JOHN SUMSER,
E D I T O R


S P O N S O R S


Find out more
About IBN


Articles

Archives

8 Corners of ECommerce


Register to receive
e-mail when
this page changes.

Email address


Hall Of Fame
8 Corners of ECommerce

Types of Links

Red Herring
H C I Readlist
Webstyle guide
The Pilot
Daily Webnews
I A Daily
Webcatcher
Professor Pete
Ad Tutorial
Advert World
TRADEWINDS
WebMaster Mag
HT Marcom
Dave-Net
A1 Index
Telecosm
Submit It

Suggestions?



The advertising
industry is on
the verge of
being shattered
into a thousand
fragments due to
the knowledge explosion
and the proliferation
of new technologies.
There are no
more grand theories
that hold sway
over the entire
industry.
Michael Strangelove


Advertising is
one of the minor
arts, so don't
be intimidated
by it. Try
not to lose
your sense of
playfulness.
Keep it fun.
Robert Bly



Reality
is more
complex
than
it seems.
John Gall



The System
is its own
best
explanation.
John Gall



It's better to
do a few things
really well than
than to do
a lot of things
badly.
If you can't
make the necessary
commitments of
time and energy
to your
electronic
marketing
efforts
scale back
your plan.
John Sumser


Suggestions?

All material on this
website is the
property of IBN
(The Internet Business Network)
You may download
a copy for personal
use. Redistribution
without permission
is strictly
prohibited.
All material on
this site is
© 1995. 1996. 1997 by IBN



OUR HOME

...


Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter

February 19, 1997

Flabbergasted

According to Dave Werthheimer of Paramount Digital Entertainment, the Internet is destined to become a forum for entertainment as opposed a technological medium.

Speaking at an Adtech trade show last week he commented, "Once technical issues are worked out, talking about Net technology will be about as interesting as talking about the Yellow Pages".

Werthheimer went on to say that current developments in infrastructure and general technological improvements for the commercial Internet are laying the path for the Internet to become a medium for entertainment.

And this from one of the people who brought us "Titanic", which can accurately be described as "entertainment of the Lowest Common Denominator".

The sheer cultural arrogance of that statement gasted our collective flabber.

Obviously, Dave has never ventured beyond the shores of this sceptered continent. Had he so done, he would have realized that the inhabitants of the "land of the brave" comprise a mere 250 million of a planetary population of some 6 billion.

Now, we are not suggesting by any means that the 'Net will continue to be primarily a "technological medium".

What we are suggesting, however. is that, once people who use a different alphabet (for example) start taking to this medium in substantial numbers, we (in this country) will be forced to rethink our assumptions about what is essentially a US medium.

We have no idea where the New Medium will take us. What we are certain of, however, is that the fatuous opinions of such as Dave Werthheimer have no place in our vision.

--John Blower

February 19, 1998

Correction

It has been brought to our attention that a sentence in our recent piece "How to Create a Deadly Website" contained a grammatical error.

Viz:

And remember - never, ever integrate your web efforts with any of your other publicity of promotional material....

This was intentional.

--John Blower

Date

Correction

It has been brought to our attention that a sentence in our recent piece "How to Create a Deadly Website" contained a grammatical error.

Viz:

And remember - never, ever integrate your web efforts with any of your other publicity of promotional material....

This was intentional.

--John Blower

February 17, 1998

The Times - Tovarich!

We check into "The Times" (we eschew the "of London" bit, as it seems almost superfluous, despite the esteemed organ being simply another mouthpiece for the Murdoch "empire") on a pretty regular basis. It uploads at 1:00 AM UK time, so you can get tomorrow's news today...

We were a bit surprised to click on to The Moscow Times and find ourselves at an almost identical site. Well, of course, the content was different (despite El Niño, we don't think the good burghers of London will be going around getting rid of icicles on the eaves of buildings because they could fall on - and kill - innocent strollers-by...).

What we liked was the fact that they'd taken The Times' layout and stolen it wholesale. Hey! If it works for Murdoch, why shouldn't it work for them?

We particulartly liked the "Jobs Page", which is written in remarkably good English.

We wonder how many US-based (or simply non-Russian, for that matter) recruiters could write as good job descriptions in Russian.

The Web, after all, is "World Wide"...

--John Blower

February 16, 1998

Meta-Small

SiteMetrics Corporation released the results of their first Enterprise Web Content Survey. The survey examined content on the home pages of 25,000 enterprise Web sites ranging from small ($10 to 50 million in annual revenues) to very large (more than $1 billion) enterprises in 14 different industries.

Overall, the survey found that while more than 96% of the sites surveyed use the common TITLE tag, only 31% include the META Keyword tag used by most of the largest search engines to catalog the Web site. Just 28% of the sites were found to include a META Description tag used by many of the search engines to create the summary description.

The TITLE tag is used by every major search engines to catalog that page in its index. The META Keyword tag helps to improve the cataloging of the page in several of the major search engines including Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, Open Text, Northern Light and WebCrawler. Most of these search engines also use the information in the META Description to create the summary for the page.

The study found significant variation between the 14 industries surveyed. The Travel industry leads with nearly 40% of Web sites using META keywords. The Consulting, Industrial Technology and Manufacturing industries cluster slightly ahead of the overall mean with nearly 33% using the META keywords. Computers and Consumer Products trail the mean with just 27% using the tags. The lowest adoption rates were found in the Education (23%) and Utilities (21%) industries.

--John Blower

LinkExchange
LinkExchange Member


Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.



Check out the Archives....160 Weeks of Back issues including:


Feb 16, 1998
  • Nobody Told Them
  • The 5 Cs
  • One Seek
  • Take No Prisoners
Feb 09, 1998
  • Martha Stewart
  • Tenagra Awards
  • Interactive Email
  • Zero 1
  • Media-ocrity
Feb 02, 1998
  • Link Info
  • Recruiting Design
  • Were They Thinking?
Jan 26, 1998
  • What's In It 4 Me
  • Global Reach
  • Deadly Sites
  • Accomodating Design
Jan 19, 1998
  • It's Local
  • Dodgy Data
  • Elementary?
  • Novices
Jan 12, 1998
  • Communities
  • Is It Worth It?
  • Luncheon Meat
  • Web Rings
  • Marketing With Titles
Jan 05, 1998
  • Holiday Greetings
  • Website Garage
  • AArgh!
  • Year End Forecasts
Dec 21, 1997
  • Surveys
  • Communications Arts
  • Daily Brief
  • Click Trade
Dec 14, 1997
  • Whose Eyeballs?
  • NPR
  • Cool Tools
  • Hamsters?
Dec 07, 1997
  • Color Of Money
  • Resources
  • Search Engine Tuneup
  • Nice Makeover
  • European Design
Nov 30, 1997
  • Site Design
  • Statistics
  • Semi Free
  • Thanksgiving
  • Visitors
Nov 23, 1997
  • Easy Shopping
  • Great Content Wins
  • "Skinny" Graphics
  • Site Design
  • Net Mailer
Complete Indexed Archives(36 months of marketing and design) Complete Indexed Archives(36 months of marketing and design)

Contacting Us
Call, fax, write, email. We'd love to talk about your project.

All material on this site is © 1995, 1996 by IBN (The Internet Business Network), Mill Valley, CA 94941