aaron dalrymple dot com

Just looking for a little help from my Internetz friends to solve a marital dispute. Please take a few seconds to give me some support:

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Tagged as: Other, sex and the city, movies, transformers

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Third Places are those places where people meet, work, relax, study and socialize that are not home (First Places) and not work (Second Places). Think Starbucks, country clubs, some taverns and cafes, libraries, or even Barnes & Nobel. While Third Places used to be the norm in American life (Elk’s Clubs, VFWs, community centers), when suburban living became the context for the American Dream, Third Places started to disappear. With work, home and the commute in-between, there was less time, and maybe less desire, for these gathering areas.
However, now that people are starting to reappreciate urban living, and as more and more people telecommute, work as freelancers or are becoming professional nomads, Third Places are making a comeback.

As a professional who works from home, I (and many colleagues) have come to rely on Third Places. Not only to get work done on the road, but as a place to get out of the home office and out among other living beings. Most of the time I can get more work done in a noisy coffee shop than in a silent office in the corner of my house sitting in a comfortable chair.

I’ve come to rely on coffee shops, for the most part, for a break from my home office. While there are several that are either walking distance or a short drive from my house, only a few make my cut as a viable Third Place option for getting work done. So what makes a great Third Place? Here is my list:

1. FREE internet access. This is where Starbucks has lost me. I will sit and drink overpriced coffee all day long, but I’m not diggin’ spending $6/hour for internet access. In my book you can’t be a true “Third Place” without free wireless access.
2. Familiar Faces. I like it when employees recognize me and I like to see my neighbors and friends occasionally walk through the door. And if I’m someplace out of town, treat me like I’m a regular - I’ll make sure to come back the next time I’m passing through.
3. Warm atmosphere. I like decoration that is warm and inviting. More cozy cafe, less diner. I also prefer some soft surfaces to soak in the sounds of a busy coffee shop.
4. Comfortable Seating. This one, along with number three, are the reasons I don’t visit my local Dunn Bros anymore. The place is an echo chamber and the seating is mostly hard, wooden, upright benches. It’s impossible to sit in place for more than 10-15 minutes. This place is just screaming, “Please don’t hang out here too long!”
5. Other People. One local coffee shop that I dig has almost all other elements except it’s usually dead in the middle of the work day. I don’t want a standing-room-only kind of place, but there has to be other people there in order to qualify as a Third Place… Otherwise it’s just an empty room.
6. It should be Clean. Send someone around to clean the tables every once and a while. Enough said.
7. Good Selection of Food and Beverage. I really haven’t said anything about the quality of the coffee, food, etc. This really is the least important in most cases. But, there should be ample selection. I’ve been known to show up at 9am for coffee, have a sandwich at noon, and grab a bottled water before I leave at 2pm. So having some options is a plus.
8. And Finally, They Must Welcome People Who Sit for a Long Time without Spending a lot of Money. No one likes to feel unwelcome. If you want to have a kind of place where people gather and socialize, study, work, etc., then don’t make me feel rushed or give me nasty looks when you see that I’ve been nursing a small latte for two and a half hours.

What did I miss? What makes a great Third Place for others?

Tagged as: Other, Third Places, Third Place, Starbucks, Coffee, Coffee Shop, Home Office, Dunn Bros

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Either this is a typo in iCal, or someone at Apple has decided to use King James English:

Tagged as: Other, Apple, Mac, MacBook, iCal

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I love High Definition television! And when you combine HDTV with a DVR, you end up with the ultimate tool for wasting time, burning brain cells and enticing the senses. My fanaticism for NFL football went from a solid 9.5 to 11 after adding HD and a DVR. Currently, my setup looks like this:

• 42″ Phillips LCD HDTV (only 1080i though)
• Kenwood AV Receiver
• Comcast HD DVR
• Sony Progressive Scan DVD/CD
• Apple TV 2.0
• Wii
• 6 piece Boston Acoustics Speakers

Probably not going to impress a major audiophile, but it works out pretty well for me. So anyhow, HDNet and HD Movie (Mark Cuban’s networks) are great for HD, however when it comes to quality of programs, it’s getting hard to beat the MOJO Network! Do you get MOJO? If not, you gotta call someone and ask for it!

Three shows that you shouldn’t miss (watch them online if you don’t get MOJO):

• Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist - Follows around Bobby Genovese, founder and owner of BG Capital Group, Ltd. and BG Capital Management Corp. Bobby is an adventure loving and filthy rich, a bit eccentric and genuinely a good guy (it seems). It’s a great snapshot of the life of a person who has made it in business and still manages to have fun - and he isn’t full of himself or an a-hole. He’s Canadian, they’re all cute and cuddly, right?

• Wall Street Warriors - This show follows the life of several Wall Street folks ranging from hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, floor traders and day traders. The “characters” are very diverse and you can actually learn something about how deal makers function and a bit about their personalities.

• Three Sheets - It’s drinking show, it’s a travel show, it’s about people and cultures. All great things that are even better when combined, like gumbo.

I also dig Start-Up Junkies, but I’ve worked for an Internet start-up and it’s all just a little too familiar for me. Plus the internet marketing guy on the show makes me want to throw things at him, and that would hurt my HDTV.

Tagged as: Other, hdtv, mojo, bobby g, three sheets, start-up junkies, wall street warriors, zane lamprey

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It might sound something like this:

Runnin’ With The Devil (DLR vocal track)

That was bloody brilliant!

Tagged as: Music, Other, David Lee Roth, American Idol, Van Halen

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Today a guest post from SEO Mary Bowling, who I had the pleasure of meeting at PubCon last month:

I’ve attended 3 unique internet marketing conferences this year, each hosted by a different big-name producer. Each had their own strong and weak points and none of them were ideal. So, I started thinking about all the best things that would go into planning the absolutely perfect conference.

Here are the ingredients I crave:

Registration

• A really enticing preregistration discount. Give me some ammo to take to the controller to get her to shake the money loose to pay for this.
• Quick and easy registration. Maybe even online.? Self service kiosks where you can print your own pass?

Venue

• The venue’s in a big hotel or directly adjacent to one. It is so much more relaxing to be able to go to your room if you need to during the day than it is to have to commute to the conference area and make your headquarters there.
• Free wireless in the hotel rooms. Come on, the internet is a required utility for the set of people who go to an INTERNET marketing conference. You don’t charge them extra for water or electricity. Why make them pay $10-15 a day for internet access? And no, if we’re going to get any work done at all during the conference, please don’t expect us to conduct it in noisy and distracting common areas, so free internet in the lobby doesn’t count. If you can’t negotiate free internet, then at least get the hotel to include it in the room price. Then, we’ll never have to know.
• Free wireless internet access in the conference area and adequate bandwidth to accommodate all the laptops in the audience. A lot of the people typing away are blogging about what’s going on at the conference. Do you want them complaining about inadequate internet service?

Amenities

• Power to the people! Electrical outlets would be everywhere so that we could stay fully charged throughout the day and into the evening sessions and events.
• Good food. You will be judged by the food you serve and the way it is served. A cold box lunch from a long table? or a long buffet of catered food we’ll all be blogging about?
• Comfortable chairs. We can sit on hard plastic chairs all day, including at lunch, but we won’t be comfortable. Can we have a bit of padding, please?
• Tables, as well as chairs in every session room. They call them laptops, that’s not really the preferred way to use them.

Sessions

• Good acoustics and audio equipment. We want to hear what everyone says in every session. That’s what you’re selling and that’s what we’re here for.
• Prepared presentations. No matter how celebrated a speaker may be, it ‘s disrespectful of the audience if they do not make any effort to prepare for their conference role.
• Coordinated sessions. It’s a total waste of time when more than one speaker in a session gives us the same information. The moderator should review and coordinate the presentations to insure against the dreaded duplicate content.
• No pitches. Nothing ruins a session faster than a speaker trying to sell the audience on their product or service.

Networking

• Networking opportunities. Give us plenty of meals together, parties, evening sessions, exhibit hall time and creative events, like charity poker tourneys and roll-playing extravaganzas. Who we hook up with is often as important as what we learn.
• Friendly, accessible speakers. It is so cool to have breakfast with an SEO hero or two. Meeting and speaking with the speakers is a highlight of any conference.

Here are a few niceties I’ll throw in, too: dimmable overhead lighting in the session rooms; comfortable temperature; snacks and drinks available throughout the day and at least a 10-15 minute break between sessions.

Mary Bowling is the senior SEO for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc and blogs about optimization.

Tagged as: Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, WebMasterWorld, Blogging, Other, Mary Bowling, Blizzard Internet Marketing, PubCon, Search Engine Conference, Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing Conference

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According to Brett’s blog at www.PubCon.com, the Wynn Las Vegas block of rooms for the upcoming PubCon Vegas 2007 (December 4-7) is sold out.

Although I would love to stay at the Wynn, I wasn’t able to get one of the blocked rooms. A buddy of mine has a hotel site that I was able to book a room at the Las Vegas Hilton for about $100/night though, which is really close to the convention center and a heck of a deal! He told me that if I can get another 10 bookings through the blog he would give me $50 - so here I am… plugging his site:

Hotels Near the Las Vegas Convention Center - site of PubCon 2007

Let me know if you book through this link and I’ll gladly buy you a beer at the conference - until my $50 is gone anyhow (-;

Tagged as: WebMasterWorld, Other, pubcon 2007, pubcon, wynn, wynn las vegas, hotel, las vegas

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Why doesn’t this surprise me? While Yahoo is getting really good at pinpointing successful models and snatching them up, or creating them itself, all while mastering the art of integration… Google is creating obscure tools, which may or may not be around in a year and neglecting to properly market or integrate them. I think Google is really falling short on user experience. Yes, simple is good - but times change; what worked five years ago may not be the best approach today. Yahoo has integrated its tools so seamlessly that it makes sense to me that users are more satisfied. How will they turn that into search volume though? Do they even need to worry about that?

Yahoo edges Google in user satisfaction survey | Technology | Reuters

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, Other, user experience, survey, reuters

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On Friday I upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress (2.0.4); hopefully I didn’t screw anything up too bad.  In the process I found that Yahoo still had a bunch of pages from my old blog indexed in its search engine.  I had imported all of those posts to this blog, so they weren’t really doing much good out there.

So, I decided to use a mod_rewrite 301 to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new.  I didn’t do it on a page-by-page basis since I wasn’t really getting any human traffic to the old blog, the new pages are already indexed, and I didn’t really feel like it was worth putting the time into redirecting each of the permalinks.

So, I decided just to 301 redirect every page at the old blog to the home page of the new.  That way the search engines will drop the old pages and any real visitors will find the new site.

I opened up my .htaccess file in the directory where my old blog resides and added the following code to it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^blog(.*)$ http://www.aarondalrymple.com [L,R=301]

“blog” refers to the old directory name where the old blog lived.  So, all traffic to that directory now forwards to www.aarondalrymple.com.  To see it in action, go here: http://www.aarondassociates.com/blog/.

I should note that if your site is on a Windows server, there is a different process for this, which you should be able to find by digging around this post on redirects.

Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Blogging, Other, 301 redirect, redirects, WordPress, mod rewrite, htaccess

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A recent study analyzing clickstream data and eye tracking results found that the web is quickly becoming the interactive tool that it has always promised to be. The development of web based technologies like Ajax and the expanding adoption of broadband have led to a number of changes in how users interact with the web.

The University of Hamburg research found:

• An F-shaped pattern of clicking activity similar to results found in eye tracking studies. There appears to be a strong link between our eye and hand movements over the surface of web pages.
• Following links accounts for 43.5% of page transitions.
• Direct access through bookmarks, typing in urls, or home page buttons has remained relative steady over the last several years at around 10%. However, new window launches has jumped from less than 1% to over 10% of all page transitions in the past 11 years.
• Form submission has increased from 4.4% to over 15% of all navigation actions reflecting the increase in web services
• 43% of all form submissions involve search submission, followed by online dictionary and travel planners.
• There has been a 50% drop in the use of the back button for web navigation.

The study attributes many of these changes to the increase in web services, AJAX, etc. I wonder how much tabbed browsing affects these numbers as well? Considering the study was performed with “experienced volunteers,” are avid users more likely to use tabbed browsing and therefore driving the new window launches up considerably? I know I use tabbed browsing and launch links in a new tab more often than I use back and forward button browsing. Other findings include:

• Over 45% of all user clicks occured in a region slightly larger than the upper left quadrant of the visible page.
• Over three quarters (76.5%) of selected links were in the visible area at load time (above the fold).
• 23% of all links followed were below the fold.
• For 1024 by 768 screen users, the average available document width was about 890 pixels because users are not necessarily expanding their browser window to fill their entire screen.
• The average web page has 53 hyperlinks and 551 visible words.
• 25% of all documents were displayed for less than 4 seconds and 52% of all visits were shorter than 10 seconds with a peak value located between 2 and 3 seconds.

The data also reveals some mistakes that we make when designing pages for the more dynamic Interweb.

• Designing pages for a specific resolution may not be a great idea. Users generally only use 85% of their available screen space for a browser window. And, users almost never scroll horizontally. Make sure your “above the fold” calculations consider this data.
• Fast loading pages are as important as ever. With 52% of users visiting a page for less than 10 seconds, your page should load in less than four… And don’ forget that some still use dial-up.
• The upper left hand corner of the page is where most users are clicking. Put your important links there. Be careful not to put important links (usually those that generate revenue) in areas that users generally ignore.

I do see a few problems with the data. For instance, it appears by the heat maps that Google’s layout has greatly influenced the results… I wonder how different the heat maps would loook if the search engine sessions were ommited from the data… See the entire write-up here:

Clickstream Study Reveals Dynamic Web - fast web navigation in browser study heatmaps