Ken's Sandbox

Dear webmaster

I just left the Home Depot site where I was trying to locate a strip light for behind a valance in our living room. Working from home I am on a not-so-broad broadband satellite connection and every page load is painfull. Especially considering the site would probably take 30 seconds to load on my 7mb fiber at the office.

I managed to get to lighting ok but nothing in any of the categories or manufacturers seemed like a good fit for my search so I chose the under $50 category. The first 9 of 300+ entries came up. At the top are options to sort, change to a grid view and change the number of results per page. I changed the sort and the page reloaded. I realized that changing to grid view or changing the number of results per page were both going to result in a page load. So, which do I select first? My decision, close the wuindow. Screw ‘em, I don’t need to find it that bad.

If you are the webmaster of a large site like this (or the CIO of the company), you definitely should visit your site through a dial up connection and try to actually use it. When you finally get fed up, go back and add some simple ajax to the site to eliminate those full page loads and make your site usable for those with slow connections and really nice for those with fast connections.

Well, I’m off to Lowes .

Ken

Tom Peters on Personal Branding

From Tom Peters This I Believe:

32. Branding is for … EVERYONE.

Whoever has … THE BEST STORY … takes home the most marbles. “Branding?” “Branding is a character issue. Next question?” It is almost that simple. And, thus, that hard. Continue reading Tom Peters on Personal Branding

Google yourself (Your Personal Brand)

My favorite weekend morning pastime is catching up on my on-line reading. This weekend having read everything Seth Godin has read in the past 8 months or so I wandered over to ChangeThis where I found a manifesto (that is what ChangeThis calls them) on personal branding. Continue reading Google yourself (Your Personal Brand)

My first Spam Post

I stumbled across a post this morning by Chris Anderson (The Long Tail Blog). The post itself talked about how Chris was tired of being spammed by PR people who have apparently purchased media lists and indiscriminately blast their press releases to every one on the list. He went so far as to print a list of the email addresses of people he has blacklisted.

The comments on his post when on for hours. Before I finally bailed, I saw this:

“It makes me wish the e-mail system was designed based on whitelisting or something. I realize how much trouble this would cause, but I might actually be willing to deal with it.”

“Let me help you out a bit — as the guy who released what I’m pretty sure was THE first anti-spam program more than 20 years ago.”

This is where I usually mention that it’s unbelievable that we still use SMTP, endlessly hacking around what’s become painfully clear is a design flaw, rather than designing a different, hopefully backwards-compatible protocol. The amount of cruft that’s been piled on top of this craptastic standard is utterly mind-boggling.

(Seriously… CRAM-MD5? SPF? Bayesian filters? Tarpitting? The endless RBLs? It’s the mother of all kluges.)

Weirder still, this sort of thing strikes me as absolutely counter to the normal disposition of those of us who normally would be expected to solve these things. This problem predates Linux! The open source community built an entire *OS* since then! SFTP replaces FTP, though that’s arguably a far less important protocol. New processor? Gimme! New graphics card? Gimme gimme! iPhone! Woo! AJAX! Ruby! We have entire programming languages younger than SMTP.

Yet despite an almost immeasurable amount of anger, vitriol, and frustration, the beast lumbers on year after year, unchanged. HELO? EHLO? Qua?

The number of hours that’ve been poured into designing filters and maintaining blacklists and so on surely could have yielded something better by now. Sometimes I think about it and it’s almost embarrassing.

Anyway.

Posted by: Adam | October 30, 2007 at 07:43 PM

I could not have said it better myself. This is exactly what I have been thinking. All of the kludges around SMTP do not address the underlying problem. SMTP presumes that the message is not spam. SMTP will allow any server to connect, dump a few megabytes of crap and leave it to the recipient to sort it out.

So here it is. I am now committed to writing several posts about how I believe the problem could be solved. Who knows, I may even try to implement some of it.

Help wanted – Abstraction layer

I just discovered one of the best essays I have ever read. Although it talks specifically about software development and marketing but I can see how it would apply to almost any business. As you read the essay, think about your role in your company. Is your job to support someone else’s (the company’s “programmers”) productivity or are you a producer of your product? What is your company selling and how can you make your product or service more transparent to your customers/clients?

Do you need an abstraction layer? I now know I do.

An eventfull morning

Power is back on. I was out of the office when it went out (my office neighbor said it was about 9:00 AM). The city said it was a fire on a pole near a substation.

The battery backup carried everything very nicely for the expected 45 minutes but that was about 45 minutes short. Guess I either need to beef up the battery backup system or buy a generator.

Note to Joe Whitsett: The modifications to my cpe worked great. Both internet and phones stayed up fine. But you need amend my testimonial ad to say no unplanned downtime due to Comspan.

And then I see this

Right after I posted about hosting video tours, I see where Marc Andreessen posted this about how the real estate downturn may be permanently changing where and how agents advertise their listings. Read it here.

Video Real Estate Tours

The other day Hope MacManus at Old Town Realty in Florence asked if I could (would) host a video tour for her. It seems that linking the tour from the office web site was in violation of the RMLS rule about branding tours (more than a little ridiculous but I don’t make the rules, I just have to listen to the complaints .

So far, this is the second video I have seen that client agents have had done for their listings. Now, two video tours out of 2,400 listings does not necessarily make it a trend. But throw in a couple of comments from other agents and there may be some interest. Maybe a few others would like to try it. Add the fact that I take pride in keeping ahead of other real estate sites in areas such as this* and well … you never know where an idea is going to come from.

So, beginning immediately, RealWorld will host your video tours at no additional charge. If it looks like we are going to become the youtube of real estate, I may have to rethink things. But for now, I would like to encourage the use of video as much as possible.

A couple random thoughts:

Video tours will have the virtual tour icon on RealWorld. If videos become popular enough, I will add a video tour icon and add an upload function to the on-line menu.

I recently purchased a Cannon digital camera that takes beautiful 640 X 480 video. A camera like this would allow you to shoot your own video. It would be great if someone offered the service of editing raw video into a nice looking tour with music and or voice over.

If you have a video produced, you should ask for two versions. In Hope’s case she had to have her producer go back and cut out the title segments with the office name and contact information. This unbranded video is the tour she will enter in RMLS.

Are video tours a good idea or a waste of time? Post your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.

If you know of someone who produces video tours or can help with production, post their contact information in the comments as well. I would like to provide a resource list.

* The end of August RMLS will be expanding their photo capabilities to allow 16 photos per listing and the photo size is being increased to 640 X 480. RealWorld has supported up to 25 photos and 800 X 600 for over a year.

Google Earnings up 28%, stock drops 7%, WTF

In a typical case of investors living only for the short term, they dumped on Google’s stock after the company reported quarterly earnings were up only 28%. Here is the AP article. I realize Google is an expensive stock. But this definitely falls under “what the f__k” in my book.

The best testimonial in real estate

I ran across this blog post this morning. I love “knock their socks off” customer service and since this was real estate related, I thought it would be worth sharing:

The best realtor in the East Bay, Bar none, an unsolicited testimonial.