DOWNTEMPO Blog

I’m proud to announce the launch of Downtempo’s first home-grown product, “Is It Safe to Visit?“.

Built with Brent Fitzgerald from Taco Lab, our product aggregates the travel advisories from the U.S. Department of State, Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, Australia Smart Traveler, and New Zealand Safe Travel. We normalize and average out the data, creating an overall risk rating for the country, in addition to providing the ratings given by each country as well.

The idea for this product came during my around-the-world trip, when I was looking for a site that provides this data but couldn’t a site that aggregated this data in an easy-to-read format. So we solved the problem by building the site and putting it out there for everyone else to use. It’s a very simple Ruby on Rails site, and for all of you mashup geeks, we’ll have XML APIs for coming soon for all the travel advisory data.

Our goal is to provide more transparency to the travel advisory system and provide a 1-stop website for users interested in the current advisory status for a specific country. We WANT people to travel, and we’re definitely not trying to discourage people from traveling, just to make it easy to discover the travel advisory information thats already been published.

So give it a try! Check out some random countries, or take a look to find out the average opinion about whether it’s safe to visit South Africa or safe to visit Mozambique, two countries that I’m headed to later this month!

As the site footer says, “Keep traveling”. If you have any feedback on the product, we’d love to hear your opinion in our forums on Get Satisfaction.

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I was browsing the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree message boards (the most popular independent travel message boards online), and I was checking out their homepage design. When scrolling down the Thorn Tree homepage, this tag cloud popped out at me:

A unique set of “popular tags”

Evidently some of the Thorn Tree users have learned how to game their tag cloud. And the Lonely Planet staff maintaining the Thorn Tree site have somehow missed this hilarious collection of tags… not to mention the fact that there are hardly any relevant tags being displayed besides the humorous ones.

What can you learn from this experience?

1. Don’t add features without knowing WHY.

This Tag Cloud feature was probably added as part of a misguided effort to add standard Web 2.0 functionality, without having a strong use case to back up the feature. Instead of just dropping extra features into your product plans, have your site functionality be driven by user stories which fulfill the goals of your target audience.

2. Be actively involved with your product and your community.

You’ve got to live the product. This means being in close touch with your community, using the product on a daily basis, and actively participating in the site. You should spot trends like these as they’re emerging, and address them. It certainly appears that the Thorn Tree users did… months ago. Where is the Chief Community Officer at Lonely Planet?

3. Keep shipping new features, iterating, and evolving.

The Thorn Tree could definitely benefit from a continued evolution of the site. (From my perspective as an occasional user, they seem to go large updates rather than little ones.) Little-used (or abused) features like the Tag Cloud should get removed, and new features need to be added. There is a tremendous amount of momentum and activity on the Thorn Tree message boards, and adding a series of user-inspired features could go along way towards ensuring that the Thorn Tree continues to be the main discussion forum for independent travelers.

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With the amount of CSS formatting that occurs on most pages now, it’s easy to apply your own styles to <span> and <div> tags, and neglect the humble heading tags <h1 - h6> that have been with us since the early days of HTML.

Web standards issues aside, one key reason to keep using the heading tags is to optimize your page to be a search engine crawlable as possible. The Trif3cta blog has an excellent article on how to apply page heading tags for SEO, which reviews a series of cases on how to apply page heading tags to a webpage. I highly recommend reading this article in detail for suggestions on how to handle different cases where you’d need to use page heading tags.

A few key points to keep in mind:

• Use <h1> for the main content title on your page (ie. for your homepage, your site name is the <h1> content. For your news section page, the news section page title would be the <h1> content. And for a news article, the article title would be the <h1> content.)
• Use <h2>, <h3>, and so forth, to call out logical subheadings on a page.
• Try to only use <h1> once a page.
• Don’t skip header levels (ie. don’t only have <h1> and <h3> tags on a page without any <h2> tags).

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I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails (RoR) project with a colleague as DOWNTEMPO’s first incubated product. While I’m more of a product shepherd than a programmer, I believe in trying my hand at everything, and so I found myself being tutored in the ways of Ruby and RoR.

One of the (many) great things about RoR is that it gets you up and running quickly, but one thing that you need to still do manually is to plan out a set of clearly readable “friendly” URLs for your website structure. (There are volumes of debate on how importnat the second item is, but I’ll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader.)

Search engines use a combination of URL, page title, and page content to index content on a site. Having clear URL structure will significantly impact the ranking of content in search results.

Here are some simple suggestions of how to structure your own site URLs. I thought I’d share them with you and save you paying me my consulting fees just to learn something that everyone should know.

HOMEPAGE

Should always be linked to as ”/” (so the homepage URL would always be “http://www.downtempo.net/” and never “index.htm” or “http://www.downtempo.net/page/2”).

TOP-LEVEL PAGES

Should always be linked to as the section title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces. Use short, descriptive names that either match or are a derivative of the page title (ie. a page titled “The People of Downtempo” would get a url of “/people/”)

For example, the top-level page URLs on the Downtempo site are:

http://www.downtempo.net/work/
http://www.downtempo.net/process/
http://www.downtempo.net/people/
http://www.dowtempo.net/blog/

SECOND-LEVEL PAGES

Second-level pages (sub-sections) should always be linked to as an abbreviated form of the second-level title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces.

For example, if i had a news section on the people site, and i had it broken down by subsections called “Featured News”, “News from Partners”, “Press Releases”, and “News of the Weird”, my URL structure should look like this:

http://www.downtempo.net/news/featured/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/partners/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/pr/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/weird/

THIRD-LEVEL PAGES

Third-level pages (ie. specific articles or images) should always be linked to with the full title of the article or image in the url, using underscores (or dashes, depending on your personal preference, it doesn’t make a difference with regards to SEO) instead of spaces, and removing any non-URL-compliant characters (ie. don’t urlencode characters like quotes ” just strip them out).

NOTE: If the user later changes the title of an article or image, this should NOT change the URL. This gets set only once, when the article/image is first created (although you may want to have a special override in later for cases where they REALLY want to change this—a lot of blogging platforms have this feature).

all URLs should always be less than 255 characters to avoid problems with some spiders and web form fields (they might want to use a URL as their IM status, for example).

A few examples of how to apply these guidelines:

1.) A news article article at “http://www.somenewssite.com/news_item/2″ should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somenewssite.com/news/article/bush_announces_unprecedented_step_to_address_financial_crisis”

2.) The press release at “http://www.somecompany.com/releases/2008/10342.html” should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somecompany.com/news/pr/revenue_grows_100_percent_over_last_quarter”

3.) The image at “http://www.somephotosite.com/image_set/2″ should have this URL instead: “http://www.somephotosite.com/photos/sutro_tower_in_the_fog”

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XML sitemaps are key to instructing Google and other search engines the page structure of your site, how often page content is updated, and when new content is added to the site.

Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:
1.) All site pages are crawled and indexed.
2.) Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
3.) New site pages are quickly indexed.

The standard XML sitemap structure is available at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php - for an example of a sitemap that i used with my travel blog, see http://www.goneliving.com/sitemap.xml.

I recommend posting the sitemap at the standard filename (sitemap.xml) and location (your website’s root directory), so your website’s sitemap would live at “http://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml”.

The sitemap should contain URLs to every page on the website, which means that it would need to be automatically updated by your website CMS every time a new page is added to the system (or manually updated if you don’t have a CMS).

When you’re ready to submit your sitemap to Google, you can submit it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. it will also give you valuable feedback about how pages are ranked at Google from the site, and also let you know of any 404s or other problems with the sitemap. (Note that Yahoo! has a similar product with Yahoo! Site Explorer, available at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

To ensure autodiscovery of your sitemap from all search engines (like Ask, MSN Live Search, and so forth), you need to add this line to your website’s robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursitegoeshere.com/sitemap.xml


And you’re done! You’ll see an improvement in how your website is indexed, and get a lot of valuable data from products like Webmaster Tools and Site Exporer.

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After finishing DOWNTEMPO’s first year of existence as a California company, we’re celebrating by releasing our new website! As compelling as our former 1-page “find us if you’d like to work with us” website was, i’m glad to have a chance to launch a revamped website that lets us share more with the web about what we’re doing and how we do it. Kudos to Mark and Stephen for their fantastic work designing and developing the site!

It’s been a great first year for our business. I’ve been privileged to work with the excellent teams that i pull together to match each client’s needs, and we’ve in turn been glad to work with a variety of high-profile clients and projects. With roles ranging from early-stage strategy papers to full product management, wireframing, and implementation, and now the commencement of our first pro-bono project (doing projects that give back to our community is something that is important to me), i’m extremely pleased to be running this operation.

While I’m still working through the various logo approvals to list our current clients, the redesigned website should give the curious a better understanding of our role in developing Internet products. Once we receive the necessary signoffs, we’ll be able to reveal more oh-so-tasty information about the projects we’ve developed over the past year.

Besides our new website, we’ve completed a recent physical shift in our offices from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and now that the boxes are unpacked and put away, the oh-so-functional ikea desks are in place, we’ve got enough time to enjoy such features of our new offices as the great coffee bar (complete with a clover coffee machine) on the ground floor, the best cupcakes in san francisco are made across the hallway from our office, and an all-too-tempting wine shopping & storage startup shares our building as well.

We’re looking forward to another great year with our clients, both current and future. Onwards and upwards!

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Scratch, the question mark, i’ll just state it directly: “Multitouch is the new mouse.” The kind of computer input device revolution that comes about every 10 or 20 years. Why?

I’ve been reflecting on the growth of multitouch technology after the introduction of the Apple iPhone last year, and it seems clear to me that multitouch is going to have the impact that the mouse did (and the Tablet PC wishes it could have had) with Apple’s 1984 introduction of their mouse when it released the original Macintosh computer.

The appeal of multitouch technology is immediate and obvious – as opposed to the Tablet PC technology that many companies have tried (and failed, outside of specialized markets) to gain mainstream adoption for, multitouch uses a different metaphor. Instead of trying to have computers replicate a clipboard, multitouch allows users to reach in and interact with the computer directly, using fairly natural gestures.

Apple clearly recognized this trend, moving to acquire their multitouch technology through the acquisition of FingerWorks, a company which developed high-quality multitouch user interfaces. This fits with Apple’s strategy of developing major technology shifts by acquiring little-known companies, which was previous seen in their acquisition of Casady & Greene’s early Mac MP3 player application SoundJam MP, which became the basis for iTunes 1.0.

If you look at the history of the mouse, you’ll see that it had a 21-year history from the time of invention until Apple’s release of a product that made commercial use of the technology. Similarly, if you look at the history of multitouch, you’ll see that it took 25 years until Apple released the iPhone. Both technologies were invented externally, and then later copied/acquired by Apple. (Not a bad way to go — it certainly worked for Google’s AdSense text ads!)

With the future expansion of multitouch in Apple’s product line (in the trackpads of the MacBook Air and future MacBooks, and no doubt in full-sized displays at some point) evidenced from their product line and multitouch application development platform. At the same time, Microsoft has been pursuing multitouch from the high end of the market by developing their massive Microsoft Surface devices (a quick read of their Microsoft Surface press release reveals exactly how important their believe multitouch is). At the low end of the scale, ASUS has been integrating multitouch into the next round of their ultra-low-cost EEE PCs. It seems clear that  the development of surface computing is moving along quickly.

I’m not saying that multitouch will replace the mouse, anymore than the mouse replaced the keyboard (and keyboard shortcuts). But it will add a rich new interface option for modern computers and devices alike.

Update: A delightfully detailed history of multitouch technology has been written by Bill Buxton - I recommend reading it over if you’re interested in this topic.

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This article is written to address the needs of new projects looking to gain traction through user-created viral communities.

Background

Launching successful websites that depend on user-created content (UGC) is hard. It’s a problem that you can’t just solve by applying large amounts of cash to traditional marketing campaigns (although several sites have tried this in the past — CMGI’s iCast is one example from Ye Olden Days of Web 1.0, with their well-produced TV ads featuring DJ Qbert).

So what are the strategies that work to get your UGC community going?

Solve The Problem

You *are* solving a problem, aren’t you? Good.

Now find the users (you should already know who they are) that are feeling the pain from not using your wonderful new product, and strike up a conversation with them. This brings us to:

Recruit Superstar Users from Related Sites

When you’re rolling out your product, you need to find your core audience (especially in terms of content creators — if your product incentives are structured properly, they’ll bring their own audience with them). You’ll want to be recruiting them while you’re finishing your product, to get early product pre-launch feedback, and also to contribute the initial set of content to your product.

When I was launching the website Live365, we were offering a hosted “build your own radio station” service, along with a directory where you could find and listen to radio stations that people had created. Of course the employees all created our own radio stations, but we needed to recruit great broadcasters to our site.

Shoutcast had been released a few months earlier, which provided online audio broadcasting software, and a directory of stations using the software, but didn’t provide a radio hosting service to their users. As an avid early Shoutcaster, I could see the pain in the forums for people trying to find sources of serious bandwidth to use for broadcasting. (And in 1998, that was not an easy task.)

So I contacted the top Shoutcasters, started talking with them about their stations, the music they loved, and their current sources of bandwidth. Once they heard that we were offering the ability for them to reach up to 365 listeners with our service, we had a lot of great users trying out our service. And if they decided they liked it, they started discussing it with each other on their favorite forum sites, and the word spread from there. Rapidly.

Invite Your Friends. All of them. And get them to invite their friends.

I don’t mean “automatically grab all of their contacts from Gmail and send them a spammy be-my-friend-on-this-cool-site email”. I mean invite them. Send them an individual email, explain what you’re doing (you can re-use text describing the service from email to email), and explain why you think they might be interested. Then encourage them to invite their friends, preferably through individualized emails or IMs or whathaveyou. Just don’t spam.

I’d like to introduce a quote from Danah Boyd’s notes on her talk, The Significance of Social Software: (emphasis added by me)

“All marketers know that the stickiness of a product is greatly increased by learning about the product through friends instead of through advertisements.   This is why there is so much scheming around viral marketing.   But organic growth is not just a means of advertising - it is the primary means in which the culture of a site is formed.”

“Consider Flickr.   When Flickr launched, Caterina and Stewart welcomed all users, told them about what was available, and asked them how they could improve the system.   They framed the site as a space for amateur photography, not just as a place to store photos.   As users invited their friends, they helped pass along the message, both explicitly and implicitly through the ways that they used the system.”

This is why you don’t want to have your invites be spam-like. After all, do you want the type of users who buy dubious medical cures via e-mail to be the same users who will define the nature of your site’s new community? Probably not.

Wrapping Up

These are just a few examples of strategies you can use when starting a new UGC community. In a future article I’ll cover how you can target specific user interest niches and other fun topics.

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