Round one was won by the geeks selling their ideas and technology to venture capitalists. Round two was won by lawyers who had to deal with bankrupt companies from the .com companies. Now round three has started and now real .com companies are starting to be profitable. Especially in the e-tailing and finance businesses some companies are truly success stories. Read the article in businessweek.
You do probably have a few words that you often is testing the search engines up against for ranking. Rankpilot is an easy way of testing how your current ranking is. Just enter your website URL and one or more keywords and you get the ranking from 14 different search engines. (don't use the email field - you just get an email with your URL and keywords - no ranklist!) The Google Ranking is like this: PR0: Penalty/Starting Rank PR1: A one-page site that no-one cares about PR2: A very small-time, very new site PR3: Probably a new site. 3 is a common first ranking. PR4: A hobby site or small venture site. PR5: A reasonable site. Not small-time, but not big-time either. PR6: Established site, with a reasonable amount of content. Usually the result of the hard work of one person. PR7: A large venture, often a collaboration or decent-sized company. Can also be long-established sole venture. PR8: Major site. Often the web presence of a large company. PR9: Very large company or well-known media outlet/internet service. PR10: Large international company / software company or major search engine. PR11: Google This is found on the great discussionforum Google News.
When it comes to self service, recommendation engines are beginning to be more visible - like the recommendations on amazon and the TiVo (digital automatic VCR, only available to customers in USA and UK). But now the backside of automatic recommendations is starting to show up - like when Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) is getting recommendations for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity" during a presentation, just because he previously ordered "Barbarella" with Jane Fonda. Some consumers using the TiVo box suddenly found that their TiVo boxes think they are gay, just because they once set the TiVi to watch a film about a woman turning into a bisexual. In order not to have the TiVo box to continuously recording gay films, he must start recording from the Playboy Channel and bikini documentary. Read the article in Wall Street Journal.
In an internal memo from SUN, engineers warn against running java programs on Solaris. The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) provides too many barriers to deliver reliable applications on the operating system made by the creators of the Java language. Some of the errors that have been closed as "will not fix" is errors like heavy consumption of virtual memory and errors and version inconsistence in the JTable class. The conclusion is, that Solaris is not suitable for serious use of Java programs.
Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has conducted a survey for identifying the biggest obstacles to effective content management - the results are available online. When looking into the results, I sure need information on what CMS solutions the 64 recipients already had and the size and complexity of their solutions. It is pritty hard to get any real conclution without this information.
You have probably discovered that most of your webpages new users is comming from Google and if you have the google toolbar installed you might have noticed the PageRank indicator, which shows the PageRank of the webpage you currently are visiting on a scale from 0-10 (0 is not ranked and 10 is top ranking). The PageRank on a page is calculated based on the rankning of the pages linking to the page by the patented PageRank algorithm. Google has more than 10.000 servers, so it is quite a task to calculate the pagerank, so the pagerank is typically updated monthly - last time was between january 26-29 2003. This update is known as the Google Dance. The previous google dances is listed here. This PDF describes PageRank in 56 pages - so if is abour PageRanking, it is in here! If you want to know how to optimize your site for google, try these google-tips.
David Travis has just written a new book about e-commerce usability and in regards to this he has uploaded a few chapters and a fine usability survival kit, with a good test for verifying if your ecommerce solution is customer centred. He's also got a great example of real life usability from a car park machine in Stuttgart airport: Which button would you press to lift the barrier? Well - as you probably guessed it is the red button?!? Read the full story about how the german usability experts improved the process in 4 steps.... He also has examples of how to lock a toilet door in a train and how to do oven control.