e-Business Buzz Words 101

Every year has it hot buzzwords and business bon mots du jour.

Globe & Mail columnist, Sean Wise outlines the key terms of last year with an e-Business bent and how they actually can mean something for a business.

I've heard several of these terms bandied about, so I found it useful to have a brief overview to clarify and demonstrate.

Here are the terms:

1. The Long Tail
2. The Wisdom of Crowds
3. The Tipping Point
4. Community is King
5. The World is Flat

Read the full article, Wise Words

The Missing Quick Link

I’m in the midst of a site remake.

The biggest challenge I’ve encountered so far is with the navigation. How to get as much as possible to a high-level? Can’t put too much in primary navigation or it overwhelms users. But if one rolls things up too much, the resulting labels can be cryptic and things can easily get buried deep.

One feature to help users get to the crucial destinations on a site easily is the Quick Links feature. Quick Links are generally a select menu with items in the menu being links. They usually are only available on the homepage of a site.

I started seeing Quick Links about two years ago and lately it seems to be becoming common practice.

Today, while scouring the Web for inspiration for my website remake, I checked out Microsoft’s site. In my travels over the biggest and brightest websites, I hadn’t found anything innovative in overcoming the basic navigation challenge. But at Microsoft I did find an invaluable tool to bypass those problems. (The feature isn't on all MS sites, so check out Microsoft Mobile to see it.)

Their Quick Links tool improves upon the common version dramatically!

1. It appears on every page.
2. It appears in the top-right hand corner (opposed to the center of the page). The top-right hand corner is pretty much the standard utility bar area and it’s where users expect sitewide functionality options and search methods (eg. Search engine, site map).
3. A mouse-over which is easy and quick to activate triggers a pop-up layer to appear with the links – this is easy to peruse and offers at-a-glance links
4. It allows a prominent, visual way to organize the links

I intend to use this approach on the upcoming website remake. It will go a long way to solving my navigation nightmares.

So Microsoft can be innovative – maybe just not in their browsers though.

Postcrossing.com

I love the Internet and I love postcards. Recently, I found a way to marry those two loves: Postcrossing.com.

A friend, Stacy, passed this free website and service on to me last month and I’m hooked. Having collected postcards since I was a kid, in the last couple years I have become a fervent, ardent collector. (Thanks to a trip to Ikea and spotting their cobalt Emu bins - with the storage in place the collection could now flourish.)

But I don’t buy cards for my collection and my friends and family don’t travel much (except Stacy), so my collection has languished.

Then Postcrossing came along!

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

1. Sign up and create a profile, indicated the types of postcards you’d ideally like to receive
2. Request to send a card – the system will then draw from its database pool and give you a person and their profile
3. Mail the postcard
4. When the recipient receives it, they log it into the system
5. Your name now goes into the pool to receive one

I’ve already sent and received four postcards. I love them all but two of them are really terrific! There does seem to be some idiosyncrasies as I received two on the same day that mine were received. But otherwise, it’s been great.

Check it out and you’ll love it – the Finns sure do, as you’ll soon discover.

I love how the Internet has enabled this (and the site founder too). Prior to the Net, things like this just would not have been possible!

My Emus will soon be bursting…

YouTube Puts the You in Useless

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You are the Time's person of the year!

It's been a few days, but I just found out that YOU are Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

They mean the you in the sense of Web 2.0.

The content-creating, forum-posting, avatar-living, blog-ranting, review-writing, video-producing, social-networking, online-collaborating, web-living YOU!

Along with their declaration of the role of the individual in shaping the new Internet and the resulting cultural changes, Time has put together a suite of good articles.

My favourites articles are:

• Enough About You - how user-generated content and increasingly niche news/info sources allows people to not hear about things they need to know about
  
• Andy Warhol Was Right - the Internet as the ultimate narcissist vehicle, "On the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people."
• Web Boom 2.0 - why the build-up of Web 2.0 is not a bubble about to burst
• My So-Called Second Life - are people's Second Life as pathetic as their first?
  

Online Retails Hits All-Time High in 2006

e-Marketer today reports that 2006 in the United States was a good year for e-commerce. Revenues surpassed 100 billion!

While overall retail spending was cool, online shopping was hot.

This figure doesn't include online sales of travel or I, suspect B2B purchases. Suffice to say this item gives me the warm fuzzy feeling of job security.

Read the full story at e-Marketer

Internext

The beginning of new year always brings some predictions for the future. Globe and Mail journalist Ivor Tossel gives his five predictions in his article "What's Next on the Net".

For the time-pressed, here are his five predictions:

1) The Internet will be everywhere
2. The Internet will know where you are.
3. The Internet you know is going to look pretty quaint
4. The Internet will look back at you. (widespread videoconferencing)
5. The Internet will get a little respect.