So, I’ve continued messing around with the blog because I love getting involved on mini-tech projects.  This time I installed about a dozen plugins and went to town making sure they work exactly how I want them to.  Most of them are “under the hood” type stuff, but there are a couple that you’ll notice and possibly take advantage of.

RosenBlog for Gamers
So, I don’t officially call my blog the RosenBlog, but I very well might in the near future…  The point, however, is that you can now view my blog in an optimized format on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable (PSP), or the Apple iPhone.  Each browser displays a tiny bit differently, and now I’m set to optimize for each of those browser configurations.

(Sorry, I don’t have screenshots…)

Greet Box
The Greet Box is kind of fun and new. Depending on how you get to the blog, you may find a semi-personalized message for you as you access a specific post. For Example, when coming from a Facebook.com link you might see the following:

These messages are pretty discreet and are easily closeable.  I think it’s kind of a fun way to encourage spreading the word…  This also works for those who come in from Digg, Reddit, or all by themselves (displays a recommendation to add an RSS feed).  Nothing too huge, but kind of fun.

Sociable
Sociable is a simple sharing tool that gives a reader quick access to the correct link in order to share a specific post with the rest of the world. You should see the following buttons beneath every post if you visit the actual post page (not just the main page with multiple posts listed).

Facebook Connect
Now my readers can post comments with their Facebook ID which does a couple different things… One, it makes them a “user” more or less that can have their comments tracked on the site (I think – pretty sure). The other is that it allows users to post directly to their Facebook Feed that they have visited my site and commented on one of the posts.

You’ll notice below (if you’re on the single post page, not the main feed homepage) that you now see the Facebook Connect button:

(Note that I hate the way it is currently formatted and I will be modifying it as soon as I can find the right code… The padding and the text above the button are hidden away in some .php file within the plugin, and I’m not finding it.)

Once logged in, you’ll see this fun addition to the corner of your browser window:

Once you’re logged in and setup you just jump down to the comments box, input your text and it will post your information while your credentials come from Facebook.

You’ll have the standard Facebook stuff pop up and ask you a couple questions (like if you want to post a note in your profile feed or not) and then your comment will be up for moderation. Nothing super amazingly spectacular, but I’m all about providing options to people, and I think this one is kind of cool.

Statpress
Ok, so this one isn’t one that the rest of you can see, but I think it’s cool enough to share… I installed Statpress to do some simple analytics work for me. Nothing super spectacular (though I can install a couple other plugins that would work in coordination with this one to provide a LOT of info), but I think it is pretty cool to get some basic information from my users in terms of how they got to the blog and what they’re checking out. I don’t get tons of traffic, nor do I care all that much, but I like to feed my curiosity every once in a while.

(click on the image to embiggen and actually see the text)

That’s about it! Just thought I’d share some things. Nothing huge to update in the personal life other than that I’m enjoying the summer and my friends. Definitely looking forward to Travis and Annie visiting (likely) around Thanksgiving, and I’m pumped for Tony’s wedding in September. Also, I turn OLD on July 6th… Weird…

The other day I was floating through some links on a friend’s blog and noticed my buddy Andy Wheatley’s website. The funny thing about that is that his page looks EXACTLY like mine. I actually thought I had hit the wrong link or perchance hit the “Back” button on my mouse, but nope! Check his page out here.

Anyway, I used this as an excuse to update the main page. I’m thinking of ways to modify it a bit more than I have, but I had about 15 minutes at work to play with something new, so this is what I went with:

click the image to enbiggen

Let me know what your thoughts are – I think I like the general “landing page” look to it. I’ll most likely change the image, but the guitar certainly works for the time being.

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Quick Update:

I’ve modified the look a little…. :-D

Click the Image to Enbiggen

Jason, Travis and I are looking at starting a company. We have a pretty sweet idea and we’ve got a lot of skills, but this whole starting a business thing isn’t an easy undertaking. More than anything, I’m intimidated as hell at the proposition of doing all of the stuff we’ve outlined as key steps to developing the business.

Basically, without giving a whole lot away, we’re trying to carve ourselves into an internet marketing niche that can serve a huge community with content that is interesting and fun while yet providing a great forum for coporations to get their propoganda to the masses.

This is something that I can definitely see as a success down the road, but the basic implementation needed to get us started and into everyone’s bookmarks is a little daunting to think about. Not only do we need to develop a great looking site, but there is some functionality that we’ll need implemented right away (such as a database and dynamic pages) that I’ve definitely never developed before or had to work with. Aside from that you have the constant issue of defining a revenue model, setting goals and acquiring enough content from corporate marketing departments to make your site sufficiently sticky. Needless to say, this is all incredibly new to me.

I’ll be searching through some internet documentation to see what I can find in regards to starting an internet only business. Hopefully I will find enough quality information specific to our online marketing idea to help smooth out some of the wrinkles I already see in our business plan that could potentially become problems. I mean, what’s the best way to develop something that needs a scalable infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, processing power, and storage? There are options like Amazon’s web services, but those can tend to be somewhat expensive – especially when you’re in beta!

Anyway, if anyone is seriously interested in joining our little team, let me know. The three of us would really like to dive through the first few steps in the development of our plan by ourselves, but I have a feeling we’ll need some quality web developers and the like once we get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be successful and can walk away with some serious money in the future, but I am sure it will be a great learning experience no matter what happens.

It’s been a while since I’ve had some time to get a post up, and one of the reasons why is because I have been spending a lot of time preparing for the Omniture Web Analytics Competition at BYU. For those who don’t know, I’m taking a Web Analytics class this semester and we’re encouraged (maybe required?) to participate in the competition. This was my second semester participating in the competition, but unfortunately we worked with the same website’s data. Though you’d think I had an advantage, being familiar with http://www.costumecraze.com/, the Omniture people made it clear at the opening meeting that we needed to come in with new information this time around.

I can’t share any specific information due to my signing a non-disclosure agreement, but I can talk a bit about the SiteCatalyst product! To be completely honest, SiteCatalyst is an absolutely fabulous tool that still needs a little work. Currently, you have great flexibility and customization available to you (though sometimes you end up paying quite a bit more for some of those options) as an Omniture customer. The task of keeping up with all of your key performance indicators is pretty simple with the advanced dashboards you can create. From my experience, which is admittedly little, SiteCatalyst blows the competition away in sophistication and the level of customization available. Granted, those who use Omniture’s tools are paying out the nose, so SiteCatalyst better be good.

I do, however, have a few complaints. Omniture has broken up their reports into three main sections: Commerce, Traffic, and Paths. This is really helpful in some regards because it breaks up the many reports available into three different categories, yet I found myself extremely frustrated on several occasions. Because these three categories are very rigidly constructed, getting reports on data from both traffic and commerce is impossible (or at least hard enough to seem so). For example, should I want to find a report that gave me the percentage of site traffic that came from a specific domain and the revenue from that domain I would be out of luck. For some questions you can look up two different reports within their respective categories, but this is not always the case.

Without giving out specific information, I was trying to do research on CostumeCraze’s global presence (where commerce and traffic were coming from geographically) and I could not find reports that really helped me drill down on the issue. SiteCatalyst provides traffic maps, showing which countries around the world are providing site traffic, but I could not find anything that would help me see the revenue that matched up with that traffic. The data already being tracked, so why can’t I get to the information I need? There were ways to work around the problem, sort of, but I’d rather just have interoperability between the three categories.

Omniture does offer other services, and it’s entirely possible that Discover (a new app they use) or another piece of software solves some of the problems I see in SiteCatalyst. Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to any of the more advanced tools, but I can probably research it a little bit. Either way, web analytics is a pretty interesting and I encourage those who are web developers to look into Google’s free analytics tools (http://www.google.com/analytics).

I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of Internet video the last few days and I suppose I should comment on the issue (links to the articles can be found below). There are a couple different topics I’d like to touch on in this post…The real secret ingredient to successful online video advertising is similar to Metcalf’s Law in that as you increase the amount of locations that host your content you are thus increasing the power of your message. Think about it, if you have a really clever advertisement that is playing on half a dozen different websites that all receive a decent amount of daily traffic, you have a pretty strong network working for you. Users begin to take ownership of some of these great videos that are available because they found them on their favorite site, or because they can download the content to their local machine for later playback.

Sharing on-demand content with your friends is much easier than trying to find when it will be replayed on television; by creating quality, on-demand media that can spread throughout the internet you are increasing the total number of “views” you get for little to no marginal cost.  One of the keys, in my opinion, to a successful marketing campaign is being able to select a target market (or two) and successfully drive your advertising and other marketing efforts towards those people. By creating video content (or any content, really) that is posted online, you can more easily advertise to those who you are looking to target. MySpace and YouTube have become extremely large online communities where mass amounts of younger generation users spend a lot of their time. By creating quality content with the target audience in mind, you can now specifically place your ads on YouTube, MySpace, or on another online community that specifically caters to your desired market and thus increase the effectiveness of reaching your target audience.

The creation of online content is also fairly cheap. By comparison to a television or print media ad, your costs to post some of these videos around the internet are extremely cheap or, in a lot of cases, free! It is no longer true that you need to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign because television advertising means high costs if you want a quality time slot; in the current market you can develop an ad spot or short film for as little as a couple thousand dollars, and then have the ability to post it online for free at several video hosting sites. Even to post videos on a corporate or personal website if fairly cheap considering the plummeting costs of bandwidth. Though television and print media ads have their place, anyone can diversify their marketing efforts to the web and thus save money while increasing brand awareness and attitude.

The most curious thing, which wasn’t directly talked about in the articles I read, but was implied. If an organization wants to create a great following and truly have successful marketing on the web, they need to create a community that users will want to be a member of. This goes back to the whole Web 2.0concept that has been all the buzz over the last year or so, and the validity behind all of it is becoming more and more obvious. Think of some of the more successful web organizations out there and you’ll quickly come up with a list that includes MySpace, YouTube, and Amazon. One of the things that each of these sites have in common is their feeling of community and the fact that any registered user can create and contribute content to the site. MySpace gives you a page online where you can communicate with friends and create a customized page for yourself. YouTube gives each user the ability to upload and rate content. Amazon creates a community by allowing everyone to review products and make recommendations to others who may have similar tastes and preferences. As people become more attached to their online community, they spend more time on the site and become viral marketers to the world about the things they love online. I don’t necessarily endorse any of these services , but you have to concede that these companies have done something right that the rest of the world is trying to emulate or take advantage of (evidenced by the insane amount of money YouTube and MySpace sold for over the last year).

BTW, the sources I read can be found at the following locations:

• Blending Video and E-Commerce
• Business Goes Straight to Video

OK, OK… I admit, I gave into the Facebook stuff a couple of years ago and I initially felt very silly for doing so. Having said that, I now look at what the Facebook team has done with great awe… Honestly, they’ve put some amazingly cool technology onto a single website that will now let me share everything I want (while keeping everything I want private safely hidden) with my friends.I have to come forward and express my absolute hatred for myspace.com. I did have a myspace profile for a while, though I never posted anything besides my name and the school I attend… Before myspace was purchased for a bajillion dollars, I fully intended on becoming rich just so I could buy the site and shut down the servers. The reason I hate myspace so much is because it seems incredibly amateur. I also became increasingly concerned with the safety of the thing… The last thing the world needs is another avenue for people to be creepy with, right? There have been plenty of reports of sexual predators stalking young/teenage kids who are spending massive amounts of time on myspace, and that’s really sad and a problem that the myspace people should be taking a little more seriously; I don’t want my little sister in the middle of sexual predator’s battlefield. There seems to be little to no content moderation, and I don’t agree with that. I learned from a successful social networking professional that it’s a million times better to moderate content and ban those who abuse their membership, thus keeping the other billion people who responsibly use your product happy. Every time you allow one person to post inappropriate or disturbing content you lose five people who were more responsible.Anyway, I hate myspace.

Facebook has done things a little differently. First of all, the website looks classy! There is a lot to be said about the quality of the Facebook product; each page looks professional, there is a very consistent feel to each page, there is content moderation to make sure I don’t stumble upon inappropriate content, and I have very powerful control over my privacy options. I know myspace provides some of these things, but it doesn’t make the process of manipulating options very easy, nor does it look professional.

Groups are a fabulous way to link people together. Picture albums are a much better way of presenting your images in an easy to view manner (whether to your friends, everyone, or only a select few). Each user can select the political campaign issues they consider important, thus indirectly encouraging more and more people to vote. Companies can advertise in new and non-invasive ways through Facebook marketing (whether using the small banner ads – which I find very unobtrusive – or through groups). The new “share” technology is really interesting, bringing the non-Facebook world INTO the Facebook realm (I’ve shared one of my favorite websites – www.pandora.com – with my friends).

What I really enjoy is how the Facebook team is stepping outside of the box and changing many of the stereotypes of how the internet, and social networking sites, should work. They have done some really cool things with the new technologies and programming languages available to present a really fun and useful place for you to begin your daily web surfing experience.

Am I alone? What do you think about what the Facebook team has done?