Having received feedback on my three project ideas, I've decided to focus my attention on the 'Belief Based Social Bookmarking Website', which both Nicklas and I believe to be the strongest of the three. I'll spend the next week or two investigating weaknesses/shortcomings which could lead to problems in the future.
I'll start by addressing a few of Nicklas's concerns.
- Some users will take the website too seriously. (Belief is everything to the faithful, a website which clashes with their worldview may be seen as controversial or even heretical. The solution to this problem is to develop the website from a neutral perspective and to offer a service that allows for the peaceful, inclusive interchange of ideas about the nature of the universe. Perhaps I could choose a colour scheme that has a calming psychological effect on users? White? Blue? I could also take a 'Zero-tolerance' policy towards threats or any other general nastiness.)
- Some advertisers/investors mightn't take the site seriously enough. (Will companies be willing to place advertisements on the website if they see it contains a religion in which Gary Lineker is raised to the level of Messiah?)
- Since the lion's share of the content will be user generated, I must attract a core userbase and fast. How? I deal with this in my How To Attract A Userbase post.
I started this week by investigating microformats and their applicable uses in multimedia design. So far I've been mainly working with hReview which is a standard for marking up web based reviews. In order to test the technology I marked up Week 1's 'Five Inspiring Websites' using this standard. Since none of the major browsers currently recognise microformats, I downloaded the Tails Export extension for Firefox.
After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, I noticed that the Tails Export icon at the bottom of the screen had turned orange. I double clicked on it and a new page opened on the left hand side of the screen containing a formatted list of my reviews. Now this isn't particularly useful in itself, but it gave me the indication that I was marking up the reviews correctly.
So if no browsers support microformats, why on earth would any sane developer want to use them? Well, since they define a way to mark-up existing data in a consistent way third-party designers could take advantage of this by developing a web application which reads in the page, dissects the mark-up and then stores it in a database.
In the context of reviews and hReview it would be possible to develop a decentralised review website, which indexed pages containing microformats subsequently displaying them in a way which is beneficial to the end user (think of Metacritic without half of the editors).
Now this in itself brings in the issue of permission. What if you don't want certain sites indexing your content? Bare in mind that this view is becoming increasingly more common across the internet, especially since Google are continually refining their duplicate content filter, which when imposed on a site, can impact a page's search engine rankings negatively. One way would be to only quote the first view hundred characters from the original article and to then place a permalink back to it. But what if the review is less than 100 characters long?
Also, would a robots.txt directive be effective at deterring unwanted robots without penalising legitimate search engine crawlers especially if the number of 'microbots' explodes in the coming years?
I'll explore this topic in further detail as my project idea evolves. I'm sure I'll be able to put it to good use.
Memes
If you've used any social networking websites in the past you'll be familiar with memes. A meme is an idea that people can relate to, which spreads virally from person to person like a virtual and often, equally irritating version of the crabs.
Now I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine. This is Jim and he's a horse meme. You'll have seen the 'Adopt Your Own Virtual Pet' a million times before on Bebo and it's pretty damn clever. Why?
See the "adopt your own virtual pet" link at the bottom of Jim? That's not just there for fun! It's been placed there to boost bunnyherolabs.com link popularity in search engines, leading to greater visibility for bunnyherolabs.com in the search results. Now here's a simple equation that even I can understand (and I can barely count).
Better search engine rankings = more visitors = more ad impressions = more click throughs = more dosh = more booze = less repo men booting the door in at dawn.
Now onto my main point (I'm not even sure I had one now...). I could attract a userbase by developing some clever little flash applications that the user could embed in their blog, which would help get the website indexed by the search engines initally. But most importantly these users could help the community find it's feet in the all-important few months.
Q : What if the meme attracts morons to the site, like a horse virtual pet application would?
A : I'd obviously have to target the meme towards mature people who can spell and participate without causing trouble. The problem with viral marketing is that once the meme is out in the wild, you can't control it, so it will be difficult to deter every troublemaker. I could build moderation and user control facilities (i.e. bans/suspension by username and IP address) into the site to help keep things in order.
Google Adwords and Domains
It's reasonable to assume that organic search engine traffic will be at a premium in the sites' formative months, due in part to a lack of link popularity and the Google Sandbox Effect. The Google Sandbox Effect is caused by an algorithm which seems to stop new websites from ranking in Google for a period touted to be between 3-6 months.
Since it's crucial that I drive as much traffic to the site within these few months as possible, I could...
Neither of these really appeal to me at the minute. I'm wary of buying an existing domain as it's possible I might fall short with my research and later find out that the domain's banned from Google or linked into a bad neighbourhood. What keywords could I possibly target with Adwords anyway? Well there's.....
- Make your own religion
- Create your own religion
- ...........(what will people be typing in to find this site in all fairness? This is a completely new topic. Is there even a demand for it? If so, how can I find the target market? Questions, questions, questions).
Ok so I entered "Make your own religion", "Create your own religion" phrases in the Overture Suggestion Tool and neither of them have been searched for at all. If the Adwords campaign is to be viable, I'll need to focus on multiple broad search terms for individual beliefs like "Afterlife", "Heaven" or "Ghosts".
But then again where will the money come from for such a campaign? Could I somehow attract investors into the project? How about some fundraising? Is this really an option?
I'll explore more methods for generating a userbase over the coming weeks.
The one additional item we asked you to look at this week was Harvard Referencing. Find out what it is, find out why you should be citing your sources properly. (Murphy, C., 2007)
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Back in the mid 19th century referencing was something of a free for all with individuals often electing to use their own methods for referencing information. The Harvard Referencing System began in much the same way with Edward Mark, a scientist who had the unenviable task of writing about the development of baby slugs. Marks' fledgling system was soon discovered by an English academic who brought the standard over to Britain where it was quickly adopted as a popular method for referencing academic papers.
Citing your work is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, incorporating someone else's work into your own without citing the copy is plagiarism, even if the cite was omitted by accident. Besides this, the quantity and quality of your cites can be used to quickly gauge your commitment towards the course of study. By scanning your references your tutor will have an indication to how well read you are in the subject area.
By electing to use the Harvard system alone, the University has made life for both academics and students much easier by providing a consistent and reliable model to build our references upon.
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References
Murphy, C., 2007. Interactive Multimedia Design. Murphy: University of Ulster. Available from: http://interactivemultimediadesign.org/4/ [Accessed 9 October 2007].
