TetraMesa

Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed-Part-2

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Welcome to Part 2 of Finding Web Page Publish Dates when they’re not displayed on a page. Why would you care? Well, you have your reasons. Please see Part 1 of this topic to get a sense of why we’re bothering to look at this stuff.

In any case, continuing then…

  • See if images have a date stamp.
    • Click on an image or right click and open in a new window. See if the URL has a date stamp on it.
    • A more extreme option might be to look at image info to see if there’s EXIF data in the image with a date. This doesn’t necessarily tell you much as the image could have been taken any time. Maybe it’s years old stock photography.

[Read more…]

Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed Part 1

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In an earlier post, I expressed by own annoyance when certain types of sites choose to not display publish dates on their web pages. And how this is especially annoying when it’s an article that presumes to be talking about current statistics or other aspects where knowing the date context is useful. My goal in that post was to convince any publishers who might happen across the article as to the value of including the date. (Here’s the link to: Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?)

This blog is mostly geared towards the Product/Business side of things. But today, it’s more for end users, whom of course may be business users with the need or just desire to find publish dates of content.  I’d like to try to offer web users, surfers, researchers, whatever your self-identifying characteristic may be, some techniques to try to find content publish dates when they’re not clearly provided. These methods are not necessarily accurate, precise, or at all reliable. But they may be all you’ve got.

Why does this matter? Well, it might not. The assumption here is that there are certain types of content, (business research for example), where knowing the date is important enough to warrant the effort to look into the publish date, and possibly the last modified date. [Read more…]

Any Useful Tech from the Advertising Industry’s Toilet Bowl of Fraud?

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Right, wrong or otherwise, online technology innovations were – and are – sometimes driven by pornography, (See PORN: The Hidden Engine That Drives Innovation In Tech), gambling (See VR is a smart bet for the future of gambling), and crime in general.

Leaving aside moral judgements on those industries, they’re generally considered on the seedier side of business in general even if they’ve become more mainstream. I recall early in the digital business, (around mid 1990s), there were some companies that just didn’t want business from such industries more due to a higher incidence of fraud and such more so than any other reasons. Over time, of course, ad fraud has become more prevalent everywhere. It seems everyday there’s something about ad fraud in at least on of my industry news feeds. I’m starting to wonder what – if any – spinoff benefits there might be from AdWars. Pick a study, any study, and you’ll find ad fraud to be in the billions of dollars. Here’s just a small sample…

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Amazon Eats Whole Foods

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So if you’re a Digital Product Supermarket Augmented RealityManager and you’re looking at that Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, are you asking some questions? Such as…

  • “What’s Amazon’s strategic imperative here?”
  • “How might this affect my business and do I need to do anything differently?”
  • “Even if this move doesn’t appear to directly impact my business, will there be cascade effects through the marketplace that will eventually change something to which I’ll need to respond?

I’ve seen a lot of digital ink spilled on the whys of the Amazon/Whole Foods deal. It makes sense for anyone working in digital to be looking at this and considering the strategic implications. And while we don’t know exactly what’s on Jeff Bezos’ mind, this article Amazon’s Whole Foods Strategy: It’s Not What You Think from Forbe’s Jason Bloomberg is the best survey of possible strategic imperatives I’ve seen yet.

There just a couple items Jason doesn’t cover that I’d add: [Read more…]

Website Speed is a Feature

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Speed Dial

Your login functionality is a feature. Your social sharing buttons are

features. Your core product offering itself has who-knows-how-many features. But what about your website’s speed? Given that research has shown slow website speed, (whatever slow might mean to some users), can hurt you in terms of abandonment and lost sales when there’s any sales involved, shouldn’t speed be considered a feature? That is, maybe website load time shouldn’t be just a “tech thing” that kind of gets done as a matter of course. Rather, it should be a core measurement given that it’s demonstrably a driver of other Key Performance Indicators. (KPIs.)

How bad is the problem?

Following are a couple versions of a chat about Speed I put together for a Udemy.com course I built for Digital Product Management. The ideas are so important though, I’ve extracted these as free segments because the more people that spread this word the better.

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IoT Safety – For Consumers & Makers

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IoT-CityscapeIn a prior post, I poked a bit of fun at some IoT fails. Some might not be so funny. And so far, I’m not aware of anything resulting in a great deal of personal injury or death. So far. But here’s the thing… we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The rush to market and possibly the industry mantra of Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is going to dump some more bad products on the market. Unfortunately, security is still very poor across the IoT marketplace. There’s a lot of reasons for this. Not the least of which is there’s not a lot of value to building it in; just costs. The sad reality is that security costs are often a so-called “negative externality.” That is, any impact is suffered by a third party. This will likely change once some more lawsuit hungry lawyers get more deeply involved.

So what can you do for now? That very much matters whether you’re a Consumer or a Maker of such items. As a Consumer, I’ve got a bunch of this stuff rattling about. As a Product Manager, I’ve only worked briefly on one effort, so hardly an expert. But here you go… [Read more…]

Self-Driving Vehicles – Cascade Consequences & Product Opportunities

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Things. And the Relationships Among Them

SelfDrivingCars-300Many years ago I’d read a discussion about a few early science fiction writers. One thing that particularly struck me was thoughts about how it was one thing to imagine a few potential possibilities for technology or products, but quite another to brainstorm all of the side impacts of such things, both obvious and non-obvious. Those writers who thought of flying cars well before their time may have been prescient. But the ones who thought about how that might require new air traffic patterns, accident management, skyborne fast food pickup windows and more, they were even more visionary. They thought through what a lot of the cascade side effects might be; both for adjacent technologies and systems, and sociologically.

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Internet of Things versus Internet of Stupid

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IoT-1-300pxInternet Of Things, (IoT), can run from a sensor to keep track of watering your lawn to your car to who knows what. Pressing a button or just giving a voice command to have your vehicle pull up in front of the restaurant sounds like a great idea. So does having your car call for help if you hit something with it and you’re non-responsive.

Still, we’re not quite there in terms of all the smarts with smart devices just yet. It’s called the Internet of Stupid. Here’s a fun summary of some idiot savant servants, (perhaps one day our masters), have been up to over the past few years!

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SaaSalytics – Some SaaS Services Lacking in Tracking

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SaaS (Software as a Service), and its variants, PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), DaaS (Data as a Service or Desktop as a Service), and more… are all on a tear right now. In the classic Buy vs. Build argument, we’ve now got more reasons than ever before to hire out for more and more components of our businesses. Unfortunately, these still nascent services may often lack core analytics capabilities or the ability to provide hooks or tags to insert your own collection capabilities.

Quick Review on Why to Build Your Own Code

There remain some key reasons for continuing to build your own technology, even when there’s some great aaS out there for you. Among them… [Read more…]

More Most Annoying Ecommerce Mistakes – Part 1

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We’re Really Still Here?

After so many years in digital commerce, we still see what I think I’ll call “average practices” in surprising places.

I’ll admit I’m not a typical user or digital product manager. Probably from having been in this business for some time, I’m just amazed at some of the things I still see  brands doing online. (Or not doing.) William Gibson, the guy who first used the term “cyberspace” in print once said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This certainly seems true of Best Practices in ecommerce. [Read more…]

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