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Tinkering Your Way To Success

If statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right in this Forbes article, we tend to underrate the power of random tinkering and events that are outside of our control with respect to business failure and success:

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

[thanks to WebGuild commenter Atolley for the heads up on this author]

Randomness is a major component of biological evolution and I would suggest that business and evolution have a lot in common, most importantly the notion that both biological and business entities work *away from failure* rather than *towards success*. Events both random and controlled continue to change the playing field, making it difficult to find consistent formulas for success, let alone even predict which among a dozen companies will survive into profitability and business success.

Web Pages : Size Matters!

A recent analysis indicates that the size of the average web page has tripled since 2003, up from 94k to 312k (!). Also, the number of objects on the page has doubled to a whopping 50 objects per page.

Details of this excellent analyis that combined website data from two studies are at WebsiteOptimization.com, where they conclude with some advice for designers:

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced faster load times, dial-up users have been left behind. With the average web page sporting more than 50 external objects, object overhead now dominates most web page delays. Minimizing HTTP requests by using CSS sprites, combining JavaScript or CSS files, reducing the number of EOs, and converting graphic effects to CSS while still retaining attractiveness, has become the most important skill set for web performance optimizers.

It's easy to see how wider use of broadband and high speed internal networks have combined with a lot of misunderstanding to create corporate and small business websites that are often bloated with questionable graphics, pictures, and design elements. Although a shift is underway, search optimizers are generally much lower on the corporate food chain than, say, a brand manager who will be reluctant to sacrifice powerful design components for a faster page loading time.

Complicating these matters is the fact that many consultants and even internet IT departments generally create web redesign presentations for high speed or internal networked environments that are many times faster than normal user interaction. Dial up is still a common method of connection in the USA yet few websites are well optimized for low bandwidth - arguably losing thousands of potential sales as customers leave in frustration with slow page loads.

Recommendation? Take some lessons from Craigslist and start with the most spartan, efficient, optimized environment you can imagine and then add design elements only if they are essential to your online functionality. Are customers basing decisions based on the *look* of your website? In some cases yes, but in general I'd suggest customers will prefer a fast and functional site to a pretty one, and sites that err on the side of function rather than form will see higher conversion and interaction levels.

Just the Facts Please - Online Seminar Limitations

Online Seminars, webcasts, and podcasts have really exploded on the tech scene over the last year or so, but I remain skeptical about the potential of these to change things very much. An "old style" online information gathering approach still works very well. Generally it takes only a few online minutes to search, find, and quickly scan a topic you need to understand better or learn about for the first time. If you need to become an expert in a topic I'd suggest it is better to surf a lot of sites and participate in blogs and forums rather than spend the same amount of time watching a webcast, though of course there are exceptions to this. Unfortunately it is hard to know which of the millions of videos on millions of topics are great vs. a waste of your time. Sorting the wheat from the chaff - at least for me - is much easier if I'm scanning search engine listings, text snippets, and websites rather than listening to podcasts or video clips.

Webcasting and Podcasts in some way bridge the human gap we have with simple surfing where you have a very limited connection to the purveyor of the information you need. Yet thanks to blogging and forums you are able to to get direct feedback from experts by simply commenting or participating in those formats, which to my way of thinking have the huge advantage of allowing you to jump in and out and quickly scan for the good stuff without enduring a lot of information that is not relevant to you.

Certainly a podcast would be a better choice for some specific types of learning - languages for example - where audio and repetition are key parts of the learning experience. Also obviously there are times when the online picture can "paint a thousand words" and thus may trump any amount of text reading. Real time breaking news could benefit from webcasting, especially if pictures are a key part of the story. However I think these exceptions are relatively few. In most cases your best information bet, in terms of return on your valuable time, is the same as it has been for some time - good old Web 1.0 search, surf, and find.

Web 2.5?

Today CNET has a fun piece on the evolution of the internet where - partly I think just for effect - they use the increasingly incomprehensible numbering system for "Web 1.0, 2.0, etc" that is now thrown around without much regard to consistency or even comprehensibity.

I agree with the author that we should probably abandon the Webish numbering system in favor of some online characteristics and definitions that everybody can agree about and then use terms that actually have some real - and more importantly consistent - meaning behind them.
































(Source: CNET News.com)

Yahoo's Open OS: Really, Really Open

Larry Dignan and Dan Farber at CNET have the early scoop on Yahoo's freshly unveiled Yahoo! Open Strategy somewhat cryptically labelled .... "Y!OS"

Ari Balogh, Yahoo CTO said at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference today:

“We are taking open to a whole other place,"... “We are rewiring
Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets
of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social
throughout and provide hooks to developers.”

It is too early to know if this type of openness will be embraced by developers to the degree needed to make a significant impact in the way people use Yahoo services, but it is very encouraging to see how the key players are racing to claim the title of the "most open" online environments. Facebook's API's were followed by Google Open Social and now Yahoo which appears to offer more programmatic freedom than ever across Yahoo's massive number of network assets and 500,000,000 person user base.

Social Media Research

Here is a recent Social Media report from Universal McCann. The report has data points on global usage of social networking sites, blogging, content sharing and creation. The report is not available for distribution but McCann was kind enough to provide a download link to the report.

| View | Upload your own

Shame On You Tim O'Reilly

On January 18, 2008, Google informed me that they will no longer be hosting the WebGuild events. A Google representative said the decision was based on the fact that the name of our January 2008 event called "The Future of Web Applications" and the name of our web 2.0 conference called "Web 2.0 Conference & Expo" were not changed as requested by O'Reilly.

O'Reilly associates contacted Google and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our events and conferences and to cease supporting the WebGuild. See the email below.

from A**** I*** ******@google.com
to Daya Baran
date Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 8:03 AM
subject Webguild and Google
signed-by google.com

Google will no longer be able to host the Webguild meetings. We need you to take our logo off your website as a sponsor since we will not be sponsoring your meetings moving forward. We also need you to take off our logo on your upcoming conference site as Google is not sponsoring that conference http://www.webguild.org/meetings/web20/2008/. You can keep our logo as a PAST sponsor but the language needs to say past as that is indeed what we are, a past sponsor. I tried to warn you that this was a delicate issue but you did not listen. I asked you three times to change the name of this weeks event in order to maintain the relationship and since you did not budge we will no longer support Webguild. I wish your organization the best of luck!

Thanks,

*********

The WebGuild Conferences and Events provide the web community with the opportunity to learn about new developments in web technology. We believe that knowledge is not the domain of the privileged. Our events have been extremely successful in creating an open platform to share knowledge with the masses. This is contrary to O'Reilly's model which is based on withholding knowledge and gouging attendees, companies, and sponsors where the highest bidder wins shelf space.

Do No Evil
The old boy's network has benefited from the O'Reilly platform by publishing books through his company and by speaking at his conferences and hence, positioning themselves as experts in their respective fields. Many such experts have landed at Google. O'Reilly contacted these old-timers and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our event and conference and to cease supporting WebGuild. Once such individual is Dewitt Clinton, who joined Google in 2006. This arrogant individual threatened to cancel the January event on 200 people if I did not change the name immediately. I did not budge. The harassment continued. I was flooded with emails and phone calls demanding I change the name. Finally, they became condescending, arrogant, unprofessional, and appalling. I emailed Larry Page, Serge Brin, and Eric Schmidt about this issue. I also told them that the WebGuild has been a big supporter of Google and its products since 2001 and we represent the community that are early adopters of Google products and contributes to Google's revenue engine. I never received a response. Google has also hired several hundred employees from the WebGuild events they hosted saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions.

O'Reilly felt it was necessary to cut-off Google's support for WebGuild because he felt that without Google's support we would not have a venue to keep putting on high quality events at low costs. Thus, he would be able to continue gouging the industry. Furthermore, O'Reilly contacted speakers, sponsors, and bloggers and asked them to withdraw support for WebGuild Conferences and Events. O'Reilly was desperate to avert a repeat of the backlash when he sued an Irish non-profit for putting on a Web 2.0 conference.

O'Reilly Sues Non-Profit
Web 2.0 is about community, openness, and the free flow of information. O'Reilly's model is centered on limiting access to knowledge and creating dependencies for profit. It is a Web 2.0 Conference, however, not everyone can attend. You have to be exclusive enough to be invited to the conference which is about common technologies and for that privilege, you have to pay a king's ransom to get information that is freely available. O'Reilly sued ITCork, an Irish organization for holding a Web 2.0 event (see here and here). His attempt to extract his pound of flesh backfired so badly that he is resorting to questionable tactics to avoid a similar backlash.

Claims To Coining Web 2.0
O'Reilly even claims that he coined the term "Web 2.0". The term was coined two years earlier by Joe Firmage, CEO, ManyOne Networks. Web 2.0 is a term used to refer to the web as a platform to develop applications. The term "web 2.0" is in the public domain, however, O'Reilly has attempted to trademark it to retain exclusive use of it and prevent others from using it. Paul Graham has a great post about the term Web 2.0 and his run-in with O'Reilly.

Shame on You O'Reilly
Presently, O'Reilly is promoting keynote speaker Saul Griffith calling him a "genius" and "a scientist and engineering polymath" without disclosing the fact that he is his son-in-law. When I met him, I cordially introduced myself, however, O'Reilly was a despicable individual. He is a dinosaur whose time has past.

As a result of this, we have not had a venue for events for the past few months. Many of you have been asking when the next event will be. I am happy to announce that the events are back on track and we will be holding the next event on May 7, 2008.

The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.

Really Simple Web 2.0

Web 2.0 apps look all shiny and bright, but we all know what horrors lurk within the typical enterprise IT shop. Web 2.0 will not be able to transform the enterprise until it can deal with real world integration nightmares like CICS systems, flat files accessed through obscure SNA protocols and AS/400s programmed in RPG.

Who is going to tame all this real world IT stuff and bring it into the bright shiny Web 2.0 world? SnapLogic and WaveMaker, that's who!

WaveMaker and SnapLogic announced today a partnership to use SnapLogic's Really Simple Integration platform to wrap any legacy data source as a web service. Once SnapLogic has "tamed the beast", WaveMaker provides a point and click, WYSIWYG development platform to expose legacy systems via rich internet applications.

Although we are performing very different tasks, both SnapLogic and WaveMaker are getting incredible value from creating web service-based products. SnapLogic wraps any data source as a web service, while WaveMaker assembles applications from any collection of web services. Chris Marino of SnapLogic also blogged about our partnership.

The following marketecture diagram shows the power of this approach. Rather than a rat's nest of one-off adapters, replicated data and custom data conversions, there is one clean API to the data - web services - and one simple tool for exposing the web services - WaveMaker!
To demonstrate the power of the rich and thin approach to web 2.0, WaveMaker and SnapLogic will be demonstrating an application at Web 2.0 Expo this week that integrates mainframe, minicomputer and relational data into a simple inventory tracking and re-ordering sytem. Stop by our booths and check it out!

Social Media Top Priority For Enterprise

Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to a report by Forrester Research. The top priority for enterprises will be social media applications and tools and most of the money is expected to flow to social networking tools and mashups.

Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition:

In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.

Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time.

AOL Spheres It With Acquistion

AOL announced today that it purchased Sphere for an undisclosed amount. The company responsible for the "Sphere It" link which appears on a growing number of sites, describes itself as connecting your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from blogs, media stories, video, photos, and ads across the web.

According to Ron Grant, AOL President, the acquisition will help AOL enhance content on its own sites and distribute its content across Sphere's third-party publisher network. Additionally, the acquisition provides AOL with access to advertising inventory across Sphere's network, while growing its reach to content publishers via the widget. Sphere was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco.

Stanford Website Redesign Coming June'08

Stanford University is working on the redesign of their website. The project which started last Nov 15 will take 7 months with an expected launch date of June 15 '08. Codenamed "Project 8180" which refers to the total acreage of the Stanford campus, the redesign will be the third of the site since its inception. The site has not undergone a redesign in about 5 years.

The goals of the redesign are to create a more consistent and updated look and feel across Stanford sites, focus the global navigation by decreasing the number of menu items from 8 to 5, to surface and provide a more holistic view of what the university has to offer, and to better market it. What is interesting to note are the following:
-the page has a lot more content
-it is now more of a portal or gateway page
-front and foremost use of rich media i.e. videos (very web 2.0-esque)
-use of lots of imagery
-timely and current news section
-multiple rss feed subscriptions (very web 2.0-esque)
-jump links to the most popular content areas
-what looks like in-page quick links versus a link to another page (very web 2.0-esque)
-events calendars
-scrollable in-page view of other stanford sites (very web 2.0-esque)
-international program section surfaced

MOCKUP OF REDESIGN:

Web 2.0 Bubble Bursting - Crash 2.0 Coming

Dow Jones VentureSource released a report on venture capital investment in Web 2.0 companies Tuesday saying that "investment boom may be peaking."

A total of 178 deals received $1.34 billion in 2007, an 88% increase over 2006. Of that Facebook received $300 and Ning.com received $44 million. The rest of the distribution does not look too good from there. Venture capital investment has been sustaining many Web 2.0 startups, which are often chasing the same users. When the money dries up so will most Web 2.0 companies unless they find a new source of revenue.

U.S. Web 2.0 Investment by Region, 2006-2007

                         2006                           2007
              Deals     Investment (MM)      Deals     Investment (MM)
                     
Bay Area              74         $431               72*         $721*
New England           15         $79                20          $158
Southern California   10         $41                14          $115
New York Metro         9         $18                25           $58
Pacific Northwest      6         $35                13          $140
Southeast              6         $24                 7           $47
Mountain (CO, AZ, UT)  4          $7                 7           $31
Texas                  3         $10                 2            $4
North Carolina         2          $3                 2           $10

*Includes Facebook

"The beauty of Web 2.0 companies is that they can do so much with so little. A few million dollars and they're not only up and running but attracting eyeballs and advertisers. 2008 may be a make-or-break year for many Internet companies with business models relying on advertising. The slumping economy, coupled with a slowdown in click-through rates for online advertising, is going to pose a real challenge to their ability to generate revenues and position themselves for an exit," said Jessica Canning, director of global research at Dow Jones VentureSource.

Web 2.0 Bubble Bursting - Part 1

Blue Links In A Web 2.0 World

Should all things blue on the web be links and all links on the web be blue? While in the offline world green means go, in the online world it is a well recognized convention that blue is our cue to click. But with the ever-evolving web, how is this standard faring?

• Corporate Sites. The vast majority of enterprise sites I looked at adhered to the law of blue links - Microsoft, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Intel. The anomaly was Oracle.
  

• News Sites. CNN.com, CNET, NYTimes.com, and WSJ.com all sported blue links.
  

• Consumer Sites. Amazon, Apple, eBay, MSN.com, Yahoo, Google, Walmart, and Petsmart are all bullish on blue. An exception I found was Target.com.

• Social Media Sites. YouTube, Flickr, My Space, Facebook all maintain blue links. But popular blogs HuffingtonPost, TMZ.com, and tech rag ValleyWag.com don't have blue links.

• Politicking Sites. HillaryClinton.com, BarackObama.com, and even JohnMcCain.com have blue links. So, clearly this rule transcends political persuasions too.

Of course, it also depends on the type of links, positioning, context, etc.. I am, of course, referring to the standard body copy links. Some sites even omit the border="0" on images thereby rendering the blue border on images to illustrate their clickability. Many sites use multi-formatting on their links to visually communicate their click states. And these links can come in all shades of blue. There is the Intel blue, big blue IBM's blue, and the Microsoft blue. Blue links are in fact the defacto fail-safe color of choice for links. Even usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, follows this model.

Does this mean that sites with non-blue links are doomed? Not at all. While it is the color of choice for links, links are popularly manifested in a myriad of colors. Many well-known sites have successfully accomplished this. It is the implementation of those links to appear as links - either by way of underlining or some other visual cue such as a symbol - that become important but such links can and do work. A lot may depend on the target audience and genre of site. There are many examples of Web 2.0 sites and teen sites that do different things that work as well. But tread carefully with this before deviating from the norm.

Video - Social Bookmarking 101

Here is a video explaining Social Bookmarking and how it works. See also post on Social Bookmarking Going Enterprise.

Social Bookmarking Going Enterprise

Social bookmarks are joining the ranks of utility navigational elements like print and email as a standard feature. For companies integrating Social Marketing into their Web Strategies and adopting Social Bookmarking, this can be a competitive advantage.

Bookmarking 2.0 or Social Bookmarking has been popular for about five years now. The old-school way of bookmarking web pages using your browser toolbar to "Add to Favorites" in IE or "Bookmark this Page" in Firefox is now considered archaic, basic, and standard. Newer and more advanced bookmarking tools have spawned which allow users to save links to pages using varying bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google, and Yahoo.

The basic premise behind this kind of bookmarking is:

• Portability - to allow users to save their bookmarks online and take them with them so they have access to them anywhere they go as opposed to saving their bookmarks to their browser favorites locally on their computer - where they would be inaccessible from any other computer.
  
• Social Bookmarking also allows users to not only save for quick, ubiquitous access but with the capability to share and proliferate content virally if they so choose. In some cases, users can subscribe to web feeds for their list of tagged bookmarks allowing them to be notified when a new bookmark is added.
  
• Users can also tag the content in meaningful ways to them and others making them easier to find and be found.

Having been tried and tested for some time and popularized, the concept made its way to the blogs and news sites such as CNN and NYTimes, and is now making its way more and more to enterprise websites. The business case is similar to that of the standard "Email this page" functionality - referrals! If a visitor on your site reads a great white paper that they find is worth sharing, they can do so easily with potentially many people using a social bookmarking utility. Many users are leary of the "Email this page" option as they fear their email address will being captured for lead generation or other purposes. So, social bookmarks are a safe alternative. For corporate sites using social bookmarking, the relevance seems to be more so for news, press releases, blogs, webcasts/podcasts/videos, and case studies/white papers. But there are many instances where for such bookmarks are made available persistently across sites.

Yahoo Launches Mobile Content Tool

Yahoo announced today the impending launch in Q2'08 of onePlace, a mobile content management tool to enable consumers to better manage the wide selection of content available across the Internet. Yahoo! onePlace is expected to become available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers globally.

"Yahoo! onePlace(TM) will bring together a consumer's interests, passions and important information into a single location - creating a rich and highly personalized experience. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept current, and served to them the way they want. So now, the content they consume and the way they consume it will be hyper-customized to their specific preferences and tastes."

onePlace will provide personalized views, dynamic content updates, and a mobile RSS reader. Users will be able to bookmark content online, keep it automatically updated with the latest updates, and assign categories and tags - or placed into customized "collections" that consumers create.

SaaS To Account For 18% of Software Sales In 2013

The Software as a Service or SaaS market is reportedly growing but is still relatively small. 6% of the software sales in '07 was SaaS and this is expected to grow to 15-18% in 5 years - which is still small. This, according to the OpSource Summit. Gartner expects SaaS to grow at 22.1 percent until 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets and predicts that 63 percent of products in the software infrastructure market and 56 percent in the software application market will support Web services.

A panelist at the summit described SaaS as the thin edge of the web for utility computing. They went on to say that objections to SaaS in the enterprise are still quite high despite it being an important way to deliver critical functionality without having to maintain the apps internally, being able to push out upgrades on a continuous way, and having a low TCO.

Some of the top SaaS providers include:

• Salesforce.com - CRM solutions provider
• Adobe - looking at bringing Photoshop online
• Netsuite - another CRM solutions provider
• SuccessFactors - talent management solution
  
• Axentis - governance, risk and compliance solutions provider

Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft is also in the Saas space. Other companies in this space are Oracle, IBM, and SAP. There are also others that provide web-based content management systems and analytics solutions. Clearly, this area has a lot of teeth. There is nothing worse than teams using different versions of the same software giving rise to file incompatibility issues.

Hidden Power of Online Forums As A Marketing Tool

I was at the Opsource SaaS Summit today and sat in on a preso from the Lithium SVP, Amy Lewis, who talked about the value of online forums to companies. Some of the key points were as follows.

Why have an online forum:

• Forum-ize your product line as part of your Web 2.0 marketing
  
• Forums can be used for customer support as well as for marketing
• Building a forum allows you to identify who your super users and because they are passionate, they represent a critical user group, a tribal base that are influencers.
• Consumer groundswell can be positive or negative which a forum can help manage. As a vendor, a forum allows you to be involved and make it a two-way dialogue and manage conversations happening on the blogosphere otherwise outside of your control.
• Communities can provide a powerful real-time vehicle:
• enhancing customer care
• enhancing brand loyalty
• providing support provided by users to users
• content is raw and unfiltered
• immediacy of great info
• value of having users talk to each other eg. customers share workarounds
• foster demand generation
• can serve as an online focus group eg. an setup private communities to help with product design
• value of happy comments being viewed by many users has a nice halo effect for branding
• professionalism and tone of forums have improved. Forum moderator should respond where appropriate and establish rules of conduct.
  
• ROI on support forums is a great place to start eg. call deflection
• suppport forum helps to build up critical mass
• lot to learn from customers

Rolling With Online Video

The majority of online video content viewed in the US is news/current events followed by jokes/bloopers/funny clips and movie trailers (previews, clips). Such videos are generally up to five minutes in length. But as David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst states, "as technology problems are solved, however, making the computer-television connection more viable and pleasurable for the average consumer, online video content will expand in both length and breadth, and professionally-produced material will account for a large part of the menu.” But until then, don't extend the length of your online videos because as a lean-forward technology, the web is second to TV for now "when it comes to elements such as convenience, control and the ability to easily find enjoyable content, TV video content wins out for relaxation, sharing the experience with friends and family and less annoying advertising than online."

When A Website Redesign Takes Flight

In the market for a helicopter?! Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., announced the redesign of their website yesterday. When I came across this, what stood out for me is that the company seems to get what sometimes gets forgotten - that a company's website is a business tool and increasingly its "front door" to a global audience and the first experience many visitors have with your brand. As a result, they wanted to make the site a positive and memorable experience for visitors.

Given the product, it is kind of cool that they tried to mirror the offline experience online which can sometimes be tricky to do and given the medium, not always recommended. The company used a combination of video and Flash animation to bring the aircrafts to life by creating an interactive aircraft tour complete with a hangar and airfield, helicopters landing and taking off with all the sound effects, and a pilot describing them. You can get different views of the aircrafts and click on specific parts to get more info...simplified like buying a pair of jeans. They messaged their progress bars creatively; the labels were things like countdown, requesting landing clearance, and cleared for landing/takeoff. It's overall a very creative and unique way to sell such a complex product online effectively using rich media to create an interactive tv-like experience and taking design to greater heights.

Martha Stewart Expands Online Empire

Today's good thing (actually Thursday's) at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was the acquisition of a 40% stake in online wedding planning company, Wedding Wire. The union provides MSLO the opportunity to increase their digital footprint in the lucrative wedding business both on- and offline. Wedding Wire boasts a localized online wedding marketplace, planning tools, and a social community. "By investing in WeddingWire, we are assembling a robust online offering with a proven toolset to enhance our digital Weddings content and complement what is already the category's premier print magazine," said Wenda Harris Millard, President, Media, MSLO. "We are impressed by WeddingWire's superior online platform and see great opportunities to leverage its expertise across our Internet sites and bring similar tools and features to our other lifestyle content verticals. This is also a tremendous opportunity for our advertisers to reach couples engaged in the process of planning their wedding."

The media mogul's growing online empire is quite impressive. Her own site, MarthaStewart.com, is of course elegantly designed but also has a lot of Web 2.0 and new media features and capabilities that a lot of traditional tech companies lack. It is clearly designed for users and usage and around community building. It's a good thing!