I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.

It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.

Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.

Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:

• You have no photos with people in them.
• Your site colors are all cool in tone.
• Your site is static with no interactivity.
• Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors wants and needs.
• You have no audio or video media.

If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:

• Add a video message, demo, or interview.
• Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
• Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
• Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
• Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
• Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.

Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!

In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example - the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.

Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.

Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.

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If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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When you leave software to make up its own mind, like which ads to show a user, sometimes strange things happen, or worse. I have been noticing this more and more, especially in high profile sites, like Gmail, CNN, CNET, and other sites you would think sport top-of-the-line advertising engines.

Here is CNET’s media player, currently sponsored by T-Mobile, playing a Sprint phone review. Before the review you get to enjoy a short T-Mobile spot professing the superiority of their phones.

Here is Google attempting to peek my interest in purchasing a heavily armored vehicle. I have also been served ads for body armor and night-vision goggles. Just how dangerous does Google think Minneapolis is?

I am not even sure what this is. Gizmodo rarely breaks away from their usual fare of programmable toasters and Apple news. So when they blog about a mysterious, non-English shopping site you have to look.

Take note: if you are on psychedelic drugs when viewing the site you may not notice anything special.

People are saying the broadcasters are in trouble, that the future consumers of video entertainment will turn to the Internet, and turn the TV off. I don’t buy it, at least not yet. There is a saying: “content is king”.

Right now the quality content is not online; it’s still in the kung-fu grip of traditional broadcasters. Sure you can see hundreds of clips online of people blowing things up, getting hit in the groin, or building epic Slip N’ Slides, but no one would ever waste their time watching if it wasn’t free, and they weren’t at work, bored.

There are, however, a few bright spots in the online video wasteland. These sites tend to be less popular than Youtube, and a lot edgier. Here is a small sampling of the online video underground:

www.heavy.com - Heavy has been around for a while, and features both original and third party content.

www.metacafe.com- They claim to have the very best video content on the web, a claim many would agree with.

www.vbs.tv - This is a site from the people at Vice, and is sure to generate a solid cult following.

With so many to choose from, it’s getting harder to settle down with just one social networking site. Most of us are SNS polygamists, spreading the love around to a few.

The first one is always special though, and says something about who you are. For instance:

LiveJournal
You are old school and were blogging before there was even a name for it. A select number of friends read your long thoughtful posts over warm spiced chi.

Twitter
You have way tOo many friends, and they have tOo many friends. The constant beeping of your cell phone keeps you in the loop to what your friends are up to when you should be concentrating on the road.

LinkedIn
You are power-lunching outgoing socialite with a resume as long as my arm. Your friends (connections) keep you abreast of their upcoming IPOs.

FaceBook
You are well-educated and have multiple Gmail accounts. When bored in company meetings, you update your status from a Blackberry Perl.

Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting other players squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.

But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popular Bittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.

Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.

When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.

It wasn’t long ago that web developers obsessed about page weight (the total file size of a web page’s HTML, images, scripts, CSS, etc..). The “lighter” a page, the faster it would download, and presumably offer the user a more enjoyable browsing experience.

With everyone on lighting-fast Internet connections, optimizing page weight has fallen by the wayside. When I was developing content heavy sites for publishers in 1999 we would typically keep pages at 50k or less. At that size even modems users would find the site usable.

Today I did a quick survey to find that many popular sites are over 300k (3x the size recommended by HCI).
www.cnn.com: 631k
www.abcnews.com: 331k
www.cnet.com: 533k

This, of course, is no problem for users on dual-core machines connected to DSL. But many people now surf the web from mobile devices, with much slower processors and Internet connections. With the popularity of these devices, it’s almost as if we have been hurled back in time to the days of modems.

The solution may be to re-visit these optimization techniques from days of old, or to operative twin sites, one being specific to mobile devices. Whatever the answer may be, I beg you, as a mobile surfer, please put your sites on a diet.