Archive for the ‘ZDNet’ Category

ZDNet wins “Best business website 2007″

October 4, 2007

AOP Awards Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?

Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?

I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.

I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″

The judges said: -

“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”

Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.

Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.

Posted in AOP, Social Media, Web 2.0, ZDNet | 1 Comment »

User generated content, what are they talking about?

March 23, 2007

One of the major components of the Web 2.0 revolution is User Generated Content or UGC to its friends. But while it undoubtedly adds colour and content to the traditional editorial on a site, just how useful is it?

The main problem with UGC is that nobody knows what the content is about. It’s difficult enough getting editorial teams to classify content consistently, so asking users to do this is unlikely to work. Of course we’ve seen the concept of tagging work brilliantly on the likes of Flickr and del.icio.us but even here there are a lot of inconsistencies. People don’t all use the same language, have the same idea about what the content is about and, some just can’t spell.

The upshot of this is twofold. Firstly, its pretty difficult to automatically connect editorial content about a subject to its UGC cousin. There’s no consistent tagging or mapping to enable this to happen automatically. So for example if I were reading an article about tagging, it would be great to see all the member blog posts that were related to that subject.

The second is more important to publishers which is that there is no easy way to target advertising at the readers of UGC. So despite paying $580M for MySpace, NewsCorp couldn’t run any of their conventional display advertising on the site. There was no targeting available other than the basic site demographic. They have solved their commercial problem in the short term by doing a $900M deal with Google to run AdWords on the site. Big advertisers though who want to reach the MySpace audience don’t want to do this through AdWords.

They want their brands and imagery associated with quality, targeted content, not mixed in with all the random ads in AdSense for unrelated products. If you have any doubt about this, have a look at the ads that get served against your emails in GMail for seemingly unrelated products. It’s a great game and depending on the subject matter you can expect to get some spectacular results including one example I found that combined British Airways, satellite TV, the best tennis grip and lingerie. I’ll leave it to you to work out what the email was about…

So what is the answer? Lots of sites have introduced tags as navigation devices either in clouds such as or associated to the stories as on my fovourite site ZDNet. The holy grail is to automatically tag all content consistently across the site whether its editorial, UGC or vendor content such as whitepapers. That creates a consistent way to connect content together and also to identify what its about so as to be able to target advertising.

The new search engine on ZDNet, provided by UltraKnowledge is designed to tag all content consistently regardless of where it originated from. At the moment it is only indexing the editorial content but soon it will be rolled out to the vendor and UGC areas. At that point, it should start to provide the targeting the publishers require to make money from inventory which was previously low value, run of site.

Posted in Ad serving, Social Media, Tagging, ZDNet | 2 Comments »

Googling yourself

February 14, 2007

Google logoLast year, I started blogging on ZDNet.co.uk as part of the launch of the Community features as I thought it was only appropriate to practise what you preach. At the time, my visibility to Google was pretty limited so it was an interesting experiment to see the power of the ZDNet brand at work. I’d never really understood why bloggers would want to associate themselves with a brand rather than going it alone and being independent.

However, ZDNet’s standing with the Google algorthm as a trusted provider of content means that the weight given to my blog there far outweighs any that I could achieve as an independent blogger. As a graphic example of this, I wrote this post back in November when I first started out about how my Google ranking increased dramatically after a few weeks. Today after steady, methodical posting (at least one post per week) I reached the heady heights of a page one Google ranking if you type in “Mike Barrett“.

Today sees the launch of my new column on silicon.com about the transition from CIO to consultant. What will be interesting to see is the relative rankings of ZDNet, silicon.com and this independent blog.

Posted in Blogging, Compound Media, Search, ZDNet, silicon.com | 2 Comments »

ZDNet stars at Association of Publishers event

January 18, 2007

I blagged myself an invite to the latest AOP event this week where Suzie Daniels was up on stage with the likes of Yahoo to talk about the social networking experience ZDNet has gained from this part of the site.

The audience were all on-line publishers of one description or another and Suzie talked about the lessons learned so far, the importance of having built a solid platform and the cultural changes that are taking place inside the organisation. There was a very lively Q+A session at the end and It just demonstrated how far ahead the team at ZDNet are with their thinking.

It has prompted several comments across the blogosphere, the most notable, this one at the Guardian.

Posted in AOP, Blogging, Social Media, ZDNet | 1 Comment »

Searching without thinking

November 27, 2006

For too long search design has been dictated either by the search engine technology i.e. “Keywords” or by the agregators (Google/Yahoo/MSN) ranking algorithms. Both have their benefits but neither necessarily serves the user the best.

Keywords work perfectly if you are searching for a product. If I want to know about the Treo 750W then typing that into any reviews site or search engine I’ll get very specific results. However if I wanted to find out about Smartphones, then things start to get messy. Firstly the term Smartphone means different things to different people. Secondly most product reviews probably won’t even mention the word “Smartphone” in them anyway. So keyword searching on a topic is a very hit and miss affair.

Using the main search engine sites, the problems are different but equally vexing for the user. At the mercy of the algorithm, users are now provided with content that has been deemed by some invisible mechanism important.

Google changed the landscape here by working out that what the users thought was important (i.e. Number of links to that content) was actually more relevant than the most recent content with that keyword. Of course, it’s not as simple as that and the big three spend millions of dollars tweaking and tuning their “special formula” with as much secrecy and security as Coca Cola.

Natural language search engines have been around for a long time but the problem has always been that it takes around 100 times more computing power to index and search in this way compared with conventional keyword search. Now, with processing power becoming cheaper and cheaper, we are starting to see investment ramp up in these technologies. Cited in this article, there were 47 search start-ups in 2005 raising a combined $260M.

And here on ZDNet, we are starting to experiment with this technology too. Our new search engine has the ability to automatically create relevant tags and topics related to the search term. It’s still early days for this type of technology but we believe that this type of search is the only one that considers the user first. Up to 75% of search terms are a single word and our most popular search term is often “Microsoft”.

Given the size and scope of Microsoft’s market, this would lead you to believe that the user doesn’t know how to search for what they are really looking for. And the truth is, most users are working blindfold when it comes to understanding conventional search syntax so they go in one direction until they bump into something, re-adjust and try again.

By creating tag clouds of the most relevant tags and terms, we are narrowing down the search for the user and helping them towards what they were really looking for. Go on, give it a try, take off your blindfold, click here and check out the related tags box.

Posted in Search, Tagging, ZDNet | 1 Comment »

“Old school” business – your opportunity to have fun at the ball?

November 6, 2006

One of the things we learned while developing the new ZDNet.co.uk site is that the old “Web 1.0″ model for building web sites doesn’t apply any more.

We used to have a pretty slick production line that consisted of Design building pages, Production turning them into HTML and Tech engineering the code into the content management system (CMS).

As we developed the new site, particularly the Community section, we found that that model doesn’t work any more.

In a “Web 2.0″ world (whatever that is) we’re returning to the age of the developer. The Community area on ZDNet V is all about functionality rather than style. Sure, it looks good but the emphasis has shifted towards more traditional development. Where once the on-line world coveted pure design, what we need now are people with experience in useabilty and Human Computer Interface (HCI) skills.

What’s interesting is that these are not new requirements, application development was around long before the web was even thought of. Web businesses are desperately hiring developers as fast as they can and the dangers are clear, application development requires a completely different process to web site development.

Changing that is difficult, as a result of the ZDNet V experience, we are completely re-engineering our development processes to put more emphasis on functionality without losing any of the design ethos that has made us successful so far. It’s not going to be a simple process but we’ve made a start.

The challenge for on-line businesses is strangely converse to those that faced traditional businesses when the world went on-line in “Web 1.0″. Those businesses struggled to get to grips with Design and HTML skills compared to the new media upstarts. We were the Cindarella’s to their ugly sisters and we had a great time at the ball.

Now us upstarts would do well to look to the experience that the traditional companies have had all along. That is the ability to build robust, functional, easy to use systems and adapt that experience to make them accessible via the web browser.

This is the next big challenge for both traditional and new media businesses but for once, the old school businesses might just have an advantage.

Time for the ugly sisters to get a makeover and pull on their party dresses?

Posted in Web 2.0, ZDNet | Leave a Comment »