Ecommerce and web marketing research April 1

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New article - WAP/WML tutorial

The subject of writing cell phone friendly pages has stirred my curiosity for some time, especially given our 4 year involvement with ringtones and related services. I thought it was high time to write my first WAP application; a simple page in WML (Wireless Markup Language). It's easier than I thought! If you'd like to learn yourself, check out my WAP/WML tutorial.

Email marketing performing well

In a report released by DoubleClick last month, data showed record delivery to order rates and excellent click/purchase ratios.

Open rates for HTML emails gradually declined over 2004 but clickthrough rates remained solid. Given this information, it appears that While many ISP's are using email image filters, which affects open rate reporting, consumers are continuing to click on links in email campaigns.

Pharming scams an increasing threat

A relatively new kind of scam is making some security analysts rather nervous - pharming. Pharming, as opposed to phishing, requires little user interaction. Hackers can compromise the DNS servers of ISP's and change IP addresses (which translate to site names) stored in DNS caches to addresses of sites set up to look the same, but with the express purpose of collecting personal details. As an example, it is viable to switch a banks IP to a fake site that looks identical.

To the best of my knowledge, most good ISP's refresh their caches every 2-6 hours, but imagine a major ISP being hacked in this way. Those few hours would be enough time to gather hundreds of users' banking details and if executed correctly, it may be quite a while before the breach was detected as the refresh would somewhat cover the tracks of the hacker.

Google sandbox/link dampening filter - do they exist?

There's been conspiracy whispers around for many months about Google implementing special filters to combat spam sites that have also slowed down "white hat" (clean) sites from gaining rankings.

The first theory has been dubbed by many in the SEO industry as the "sandbox". The Google Sandbox theory is basically that a filter has been put in place on new web sites, resulting in lesser rankings for target keywords and phrases. As the site ages over a number of months, it rises in the rankings - if of course it has quality content, inbound links and all the other standard items needed for good search engine rankings. I personally feel that it's a little more complex than that as I've seen some new sites apparently unaffected.

The other filter being debated at the moment is link dampening. Much like the sandbox, it is purported not to give full credit to new inbound links until they have aged. Again, this is thought to be a move to hinder spammers.

Whether either of these filters exists, nobody is 100% sure. As much as a pain they may be to new site owners, it can be understood why Google would implement them - it's just a quality control tool.

If you're interested in either of these theories, Wayne Hurlbert has published two very good articles - one on the Sandbox and the other on the more recent link dampening phenomenon; well worth a read.

AOL to offer VoIP

AOL recently announced its intentions to provide Voice over IP services and it appears the company will give further details regarding pricing and availability details late this week. It's reported that VoIP services will be offered to current AOL users initially and to a broader audience at a later date.

$100 notebooks for developing countries

A little off-topic, but such a great idea I thought it worth mentioning. MIT Media Lab, in partnership with Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Google and News Corp have embarked on a project to provide notebook computers to developing countries for around $100 per unit. The notebooks will be Internet and multimedia capable.

One aspect, aside from the good intentions, that I found particularly interesting is the concept of providing a hand cranking recharging unit for each notebook. What a great idea! If those ever hit the market, I'll be standing in line to buy one.

At any rate, I really hope this project is successful - good luck to all those companies involved.

Yahoo search blog - announcing updates

Something that completely escaped my notice was Yahoo's search blog, "A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo". Yahoo took the unusual step recently of announcing an update to their index (occurred on April 1).

Updates from most of the engines are usually unannounced, with only hints from the major SE reps. The leadup to an update usually gets the SEO world really buzzing; with people placing bets on when it will occur :). This latest update is the same as any other; many people reporting improvements and equally as many stating major problems with spam pages littering the results. I guess you can't please all the people all the time; one man's spam is anothers' quality content it seems :).

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New article on landing pages

The term "landing page" crops up a lot in articles on marketing; so what are they and how can you use them effectively? Learn more in my new guide, creating effective landing pages

Beyond the text cookie

A Flash based technology that can provide the functionality of cookies is causing quite as stir. As I reported last month, it appears that many users are deleting cookies on a regular basis, which can make it can be very difficult to gauge consumer behavior.

The "Flash cookie" is a feature of Flash MX - Local Shared Objects. These objects can be transmitted to the user by adding JavaScript snippet to web pages. As users generally aren't aware of these objects, it will take some time for them to catch on. They are also skipped by anti-spyware software and supposedly can provide a great deal more information that traditional text cookies. Finally, a truly useful non-eye candy Flash feature :)

Gmail - 2 gigabytes + of storage

Last week I wrote that Yahoo announced an increase to 1 gigabyte storage for it's free email service. Not to be outdone, Google has announced it will double storage space for its Gmail users to 2 gigabytes. It doesn't stop there. According to the Gmail site: "Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able." Surely Google must be making a move soon to get Gmail out of beta.

Wow, where will it end? It wasn't that long ago that the big free email service providers were only offer 10 - 20 meg storage space.

This news must have Yahoo Mail's head honchos wailing and grinding their teeth :).

Current browser usage stats

So where are things currently in the browser wars? According to TheCounter.com, from data gathered from over 1.5 million users, here's the state of play as at the end of February 2005:

1. Internet Explorer 6.x	(81%)
2. Internet Explorer 5.x	(8%)
3. Mozilla (inc. Firefox)	(6%)
4. Unknown	(1%)
5. Safari	(1%)
6. Netscape 7.x	(1%)
7. Opera x.x	(1%)
8. Netscape comp.	(0%)
9. Internet Explorer 4.x	(0%)
10. Netscape 4.x	(0%)

Firefox is still showing a healthy slice. While on the subject of Firefox, it appears that they are now offering bounties of $500 for reports of valid critical security bugs, plus a Moz T-Shirt just to sweeten the deal :). If you're an avid bug hunter, find out more here. Perhaps this is a way that script kiddies and would-be hackers could actually make some legitimate use of their "skills" instead of just mindless drive-by vandalism.

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Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: April 1 -31 2005