Ecommercepartners.net

Asi Erenberg is CEO of Ecommerce Partners

A few days ago I visited a bookstore in the center of the city, when suddenly… I came across a pop up. “But I’m not on the Internet right now,? I thought to myself, “I’m in the real world – the one that once used to rule! How did a pop up get here… that repulsive creature from the world of the Internet?

Well, it turns out that it wasn’t a real pop up. It was the store assistant asking if I needed help, but the minute she approached me I thought, “Hey, what she’s doing is exactly what popup windows are supposed to do – grab my attention and introduce me to an important matter that I might miss.

On our website, for example, we use pop ups for “request a quote. This pop up appears only once to the visitors.

My statistics show that approximately 30% of those who have filled the form wouldn’t have done so unless I’d caught their attention using this irritating window.

My conclusion and the conclusion of many Internet marketers is that, even though the public doesn’t like it and all kinds of pop up blockers have been created, the pop up still works.

The pop ups themselves are not bad… bad pop ups are bad. And others may actually be good and useful.

Good uses for pop ups could be:

• To encourage registration to a newsletter.
• To introduce an answer to a potential question from visitors that on the one hand you don’t want to show on the page, and on the other hand you don’t want to send to a new page at the risk that they won’t return.
• To encourage downloading of a trial version of the program.
• To introduce attractive discounts.
• A survey. For example, to ask the visitors leaving the website why they didn’t purchase.
• To show a unique, prominent characteristic of the product or service.
• As with the assistant in the book store, to ask the visitors if they need help.

It’s advisable, of course, to introduce the pop up only to those that didn’t carry out the relevant action. And this is done by planting a cookie in the surfer’s computer.

The timing is also important. It’s not appropriate to throw a pop up in the visitors’ face the moment they arrive (consider the assistant in the store offering help the minute you walk into the store – “Give me a break! would probably be your response). It’s possible, using JavaScript to delay the pop up and to introduce it only when the visitors leave the page.

The technology that controls pop ups is JavaScript, a language that runs in the browser environment. To program pop ups, it’s of course necessary to control this language.

By using JavaScript, it is possible today to overcome all kinds of pop up blockers. Pop up blockers are capable of blocking the browser’s new windows, but they can’t block a window that is on a new layer of the page, and therefore hiding the contents under it but still being part of the page.

An example of this technology can be seen on the following link in Ralph Wilson’s website that deals with marketing over the Internet:

If you wait a few seconds, a new window that will appear that prompts you to register to Ralph Wilson’s newsletter (highly recommended, incidentally – Ralph is one of the leading experts in the world on Internet marketing).

This window is not a new window in the “Bill Gates sense, and that’s why it won’t appear in the Task line of your computer and won’t be blocked by pop up blocker programs.

In summary, the correct use of pop ups can definitely contribute to improving the conversion ratio of your website! The new pop up technology enables pop up blockers to be overcome.

Wireless giant Motorola Inc – the number two handset maker in the world – is teaming up with U2’s campaigning singer Bono to launch a cell phone that’s intended to fight AIDS and other diseases in the developing world.

Bono’s “Product Redâ€? project now includes a special red version of Motorola’s slim SILVR model, on sale only in Britain for now, but with hopes to spread Europe-wide and to other continents later

Motorola and retailers who sell the phone will contribute about 3.5% of the sale price to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, set up by the UN’s Secretary General  Kofi Annan four years ago. Phone network operators are expected to donate a further 5 percent of each Red SLVR owner’s monthly phone bill.

The red phone will join a red American Express credit card (which sends 1% of its owner’s consumer spending to the Fund). Other corporate participants include the Converse unit of Nike, The Gap (selling a red T-shirt made in Africa) and Giorgio Armani who offers a range of – guess what, for Bono? – special sunglasses emblazoned with a Product Red logo.

Bono launched Project Red in collaboration with record producer and local Californian politician Bobby Shriver, son of President John F Kennedy’s founder-director of the Peace Corps (and his brother-in-law) Sargent Shriver

As often before, Bono has been winning over businesspeople to this latest project with sound commercial imperatives, beyond do-gooding. Motorola had already been trying to cultivate a hip, youth-engaged image with more edgy advertising – especially for its RZR and SLVR phones – and through marketing combinations with MTV and various hip-hoppers.

Evidence that I reported in mid-April, filed for a pending court case, revealed the existence of a room in AT&T’s internet and telephone hub in San Francisco, where the National Security Agency has routinely gained access to details of AT&T customers’ email and phone traffic. Now, thanks to some valuable probing by USA Today, we know that Verizon and BellSouth, as well as AT&T, have been turning over tens of millions of their customers’ accounts to the NSA since September 11, 2001.

The Agency has thus been able to build up what is reckoned to be the biggest database in the world today.

The newspaper’s revelations prompted a display of bi-partisanship in the US Senate, whatever that may be worth these days. An outraged Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced he would summon the phone companies before his panel “to find out exactly what is going on”. And his ranking Democrat committee member, Patrick Leahy, was more theatrical, and waved his copy of USA Today to demand: “Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda? These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything … Where does it stop?”

Well, we know the buck stops at the US President’s desk. When pressed on the morning of the story’s publication, President Bush said: “the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.” Reassuring, as always.

New corporate rival to YouTube’s video-sharing

YouTube.com was slapped down by the heavy corporate hand of the US cable TV industry (when its carriage of Stephen Colbert’s satirical performance within feet of President George W Bush was halted by C-Span, which had control of the original video coverage. Now YouTube’s whole concept of social networking through videoclips is coming under competitive fire from the corporate titan Time Warner and its internet arm, AOL.

AOL has begun quietly rolling out their new service, AOL UnCut, already up in beta test form for a while now. It will officially launch at the end of June or beginning of July, according to a low-key company announcement on May 14th.

Low-key is the watchword in other ways too. The service is certainly limited, at least for now, and far from open-source in nature. No one under 18 years of age can use the service. Users must have an AOL or AIM screen name, and must agree to the company’s terms of service. Membership will allow users to upload videos lasting up to five minutes – and they can come direct from camcorders, using the neat VideoEgg technology. But anyone across the web can watch the postings, regardless of AOL membership. The clips are converted to Flash 8 format, which is reminiscent of YouTube.

That increasingly evident mainstay of online community-building, LiveWorld, founded eleven years ago by Peter Friedman, who formerly built Apple’s internet services, has been hired by AOL to monitor the site for piracy and to remove illegal and/or offensive postings.

YouTube with its 13 million user-base may currently seem pretty unassailable, but there’s little doubt the Time Warner empire has its sights set on eating into such recently successful, organically-grown, “ground-up� community sites. As well as Uncut, the company has launched AIM Pages, which expands on AOL Instant Messenger, its 43 million-strong instant messaging network. AIM Pages will directly compete directly with MySpace.com, once a reputedly innocent teenage site until it grew a massive 70-million user-base and got bought out by Rupert Murdoch.

NEW, TIGHTLY-TARGETED ADVERTISING FOR YAHOO

Advertising that’s firmly focused on the audience’s needs and interests is said to be the best kind. So unsurprisingly Yahoo has high hopes for their new search-advertising software, “Project Panama”, which goes live this summer.

Yahoo’s own research is supported by estimates from outside experts that with Panama in operation the company’s search-advertising revenue will leap by 20 percent immediately, bringing in  $125 million in this year’s final quarter and $600 million by the end of 2007.

It has taken Yahoo since 2003 – when it bought out Overture Services, the company generally credited with inventing search-advertising – to rebuild the software involved to fit its own freshly-overhauled search machinery. The delay came in part from a major re-jig, more daunting than first expected, as technical staff wrestled with ensuring that advertisers could reliably present search users not just with text but with graphics and video as well.

In the run-up to the product launch, Yahoo Search’s open-plan offices in Burbank, California are bedecked with signs reading “Panama! – Are You Ready?”  It’s not just a rush to counter the effect of delayed deadlines. Yahoo needs to contend in the market place of innovation with Google, who can count on enormous attention flowing from the annual May “Press Day” at their Mountain View headquarters. This year Google touted several new services, in particular “Google Co-op,” which will carry content created and annotated by users. Co-op will be rolled out for two subject areas, health matters and city guides, but eventually will cover 16 such separate categories.

*Update – EntireWeb has since changed the author bio informatiion to the proper source, however they refuse to send an email to their userbase acknowledging the mistake.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I started receiving newsletters from Entireweb on a regular basis, as some 413,883 other subscribers do (as of March 23rd, 2006).. Somehow I got signed up and I guess I never much minded them coming to my inbox on a regular basis. But from the first time I read it to this very day, I’ve seen nothing but obvious or very low level SEO information come from it. Needless to say, it’s not one of my daily reads.. However, today something compelled me to take a closer look. So I did..

As expected, it was a basic beginner’s article about title tags and meta data. Offering nothing new, but information a beginner might benefit from nonetheless. After I finished reading, I took a look at the author bio to see the source. This is when the unexpected happened.. My jaw dropped and a silent anger crept through my veins. The author name, Akash Kumar, was the same person I had discovered stealing my own articles a few months back. Articles I had written for the benefit of our clients that I used to write on a regular basis.

In fact, Mr. Kumar’s theft of my own hard work actually caused me to STOP writing these articles because of the helplessness I felt reading my own words attached to his name. Not only did Akash Kumar steal my articles but he also syndicated them across the internet through various sources under his name, as if it meant nothing to him. By weeks end I had found over 50 instances of my work syndicated on websites thanking him for the contribution.

I worked tirelessly to have these copyright violations taken care of. I contacted webmasters, article syndication sites and anybody else that played party to this theft. Most parties I contacted were very helpful. They removed Mr. Kumar’s information and replaced it with my own. But they all spoke of how difficult it was to control such violations, which I disagreed with. Today, when I saw the name Akash Kumar attached to this so called expert article, the feelings of rage came back and I knew this would be another case of blatant copyright violation. Cheaters always cheat, Akash Kumar will always pretend to be an expert while passing off others work as his own.

As I suspected, it took me about 30 seconds to run the Entireweb newsletter issue url through copyscape and find the exact same article, word for word, elsewhere on the internet. One of the url’s that came up was to a SiteProNews newsletter issue dated December, 2002, written by a man named Donald Nelson (note: not only is entireweb allowing copyright theft but they are also handing out information that is outdated by 4 YEARS!). I’m sure Mr. Nelson would not be happy to find out his article has just been sent out to over 400,000 subscribers 4 years later.. attributed to Akash Kumar.

It’s no wonder the field of SEO is looked upon with suspicious eyes.. So called credible sources of information like the Entireweb newsletter are nothing but mass advertising with little regard for their actual reader base. Entireweb doesn’t care if the article has been stolen, evidently. They only care about gaining more subscribers and pushing their search engine to a greater audience. Unfortunately, many of the newsletter recipients are beginners. They don’t know right from wrong in this field. They subscribe because they believe the information they are reading is valid and the source of that information is valid. Many people today looked at Akash Kumar as a helpful, knowledgeable person in the field of SEO. Many may try to contact him for further advice or even for services. Little do they know Donald Nelson is the person they should be contacting, not Akash Kumar.

Article thieves are true scum. They hawk on the altruism of others to progress their own cause. Instead of taking the time, doing the research and writing something useful of their own, they steal from those who do. Unfortunately, this tactic seems to work. Akash Kumar got mass exposure today through stealing, which is bad enough. But Entireweb is ‘entirely’ to blame as it’s their job to force quality control and ensure their users are being exposed to the truth. Anyone who’s ever put any stock into something seen in Entireweb’s Newsletter is now forced to reassess its validity. That’s all 400,000+ of you. My hope is that you unsubscribe immediately and find yourself a better, truthful and more quality source of SEO information.

*note: the following links no longer show proof of the copyright theft as entireweb rightly changed the author bio information

For proof of this blatant copyright theft, feel free to run the Entireweb Newsletter url through copyscape or compare the links below.

Entireweb’s Latest Newsletter aka: Stolen Content:
http://www.entireweb.com/newsletter/archive/2006/ISSUE229.html

Original Article from 2002:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2002/dec/2.html

The digital divide is being chipped away at. At the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, the Media Lab founded by Nicholas Negroponte (curiously, the younger brother of the Bush Administration’s Intelligence Director, John Negroponte) continues its work on developing a really cheap computer (under $100, that is) for use by educators in the Third World. And now the Intel Corporation is to spend more than $1bn over five years to bring laptops, training and internet connectivity to developing countries.

It’s more than altruism, of course. The company will be laying groundwork for future sales as the markets in these nations mature. Intel, after all, entered China way back in the 1980s and was able to capitalize on the phenomenal growth of that country’s hi-tech industries.

Intel is also banking on a future of wireless connections in poor countries, leapfrogging over the wired form of communication that already-industrialized countries have all had to pass through.    WiMax — the long-range wireless networking standard promoted by Intel — will figure prominently (up to 175 trials are being conducted worldwide) in the chip-maker’s program.

MySpace.com may have gone corporate-owned, but it began as a pretty genuine self-generating community site, and it can still demonstrate that challengingly named quality, “the wisdom of crowds�.
A little-known band from Austin, Texas called The Octopus Project, found itself playing at the prized summer festival in Coachella Valley, southern California, thanks entirely to being entered in a MySpace.com contest by some unknown fan or fans, and then voted on.
(By the way, some great band names seem to be germinated in Austin’s fertile soil … like, from different generations, Asleep at the Wheel and I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness.)
Coachella has become regarded as among the hippest of musical events, a chance for the really discerning to catch sharp new indie bands (though this year’s gathering was headlined by Madonna and Kanye West) and it was a major thrust into the limelight for The Octopus Project to get there. They received an email just one week before the festival telling them they had been selected – without even knowing they had ever been entered – and they quickly inserted a Californian detour into their Spring touring dates, between Oklahoma and Arizona. Their recording company Peek-A-Boo Records expressed its surprise with a measured statement on its own website: “Holy Shit, right?�

I know I’m not the first to draw attention to it. But I trust I’m not the only one to be offended by it.
Do you feel as patronized as I do by the growing habit of e-commerce sites – especially those owned by corporate giants – to pepper their site names with personal pronouns?
It’s presumably an effort (though pretty specious) to make themselves seem familiar and friendly. Over-familiar and over-friendly, you might think.

It’s presumably an effort (though pretty specious) to make themselves seem familiar and friendly. Over-familiar and over-friendly, you might think.
The pattern has been set by the community site MySpace.com (now a part of Rupert Murdoch’s massive News International) and the video site YouTube.com. Now every big business entity sees to be getting in on the game. The gargantuan Coca-Cola Company shows up in the guise of MyCoke.com – almost as if it had been built by the teen geek around the corner.  An official rationalization came in revealing company-speak from Coca Cola’s Senior Vice President for North American brands, Katie Bayne:  “The MyCoke strategy is about the thought that we have this wonderful brand that doesn’t belong to the Coca Cola Company; it belongs to the people who drink it�.

I thought (so conventional am I) that it belonged to the people the company belongs to – the shareholders. Having earned a record $6.4 billion last year, the company paid them a handy $4.7 billion. What’s the real “real thing�?  A cool few billion, or the stroke of a cosy pronoun that “we� customers get?