Entries Tagged 'Technology' ↓

I’ve been playing with a few open source CMSs for my new book. And I am actually surprised! Most of them are just so darn difficult to use! Not only they are jargon filled, but they are also unintuivie!

I am looking at both user side and the admin side.

I think WordPress excels in usability. The design is good, and it’s easy to figure out how things are laid. It follows task-centered approach to design. Which is great.

Joomla is confusing. The action buttons are above the form where you fill in the information. That’s very sad. The content adding interface is overly complicated and difficult for an intermediate user too.

Drupal makes me feel I have landed in wonderland! The taxonomy and nodes tangle me! And where is the WYSIWYG interface? That should be on by default!

What’s been your experience? Which CMS is best in terms of usability?

Vaishali told me about the FWA Theater. It has a clean interface and a collection of good videos. Some of them amazed me, some of them made me laugh. Go to the Best of FWA and watch the Kitkat Ad or the Nissan Stunt! I think you will like it!

Nice use of RIA!

Go, the inflight magazine of AirTran Airways carries an introductory article on Mobile Web. The author Lee Gimpel contacted me for inputs a while ago and I was glad to help. Clearly, mobile web is huge, and there is good amount of buzz around it these days. But like Amy Mischler of dotMobi said, it’s important to set your expectations and realize that you’re at the beginning of something that can really differentiate yourself.

Have you tried something on the mobile web yet? Did you read my book on it?

A while ago, I got an email from Sean, about a journal he has started about search engine marketing. I checked out what it was about and learned this:

SEMJ.org is the first printed journal dedicated to the advancement of search marketing through peer reviewed articles. The goal of the journal is to help professionals in the industry share and demonstrate their expertise. We are different than a magazine in that we encourage the submission of articles and research papers by experts in the industry. Similar to a scientific journal, we review articles submitted by industry professionals and our editors decide if the article will be published in our journal.

That’s a very good concept. The search engine / online marketing industry is booming and it needs validated information and learning tools.

And I accepted Sean’s invitation to become a senior editor!

The first print edition is going to have a lot of interesting papers.

If you are in online marketing or SEM, check out the journal. You can also share your knowledge by becoming an author.

Adobe is teaming up with Google and Yahoo! to improve indexing of dynamic content in rich internet applications made with Flash. This means Google and Yahoo! will be able to crawl your site if you have a Flash/Flex/OpenLaszlo based application that pulls content from database.

Here are some excerpts from the press release.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine.

Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search.

This surely is a great development!

Update:

OpenLaszlo blog has a great post on why this is not so big a news!