Tom Nixon

Spike The Vote for sale on ebay

The website Spike The Vote is up for sale on ebay. I hope potential buyers see sense and avoid it.

Spike The Vote is a source of spam. Not email spam, but something just as anti-social which creates ‘noise’ on the Internet, getting in the way of useful content.

The site works by interfering with another website called Digg. Digg is a popular news site which anyone can submit a story to. Users can vote for (or ‘Digg’) stories, and the most popular stories are ranked on the Digg homepage. So users control what content appears on the site, and how it’s prioritised.

Since Digg is so popular, there’s an advantage for users to have their stories appearing on its homepage, as it drives traffic to their website in much the same way as appearing high in the listings on a Google search does.

Spike the Vote is a community of users who ‘Digg’ each other’s news stories. Not because they’re actually worth reading, but to earn credits so that other users will in turn Digg their stories. This is great for the Spike users who see their stories artificially boosted up the rankings on Digg, but it undermines the quality of the content that appears on Digg by creating a whole load of ‘noise’. This effect is amplified even further by Spike because users also Digg random news stories, to make the ‘cheating’ effect more difficult to detect and filter out by Digg.

I haven’t checked, but I expect that someone has already coined the term ‘Spam 2.0’ for this kind of thing (a variation on the Web 2.0 meme that refers to the recent trend towards community-style websites like Digg, del.ico.us, flickr and others.)

The problem with all of this is that the more popular Spike becomes, the less useful, interesting and relevant to its users Digg will become. This will lead to a decline in users of Digg, and so Spike’s growth will actually kill the very thing that it relies on (new buzzword: GoldenGoose 2.0!!)

The reason Web 2.0 has been such a big success is because, as it turns out, most people are decent, honest and helpful. This is why ebay and other sites built around trust and cooperation have done so well.

It’s sad that the obviously intelligent mind behind Spike The Vote didn’t apply itself to an idea that would benefit web users at large instead of benefiting a small community of users at the expense of a much larger one.

Any ecosystem, in the natural or online world has a minority of rogues. This is healthy for evolution, and I hope Digg manages to find a way to protect itself from this kind of spam (without simply buying the site, which would be a shame) as this will make it stronger in the long run.

But for the time being I hope that most people will avoid Spike The Vote, and certainly not think about buying it.

Come to our online marketing seminar

Shameless plug: We had great feedback following our last seminar in May. If it had already sold out before you booked, why not register for this one, on 30th November?

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What users find most annoying about websites

Interesting article about what users find most annoying about websites.

Number one on the list? Invasive advertising.

Ironically, to get to this page you have to skip past an advert, and then when the article finally loads, there's some special effect whereby the page appears to peel away from one corner to reveal yet another advert underneath. Hilarious, although I'm still not sure whether I have fallen for a prank.

Peer review: Guidelines for front-end (XHTML & CSS) coding

This is one for the techies (normal service will be resumed soon)

We've produced a set of guidelines for front-end coders, primarily for freelancers that we use for this kind of work, but also to ensure consistent quality from our in-house team and to bring new employees up to speed quickly with what we expect.

It's not meant to be an XHTML/CSS tutorial - there are plenty of these already out there. This document is intended to be a reasonably concise guide to quality and best practice.

We thought it might be useful to the wider web development community and so we are releasing this under a Creative Commons license.

The document below is a draft, and we're looking to the web development community for peer review. If you can spare the time, please review it and post feedback as comments to this blog entry. This will help us to create a more useful set of guidelines for us all to use. We will credit in the document all those who have helped with this. Thanks in advance for your help.

Download Nixon-McInnes-Front-End-Coder-Standards-2006_10_06.pdf

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5  License.

How to create a successful subscription-based website

I had a great chat with a web start-up entrepreneur at the weekend who has launched what sounded like an amazing new business. Being someone who fitted into their target audience profile I eagerly checked out her new website today to try it out.

You have to register in order to use the service, so I entered my details, and then bang this message came up: (click for larger image)

There are three problems with this:

1. It looks like an error message which makes me feel like I've done something wrong.
2. It was a complete surprise, because up until that moment I had no idea that I had to pay to register.
3. (worst of all) there's no attempt to explain the benefits and sell me on the idea.

If you've already done the job of selling someone on your service off-line, then it's acceptable to use the website purely as a sign-up form, without any selling. But this is going to exclude a huge number of people who hear about you; are curious and want to find out more; and might sign up if they like what you're offering.

My rules for subscription-based websites are:

1. Provide an easy way for people to try before they buy, with a minimal level of registration required.
2. Sell the benefits of registering and using the service, and provide constant reminders of this when someone is using the system.
3. Offer constant, clear and simple 'next steps' to give the user a call to action to take the next step towards actually paying for the service.
4. Carry out user testing and monitor the web stats like crazy to understand how people actually use the service, and where they get stuck or put off to highlight the areas you need to improve.

I'm keeping the name of the site anonymous because they've only just launched and I know they'll be able to crack these things and make it a success. I'll post up a review when the time comes.

Blogging about blogging

It never ceases to amaze me just how much bloggers seem to blog about blogging. It's a reminder of how young the medium is, a bit like the way people used to talk on mobile phones and ask 'Where are you right now?' and marvel at the fact they were having a conversation whilst being out and about. Like mobile phones at the time, blogging isn't ubiquitous yet and we don't take it for granted. We're still in early adopter territory, and a good number of the people blogging right now are 'into blogging' (as opposed to just using it as a tool for having a conversation, like a mobile phone.) I'm looking forward to seeing more 'ordinary people' with an interesting point of view joining in.

[Picture credit]