John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

'live' snow mashup: 30 December 2009: Loving this 'live' UK snow mashup. It shows where there is snow in the UK based on reports from people using Twitter.; Mashups are something people are getting very excited about. Now there are Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps and so on, and many of those provide ways for programmers to access them (APIs), programmers are mixing them together. So this combined Twitter with Google Maps to produce a 'live' snow map.; Much as the core of me goes "pah, new fashionable bullshit trend nonsense it'll all be over by the spring", I'm wrong in this instance. Mashups (bleaugh) are exciting. I need a client to let me really integrate their site with Facebook .. just look at the possibilities.
Automated translation: 29 December 2009: Marketing by numbers: The Paragon Hotel was getting website visits from non English speakers so I thought I'd use Google Translate to provide an automated translation of the site for the most popular languages.; The result? An 8% rise in traffic from non English speakers, a 31% improvement in the bounce rate, and pages per visit up by 25%.
A climate change suggestion: 16 December 2009: Every tonne of carbon emitted affects us all, not equally, but the poorest more. If there's a finite amount of carbon we can safely pollute, lets divide that up equally between everyone on the planet and give every child, woman and man their annual quota.; That quota is worth something. A nomad in the desert is unlikely to use theirs. They can sell it. It's a market of finite resources. But it doesn't matter how it changes hands, it still adds up to the same total.; So let Chrysler buy the quotas from African farmers. The farmers will buy seed and educate their kids. In the end, we get food and more stability.; At its heart is a principle. Climate change affects everyone. So let us all take our share of the responsibility. Give us our quota, let us decide what we do with it.
Website personalisation: 16 December 2009: It was my g/f's birthday recently and I went to see Peter Brewer Goldsmith Jeweller to see if between me and him we could work out what she might want and it was, frankly, pathetic (me, not him). I had no clue.; So I took my g/f there and it worked like this. We said "bracelet maybe" and he got one out and we tried it and we said "too chunky" and he got lighter ones. We said they didn't sit right, so he got others out. Finally we settled on one.; Basically, he was using his knowledge and experience to, in my world, do a binary chop.; A binary chop is the fastest way to find a record in a list (a piece of jewellery the customer will like). Let's say you have weighed all your fruit and arranged them in order of their weight. You have a new piece of fruit you want to put into the arrangement. Choose the piece of fruit in the middle of the arrangement. Is your piece lighter or heavier than that? Disregard the 'wrong' half of the list. Now do the same on the half you're keeping, take a piece in the middle, is your fruit lighter or heavier, etc. Basically you'll find where your new fruit needs to go in the least number of weight-checks.; When we said "that bracelet doesn't sit right", Peter Brewer made a mental binary chop with his stock. He knew it wasn't sitting right because of the shape of my g/fs wrist or the style of the bracelet or that's how they are supposed to sit we are just ignorant or whatever, and he disregarded a portion of his bracelet stock and chose again from the remaining possibilities. We iterated our way forward until we found something she liked.; Humans can do that on the fly because the way the stock is chopped up is different every time. The next person might have been more interested in the weight of gold, or the spiritual significance of the jewels.; And that's the problem with most e-commerce setups, like Retro 36 for instance. Want to see things related to dinosaurs for a 5 year old? Can't do it. There's one categorisation method and that's it.; So one of the things I like to do is to make websites bend to the will of the visitor. Personalisation might be what I do. But it's usability too, it's basically acknowledging that every visitor will bring with them a whole load of assumptions and life experiences and abilities before they even start to think about what they want to buy, and every one will approach it differently.; One issue with having lots of stock is how not to bamboozle the new visitor.; So one thing I've just programmed for Metcalfe Insurance is a little bit of personalisation.; That word cloud, it's currently showing the most popular pages. But as you use it, it'll show more of YOUR most popular pages.; So if you use Metcalfe for car insurance, the next time you visit, the link to 'car' insurance will be that much bigger and that much easier for you to find. But when I visit it won't show car insurance bigger, it'll display my preferences instead.; It's just the start, but ultimately, the Metcalfe insurance website will show you the sorts of insurances you're interested in, and none of those you're not. So it will look like just exactly the kind of insurance company you're looking for.; Neat, eh?; I just realised, I worked out how I was going to program that by writing literally on the back of an envelope. I like that.
Shane Dawson: 16 December 2009: OK so this video is really curious. It reached me because I follow the Twitter feed of a local teenage girl (she's a Twitter friend, alright?) So it's reached the schoolkids of Scarborough.; On the one hand, it's just a guy speaking directly to us in a very personal way, and it's affected him and we've been a part of it, so there's a real connection.; On the other hand what he's crying about is getting 1m hits on YouTube.; Back on the first hand, he's crying about not feeling like he fitted in, doing stupid stuff, but now he has us, he feels accepted.; And on the other hand he won't let us down, he'll keep making videos.; It is really interesting. See, any sense of selling gets slapped down and shot within a second. Yet this looks like selling to me, and I've been slapped down and shot many times by people who take this (kinda thing) as honest and true and shoot me for being cynical.; So, he got 1m hits because he's like the people who watch youTube, seems genuine and likeable, and speaks of the same experiences that young people have.; But there's something else .. it's the fame thing. That seems a given, an unspoken, obvious thing everyone wants. On X Factor, no-one says "I want to be the best singer", they all break up when they get a taste of fame .. turning up at an opening night or seeing Cheryl's infinity pool and they go "this is what I want" .. yeah, sure, it would be nice to have an infinity pool and to be totally adored by roomsful of hormones. I'm sure that wasn't there for my generation. That underlying obvious assumption simply wasn't there. We just wanted not to go to the local factory, our dream was to follow our noses and get a job where we could do something we enjoyed.; That's progress, I'm not complaining about that. I'm trying to split out how wanting to be famous isn't selling, and how selling is bad when everyone wants to do it.; OK, I think it's not selling, it's wanting. It's not selling if you want it. A zillion young people on YouTube wondering what to watch next. And, there's nothing to buy from Shane, so that's not selling.; (Being known is worth something, he's selling (himself), the paycheck comes later).; PS. Everyone getting behind Rage Against the Machine to give Simon Cowell a bloody X Factor nose. That's not been set up by Rage Against The Machine's publishers has it? Blur v Oasis. Punk and Maclaren. To sell more records? Nah. Couldn't be. Ah, here you go.
Improved copy: 10 December 2009: Marketing by numbers: As a test, I improved the copy (writing) for one product on an ecommerce website a couple of weeks ago. Stripping out the overall growth of the website for Christmas, they now have 50% more search traffic to that page. Pageviews to that product page on the site are up by 2.37 times, and the visitors who see the page are spending twice as long on the site as previously.; The new copy didn't take too long to improve, so it's exciting to think what the effect would be of improving every page (there are 300 products now, but potentially lots more without losing quality).; So that's the power of copywriting, and I don't even think that's the best I could do .. I only set out to make a single pass through the text to see the effect.
Longer term growth: 1 December 2009: Marketing by numbers: When you're working with clients with relatively low traffic volumes (in this case maybe 15 visits per day) it's hard to play some of the games you'd like to. If you make a change, you've a long wait before sufficient visitors arrive for you to judge your work, and because the client's only getting 15 visitors a day they are obviously keen to see some quick improvements so you can't hang around.; So I thought I'd cheer myself up by looking at the longer term and a full quarter, comparing this client's performance for September through November last year to this year. We've been working solidly together for longer than that, and I can't claim all the gains by any means because the offer's improved for a start. But here's the difference.; If we take my starter-for-ten goal, which is to improve traffic by 25%, conversion by 25% and loyalty (long term sales) by 25% (1.25 * 1.25 * 1.25 = 1.95 which is almost double the business), then for this client over the year, traffic has increased by 1.55, conversion from new visitors by 2.06 and return visitors by 1.83*, making 1.55 x 2.06 x 1.83 = 5.84, ie. almost a six times growth in their online business (*I put it that way because I get confused about percentages, an increase of 55%, or an increase by 155%?).; This is in a business where I personally feel like it's an uphill struggle because it's a highly competitive market, so every gain I make is matched or bettered by the competition. I feel like I'm running to stand still, yet actually we're making gains like that.; Have you thought about how far you've come in the last ten years? Just think what you were doing ten years ago. Really, go get a cup of tea and sit back for a minute and picture it. Are you in the same house? Same job? Same country even? How was your environment? Were you on the Internet? What were your interests? In ten years a lot can change. The exercise is designed to show that we underestimate our ability to change where we will be in ten years time, but overestimate what we can achieve next week. Once you've realised how completely different your life was ten years ago, you're mentally free to design your new life for ten years hence.; Well here's an exercise for you. What if you had six times the business in just one year's time?