The Opera web browser is now available for free without embedded advertising. From the site:
Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal.
Hey, how about that. An actually competitive browser market has returned with more than 2 free options. Welcome back to the mid-to-late-90s!
I have just posted an article I wrote that went out in ASAE’s Technoscope newsletter a while ago: The Association Web Job Description. The article identifies the major areas that should be considered when designing positions to support an association web site, including sample language.
You may also want to see the sample interview questions for content management positions that I posted a while ago.
So there were about 10 people who attended the Idea Swap last night. Roughly equal mix of association staff and vendor/consultant types. I didn’t hear any revolutionary ideas but I did hear something interesting about what associations think about as they consider an online directory.
The biggest factors for associations creating online directories seemed to fall into one of two areas: preserving print-based advertising revenue or cutting costs by ceasing printing of the dead tree directory. What was missing from the conversation was discussion about creating value for members via an online directory. Revenue and cost are valid concerns but shouldn’t they really be secondary to what will create the most value for the association’s members?
Creating crippled online directories just to preserve some existing revenue streams doesn’t tell your members that you are keeping their interest front and center. Once they get that perception, you renewals will drop and then those other revenue streams will go away too. Then what?
I think associations are really going to have to get back to basics as the web continues to disrupt existing revenue models. It won’t be easy but they have to address value for members if they want to remain healthy organizations.
I’ll be heading down to the Center today to attend the technology idea swap about online directories. This is my first Idea Swap, looking forward to seeing how it goes.
I’ll post any good ideas I pick up from the event.
Associations often make their online dues payment processes hard to navigate for their members. Given that dues still form a significant chunk of any association’s revenue, it’s shocking how hard some of them make it for their members to give them money. These five tips focus on how to make your online dues payment system ridiculously easy in order to gather as much dues online as possible.
The point of all these tips is to make it as easy as possible for your members to do the one action your renewal notice should spur: paying dues.
Verity’s Ultraseek, a search engine, is now available for download and free trial. This is the tool we used at ASHA when I was working there. Excellent ability to tune results and the interface can be customized relatively easily using Python and HTML (although the templates were rather incomprehensible spaghetti code, which is hard to do with Python, normally). Hopefully the spaghetti issue was improved with the latest release.
Spotted via SearchTools.
Sue Pelletier of MeetingsNet is doing a great job of posting updates on the impact of Katrina on meetings and events scheduled for New Orleans and how the association and event community is responding. Thanks, Sue!
I’m posting this note with Robert Scoble‘s name in it in order to get some attention from Microsoft about the behavior of their RSS bot, msnbot.
Over the past week, the bot has hit my site over 27k times for about 38mb of bandwidth. The bot is almost exclusively hitting RSS feeds. However, most of the feeds it is getting on my site are for individual entries, which allow people to track comments. Each feed is getting hit about 100x a week. I would think that is a big waste of effort for older entries that get few comments. Once a day should be plenty.
So, Robert, when you see this in one of your ego notifications, please pass the word to whoever manages msnbot to chill out a bit on the hits. I love to be indexed but not at such a heavy load which is wasting my bandwidth and MS’s. If the load goes much higher I might ban the bot for poor manners.
There are a few association blogs (as in formally affiliated with an organization, as opposed to the rabble of association staffers/consultants/writers who blog, me included) who are writing substantially about their members’ experience with and reaction to the Katrina disaster. Here are the ones I have spotted so far:
IABC Cafe from the International Association of Business Communicators. From Warren Bickford, the Chairman of the Board:
I spent much of today watching events unfold in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast. What looked bad last night, looks bloody awful in the light of day. The destruction is unbelievable. Millions of lives affected. It’s almost too much to even process in any meaningful way. Thinking that I and other members of the Executive Committee came close to experiencing it first hand is frightening at best.
Thank goodness Charles was so insistent that we leave town. Thank goodness we did. That we made the right decision was brought home to me over and over as I watched events unfold today. We could be there with no potable water, no food, no electricity – and no way out of town short of being evacuated by the military or the National Guard. It was brought home to me again earlier this evening when I saw video of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway with entire sections missing. The causeway was our escape route on Sunday morning.
The Executive Committee were fortunate to get safely back to their homes. Yes, we have homes, unlike the hundreds of thousands of people that don’t have homes any more or won’t have for some time. All members in the area have been affected in some way by this tragedy. If you have information about members, please use the Cafe to pass on what you know. We are concerned and hope to hear they are safe.
BoardBuzz from the National School Boards Association. They have been covering the impact of the disaster on schools in the area and how neighboring states are rushing to enroll refugee students into their schools. The leaders of Texas offering their schools to refugee children was one of the very first acts of genuine leadership and compassion that I saw in this whole mess.
Manufacturers Blog by Pat Cleary of the National Association of Manufacturers. A post from today discusses how their members are offering assistance:
Well today, Katrina’s torrent was matched by a torrent of charity from manufacturers large and small across this great manufacturing nation, some $40 million at last count. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch and Crown Cork & Seal all sent truckloads of bottled water. Abbott Labs sent some $2 million in cash and $2 million in nutritional and medical products. Holloway Sportswear re-opened a closed facility to be used as an emergency shelter for the Red Cross. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble donated cash and personal care products to the effort.
It is just so heartening to watch the tremendous outpouring of charity and products — the best in the world — from America’s manufacturers. These are our members and we are always proud of them, but at times like these, our hearts especially well with pride. This is still day one, folks. We expect the $40 million number to grow enormously.
That is all I have now. If you know of others, please post a link in the comments of this entry and I’ll update the list.
Update: American Association of Law Libraries has started the AALL LawLibAssist blog for sharing news about their members and to offer assistance to those in need.
Update 2: Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Katrina Relief Blog. The title says it all.
Update 3: Hurricane Katrina Information for Mississippi Hospitals from the Mississippi Hospital Association. Shawn Lea left a pointer to this blog in the comments.
Update 4: ARVO Hurricane Katrina Information Blog by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. TJ Rainsford, who works at ARVO, added a pointer to this in the comments.
Lou Rosenfeld is coauthoring a book on search log analysis. Excellent!
Based on my recent posting, it might not come as a huge surprise that I’m co-authoring (with Rich Wiggins) a new book on search log analysis (SLA). I’m happy to report that we’re already a couple chapters deep and I’m actually enjoying the process of writing, which usually requires a lot more self-discipline than my genetic programming supports.
I’m gung-ho on SLA because it seems so obvious, and yet it’s still uncommon in the worlds of UCD and, more broadly, web design. Rich and I hope our book helps clear away many barriers to SLA–practical, technical, and political–by collecting both how-to info and justification in a single, short book.
When I was at ASHA, we found that reviewing our search logs on a regular basis told us a lot of great information about what people are looking for and where we needed to pay some attention. We would identify searches that didn’t return the appropriate content and we would take steps to tweak the content to float up higher or do it manually through best bet links. We would also identify searches for which we had no content, giving us great ideas on what we should add to the site.
Can’t wait to see what Lou and Rich come up with in the book.
C. David Gammel, CAE 