Microsoft World Wide Telescope Trumps Google Earth

[UPDATE : May 2008, Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope can now be downloaded for use]

Microsoft revealed the World Wide Telescope yesterday after it had been one of the worst kept secrets of the um … past few weeks. The buzz started a few weeks ago when Robert Scoble announced that he’d seen technology that had made him cry (in the good way, not the every day bad way).

What Is The World Wide Telescope?

Think Google Earth for the universe. Microsoft have created an application that has stitched together satellite imagery and data from space telescopes such as Hubble and enables us all to take a wander through the parts of the universe where this kind of data exists.

Now I know that Google Earth has a feature to explore space, but it’s rubbish and according to the massed ranks of scientists and children that have sat in front of Microsoft’s publicity video cameras, WWT will make our jaws drop in wonder.

I’m going to remain sceptical so I can be pleasantly surprised when it becomes available to the public.

Of course, the great strength of Google Earth, is it’s relevance. I live on Earth and I like to visit places on Earth. I think this is probably true of most of my readers. We’ve all checked out our house on Google Earth and peered into the garden of that big house at the end of the road etc or shown someone the nice little village where we went on holiday last year.

I’m not sure there will be many people thinking, “Ooh, I used to live on Alpha Centauri, I wonder if my old house is still there.” But if the hype is right, World Wide Telescope isn’t just going to be limited to the astronomy community (though they’ll get most out of it) , it should bring a little bit of wonder to us all and that can’t be a bad thing.

For me, nice thing about all of this is that Microsoft launches WWT at TED, which is great for TED as the massive coverage that this project is going to receive will undoubtedly bring TED.com to a much wider audience. If you don’t know what TED is, throw out your TV and get on over to their web site now. www.ted.com

Ted Have also posted a video of the launch presentation. www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/224

You can check out the WWT web site at worldwidetelescope.org

Filed under: New Technology , astronomy, microsoft, TED, World Wide Telescope, WWT

Are You Organic or Direct?

Web analytics is a complex business and depending on how you measure traffic, you can come up with some wildly differing results. Like any kind of statistics, the raw information that you are provided with is largely neutral, it’s what you extrapolate from the data that matters.

Forget About The Home Page

I’ve recently been analysing traffic to a web site that I have been asked to redesign. The client wants to attract new clients in particular areas of business. So I’ve been measuring the extent to which their content talks about those subjects and what percentage (if any) of the traffic that comes to their site via search engines is related to keywords in these areas of business.

One thing that struck me is that the current incarnation of their site works very differently to anything that I would have designed. 80% of the traffic to their current site is direct and direct to the home page. In other words, the majority of people visit the web site because they already know about the company. Building this kind of brand recognition can be a very expensive way to grow a company and find new business.

Promote Your Products And Services, Not Your Company

On sites that I design, usually it’s the other way around, 80% of the traffic will be from a search engine and will be to a page other that the home page. To my mind that’s an indication of a healthy web site that has the potential to grow. It indicates that people are looking for services and products, finding them and potentially discovering your company as a new source of the product as well.

Or Maybe Not…

Something I saw the other night though has made me question that slightly. Some organic traffic may in actual fact be direct traffic in disguise. To truly understand why people visit your web site you’ll have to understand what traffic really is organic and therefore has been worth your investment in creating good content for your web site.

How To Analyse Types of Web Traffic

When we use analytics packages to research how visitors find our web sites we generally break visits down into three categories:

1. organic search
2. referrals
3. direct traffic

Organic search means that someone has typed a word or phrase into a search engine, you have appeared in the results and they have clicked through to your site.

A referral is when someone clicks on a link on a different web site or in an email to get to your web site.

Direct traffic is when someone types the address of a website into the address bar of the browser or clicks on the address in their favourites / bookmarks of their browser.

Direct traffic usually implies that the site is already known and therefore the site has a reasonable brand recognition. e.g. if you want to find Sony or BMW, you just type sony.com or bmw.com in to the address bar of your browser.

You do do that don’t you? That’s why companies put their domain names on posters and on adverts in magazines.

What Address Bar?

Well it would seem that not everyone does type the domain name into the address bar. In fact, I suspect most people don’t.

Now I’ve known and observed this for a long time, but always just discounted it as one of those “Why do people do that?” things (apparently they find it quicker). But the implications for web analytics has only just occurred on me.

I was watching someone book Eurostar tickets the other night. She knew that she wanted to book them via eurostar.com, she knows that eurostar.com exists, yet she opened up the browser and typed Eurostar into Google.

The first result was eurostar.com, she clicked through and proceeded to book the tickets as normal.

In analytics terms, that visit would have counted as an organic visit, but to my mind, it’s a direct visit. She knew the site she wanted to get to, she just happened to use a search engine to get there.

Discount Some Organic Traffic

So when you’re analysing your web stats look carefully at the organic traffic and perhaps think of some of the organic traffic as direct traffic. Organic traffic that could be classified as direct traffic includes things such as search engine traffic using keywords that are unique to your company e.g. your company name, a product or brand that only you provide, your domain name, the name of a member of staff.

It’s not that this isn’t good traffic to get, but if you’re serious about increasing business via your web site, you should take this kind of traffic as a given. Direct resources at the more challenging task of taking on your competitors for position in the search engines over more generic terms related to your products and services. This is where the real battle lies.

Finally, most people understand that they need to achieve better search engine results for their business to succeed, but like all things related to maintaining your web site, it’s an on going job. As your site improves in the rankings for specific terms, your competition will respond and you need to stay on top of creating fresh and relevant content.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Analytics , direct traffic, google analytics, organic search, referrals, Web Analytics, web stats

Is PHP The Server-Side Equivalent of Internet Explorer?

Let me explain.

Internet Explorer (particularly IE6) is accused of holding back the web. When it was launched in 2001, it was was very advanced and the number of web designers created standards based web sites was negligible so it’s lack of standards compliance wasn’t such an issue.

Since then though, other browsers have raced ahead in terms of standards implementation and are regularly updated. Web designers have adopted web standards more widely and now have a plethora of web browsers to support.

But, while other browsers have streaked ahead and even IE6 has been replaced with the option of new versions, the predominant browser on the desktop is still IE6; a seven year old technology.

IT departments afraid of change, or breaking their web apps and users who are just not aware that there are different versions of browsers have maintained this status quo.

To a certain extent we see the same thing with PHP. PHP6 is in development, but adoption rates of PHP5 are still very low and this in it’s own way is holding back development on the web.

Most ISPs still roll out PHP4 and most of the free blogging systems, CMSs and other PHP web apps are still built on PHP4.

But there is a movement to try to get developers and hosting companies to switch over to PHP 5.2 and they are calling for people to start today.

Go PHP5

The deadline date for this campaign – 5th February 2008 – was chosen because it reflects the latest major version number of PHP (5.2) (at least to us over here in Europe!)

They are promoting general PHP5 adoption as well as highlighting hosts implementing PHP5 and applications built using PHP5. The aim is to create enough momentum in the PHP community to switch over to the latest version.

The campaign site has some good resources for those looking to make the leap.

What is your web host doing to update their PHP versions?

If you need guidance on  migrating your applications from PHP4 to PHP5 you can find it at this page on the PHP web site.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Web Browsers , backward compatibility, go PHP5, php, php 4, php 5

S3 Fox – Free Fridays #11

Amazon S3 is an online storage service which is blisteringly fast and ridiculously low cost. You can store and transfer Gigabytes of data using their service and you’ll end up with monthly bill in single dollar figures.

It sound greats, and it is, but it is just a service and a bare bones service at that. S3 is not very accessible to the average person, but there is a flourishing industry developing creating tools to hide the complexity from users and make this a very useful service.

One such tool is S3Fox, a plug-in available for Firefox.

If you’re used to using FTP then this will all seem very familiar. Once you have signed up for an S3 account and entered your credentials into S3Fox you’ll be presented with your local files in the left hand pane and the remote files stored on S3 in the right hand pane. You can use S3Fox to manage more than one account which is particularly useful if you have accounts for work, home or clients.

Select the files you want to copy to S3 and hit the big blue arrow between the two panes and off they go. It’s also possible to set up folder synchronisation.

The listings on the left hand pane can be set to display as thumbnails or a traditional file listing.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Web Browsers , amazon, aws, firefox, firefox extensions, mozilla, s3, s3fox