Category: Web/Tech

  • 2008 Buzz Words to Watch

    2008 Buzz WordsLet’s review the buzz words of 2007, then I’ll provide 5 buzz words to look out for in 2008. (Weighted towards internet stuff)

    Web 2.0, Digg.com, social networking, twitter/tweet, viral marketing, Mac, offline relationship, Facebook, search engine optimization, widgets, add value, and text lingo.

    1. Micro– Social networks, blog networks, online advertising, and a whole lot more are going to be gearing more and more to tiny, micro sized everything geared at your interest. You’ll see online marketing getting extremely exact and precise determined by your marketing niche. Macro-stuff like Digg.com will give way to micro-stuff like Mixx.com.
    2. Video– 2007 saw a huge uptick in video content on the web as broadband internet connections become as normal as dial-up used to be. In 2008 and beyond you will see more video podcasting and a lot more “little videos” that explain how to do just about everything. Watch as micro-producers get better and better and watch out for websites popping up that are going to make creating broadcast quality videos accessible to all. YouTube will still be hot. But watch for a video production site to pop-up.
    3. Mobile apps– Smartphones and the next generation of iPhone will bring power to the mobile phone as their prices get cheaper. Broadband for mobile! Any website worth its server space will offer a mobile app to your micro-network and video content.
    4. Campaign fatigue– It’s December 31st, 2007. With 300+ days until the election people are tired of the election coverage. Expect to hear about campaign fatigue negatively impacting voters attitudes late Spring.

    What do you think buzz words will be in 2008? What about words for 2007, what did I miss?

  • Stupid Microphone

    This morning I had a 5 minute bit in both services where I was asked to share the vision for Light Force in 2008. The first service went super smooth. I had a good train of thought, good rhythm, and over all it went well. During the second service, the mic cut in and out, popped and I eventually had to go for a back-up. In the course of that I totally lost my train of thought.

    That was annoying and embarrassing.  I  think it may be time for that pack to disappear.

  • First Things First, How Most Mornings Start

    dawnI start each day pretty much the same way. Here’s a list of things I try to do in the morning. The days of grabbing a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper are long, long gone.

    1.  Download e-mail. This usually takes just a couple of seconds as almost everything I get is spam. Even if I get something compelling enough for a response I typically will wait until I am more awake. The only thing I’ll do right away (typically) is send out a prayer request if one was sent to me.
    2. Login to feedburner. Actually I login at least twice so I can check out the subscriber levels of YMX and my personal account. (With blog accounts for Kristen and I.) Here I’m looking for a spike in additions or subtractions. If it has spiked, I’ll update the YMX team.
    3. Login to Google Analytics. Since I’m managing about 20 websites now, this is my one-stop shop to see how everything is doing. (It doesn’t update live, so the morning is my first look at what happened yesterday.) Again, I’m looking for spikes and dips. For YMX, my blog, the church site, and any other site I’m paying special attention to I’ll look at the referral tab. I alway like to see how people are making it to my sites. The vanity search thing is sending us bucket loads of referrals lately. (People googling their name.)
    4. Check site rankings for my favorite search terms on Google. (No, I’m not checking out my name… I get emailed when that pops up anywhere on the internet!) But I like to know if there has been any shift in organic search terms I care about. In just the last 30 days Google has sent 4100 visitors to YMX… our number one referral. (Gospel.com is moving up quickly, love that site!)
    5. Google Reader time. I subscribe to about 100 blogs. My goal in the morning is to clear out the blogs… meaning I want to drop the number of unread things to 0. If it’s good I share it (appears on the left side of my blog), if it isn’t I don’t finish reading it. This is also my primary news source. So if there is something going on in the news I am depending on bloggers to cover it. This is also the source of my morning Bible reading, devos. (Check out RBC’s RSS page)
    6. Pop into YMX. That may surprise people but I only pop into the YMX forums a couple of times per day. I love having a great team of folks that keep the forums going! Patti is the forum-meister and the more I trust her, the better.
    7. Post on my blog. If there has been something on my mind or if one of these other steps brought something to mind that was compelling. I’m also becoming a bigger user of the draft feature, so sometimes I’ve got 8-10 posts that I want to work on when I get a chance. I also go through big “writing feasts” where I may write more posts in a day than I should publish… so I time them to release later.
    8. Publish stuff for YMX. I login to Google docs and see if there is something Amy wants me to publish. It takes me at least 20 minutes to publish an article, do the graphics, and pimp it out. If I’ve got time and it needs to get done, I’ll do it then. If I can’t swing it, it’ll wait until after work.

    How long does all this take? It depends on what I’m doing, how much time I have, and a lot of other factors. (Like getting picked by Megan to take her to school.) I can do all of this in as little as 5 minutes… or if I’ve got a lot of time, it can last all morning.

    What about your morning routine? What do you do?

  • vConvert allows you to save YouTube videos for use later

    vconvert_logoOne of my constant frustrations is that we struggle to use all the media we can find at our different ministry environments at Romeo. We feel like we always want to push the envelope and shape the culture around us instead of being a church that responds 2-3 years after the fact.

    In the last two days we’ve jumped past two big obstacles.

    1. We couldn’t use stuff from YouTube in MediaShout. For whatever reason, we just struggled to get a stable enough file to use consistently.
    2. We couldn’t use every DVD. For some reason MediaShout struggled with certain types of DVDs which is quite frustrating. Even if we could get it to work, it was just one DVD per service as changing discs wasn’t pretty.

    This week I’ve managed to find solutions to both problems.

    1. Enter vConvert. This allows me to easily convert a YouTube video or any other format I find online into a format I can easily use in MediaShout… like Windows Media’s .wmv.
    2. Enter Pinnacles Movie Box. This allows me to easily import any analog signal onto our video PC and capture it. So let’s say we want to show a clip from a movie. (and we obtain permission to do so) I can run it from a DVD player and capture the clip I want in Windows Movie Maker easily.

    Both of these tools will help us in the back of the house on the production side of things. It both makes our lives a lot easier and will make the whole presentation much more stable. I’m very happy to pass along these as recommendations!

    Mega kudos to myhook-ups on these tips. Patti for the Movie Box and Tim for vConvert.

  • Bloggers: Turn off post excerpt

    blog tipWith the tremendous increase in feed reader users and mobile blog reading… I really have to insist on this. You must make sure your feed is sending out the full post and not an except. (Called summary in WordPress)

    Why? The reality is that, as a blogger, you want your readers to actually read what you write and not just see that you have written. Right? Well, having the except feature turned on eliminates a large portion of your readership.

    What’s changed? And why do I need to change? Let’s say your average reader is like me and subscribes to 50-100 feeds. And each day 125-200 things pop up on my reader to read. Let’s say I spend 15-30 minutes per day doing just that, reading blogs. While it is true that I am quickly scanning your posts so an excerpt may be all the more I’ll read anyway… but when I see it’s an excerpt I immediately skip over it. I just don’t have the time or interest to go to your blog.

    Why do people have excerpt anyway? I think it has something to do with stats. Such as, you really want to see that pageview number go up.Just keep this in mind… every day you can take the number of RSS readers you have and add it to your unique visitors! Why? Because people who are subscribed to your RSS are highly likely to read your stuff or else they’d simply unsubscribe to your feed. Other than that, I can’t think of a single good reason to keep excerpts turned on. It certainly doesn’t effect my comment rate as I think some may think it does.

    Let’s say I did want to read the rest of your post? (Which I won’t because excepts are annoying) I am forced to click on it and load another tab. And if I’m mobile (where I do about 25% of my blog reading) I couldn’t look at the rest of your post even if I did want to as most blogs won’t load on a mobile browser very well. And they definitely aren’t worth the time it would take to load the page and then go back to what I was doing. When I’m mobile, an excerpt is just a waste of my time.

    So if you want to increase your blog’s potential to grow do yourself a major favor and turn off the feed excerpt right away. Otherwise I’m killing your feed because I’m sick of scrolling past it.

    Did you do it yet? Really. I’m serious. Do it now so you don’t forget.

  • Less than perfect Apple experience

    Dress MacSo I don’t get flamed, let me first say that there are a lot of things I like about my new iMac. It’s pretty and it has loads of power.

    OK, that’s out of the way. Now I can complain about the things I’m not thrilled with on my new computer.

    1. It arrived with the wrong operating system. This cost me more than a few hours of my life. While it’s true I didn’t have to pay for Leopard, Apple shouldn’t have sold me a computer with their old operating system at full price without telling me. When I’ve complained about his to other Apple users I’m basically blown off as if this weren’t a big deal. It’s a big deal. I consider my time to be valuable.
    2. It won’t “just connect” to my Windows network at home. I have fiddled with it for ages trying to get the new operating system to talk to our XP Home desktop and my XP Pro laptop. The only solution I could make work was getting my laptop to talk to the Mac one way. In other words I can use a Windows computer to access the Mac but not visa versa. I’ve read dozens of tutorials and helps and it won’t work. That’s not cool in my book. It takes less than 2 minutes to do this in XP… 4 days and still not working on the Mac.
    3. There is really no introduction to Mac/Leopard available. I would consider myself pretty web/tech savvy when it comes to Windows and it has taken me a week to feel like I know how to do some things. If it weren’t for Patti and a few other long-time Mac users I probably would have just taken it back to the Apple store and went out and bought 2 new Windows desktops. At least with Windows I know how to make stuff work. Seriously, if they are looking for flocks of hardy Windows users to convert they are going to have to make the learning curve a whole lot less. I haven’t even figured out how to install new programs yet… at least not “the right way.” When I booted the thing up the first time I wish there was an introduction I could have watched to teach me most of the stuff I’ve had to ask about.
    4. Customer support is actually pretty average. Other than being American-based and not available 24 hours I don’t see anything atypical about being hung up on, put on hold for long amounts of time, and otherwise not helped. I explained my problem to a customer service person and she actually laughed at me. Way to make me feel like a million bucks, lady.
    5. Too many things that your expected to just know. Apparently you aren’t supposed to put DVDs with paper labels in an iMac. When I discovered this on an Mac users forum I was pretty annoyed. It’s just like the fact that my computer didn’t have Leopard installed… I was supposed to just know that too. So it took me a couple hours but I finally got that disc out.

    I know I sound ungrateful. This is a very pretty machine. My kids love it. Heck, I love it. But my experience is so far is that Mac just proves everything Seth Godin wrote in All Marketers Are Liars. The marketing department created a “lie” (e.g. marketing strategy) that their users believe. And they believe it to the core. Whether or not Mac is better than Windows isn’t even the discussion. The assumption that the user base has is that it is a superior product in every conceivable way.

    My point here is that I want people who are switching (as I am) to know that it’s not as easy as you think it’s going to be. Switching platforms is a radical change in how you use a computer. I am not saying “don’t do it” but at the same time I want potential people for the switch to know that it’s not a matter of taking the thing out of the box and plugging it in either. It’s a big change. It’ll take you a long time until it feels natural. All the time I am switching back to my laptop because I can do something easier, faster, and better on Windows than I can on Mac.

    Put that in a commercial!

  • Google Vernacular

    MeganMy daughter is 6. She’s pretty smart. I don’t know if she is the smartest kid in her class but I tell her she is all the time.

    Tonight she and I were talking and she told me something very cool.

    “When you want to find something on the computer, you google it.“

    I don’t know if a lot of people realize it, but Google has become so much more than a company we use to search the internet. When a company has gotten to the point in its brand identification that it is no longer a company, it’s a part of your vernacular… you’ve reached a plain reserved for a few companies in the world.

    Coke. Play-Doh. Frisbee. Ping Pong. Things like this are not just brands… they are nouns.

    Imagine this. Today’s 1st graders were born after 9-11-2001, may have never seen a house phone, and never used a computer without WiFi. And you don’t hear them say things like “Let’s see it on Yahoo.” or “Check it out on MSN.”

    It’s really all about Google. Pretty soon we will say “The Goog” just like Ted Nugent fans say “The Nuge.” Well, maybe not that far.

    We’ve come a long way from my first computer. It was a laptop, the Kaypro 2, and weighed about 90 pounds.  I was pretty young when my mom’s boyfriend hooked this thing up. I remember it had a state of the art 1200 baud dial-up external modem and we dialed into the bulletin boards at Notre Dame. (Not sure why) So, you can see I’ve had my hands in computers for a long time. I hope/pray that my kids grow up with the opportunity to embrace technology through play like I did.

  • Google Maps just got better

    Now my favorite mobile application tracks my location… for free. Now my smartphone is a free GPS, I love it!

  • Using Site Optimization on Your Website or Blog

    Well, that sounds a little too omniscient for a company. But when it comes to the web, Google pretty much knows everything that happens.

    If you administrate a website you must install Google Analytics onto your website or blog. Well, you need to do that if you care about getting to know who your readers are, where they come from, and what they like.

    It’s called Site Optimization. (Different than Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it’s known.) When you optimize your site you start creating content that your readers like more. You also design the site to fit what your users can handle with the navigation.

    An example of optimization:

    We work to optimize the YMX  Newsletter all the time.  With MailChimp, we get detailed reports when we send out our weekly newsletter. This reports doesn’t tell us who opened it and what they clicked on but it does tell us how many people opened our newsletter what they clicked on when they read it.

    So, to optimize we experiment with different wording of the subject line and order of what we put in there. Studies show that if you write a compelling subject line on something like that, people are more likely to read it. So we experiment with certain words that lead to a higher open rate. We try sending it at different times of the day to gauge the open rate. And based on what people actually click on under our  “5 Spot” determines the types of links we figure our recipients think is useful.

    Through optimization we’ve learned the recipients of the YMX weekly newsletter like something they can download right away. So we mention it in the subject line and  then mention it in the #1 position. And they also like to look at blogs (not YMX ones necessarily) that  offer a hot deal or a quick tip to something.

    Based on that optimization report, we’re able to increase the open rate and also grow the newsletters subscriptions. (It’s free but we still get excited about it growing!)

    Using Site Optimization for the site you run

    Even if you are blogging you need to be aware of some basic rules of optimization if you want to gain an audience. It’s not that you write for your audience, it’s that you stay aware of what the audience will read. (Like, on my blog if I write about family stuff… I need to be aware that no one really cares about that too much.) So, here are a few quick tips on site optimization. There are certainly other and better resources out there! But here are some getting started points.

    3 Ways to Get Started on Optimization

    1. Install Google Analytics to your sites template. It’s free and it takes about 5 minutes to set up.
    2. Wait 15-30 days. This is important because the more data you draw from the more accurate your conclusions are going to be.
    3. After some time has passed, take a look at a few sets of very important data. (I know, you are Christians and the #1 thing seems to be the total number of visitors… but it’s not that important to site optimization!) Look at the bounce rate. It’s it’s low, under say 50%, you are doing OK. The bounce rate means the percentage of users who looked at more than one thing on your site. Look at the content overview. Notice what people are clicking on from your site. The “/” will be the #1 spot as that is your home (landing) page. But what is #2? This may surprise you. And a quick change you can do is moving some of those navigation links around. Let’s say you have a church website and you want every first time visitor to look at “About us” but every first time visitor is looking at “Staff” instead. You may need to re-prioritize your navigation to show off your “about us” button. Or… you may want to clean up that staff page! Lastly, set a goal for your analytics. This is pretty easy to set up and the point of it is that you want to track what you main goal of your site is. For YMX, our two main goals are “registration” and “newsletter.” For your blog it is likely the “feed” button.

    Last thing about Analytics that is super cool. The search engine report. Google will report to you exactly what keywords led to someone coming to your site or blog. This will also tell you a little about what people are looking for when they come to your site. This is amazing when you run a big site like YMX. There are thousands of search terms that lead to us and some of them are funny and some of them are… odd. But with Analytics I can see every single search term that leads to us.

    For instance, let’s say the keywords that most often bring people to your church website are “food pantry Romeo.” What do you think you should highlight front and center on your main landing page? You probably don’t want to feature a picture of your church building, do you?

  • add this to the Christmas list

    miShare

    This little gadget allows direct sharing of photos, videos, and of course music without a computer.

    Seriously, if anyone has $99 laying around I could make good use out of that.

    HT to trendhunter