Is history repeating itself?

This is a capture of a recent jokey conversation at Facebook which I was involved in. I have the uneasy feeling that history is making a stab at repeating itself. Right now it appears we have a dotcom bubble getting within sight of bursting point. It may not be such an idiotic and hysteria-driven bubble as the one a decade or more ago, but it may yet prove to be an even more tragic crash because of the stupendous amounts of money being thrown around. Ten years is about half of recorded history in Internet terms, so I guess a large number of today's players were too young to notice the first time. Their elders should know better. A bit of quiet reflection might be in order.

(If the images are too small to read, click on each to enlarge)

How to Auto-tweet Calendar Events

Generally speaking auto-tweeting is not a good idea. Your followers on Twitter will be thoroughly turned-off when they discover your tweets are impersonal and robotic. In a word, they will be seen as spam, nothing more. Auto-tweeting naturally falls into a similar numb category to auto-following based on a keyword.

However, that is not the whole story. There are a number of circumstances when auto-tweeting is the perfectly acceptable and time-saving solution. One of these circumstances is calendar events. What better way to provide your followers with useful information about your activities than have your public calendar tweet event reminders automatically? This must be useful for a huge range of individuals and business types: a musician tweeting tour dates and a cinema tweeting programme changes; companies announcing which exhibitions or trade shows they are attending, and university departments, societies and clubs of all kinds posting event dates and fixtures.

Automatic calendar event tweets can be the sole output of a particular Twitter account if it is made perfectly clear in the bio that that is the modus operandi, and you feel that that is the best way to serve your purpose. However, I suspect that in most cases these kind of tweets best form just a part of the output.

Back in the middle of 2009 I wrote a piece call "Do a bit of plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes." It described two methods of producing an On This Day In History type feed for a learned history society, the Crimean War Research Society. The first method was by iframe and javascript, the second used RSS and Yahoo! Pipes. Since then I have set the whole thing up on a Google Calendar and processed it so that every event is posted at Twitter. It works very well as an illustration of the method described below.


This method for auto-calendar event tweeting is not unique to me or Glanton and there are other ways of doing it. However, this is the method I find most satisfactory. One side-effect of the process is the creation of a blog of all the automated events (to which the auto-tweets link) which can in turn be automatically processed further - for example with geo-location.

The method involves using a Google Calendar with email reminders, Googlemail and Google Blogger, plus Twitterfeed. For simplicity and to keep control of the process I recommend setting up a unique Google account to handle the calendar, mail and blog. You can always import other calendars into the main one, and having another Google account gives you an extra lump of potentially very useful cloud storage space.

When setting up the Google account I suggest choosing an esoteric or even coded name - remember this account is not intended to handle emails other than those generated by the calendar and you don't need punters trying to use it as way of contacting you. Similarly shut down the profile of the Google account to the barest minimum. Whatever you do, you will get some spam in the inbox of course, so you will need to visit the email account every so often to perform housekeeping tasks.

Now, using your new Google account, set up the blog at Blogger. Like the calendar, this part of the system is public: it is where people will come when they click on the shortened URL in the tweets. Each tweeted event will have its own blog post, or rather each reminder from the calendar will be posted at the blog, which in turn will be tweeted by Twitterfeed.

Next, start populating the calendar with one or two events. Set up the reminder(s) for each event, and also the location if relevant. Make sure you put concise details of the event in the title field as this is the bit that will get tweeted along with a link to the blog post. Remember that it is only 140 characters long and will always be preceded by Reminder: , which is 10 characters including the space, and will have details and shortened url for the link to the blog stuck on the end. So it is best to keep the title to around 50-60 characters, or at least get the important information in that space, because anything over that will be chopped off.


Each reminder will be tweeted, so think about what is going to be the most effective sequence for each event. If geo-location is relevant, add the event location and check to see if it gives you the right map. If not, edit it until you get the right response. (Clearly if the event is to take place in Conference Room 101 at Head Office, then you just need the location of Head Office.)

So you can see the whole system working, I suggest setting up a dummy or test event only a matter of a couple of hours or less into the future so you can check it all works.

Now go to 'Settings' in your intergrated account blog. Click the 'Email & Mobile' tab and then look at 'Posting Options' (see below). What I have changed to 'account-name' will show as the first part of your Google account name. In the field that I have changed to pink you will be invited to enter the 'secret words' part of your special posting email address. When filled in, make a note of it and 'Save Settings'.


Next, return to the email account armed with this special blog-posting email address. Set up forwarding by creating a filter: click 'Settings', 'Filters' and the 'Create a new filter'. Fill in the Subject field just like this below and click 'Next step'. (Every email from the calendar will have 'Reminder' in the subject field, so it is a good choice of keyword. However, if you can guarantee to always use an even more esoteric word in the event title field - perhaps the initials of your company - then you could use that instead.)


Fill in 'Forward to' with your special blog-posting email address and click 'Save filter. You CAN set up forwarding using the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' facility, but that will forward every incoming email straight to the blog and you don't want to risk those few spam mails that get in your inbox being blogged and then tweeted! That would be very confusing for your followers, and excessively generous of you towards the spammers.



Now you need a Twitterfeed account. Set up a new feed to catch every new post from the blog's RSS feed and send it to your Twitter account. Use the 'Advanced Settings' to tweet 'title only' and make sure 'Post Link' is ticked.


Don't forget that you can have Twitterfeed do the same for other blogs too: tweet a reminder that there is a new post at any of your blogs. And you can have Twitterfeed post to Facebook too, if that is your game. (In fact this is one of the best ways to keep an FB page appearing fresh). Other end services offered are StatusNet and Hellotxt, either or both of which could be the right place to send your calendar event reminders, depending on your particular circumstances. The possibilities are endless - but work out what is best for you and your audience, rather than over-egg the job by trying everything! Consider also that in the next year or two there is almost certainly going to be a big shake-down and streamlining of Social Media apps: the same services - in fact more - will be available, but they will be provided by fewer companies and sites.

If you would like to see a simple calendar event tweet set-up in action, go here to the blog and here to the Twitter account. This is the one I set up for the history society mentioned at the top of this piece. It tweets one or more events per day from the Crimean War, covering the period of the war, 1853-1856. There is at least one event for every day of the year, and every event has a map location. The calendar is set up to repeat every event every year ad infinitum and send out the reminder just before the event. The Twitter account also receives irregular and infrequent automatic posts when the society's website is updated, plus occasional manual tweets about new books and Crimean War related websites. I hope it acts as inspiration!

Information paywalls: betrayal of the World Wide Web’s first principles, or realistic necessity?

This post is a follow-up to John Royle’s and my posts about News International’s decision in the summer of 2010 to charge for online access to The Times and Sunday Times.

What are the issues surrounding information paywalls? To be absolutely clear - I am not talking about ordinary ecommerce: buying a new book from Amazon; having a bouquet of flowers sent to your mother through Interflora (FTD); paying for a software download, or web hosting services. Everybody understands that goods and services bought online are just the same as goods and services bought in a bricks & mortar shop or by snailmail order. You might quibble about the relative charges, but they are straightforward commercial transactions.

No, this is about information - a far slipperier beast than any DVD, bunch of carnations or tin of baked beans. Potentially ephemeral and transient, or timeless - eternal even. Valueless to some; priceless to others.

Right now, in November 2010, this blog post is worth nothing at all. Nix. Niente. Tipota. Zilch. Just possibly in a few hundred years, in the unlikely event it still exists in some retrievable digital form, a researcher of the 21st Century World Wide Web may consider paying for access to it as part of a bigger package of relevant archived material. Or perhaps I am flattering myself. But I like to think not. If it doesn’t sound too pompous, in my experience all old manifestations of the written word have some value to somebody, somewhere, sometime.

So what characteristics bestow monetary value on digital information? Is it simply age? And how old is old?

Certainly age is a very important factor. No one (except perhaps Rupert Murdoch) can pretend that up-to-the-minute general news stories, comment and advertisements – in other words most of the content of hardcopy newspapers – can possibly be hidden behind a paywall when presented online. Advertising is free by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be advertising. And advertising is already used online to generate some income from otherwise ‘free’ information. Everybody knows “Comment is free” – this blog is effectively ‘comment’ and we certainly wouldn’t have the bare-arsed cheek to try and charge for it. And as for real general news stories they are available ‘free’ (plus ads, see above) from so many online sources it must be extremely hard to justify charging for your particular version of the story, because your version should be almost identical to everybody else’s if you have all got the facts right - er, shouldn't it? And everybody else’s is free. And remember that most stories, apart from genuine exclusives, originate with a limited number of sources anyway.


But when news is old news it becomes archived. Literally ‘yesterday’s news’. That expression normally means something is ‘old hat’, passé, worthless. In fact the very opposite is true. Such is the demand for history, both old and recent, that the keepers of newspaper archives who have digitalised their collections at considerable expense have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people prepared to cross paywalls for access. And whether it is newspaper archives, or all kinds of old records for which major expense has been incurred in the digitalisation process, then a paywall is fair and justified. (Not everybody can afford to be as magnanimous as Google Books and provide online versions of hundreds of thousands of old books ‘free’. And bless them for it.)

The Lancet - clearly a specialist information paywall:

But up-to-date specialist news is quite a different matter from general news and comment. Business and financial news is a good example. Ordinary newspapers do contain business pages of course. However, if you are prepared to pay for business and financial news online, are you going to subscribe to a general newspaper or are you going to subscribe to a specialist like the Financial Times? Obvious really, but yes, the Financial Times online - specialist - is doing rather well; News International’s London Times online - general - is doing rather poorly by all accounts.


But what has happened to the “free access for all” concept of the World Wide Web? Well, it is still there, don’t worry! It has only acquired a certain amount of realism. There are still millions of amateurs (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense) out there spending their evenings and weekends posting information to websites – available free to anyone with an internet connection and a relatively enlightened government. But anyone of those amateurs will tell you that it is quite hard work and time-consuming. They know that as an individual, or part of a small group, they don’t have the clout to tackle big digitalisation projects. Realistically therefore, big projects involving one very large collection of information can only be undertaken by, or on behalf of the keepers of the collection, and that means business. And money.


There are exceptions of course. Wikipedia I hear you shout. Quite right, but it works because it is only an aggregation of all of those millions of amateurs, all doing their small piece of the whole. It is actually just like the old multi-volume hardcopy encyclopaedias: numerous contributors each covering their own specialist subjects. But even so, Wikipedia is such an enormous beast it does need money to keep it alive: the amateur maintaining his small, but valuable family history site, say, can stand the cost of 50 megabytes of server space. Wikipedia is different! If they are to avoid selling advertising space or selling access through subscriptions, then they must continue to seek donations.


I haven’t said anything about copyright. Copyright exists in a different dimension to value. Sometimes they overlap, but neither guarantees the other in the mind of the potential buyer. Copyright is useless without value.

To take you back to the beginning of this piece: it belongs to me – technically I hold the copyright, and, just like the journalist at The Times newspaper, I am paid to write it. In my case it is as part of a package I sell to Glanton. But you are never going to pay for this post in the lifetime of that copyright. And anyway, the whole blog in itself acts as a kind of oblique advertisement for Glanton. If Glanton didn’t exist, this blog post would never have been written. And if my imaginary researcher (in the year 2525) has actually paid for access, then it is only because the provider has gone to the trouble and expense of aggregating and storing blog posts from more than 500 years ago, and the researcher (Just in case: “Hello there! And sorry about the links and images: I guess they are all broken by now.”) believes there is value in buying access. I hope it was worth it.



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Welcome to the paid-for web: a contrary view

I disagree with my colleague John Royle about his post Welcome to the paid-for web. Or rather, I have a slightly different take on the significance and certainty of the events he describes.

I believe that tacit in his description of Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites is the assumption that the said news organisation and newspapers are actually important in a web news context.

There is no denying that News International is big and powerful as a print news organisation. And there is no denying that the London Times was once thought of as The Thunderer - THE Upmarket British newspaper; how Britain saw itself and the rest of the world, and essential reading for 'top' people everywhere and perceived as a source of sound information and steady, sensible opinion. However, that reputation has been steadily eroded in the decades since Murdoch bought the paper. Eroded to such an extent that for a number of years now it has been only half-jokingly referred to as "The Broadsheet Currant Bun" - a mildly scurrilous Cockney Rhyming Slang comparison to its stablemate at News International, the infamous and unapologetically downmarket redtop tabloid, The Sun.

Of course there is a lot of oohing and aahing at the moment about The Times and The Sunday Times charging for content because, well, it is a change. But I don't believe it is a very significant change; nor do I believe those newspapers' online presence is either important in a global web context, or would be greatly missed if it was to disappear completely. Generally speaking, I don't think there is any particular loyalty amongst online news consumers: one source disappears, another starts to charge - "oh well, never mind, forget them, let's move on. There is plenty more out there."

I believe online news is so big, so diverse, so instantaneous, and online news grazing so endemic and habit-forming that the majority of online consumers will soon forget about Murdoch's newspapers - if indeed they ever knew they existed. Yes, he may well get his 10% of current visitors to sign up (though my guess is it will be slightly less) and that small percentage almost entirely consist of libraries and universities along with journalists and commentators from other news organisations who need to have their fingers on every pulse - however weak. The few readers of The Times who still care deeply about their favourite newspaper are I believe almost exclusively confined to those who buy the print at the railway station kiosk or have it drop through the letterbox every morning. If you have paid for hardcopy you are not very likely to worry too much about any online version, one way or the other.

Based on the above, I don't believe everybody is going to cling to Murdoch's shirt tails and move to pay-for content. Firstly, I think very few will see 'Murdoch's 10%' (if he ever gets even that) as a good result. Nor will the advertisers.



Secondly, there is already a well-established model for charging for online news content: back issue archives. The Times itself, from 1795-1985 inclusive has been totally digitalised and available online in its entirety for nearly ten years now. At a price. And fair enough I say (although currently they only cater for institutional subscriptions, which is bad luck on private individuals without access through a subscribing organisation). Similarly, but more universally available, is the British Library's Colindale Online Newspaper Collection which currently provides total searchable access to 49 local and national titles from 1800-1900.



Surely this already established method is the way for news organisations to deal with their online presence? The everyday, constantly updated, headline and limited article output is to stay free (with any advertising that can be sold attached of course), and the back catalogue of full, uncut issues is available online in an archive at a price. I believe this is the way most newspapers will go. The Scotsman already does this. The Times was doing it too until last week, but they seem not to have realised.



If however, John is right, and print newspapers as a herd all turn to pay-for online content, then they will marginalise themselves in web terms. The massive online news consumer group will simply drift away to specialist online news services or organisations which remain free to view. There will be enough to satisfy every taste everywhere, I am certain.

And as for a general stampede away from free content of value on the web to charging, I suspect the former has been something of a rose-tinted illusion for a considerable time. As I have said, The Times Digital Archive has been online for the best part of ten years, and has only ever been available by subscription. Almost every serious specialist magazine which has an online edition charges for access, and always has done, in my experience.

However, daily news - real news, collected, processed and broadcast on the web on a constantly updating basis, is a different beast altogether. It's diversity, quality and volume may fluctuate, but I believe it will always be free.

So what do I think will befall The Times and The Sunday Times online output and any other national newspapers who do choose to go the same way? Surely they are asking to be treated like specialist magazines, when they are actually quite the opposite. What can they do? Perhaps they should be broken up into specialist departments and subscriptions sold for these new seperate sites on that basis, so that The Times newspaper as a total concept, an entity, no longer exists online.

Will John or I be buying the drinks in 2011? No doubt it will be me whatever happens! ;-)


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Welcome to the paid-for web

Last week saw an event which I believe will go down as one of the most fundamental shifts of the internet age and will mark the end of the honeymoon period we have enjoyed thus far. I'm referring to Rupert Murdoch's News International's decision to start charging for access to The Times and The Sunday Times websites.



From this week you'll pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week. Furthermore he is blocking Google and other search engines from spidering the content - in other words News International content will not legally appear in any news feed or news digest.

The jury's out on whether this will work (Murdoch says he's prepared to lose 90% of visitors so long as the remaining 10% pay) but if it does, and my money says it will, then every single news and newspaper website will follow suit faster than you can believe. If you think about it, it has to happen. Every newspaper in the world is losing money and the web advertising revenue is just too widely spread to fund them.

I know it feels like a shame and we are being hard done by, and at odds with the fundamental perceived principles of the internet, but 'reality bites' and in the current climate every word that someone is paid to write is an asset and who can blame the owners of those assets for profiting from them on the web just as they do in print? There is no reason at all why one medium should cost and the other be effectively free, despite the presence of advertising.

My point is, that once the new News International business model is established then every digital product that has any value and can be distributed over the web will come with a price. My guess is that by mid 2011 it will be the norm. Incidently, did you see that I linked value with cost? Remember that old one?!

Projecting further ahead, I think we'll see a whole new raft of businesses floated who aggregate, summarise, and recommend all these paid-for digital products so that you can make an informed choice before subscribing and keying in your credit card number. These advisory services will, of course, cost you.

Look out too for new technologies to help you protect your new valuable digital assets - RSS blockers, cut and paste stoppers, screen grab disablers.  And if that fails then happy days for the poor cash-strapped lawyers of this world who will be employed to sue anyone re-publishing paid-for content.

Welcome to the new internet world where content costs; gateways rule; and people of our generation look back on the golden age of free access and free material on demand.


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Volcanic Fallout: How Did Your Company Shape Up?

Ongoing air travel and transport chaos in Europe caused by the size of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano has brought the fragility of our express/last-minute/on-demand civilisation into sharp focus and demonstrated just how at-risk our way of life is from natural disaster or catastrophe. It used to be called Act of God. Despite the minimal risk to human life on the mainland of Europe, this event still qualifies as a disaster because of the disruption and the knock-on effects worldwide.

This is not the place to try and sort out the huge problems piling up for Kenyan farmers for example, but we can look at the day-to-day running of our companies - the flow of information within the company and that flow's relationship with the movement and physical interaction of personnel within the company and with customers and clients.

In other words, we should be asking ourselves, "How did we, or how are we shaping up?" in the face of these problems.

This is not a new idea of course. Since the beginning of the Digital Age people have been looking at ways to wire up their businesses better and find ways to make the journeys of company personnel less and less necessary. Every disaster, whether it be local or global, has (or should have) inspired companies affected to re-examine their modus operandi. Unfortunately however, human nature being what it is, good intentions are liable to be forgotten in prolonged times of comfort and relatively easy mass travel. We get sloppy.

The European Volcanic Ash Cloud Disaster has had a very specific victim: jet air transport. Hopefully nobody is dying. Nobody is being made homeless. Or starving. And all telecoms are working normally. But it is beyond our control.

However, one of the things a company can actually control is the movement of its employees and consider whether disrupted journeys were really necessary in the first place. Clearly many journeys are necessary - I don't want to suggest anyone goes the way attempted by George Clooney's character's company in the rather disturbing film Up In The Air. For those unfamiliar with the plot, George Clooney plays a professional 'executioner' working for a company which is employed by other companies to come in and physically make all the redundancies. The result is that George Clooney spends most of his life in the air between appointments to downsize businesses. One of the central themes of the movie is his employer's attempts to do the whole thing by video link from head office, so doing away with George Clooney's travel and the personal and physical face-to-face meeting with the about-to-be-jobless. The scheme is a disaster, and the value of the genuine face-to-face meeting in such trying circumstances is proved.

So any George Clooney characters caught up in the Volcanic Ash Disaster will just have to get on with it the best they can and go to ground until it all blows over. Similarly the likes of the trade exhibition planned months before will just have to be cancelled. And on the customer side I am assuming that you have placed warnings about despatch and delivery times on e-commerce operations you may run.

But what businesses can do is check and overhaul their existing internal online systems and work out which areas could or should be done better.

Some questions:

Does your company have an Intranet?

If so, does it really work properly, and do your employees really use it to its potential? Or is it only used by a few geeky types at head office?

Are you cloud-computing? (Perhaps an unfortunate term under the circumstances). Are your employees able to work effectively from home, a hotel room or the hotspot in an airport?

Do you use Skype for Business?

Do you use Yammer?

Some other internal instant messaging service?

Was your cancelled international business meeting in Frankfurt on 19 April re-arranged with online white boards, screen and file sharing and video? If not, why not?

Do you do most of your in-house training online? (See our image at right).

Now clearly some of these questions cover similar ground and some won't be relevant to particular businesses. But can you put your hand on your heart and say that your company does the best possible job with the tools available online to minimise disruption inside your business in the face of a disaster preventing travel?

Well?


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Customisation or control-freakery?

Those of you accustomed to watching 'free' live sport, football for example, on one of the mildly dodgy TV feed websites, will recognise the following scenario.

You wait for the stream to load and the first thing that happens is the screen is obscured by a click-through advertisement. Sometimes it will be announced that the ad will close in 20 seconds, sometimes you are given a 'close' button after a short interval. You wait patiently for one of these options - well you have to, don't you? You are doing something a bit naughty and for free, so advertisements come with the territory. These ads are liable to reappear at regular intervals throughout the 90 minutes of football.

Presumably - however puzzling you or I might find it - these advertisers are not wasting their money and are getting a return of some sort in visits and sales. You or I might not dream of ever clicking on such an ad, but we recognise that somebody must be.

But now there is a new little comic twist to the process: sometimes when the 'close' button appears, it is not quite what it seems. Presumably controlled by a length of javascript, this button, when approached by mouse, jumps to left or right, committing the slow-of-reaction amongst us to clicking on the pesky advertisement afterall. What is our reaction to this cheap trick? Universally unprintable I would imagine. Do we smile and say, "Oh well, I might as well buy this thing now I am here because these nice people are obviously so proud of their thing that they will try any funny trick to get me to their website" ?? Oh yeah, sure we do.


(This is not necessarily a capture of a jumping 'close' button - it may be one that isn't. However the jumpers look very similar to this.)

So who is responsible for this advertising aberration? Not real advertising people that's for sure. It must come from the techies - the people who wrote the javascript or run the dodgy website. Yes, they are cute and clever, but they apparently know Sweet Felicity Arkwright about advertising or public relations or any basic social skill. Somehow they have managed to sell the trick to the customers wanting to place the ad, who themselves are clearly lacking in advice from real advertising people. The last thing any proper advertising person wants is for the potential customer to be confronted by the product with pre-raised hackles, steam coming out their ears, "Oh shit" on their lips and an automatic and irreversible feeling of antipathy towards the product and all who sail in her. The percentage of potential customers must be pretty small anyway for this kind of click-through advertising - something akin to spam emailing. But with added trickery? Surely any potential must evaporate completely...

Now I have blogged previously about allowing the silver-surfer (or non-surfing) suits with no adeptitude too much power and control over web content and design. But the reverse is also true. Don't let the inept tunnel-vision techies take over the asylum either!

Which brings me nicely, if a teeny-weeny bit unfairly, to Google. Not Buzz, the current number one hot Google topic, but an old standby, Google Books. And not for the usual reasons to do with copyright, access rights, intellectual ownership, commercial interests and so on. No - like the above naff ad trick - this is about bad design, presumably inspired by techie know-how, but little in the way of common sense and logic.

First let me state my position clearly. I am a huge fan of Google Books. The basic concept of scanning and making available - free - online as many complete, out-of-copyright books as they can lay their hands on is one of THE great successes of the digital age. It has long since become a resource without parallel and it grows all the time. When I wear my naval and family history research hats I am constantly aware of how much Google Books has helped my work - so saying it has 'changed my life' is not an exaggeration.

For my research purposes I have a 'Library' at Google Books - literally a bookmarking system. These bookmarks can be divided up into folders, or what they now call 'shelves'. And this is where the problems start.

Not satisfied with simply being an online repository of digitalised books, Google have decided they should ape the likes of Goodreads.com and become a social networking book site too. OK, if people want to use Google Books like that, then fine. However, despite all Google's claims about customisability within users' 'libraries', the SN element has taken over: it is right up front, in-yer-face and unavoidable. They have created five default 'shelves' called 'Favorites', 'Reviewed', 'Reading Now', 'To Read' and 'Have Read'. Yes, you can create your own shelves as well - this is the user customisation part. Currently I have 22 of them. These user-created 'shelves' are customisable to the extent you can make them public or private and, most importantly, delete them if you don't need them anymore.

But the five default 'shelves' are un-deletable. (You can make most of them private - but where's the logic in that?) Furthermore these five 'shelves' are stuck permanently at the top of your list, taking up hectares of extremely valuable real estate on the start page of your 'library'. WHY?

Have a look at the capture of my Google Books 'library' full-size by clicking on the image below:



As you will see, four of my five default shelves are empty. (The other, 'Favorites', Google populates for you automatically.) These shelves will always be empty. I don't want, or have any need to use them. I would like to delete them. What kind of techie control-freakery makes Google think it is cute to lumber me with shelves I am never, ever going to use? The image above left shows the drop-down 'Options' box for the 'Reviewed' un-deletable shelf. It looks just like this for the other four compulsory shelves. Why? Why set something up to be customisable and then remove some of the options? Below left shows what it should look like: this is the drop-down options for user-created shelves with all the options active, including 'delete shelf'.

You can't even make the 'Reviewed' shelf private - what are Google going to do? Order me to review books in my library and ban me from Google Books if I refuse? (Reviews of the books in my particular library would be the most boring of all time: what on earth could I say about Navy Lists, Army Lists, The Annual Register and Parliamentary Papers from the mid 19th Century? And I am certainly not going to mark them up as 'To Read', 'Have Read' or 'Reading Now' as these concepts are completely irrelevant for what is essentially a reference library!)

Yes, of course, if you want to use the social networking aspects of Google Books, then fine. Use them. But how many people are there like me who find this a useless bore? Google may imagine they will get some useful statistics from this set up: perhaps the "Most Read Book" or the "The Book Most Commonly On Users' Shelves, But Left Unread." (Something by Richard Dawkins? - he commented mischievously).

But Google can't force me to fill in those five shelves, so why not let me remove them? Empty shelves are no help for their statistics - other than to show how many people don't want them. And in this day and age of almost infinite customisation possibilities - so well exemplified by the likes of DotNetNuke - it is actually so easy to get it right. Why don't Google Books borrow some ideas from their stablemates, Google Blogger and iGoogle? It is almost as if the Google Books team are working in a vacuum, unaware of what goes in other arms of the business, and the current incarnation of their interface is simply, well, shabby. Real customisation, that's the key.

This Google Books aberration looks to me like a classic example of unjoined dots and ducks not in rows. Somebody has looked at what the techies have suggested and waved it through without any logical scrutiny. Google's defence will no doubt be that Books is still really in 'beta'. But I am sorry that just won't wash: this daft set up has been around for far too many weeks now for them to use that feeble excuse. (And yes, I have filled in a couple of feedback forms in recent weeks pointing out to them just how daft the current set-up is.)

Unless of course Google really does have some sinister ulterior motive and are going to insist that all Google Books Library users tell the world what books they have or haven't read and write reviews of them!

It might seem far-fetched to criticise in the same breath both a darkside and counter-productive advertising trick and the inept counter-customisation design produced by an Internet giant who should, and usually does know better. But when the details are stripped away, it is clear to me that both aberrations have the same distant pedigree: they are the result of too much reliance on techie expertise and a culture of control-freakery, rather than the application of good old marketing common sense.

As I wrote last year in a different attack on bad design, "Don't do it just because you can; do it because you should."

Go to this post's page at www.zinepal.com and get the PDF file or perform various sharing actions.

Good Checkouts...

(or I must be going soft...)

As something of an antidote to my last grumpy post about terrible checkouts (PCWorld.co.uk being such a classic example), I thought I might make a list of my favourite checkouts. Personal and partial, but giving examples of how to do it right.

I started with the idea of collecting a 'top ten' list from among the biggest online retailers, mixed with a personal group of perhaps less well-known sites that I happen to use regularly.

Ten? Some hope. (Bit ambitious aren't we?) Struggling to four, more like.

It seems that all the really big online retailers are prepared to sacrifice following the Ecommerce-guide and Jakob Nielsen's advice and are forcing customers to register before they make their first purchase. Exactly as Nielsen said. I can only think that they have weighed up the pros and cons and have cynically decided that if they stick with the pre-sale compulsory registration method they will eventually groom potential customers into accepting this as the norm. To a very great extent this has already happened of course. And everybody is agreed that there are advantages in registering for regular customers. And those regular customers will forget that they had to "create an account" before their first purchase. (I have been shopping at Amazon for so long I had to visit the site anonymously to remind myself that, yes, you must pre-purchase register there too.)

Before I start the list proper I would like to give honourable mention to Deutsche Bahn's (German Railways) English language site. I just can't get them onto my full list because of other failures - it's tough stuff selling travel tickets online - but they do try. Look at this:

Isn't that a good set of options to give potential customers? I think so.

So, my list will have to include sites that make you pre-register, or I will have virtually no list at all. And yes, good old Amazon is the first on the list. World leader: their website is to online retailing as the BBC is to online news. An industry standard.

Second onto my list is Cafepress.com. They have a good looking site and clean, clear checkout. And look at this:



No stupid 'title' field! (Or 'salutation' as some fools call it: presumably imagining it to be 'PC') Hurrah! Just ask for the name as it appears on the card!

Cafepress do mess things up a little by making you register at the end of the billing process, but all in all they have a nice, easy to use site and checkout.

Third onto my list is one of the giants: Play.com. Yes, they make you register first:



but the site is fresh and easy to use and I like the address and credit card form page:



Single name field again gets a big 'tick', plus a straightfoward postcode checker and recognition that that doesn't always work and only covers the UK. No stress there.

Fourth, and quite simply my favourite checkout anywhere, is that used by the Documents Online service of the UK National Archives. Below are captures of the three simple stages you go through. OK, I concede that they have a much simpler brief than most online checkouts: customers are only buying PDF downloads - there is no messing around with delivery addresses or 'special extras' in the equation. But they don't make you register, though you can if you wish, and as long as your plastic is in order and you have a valid email address, they'll sell to you. The people who designed it clearly have real adeptitude. If only every checkout designer would use this basic example as their starting point!







Finally I can't resist mentioning some comedians - Staples.co.uk. I mean that in the nicest possible way. Staples are one of the very biggest online retailers on the planet. Their UK-based checkout appears fairly unexceptional: yes you must register first, blah blah, and the whole thing works pretty well without being what you might call attractive. But the laugh comes when you get to enter your name. They have a title field, but it's not compulsory (phew!), but wait a minute - it does have a drop-down of choices. See left. Great! Ho ho ho. I want to be a voluntary 'other' please...

How good is your checkout?

Do you have an e-commerce operation? How neglected is your checkout? Is your online shop all wonderful and clever and cute and bang up to date, but with a shopping cart and checkout bolted on to it which looks like the snailmail order form off the back of a magazine - circa 1970?

I first wrote a similar piece more than ten years ago when I was working in e-commerce full-time and had become very frustrated by high-stress, user-unfriendly checkouts. Complacently I supposed everything had changed. For many it has: most e-commerce sites now have a respectable checkout. Most. But many - large businesses included - still have a 'nightmare' bolted onto the end of their attractive, slick and well-oiled shop.

How often do you test your checkout? How often do you survey your customers about its user-friendliness and lack of irritants? And if you do, do you act on the results?

There are some very useful guidelines for e-commerce site designers at the Ecommerce-guide.com. The article was first published in 2006, but is just as important in 2009. With their page about checkouts on half my screen I am going to pretend to run through the buying process of major British online retailer PCWorld.co.uk and see how they shape up. Now you may think it is a little unfair of me to do a hatchet job on just one site. But why not? Everything below exists - or doesn't exist - on their site. Also, space is limited and PCWorld.co.uk's checkout is a very good example of how not to do it... and you never know, this just might persuade them to have a rethink. Incidently, I say 'pretend' to go through the buying process because I know from experience that I can't actually buy anything from them even if I wanted too! (All will be revealed.)

So here we are with our chosen item in the PCWorld.co.uk shopping basket. It is our first time buying from them and we don't want anything else, so we can go straight to the checkout. But wait -

The Ecommerce-guide has the following paragraph in its advice about checkouts:

The Big Bugaboo: Having to Register
Everyone seems to know it - merchants included - but it still causes aggravation on countless checkout pages: When a shopper has to register on a site before buying, it hurts sales. "We know users hate that, and we know it's very error prone," Nielsen [Jakob Nielsen] says. "Requiring registration before or during a purchase drives away business."

Bearing that in mind, let's click on PCWorld.co.uk's checkout button. What do we get? This:


(Image capture courtesy of Snagit - one of our favs here at Glanton Solutions)

Oops. Ooh-dear! Clunk. Fallen at the first. OK, never mind, we really want to buy this thing, so we have to grudgingly click on the purple register button. (Before we move on, just note the perfectly normal selection of 'plastic' logos - implying that we can use any of those cards.) So what do we see first in the registration process? This:


(Another Snagit capture, with the 'title field' drop-down added)

Now the Ecommerce-guide doesn't say anything specifically on its checkout page about offending customers, but it is something of a no-brainer and very important nevertheless. Very important, but it should just happen naturally. It shouldn't need me, or anyone else, to bang on about it. Note that the 'title' field above is compulsory (viz asterisk).

Why?

The only version of a customer's name you actually need to make a sale is the version which appears on their 'plastic'. So give them one field and ask them to fill it in exactly like that. You don't actually need a 'title' field at all. You certainly don't need a compulsory one, and anyone who thinks adding 'Ms' to the bottom of a list of 'Mr', 'Mrs' and 'Miss' makes it inclusive and 'politically correct', is being very smug and needs to drag themselves into the 20th Century, let alone the 21st.

The only acceptable, non-irritating, inoffensive kind of 'title' field is a voluntary one. And blank to boot, so that any entry is user-defined. But it is still amazing just how many compulsory 'title' fields with just this absurdly limited anglo-saxon-centric selection are to be found around the web. Other than identifying gender by the back door - and maybe marital status if your victim is a woman - and getting up a lot of noses, it achieves nothing at all. Comic - if it wasn't tragic.

Now I can hear the customer-information harvesters in marketing departments tut-tutting and asking where are they going to get their info from if they can't force customers to hand it over. Well, we need to make them go and read the Ecommerce-guide and Jakob Nielsen again. If users have a good, hassle-free experience with your online shop they are much more likely to return, and much more likely to sign up to a voluntary registration scheme if they can see clear benefits for so doing. Your voluntary registration can include voluntary questions about gender and marital status if you really think it matters to your business.

Question: What do you want to do?
Answer: Make a sale, silly.
Question: Do you want to risk that sale by making customers give up personal information - information you certainly wouldn't get from a cash sale in a bricks & mortar shop?
Answer: No!
(If yes, then you are in the wrong job.)

Back to our checkout adventure. In reality I might not actually be 'Mr' Thomas Muir, but for the sake of our investigation I will grit my teeth, and move on.

(So what's the score so far? "PCWorld.co.uk - nul points!")

Next up we get this form:



Humph. That's a bit odd. My billing address for Mastercard is in Greece (Link for the benefit of PCWorld execs), and I have a sneaky feeling that this postcode search isn't going to recognise my Greek one. OK let's see if we can enter my billing address by clicking that blue hyperlink about doing it manually. This is what we get -



Note the pre-set 'country' field. Huh? I already know that PCWorld.co.uk, for perfectly sound and comprehensible business reasons only deliver in the UK, but that's where I want the laptop I'm trying to buy to be delivered... Starting to get a bit hot and bothered now. Deep breath. Perhaps we can enter my UK address - which isn't a billing address anymore - and hope to be given the chance to change it at the 'order review' stage...

But it was no good.

Readers will have realised by now that this is a true story. The experience was in 2008, but I see that nothing has changed. I wanted to buy a new laptop and have it sent to a colleague at a UK address so he could bring it out to my Greek island when he visited the following month. I wanted to use my Mastercard which is issued in conjunction with my GBP international bank account based in Jersey. The billing address is in Greece, that being my primary residence. That's what credit cards are for, right? Right.

Instead of giving up, as many of their potential customers surely must, I emailed PCWorld's sales department, and asked them why they didn't want my custom.

On 22 September 2008 I got the following reply:

Dear Thomas Muir,

Thank you for your email dated 19th September 2008.
PC World only accepts registered credit cards and billing address from the UK. Please accept my apologies that I am unable to assist you on this occasion.
Yours sincerely,
XXXXXX

Great. I asked them again why they wouldn't accept a (presumably automatically nasty/untrustworthy?) 'foreign' billing address. This is what I got back on the 24th:

Thank you for your email dated 23rd September 2008.
As stated previously, it is PC Worlds (sic) online policy that we can only accept registered credit cards and billing address from the UK, due to the distance selling regulations. However, you could use your card personally instore.
Please accept my apologies for any difficulties you have experienced in this matter.
Yours sincerely,
XXXXXX

Distance Selling Regulations? Really...?

I wrote back pointing out - of course - that the Distance Selling Regulations had, and have, nothing to do with it. They are to protect me, the customer, not an excuse for retailers to introduce restrictions of their own. I got a reply from a different operative admitting that that was indeed a mistake, and apologising for it. But adding that PC World's parent company had developed this policy of UK delivery-UK billing address. End of conversation.

PC World lost their sale; I have a new laptop from a different source; PC World's checkout is still just as dire. The only possible explanation for the policy about billing addresses that I can come up with is that executives (or lawyers) at the parent company (DSG International) think that it is an added security measure. If that is indeed the case, then they are sadly lacking in adeptitude.

What completely baffles me about PC World's policy is why they should throw away a whole sector of potential sales. Now some may be thinking that if they only deliver in the UK, realistically how many attempted purchases are going to come from overseas credit cards anyway? No doubt PC World use this muddled thinking to comfort and reassure themselves about their peculiar policy. I say what about all the tens of thousands of people worldwide with relatives in the UK - grandchildren perhaps? Surely this is a classic e-commerce sale? (Think Amazon; think Interflora) The new laptop for Christmas perhaps - bought from India or Australia and delivered to the grandchild's door in Essex. Surely PC World can't have overlooked this, can they? Shouldn't they be actively encouraging it?

I don't know whether the credit card companies are aware of PC World's policy. If I was Mastercard, or any of the others, I wouldn't be very impressed when I found out that one of our merchants was excluding one - ahem, rather large - group of our card holders.

The deal is, if you see the sign, you can use the card...

If PC World insist on their odd policy, for reasons best known to themselves, then surely they should do their very best to make their shopping cart/checkout more user-friendly: put this in the bottom of the item template, so everybody sees it straight away:

"PCWorld.co.uk only accept orders for UK delivery, paid for from a UK billing address"

Stick it everywhere in fact. Right up front on the entry page for the online shop. All they've got is the credit and debit card logos, as noted above, which is just a little misleading. A search through 'Help & Support' to 'Terms & Conditions' at pcworld.co.uk only reveals which cards customers can use; not a mention of the company's strange restriction. They may have something about it somewhere on the site, but I can't find it in any of the obvious places.

OK, we've had a bit of a laugh (albeit strained) at the expense of PC World. But there is a very serious message here. PC World is one of the UK's biggest online retailers* and it's a sad day when they apparently think their online shopping experience is perfectly adequate. Other online shops might reasonably be expected to use PCWorld.co.uk as a role model. Heaven help them.

The message is clear: make sure your shopping cart and checkout are as simple and straightforward to use as possible. Don't irritate users by making them jump through all sorts of hoops. Don't subject them to compulsory info-harvesting. Don't tell them things at the end of the process which you should have told them at the start. There is a good adage which everyone connected with e-commerce (and indeed websites in general) should remember:

Don't do it just because you can; do it because you should.

_______

*In November 2007 PC World was ranked 24 in a list of the UK's biggest online retailers by netimperative.com I couldn't find any more recent figures. However, they are not currently in the top ten. TM.

PS - Full email conversation with their sales department supplied to proven PC World executives on request. If they are interested. Full consultation with Glanton Solutions regarding their entire internet/intranet operations at a negotiated price. If they are interested.