SMM has now launched a very useful website mini-review service. In doing market research on other website review services, some interesting aspects came to light that many will find of interest.

Free Is Never Free

That innovative thinker, Chris Anderson, will be publishing his new book, Free, at some time in 2008, we presume. This will discuss giving zero cost products/services away for free and then making money on upgraded versions. That’s one of the opportunities this zero-cost virtual world now gives us. A more important sub-theme in the book is that of course everyone pays for such products or services by investing their personal time in them. This means that you should be even more skeptical in checking the teeth of any gift horses. Looking after that horse could involve major effort and expense.

This is particularly important in thinking about website review processes. Whatever you learn from such a process may well involve you in major effort to implement the findings. Given the importance of your website and of your time, it’s important to make the right choice.

Who can best assess your website’s performance?

Whatever objectives you as the owner may have for your website, they can only be achieved if there are enough visitors to the website and if they can take the actions that you hope for. So it boils down to good visitor traffic and visitors having satisfactory experiences on the website. Both aspects are tough to evaluate. If you do not think so, just spend a little time checking out the excellent research work that Jared Spool, and his team at UIE (User Interface Engineering), do on website usability. There’s more to the way visitors move around a website than the you might have imagined.

Which website review process is best for you?

Assuming that you are not about to invest in a massive program of visitor testing of the website, some simpler process that looks at all aspects of performance must be found. All aspects of performance covers a lot of ground. To get a sense of this, you might wish to review a very long checklist for website review put out by Polson Enterprises. Unfortunately this has not been updated since 2006, but most of it is still very appropriate. It stretches to fifteen pages and includes almost 300, often meaty, paragraphs on different aspects of website performance.

A website review covering that degree of detail is a major undertaking. A better initial step is to take a ‘big picture‘ or ‘helicopter vision‘ approach. This will help to identify where work may be needed. If you are searching for free resources for this big picture approach, there are two main alternatives. Some Forums offer such ‘big picture’ website reviews and some experts will do such reviews but require the freedom to publish their work.

Forums Offering Website Reviews

The type of website review you will get from a Forum depends on the interests of its members and their skills and experience. You should only consider active forums where you’re likely to get a number of members commenting. Three Forums seem to do a reasonable job in this respect:

• Estetica Design Forum > Graphic Design & Web Design Critique
  Given the fields of interest of its members, you might expect a review that will put much more emphasis on graphic design aspects of the website.
• Web Design Forum, UK > Web Designing Resource > Website Reviews
  Checking on activity in other threads, although the main emphasis of the Forum is Web design, some attention is paid to other Internet marketing aspects.
• Cre8asite Forums > Web Site Building, Testing and Support > Website Hospital
  The Cre8asite Forums (where I moderate) covers all aspects of web design and Internet marketing. Reviewers would therefore bring a variety of perspectives in their comments.

Experts Offering Free Website Reviews

If you do not mind an expert giving a public review of your website, then there are a number of experts you can consult.

For example, Jackie Baker at Search Engine Guide offers a weekly site clinic column. As she says:

Small businesses are invited to submit their websites for review. Can’t beat a little free advice, right? I’ll be looking at the design, copy, usability, SEO, marketing, and any technical issues that may prevent websites from drawing loyal, active visitors and meeting goals. Each week, I’ll give the top five issues the website owner/manager can address to significantly improve performance.

Scott Hendison offers a Free SEO Site Review. As he explains:

For a limited time, you can get a video made of your own website, seeing how it complies with generally accepted search engine optimization best practices.
…
In exchange, all I ask from you is that you agree to allow me to make my information public, so that others may learn from the experience. Selected video reviews will be shared on my site and on my blog.

Such expert views are likely to be well-founded, particularly since the expert is also going public and their reputation will be affected by what they reveal.

Free Website Reviews Come With A Risk

There is a risk in having your website reviewed in public. The UK Web Design Forum outlines this well:

When posing a link to a site to be reviewed remember that some people may not like your site and could leave comments to that effect. These threads can appear on a search engine results for your website or other searches, so if you get negative comments people who search for your site may see these.

Please be sure that you don’t mind that some members may not like your design and may criticise the work you have done. Most of these members will offer opinions on how to improve, which is what this section of the forum is about. So if you are looking for helpful advice and a honest view of your site this is the perfect place to do it.

Really all we are saying is post your sites at your risks, this forum will not be held responsible for any loss of business or negative things that happen due to you deciding to place your site here for a review.

Time Is Money

Each webmaster will decide for herself or himself how to balance the usefulness of the website review, its cost and the time it takes to get it. However it is done, it is important to have your website performing well and that requires knowledge. SMM is now offering a Website Mini-Review service that gives good value in getting the right big picture view. It’s not free, but it may be less costly, taking everything into account, than these other free services.

If you have your preferred method of assessing the performance of a website that you think others might find useful, why not give details in a comment.

Other Related Posts

• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
• November 24, 2007 -- Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?
• October 23, 2007 -- Free 411: GOOG or CALL

You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his protégé has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.

Tags To Bring Order To The Cyber Sphere

Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.

A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.

Picturing Tags - The Tag Cloud

If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.

If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.

It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.

WordPress Has A Tag Cloud Feature

Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.

Making Your Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page

Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.

<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul  style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in del.icio.us</p>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. Wordpress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.

You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.

Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:

<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>

The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.

Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.

Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You

Other Related Posts

• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links
• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers
• February 5, 2008 -- My Other Wordpress Blog Was Hacked Too

NoFollow is one of the most contentious tags around. That is because Google has suggested it be applied to all paid links from web pages. It does have a more acceptable usage in attempting to remove the incentive for spammers to add comments to blogs. That is why Wordpress automatically applies the NoFollow tag to links in comments.

Matt Cutts has set out the Google position on the NoFollow tag, and it certainly does not imply that all comments should have the NoFollow tag applied. Recently John Mueller was one of the Google experts in an online chat and the NoFollow tag came up in the discussion. This is followed up in a Cre8asite Forum discussion on When To Remove Nofollow From Blog Comments. For both Elizabeth Able and Donna Fontenot, removing the NoFollow tag selectively seemed to be a preferred route. They recommended using the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. This can be set so that the NoFollow tags are removed after a visitor has made a certain number of comments.

In researching this, the WordPress Codex provides an explanation of Nofollow. Here is some of what is mentioned:

Despite nofollow’s Google backing, there is some very strong criticism from the overall blog community.

• Prepare for more comment spam, not less
• NoNoFollow
• DoFollow No Nofollow Community has been established on Bumpzee, as a means for people to find information on Nofollow / DoFollow and find other blogs in the same niche with which to interact.

To disable nofollow, use one of the following plugins:

• DoFollow
• Follow URL

An excellent and more complete discussion of the issue is given by Andy Beard in his Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins. After reading all this we settled for the tried-and-true DoFollow plug-in mentioned in the WordPress Codex.

SMM DoFollow Policy

Our policy is to encourage more valuable comments by offering their authors ‘linkjuice‘. This is more generous than the approach of the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. At the same time, we accept the burden of removing spam comments. The Akismet plugin already does a good job of removing most spam comments. Other comments are deleted if it is felt that they do not merit being seen by other readers of the blogs. If it is felt that a commenter has written a comment merely to gain a link, then all his comments will be carefully scrutinised and may be deleted. It’s a kind of Tough Love policy but hopefully everyone wins.

Other Related Posts

• June 10, 2008 -- Who Killed Conversations?
• May 20, 2008 -- A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers

If you have a high-traffic blog, then you certainly deserve congratulations. Unfortunately some of your admirers may be hackers who would like to ride on your success. In a way there is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is they may well try to hack in to your website. The good news is they may do it in a way where you won’t even know. However that is no consolation.

Perhaps one of the most visible case studies on that is the blog of Matt Heaton, the Bluehost and Hostmonster CEO. The Kakkoi website provides a good account of what has been happening there. At the time of writing this post, the blog is still hacked although you would not know by looking at it.

How Can You Guard Against Hacking?

In some ways security for your blog is similar to security for your home. Almost every home security system is crackable, given time. However if you have a fast response to any signs of a break-in, then you may significantly limit any damage that is caused. Indeed any potential housebreaker may decide to go for an easier target.

The same principles apply in considering websites and blogs. The article, Guarding Your WordPress Blog, suggests two main priorities for your blog security. The first is continuing vigilance, since many hacking activities seem to take place during weekends and holidays. The second priority is to ensure that your blog is as secure as it can be by upgrading to the most recent secure WordPress version and by hardening your total WordPress installation.

A Rapid Way To Spot Intruders

Expert hackers often attempt to gain entry without leaving visible traces. So how much effort should you put into searching for signs of entry every day? One method that will often detect such entry is to look at the source code for a typical blog entry. It takes a little time, but usually signs of entry are fairly visible given the pharmaceutical and porn links that are included in the code.

A more rapid way of doing such a check is to create a test page within WordPress. WordPress supports the creation of both blog posts and pages. Pages are entries that are not tied to a particular date. All that is needed is a test page with the title of ‘Test’ and the content of ‘test’. Such a page is generated by the WordPress software in a similar way to each blog post. If a hacker has been able to gain entry and modify the blog post content, then this will also affect the Test page.

If Mozilla Firefox is your browser, then you can do a very rapid check of your blog security. Just visit the Test web page. Clicking on the Tools > Page Info navigation menu choice will give you information about that Test page including its size in bytes. Unless you change something in your Theme that affects the header, sidebar or footer that size should always be the same. Such a check of the size of the Test page can be done in seconds as often as you wish.

Unfortunately in other browsers such as Internet Explorer, checking the size of the Test web page takes just a little longer. One way is to look at the Source code in Notepad and save this as a text file. You can then check the size of this text file. Each time you do this you should find the text file is exactly the same size. If you have a number of blogs to check, then you might be advised to keep Firefox available as your way of doing this check as rapidly as possible.

One small note of caution is that you should do the check while not logged in to your Administration Panel. If you are logged in, then the resulting page contains a few extra bytes. Equally if you arrange a rapid cache arrangement for your blog using wp-cache, then this may add a few extra bytes. However if you use the default value where web pages are not cached for more than 3600 seconds, then a daily check of the Test web page should not run into problems.

Conclusion

The simplicity and rapidity of this method of checking for intruders is such that a daily check is only a matter of seconds. If you feel that your blog is less attractive to a hacker, then a weekly check each Monday morning should be sufficient. If you make regular backups of your blog and of its database, then if ever you find that a hacker has struck, putting things back in order should not be too onerous.

Related:
WordPress Blog Hacked
Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words)

Other Related Posts

• February 5, 2008 -- My Other Wordpress Blog Was Hacked Too
• May 20, 2008 -- A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Spotting the intrusion was a matter of complete luck. I was involved in creating a new page for the blog. Reviewing the source code for the blog, which I almost never did, showed extra code had been added. Later it turned out this had happened only a few hours prior to that source code review.

More information on all this can be found in another blog post at BPWrap entitled Wordpress Blog Hacked. It’s information that all WordPress bloggers should be aware of.

Related: Matt Cutts: Three tips to protect your WordPress installation

Other Related Posts

• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers
• May 20, 2008 -- A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Will the Mobile Web happen and if so what will it look like? Three recent articles address this question and come to different conclusions. That is because they look at the question from different viewpoints. There is always a dichotomy. You can examine a situation from the manufacturer viewpoint - what might be called the product-driven approach. Or you can look at it from the consumer’s point of view - the customer-centric approach.

Richard MacManus in a post, iPhone vs Mobile Web, examines a Forrester report (summary) that might be said to embody the product driven approach. Their conclusion is that the iPhone signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today. Presumably iPhone-like devices will dominate the mobile space.

Christian Montoya finds that a very gloomy view of the mobile web. He feels that it would be ludicrous to think that any company would be capable of designing a separate portal to their website for each and every device. He pins his faith on the good folks at the W3C, who have had the foresight to offer device-profiles for CSS, so that any developer can write one CSS file that caters their site to all hand-held devices. Whether this will deliver satisfactory user experiences is open to question.

In my opinion both of these views do not adequately include the consumer’s point of view. The vast majority of consumers will be using cell phones. This imposes obvious constraints on screen real estate and battery capacity. The third article accepts these realities in discussing solutions. WAP Review suggests that Transcoders and the iPhone do not make the Mobile Web obsolete. As they point out:

Purpose built mobile sites can work around the limitations to give the best possible experience. As mobile browsers get more powerful new types of exclusively mobile web services will become possible. Already we have streaming media on mobiles and soon it should be possible to share your GPS or cell location with mobile services to provide location aware information without having to type in an address. Integration with near field communication for mobile payments is another technology that is surely coming to the mobile web.

Their solution is that for most sites you will still need two versions:

• A full-web version that is designed to degrade gracefully for maximum usability on the iPhone and other full web mobile browsers, and
• A mobile specific version with no JavaScript that is under 10 KB of mark-up and 20 KB total page weight including images and style sheets for the limited browsers still prevalent on cell phones.

To me that sounds like a Mobile Web that will deliver the satisfactory experiences that consumers are looking for.

Related:
Design For Mobile Device Diversity
The Multi-Web Practice

Other Related Posts

• November 1, 2007 -- A ?phone for Christmas
• July 26, 2007 -- Apple versus PC - Now For The Real Mobile Web
• July 24, 2007 -- Further iPhone Boosts To The Mobile Web

Does this explain the slow take-up of the new Microsoft Vista operating system? It no doubt was instrumental in the excellent operating results that Apple announced yesterday. Apparently the sale of Mac computers was a key factor here. It has also resulted in Apple climbing to the No. 4 spot in Notebook sales.

As yet the Apple iPhone is not a major contributor, but the future looks promising for Apple on this one too. Perhaps it’s a compliment to Apple marketing that the biggest effect of the iPhone so far has been on the Mobile Web itself. As Ed Sim comments, The wireless Internet is heating up. With the iPhone, the real Mobile Web is here and now. Websites on the Mobile Web are no longer just severely cut-down versions of the equivalent regular Internet websites. Given these developments, as Lucky Balaraman suggests, you need a mobile web site NOW.

Facing this today reality, the iPhone determines how the Mobile Web will evolve. Indeed Georg Kaindl suggests that the iPhone involves nothing less than a reinvention of the Mobile Web. Some quotes from his post illustrate his position:

As many people have noted, this is quite interesting, since with the advent of web standards, designing specifically for certain browsers or serving different stylesheets to different browsers has been rather seen as something to avoid. Now suddenly, everybody is pumping out iPhone-specific sites.
…
I understand why Apple refuses to let the iPhone support the “handheld” media query: After all, “handheld” internet has (unfortunately) often been associated with a watered-down, crappy version of the Internet. The iPhone, on the other hand, wants to provide the “real” Internet. I can see that Apple doesn’t want its iPhone to load a badly designed mobile version of a random website that has not been designed specifically for the iPhone’s advanced browser and high-resolution screen.
…
However, what remains true is that a unified, “standardized” version of a website, a piece of software or a generic interface is not always preferable over specialization. Browsing on a desktop with mouse and keyboard is different than browsing on a handheld device with a stylus. Browsing on the iPhone’s scalable, multi-touch controlled Safari version is different than browsing on an ordinary handheld that mostly mimics the desktop. So is browsing on the TV set with a Wii.

The more ubiquitous web browsing will become, the more we have to distance ourselves from the “one site for all” idea that we’ve excitedly embraced with the advent of web standards. It’s not about being non-compliant with the standards, it’s about creating different experiences while adhering to the standards. And if we don’t want to resort to ugly hacks, there’s no better way than creating different stylesheets (or even whole front-ends) for different devices.

So the good news is that the Mobile Web is now and not tomorrow. The slightly disturbing news for some is that the One Web Principle is superseded by the Multi-Web Practice. Here at StayGoLinks, we would argue that this was always inevitable.

Related:
The iPhone Boosts the Mobile Web
Further iPhone Boosts To The Mobile Web

Other Related Posts

• November 1, 2007 -- A ?phone for Christmas
• August 8, 2007 -- The Mobile Web Experience
• July 24, 2007 -- Further iPhone Boosts To The Mobile Web

Google user experience designer Leland Rechis said, bluntly, that the mobile Web is Balkanized, “The Pangaea of the Web is gone.” And don’t expect this to change anytime soon, either. Thanks to carrier portals and off portal applications, there is no one mobile standard to develop for.

In the mobile world developers have to be prepared to optimize for different devices, browsers, languages, carriers, countries and cultures.

For those who haven’t heard about Pangaea, that’s the view that all Earth’s continents were originally connected and have separated through tectonic plate action. Perhaps that resonates with the other Google PhDs but for most of us I think Humpty Dumpty provides a better simile. You remember the rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Some may resist but just check out a New York Times item on Big Money in Little Screens:

“The biggest growth areas are clearly going to be in the mobile space,” Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said when asked about new opportunities at a conference here this week. In case his point wasn’t clear, Mr. Schmidt drove it home: “Mobile, mobile, mobile.”

With everyone fighting over their piece of the egg, who cares about putting it back together?

Tags: Mobile Web, Pangaea, Humpty Dumpty

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• February 2, 2007 -- Perhaps You Can’t Get To Mobile From Desktop PC
• November 15, 2006 -- Ubiquitous Web - Visiting A Museum
• April 15, 2008 -- Mobile Web Dead - No, It’s Ubiquitous

This picture came to mind in thinking about a post by Ross Dunn on the Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization session at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York. He describes sessions by Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works and Rachel Pasqua, Director of Mobile Marketing at iCrossing. The two took diametrically different approaches to designing mobile websites.

Cindy Krum felt strongly that an existing website should pull double-duty as both the wired and the mobile version by using CSS to provide an alternative, mobile friendly version shown only to mobile users. On the other hand, Rachel Pasqua stated firmly that offering your current website to users, reformatted or not, would likely provide a less than desirable user experience. She went on to explain that mobile users should see an entirely different, more time efficient version of your website because such users are task oriented. In other words, Cindy was following the One Web principle while Rachel was using the Multi-Web practice.

That’s where old Heraclitus suggesting you cannot jump into the same river twice came to mind. Thinking back to a simpler world, the main problem was which browser you should design for. One history of browsers by Peter-Paul Koch suggests that following the browser wars from 1997-1999, you had a period of Explorer dominance from 1999 to 2003. Cindy Krum could have been giving her presentation in 2003 to help push the One Web message that web pages should use CSS style sheets and be satisfactory whatever the browser used. Even then the Internet river was somewhat turbulent and the One Web canoe had a bumpy ride. Some websites even now do not always display well in all the major browsers.

In 2004, the river was looking to become much more turbulent. The browser confusion continued but in addition a massively diverse set of devices was available. There was also the possibility of .mobi domains specifically for mobile devices. Well we now have dotmobi domains and websites. In addition there are many other players doing what they believe to be right and in their own interests on this Mobile web. The One Web canoe that might almost have worked in 2003 does not stand a chance in the extreme white-water rapids of the Internet river of 2007. So all strength to people like Rachel Pasqua, who are taking a practical approach to having websites that work.

Related: The Internet Tidal Wave

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• September 4, 2006 -- The Fewer The Better
• October 20, 2007 -- How Will Advertising Influence Mobile Web Growth?
• July 27, 2006 -- Don’t Leave Home Without It

For those whose French is a little rusty, Poisson d’Avril is the equivalent of April Fool. Poisson is of course the French for Fish.

Some might therefore ask whether naming a new mobile web browser, Deepfish, and launching it close to April 1 was perhaps an attempt by Microsoft to delude us all. However it is for real. Here is what you’ll find on the Deepfish website:

The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are.
Note : Deepfish is currently only available by invite only to a small number of beta users. Please visit http://labs.live.com/deepfish page to keep informed of future updates and availability.

Tip of the hat to Gizmodo

Tags: Microsoft, Deepfish

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• November 22, 2006 -- Mobile Device Detection
• August 22, 2006 -- News Goes Mobile