Apparently Quark has just redesigned their logo for the second time within 6 months, and the designer blogs are all over it. Their first attempt by SicoloaMartin used a shape not that unique and also used by others in the design community. An odd choice considering it’s their target market, and how picky we designers are about these things. Now their second try is out and it seems, from the comments, that they’ve gone from a painful shot in the foot with a peashooter to blowing it clean off with a 12 gauge shotgun.

When I made the logo for Headlight, I was a bit concerned that it wasn’t good enough. That somewhere down the road I would discover a situation where it wouldn’t work. I spend around three days making it, which we all know is a bit short to explore all possibilities. But in the spirit of getting things done; that was the time we wanted to use. Now that I see what a respected company that has long been a design community darling can try to get away with, I’m sure the Headlight logo will be just fine.

They probably spent loads of time and money to reach their result, and they haven’t covered half the issues we’ve covered in three days. Ground rule issues like; how will it scale, how will it look in single color, is the shape similar in positive and negative, seems like they’ve been ignored all together.

While Quark struggles with their community, I have yet to find out if the Headlight logo gets the message through. It’s not a question of whether people think it’s pretty or not. Luckily we all have different taste, so of course there will be some who hate it. There will also be people with brilliant imaginations thinking it looks like a parrot in a pirate’s hat. I don’t really care about that, all I’m interested in is the message.

You can’t really tell until you try it in the real world and in its real context, which means just using it and see what happens. If you start asking around, people will be obliged to have an opinion, and we certainly don’t want a bunch of people with opinions on our back. Like Quark, you could end up with a huge amount of coverage and awareness. Oh no, we don’t want that.

We’ve said a it few times over the last year. Ok, we’ve said it many times during the last year: It’s almost there. Just a little more time and we are done. We just need to…

The character Garak from Star Trek has a striking remark, when he is told the story about the boy who cried wolf:

Bashir: If you lie all the time, no one is going to believe you, even when you’re telling the truth.
Garak: Are you sure that’s the point, Doctor?
Bashir: Of course. What else would it be?
Garak: That you should never tell the same lie twice.

In order to be more trustworthy, here’s a new lie: Our product is in beta, but it is still not feature complete.

Truth be told, it will never be feature complete! Even when Headlight is released, it will never become completely done; in order to fulfil the demands of our customers and to be agile, we will keep adding new features and removing old ones.

For obvious reasons we do make roadmaps. But if a new opportunity comes along, my personal belief is that we should go with that instead of the planned roadmap. I think that is being smart: Not sticking with plans and schemes made months or years ago, but adapting to reality as we know it. And that’s not even a lie!

Salesforce.com, the leading on-demand CRM solution, is taking the idea of the programmable web (e.g. Mash-Ups via APIs) for on-demand business applications to the next level by introducing a development platform so extensive and so motivating leaving me quite stunned. They call it Appexchange. I see this bring so many added values to all the clients of Salesforce.com and I see so much potential for companies like TraceWorks.com.

Just how big is this? Simon Fell of Salesforce.com says “Sforce [now called Appexchangee] is one of the world’s most widely used enterprise Web services, accounting for over 40% of the total transactions on salesforce.com” - and with $310 in revenue we don’t need help from Einstein to figure out if this is a success or not …

Open Outcry to all (well, most) TraceWorkers
All TraceWorkers directly or indirectly associated with product development should register for an AppExchange Seminar. All TraceDevelopers should visit http://www.salesforce.com/developer/ and gain an insight on to what extend developing a mash-up would be possible. You might also want to add the company’s developer blog to your RSS reader.

Need a better understanding on what the programmable web, web2.0 (ask Pelle), Mash-Ups etc. is all about? Take a look at this website: http://www.programmableweb.com. (Perspective: today TraceWorks.com is only working with two of the APIs listed here, Yahoo and Google).

I can’t wait to begin developing a Headlight/Salesforce Mash-Up solution and I can’t wait to launch our planned enterprise web service for Headlight.

Oh no, not another post by me on Web 2.0… I mentioned our drag’n'drop boxes some posts ago as an example of something smart - because it makes your job done faster.

Something that is not so smart is copying blindly what you’ve seen on other web sites: 10 months ago I saw google.com/ig and was deeply impressed. 8 months ago I saw live.com and thought “Ok, if Google’s got it, surely Microsoft must have something similar”. 2 months I discovered netvibes.com and was impressed by the fact that it was done by a minor company (previously unknown to me at least). 2 weeks ago I saw Pageflakes and started to get tired of moving boxes around a web site.

Today I found Protopage, ItsAStart.com and VIKI.2. I was neither impressed nor amused!

While much effort has probably been put in these applications they don’t seem to innovate but merely imitate and are thus: One step behind!

Just learned about a new kind of fraud: “Impression Fraud”. Interesting.

Read more about it here: Google faces pressure from ‘impression fraud’.

An Online Marketing Manager at a new and very hot phone company asked me yesterday in London something in the line of: 

A/B testing is an important way to optimze performance in Search Marketing … How do you do this with Headlight?

(I’ll actually end-up answering this question further down)

Well, first of all he’s right that A/B testing is important. With A/B testing you determine the right ads for the right keywords. This will improve your CTR% which is key to lover your CPC (while keeping POS) over time while increasing your ROI% bla bla bla. The method and theory is pretty straight forward. But when I come to think of it; all the marketing managers that I know don’t use A/B testing. Why is that?

The reason is obvious: When your are working with hundreds or thousands of keywords and ads A/B testing becomes Godzilla of complexity and time killing. Most Marketing Managers and Search Managers are already facing quite a huge job in simply doing the basics; keyword research, copy-writing, and finally uploading all the stuff to Yahoo/Google/MSN.

In many cases optimization is reduced to just deleting keywords that are not performing in terms of CON%, ROI%.

Houston, we have a problem.

Well, the actual question was: How do you do this with Headlight?. My answer was: “We do and we don’t”.

With Headlight we have been working on a slighty different approach - than the traditional process. We think of course like everybody else that A/B testing really sucks - that is the manual process of doing A/B testing. Not the purpose of A/B testing itself = locating the best marketing assets or the right combination of marketing assets. It’s fundamental and powerfull.

(BTW in Headlight marketing assets mean 1. Keywords 2. Ads (text ads / image ads) 3. Landing pages.)

We don’t introduce or plan to introduce any easy (or hard) way of manually doing A/B testing with Headlight.
We do introduce some very simple ways in order to apply automatic A/B testing rules to your campaigns.

Actually we don’t call it A/B testing but business rules. What the business rules do is basically A/B testing automatically across all your selected marketing assets (ads, landing pages) in order to detect the most succesful combinations. 

The business rules was primarily developed to automatically optimize traditional banner campaigns (served either 1st or 3rd party) on request of Henrik Lykkesteen of Saxo Bank A/S. After being asked about A/B testing regarding keywords and text ads I’ll think we’ll ínvest some time and energy into making this possible with Search Engine Campaigns as well.

We try and do it smart … by doing it for you. Hopefully it turns out just as good as it sounds.

Imagine a world where there are no usability standards…

Every car make has its own way of placing essential controls. If you wish to accelerate a Toyota, you need to press your knee against the door while resting your foot on the breaks; this gives an incredible reaction time that saves lives. On a similar Peugeot, a small gas lever is placed between the seats, while the steering is controlled with your feet; this enables you to break fast, by punching the airbag. The break is the only pedal in a Corvette, while the new BMW has a joystick instead of a steering wheel.

All solutions are great innovations, and each car designer has a vast argumentation arsenal to why his control placements are the best.

This situation is somewhat similar to what we can experience if we just implement the new Web 2.0 ideas without considering using a set of well know standards. Standards that unfortunally does not exist yet.

An example is Microsoft’s new super AJAX search engine, search.live.com.
No one can argue with the brilliance in the new search result view. You no longer need paging, the view just loads on the fly while scrolling. It is also hard to find argumentation against the usability in the ability to search a site, by clicking a small magnifying glass next to the search result.

But the issue lies in the time I need to invest in learning how to navigate this brilliant interface.

We need a common ground, and a set of controls, that support the demands of the new generation online applications and websites. In a perfect world, these controls would be the same in applications as in online applications.
How about a couple of new W3C recommendations?

I would love to be able to implement the search.live.com result grid as easy as:
<livegrid provider=”results.aspx” loadsize=”20” />

But that is not an option, since it takes W3C years to accept new tags and concepts.

The way to go is to acknowledge a set of AJAX Defacto standard frameworks, which fulfill the most basic Web 2.0 requirements, and then go from there. Within a couple of years one will be the leading framework, and suddenly we have a full set of Web 2.0 industry standards, that everybody knows how to use. In order to make this work, we would probably need a World Wide Web 2.0 Consortium (Is w32c.com available?).

The ideology of Web 2.0 is great; make the web as easy navigate able as possible. But without standards, lots of sites and online applications will miss out, simply because of a steep interface learning curve.

Back in January I emailed this cover story from Wired: “How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet” to my colleagues at TraceWorks.com in order to quickly explain why click fraud is a huge problem to all our customers and of course also to explain why this is to be an important part of our upcoming end-to-end marketing application, Headlight™.

Now a new chapter is about to enfold as Google has just agreed to settle a class action click fraud case brought in an Arkansas state court for up to $90 million. More on the .org behind the lawsuit: http://www.lostclicks.com/. Read in depth reporting on the settlement: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060308-152034.

This means that click fraud is now not only a major problem to advertisers - also Google/yahoo/MSN etc. is troubled by this. And this means that our investment in developing and implementing “click fraud detection/reporting” in Headlight(tm) will probably pay off. That is if Google/Yahoo/MSN etc. acknowledges our findings - time will tell - but with this new settlement I think the chances are pretty good!

More specifics on our click fraud feature as soon as Headlight (beta1) is officially launched.

What’s The Dojo all about? Since we’re obviously talking about a corporate blog one could argue that the main function of The Dojo is to be helpful. This blog should provide users of our software with tips and tricks. At least that’s how the folks at 37signals define their blog.

However, those guys aren’t always right. Would you believe that? I got down to thinking about The Dojo and there’s a lot more to it than that!

For starters, there’s the whole thing about the meaning of the word, The Dojo.

As you probably already know, in martial arts the dojo is a training hall. When you’re in the dojo you try to perfect your skills in order to become the best that you can possibly be. In other words, The Dojo also has to do with ambitions, potential, obedience, respect, and discipline.

This blog is almost a holistic place. Everything comes together and makes some sort of sense when you’re in The Dojo. Am I making any sense?

By the way, we need a sempai, an apple pie, or whatever we want to call it.

A more down to earth way of looking at The Dojo is to stress that it’s a place where we can communicate in a more distinctive manner. As opposed to our usual day-to-day talk about things, when you’re in The Dojo you really get down to business. What’s the point? Or rather, what’s your point? What’s your opinion?

But as I see it, The Dojo is actually not only about expressing our thoughts. It’s also about discovering what we really think about all the stuff that’s going on. Without The Dojo it sometimes feels like there’s no opinion there at all. But The Dojo helps you. It gives birth to thoughts, opinions, ideas, and feelings. That’s it! The Dojo is a delivery room!

On a more personal note, the name Dojo reminds me of a Dodo. It’s probably because I had a pet bird named Dodo once. Dodo was given to me because its former owner, a friend of mine, didn’t really care about it. I already had a similar bird – endowed with the very cool name Gokke – so it wasn’t a big deal to accept the donation.

The only problem was that Dodo was a nervous wreck compared to my old bird. Gokke had already been under my wings for some time and it could do all sorts of tricks. I suppose you could talk about domestification. Anyway, Dodo seemed a bit stupid as it sat there anxiously on its perch while Gokke was flying around entertaining guests. As opposed to Dodo, Gokke really got a kick out of being a bird!

What’s all this got to do with The Dojo?

Well, one could argue that the difference between the two birds had to do with the fact that Gokke had been in my custody, or my dojo, for some time.

So Gokke most definitely was not a Dodo.

And neither is The Dojo.

Just a quick note in order to introduce “Jonathan”.

He’s a close friend of TraceWorks.com - and lately he’s been helping us out locating and expressing the core values of our company. He has also helped us put together everyday activities on how to better ourselves - individually and as a team.

It was his idea to name our corporate blog “The Dojo”… His perspective on what “a dojo” and what “the dojo” is - and what it is not poses interesting perspectives.