See this “marketing edge” in action here, link provided by Jambor-ee..  I can imagine site visitors being surprised to get a talking head, alright—and then annoyed that there is seemingly no “close, go away or shut up” button, clicking on it in frustration takes you to the site of the company who produces the...thing...and the talking head covers up most of the links on the page which forces you to wait before proceeding.

This is nothing more than a Flash intro overlaid onto the home page with no “Skip Intro” button...and really - if all you have to say is “welcome and there’s alot of great information here”, then you’re simply wasting people’s time with something that could be done via a photo and and a paragraph of text.

Oh - and please...if you’re going to do audio on a website record it somewhere without all the distracting background noise....

I was looking at the business listing of an upcoming tradeshow, and noted a booth from “WSI Internet Consultants” - so hit Google to check them out.  I hadn’t heard of them before, so—always being interested in the local web scene - went to take a look.

What an interesting little nut…

So - from reading the corporate site apparently this is a franchise business, like any Subway or McDonald’s you pay a fee and get to be the local WSI branch.

It struck me as odd that, even though I’ve been in and around the web business for as long as WSI apparently has, I had never heard of them.  Since it seemed odd that someone, in 1996, would have had the foresight to start such a business I went to the Internet Wayback Machine to check on that claim.

Trying to search the Wayback Machine prompts a “Blocked Site Error”.  OK, so now I’m even more suspicious.

Hmmm...funny that in 1996 they wouldn’t have been able to get the “wsi.com” domain - which currently brings up a Weather Services related site...so I tried a Wayback Search on that domain and see that in 1996 it belonged to:

Workgroup Solutions(WSI), a premiere Professional Services company, linking business needs, people, and best-in-class solutions for today’s corporations.

Hmmm...looks suspiciously like a business that might turn into an internet Consulting Franchise....doesn’t it?

Googling around - there look to be dozens of look-alike WSI-related sites:
http://www.wsiwebworks.com
http://www.wsiresources.com
http://www.wsiconsultants.com
http://www.wsimarketing.com
http://www.wsisolidsites.com

Some of their client sites have all the code-stampings of being Dreamweaver-based, or worse.  And..don’t even checking either their company or client sites against a validator of any type.  Just don’t.

Doing a “WSI Sucks” search brings up some interesting discussion forum threads where the fee structures are discussed.

Just makes me wonder - if after 11 years and all the supposed business awards, shouldn’t I have heard of them?  If I haven’t then what are prospective franchisee owners getting for their $50K upfront investment?  Certainly not the brand awareness and market position of a Subway or McDonald’s.

Anyone else heard of these guys?  Used them?  Bid against them?

I just recently responded to some requests for improvements to the group - as valuable information gets buried in email archives that aren’t easily searchable.  I had to respond saying basically that my hands were tied because of the tools that Yahoo! provides, and that they hadn’t done much with the Groups interface.

This morning when I went to approve a new member I was greeted with this:

Interested in Trying the All-New Yahoo! Groups?

We’d like to recognize your valuable efforts as a group owner by giving your group the chance to be among the first to experience our new Yahoo! Groups Beta.

We’ve listened to your feedback and renovated Yahoo! Groups so that every group can be unique, every experience can be tailored to the group’s needs and members feel like they belong to a special community.

The new Yahoo! Groups offers:

- Greater customization for a more vibrant group experience
- Better communication tools for richer conversations
- Easier controls for you to moderate more efficiently

If you’re interested in trying it out, please select the group(s) you’d like to be considered for invitation below. If your group is a fit for the beta, we’ll notify you soon about how to get started.*

I’ve submitted the request to be part of the beta —I think anyway.  Either I did it about 7 times or not at all - the interface they provided gave me no feedback after clicking a “submit” button.

I’ll be curious to see what they’ve come up with for the groups experience.  I know I’d like to see:

• Better spam protection for group owners.  I was getting so much spam to the owner account that I had to shut down that address, which means sometimes requests to join the group sit for a couple of days until I remember to check for them.
• A better home-page or small website builder for the group.
• A way to tag valuable emails that run through the group and pull them into a FAQ, or Wiki, or something that keeps them closer to the surface.
• Improved image gallery—with restrictions on file size, emailed alerts when the account is getting close to being full, and better admin tools for cleaning things out.

Our local Sunday paper ran this article this weekend, about a company seeking to help businesses track and affect their on-line reputations.

You can Google up the company in question through the above article—I’m intentionally not posting their name or linking to their site as I want comments from the blogging community and not responses from the corporate representatives.

While, from a client perspective, I can see the value of a tool that allows high-level analysis of their reputation online, what bugged me as a blogger/content provider is idea of “copying the conversations into a massive database”, which immediately made me feel violated.

It begs the higher question—who owns the comments left on blogs and discussion forums?  It seems like often the site owner, for legal reasons, disavows any ownership of user comments and assigns that ownership to the comment author.

So, as the owner of the comments and thoughts I leave online, are my rights being violated by being copied into a database for analysis?  Or am I just being snide because someone found a way to make money off my contributions to the internet, and I don’t get any of it?

I want to play with Twitter a bit to see if it has benefits for businesses.  Anyone else using Twitter?  What for?

Noodling around a bit on their site, using the archive search you can reach back as far as March of 1923, and read about a proposed airship company that would take 50 passengers on an overnight dirigible ride - departing in Chicago and arriving in New York!

And yes, you can even “Digg” that article…

Cool stuff!

Here’s one I missed while my head was buried in recoding Boyink.com.  Quite a strike against HTML email.

Now that the Christmas season has passed I can finally talk about this book here - I know some family members actually check in on Boyink.com once in a while so I had to keep this...uh...under my hat.

I have to say, Lulu.com is one of those websites that make me sit back and say “the internet is really cool”.

I’ve put together books for my kids in the past - I remember one year taking a bunch of pictures of the kids from over the year and making up a story to go with them. I had it printed, laminated and bound at Kinkos.  Final cost?  Around $65.00.  For one copy.

Granted, Tales From a Pink Cowgirl isn’t printed in color, nor is it laminated.  But at a per-copy cost of less than $6 we could simply buy a couple of copies and keep one nicely stored for posterity.

We were very happy with the quality of the book - the cover photo looks as good as the print I compared it to, and the binding and interior print look as good as anything we’ve brought home from the library.

This book was actually two gifts in one this year - we gave a copy to Miranda as a gift, then bought additional copies for her to give to friends and family.  It went over really well on both accounts.

So if you - or your child - is inclined to write, check out Lulu.com as a way to self-publish a book.  Even in our high-tech internet world there is still something tactile and magical about a book.

Yeah, I know.  Most web-heads will read this announcement from Microsoft, let out a snort, and say “It’s about time!’.

For me though, it’s not without just a bit of sadness and sense of loss that FrontPage goes quietly into the night.

You see, I was working as a software developer at a Microsoft Solution Provider when Microsoft first purchased the FrontPage product from Vermeer.  As part of our partnership we received beta copies of all the new MS software, including FrontPage. 

FrontPage was my introduction into the entire world of web development.  I mostly learned HTML by creating pages in it, then switching over to see the source code it had created.

And yes, I realize it created a lot of junk code, and was the basis for many nasty looking websites - but no more, in my opinion, than Geocities did 6-7 years ago or even MySpace is responsible for today. 

I still think the way FrontPage would build navigation bars from a flowchart view of a site is pretty nice - although it could have been nicer but MS hadn’t updated it for probably 7 of those nine years of production.

At any rate, I haven’t actively used FrontPage for years now, and the world of web authoring and content management has taken great leaps in terms of functionality and price.

But I wouldn’t be where - or who - I am today without Microsoft Frontpage, so I truly mean it when I say “Rest In Peace”.

I have to admit - I’ve visited MySpace several times and always left with the feeling that I was just too old to “get it”.  The pages I visited reminded me of 1996-era websites on Geocities.com—terrible tiled backgrounds, music playing, and junk just everywhere.

So I have to admit to a bit of a “humph” moment, reading this article on the background of MySpace.  I’m am a bit impressed that a bunch of suits managed to pull off the creation of such a popular site for teens - that’s not what I would call the ideal internet success story (we always want to hear that some ambitious young folks did it and got lucky (ala Slashdot).

It’s an interesting read though - well worth checking out.