Is this weekend! See you there.
http://barcampphnompenh.org/
Blog
Facebook phone
Tech Crunch says it’s definitely happening. Would you consider buying one? And why?
UPDATE: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, breaks it down for TechCrunch.
The coming of Internet Explorer 9
Ars Technica takes an in-depth look at Internet Explorer 9, the beta version of which was released last week. For a Microsoft product, it looks pretty good. The only bad news is that it doesn’t run on Windows XP, still the operating system of choice for many in Cambodia.
Web design insights from the iPad
In an article about iPad usability, Jakob Neilsen says this:
For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contrast, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.”
Busy, in case you haven’t noticed, is bad. It’s confusing. Unfocused. And leaves the user without a clear idea of where to concentrate his or her attention. E-commerce designers discovered long ago that 2-column Web page designs produced significantly more sales than 3-column designs. Eye-tracking studies, which suggest that viewers tend to ignore the third column anyway, reinforce this notion. Far from giving users more information, junking up the page with every last tidbit of information is not only wasteful, it’s almost guaranteed to drive users away with a bomb cloud of information overload. That’s not what you want.
VBMania: New worm ‘spreading like wildfire’
McAfee and others are reporting a new and fast spreading worm, currently dubbed the “Here you have” virus, which spreads via emails with the subject line “Here you have” or “Just for you”.
In the content of the email is a link to a Web site that hosts the virus. Since the actual virus file is not on the user’s computer, it’s very easy to evade anti-virus protection.
Once the virus infects a computer, it then sends itself to all the addresses in the computer user’s address book. The new emails appear as if they were sent by the infected user, which of course they were. Unsuspecting users are apparently clicking on the links by the hundreds of thousands.
Symantec says the new worm also:
- Spread through mapped drives through autorun
- Spread through email by taking contacts from the address book
- Spread through instant messenger
- Disables various security related programs
MacAfee provides the forensics and disinfection tools.
Analytics on steroids
Cisco goes to Battambang
More evidence that Cambodia is on the fast track to the 21st century:
Cisco today announced the launch of a Cisco(R) Networking Academy(R) at the University of Management and Economics, expanding the program further into Cambodia. UME will integrate the IT Essentials course into the core curriculum for students at the provincial campus in Battambang.
Not Phnom Penh. Battambang!
Blogging and SEO
Every person I talk to wants to be top 10 in Google.
Ranking well, however, is just the means to an end. And the best SEO gurus will tell you that SERP rankings are a poor measure of success.
What Web site owners really want, or course, is more traffic, more leads, more customers and, let’s be honest, more payola.
But how do you get there?
Social media provides one of the easiest ways to kick start your online marketing. While there are literally thousands, if not millions, of sites and tools out there that fit the “social media” definition, there are only three that matter: blogging, Facebook and Twitter. (Tumblr, so sayeth The Times, may soon make it four.)
A blog is the closest thing to an online marketing panacea that the interwebs have to offer. A good blog guarantees your Web site has fresh content. (That alone is worth two gallons of Google juice.) Blog posts filter out through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and posts can be effortlessly pushed out to blog trackers such as Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket.
A blog guarantees your site gets an RSS feed. And a good blog improves your site’s chances of reaching people interested in knowing more about your offerings and your industry. A really good blog can establish you as an expert in your field, or define you and your organization as thought leaders. And a blog gives people who reach your Web site something worthwhile to view, instead of lamo stock images or worse, completely irrelevant content used simply to take up space.
With a little focus, keyword rich blog posts can also improve your visibility in the rankings.
All of that and more from a single, regularly updated blog. And there’s a whole cottage industry of site-makers out there developing tools to make it all one-click simple. Twitterfeed automatically publishes your blog posts to Facebook and Twitter. Ping-o-matic updates more than 20 search engines. That means blog once and hit Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other smaller players with a single click.
A recent blog post (what else?) from Marketing Sherpa titled “Blogs are Becoming the New Front Door for Prospects: Is Yours Open?” highlights the skyrocketing importance of the blog. Although the story is aimed at business-to-business marketers, the same concepts hold just as true, if not more so, for B2C sites.
In Marketing Sherpa’s research, many businesses reported that their blog page had overtaken their home page as their site’s No. 1 entry point. One company reported a 4x increase in traffic, a 3x-4x increase in the amount of time viewers spent on the site, a huge jump on Google rankings and a 70% increase in inbound leads.
Payola!
Just Launched: Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse
The Web site for Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse in Sihanoukville recently launched. The word guesthouse often carries budget connotations. But Pagoda Rocks is far more an upmarket get-away than a mid-range flop-house. Many of the guesthouse rooms are actually standalone bungalows, with air-con, hot water and ocean views.
From a Web design standpoint, I riffed a lot on what the guesthouse’s local print designer had done, and used a little jQuery for nifty photo presentation. Like every Web site, it’s still a work in progress, but so far, it’s coming together nicely.
Faster sites are still better than flashy ones
This week’s simple wisdom from Jakob Neilsen, godfather of Web usability:
A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.
Preach it, brother.