I have been signing up to all sorts of web2.0 tools looking for a way to leverage my list of feeds. Many tools come close but have yet to offer quite the functionality with the level of completeness I have been after.

Matt Cutts, on commenting about the new Google customised search features, had this insight to share…

When I played with the first version, I wanted to avoid the standard stuff
where you plug in 1-2 sites and get a custom search engine that isn’t
blood-pounding-ly exciting (”Oh, a search box, and it searches. Great.”). So
what I did was take my feeds (I was using Bloglines at the time) and exported it
as an OPML file. Running a command like
cat export.opml | grep "title="
| cut -d'"' -f6 | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq
was enough to get the
blog urls that I was reading (not the feed urls), and I threw those urls into
the custom search engine.

And just like that, *BOOM* I had a search engine that
covered 70+ blogs in the search/SEO industry. If I searched for [bug], it would
return search engine bugs, not bugs in general. OPML-import was so much fun that
the Co-op folks promised to support it (I know that importing from Bloglines
works; importing from Google Reader might still need a tweak to the OPML
parsing). It’s nice that every blogger can have a custom search engine that is
centered around their interests.

Smart guy, cuts straight through the gloss to a key use of this functionality. Hopefully they support a regular OPML import/sync from a fixed url (say a public newsgator OPML file…) so I can keep an engine up to date based purely on my web development blogs.

Combine that with certain del.icio.us links and now I have a massive information resource minus the majority of noise (you see I am not in the habit of bookmarking splogs and the like…).

In the mean time my dummy spit over that post still has me looking at other engines… A suggestion from a commenter got me back looking at snap.com. I’ve gotta say - its actually a joy to use! A recommend giving it a shot, its got liberal use of web2.0 features but in ways that really aid usability. The best feature by far being keyboard support.

With the issues I am having with my Yahoo! account and the innanity of Google’s legal goons attempting to dictate the public’s use of language, I find myself wondering what my options are in regards to a new search provider. Of course, like most other web developers, I use Firefox predominantly (Firebug being a big part of the reason behind that) and therefore want to add a new default engine into the search dropdown it provides.

I wandered over to ask.com (they’ve always done a nifty thing here and there and might be able to provide the quality of searching i require). The URL is also nifty short in case I need to type it. The offer a pox looking toolbar that makes me think ‘Web Browser Helper Object’ (that is not good).

A quick wander through a few links on Ask I find this page…

Its been updated for IE7 to guide you through setting Ask as the default engine but then goes on to give directions for… Netscape Friggin’ Communicator!?! No quick add link for the ‘Ask’ engine? Wikipedia.org, Dictionary.com and even our ticketing system at work has implemented one of these… Why not Ask?

Has anyone switched? Anything worth checking out and potentially switching to?

I have been trying with some frustration and some amusement to regain access to the account I setup with Yahoo! about 10 years ago. I say ‘about’ because I really can’t remember exactly when but I do know that it was early days, well before the boom (and eventual bust). What I do know is I am the only person using the handle ‘wioota’ and I am the only person with a grasp of the full details of my life. I cannot remember what password I used back then (hence the problem) and I am not even sure which of a myriad of work email addresses I may have used.

What I do know is that none of my current email addresses were used as the alternate address for this account.

With all that in mind you would think I could get in contact with Yahoo! and set a new alternate email address (which in turn would allow them to send me my password). What has ensued over the past year (my first response from Yahoo! on the matter was on January 16th) has been 3 separate attempts, each involving about 7-8 exchanges between Yahoo! and myself.

And still with no resolution.

Some of the highlights include:

• Yahoo!’s insistence that I supply both my Secret Question and my Secret Answer - I’d have found it a bit easier if they could supply me with the Question so I could respond with the Answer as I am sure that is how a challenge-response mechanism is supposed to work.
• Yahoo!’s later (much later) admission that my account is so old that it doesn’t have a Secret Question or Answer attached to it.
• Yahoo! then offering to let me add a Secret Question and Answer to my account for extra security and conveniance (no offer to help me identify myself and regain access to my account though).
• Yahoo! requesting me to fax or snail mail California (during an exchange where I thought I was in contact with local - Australian - representatives).

So to Yahoo! - a company who I have felt were being unfairly ignored in the face of Google’s impressive brand equity - you are driving your loyal customers away! I would suggest taking an axe to your customer support departments (which have clearly become bureaucratic and over-automated) and start investing there. This time don’t turn to your geeks for the answers, don’t offshore it, get someone or some enterprise who know’s customer service and let them take over.

You are doing a great disservice to the excellent efforts of your talented engineers by allowing your customer service to remain this bad for this long.

Robert Nyman wrote recently about the difficulty to get buy-in for accessible web pages. His article speaks to a greater issue however of the difficulty for organisations to address the detail of generating quality. I define quality to mean not only those aspects of a products finish that benefit an end-user but also those that benefit those that support and maintain a product.

The strategic decision makers often talk to short-term benefits as reasons
for taking short-cuts on quality. Sometimes I think the Google Offline Spider’s Archive maybe handy in settling once and for all how the short term thinking had lead to issues such as poor stickiness or excessive bug reports or that high exit rate from page x.

I have had various QA tester and QA Manager roles in my past (it was even my entry into my current company!). From this vantage point it often feels like the last thing anyone wants outside QA is a quality product.

Things aren’t generally that bad - of course once you experience different roles around the workplace you do realise that quality is being achieved despite conflicting incentives. I’ve done in-the-trenches development (I continue to moonlight with this every once in awhile to satisfy my hobby interest and to make sure I maintain a reasonable understanding of the work at hand), content direction and production, marketing and various managerial roles as well.

Developers and content producers generally are striving for quality in the face of deadlines, distractions and the conservative decisions of their managers (spending time on both sides of the fence I acknowledge that sometimes those decisions represent excellent risk management and othertimes fear/laziness of disturbing the status quo). Managers deal with distraction, the competing needs of other managers, the goals of the organisation and that estimating accurately is HARD.

In my post detail versus perspective I had discussed the trap of fiddling with details whilst the truly valuable contribution to the success of your organisation languished. This is not in conflict with achieving quality in your work as often quality (attention to detail, usability, accessibility, reusability, literate code - whatever it is that provides ongoing benefit inside and out of your ogranisation) is that truly valuable contribution.

So how do we all ensure we contribute to an overall environment of quality? There is no way to guarantee it but you can certainly do more than ‘your little bit’. To understand and facilitate others in their efforts to contribute to the quality of the product of your workplace is important. If QA request consideration to their workload and throughput then give it. In fact support any of your domain experts when they are suffering friction from decision makers when trying to address issues within their domain. And evangelize the aspects of quality that are key to your own domain succeeding.

Over time it is natural for any marketing department and development team/s to drift apart. I suspect it is often due to differing personality types amongst the decision makers - in development you often have ex-developers in management positions, in marketing you have a wide array of PR professionals and the more dangerous variety, marketing degree graduates ignoring everything they learnt in their marketing degree.

Many web developers have some marketing experience in their past - many web roles are about executing on marketing strategies - many more are multi-skilling producer/marketer/developer type roles (I’ve had experience in both).

Developers work well as marketers for certain tasks - particularly the measurable ones. Internet PR, SEO, SEM these are all tasks often undertaken by developers when there is no other implementers available. We also do some tasks terribly. Sometimes over-estimating clients and prospects. Sometimes under - we forget that they are not us.

A good marketer has been trained in all the tools and techniques to find out who the target market is. I often get frustrated when marketing lose sight of this and spend too much time engaged in PR activities (but maybe that will be the topic of a future post).

What is often overlooked is that the worst situation for a company is for communication breakdown between tech and marketing. Take the new site that one of the big 4 australian banks, ANZ, launched - designmycard.com.au. It went live with a TVC campaign - the purpose of which was to drive consumers to their website. The website is no doubt the hard work of some creative individuals as are the TVCs. The key point of connection is the URL. The ads use the more modern looking URL sans the www. So why the hell hasn’t anyone configured the webserver to resolve said domain??

As someone with a web development background I spotted the gaffe straight away and adjusted the URL I typed in the URL with the www added (after checking my internet connectivity and a host of other common issues that cause a site not to load…). But I can guarantee that the majority of people who saw the ads tonite and tried the URL did not. As Seth Godin says, ‘no one cares about you’ (that’s you ANZ).

The implementation fault is obviously on the technical side - its webserver configuration most likely. But the real fault is that a TVC campaign was launched directing people to a non-existant address. This sort of oversight I’d wager sits on the other side of the fence.

But the point of this post is not to gloat. I say wander down to your marketing manager’s pod or office and get reacquainted.

What is going on here? Technorati have listed www.statcounter.com as the #1 blog! Technorati was my source for blog rankings but how can I trust a source that lists a non-blog as #1!!

Update:

They appear to have resolved the issue. I’ll be interested to see what the explanation is…