Drew Rattray
| News and views on design vs. functionality balance across the communications and technology space.
June 2009
You are browsing the archive for June 2009.
Michael Jackson Dies and Takes the Internet with Him
June 26, 2009
A handful of the largest sites were brought down last night by the surge of traffic that ensued after news of the death of the King of Pop hit the wires.
Google went down for over a half hour for some users due to the weight of traffic, and many were receiving the message "Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application". The search term "Michael Jackson Died" had bombarded Google's servers so fast, so frequently, and in such a volume that it's automated system shut down the keyword. It wasn't until the term was manually released that users could receive their news on M.J.'s death again. Google trends described the "Hotness" of the search term as volcanic: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=michael+jackson+died&date=2009-6-26&sa=X 7 of the top 10 searches had something to do with Michael Jackson throughout the day.
The Michael Jackson Wikipedia page also had to be brought down do to the increased traffic and the bombardment of requests to update the page. As conflicting news reports were released, users and fans began an editing war on his page trying to get the latest and correct information up.
Twitter also crashed (not a big surprise actually), with unconfirmed reports stating that there were 66,500 tweets containing the words "Michael Jackson" within an hour of the first news of his hospitalization. Supposedly twitter registered that M.J. based tweets were 15% of the global total yesterday, the highest ever single subject tweet volume.
TMZ.com broke the news, and later that night broke itself when the traffic became too much for it to handle. The LA Times was the first to confirm the reports, and also succumbed to the influx of traffic shortly after.
One site that managed not to break was Bing. But, that's because Bing didn't pick up on the story for hours after the event.
While I think M.J.'s lifestyle and choices became somewhat questionable later in life, I can't deny that his talent and music were a large part of my childhood and he will be sorely missed by millions. Rest in Peace M.J., you left your mark in more ways than we ever thought you could.
Google went down for over a half hour for some users due to the weight of traffic, and many were receiving the message "Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application". The search term "Michael Jackson Died" had bombarded Google's servers so fast, so frequently, and in such a volume that it's automated system shut down the keyword. It wasn't until the term was manually released that users could receive their news on M.J.'s death again. Google trends described the "Hotness" of the search term as volcanic: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=michael+jackson+died&date=2009-6-26&sa=X 7 of the top 10 searches had something to do with Michael Jackson throughout the day.
The Michael Jackson Wikipedia page also had to be brought down do to the increased traffic and the bombardment of requests to update the page. As conflicting news reports were released, users and fans began an editing war on his page trying to get the latest and correct information up.
Twitter also crashed (not a big surprise actually), with unconfirmed reports stating that there were 66,500 tweets containing the words "Michael Jackson" within an hour of the first news of his hospitalization. Supposedly twitter registered that M.J. based tweets were 15% of the global total yesterday, the highest ever single subject tweet volume.
TMZ.com broke the news, and later that night broke itself when the traffic became too much for it to handle. The LA Times was the first to confirm the reports, and also succumbed to the influx of traffic shortly after.
One site that managed not to break was Bing. But, that's because Bing didn't pick up on the story for hours after the event.
While I think M.J.'s lifestyle and choices became somewhat questionable later in life, I can't deny that his talent and music were a large part of my childhood and he will be sorely missed by millions. Rest in Peace M.J., you left your mark in more ways than we ever thought you could.
Bing Isn't Too Friendly to Other Search Engines
June 16, 2009
I found an interesting feature of Bing this afternoon.
First, go to Google and do a search for Bing. My search found about 47,800,000 results and displayed the first 10. Now do a search for Yahoo!. This search turned up about 2,460,000,000 results for me. That's a lot of real estate Google allows for other search engines in the market, and rightfully so. A search in Google gives you everything you could possibly want that it has in the index in a fairly logical order of importance. The user gets to choose what to ignore. Sounds like a true search to me.
Now go to Bing and search for Google. I don't know about you, but I get 1 result displayed. It says it found 184,000,000 results, but only opted to show me 1. No supporting stories, no news listed underneath, no other websites, just Google. You have to click the link below to "search for other results containing Google" in order to see more. Now search for Yahoo!. Again, I get 1 result displayed. It's the same for Ask.com. However, if you search for Bing, you get a full display of the first 14 of 6,270,000 results.
I also found that a handful of news sites are treated the same way. CNN, Fox News, ESPN, The New York Times, and probably more. Thankfully my main source of news, BBC, has been excluded from this treatment, which actually helps me prove my point. A search for BBC gives you a ton of results on the first page including, sub sites, news articles, and video clips.
Seems like Bing has restrictions built into it that greatly limit the exposure of certain competitive companies in its search results. I'm not sure who the genius is behind that one, but come on Microsoft... do you really have to be that petty? You want to be the next best search engine next to Google? Then take a page from their book and treat just about every search the same. Find everything you can, lay it all out there for us in an order that makes some kind of sense, and we'll figure out what we want from the results. Hell, we might even learn something new a few pages down.
First, go to Google and do a search for Bing. My search found about 47,800,000 results and displayed the first 10. Now do a search for Yahoo!. This search turned up about 2,460,000,000 results for me. That's a lot of real estate Google allows for other search engines in the market, and rightfully so. A search in Google gives you everything you could possibly want that it has in the index in a fairly logical order of importance. The user gets to choose what to ignore. Sounds like a true search to me.
Now go to Bing and search for Google. I don't know about you, but I get 1 result displayed. It says it found 184,000,000 results, but only opted to show me 1. No supporting stories, no news listed underneath, no other websites, just Google. You have to click the link below to "search for other results containing Google" in order to see more. Now search for Yahoo!. Again, I get 1 result displayed. It's the same for Ask.com. However, if you search for Bing, you get a full display of the first 14 of 6,270,000 results.
I also found that a handful of news sites are treated the same way. CNN, Fox News, ESPN, The New York Times, and probably more. Thankfully my main source of news, BBC, has been excluded from this treatment, which actually helps me prove my point. A search for BBC gives you a ton of results on the first page including, sub sites, news articles, and video clips.
Seems like Bing has restrictions built into it that greatly limit the exposure of certain competitive companies in its search results. I'm not sure who the genius is behind that one, but come on Microsoft... do you really have to be that petty? You want to be the next best search engine next to Google? Then take a page from their book and treat just about every search the same. Find everything you can, lay it all out there for us in an order that makes some kind of sense, and we'll figure out what we want from the results. Hell, we might even learn something new a few pages down.
SEO for Bing
June 15, 2009
Hooray another search engine... sorry "decision engine" according to Microsoft. What's does Bing mean for people like me? New rules, new headaches, and more importantly new research. While it's still a fledgling at this point, Bing has sparked enough interest to make me actually care about trying to devote extra effort into gaining ranking somewhere other than Google, which still holds 60% of the search engine market share.
Don't get me wrong, I always try to rank everywhere. But, with such a fickle science as SEO, once I gain optimal ranking on Google, I stick to whatever I'm doing until I see a fall off. Sort of a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" mentality. If you try to do too much you can sometimes get nailed with a penality. While a lot of us who spend a substantial amount of time with SEO know what will and will-not affect our ranking... sometimes you just get blindsided. Personally I feel maintaining ranking is somewhat simple, but fixing something I accidentally broke is an absolute nightmare.
That said, I don't see too much difference so far in the ranking of sites I maintain on Bing versus the old ranking in MSN Live Search from a few weeks ago. Either I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing for every search engine (which is highly unlikely), or the algorithm hasn't changed that much. While Microsoft has gone from a 9% share to an a 11% share in the search engine market with Bing, I'm going to treat it as a new wrapper for the same product. Well...
Don't get me wrong, I always try to rank everywhere. But, with such a fickle science as SEO, once I gain optimal ranking on Google, I stick to whatever I'm doing until I see a fall off. Sort of a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" mentality. If you try to do too much you can sometimes get nailed with a penality. While a lot of us who spend a substantial amount of time with SEO know what will and will-not affect our ranking... sometimes you just get blindsided. Personally I feel maintaining ranking is somewhat simple, but fixing something I accidentally broke is an absolute nightmare.
That said, I don't see too much difference so far in the ranking of sites I maintain on Bing versus the old ranking in MSN Live Search from a few weeks ago. Either I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing for every search engine (which is highly unlikely), or the algorithm hasn't changed that much. While Microsoft has gone from a 9% share to an a 11% share in the search engine market with Bing, I'm going to treat it as a new wrapper for the same product. Well...
Poor Web Design
June 12, 2009
What is poor web design? How can you tell it's not good? Why does it matter? How do I fix it? These are a few of the questions I'm asked on a weekly basis by clients and sponsors. Here's my take on things.
Well for one, if it's poor design, it's not design at all. An actual "design" has a plan and a goal behind it, and if those are not represented in the final product... you failed and didn't really design anything. You manufactured a waste of everyone's time and money. Well, that's not entirely true. There's plenty of poorly designed websites that work out there, but they definitely do not work to their potential and in the end drive users somewhere else. I really debated citing a few examples of what I mean, but it's probably best that I don't. I don't want to hurt the feeling of any past or potential future clients.
The internet is the best media source at our disposal for marketing right now and it's all because the internet has given consumers the ability to find whatever they want, whenever they want, from whomever they want. In turn, it also gives advertisers the ability to push their products to a more targeted audience. The other sources of media that aren't able to follow suit are suffering. Print - dying. Direct mailers - dead. Radio - a joke. Even television has changed. Television production companies have to compete with streaming Online Videos, Tivo's, DVRs, and the shortening attention span of consumers who can find what they want at the touch of a button. Commercials are increasingly directed at advertising more television shows, and less products. The product advertising is more focused inside the shows as product placement.
I'm off subject, sorry.
There's 4 essentials to keeping your site from being a failure.
1) Brand Yourself
Everyone has a brand. Your colors may be offensive, your logo may be terrible, but you can still make it all work without redesigning them. Even if you only have 1 color, there is a series of other colors and hues that complement it. Pick 2 - 4 colors, and make those your branding colors. These are what you use whenever you are creating something that applies directly to your brand. Unless your logo incorporates a rainbow, don't waiver. It's not necessarily always a bad thing, but if you use every color, it becomes very hard to use it as a branding tool.
Even if your logo isn't present, you can use the colors to remind them.
Well for one, if it's poor design, it's not design at all. An actual "design" has a plan and a goal behind it, and if those are not represented in the final product... you failed and didn't really design anything. You manufactured a waste of everyone's time and money. Well, that's not entirely true. There's plenty of poorly designed websites that work out there, but they definitely do not work to their potential and in the end drive users somewhere else. I really debated citing a few examples of what I mean, but it's probably best that I don't. I don't want to hurt the feeling of any past or potential future clients.
The internet is the best media source at our disposal for marketing right now and it's all because the internet has given consumers the ability to find whatever they want, whenever they want, from whomever they want. In turn, it also gives advertisers the ability to push their products to a more targeted audience. The other sources of media that aren't able to follow suit are suffering. Print - dying. Direct mailers - dead. Radio - a joke. Even television has changed. Television production companies have to compete with streaming Online Videos, Tivo's, DVRs, and the shortening attention span of consumers who can find what they want at the touch of a button. Commercials are increasingly directed at advertising more television shows, and less products. The product advertising is more focused inside the shows as product placement.
I'm off subject, sorry.
There's 4 essentials to keeping your site from being a failure.
1) Brand Yourself
Everyone has a brand. Your colors may be offensive, your logo may be terrible, but you can still make it all work without redesigning them. Even if you only have 1 color, there is a series of other colors and hues that complement it. Pick 2 - 4 colors, and make those your branding colors. These are what you use whenever you are creating something that applies directly to your brand. Unless your logo incorporates a rainbow, don't waiver. It's not necessarily always a bad thing, but if you use every color, it becomes very hard to use it as a branding tool.
Even if your logo isn't present, you can use the colors to remind them.
Verizon Redeems Itself with 4.7.0.148
June 5, 2009
If you read this blog semi-frequently, you know about my love / hate relationship with my BlackBerry Storm. I'm normally fairly quick at announcing my reaction to the latest releases regarding this phone, but I purposely did not announce the release of BlackBerry Storm OS 4.7.0.148 last Sunday.
Why you ask? Because I don't trust Verizon anymore, and I didn't want to suggest downloading anything that could drive a BlackBerry Storm user closer to launching this phone off a cliff. I wanted to put in a few days of testing and see if this really is the update we were all waiting for. I'm happy to say... it is!
How do I know? Because for 5 days straight my BalckBerry Storm worked. Yeah that's right, it worked. No Joke. No hangups, better response time, no battery pulls. I know to all of you other smartphone users, this doesn't sound impressive. But, for a Storm user, having the phone work is a blessing in itself at this point.
A few people have had issues with the new OS erasing their contacts and addresses because of how they completed the update, but you should always back-up your BlackBerry before an update. I had the same issue, and with a quick restore from my latest back-up, everything loaded back in.
Other than that hiccup, I haven't had another issue. The phone is much more responsive especially on the home menu and with scrolling. It just feels like a much more stable program all together. The accelerometer is still not perfect but it's much, much faster. I don't type in portrait mode much, but I can at least use the new QWERTY keyboard effectively and easily. I'm pretty sure I looked like a monkey with a math problem when trying to use the old portrait mode SureType keyboard. I don't use my camera a lot either, but the camera functions have been mostly fixed as well. There use to be a white screen delay of nearly 3 seconds between when you snapped a photo and when the camera actually took the picture and displayed the image. It's now virtually instant, just like a real camera.
I guess that's my whole point about this update. The Blackberry Storm now works like a REAL smartphone. I honestly feel like I bought a new phone last Sunday.
A full list of the fixes included in 4.7.0.148 is below:
Why you ask? Because I don't trust Verizon anymore, and I didn't want to suggest downloading anything that could drive a BlackBerry Storm user closer to launching this phone off a cliff. I wanted to put in a few days of testing and see if this really is the update we were all waiting for. I'm happy to say... it is!
How do I know? Because for 5 days straight my BalckBerry Storm worked. Yeah that's right, it worked. No Joke. No hangups, better response time, no battery pulls. I know to all of you other smartphone users, this doesn't sound impressive. But, for a Storm user, having the phone work is a blessing in itself at this point.
A few people have had issues with the new OS erasing their contacts and addresses because of how they completed the update, but you should always back-up your BlackBerry before an update. I had the same issue, and with a quick restore from my latest back-up, everything loaded back in.
Other than that hiccup, I haven't had another issue. The phone is much more responsive especially on the home menu and with scrolling. It just feels like a much more stable program all together. The accelerometer is still not perfect but it's much, much faster. I don't type in portrait mode much, but I can at least use the new QWERTY keyboard effectively and easily. I'm pretty sure I looked like a monkey with a math problem when trying to use the old portrait mode SureType keyboard. I don't use my camera a lot either, but the camera functions have been mostly fixed as well. There use to be a white screen delay of nearly 3 seconds between when you snapped a photo and when the camera actually took the picture and displayed the image. It's now virtually instant, just like a real camera.
I guess that's my whole point about this update. The Blackberry Storm now works like a REAL smartphone. I honestly feel like I bought a new phone last Sunday.
A full list of the fixes included in 4.7.0.148 is below:
