quickly publish, and to modify at will. A balance is needed between them.
3) Expiration of content: The worst thing that happens to an intranet is the layer and layers of retired content that is overlayed on it. The intranet team should auto-review content that hasn’t been modified after X quarters or years, identify the creator, ask if it’s valid and remove if not.
4) IT gets ahead of the need: IT needs to move away from thinking of the intranet as a system to maintain, but as a system to grow, develop and constantly build on top of. Failure to do so will result in business teams finding their own third-party software, installing or running on a remote server.
5) A social sandbox for employees: Currently, many employees are sharing their personal and business lives on third party social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and to some degree LinkedIn. In many situations the opportunity for self-expression or to share personal information (even in the context of the workplace) is not supported by the enterprise. Companies should provide a social networking like service for employees to connect, share, build and further relationships on the intrarnet. Clearly delineate this is separate from the other area of the website, but give freedom for unique ideas to spread, grow, and be built.

So where is your intranet? which Challenge? What stage of evolution? Which success factors are present
For each of the three sections above which relate to you or your clients? Share with me in the comments:

Related Resources:

12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008

Enterprise Irregulars

Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New “Web 2.0″ Tools

Facebook as a Corporate Portal Platform?

Project portfolio management and IT governance

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My intranet background: I don’t talk about it as much now, as I’m more focused on social media, but it’s still a passion. But in the past I’ve managed a global enterprise one for Hitachi Data Systems, aligned one at World Savings (now Wachovia) and did UI design and management at Exodus and Cable and Wireless America. Details on my profile.

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This blog often talks about the tools and technologies that companies can use, the same principles apply to real-life, and how we treat the next customer.

Last night, I had dinner and drinks over at my Uncle’s friend’s place. Ted, who’s already retired, shared some of his wisdom with me regarding running a business. His business? he launched a silicon valley startup right in the heart of the valley, but the thing was, it has nothing to do with tech. In fact, he had run a fly fishing shop in San Mateo for 15 years, and knows what it’s like to run a startup. Like most startups in the valley, it’s a combination of ambition, risk, and all passion.

The most meaningful story, which I’m now sharing with you, explained how he treated prospects. Three gentleman used to visit his fly fishing shop, yet they didn’t have enough money to purchase the gear or attend any of the exclusive trips accustomed to the fly fishing community, yet Ted welcomed them in. They were encouraged to be part of the shop’s community, hang out in the store, and at least live the dream –even if from afar.

Three years had passed and the gentlemen kept on returning, the small software company, which the three gents co-owned, eventually was sold. Each of the three were worth about $11 million dollars –each! There was no way to predict these guys would have ‘made it’ for their company when Ted invited them to hang and be part of the club.

They came back specifically to thank Ted, for letting them hang out in his ‘club house’, even though they couldn’t afford to purchase any of the gear or excursions at the time. Over the next few years, they purchased 3 exclusive excursions per year, helping Ted grow his business from a 11k net to a million dollar yearly business. (and yes they had a website).

Lessons learned

1) You never know which one of your guests will become your big customers, treat everyone as a top customer.

2) Those who are interested in your products, invite them in, let them be part of your community. This applies to the web as well.

What about Ted? He’s now happily retired, with all the creature comforts as well as friends and family, and couldn’t be wealthier. So back to you. How are you treating your prospects? Do you give them the same amount of benefits and respect as customers? How can websites align with this strategy

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Click To Play

A few weeks ago, I met some SF folks at Lunch 2.0 in SF (see pics of this rooftop party.

Randy Fong is a Flex champion and evangelist and gives us his reasons why he prefers to develop there. He tells us about the differences between Flex, Ajax, and Silverlight, and answers which one he thinks will have a faster development time.

I probed him about measurement, which has been a point of contention for many web strategists, he gives his response.

There’s a lot of web strategists reading this blog, tell me about which technology you’re using for rich user experiences and why.

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My antennae are being retrained to watch what people are saying about Forrester, my new employer. I’m starting to understand the conversations around the company and am actively starting internal conversations about what you are all saying. Yes, we are listening.

I woke up this morning to see that Robert has challenged Pete’s data in his post entitled: “Where did Forrester get its Twitter data?” Peter (Analyst) and Cynthia (Researcher) have data on usage of microblogging. His relationship with the Obvious folks gave him suspicion about the numbers. In just a few hours, Peter has responded via his blog, and Cynthia provides details on the methodology (read comments). If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my three short weeks here is that data is key, and there’s lots of it available here. Data is nothing without analysis, and even less without actionable recommendations. If you’ve more questions for Pete, he’s on Twitter.

Also, If you want to check out some of the great Analysts at Forrester, start with Bruce Temkin, who is one of the all star analysts at the firm, and has the highest read reports in the entire company. He blogs at Experience Matters, and if you’re into user experience, put him on your reader.

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Here’s one of the last Web Strategy Show videos that will be published on this round (new readers: I interviewed the top web and marketing leaders in the industry at PodTech, see archives). Josh Hallett is known in the web marketing and social media fields, and is frequently seen at conferences speaking, sharing, or just taking pictures. Based out of Florida, he’s become a personal contact of mine, and he recently visited me at PodTech in Palo Alto.

Josh shares with us at the WeMedia conference on the topic of Citizen Journalism, (1:10). He discusses how we both witnessed Shel Israel pissing off the traditional journalists in the room who are holding on to the old publishing model in a new world. The challenge of monetizing the social sphere continues to come up (although I’m very aware of how elite bloggers are cashing in). Find out about the tools used in Citizen Journalism. Josh has designed some of the top blogs out there, when he named off the list, it was many of the blogs that I’ve read. He’s sure right about mastheads for blogs need to clearly state what the blog is about, you only have a few seconds to impress upon visitors that they get the context.

Speaking of blog design, this blog was heavily modified by me, I tweaked an existing template, created the banner, and shifted the style sheet. In the spirit of practicing what I preach I actually polled my community to give me feedback about this blog design.

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A Web Strategy must balance all three spheres
What’s a Web Strategy? It’s the balance between the three spheres for effective long-term planning of a website. This person is a hybrid of a few roles, and may have emerged from any of the following spheres. A Web Strategist is responsible for the long-term planning and decision making of a website, but must balance ALL of the following three spheres:

1) Community (formerly Users)
The Web Strategist must understand (by using a variety of techniques and tactics) what users want. This is commonly known as User Experience Research which will create and craft a ‘mental model’. In addition, the strategist will need to be in tune with the community in which their website is part of, this is greater than just users, as it will include competitors, partners, and prospects.

Skills: User experience (UX), usability, information architecture, social media skills, customer support, community marketing, marketing, product marketing, ability to listen and be empathetic.

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2) Business
The business sphere requires a strategist to understand the long term objective of a website and it’s goals. This sphere also requires ability to internally maneuver within an organization and maximize the persistent limitation in resources. A website that is not aligned to business or market objectives is ultimately doomed to fail. The User and Business requirements will often match, but will rarely ever be a perfect fit. The Web Strategist) will need to obtain business requirements from stakeholders, whether that be execs, sponsors, sales, or even shareholders. Understanding the market, competitors (and key milestones) and other external forces are also required –a business requirements model will be formed, these are your objectives.

Skills: Marketing, advertising, media, management, measurement, ability to evangelize internally, process management, resource management, obtain objectives, product development, product management, savvy in political maneuvering

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3) Technology
Lastly, a Web Strategist needs to know how each and every tool and technology work, they’ll need to know the strengths, benefits, limitations and costs. This also applies to human capital, and timelines. Often technical limitations will reduce the scope of User and Business needs, so you’ll need to incorporate this going forward.

Skills: Software Development, Web Development, Web Architecture, Industry Trends, experiments with web technology, but understands how to extrapolate and harness a tool.

Can’t master them all? Be able to Learn or Delegate
It’s unlikely he or she is a master at all, but most importantly, has the ability to learn and delegate. In my career, I’ve tried to have a balance in all these spheres (former UI Designer, Marketing Degree, and worked in software engineering group) keeping up with all spheres is nearly impossible. Therefore two skills become very important: 1) The ability to quickly learn, and extract value, 2) Ability to find talent and delegate, no really, I mean really delegate, which requires trust.

If you have other skills to suggest, please leave a comment, and I’ll add.

Notes:
I originally introduced this concept August 25th 2006, just about one year earlier, and am now making these amendments. This was primarily spurred by Johnathan’s suggestion of looking at the user sphere as greater than just a customer base, thanks Jonathan, you’re an excellent strategist. Also, Robert suggested I try to incorporate more of a visual representation in my concepts, which I think is a great idea.

Additional Resources
Did this post interest you? See all posts tagged Web Strategy, or watch the supplemental Web Strategy Video Show.

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Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. It empowers anyone the ability to tag, label, and share with others web pages. For the Web Strategist, it’s a great tool to understand how people think (or don’t think) of your brand. Those who tag your website are more engaged than passive readers, and are sharing your content with others, so pay attention.

How to use?
How do you use it? Go to Delicious, in the search bar, type in the name of your brand, website, or name, and review results. You’ll see some pink highlighed words “Saved by X People”, click on that, and it’ll take you to that page where you can see details of comments, a sorted tag listing, and a history.

Here are the top 5 tags on my index page:

76 tagged the site “blog”
74 tagged the site “strategy”
73 tagged the site “web2.0″
58 tagged the site “marketing”
52 tagged the site “web”

Analysis
Interesting, I don’t consider myself a Marketing blogger, or a Web 2.0 blogger (I don’t even have a keyword category for that term), to me those are just sub-sets of what Web Strategy is about. It’s amazing the the tags that I use for my own posts are slightly different than readers perceived it. I could even get more granular and look at specific posts that were tagged, try sifting on your own pages.

Digging Deeper
I did a Delicious search on my Facebook Strategy post, and discovered that the post had been tagged 186 times, I could then drill down and find out what they said (such as Peter He), and what else they tagged –that’s intelligence. What’s amazing is there is far more activity in Delicious than in the comments of the same post.

I did the same for Jennifer Jones’s Marketing Voices, Scoble’s blog,

Learn more
If you want to learn more about how to use Folksonomies to build a better website, I wrote this post a while back. You should be using these keywords to help you uncover what people are classifying your content as, and as a result should factor into your SEO strategy.

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There’s more and more content being produced, as every human with internet access and limited know-how can be a media platform. This results in those who want their messages heard to yell louder or intrude farther. Everyone wants to be heard, resulting what appears to be noise, with very little signal.

Steve Rubel suggests that we’ve hit an inflection point, resulting in ‘bankruptcy’

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

It’s arguable that information is now segmenting down the tail of unique and specific interests. No more are the days of ‘mass’ media and majority popularity in content. I embrace the very specific interests and details of small loosely joined individuals making up niche communities. The right content is available for everyone, it segments.

Shel Holtz suggests that there’s NO attention crash,

“If you don’t care about it, it’s crap to you, even though it might be gold to me. The point is this: There really is no such thing as information overload, as long as the information is content that is useful to you. We can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about.”

[Our media interests are starting to fragment and specialize, as a result, content outside our preference area will appear to be useless noise]

I’m going to suggest that Shel has some valid points, there’s always been too much information for all humans, even before the birth of modern media. Humans will continue to prioritize their content sources in order to fill the voids in entertainment, knowledge, or other.

Content is getting smaller/faster humans are getting ready to consume more ‘bits’ of chunky information, hence the coinage of the term MicroMedia. I’ve observed Scoble scanning his feedreader, he ‘imprints’ a post to his mind, much faster than skimming or reading text. Read more, learn from Wikipedia: The Attention Economy

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Recommended reading over the last week. (I’m doing this every week for a while)

Analysis on Facebook, Identity and data
First and foremost one of the best analysis points I’ve seen since I wrote a post on Facebook predictions

A standard operating system is coming for cars
Could bring a browser or application that could deliver traffic, location info, and pictures of where you’re headed.

Slapping the A-list bloggers

Not all content is for all people, understanding relevance
Thanks for this, I shared it with the whole tribe.

Stats from ComScore Social Networking takes off across the globe

Want to build a Facebook App? Find out what 10 interns think is cool

100 resources for Bloggers

eCommerce User Experience rankings and research by Keynote

Anti-Corruption video game in China is popular

Variety of Data Visualization Techniques
Mind expanding!

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Ian from Conversation Marketing has a great video and “how to” on understanding what users want on your website.

What could you do with this data? Find out what users content they want, how they phrase their terms, what content is missing. Also analyze from where and when they used the search bar, it could provide some clues on what they’re looking for.

[Analyzing search logs right on one’s site is a an easy way to understand what users are looking for]

Yes another way to evaluate the user experience. Louis Rosenfeld has a speech, research, and a book on the same topic.

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AOL has announced their new homepage design, it looks strangely familiar to Yahoo’s. Here’s the feature list.

Let’s compare using the same techniques I did for the top ten blogs(well they are more like magazines and top personal tech blogs.

Yahoo’s homepage

AOL’s new homepage

These look pretty simliar, what do the rest of you think? Have you seen my comparison of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL? Take a look.

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I’ve many friends that are in the web analytics space, in fact, I’ve interviewed many of the top names in that industry on my show. Web Analytics has it’s place, it’s important, and it’s only going to increase in value. Web Analytics is great for understanding what’s happened on the server in the past. The rest is inferences and educated guesses.

[Relying on Web Analytics ONLY for web decision making is the same as driving on the freeway, but only looking backwards]

The limits of Web Analytics
Web Analytics can’t tell us, why did someone come to our site, what they want to accomplish, what their emotional experience was like, what their eyes actually looked at, and what they told others later. But we’ve got to stop ourselves and realize that it’s only ONE form of understanding the direction of a website. In addition to using Web Analytics, the serious Web Strategist will be using other methods and processes to understand what users have done, and what they want.

A partial list of understanding users
While Web Analytics is important, there are many other methods that should be done to find out what users want:

-User testing
-Surveys
-Heuristic Evaluations
-Ethnography
-Search Logs
-Social Media listening (on other sites)
-And most important: just ask them (interviews)

Many other ways to understand users
This is not a comprehensive list by any means, as there are complete industries devoted to User Experience (UX), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface Design (UI), and Information Architecture (IA). The newest group to the bunch? Social Media Measurement, which measures what is said or gestured by who, when, and where. It’s assumed that the web user experience has spread off the website, so start planning accordingly. Web Analytics is limited in that it only measures the activity on your corporate site –not other areas where customers may be talking.

The User and Customer Experience has moved off your website
What are some other examples that your website has moved off your domain? There’s a list of third party extranets (yes, this impacts YOUR customer support site) and my theory that Web Marketing is not limited to two domains (your website and google search results).

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You must read this first to understand this post: Yesterday, in my previous analysis, I did some homepage breakdowns for the top 10 blogs in Technorati. In the comments, I was asked to make a conclusion or a suggestion to what I found. I looked at the top personal blogs in the 100 rank and found far less advertising.

Criteria
The following blogs meet these requirements:

Personal Blogs (written by one person)

Focus on Technology (it would be too much work to do all personal blogs)

In the Technorati Top 100

Methodology
Same as yesterday, I took screenshots and put overlays for five categories: identity, navigation, search, content, and advertising.

[Finding: The Top 10 Blogs in Technorati resemble online eMagazines, and have more homepage advertising than the tech related single authored blogs in the Top 100]

Findings, Conclusions, and Analysis:

Tech related personal blogs in the Technorati 100 have far less advertising than the top 100 blogs by average, compare the “red zones”.

All of the top 10 related blogs are written by groups, some resemble online magazines more than a personal blog.

It’s being debated in my comments if having advertising reduced the credibility of a blog

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17) Guy Kawasaki
How to Change the World Entrepreneurship, marketing, venture capital, & evangelism
Authority: 8,760

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33) Robert Scoble
Scobleizer
Authority: 6,681

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54) Jason Kottke
kottke.org : home of fine hypertext products
Authority: 5,219

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65) Joel Spolsky
Joel on Software
Authority: 4,808

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73) Steve Rubel
Steve explores how technology is transforming marketing, media and public relations.
Authority: 4,508

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95) Hugh MacLeod
gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”
Authority: 3,710

Please view Part 1: Top 10 blogs for comparison. Let me know what you think. It made techmeme.

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Share with others: Jim Turner submitted this to Digg

Please read part 2: A break down the top personal tech blogs, notice the difference in advertising use.

Analysis Purpose
To analyze the homepage web strategies of the top blogs in the world

Background
We’re all fascinated and drawn to some of the world’s top blogs, according to incoming links, Technorati has listed the top 10 blogs. (Although that’s not the best way to determine authority) How do blogs get links to them? They do one of two things 1) Be interesting 2) Add Value. As they achieve stardom, the momentum of the brand continues it forward, and the traffic they drive to others increases it further.

Are top blogs afflicted with excess advertising?
As blogs reach nuclear status, it’s interesting to see how they start to monetize from ads, focus less on navigating away from the sites, and how much content they continue to share. At what point does the user experience suffer from excess of advertisements?

Methodology:
I took screen captures at 1400 X 1050, a rather large size. I only took the top page view, so it showed what’s above the fold. I then segmented the content types into five major color keys: Identity (as in self-brand), Navigation, Content, Search, and Advertising. This method is modeled after Jakob Nielsen’s homepage usability book.

Findings
Per Surface area on homepage above fold:

Most use of Identity: TMZ

Most use of Navigation: Ars Technica

Most use of Content: Huffington Post, Ars Technica

Most use of Advertisements: Boing Boing, Techcrunch (3 major areas above the fold)

Least amountof Advertisements: Post Secret (none), and my blog

Most use of Search: TMZ (two for some reason)

No use of Search: Techcrunch, Daily Kos (well at least, not above the fold)

Most use of White Space: Post Secret

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1) Engadget
Engadget
Authority: 30,080

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2) Boing Boing
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Authority: 25,587

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3) Gizmodo
Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide
Authority: 23,072

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4) Techcrunch
Techcrunch
Authority: 21,636

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5) Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
Authority: 18,344

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6) LifeHacker
Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done
Authority: 17,166

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7) Ars Technica
Ars Technica: the Art of Technology. News, analysis, and in depth coverage of technology.
Authority: 16,542

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8 ) Daily Kos
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Authority: 12,583

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9) Post Secret
PostSecret: ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
Authority: 12,294

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10) TMZ
TMZ.com
Authority: 11,360

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1309) Web Strategy By Jeremiah
Web Strategy by Jeremiah: Jeremiah discusses how companies use the web to connect with customers. While not a top 10 blog, it’s my blog, and therefore I can analyze it. I don’t have ads on for a few reasons: 1) I don’t have significant enough traffic to sustain more than beer money. 2) I’d rather gain trust from my audience bringing good content than worrying that I may reduce credibility by putting ads on the site.
Authority: 1,375

Comments? Questions?
Submit your own homepage analysis, take a screenshot, go into photoshop and do the overlay. Use the colors I set in the color key and set opacity to around 60%. Leave a comment to your screenshot

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To many marketeers and advertisers, nothing matters more than click stream data. While this has recently fallen under attack (as user engagement can be measured in ways that have nothing to do with clicks) there’s still a need to observe the holistic experience by using a wide variety of tools.

Crazy Egg is one of those tools for your chest to use in your ways of finding out what users are doing, and guess what? There’s a free limited version that can get you started on your homepage. Crazy Egg is a heat map tracker, which means it will help to tell you the story of WHERE your users clicked on your site and WHEN. This is yet another tool in the web measurement toolset.

“Crazy Egg makes it easy to: Test different versions of a page to see which works better, Discover which ad placement gives the best results, Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper, Learn which content leads to improved sales”

Useful features: The overlay helps you to find out what was clicked and when did it happen? (after how long) The confetti tool was interesting, as you can clearly see exactly where users clicked on your site.

What did I learn?

I knew that my index page was used frequently on my blog (google analytics tells me this) and now I can confirm that they click on the upper left area of my banner.

I also learned that users click on the ‘more comments’ section on my post, rather than clicking on the title text, maybe I should bring more attention to that to make it easier to find.

People want to know who I am and often click on my profile link, but not my ‘face’ which goes to the same page, interesting.

Users also went to previous pages (down at the bottom of my blog), maybe I should display more posts per view.

It appears that users were clicking on the Guy Kawasaki ustream player

Please remember that this is just one tool of many that you should be using to gauge your website, don’t forget, the most important one is to just ask your users what they think.

I recommend you try this free tool for your blog, your company homepage, or consider expanding and purchasing it for major landing pages, another great free tool that should be in your arsenal of Web Analytics, Feed tracking, Google Alerts, and Technorati.

Recommended Reading

Handbook: Observing the User Experience (I’ve used this book quite a lot when I was a web manager)

All posts tagged User Experience

All posts tagged Web Analytics

Crazy Egg Dashboard

Overlay screen: After installing a script, CrazyEgg will track your site, and let you see a realistic overlay

Overlay screen with exploded flyouts that provide additional info

Heatmap shows high area of clicks on your site

This “Confetti” feature shows with pinpoint accuracy where users clicked.

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What’s a widget? Well I have one on my blog, see the right column, that “flickr badge”, that’s a widget. I put it there because it’s useful to me, and useful to my users.

Loren Feldman interviews Jeremy Pepper about his experience at Widgetcon, a conference apparently dedicated to the monetization of, well you know…widgets. It’s interesting that he observes that this NY conference was heavily advertising focus, with little focus on users. Read Jeremy’s post “Widgetcon a focus on the CON”

He’s absolutely right, the widget manufactures are wasting their time by not considering the users first. Did anyone stop to realize that widgets will not be embedded in websites if it doesn’t first serve the user? I’d love to chat with anyone that shares these same ideas, let me know.

I’ve been the Widget market, from Google saying they’re going to pay $100,000 for widget development, as well as understanding Widget strategies.

Loren, that was one of the best interviews yet, and very timely.

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Nearly every corporation outsources design, development, SEO, measurement, or production of a website to an outsourced firm, it’s just too costly to have highly specialized roles for a web site on a full-time basis.

Rene Dechamps Otamendi and Aurelie Pols, from OX2, in Belgium, discuss what to look for in a full-service agency and how to maximize their value. Learn how to measure success, how to deploy this virtual partner for your web strategy.

I was able to interview them at the recent eMetrics conference in San Francisco. If you’re new to my show, it’s a “Video White Paper for Web Strategists”. You can learn more about my show, feel free to add any comments or suggestions.

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Above: The palm that shaded me as I read Everything is Misc.

What do these photos I took yesterday have to do with the title?

This is the first time I’ve taken personal time off since I started work nearly 7 months ago. I guess I’m having too much fun running around meeting the movers and shakers in the web industry, there’s just too much good stuff and it constantly keeps me pumped.

I had a chance to unwind yesterday in Singapore, and cruised over to Santosa Island, the southern most tip of the Asian continent. Maybe I’m a real web geek, but I even brought along David Weinberger, of well not him personally, but his book Everything is Miscellaneous, which I’m continuing to chug through. His book suggests that over-categorizations by centralized sources is inefficient and ineffective. By letting the crowd sort it out, and can actually be more useful. If you’re an information architect you should really be reading this book. The choices presented to consumers are nearly unlimited. For some reason I started to think about classification systems at the beach and multiple facets to place on items, even sand. One of the biggest challenges for User Experience professionals isn’t building the website, but understanding their audience. There’s a podcast interview of David Weinberger if you want to know more.

It’s 2am and I was woken up by a large explosion! I though a building had crumbled down the block, as I looked out the window I realized it was a tropical storm, extremely loud thunder and bright lighting, I counted over a dozen instances as it drifted off. (you can tell if you count seconds between lighting and thunder).

And if you’re not sure what Information Architecture is, and why it matters to a web strategy, check out this interview I did with Chris Baum.

The Bridge to Paradise, here’s the specific Google satellite map, you can see the bridge.

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