Who is that woman with Barry White on the new Black Cherry Vanilla Coke ads? Not being able to identify a voice I know I should know drives me nuts. Hey, I got Barry White, so I’m good for 50% of it. But who is the woman? Have you looked at the cocacola.com web site? I did. Thought I might find an answer to my question, but no luck. Plus it’s all in Flash, which is cool but annoying.
Month: January 2006
Good articles from Community MX
John Gallant and Holly Bergevin tell how to prepare sites for the release of IE 7 in Preparing For IE7 – Part One. If you’ve been putting off coming to grips with conditional comments, now is the time to give it your attention.
A second valuable article is Zoe Gillenwater’s Introduction to CSS Table-Related Display Values. This article is the first of two on CSS layouts that emulate the behavior of table layouts, so keep an eye peeled for the second one as well.
Both articles are free.
Intranets and where they are heading
Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006 – Weigh In – weighin – CIO I once worked behind the scenes on a large corporate intranet and find this forecast of where intranets are heading quite interesting. Note item number 5 about Ajax and Adobe Flex.
It’s a bad, bad thing
There’s a new trend in websites that I don’t like one bit. It is the site that’s nothing but Google ads. It looks like a site, it acts like a site, but it’s just ads. A web designer picks some niche topic and does some research on keywords and lines up some ads. There’s a carefully selected domain name, site name, page titles, a menu with well chosen keywords, but nothing on the pages except Google ads. The Google ads may lead you to actual information about the topic you are looking for, so you eventually get where you want to go. But in the meantime, a web designer and Google both made money by tricking you into clicking through what is basically a scam, or spam, or ripoff site to find the true content you seek.
These site designers have done their homework. They are getting good rankings at Google. And they are making money. Some are making enough to live on it as their only source of income. We’re talking thousands of clicks here to generate an income that will support you. But they are providing nothing of value.
I have nothing against Google ads in and of themselves. I have them on this site. But they are not the content of the site. I make an effort to provide something of value here, and the ads are merely incidental to that content. If they generate a few bucks to help with overhead I am satisfied. I’m not cheating you by including them.
Sites that are nothing but ads should get thrown into Google’s spam category. This may not happen, because Google makes money from Google ads, too. Nevertheless, I think Google should stop giving these obviously exploitative sites high rankings. Technically, it’s legal. Morally, it stinks.
SXSW Panelists Announced
The SXSW panel I announced some time back has been reformed with different members. The latest incarnation of the panel is Ayse Enginer in conversation with Liz Henry, Tara Hunt, Jan Kabili and me. The panel was organized by BlogHer. We are SXSW Session #5: Increasing Women’s Visibility on the Web: Whose Butt Should We Be Kicking? Be there Sunday March 12th 11:30-12:30.
Can you pass the quick look test?
Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink – Yahoo! News says the latest research shows that you have about 1/20 of a second in which to convince people that your site is what they are looking for. Only a very clear message can make itself known in that length of time.
The Invisible Woman President
It isn’t just women on the web who are invisible. It isn’t just Cindy Sheehan who can sit outside the door in Crawford for weeks and never even be noticed by the person inside. It is also women who become president. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was inaugurated in Monrovia, the first woman ever elected as President of an African country. Our country sent Laura Bush, who normally doesn’t take on diplomacy tasks, as its representative. Talk about a slap in the face. A woman just got elected President of Chile, too. Wonder if any of our male leadership will notice?