e-Commerce Archives - Page 2 of 5

eBay Hacks

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

eCommerce tips and tricks for auction success

eBay is one of the big eCommerce success stories – a giant marketplace where over 20 million goods of all description are being bought and sold at the astonishing rate of $680 every second of the day. You can buy and sell almost anything. Some people buy what others throw out at knock-down prices, then re-sell the same stuff at a profit – and actually make a living doing so. David Karp’s book is not just a user’s manual – though it does show you how to use the system. And the hack in his title refers to making the best of its features to improve your trading. He explains how to use and improve search terms to find what you’re looking for.

He also includes Perl scripts for those enthusiasts who want to take their buying and selling strategies to a more serious level. There’s an amazing amount of detail on how to operate the bidding system, including tips on what’s called ‘sniping’ – making a killer bid just before an auction closes. All this is advice based on first-hand experience. He’s a seasoned buyer and seller, and he even reveals some of the mistakes he has made.

There is a dizzying array of checks and balances to promote fairness and minimise cheating on eBay. The auction process works through interlocking systems of trust, public feedback, posted reputations, and third-party arbitration for any disputes.

He deals with an amazing range of skills: page design, eCommerce payments and banking, digital photography, scripting (if you want to maximise control) public relations (dealing with buyers or sellers) and mail order techniques for shipping items you sell.

Finally, for those who want to open a serious business, he explains the steps for running a full time store on eBay. You can also join their affiliate program and ‘make money whilst you are asleep’.

You might want to start with just a little part-time hobby, or you could become a serious eCommerce day-trader. Either way, everything you need to know about taking part in the world’s biggest auction is covered here.

The latest edition has been completely revised and updated to make use of an array of new tools and features, as well as to reflect the changes in the eBay API, eBay’s policies, and the general practices of its increasingly sophisticated users.

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David A. Karp, eBay Hacks: 100 Industrial-strength tips and tools, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2nd edn, 2005, pp.447, ISBN: 059610068X

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eBay the smart way

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

selling, buying, and profiting on the Web’s #1 auction site

The Internet has thrown up lots of new possibilities for commerce, and one which has exploded in the last eighteen months is online auctions. This is the car boot sale principle writ large. People are making a living – if not fortunes – buying cheap and selling as dear as the market will stand. Vendors describe their goods on an auction house website, and buyers register their bids. At its best, everybody wins. Sellers get more profit than they would in the bricks-and-mortar second-hand market, and the buyer gets a cheaper price. The person who makes most of course is the auction house, because it gets a cut of the transaction.

There are lots of auction houses, but Joseph Sinclair’s guide concentrates on eBay because it is the biggest and most successful. In July 1999 eBay had over two million items for sale in over 1,600 categories, and it was receiving over 50 million hits per day on its site. That’s an awful lot of traffic, and it’s quite obvious from his account that if you want to win in buying or selling, you need to know how it all works. There are four types of auction, and they can last for three, five, or seven days, usually producing a flurry of bidding towards the last few hours.

The system is obviously wide open to abuse and fraud, all of which Joseph Sinclair confronts quite frankly. Some people send duff goods, others fail to pay for them. Many, many pages are devoted to the problems, and by midway through the book auctions seemed to me like a legal minefield. But eBay has built into its interface a complex system of public feedback, checks, complaints, and an ‘About Me’ system in which commercial reputations can be built up via honest transactions – or lost via sloppiness or corruption. He also claims that online criminals are more easily caught than offline, because they are easier to trace.

It’s interesting that the online auction system brings all the previously ‘hidden’ disputes over problematic transactions out into the open. They certainly do go on in daily terrestrial commerce, but others don’t normally see them or even hear about them However, he includes advice on withdrawing an item from auction, withdrawing a bid, or disagreeing over a transaction. It’s quite obvious that he knows the system very well, and anyone feeling inclined to snap up bargains would do well to follow his advice.

As you can probably imagine, this new form of trading has throw up its own weird jargon – including terms such as ‘feedback solicitation’, ‘bid shielding’, ‘bid siphoning’, and ‘shill feedback’. He explains most of the terms, but I think a glossary would have been useful.

The book is quite an interesting market product in its own right. Huge margins, wide line-spacing, only 200 words per page, a sub-heading for almost every paragraph, and page layout kept brutally simple. Perhaps this is a sign of book production which has been influenced by the design of web sites? Oh, and it’s also quite cheap.

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Joseph T. Sinclair, eBay the smart way: selling, buying, and profiting on the Web’s #1 auction site, New York: Amacom, 1999, pp.418, ISBN: 0814470645

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Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide for businesses, innovative and creative individuals

Anybody involved in a creative project – particularly where a number of people are involved – knows that an early question will always be raised: “Who owns the intellectual property rights?” Or you could be selling widgets, only to find that another company has started doing the same thing. Can you sue them – or are they more likely to sue you? The product can be a manufactured object, it could be a service, or an ‘intellectual asset’. It could be designing a company web site, running a training course, writing a product guidance manual, devising a manufacturing process, or putting on a television programme.

History is littered with cases of people who assumed that they had the rights to something they had written or produced – only to find the profits from their labours taken by somebody else. This book is a straightforward guide to all the information and legal advice you will need to guard your rights to intellectual property. It’s written by a practising barrister who specialises in giving advice to individuals and small businesses. Jane Lambert is obviously committed to helping people in the creative industries, and this is even reflected in the fact that she takes the trouble to write a book on legal matters in a style which is readily understandable – and quite entertaining.

She starts with two useful glossaries of intellectual property terms – moral rights, passing off, intellectual assets, and the differences between copyright and patent. These are followed by quite an engaging scenario in which someone seeks legal advice on the copyright to household decorations which are being made in China and imported.

The explanations being given illustrate how an apparently simple case is fraught with all sorts of legal complexities. It’s amazing to learn how different laws and conventions apply to different types of product. Copyright for imaginative fiction is seventy years after the author’s death for instance, whereas for industrial design it’s twenty-five years, and a patent only lasts for twenty.

Jane Lambert is a big fan of the Internet, and full web addresses are given for all her sources of information. She explains the common cases of protecting brands and domain names, as well as trademark infringement – against which the UK legal system offers quite strong protection. However, it’s important to realise that the law may differ in countries outside Europe and the USA, and that in some places copying somebody else’s work may not be regarded as illegal.

Having explained the rights in IPR, she then goes on to cover the resolution of disputes which arise in the courts over issues of ownership. And even though she earns her living in a practise which specialises in such cases, she warns against using the system unless it is absolutely necessary – both because it is so expensive and because disputes can often be resolved outside it. She also explains how the whole system of civil procedures was reformed ten years ago (by Lord Chief Justice Woolf).

But if you really do want to prosecute a case she explains the procedure – which usually begins with a ‘cease and desist’ letter. It should not begin with any form of threats or bullying – because such actions can themselves result in prosecution.

The legal system now requires both claimant and defendant to show that they have done everything to seek resolution and not made matters worse. In the event that agreement cannot be reached, there are a number of forms of arbitration and adjudication which can be followed.

And if all else fails, and you end up in a court of law, she explains how court cases are conducted, who decides what, and how the best cases can be made. As she explains as an aside, many people falsely believe that the success of a case depends up some form of brilliant court room oratory (as in movies). But the truth is more prosaic: it depends largely upon a well-researched and carefully prepared case – which costs time, money, and skill.

But in the event that you might need them, she also offers some templates for standard letters used in making claims and defences – as well as tips on preparing your strongest case. This is a sane, humane, and very readable account of a very complex set of issues. Anyone contemplating an entry into this arena would do very well to prepare themselves by taking her advice.

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Jane Lambert, Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights, London: Gower, 2009, pp.164, ISBN: 0566087146

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Enterprise 2.0

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how social media will change the future of work

The title of this book combines two coded terms – Web 2.0 and ‘The Enterprise’ – for which read social media software’ and Big Business. And the purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS, and social bookmarking) can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in what was previously thought of as secretive, competitive businesses.

It’s an argument which is fast becoming quite familiar. To succeed in modern business, managers and directors must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff. They need to be more agile in their thinking, less monolithic in their practices, and they need to catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight [look what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica] and create multi-billion pound enterprises almost as quickly [Amazon, Google].

Niall Cook realises that there will be problems and resistance to such suggestions from within orthodox business communities. But he also points to their existing weaknesses.

Companies spend millions of dollars installing information and knowledge management systems, yet still struggle with the most basic challenges of persuading their employees to use them.

Will it be difficult to persuade large organisations to adopt these very democratic tools? He offers case studies from companies such as the BBC, IBM, Microsoft, and BUPA and others to show that it might. He even makes a case for the use of instant messaging and social presence software (MSN and Twitter).

He also has an example of the US Defence Intelligence Agency using mashups to provide simultaneous streams of information through a single interface (because that’s what its users want), and a multinational software company using Facebook as an alternative to its own Intranet (because its employees use it more).

He gives a very convincing example of the creation of a wiki running alongside the company Intranet in a German bank. The IT staff started using the wiki to generate documentation, and within six months use of the Intranet was down 50%, email was down 75%, and meeting times had been cut in half.

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions – including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietary systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them – and are free.

Is the embracing of social software solutions likely to take place any time soon? Well, Cook has some interesting answers. His argument is that these developments are already taking place. Smart companies will catch on, and obstructors will fall behind with no competitive edge.

Bear in mind that within just five years, members of the MySpace generation are going to be entering the workforce, bringing their collaborative tools with them. If you don’t have the software that allows them to search, link, author, tag, mashup, and subscribe to business information in the ways they want to, they are going to do one of three things: use third party software that does; leave to join a competitor that does; not want to work for you in the first place.

Even the software solutions in this radical, indeed revolutionary development, must be fast, light, and quick to implement.

Speed and flexibility. Oracle’s IdeaFactory took just a few days to build. Janssen-Cilag’s wiki-based Intranet was purchased, customised, and launched within two weeks.

This is all part of what Peter Merholz in his recent Subject to Change calls agile technology. Cook provides strategies for those who wish to implement these ideas within their own company – and it has to be said that he assumes a certain degree of subversiveness might be necessary.

The book ends with a review of the literature on social software and a comprehensive bibliography – so anyone who wants to pursue these matters at a theoretical level has all the tools to do so. But I suspect that anybody who is taken with these new ideas – if they have any blood in their veins – will immediately want to go away and put them into practice.

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large. I can think of two organisations I am working with right now (one a university, the other a large city college) who ought to be implementing these ideas but who are doing just the contrary – stifling innovation. One, following its culture of ‘no change’ has just been swallowed up by its rival. The other is running onto the financial rocks precisely because it refuses to learn from its users and its own staff – whilst claiming to do just the opposite.

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Niall Cook, Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work, London: Gower, 2008, pp.164, ISBN: 0566088002

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FREE: The Future of a Radical Price

August 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business

FREE is Chris Anderson’s follow-up to his best-selling and very influential book The Long Tail. In his first book he discussed

the new shape of consumer demand, when everything is available and we can choose from the infinite aisle rather than just the best-seller bin. The abundant marketplace of the Long Tail was enabled by the unlimited ‘shelf space’ of the Internet, which is the first distribution system in history that is as well suited for the niche as for the mass

This new book explores the logical consequences of the digital revolution in terms of storage space becoming virtually unlimited, the transfer of bits being more or less costless, and the new economic models of ecommerce driving the price of (some) products downwards. That is, down towards and including zero. he discusses all aspects of the term ‘free’. That’s free as in beer, speech, gifts, offers, and so on. How can an airline company afford to give away free flights, or a telephone company offer free mobile phones?

The answer is that they make their profits selling peripheral services – such as an expensive in-flight coffee or premium call charges. At first it seems to be a contradictory, topsy-turvy world, but the closer you look at the details and take note of the implementations, the more sense it makes.

His approach is thorough. He looks at the history of ‘Free’ (which goes back further than you might think) and then presents recent examples which illustrate the fact that when a price gets low enough, collecting the income from it may not be worthwhile, and you might make more money by giving it away. In fact many companies make a profit precisely because they offer a free version of their products alongside a ‘paid-for’ version. He cites the example of an open source hardware company:

This is why Free works so well in conjunction with Paid. It can accommodate the varying psychologies of a range of consumers, from those who have more time than money to those who have more money than time. It can work for those who are confident in their skills and want to do it themselves, and for those who aren’t and want somebody to do it for them. Free plus Paid can span the full psychology of consumerism.

There are a couple of in-depth case studies. One shows how Microsoft first ignored then was forced to face up to the threat posed by Linux open source operating systems. Microsoft has now developed its own open source research centre. The other is a pure case of storage costing that shows how Yahoo beat off the threat of Google G-Mail by offering even greater amounts of free space for storing emails.

I was glad to see that in a chapter on new media and new models of distribution he included the traditional printed book. Sure enough, his own book FREE is available gratis as an online download, but like most readers, I was prepared to pay for a printed version I could read by the pool.

The other examples he offers provide fascinating glimpses into the new economics of new media. Musicians such as Radiohead and Prince gave away the whole contents of their latest CDs, but in the end they made record-breaking profits – from concert performances or special editions and deluxe box sets of the same CDs.

He even makes out a reasonable case for piracy in China and Brazil. Western musicians might not agree, but local artists tolerate it because it acts as a form of free publicity : they make their money on concert appearances and sales from merchandising.

He also refutes all the common objections to the case he is making – such as ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’, and ‘No cost = No value’. The fact is that the lunch may be paid for by somebody else in exchange for your attention, and the ‘No cost = No value’ argument is completely refuted by the examples of Google and Wikipedia – both free and both highly valued.

But haven’t many people tried to make money from Free, and failed? Yes – they have. And it’s to Anderson’s credit that he looks in detail at the examples which appear to disprove his thesis. But he points to flaws in their economic models and explains why they failed.

Finally, just to drive his points home, he offers checklists of principles to work by, and a list of fifty examples of business models built on Free – all concentrated in his refreshingly cryptic style:

Give away the show, and sell the drinks (strip clubs)
Give away the drinks, and sell the show (casinos)

It’s important to realise that most of his arguments are heavily related to bits, not atoms. Digital products have a tendency to become free, whereas physical objects do not. Motor cars and refrigerators are not likely to be free for a long time yet, but software and online content is definitely heading that way. It will be interesting to see if Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for online newspapers will work. I suspect it won’t. But then, what do I know – I’m not an international media multi-millionaire.

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Chris Anderson, FREE: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing is Changing the Face of Business , London: Random House, 2009, pp.274, ISBN: 1905211481

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Futurize your Enterprise

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

radical advice on customer-centred business methods

David Siegel is a Web design guru who made his name with the best-selling Creating Killer Web Sites. That was a manifesto on graphic presentation: this is his thesis on business strategy and e-Commerce. The message is quite uncompromising – you must pay attention to what your customers want, or be prepared for extinction. He’s a great believer that total de-regulation and the freedom for anybody to trade on line will allow the best ideas and services to prevail. He argues that commercial success in the online world comes from giving things away, letting go of control, networking, and above all in giving customers exactly what they ask for.

At times he becomes slightly Utopian, arguing that Truth will out, and the Little Man will prevail, but he has very direct, practical advice for those who want to seriously participate in the new e-Commerce. For instance, he suggests that you ditch voice mail:

It’s slow, retrieval is cumbersome, it can’t be skimmed, it’s almost impossible to annotate, it doesn’t take attachments, it can’t be archived easily, and it doesn’t tie into any other kind of system. Voice mail may be useful for some things, but switching to e-mail will pay off quickly.

He takes what sometimes seems like a New Age approach in expecting business executives to become altruists, to empower their employees, and even to give away time, effort, and information. Yet there does seem to be some logic to all this in the odd new world of e-commerce. It’s also good that he draws his illustrative examples from a wide variety of businesses.

His advice is aimed at big businesses, but the underlying principles will be equally applicable to small start-ups or individual entrepreneurs. It will be of most use to those people who realise that the Internet offers a new way of doing business, but can’t quite see how it could be realised.

He also throws out plenty of practical tips – such as the suggestion that most web sites could be improved by the use of plain English. This is because “most companies communicate using the passive rather than the active voice … and copywriters sanitize their corporate communications until they become meaningless … most web sites are full of jargon”

The latter part of the book contains eight business case studies – companies selling health foods, magazines, steel, real estate, books, and such. He analyses where they are going wrong in their web strategies; how they should make closer contact with their customers; and how they can change their behaviour to survive in the New Age. Unfortunately, these are all hypothetical companies, so his arguments are seriously weakened. With Siegel’s resources, he could surely have given real case studies, which would have been infinitely more convincing to his case.

So, like his killer web sites book, this one is full of thought-provoking ideas expressed in an energetic and ‘committed’ style. There’s quite a lot of generalization and wish-fulfilment too – but on the whole anyone who is interested in e-commerce and web-based business will profit from considering what he has to offer.

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David Siegel, Futurize your Enterprise: Business Strategy in the Age of the e-Customer, London/New York, John Wiley, 2003, pp.318, ISBN: 0471357634

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Go It Alone!

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the streetwise secrets of self-employment

I bought this book on the strength of enthusiastic reader reviews at Amazon – and I was right to do so! It’s written as a guide and confidence-booster for those people who have decided to start their own businesses and embrace self-employment. It’s written in a lively, fast-paced style which makes for entertaining reading and what I liked was that Geoff Burch makes important distinctions between essentials. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean making lots of money or creating a huge business empire. It might mean working for a couple of days a week, then having the rest of the time off for gardening, family, or golf – whatever takes your fancy. In other words success is not always equal to wealth. There are other ways of defining it.

And without being naively optimistic, he points out both the advantages of being self-employed and the many opportunities which exist to create your own work. Surrounded as we are by universally bad service, all the new entrepreneur has to do is offer prompt and good quality service with a smile, and he’ll put the old traders under pressure. This is something the eBay and Amazon traders are doing right now. Take the order, send a confirming email within minutes, and get the goods into the next post in a padded bag.

He also explains those small-but-important issues which most business self-help guides would not think to cover. Where do you meet clients for business meetings when your office is in your back-bedroom? What do you say when the bank tries to force you to open a business instead of a personal account? What title do you give yourself and think of yourself as, when your duties run from executive decision-making down to taking letters to the local post office?

He comes up with all sorts of practical, matter-of-fact advice for anybody planning to start up their own business – much of it common sense, but only if you have the benefit of experience. You don’t need an ‘office’; you probably don’t need lots of equipment such as printers and fax machines, and office furniture. You shouldn’t take out bank loans, and you should never mortgage your house. If you want to survive as a self-employed guerilla, the secret is “Travel light, live off the land, and strike from the shadows”

Don’t recreate your old working environment. The last thing you will need is a hat stand.
Develop the virtual office, the virtual car, and virtually anything else you need.
Don’t let your clients know that you are enjoying yourself. It might make them jealous.

This not just for those who want to set up their own businesses. It’s for people who are about to be made redundant; people who face early retirement; people who want a part-time job; and people who are already self-employed but who want to feel more confident and hold their heads up high.

I wish I had read this book ten years ago when I first set up my own company. I might not be any richer today, but I know I would have felt more confident that I was doing the right thing – and more importantly, going about it in the right way.

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Geoff Burch, Go It Alone!, London: Harper-Collins, 1997, pp.203, ISBN: 0722534604

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Google Advertising Tools

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

e-commerce strategies and web site optimisation

If you want to make money out of your web site, Google Advertising Tools is the best guidance manual I have come across for a long time. Ignore the title: it’s not just about Google. Harold Davis deals with all the routes you can go down to generate income from pages you put on line. The advice is clearly coming from someone who knows all the systems as a practitioner. He covers good web design principles, how to understand search engines, website optimisation, and e-Commerce in general, as well as the detail of hitching your web wagon to Google’s star via its AdSense and AdWords programs.

I’ve no way of knowing what income he generates from his own sites, but everything he says in this book rings true to me, and I have been working at e-Commerce reasonably well for the last ten years or so. I liked the fact that he lists both the positives and negatives of the strategies he describes. For instance, after telling you how to get recognised by search engines, he provides a long list of tricks and sharp practices which you should avoid, because they are likely to get you black listed.

It should be said that there’s very little HTML coding and no graphic design strategy on offer here. This is to do with e-Commerce policy and good web design practices.

But of course because Google’s AdSense program is the biggest and most successful of the advertising programs, he does go through this extensively. He shows you how to sign up, how to choose the options that will work best for your site, and how to tweak everything to get the best results. He even goes into the fine details of such things as customising the colour of the ads which will appear on your pages, and filtering out competitive ads.

I was glad he explained how to interpret all the report data which Google provides every day, because I’ve never got round to working out what it all means. [I have usually been too busy checking the daily earnings.]

Next comes Google advertising viewed the other way round – in what’s called the AdWords program. This is a scheme of paying small amounts for adverts which are served up to people who search on certain key words. You choose the words, and the ads are therefore highly targeted at the people you wish to reach.

Google plays quite fairly with both its AdSense and AdWords customers in these matters. For instance, you can filter out any unwanted ads from your own pages, or indicate any sites on which you don’t want your adverts to appear.

The AdWords process can become quite complex, particularly for people running several advertising campaigns simultaneously. At this point Davis brings in the advantages of the Google application program interface (API). This is a set of tools which allows those with the programming skills to develop software which interacts directly with the AdWords server – thus allowing them to more easily manage their multiple accounts.

So – he takes the e-commerce possibilities in advertising from a fairly simple (but profitable) start, through to a quite sophisticated level. In fact he doesn’t even shy away from devoting a whole chapter to making money from ‘adult’ material en route.

I liked his explanations because they were clear and easy to understand. Everything is spelled out in simple steps, and there’s a screenshot illustrate almost every stage of the processes he describes. All this, and there are lots of web resources and services listed as well, just waiting to be followed up. In fact I have started doing exactly that today.

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Harold Davis, Google Advertising Tools, Sebastopol: CA, 2006, pp.353, ISBN: 0596101082

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Here Comes Everybody

October 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

The classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623

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Homepage Usability

July 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

rigorous examination of 50 big commercial websites

This is the latest broadside from usability guru Jakob Nielsen – well known for his radical and uncompromising views on Web design. It’s a follow-up to his best-selling Designing Web Usability. What he does in Homepage Usability is spell out the basic principles of what makes a Web page efficient – then he applies these principles to fifty commercial sites.

The first part of the book analyses the basic elements of a home page – its name, shape, content, links, navigation, and graphics. His statement of general principles (established with co-author Marie Tahir) includes information design, typography, and navigation, as well as consistency and logic of categorisation.

He makes all this seem perfectly reasonable and almost beyond doubt. This establishes Nielsen’s ‘Guidelines’ – which he then uses as a benchmark against which to dissect a collection of sites – ranging from amazon.com to yahoo.com. In other words, he aims high, and he doesn’t pull his punches.

The analysis is detailed and unsparing – and any Web designer who stays with him through the process will learn a lot. He is keen on simplicity, clarity, minimalism, overt navigation, and lack of visual clutter.

Everything is served up with Nielsen’s customary brio. If you score below 50% on his usability test, he shows no mercy. “Most likely, you should abandon [your] entire current site and start over from scratch”.

There have been criticisms of this approach – for instance, that he assumes an aggressive commercial model as the norm. But what if your site is a walk-through gallery, or a portfolio of work, rather than an e-Commerce site like Ford or Amazon. Surely the same ‘guidelines’ would not apply.

In each analysis he shows the client’s home page and describes it across a double page spread. Just occasionally he might even sprinkle a few words of praise. Then he pulls it apart bit by bit – showing where the designers are going wrong. The secret of his approach is attention to fine detail. He looks at the small print (literally and metaphorically) checking even the font, its size, its colour, and its position on the page.

I think you could argue with some parts of his methodology. For instance, in his statistical breakdown of screen real estate (how much space each topic occupies) he puts portal listings and niche product details into the same category. Then in some cases a list of category links might be rated lowly, whereas in others blatant advertising copy might be rated highly. I don’t think that is consistent, and it doesn’t correspond to the real user experience.

He’s good on conventions for naming. For instance, ‘site contents’ is not the same as ‘site map’ – because web users have quickly got used to certain conventions – the site name at top left, Help top right, and so on. Homepage links to ‘Forum’ for instance don’t mean much – even though the information beneath them might be quite valuable. These are valuable insights.

This is an attractive and well-illustrated book. Don’t be put off by the front cover – which makes it look like a home improvements catalogue. It’s is a serious workbook for Web designers at all levels. Anybody who wants to keep abreast of Web design and e-Commerce should read Nielsen – even if it’s to disagree with him.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 websites deconstructed, Indianapolis, (Ind): New Riders, 2002, pp.315, ISBN: 073571102X

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