Archive for the 'Web' Category

With all due respect to Amy Poehler, Rosemary Watson is the Hillary Clinton impersonator.

Check out her site or her YouTube page, That Hillary Show.

I wrote some thoughts last month about how we choose to communicate URLs to people — what’s essential to getting the message across, what’s not, and what may be changing with time.

Tonight, while waiting for Gary Indiana to finally give the Clinton campaign the coup de grâce (Updated: OK, not quite, but really close), I saw a spot for a certain flower company. It is almost Mother’s Day, after all. “Which flower company was it, qwerty?” I hear you ask.

It was this one. And there’s the URL, right in the logo (assuming you ignore the flower growing out of the dot). You can read it out: “one dash eight hundred dash flowers dot com.” But you watch the commercial and there’s the founder of the company and his daughter (shades of Frank and Jim Perdue?) referring to it as “one eight hundred flowers dot com.” No dashes. Why are there no dashes? In my line of work, I advise people not to get domains with dashes, and a big reason for that is because it’s harder to communicate. But in this case, the dashes are there in the branding. Are they assuming people will think of the logo and know that when they think of “one eight hundred flowers dot com” they should remember that there are dashes in there? No, that can’t be it.

This is from the site’s About Us page:

Jim McCann, founder and CEO of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, INC., opened his first retail store in 1976 and successfully built his own chain of 14 flower shops in the New York metropolitan area. In 1986, he acquired the 1-800-FLOWERS phone number and continued to grow his business under the 1-800-FLOWERS® name. His immediate focus was to create a reliable brand name built on trust, and over the next few years he achieved this through his understanding of his customer base and market. The next logical step was expansion, and McCann successfully expanded his business into other retail access channels-going online in 1992 and opening a web site in 1995. Today, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM® has a well-known web site (www.1800flowers.com), and maintains strategic online relationships with a number of online services, including America Online, Microsoft Network (MSN), and Yahoo!.

So whatever they were called from 1976 to 1986 doesn’t matter much. In ‘86 they branded the company based on that phone number, 1-800-flowers.

The way we communicate phone numbers has certainly changed over the years. I believe everyone in the US has been on a system that requires them to dial 1 at the beginning of a long-distance call since the 1970s. We no longer say “area code” before announcing an area code. And it’s probably been thirty or forty years since one would identify an exchange (the first three digits after the area code) with two letters and a number, which was itself a streamlined version of naming an exchange for a place, followed by a number. Wikipedia notes that the Ricardo’s phone number on I Love Lucy was MUrray Hill 5-9975, which would later be referred to as MU5-9975, and later 685-9975. I remember this commercial from my misspent youth (spent in the glow of the eye of hell):

There was another hotel with ads that included a phone number with a full on “Murray Hill” exchange, but I couldn’t find that one.

But I digress. The point is, we know how to say a phone number. Even with all the changes that have taken place over time, we’ve never had to actually say “dash”. The hyphens were in there just to make the printed version of the number easier to parse. So if we know that 1-800-flowers can be read “one eight hundred flowers,” the people marketing the web site feel that we can look at that logo with its hyphens and hear the domain name spoken as the phone number with a “dot com” tacked on the end, and not have our heads explode.

Beyond that point, here’s the real point, courtesy of my pal the WebBug:

If I request http://www.1800flowers.com, the server returns the following:

HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Location: http://ww21.1800flowers.com/

A “temporary” redirect, but I end up at a domain without any dashes.

If I request http://www.1-800-flowers.com, the server returns the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 May 2008 05:31:28 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: no-cache=”set-cookie,set-cookie2″
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=0000UzUSX5tGcqe8AriacpxKyf7:120mbebeh;Path=/
Set-Cookie: ShopperManager/enterprise=d7b1c7dc-1bf6-11dd-b18b-cbe10af70195;Expires=Mon, 25-May-2076 08:45:35 GMT;Path=/
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
X-Powered-By: 1800Flowers web server
X-AspNet-Version: 1.21.366
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

No redirect. So both versions get me to the site, but excluding the dashes from my request does require the server to take an extra step. Should I take that to mean that the version with the dashes (the one that the logo looks like the domain name would be) is the default and the one without them (the one that you hear when they say the name) was set up to catch errors and keep the competitors from getting control of mistyped traffic?

One last thing to note, now that Clinton’s “apparently” won Indiana, according to MSNBC: In the footer of the site’s home page they’ve got links to other sites they run. Among them are 1-800-Baskets and 1-800-Greetings, with links anchored by “Greeting Cards” and “Gift Baskets” respectively. And the targets of those links? 1-800-Baskets is at http://www.1800baskets.com/ and 1-800-Greetings is http://www.1800greetings.com/. And just for fun, what happens when you add the dashes so the URLs match the company names on those two?

http://www.1-800-baskets.com/ returns a 301 redirect to http://www.1800baskets.com/ and http://www.1-800-greetings.com/ returns a proper 200, but the news isn’t quite as good as it appears. If I request http://www.1800greetings.com/ I get a 301 to http://1800greetings.cardways.com/cp001/clientinterface/creategiftcard.asp?cltid=121&returnid=0 (an affiliate deal, apparently), which looks like this:

And yes, a request for http://www.1-800-greetings.com/ returns a 200, but it looks like this:

The wrong site.

When you talk about a URL, what do you say? Actually, before we even get to that, how do you say “URL”? I’ve already given my own answer away by writing “a URL” (yoo-arr-ell) rather than “an URL” (erl). Similarly, I make my living as an SEO (ess-ee-o) rather than a SEO (see-o).

Honestly, this interweb business is young enough that a lot of the terminology isn’t standardized, and similarly, many of the acronyms don’t have a set pronunciation. That will change with time, I’m sure. After all, nobody pronounces “scuba” (ess-see-yoo-bee-ay) — at least I hope not.

So, back to the question at hand: when you say a URL, just what do you say? Do you include all its parts, using the official generic syntax of scheme, authority, path, query, and fragment? Don’t be silly, of course you don’t.

As more and more people go online and become accustomed to these things, it’s become pretty standard to leave out the “http://”. Even the “www” (which really shouldn’t be necessary) is left out most of the time. Just look at an ad in print or on the eye of hell. The web site is usually just represented as domain.com. And you really can, in most cases, just type that into your browser’s location bar. The browser will go with the default protocol of http, and the server, when reached, will add a trailing slash and sometimes the www as well.

Of course, there will always be exceptions, like this guy:

LETTERMAN: Can I just take a second here, Larry — I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt — to give our World Wide Web address. If people want to e-mail us, we’re on the World Wide Web as well.

KING: You are too? What is it?

LETTERMAN: wwwww.comcomcom — comcomdiggitydiggitydiggitydank.com –comdiggitywww.comdave.com. So give us some of that e-mail…

What about the directory or the file name? If you want to send someone to a document other than the home page, you have to go further than just the domain name, right? Nope. There are ways around that too.

CNN keeps their political news in a /politics/ directory, but apparently they were concerned that telling people to go to cnn dot com slash politics (which would end up taking them to http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/ after the browser and the server had their way with the request) was asking too much of them, so they’ve made it easier. You can simply go to cnnpolitics dot com.

And what happens when you request that URL? Your browser adds the http://, so a request gets sent to the server at http://cnnpolitics.com. From there, you figure the server would tack on the www and the trailing slash, right?

Wrong again. The server responds with a status code of 302 (”found”) and redirects the request to http://www.cnn.com/politics/. So why tell people to go to the cnnpolitics.com domain? I suppose part of the reason is that they registered the domain name in order to keep anyone else from getting it, but I think it’s pretty safe to assume that they chose to use it and redirect it to make things easier for the user. Apparently, it’s easier to communicate cnnpolitics dot com than cnn dot com slash politics, especially when it’s spoken rather than printed.

What can we take away from this? Apparently, it’s that slashes are problematic. Maybe that’s because a standard keyboard has two different kinds of slashes: the forward slash and the backslash. When a person says “slash,” they almost invariably mean the forward slash, but I suppose it could still cause some confusion. When I say “guitar,” do you think of an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, or what? Certainly, when the electric guitar was new to the world, “guitar” meant acoustic guitar, just like one used to be able to say “television” to mean a black and white television, then at some point one would specify “color television” for the new technology. Eventually, there would be a point at which you couldn’t just say “television” because you might have been referring to either color or black and white. Now, just about every television is color, so one can say “black and white television” and just “television” for color. And we’ll go through this again with digital, high definition, etc.

But with slashes, it seems that despite the fact that there’s a general understanding that “slash” means “forward slash,” it’s not understood widely enough, and some have decided to find ways around it. Hence, if you own enough domains, you don’t mind setting up redirects every time you publish a new document, and you don’t care about how hard your poor defenseless server has to work, you can just feed people domain names to direct them to your pages.

There’s another option out there, but it pretty much relies on people understanding what slashes are for and which ones are kosher on the web. Shell has been running spots on the eye of hell of late, promoting how hard they’re working to clean up the environment and find alternative, clean sources of energy. As if. Basically, it’s one of those “please don’t hate us, we need those enormous profits more than you know” campaigns.

At the end of the spot, they tell you to go to shell.com/us/realenergy for more information. That’s the URL you see on the screen, but the voiceover says, “shell dot com [pause] us [pause] realenergy.” Is that helpful? If you’re not looking at the screen when you hear this, will you know what to make of those pauses?

And what happens when you try to go to shell.com/us/realenergy?

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:10:07 GMT
Content-length: 0
Content-type: text/html
Location: http://www.shell.com/us/realenergy

You get redirected to the URL with the www. From there…

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:11:40 GMT
Content-length: 0
Content-type: text/html
Location: http://www.shell.com/us/realenergy/
Connection: close

You get the slash added at the end via a redirect. After that, you get a 200 response at the new URL, hit a bunch of JavaScript and then…

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; URL=http://realenergy.shell.com/?lang=en&page=homeFlash”> </meta>

A meta refresh to a subdomain of shell.com, without the www, and with some personalization, based on a flash sniffer and most likely my IP address.

As it turns out, they could have told me to go to realenergy.shell.com (look mom, no slashes!), and I’d have ended up in the same place. But I suppose subdomains are even harder to communicate than any of that other stuff.

It’s true, you kids. After making us wait almost two years, Fafnir an Giblets have returned, and one can only hope the Medium Lobster is right behind them.

And if this is one of those first of April pin-a-fish-on-my-back-and-douse-me-with-mayonnaise tricks, I’ll be very, very upset.

There’s an Easter… um… Passover… well, call it “Spring” edition of one of my favorite swarms going on: Blog Against Theocracy. You should go check it out.

I’d have written an entry myself, but I’ve just been too busy procrastinating about work.

Oy, Google. Why do you do this to me?

I have a client who is very happy with the service I’ve provided him. Since I got started working on his site, he’s expanded the business considerably and still can’t keep up with all the customers he’s getting. He’s so happy, in fact, that he keeps telling me he doesn’t need me to do any more. He doesn’t even want me analyzing his traffic.

Now, I’m not going to waste my time having ClickTracks go through his log files just to satisfy my own curiosity, but now and then I’ll check up on some aspect of the site to see how it’s doing. Today, I was in Google Webmaster Tools, checking on a couple of sites and figured I’d have a quick peek at the data for this guy. When I went to look at his top clicked queries, I saw this:

See that on the first line? It says the site is #4 for searches on mouse. Just mouse. The single word. That’s number 4 out of a total of 261,000,000 results. There are 11,500,000 results for pages with the word “mouse” in their titles. I know I’m good at what I do, but damn, that’s good.

Obviously, I just had to go to the SERP and see what pages we’re sharing the top five with.

Just look at that: two pages from Wikipedia, and two from Apple. That’s some serious company to be in. But where’s my client’s site in this fancy-schmancy neighborhood? No, I didn’t cut off the image before his page’s listing. See those three pictures at the top of the results? The first one — the cute little mousie backed into a corner — that’s from my client’s site.

Damn you, Google! Don’t call that the number four result. It’s just a picture. Yes, the page on which it’s published is optimized pretty well for the word “mouse”. So put that at number four! So, people who want a picture of a mouse land on his page. Do they call him? Do they hire him? No! All they do is look at the picture, probably steal a copy of it, and make his server work a tiny bit harder than it ought to.

This is just unfair. It doesn’t give him business, and it doesn’t give me bragging rights. Universal search. Feh.

From deep in the lair of the crab of ineffable wisdom, home of those Rather Good / 7 Seconds of Love folk, comes this rousing ode to brave Prince Harry.

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig created the video below to explain why he supports Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Even if you’re not familiar with Lessig’s work on Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I still recommend you listen to what he has to say here. It’s about 22 minutes long, but it’s well worth it.

No, I don’t have a report; I’m hoping to get one.

In case you’re not up on this, it was recently suggested that supporters of Barack Obama make contributions in multiples of $5.01 on February 12. It was to be a money bomb, a la Ron Paul (only this time for someone who actually has a shot at winning). Why $5.01, and why February 12? The five dollar bill and the penny both feature images of a certain president who, like Obama, started his career as a legislator in Illinois, and February 12 happens to be his birthday. Get it?

The idea got picked up and spread throughout the social networks, with more than 2600 diggs. It was discussed at length (and with great petulance, as usual) at reddit, a reddit/Obama group was created, and it was added as an event on facebook (and another, and yet another).

All of these sources pointed people to Obama’s donation page, and I assume it convinced quite a few people to contribute. Hell, even I contributed, and I’m notoriously cheap and cynical — a combination that tends not to lead to financial support for political campaigns.

So how much was raised? I don’t know. I’ve been searching blogs and news sites for the past 15 hours or so, and I can’t find a thing. When they ran money bombs for Ron Paul, it was always easy to find the results. I know the Obama campaign has made numerous announcements of how much they’ve raised in a given quarter, week, weekend, etc. and I’d really love to know how this went.

Has anyone out there located any information I haven’t been able to find in spite of my extraordinary internet fu?

What is shabby is the code I removed from the badge:

<small>Meet <a href=”http://www.justsayhi.com/states/155/north-carolina”>North Carolina Singles</a></small>

What is that taste in my mouth…?