sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?

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Charles Tyrwhitt have just launched their new online store, which Agency.com helped to develop the user experience for. It was a collaboration with Javelin Group, and a host of e-commerce technologies are used, including:

• Mercado, for the structured product search and merchandising
• Scene 7 for the product image presentation
• Feefo for the user reviews of products

As an occasional wearer of suits and such like myself, I’m glad this site’s gone live, as it’s a great improvement on its predecessor and is applying a lot of current e-commerce best practice.

I’ve known the people at Emailvision for 6 years, and have worked with them on several occasions, as a client and as a consultant. The company has grown amazingly, especially over the last couple of years. This morning I was at the Institute of Directors for their breakfast seminar about version 6 of the Campaign Commander email marketing platform.

As they explained it, version 6 is about 3 things: easy integration with other web-based applications, better reporting and control over user rights and workflow.

Integration is all about APIs (the interfaces developers use to integrate applications with each other) and web services , a specific kind of API used for web applications. As they explained it, you no longer need to use the Emailvision front-end at all if you don’t want to: you can control and access anything Emailvision can do just by using their APIs. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to write their own user interface to Emailvision’s email platform: there’s a good one already. It does mean that most integrations you might like to do will be possible.

Suppose, for example, you’ve got an e-commerce website that’s been doing its own email marketing, but you’ve grown out of the built-in capabilities. Now you can choose between enhancing your own email platform or building an interface and using Emailvision’s. Given the amount of R&D they do each year, the idea of moving up to their platform could be a lot more attractive than attempting to enhance your solution. If you’re using Salesforce.com or Highrise for your customer relationship management, or Coremetrics for your analytics, you could easily benefit from this integration.

There’s something about this that reminds me of yesterday’s piece about Dopplr: building something very functional and making it easy to plug into (and well-documented) makes it much more likely that people will pick up your application and start doing interesting things with it.

Chris Combemale, Emailvision’s COO, and I were talking about APIs for the Emailvision platform in 2002, so it’s great to see them doing such a comprehensive job now, and placing it at the centre of their product strategy. And very web 2.0!

The reporting enhancements looked very nice, and I would expect so too! This is a very competitive area and keeping the reporting ahead of its rivals is a necessity.

Finally, on workflow and user rights, they’ve implemented controls and structures that remind me very much of those you see today in commercial content management systems. User access can be defined at the role level, and then users can be assigned to different lists (effectively databases) with very specific control over access rights. Different workflows for campaign development and execution can be set up, and these can again vary from list to list. It’s very powerful, allowing customers to set things up so that the CEO can run a dashboard report but can’t inadvertently push the campaign live. Agencies can be allowed to upload creative (and perhaps to test it) but not to create campaigns, if that’s how you want it.

My only reservation on this point is to ask whether they might open up the workflow and user architecture, so that big enterprises can use their existing LDAP or Active Directory for user access, for example. Might a corporate website built on Sharepoint 2007 link to Emailvision for its email campaign management, and use Windows Workflow Foundation to integrate web and email development workflows?

Finally, it’s interesting to see how many pre-configured packages of services Emailvision are offering. Having acquired Barnes & Richardson, the Brussels-based viral experts, last year, they’ve designed a full-service viral solution that looks very competitive. They also have post-sale engagement and up-sell solutions that would benefit a lot of retailers.

You understand why this car’s license plate is significant…

…or you get this cartoon…

Anything to add?

This is a great presentation I picked up yesterday, from the team at Dopplr. It’s somewhat technical, and useful for developers for that reason, but it’s making some important points about business trends as well.

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The first big point is that you don’t have to build a huge online service to do something truly useful. Dopplr actually does a very simple thing, but it does it in an open way that makes it easy to integrate with other things. The presentation gives lots of examples of this: blog badges, Facebook integration and even a tool that can tell you how much CO2 you’re producing with your business travel, all powered by trip data at Dopplr, but integrated with other things, to make 1+1=3.

The second big point is about identity management. OpenID is emerging as a standard for identification online: Dopplr, 37 Signals (with their Basecamp application) and many, many others are turning to OpenID to manage authentication and identification. This will make it much easier for applications to stitch together bits of information from different sources. But there are also standard APIs (Google has one, Facebook has one, Flickr has one) that make it easy for users of the Internet to authorise applications to access the data from each others’ systems on behalf of the user. OpenID will be a big part of lots of services looking forward.

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…

Yesterday I read about Jiglu, a plug-in for blogs that reads content and creates tagging data for it, automatically. Tagging is an important, necessary, and occassionally tedious activity that people with blogs carry out, and it’s hard to say whether you’ve done it intelligently or not. Tags are used by people reading sites (for example you might look at all the content I wrote about “web 2.0″) but they’re used a lot by software as well: sites like technorati, Google’s blog search and a host of others use tags as a way to navigate and understand what content is about, and it’s a popular way into websites as a result. So it drives a lot of traffic, which makes it important, and none of us know if we’re doing it well or not.

I therefore installed Jiglu yesterday, and so far I’m pretty impressed. It’s extracted useful tags (more than I would, which I guess is good) about people, things, places, and created a little panel that you can see on the right hand side. But it’s also created active links in my text, so you can go straight from a mention of the word IASH (I do hope it’s highlighted that for me) to all my entries about them.

It looks quite useful, in a geeky kind of way. I’ll keep an eye on how it goes, but if it improves my tagging and traffic numbers, it can’t be bad.

This article was written by Innocent, who is the Chief of Gorilla Monitoring for ICCN in Congo. It’s an account of why and how he became a ranger, and his career so far. He wrote it because his team can’t go out to work, because of the civil war there.

I wanted to post a link myself because it’s an amazing personal account, about something important, and also because it shows the power of online when it’s done with authenticity and honesty. There are a bunch of very brave people in a remote part of the Congo, who are keeping the rest of us in touch with what’s going on in their efforts to save the mountain gorilla (only 700 remain in the wild) and I can’t think of a better way to do that than with a blog. The BBC, CNN, AP, Al Jazeera have all picked up this blog and are reporting. Some have sent camera crews to spend time with the rangers.

You can sign up for their RSS feed here, if you want to stay in touch.

My article for Revolution Magazine has been published. It feels like I wrote it months ago, which I guess is one of the big differences between blogging and writing for a print magazine. Anyway, this is the text of what I wrote:

A couple of recent conversations got me thinking about the potential for business blogging. I was talking to a middle manager in a FTSE 100 company, who was unfamiliar with the term “blog” despite being a fairly heavy Internet user. The term had just passed him by. Then I sat down with a group of digital natives who’d gathered to talk about their Internet usage and interests, who hardly read any blogs at all. Is blogging a minority pursuit, or is it something that companies could make more of?

It would seem like there are plenty of companies that could benefit from a decent blog. Agency.com has certainly had its share of trials over its own corporate blogging efforts. How many organisations today would cite a lack of customer trust as one of their business issues? How many would benefit from a dialogue with their customers about how they’re doing, new product ideas, or their service issues? Blogging is an ideal way to meet these needs, but great examples are few and far between. My friend, who works for Avis, recently wrote a piece from his water-logged Oxfordshire home, sharing his advice on driving in wet conditions. His company’s blog is straightforward, honest, and winning awards. The stories of Wildlife Direct’s workers in the Congo are more dramatic and emotive than any soap opera. But these are rare examples.

When I looked around this week, most companies’ blogs were too boring and corporate for words (I guess that might be expected from Boeing), or disconnected from what the company does - and therefore any reason for having a blog in the first place. Who’s really interested in what the guys at an Spreadshirt watched on TV last night? Is it really a good idea to talk about the staff party on a site that anyone can see, like I saw one top London agency had done? Microsoft putting its employees’ blog URLs on their business cards is trying a bit harder, but are any of them worth reading?

I can see several causes for this disappointment. Some companies get worried about what investors, regulators and competitors are told, and start to control who can speak in public. If they’ve put 3 layers of sign-off in their web editorial process, a tool that allows staff to just start writing and getting published must sound like anarchy. In other companies, the people with interesting things to say are just too busy. The blog is left to the enthusiasts, and most of them are just a little bit on the geeky side. Lack of innovation is another challenge: getting a company blog going is so much more than just installing the software and creating some user accounts. Adding a link to your blog to your website’s page footer does not constitute a strategy.

Perhaps whatever companies do with blogging, most people wouldn’t be that interested in what they have to say, but it feels to me like a lot of companies are missing a trick.

Someone was surely trying to create an “all environmentalists are insane” story when they announced this morning that the UK Government was trying to get us all to switch from fresh to UHT milk. Had this story been true (apparently it isn’t) the outrage would’ve sent greens throughout the UK scurrying into holes, thus ruining Blog Action Day.

Personally, most of my activity in this field is about helping people to do the green thing. Sign-ups for the project are going really well, and it’s exciting to see something I’ve been involved with for almost a year come to such a successful fruition.

Thanks to Slasheco for reminding me (via Facebook, how web 2.0 of us) about blog action day… None of my reminder emails having arrived.