First: There’s No Flash.

Theoretically, flash could show up on the iPad in the future, but as we pointed out in our article on why we don’t develop in flash, we’re not betting on it. The source code isn’t very well-optimized for mobile smartphones, and Apple is already taking a practical/political stance on the plugin that suggests they’re going to heavily push HTML5 instead.

How does this affect us? Well, for one thing, flash remains 100% non-searchable. If you embed your content in flash, you not only cannot be properly indexed by Google, but you’re increasingly going to miss out on a ton of mobile traffic coming your way, and now on future search traffic from the iPad. If you build a fall-back site for iPhone/iPad/non-flash users, great, but that’s double the development costs and time, and requires you to update across two platforms. While Flash is plenty useful for some things, the fact that it’s not on the iPad is an important harbinger for where search and internet marketing are going in the future.

Second: It’s a New Paradigm.

While everyone was busy complaining that the iPad was “nothing but a large iPod touch”, some key writers online (especially Steven Frank) realized that inherent in that very statement is an entirely new way to think about how we use computers.

We’ve been using what are essentially “swiss army knives” for the last 20 years, and for a huge number of users, that level of functionality is absolutely, completely unnecessary. At the same time that this concept opens up the computer where it doesn’t really need to be open, it also makes computers incredibly complex and annoying for people like our collective grandmothers.

That’s a good metaphor for us — we often re-write clients’ copy in order to cater to a metaphorical grandmother, not because we’re trying to “dumb anything down,” but rather because it means you’re explaining your product in simple but honest, respectful language.

If the iPad becomes that one magical computing device that finally gets the grandmothers of the world onto the internet in greater numbers than they already are — and I already know it is the first and only computer (besides the iPhone) I have ever considered trying to get my own grandmother to use — that will be a massive, massive flow of new users streaming onto the internet.

They are going to be searching for things, and they are going to be buying things, and they will be doing so from their iPads and future iterations of the device. If it is a success, it will bring a mass of people online who are just not going to make the effort otherwise.

Three: It Will Probably Change the Advertising Game.

Both Google and Apple are pushing mobile advertising, and the iPad, for all that’s been written of it existing in the ‘netbook’ class of computers, is likely to be considered more of a mobile device than anything short of the iPhone itself. Hell, it runs the iPhone OS, after all.

That means those same ads that are quietly showing up in various apps right now, in what remains a small-but-about-to-massively-explode market? A huge part of that market will be taken up by iPad clicks.

Personally, I’ve never once clicked on an AdMob ad, mainly because I didn’t want to bust out of my app and see some ad — it just doesn’t seem natural. But if the iPad eventually introduces some sort of rudimentary form of multitasking, or the advertising models take advantage of its new “Popover” UI element, then I’ll probably be singing a different tune.

That means in a few short months, we could be optimizing your AdWords campaigns to be showing up inside the latest and most popular iPad app, where a customized landing page with a format that none of us have even thought of yet will be showing up.

It’ll be an exciting time, and we’ll be there for it.

Recently, there’s been a whole lot of debate about how Flash is becoming out-of-date, how the web is going to move beyond Flash and towards something more open — mainly HTML5 standards that include embedded video.

Apple vs. Adobe

One of the main reasons — and main communities of discussion — this conversation has heated up is the often-vocal Apple community online. Since the iPad was announced in January, and Steve Jobs’ demo included visiting sites featuring flash (and thus featuring the same blue lego you see on the iPhone browser), a lot of great writing has been published regarding the potential ‘end of flash’ on the internet.

First, you have John Gruber talking about Apple, Adobe, and Flash:

Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. There are numerous proprietary web content plugins — including Apple’s QuickTime — but Flash is the only one that’s so ubiquitous that it’s a de facto standard. Flash is the way video is delivered over the web, and Adobe completely controls Flash. No other aspect of the web works like this. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all open standards, with numerous implementations, including several that are open source … it is harmful to the web as a whole to have something as important as video be in the hands of a single company, and the only way that’s going to change is if an open alternative becomes a compelling target for web publishers.

Could Flash Go Open-Source?

There was also some talk about Flash becoming an open standard, that Adobe might release the source code in order to allow Apple to re-engineer it to run properly on their iPhone, iPad, and, to an extent, their computers — as both Adobe and Apple insist that they’re not given full access to each others’ low-level computing tasks in order to get flash working as best it can on Apple platforms.

But this is unlikely, and, as Gruber pointed out, the flash source code might be a “huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horsesh*t”.

There’s also this revealing infographic from LifeHacker which shows how the number of users visiting the popular site with non-flash-enabled browsers has increased in recent years.

Adobe’s Response

Adobe has responded, both here and here, but it’s notable that the most stringest defenses of Flash online have so far come from the very company who sells it, not from Flash-using developers.

Why Loveclients Doesn’t Over-Rely on Flash

A final word should probably be given to Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote a post entitled Flash, iPad, Standards:

As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows, developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash.

This is essentially why we don’t automatically mandate flash in our designs (even though you see it on our homepage, as a video) — content and experience, which can only be well-delivered with a good, open structure, are the essential building blocks of SEO, and we don’t want to design sites on something that can’t deliver.

Typography Really Matters

A recent study just proved it — when it comes to saying yes to something, the simplicity with which it’s presented makes a massive difference. When an exercise program was written up in a difficult font, far more people expected it to be that much harder to start. Whereas when Arial was used, the opposite effect happened — people actually interpreted the exercises (identical in both cases) as easier.

The same went for recipes, where a tough font made an otherwise straightforward recipe seem much more elaborate and difficult than it otherwise was. This is why some restaurants use complex fonts — to convey the difficulty and exclusivity of a particular dish.

How Can This Study Help Our Websites?

We’re not saying this just because we design a ton of successful websites for our clients, but one thing that’s important is to listen to your designers. Even if you don’t always agree with them, a whole lot of decision-making resides behind the choices they’ve made for your website.

When clients don’t have a full branding campaign in place, we often take the time, as an agency, to present them with a new logo idea or two. We purposefully go out of our way to not make these logos complicated, for the very same reasons outlined in the study. Complex typography indicates difficulty and complexity, and when you’re trying to sell something online, turning visitors away with a complex logo and site is the exact opposite of what we want.

Finding the Happy Medium

It’s not always easy to convince someone that a simple logo, done in Helvetica (or any easy-to-read font that looks good) is more effective than the elaborate one they had designed to their exact specifications, but studies like this back up the point.

In the end, of course, we design sites for the clients, not for us, so we always try to find that happy medium. But as an SEO Agency that specializes in creating great, optimized sites from the ground up, we’re really only happy when you’re making money, and when we feel an adjustment here or a simplification there could really drive your conversions up, we won’t hesitate to tell you.

Score Another Win For Split Testing

What’s so incredible about Google’s Website Optimizer is that it brings this kind of analytical, scientific testing to the design process. Sure, a few designers have inveighed against the relentless quantification of the online experience, suggesting that numbers aren’t everything, and we’re not saying they don’t have a point — you can analyze data until the end of time and it’s still not guaranteed to help you make a decision.

But what’s so great about split testing is that it confirms a lot of the solid design & marketing principles that good designers have been pushing anyway — a clear call-to-action, copy that moves visitors from point A to point B in the cleanest, most accessible way possible, and a simple approach that tells users what your site is and why it’s useful in seconds, not minutes.

When clients (and hopefully, one day, you!) work with us to get a site built and maintained, month-in and month-out, these, and thousands of other tiny, informed, crucial decisions make up the difference between one that’s successful and one that falls by the wayside. We’re always reading, always testing, always improving everything we do, and it shows in the results, rankings, and conversions our clients continue to get.

Much like the world of SEO, there are gurus and consultants out there with a ton of tricks up their sleeves, ready to help the big and the little guys alike. In fact, the parallels abound — the really big contenders, the 3-star restaurants with the celebrity chefs — they do their own menus, study the psychology behind them, and put everything into them. Just like big corporations have in-house SEO teams, top chefs take a direct hand in their menu preparation.

Restaurant menus are a psychological exercise. People make decisions about what to order for lunch or dinner based on the way the text is laid out, the fonts that are chosen, whether or not there’s a dollar sign present, what kind of cents (if any) are used in the price — a whole series of decisions.

So — what can restaurant menus teach us about SEO?

Split Testing Works

For one thing, it’s fundamental to split test. Restaurants that really take advantage of the psychology of their menus realize that every customer is a living, breathing survey, and that even the most rudimentary analytics can determine what dish gets ordered the most often, and how those orders might change if a word is swapped, a price is shown without the cents attached, or the menu item is placed next to a more expensive one.

While analytics might not tell us everything about why a menu item isn’t doing so well (some people probably just don’t like brussels sprouts, and maybe not everyone loves the product you’re selling, either), they certainly give us a better handle on the reasons behind a consumer decision than, say, our own intuition. Use it to your advantage.

Context For Buyer Psychology is Crucial

The reason specialized consultants exist in the restaurant industry, specially devoted to menu copywriting and design, is because consumer psychology isn’t just a blanket discipline that can be applied easily to every corner of the market.

People make different decisions when hungry, when in a restaurant environment, when they have someone serving them, and so on — than they do, say, in a retail store.

The same goes online — if your site fosters an anonymous, cold feeling, you might have the best product in the world, but you’ll never break through to your customers, and all the abstract psychology in the world won’t help until you fix that one fundamental. Context matters.

The Best Copy in the World Can’t Hide a Bad Product

A mediocre restaurant can improve its completely average breakfast by referring to “country” ham, “farm-fresh” eggs, and “smoked” bacon, even though every single piece of ham, single egg, or strip of bacon is always all of those things. But in the end, that restaurant will never really take off, never get that top review in the paper, and never have people telling their friends about it with true passion.

Good, persuasive copy can drive sales up, but even the finest copy in the world can’t mask an underwhelming offering forever. If you’re selling something that’s so/so, good copy will do all it can to hide that fact. And if your site is selling something truly phenomenal? Then it deserves the best copy around. There’s a reason all the top restaurants have descriptions that seem right out of a classic novel — the food is worth it.

Make sure your website’s product or service is, too.

At Loveclients, we do a ton of work trying to improve our customers’ sites so they make real conversions, and increase their sales, or visitors, or — well, let’s just say we’ve got lots of different clients with lots of different goals, and we’re constantly working to hit them all.

But here’s one thing that’s consistent for all of our clients — if you have good content that leads your visitor towards what you want to do, you will convert them into a customer much quicker.

This is broken down into three things:

1. A Clear Value Proposition
2. A Call To Action
3. An End Result

Whether you’re trying to improve your own rankings or have called upon us to do it, these three fundamentals are worth understanding.

#1: Make a Clear Value Proposition.

You need to tell your customers what you offer. Don’t just blindly list features and characteristics of your product, hoping that one of them will grab the visitor. Instead, explain why this product will fill a need, will solve a problem, or will be necessary in the customers’ life.

Sometimes this means setting up a problem/solution type of proposal, which is quite simple:

1. The customer has a problem.
2. Your product solves that problem.

It works for any business model, but you need to put a little work into it, to make sure your copy reflects — as easily as possible — what your product or service can do for the customer. There are no secrets here — this is exactly what we’ve done with our primary Loveclients page. We know what we do: get small and medium businesses real results online. So how does that fit into this model? Like this:

Problem: It’s hard to increase your traffic and have your site found. It’s complicated, there are dozens of steps, and it takes a lot of consistent work.

The solution? Hire us. Simple as that.

#2: Write A Single Call to Action.

The call-to-action is how that solution becomes a conversion. On our site, we don’t have a massive ’sign up’ button leading you towards entering your information and immediately starting to work with us.

Sure, that’s our final goal (as it is with any business), but we understand that if that were our main Call to Action (people call it a CTA), we’d have some trouble finding as many happy clients as we do.

Instead, we want you to chat with us. That’s the whole point. By using our ultra-simple chat interface, we can explain our service further, give you honest, transparent advice, and answer all of your questions, all with zero pressure, zero obligation — just easy, clear examples.

#3: Have an End Result.

This one is the most simple — if we do our job right, it means you like what we have to say, appreciate our honesty, get something out of the examples we show you, and sign up for our service. And then everyone is happy!

This is how the system works. It’s not secret advice, it’s just good, common sense when it comes to marketing, and these are the same principles we try and implement on your site.

You Can Implement This Right Now.

Let’s say you’re working on the copy (the all-important text, crucial to increasing the search-ability of your site). But you’re wondering what kind of copy you need to get onto that front page; what exactly do your visitors need to see immediately?

Just keep the three above rules in mind. Build out from them, and not from a lengthy mission statement or press release. Now, if you’re a bigger company, you’ll probably need a full content strategy, as it’s not as easy as just splashing some punchy copy on a front page and letting it do all the work for you — but that’s for another article.

This Literally Works for Anyone.

By pushing this angle, you’ll gain more customers. Conversely, a dense mission statement or pointless front page does nothing for your web presence, no matter what your business is.

Really — we can’t count the number of major corporations who would benefit from this approach. Sure, we know they offer literally hundreds of products and services sometimes, but just take a look at a company like Apple, who really understands clean, clear copywriting — they turn over billions of dollars in business, but their website doesn’t hide behind a complicated corporate ‘front’.

It’s just not necessary.

If your site is one of the main ways your business is trying to make money, or even if it’s only a side channel — follow this advice, and get ready for a real difference in how your visitors respond to you.

photo from flickr user dbdrobot.

The consensus is that it’s time for a new kind of search, one that finally brings the internet in-line with the sort of ‘breaking news’ we might see on TV, or that ubiquitous, useless ticker at the most of most 24-hour news channels.

Writing in Seattle’s The Stranger, Paul Constant recently explained why real-time is important:

The thing most people will probably, eventually use Twitter for is its clean and efficient search engine.

The search function on Twitter is an amazing thing: It’s a focused laser beam into what people are thinking about right now.

And it’s permanently set to “now”: It doesn’t have anything to do with the past or with archiving. That is an innovation in and of itself.

An inordinate amount of the internet is devoted to archiving and filing all the world that existed before the internet.

Twitter is reflexive, instinct driven, present. It doesn’t care about the past. It’s hard to find a post older than a week old. It’s work.

Twitter’s own search has been covered to death online, and the consensus is that it needs competition and improvement. As a result, an almost comical number of competitors have stepped up to sort and catalogue what’s happening in real-time on the internet right now.

Below, we look at 5 of the most interesting ones and let you know how they work, what they do for you, and whether you’ll want to use them every day.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed was the first search I tried. To me, it ended up looking more like a blog search—most of the stories were people posting major newspaper articles pulled by Google News, or from the New York Times directly, or from other major international sources like Spain’s El Mundo. I saw a few results pulled from delicious.com and also some posts by the New York Times’ own friendfeed stream as well. The real-time updating was nicely done, but for the subject I chose, there simply isn’t enough at-the-moment information coming out to make a search like this worthwhile.

After about 30 seconds of waiting for someone else to make a comment, tweet, or social-bookmark another article, I moved on. As it stands, I could get a nice idea of how a story is developing through conversation online, but a quick Google News search would get me more relevant information a whole lot faster, considering almost everything in the feed is just links to old-fashioned journalism anyway. Perhaps with a still-rapidly-developing story things might be different, but again, a huge amount of conversation (even about ultra-fresh breaking news) comes through as links to newspaper websites.

The Verdict:

A nice but very simple interface that pulls from a wide range of sources (tumblr, twitter, delicious, digg, facebook, youtube) to get its information. Whether that information is any good is another story. If you use it just to search your own friends’ streams (and have a lot of friends online) it might be great—otherwise it’s search away and hope for the best.

Scoopler

I liked Scoopler’s approach, as it shows real-time results updating in the center column, while displaying various ‘popular’ results (sorted into videos, links, and images) on the right. I tried following a few other ‘hot topics’ as suggested on the left, and most of the twitter results that showed up were near-unreadale, full of 6 or 7 #hashtags each and several links to spam sites.

The spam isn’t surprising—any new communication format online gets abused by spam, but usually we’re able to block it out, either by not following spammers on twitter, or relying on Google’s algorithms to block it for us. Scoopler, although I’m sure they’re trying valiantly to do so, hasn’t done it yet, although they are a brand new search engine.

The Verdict:

An OK mix of the real-time flow and a filtered, more popular resulsts list, but ultimately not very satisfying in helping me find anything. If you like studying the online zeitgeist, this is better than Google Trends, in most respects.

Topsy

Topsy is actually quite fantastic. Want to see how many people are talking about a particular article or several articles on a specific subject? Topsy does it beautifully, because it ranks the results using some specific algorithms. Certain tweeters get an ‘influential’ rating, based on a series of criteria that surely includes the number of followers, the amount of re-tweets they garner, and so on. So as something new and trending pops up online, you can get an immediate sense of ‘authoritative’ search that some of the other real-time engines lack. I’d like to know more about how Topsy evaluates its ‘influential’ criteria, but they’ve definitely hit on a good idea.

The other thing I’m enjoying about their site is the following: it gives me the satisfaction of google’s indexed, archived, older searches, only applied to Twitter. I can go through Topsy and immediately find my own profile, and then get a sense of how many other people tweeted the same links I did. Authors can also use this to find articles and blog posts of theirs that other people have been talking about—while Twitter’s main search lets you do this too, Topsy makes it more elegant and far better organized.

In the end, when it came to my breaking news search (Xinjiang), Topsy was much like the others, giving me general links to big newspaper stories with lots of authority, and little else. Perhaps I picked one that didn’t have much original content outside of news agencies—it was coming from China, after all, where there’s still plenty of censorship. Breaking stories elsewhere have a much different feel to them—faster links to amateur video on youtube, and so on.

The Verdict:

Out of all of these, Topsy is the one search engine I can see myself going back to, and using it to supplement a google search. I’ve already used it about five times today, which is the only thing that matters, in the end.

Collecta

Collecta is another startup (all of these are startups, of course) searching twitter, this time with an interface that lets you put into larger focus individual tweets, and lets you run several searches concurrently.

I liked both of those features, and the fact that it pulls comments from blogs, as well as blog posts and flickr photos. There was no smooth interface action where the newest tweets cause the old ones to elegantly slide down (something that FriendFeed does, which gives it a more ‘real time’ feeling, at least aesthetically), and there was still, as is inevitable, a ton of spam when it came to any ‘hot topic’.

Also, leaving the site gave me a message about disconnection, and going back to the site left me with a big wait before all my searches started again.

The Verdict:

Again, a nice interface, but nothing I’d use on a daily basis. I’m starting to notice a trend here—slight variations on the main twitter search engine—and I think a large part of this is because all of these search engines are just so damn new.

Almost.at

Here we’ve got a site that isn’t really a search engine, as much as a way to follow a series of ongoing events through real-time chatter online. You can choose major events from the left toolbar, and you get a series of twitter updates, flickr photos and youtube videos, and various links displayed.

What’s nice is that the timing is broken down minute-by-minute, so you get a nice clean view of the traffic for a specific event. You can also head back in the timeline to see what the chatter was at a previous time. Once I did this, though, I found it tough to get back to the ‘present moment’ and started forgetting today’s date.

The timestamping for the youtube and flick results also seemed to be non-existent.

The Verdict:

A cool idea for following live events, and the actual event choices (at least during the beta) are moderated, so the selection is small and relevant. The execution isn’t anywhere close to perfect, but the concept is one of the most interesting. Following protests using only #hashtags or twitter’s main search can become a spam-fest or a messy confusion, and almost.at’s concept of choosing specific ‘events’ and following just those is a nice way of organizing the information.

To Sum Up….

Pretty much all of these services are in beta, and they all show it. In the rush to capitalize on the new flood of twitter data that’s out there, it’s inevitable there are going to be a ton of real-time search engines popping up this year, and if the rumours are any guide, Google will surely launch their own effort soon enough.

Lots of chatter about real-time search tends to paint Google as an old-fashioned search engine relying on caches and ‘yesterday’s internet’. Be weary about such claims—determining relevance when it comes to search results takes time, and for now, the best algorithms are ones that can’t get the job done instantaneously.

And What About Google?

Another cliche in the chatter surrouding these sites is Google’s lack of a real-time offering as of yet, and the fact that they’ve admitted they’re somewhat ‘behind’ on the issue. While it is surprising that so many competitors have moved into the field while Google has released nothing so far (but goes ahead and announces stuff like the Chrome OS months and months in advance, without any previews or substantial details), it’s all just a matter of tracking and indexing data, something we all know Google is very good at.

And most of the data being analyzed is simply coming from Twitter streams, combined with reading the timestamp of various other postings. None of this is exceedingly difficult when it comes to search, so what’s really going to matter is getting relevant real-time results, blocking spam, and creating an interface that’s easy to use but robust underneath.

So far, a site like that doesn’t exist (although I’d vote for topsy as the best one so far). Might Google jump into the market with the best implementation of real-time search yet seen? Although the field seems insanely crowded already, even just a cursory glance like we’ve done here shows that there’s massive room for improvement. Real-time search is still in its ‘alpha’ phase, and needs a big player to pull it out. One is probably going to arrive any day now.

Of course this isn’t web or blog content, but rather just business or personal emails we send back and forth. But can we ever use any of it as content for our sites?

Indeed we can.

The Value of Author’s Letters.

I’ve been reading Norman Mailer’s letters recently, and it occured to me that he made dozens of great points, observations, and arguments while writing to friends and editors. This is normal–we often say great stuff in our emails, too (probably not as great as his, but hey).

But it’s not really publishable, per se—it’s generally only great authors who get that privledge, and thank god, because reading through people’s random emails would be an atrocious task.

But what about the few times we do write something truly memorable in an email? An anecdote, a product review, a recounted experience—we send a lot of these things to each other. I tell various stories in a ton of different contexts: flickr captions, google reader shared item comments, my photoblog, and in emails, too.

Many of the best things I’ve ever written are likely buried somewhere inside emails. If I were running a business, surely I’d have sent many good thoughts and observations on my business out to various friends and associates. Keep that part in mind while I tell you a story.

My Friend and his Duplicate Emails (He’s Proud of Them).

I’ve got a friend who admitted to a strange practice: when he tells an anecdote that takes more than a few lines in an email, he’ll often copy and paste the whole thing into other emails when someone asks about it.

After a few seconds of personalization, that second (or third, or fourth) recipient gets the great anecdote too.

Why not just make it into a blog, you might ask? Well, a blog changes things: it’s automatically more public, and it has a frontend that requires more work than just firing off an email. This is changing, of course, but updating a blog still isn’t really as easy—for most of us—as sending an email.

How to Keep Track of Your Finest Email Moments.

So let’s say we want to keep track of our greatest e-mails, those moments of prosodic excellence where we’ve written something truly great and might want to see it again in the future, or perhaps even use it. Is there a way we can keep track of this stuff, and quickly and easily turn it into published content?

Tracking isn’t much of an issue with something like GMail: just create a tag called “content” or whatever you’d like, and any time you notice you’ve written something that might be useful elsewhere, give it that tag. Every once in a while, go through your ‘content’ tag and see what you can find.

Getting All That Good Writing Online, Somehow.

So how do we get it online? Obviously we could just copy and paste it to our blog, but there’s a new service that makes this even better: it’s called Posterous. It’s been catching on recently among a few high-profile bloggers, and its mission statement is simple: blogging through e-mail.

It’s microblogging, much like tumblr offers (they too offer e-mail postings), but with a real focus on posting from your inbox as the primary way of getting content online.

A Practical Way to Make This Work for You.

Let’s pretend you’re running a blog and company website that promotes your independent printing shop.

Every once in a while, you write a great email to a friend, extolling the glories of letterpress, or talking about a new printer you just brought in, or talking about what a pleasure it was to finish a particular job.

As you know, getting interesting content (you don’t send deadly-boring emails, do you?) like that online is invaluable for several reasons:

• it keeps potential customers on your site,
• makes your business far easier to optimize for search engines,
• and increases the chances that other people around the web might enjoy something you write and link to it, thereby greatly increasing your traffic—and potential sales.

So try this out: setup a quick blog on Posterous. They’ve just taken the extra step of not requiring even a sign-up in order to create an account—you can just email their post@posterous.com address directly and within a few seconds you’ll have a subdomain and an account.

Then, every time you write something good in an email, take a few extra seconds to forward that to the posterous email address. You’ll already be in your e-mail client, so there won’t be much of a time commitment to speak of.

Then, just feed the posterous RSS into your main blog (you can do this through posterous or—likely—through your blogging platform too), and you’ve instantly got another way to add content to your site directly from your inbox.

If this Posterous Idea Makes Things Too Complicated, Not to Worry.

I didn’t want this article to sound like an ad for Posterous—we’re not affiliated in any way. But I like the site.

And I was just using it as an example of how simplified blogging tools are getting. What’s really important to take away from this article is this: if you are at all a writer, if your emails occasionally contain great bits of information about your business, life, or anything that might serve you well if published online, take advantage of it! Don’t just let that content be for one person—edit it a bit and put it to work for you.

Famous link-aggregration and voting site digg.com recently launched a new feature, called the diggbar. It’s a type of frame that appears above the browser window when you follow a digg.com link, and serves to keep the web user “inside the digg universe” instead of immediately leaving it.

It also functions as a URL shortener. In fact, if you enter any website URL after digg.com (for example: http://digg.com/www.loveclients.com) you’ll get that page, with the DiggBar displayed on top.

What’s the Point of It?

How does Digg describe the new feature? According to their site’s blurb, it allows you to do the following:

The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.

What this really means is the bar above your page works like those popular browser toolbars that google, yahoo, stumbleupon and countless others want you to install. Functioning as a filter, helper, and advertising assistant all at once, they deal with your browsing and, depending on whose bar you’ve installed, respond to it in various ways.

The google toolbar might find relevant sites depending on what sites you’re visiting, allow you to search google quickly (largely redundant with most browsers’ built-in search boxes now), while the yahoo toolbar contains a mail widget and various other yahoo-related connections.

Web-based Toolbars are Different Than Browser Addons

Where Digg’s new offering difffers is that, like stumbleupon.com, there’s no software to install. This means that the diggbar is essentially just a frame running at the top of your webbrowser, continuously connected to digg and pulling information from the browsing you’re doing below.

Offering comments from digg.com, the ability to share page content, and offers of related ‘dugg’ sites, the Diggbar is somewhat like an advanced bookmarklet (the little pieces of javascript you can drag to your browser toolbar and then use to share content on a variety of sites: see Google Reader’s or Tumblr’s for an example).

From some perspectives, this might sound OK, except that the Diggbar is generating a fair share of controversy. As URL shorteners are already becoming slightly problematic (their prevalence on Twitter means that if any of the sites, such as bit.ly, ping.ws, or tinyURL ever disappear, all tweets using those services will suddenly be full of broken links).

And now digg has jumped on the bandwagon, offering its own bar as a way to shorten URLs for use on twitter.

Everyone’s Doing It: Why Digg Wants to Keep You on Their Site

The controversy comes because, unlike the traditional shorteners, the diggbar takes you to a version of the website presented through digg’s bar feature, which means you aren’t seeing the website in its original form, but intsead in a framed edition.

The web-development site daringfireball talks about how framing a website harkens back to the mid-1990s, when netscape introduced its ‘frameset’ tag and temporarily made the web a very difficult place to navigate. Frame-based sites were everywhere, and made browsing terribly annoying for nearly everybody:

It did not take long for a broad consensus to develop that framing someone else’s site was wrong. URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others. The DiggBar breaks that, and I’ve seen no argument that makes it any more sense to support this than it does to support 1996-style site embedding.

According to this argument, the diggbar is the exact same concept, only dressed up to look like something else. Instead of being a special ‘helper’ at the top of the site, it’s just an old-fashioned frame that keeps you on a site and confuses your sense of where you actually reside on the web.

Engadget is Having None of This

One of the biggest sites on the internet, Engadget, has blocked the diggbar entirely. In a statement, they explained why they have a fundamental problem with the way digg is implementing this new feature:

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

It’s all about context in the end, and the DiggBar simply removes too much of it. It’s great for Digg and its advertisers, but as an new method of keeping users “within the Digg ecosystem,” it’s not so great for the web at large. Engadget continues:

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Other Reactions Haven’t Been So Kind, Either

Other not-so-happy reactions came from 3dogmedia, WebMonkey, and SearchEngineLand, none of which were very complimentary. Digg’s Kevin Rose has explained that they are looking into changing the way the diggbar functions to make it less intrusive and cumbersome, and to address some of these fundamental complaints.

Whether they can do that without changing the business plan that is surely behind the new bar’s introduction is going to be an interesting question in the future.

Digg is one of the web’s biggest sites, and their further attempts to monetize and become a profit-generating business mean that some of the best aspects of the social web will inevitably suffer, or at least undergo some serious changes. It’s something we’re all going to watch very closely.

Obviously these questions matter for anyone trying to make money using different forms of content distribution, whether it be advertising in a local newspaper or taking out new ad space on YouTube. But what matters even more is how these new forms will actually affect the content itself. Let’s look at a few recent ideas and see what they can tell us.

Marshall McLuhan Is Still Pretty Damn Important.

Now, if you remember nothing else from this pioneering Canadian media theorist, just take his most famous aphorism: “the medium is the message“. It’s since been tweaked and refuted and played with so many times as to lose some of its original meaning, but in general, you can take it to mean form affects (or is) content.

Look at the Kindle, for example. The world’s biggest online bookseller has now entered the hardware game, creating a device that is designed to replace the very book form itself. And of course Amazon, being a huge seller of books, is hoping to control and monetize as much of the distribution method as possible. It’s very much along the lines of Apple’s iTunes store: create a device that a lot of people buy, then offer an elegant solution to sell content for that device.

Why Comparisons With the Music Industry Aren’t Always Perfect.

But comparisons with the music industry don’t work after a certain point: formats have changed quite frequently in the last several years, from vinyl->tape->CD->digital. Books have been the same for hundreds of years. So any time we get over-excited about the death of print, we need to step back and look at the longer view, like Dave Eggers suggests:

Eggers has a point. But there are some very convincing arguments to the contrary, and as Apple has proven, if a device good and useable enough comes out, enough people will buy one that it can change an entire industry in the course of a few years. But we do need to remember: completely ignoring print and assuming that a declining readership means a non-existent readership just isn’t a good idea.

A Microcosm For Us All: Intellectuals and Published Content.

A recent argument has also been floating around about Masters and PhD dissertations, and how the cost of publishing them is nearly always prohibitive. The argument usually continues that the ‘book’ form for academic argument is not always ideal; it has created the expectation that if a professor has something good to say on a subject, it must come in a minimum of 220 pages. While this might seem like a small corner of the publishing market, it’s actually a perfect microcosm of some bigger changes we might see in the future.

A long, read-by-no one dissertation is an antiquated notion. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure it will continue for some time, but any progressive university is probably realizing that the whole ‘university publishing’ business will have to change radically over the next several years.

The Delivery Method Starts Changing the Stuff Inside.

Here is where the dozens of options available for content publishing (the form, or medium) will begin to change the content itself. Once the necessary existential debates on the role of the academy and the importance of intellectual discourse are hashed out, we are going to be looking at a very different landscape, one where serious academic thought is not walled up in quarterly journals but actively distributed across a whole range of channels.

Many of these channels will not be conducive to a 220-page dissertation. Some will support, say, a 15-page essay, others might be wonderful for a short book (say 100 pages) on a particular subject, others only a brief article. But all of these options, and the various ways in which content creators, editors, and distributors will try and monetize this process is definitely going to change the content itself.

And Just Why Does This Matter to Us?

Simple: if you get too focused on creating quality content along a single model, the speed of innovation might take you for a loop. Things don’t change so fast that all your hard work will disappear in a moment, but if you are trying to improve your website’s SEO, build a brand online, or market your product through any kind of content creation, you need to pay attention to how the mediums are changing.

Just because Twitter has become insanely popular in the last 3 years doesn’t mean you need to scrap your print advertising budget and start tweeting incessantly. That would be quite useless. But it does mean you need to be conscious when something like a Twitter pops up, and suddenly a new 140-character format for content exists. Remember not to get too comfortable and you’ll stay on the right track.

(photos by flickr users peagreengirl and cogdogblog. Used under a creative commons license.)

And that’s all it has been doing—nothing has changed or become particularly more robust. You can add a feed of your flickr photos, links to all your blogs, and there are a few cursory implementations of various Google APIs (a non-dynamic maps image that shows where you’ve lived) to fill out the page.

But does Google have something else in store for its profile? Could they be planning something big and just waiting to release it? We know they’re trying to change the game in regards to online collaboration—just look at Google Wave—but will they try something similar here?

Google Already Has a Social Networking Application.

Yep, it’s called Orkut, and chances are you probably don’t use it. Unlike the ubiquitous facebook, orkut never really caught on in North America or the UK, and most of its user base comes from Brazil and India. While those are most definitely not places to be ignored, it’s safe to say that any big Google innovations are generally going to be ‘launched’ with the English-speaking market in mind. It’s just the way things go, Google being a Silicon-Valley based company.

So if Google would already like you to use their social networking platform and you’ve politely declined, is the point of Google Profile pretty much exactly what it says? That it provides a home for your contact information as searched with Google, and nothing more?

Why Profile is Currently Limited, But Might Not Be For Long.

At the moment, yeah—that’s pretty much it. I started poking around for a way to display my Twitter feed on it, or my shared items in Google Reader, and they just weren’t available. All I could do was add a link to my twitter page, and Google had already provided a link to their own reader feed. No robust APIs were on display here.

Much of the reason Google Profile seems like it could expand into something bigger is because of its name. Profile makes us think of our facebook or linkedin profile, full of information, photos, comments, wall posts, posted items, and the rest. But facebook, until very recently, was a closed environment. It was impossible to access the feed of content attached to any particular user.

How Facebook’s Big Announcement Could Change Everything.

Now that Facebook has introduced their Open Stream API, however, all of this could change. Is there anything that might block Google from integrating the open stream of Facebook information into a Google Profile?

Not exactly, although Google’s own attempts to create an open-source, social media API across all platforms (that would be OpenSocial) read quite similar to what Facebook is now trying to do with its activity streaming.

Since Facebook has not previously embraced an ‘open’ style of development with its API, preferring to keep things closed for many reasons (monetization being one important factor), this tentative step in that direction is a big risk.

Once all the rich user data from Facebook is openly accessible, readable, and modifiable, who’s to say that Google won’t simply step in, harnessing its unbelievable search capacity, and create an open facebook-alternative, displaying Google advertisements and providing an even better user interface?

So—while Google Profile seems strangely static and rather limited in its scope at the moment, keep watching for developments among the big social media APIs. The framework for a potential game-changer could be sitting right under your nose.