I don’t know if mobile is the next big thing or already here, but adoption of geolocation in online tools is a must for mobile to achieve it’s full relevance. Since Foursquare just opened up in Little Rock, I’ve been playing with it via my iPhone this past week and although the number of users and  number of places is limited with next to none participating businesses,  I’m hooked.

A recent article in Time Magazine calls Foursquare’s gaming component it’s “secret sauce” letting you earn points, badges and become a “mayor” when checking-in at new places.  The article says the key to user adoption is for businesses to start give aways to foursquare users who check-in often at their business–  It’s like a frequent eater card, but works virtually. The only location in Little Rock that currently offers a foursquare special is the Capital Bar & Grill with every 10th check-in getting you a free dessert and the mayor receiving a free t-shirt.

I can’t wait until US Pizza starts giving away free pizza to users who have checked in ten times, but until then it’s fun to compare how many points (and check-ins) I can get to my friends.  If you haven’t tried it, go ahead and sign-up and download your app to your phone (they make apps for iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android) or use the mobile interface and friend me.

Flash content is an important part of the overall mix of web content and has a steeper learning curve than most other kinds of web content creation. Unfortunately, Macromedia and now Adobe have changed the flash creation process/interface so often that if you once learned flash it’s like you’re starting all over again if you pick up a newer version of Adobe Flash.  I first learned flash in 1999-2000 creating some audio slideshows and calculators, but I had to learn it again 2003 for a couple of prjects and after that I just gave up because I didn’t want to go through the process of teaching myself flash again.

Mindy McAdams author of admittedly outdated textbook, Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages, now recommends learning flash using Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. In fact she has even created a nice little guide to everything you should know to create great flash content outlining the six things she thinks you need to know (and the chapter’s they’re covered in the Adobe book) and two common misconceptions about flash.

Her six items you need to know are

1. Buttons
2. Loading external content
3. Optimizing images
4. Loading and controlling audio
5. Loading and controlling video
6. Actionscript 3 and XML
7. Bandwidth profiling

Now, I have to decide if I really want to tackle Flash again.

You’ve probably heard of mission creep and home page creep when you slowly ad links and bloat your home page overtime, but it’s also important to remember to be goal focused when you’re redesigning your home page. In a large organization I think  your home page design is often like an operator just helping someone quickly move along to the actual content they are looking for, but there is always an opportunity to provide to emphasis your primary goal– your conversions on your home page, too. There’s a great post on clickz about optimizing your home page and here’s some of their maxims of home page design.

• “If you emphasize everything, then nothing will be important.”
• “The purpose of the home page is to get people off of the home page.”
• “Unless a visual element directly supports a key conversion action, it should be removed.”

This morning I received a “breaking news email” from the New York Times that the New York Times had decided to start charging for access in 2011. I really don’t understand why they would send a breaking news email over this news. First, everyone else had been reporting the Times decision for a couple of days and second it’s not newsworthy enough to disturb me with an email or text.

Outside of the fact that it’s not breaking news, the NY Times has decided to try out the middle ground in the payment wall debate, again. Last time with Times Select they hid their “premium” content from those who didn’t want to pay. This time they are going to ask the power users who access their web site more frequently to pay. Unfortunately, they aren’t ready to release simple details about the plan so we really can’t make a judgement call on it.

It would be nice to know how much is frequent? How many article can I access before I have to pay? How much will I have to pay? Then maybe we can make some comparisons to how much they are making on advertising revenue versus how much they will make for charging for access.

You think if they were sending a news alert about charging in 2011, they could have at least gotten the full story from their bosses.

Some very informative social media graphics on the Penn Olson blog.

My favorite one follows

Have you ever seen an ad on paper that you just go yuck, that ruins the page. How about a front page ad? I ran into one of those this week on the front of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette owned weekly entertainment tab called Sync.

Yuck!

I completely understand and support the need for front page ads, but front page ads on tabs take up significantly more room than a strip ad on the bottom of a broadsheet. Since the ad is ran as a vertical strip it completely dominates the page. On top of that the Democrat-Gazette recently shaved the width of their press down (like every other newspaper) leaving a tab to be rather square than rectangle making the ad more dominant.

I would think that even the advertiser, Landers, would prefer an ad the works with the content and design of the front page rather than against it.

Here’s Ashton’s online advertising model/brand promotion model from the December 2009 Fast Company:

Make entertaining stuff, give it to people where they already are, let them have fun with it, and mix in brand messaging. And because of the viral nature of the Web, each new consumer is cheaper to win than the last one.

Yes, Ashton really does get it. He continues:

Katalyst (his company) is a merger of three industries. A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.

For several years I’ve been on a kick that traditional advertising metrics are bogus and it’s impossible to compare traditional advertising numbers with online advertising numbers.  On top of that I think traditional advertising is way, way overpriced when you consider their real numbers. In this month’s Fast Company Ashton Kutcher agrees:

“For years the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system they’ve been monetizing off of. Now that the web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric – now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that Ashton can intelligently discuss this, but I have to say that he apparently really does get it.

Here’s a good video from CNN that explains how cloud computing works and how you use it every day.

In the United States one out of every four pageviews is from Facebook. Amazing! Google only accounts for one in eight page views (15 percent).