Comping a Neighborhood - Crime Risk

Trulia has built in this neat Google Maps API using an overlay of reported crime data provided by SpotCrime.com and CrimeReports.com. Whether you are a renter or homeowner, this neat display allows you to see up-to-date crime stats in your neighborhood. And, if you're in the green, you are probably safer but as their map will show...it's all relative to the type of crime. Despite it's lack of sprawl or urbanization, all downtown areas tend to have higher crime rates than its outlying neighborhoods or adjacent cities. Vancouver is, by no means, a young city, having been incorporated in the mid 1800s.

In the Northwest, people get reported missing all the time. This is because it is easy to get into the sticks if you live in a neighborhood that borders a green way. Most of those who do go missing are endangered youths or the elderly with dementia related illnesses. You can probably toss those crime data points out when doing neighborhood comparisons (e.g., comping a neighborhood).

Here is a snapshot of the crime heat map of Vancouver, WA.

Trulia.com - Crime Heat Map of Portland Metro Area, Vancouver WA

Parkopedia

Before I started working in downtown Bellevue, I had to find where to park near my workplace before I was issued a parking pass for my building's parking lot. The high end of the downtown parking scale is $24/day and the Civica parking garage next door gouges you for $18/day. The low end of parking downtown is free at either the mall or Safeway's parking structure, roughly a half mile walk. There's also the Bellevue Transit Center which is two blocks north, which doesn't have a route that passes near where I live. At the moment, the only option I have is to commute via driving into work.

I stumbled upon the Parkopedia website and it is very cleverly done. The site allows you find parking lots, public and private parking garages, and parking meter-enforced spaces.

Here is a sample map and listing of downtown Bellevue:

Parkopedia Map - Downtown Bellevue WA

Address Listings, Available Duration, and Price

There's even another service listed on the site for parkatmyhouse.com, where users can find a house or private garage to park a vehicle at, for a fee of course. There's not much action on the eastside. This is more useful for homes and garages near a metro airport, train station, or transit center.

Blog Widgets

Tonight I found another widget for Blogger that is pretty darn nice. It's made by printfriendly.com and allows you to print or PDF a blog post. For recipes, this is a nice feature to have. It sets up the blog post in a printer-friendly page that strips out the excess blog navigation, ads, and other non-necessities. 

Magazine Technology

While pulp-based paper is not that expensive and a lot of Pacific Northwest lumber is shipped overseas to developing economies, print has gotten rather pricey and not just for advertisers. And, with new(er) media in play, this opens up a largely untapped digital space for consumers to get information about your products and services. NPR had mentioned today that direct mail catalog publishers are making their content friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices. HTML5 is on the right track but it is hardly the end destination to how digital content consumers will be viewing the Internet in the near future.

Beyond all the pretty pictures and color-rich graphics, what remains the constant is the requirement of increased bandwidth and storage. For consumers to readily adopt such a technology and use it in their daily lives, content has to stream as fast as a plain text email. 

There are a few approaches to how customers can view catalogs:

• as a physical mailer (pros: can customize pre-filled order forms with a customer's past purchases or giftees; cons: ultra-old school circa 1774, seen as junk mail, customers who shop online don't actually want a printed catalog since the catalog is the merchant's website, lead time requires a lot of planning and all your publishing components being on-time)

• with a web-friendly viewer (html or Flash, pros: a content standard; cons: limited to bandwidth contracts, Flash content can't be shared in the same way of just clipping out the content that a user wants to share rather than sending the entire presentation, requires specialized knowledge and software to look good)

• as a PDF (delivered as a web download or email attachment; pros: easy to use, many complementary "PDF" services to Adobe's standard from 3rd party vendors; cons: device manufacturers are slow to bring PDF-compatibility on-board due to licensing, software, and privacy concerns, limited or nil tracking capabilities for links embedded within PDFs)

• served up as email or web content (old school method circa 1995, pros/cons: easy to use, anyone can do it, an industry standard, not all email service providers allow rich-content to be served within an email, bandwidth/hosting limitations)

• within a rich-media, portable device-friendly reader (iPad, e-reader, smartphone, tablet, etc.; pros: new digital space, no standards for how or how much ad content should display; cons: closed ad networks with exorbitant pricing, few established software content builders, dual-payment system for advertisers and consumers--advertisers pay for ad content to be hosted/delivered to portable devices, consumers pay for the device, bandwidth, and hosting fees to get content, consumer mobile devices are not ad-free)

What is surprising is that all these methods still survive in conjunction with each other. Although, advertisers and publishers of different media standards will tell you that global revenue share has shifted from print to digital to 24/7 streaming.

Here are a few examples of sites using online magazine technology:

Edible Portland
Visit Vancouver USA - 2011 Regional Visitor's Guide
eDrive Magazine (an industry publication for electric motor and drive technology)

Linked InMaps

This feature is brought to you by LinkedIn Labs and makes a graphical representation of how your network is connected. It's not surprising when I look at my own LinkedIn network how very few people cross-pollinate to other circles. Someone should build an add-in for G+ so that data junkies can see what 2.3 billion +1 transactions look like in the three months that +1 has been available.

What is interesting to note is that this visualization only takes into consideration 1st degree of separation connections. 

Color code: The upper left of the spiral (orange and purple, banking industry), bottom (green) represents colleagues from a recent employer, and the large upper right cluster (blue) are all the people I met directly through LinkedIn.

Ughly, all or nothing on Google+

At least you are able to select multiple contacts by dragging a select box with an input tool to a circle. I really don't want to see what the interface looks like for mobile Google+. First impressions are like this:

• the UI is horrific
• there is a linear path for sign-up after clicking on the invite (referral) email

You can either sign-up all the way and opt-in to everything that Google wants you to have public, or quit the process. Who thought that one up?

• it's like the devs have taken the LiveJournal interface, made it worse, then opened up site privs to everyone on the web (which, thankfully can be configured for less Google-generated spam)
• surely the FB flip-flopping on privacy issues could have made Google a better learned student on the matter, but no... Google wants everything public and searchable on the web whether you're a Google accounts user or not
• this project should have died at inception or stayed in beta a lot longer
• uhh, I like my privacy and you probably do

Like any site config page for notifications.. you could probably turn them all off unless you really love getting pinged by email alerts. Isn't that what an RSS feed is supposed to filter for you? 

Google devs, please leave my online personas alone. Obviously, I don't want my business "mktgurl" persona mixed with the food-oriented "mad scientist baker" persona. Don't just base them off of the funky "name" associated with the email account. Ugh, geez... it's like monkeys suddenly took over the dev of this app.

Geospatial Tweet Mapping

I have this love-hate relationship going on with Twitter. For starters, I hate the disproportionate amount of time it takes to manage the site for the value it creates. Marketers struggle with how much more time it takes to analyze campaign data (leads generated, mentions, retweets, followers gained, referrals, etc.) that uses Twitter as a communication channel to decide whether or not to employ the same techniques again for future campaigns. I love how the concept spurred lots of 3rd party app creators to make life easier using Twitter.

The idea that 140-character feeds could be so time consuming to manage and aggregate into meaningful data points is a challenge for most online marketers. The more apps that are created, the lazier marketers get in dealing with data. Like a multiverse gaming console, I just want a one-stop-aggregator for multiple platforms.. which means the ultimate, master API that thinks for itself, automatically adjusts to accept new connections and ports many data formats into one cloud repository. The latter incarnations actually exist. For now, we have to rely on and contend with the more sluggish, manual human interface.

Because the public sector is always shorthanded, much of the data aggregation comes from outside sources using non-standard perimeters. Even how coordinates are stored have three or four different formats. Ever look at a physical topo map for hiking? The degree and UTM systems are both listed. Google Maps uses the decimal system. Anyhow. Geospatial analysis (GIS) typically refers to sets of longitude/latitude location markers designated to individual data points and was originally developed to help solve problems in environmental and life sciences, ecology, geology, and epidemiology. It has expanded to include a lot more industries like defense, intelligence, utilities, natural resources, social sciences, public safety, etc. Marketers use geospatial data to target customer segments that are based in certain zip codes, cities, or metropolitan areas, though largely for direct marketing efforts.

Here are a few geospatial web tools for Twitter trend watching:

• Twitter API for geolocation
• Landsat Data for the World by ESRI, a tweet mapping template
• OpenStreetMap, a free editable map of the world

Here are a few examples of geospatial mapping using Twitter data:

• GPS Brand of Choice, using SurveyMapper
• Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices 2007, using MapTube
• City-based tweet counter, using Tweet-o-Meter
• Active Floods in the USA, using ArcGIS

Here's a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) to ponder about. Hardly anyone is going to contribute public data without a benefit in return. Let's say that you own a parking structure that is adjacent to a hotel or a shopping district. Wouldn't it be in your interest to log the check-ins at the structure and make that data available to nearby establishments via RSS or Twitter feed? It would deduct from a fixed number of spaces how many vehicles are parked there, updating every five to ten minutes. It might be a spammy channel but end-users would just have to visit, not subscribe to, a parking structure's online site feed to see if there was parking available. A tool like this would have been tremendously helpful on the weekend of the Northwest Food Service Tradeshow since there were multiple large events and a marathon being held near the Oregon Convention Center and it took more than a half hour to find adjacent parking. It's a winning outcome for everyone. The parking structure would get to maximize occupancy, the convention center/nearby shops/hotels would have more bodies inside for point-of-sale transactions, and the visiting end-users would be able to get on their day instead of driving around in circles in downtown Portland.

Google Analytics: Annotations

At the end of an online campaign or for month-end reporting, I bet you've wondered where all the traffic spikes should be attributed to. Rather than shuffle through piles of paper lurking about, Google Analytics makes it easy to keep track of what happened by allowing users to add data point notes (annotations) to one's traffic feed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way for marketers to download or export just a timeline of the annotations. Maybe someone will write an API to compensate for this undersight.

TheFoodening blog - a bump in referral traffic from a niche food site

The above image shows a steep bump in new visitors and is an example of a cross-posted recipe that I did (pizza balls) between my food blog and a popular food community on LiveJournal, food_porn. It doesn't have to be a direct post to gain residual traffic among an audience with similar interests. I still get long-tail hits from recipes x-posted years ago.

Google Fusion Tables

"When it comes to free data and transparency, the United States of America is one of the best." --Hans Rosling, TED Talks

In looking for fun things to do with Google, compared to similar services offered by Microsoft or Yahoo, I found that Google really doesn't invest its resources onto frivolous notions like 3rd party online games. Instead, Google seems to have everyone else beat in terms of web-based productivity tools. 

First launched in mid-2009, Google's Fusion Tables offers a means of geospatial data visualization and collaboration using public or private datasets. In its Example Gallery, the sample that caught my attention was the one done by WikiEdData about poverty in Washington state school districts. Here is a TED video of Hans Rosling using motion charts and speaking about a historical view of worldwide GDP, per capita income, and mortality rate.

Key features:

• Longitude/Latitude supported by the decimal degree system (same as Google Maps)
• Import CSV files up to 100MB
• Fusion Tables API
• Sharing and merging of tables
• Images cannot be uploaded but can be displayed using a URL

Google: Instant = On = Fail

Google's search engine assumes that if lots of people are searching on a particular phrase, you must be too. Frankly, I dislike Instant results, and there's no way to rate or send feedback to Google about it.. ok, no easy built-into-the-site way. I dislike how the page is pre-configured for Instant to be On, and if you toggle it off, the page instantly purges your current search results causing you to retype your search query. I dislike how it tells me that I really should be looking for something else other than what I typed. And, it should already know (since it knows I'm doing a web search from the Portland metro area) that the closest match to the name should have brought up search hits for the dairy in Battle Ground, WA not, as it wanted me to look at as the first result, a dairy with an entirely DIFFERENT name in Las Vegas, NV. Arrrrgh.

To be fair, this is what Bing brought up as search results (yes, cookies were purged prior to this):



Web Tools for Marketers

Every year, new web tools come onto the market. These are supposed to help make our lives as marketers easier with better time management, multi-layered views of web properties, or a better consolidated and aggregate dashboard. Many of them are free or have a "lite" version of the webware available. Here are a few good ones that come to mind:

YouSendIt - Ever get thwarted by IT's security or file size settings in Microsoft Outlook? YouSendIt provides temporary file transfers between users. It's not just a work-around for Outlook. Most email providers limit the send/receive file size to 10 mb. Their lite version is not too shabby for the occassional user. You can send files up to 100 mb with a 1 gb/month bandwidth restriction. Your recipients have up to 7 days to download the file before the system automatically deletes it. YouSendIt provides a handy link for users to download.

Icerocket - Using an RSS reader to track updates for twitter feeds or blogs is fine if you want to keep track of what people are saying about you. But what about all the other sites that are saying something about your company, its products, or brands? Icerocket is an aggregate search engine that looks for your keywords across a variety of online media: Blogs, the WWW, Twitter, MySpace, News, Images, etc., and does this all at once.

Mailinator - This is a service that lets you create a temporary email account. It's good for signing up for consumer newsletters that don't secure their account creation pages. Why is this relevant for marketers? If you're testing web contact forms, you might not want to have your work email address captured into your company's CRM; but you still want verification (e.g., like the autoresponder) that your web forms actually work.

ShareThis - Definitely not a new tool on the scene, but this is an easy sharing link for all types of web content. Check out their blog and why it makes sense for online marketers to use this tool. Did I mention? It's really easy to use, for users, content providers, and web publishers.

LovelyCharts.com - An online diagramming application. Ever wonder how flow diagrams (e.g., wireframes, flow charts, organizational charts, network diagrams, process flows) are created for PPT presentations? This tool can help map our your data bits into something graphical and more meaningful than drawing out the boxes by hand in PPT.

Web Tools for Marketers

I had originally thought about writing about nifty web tools that would be useful to small business owners, but in my research I had discovered that there were a lot of tools that people could use to make their day more efficient and a lot more that is a waste of time. I looked at these tools from two perspectives, one from my own, a marketing perspective -- how effectively the vendor generated buzz about the product and the second, from a clients' perspective in how they might perceive use of the tools and integrate it into their daily business practices.

1. LinkedIn - for business networking, pick one and stick with it. Having multiple profiles across different business networking sites just means that you have to update them all whenever a change occurs. It's better than Plaxo in maintaining current information on networked contacts. Plus, your personalize LinkedIn url is search engine indexed, so that's like free bio advertising without having to do anything other than create a basic profile. Users can easily import/export, add or remove contacts. It has a clean, easy-to-use interface that turns click-throughs into converts very quickly. It's good for creating rapport and building a reputation online through recommendations.

2. LuLu.com - a self-publishing site for hardcover or paperback books, calendars, etc. Haven't used this site yet, but they essentially remove all the barriers to entry for the publishing industry. Anyone can self-publish now, with their service offering.

3. Walk Score - originally developed for the real estate industry, this tool helps users find local-to-an-address businesses, schools, parks, libraries, etc. It's not just for people in town or the recently relocated, any traveling businessperson can find a local restaurant wherever their company sends them. The site programmatically ranks sites based on how far it is for a person to walk, point to point. All the locations feed directly from the Google Maps API, and adding a location fairly easy too. (Update: 2018-04-02, WalkScore acquired by Redfin)

4. Any blogging site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress - use for personal or business or both, promote products, introduce new services, keep an open window with your customers. Blogger.com allows you to manage multiple blogs under one master account. This is the "new" corporate newsletter. Many blogging sites have their own built-in RSS feeds, so your viewers can subscribe and be updated whenever you publish a new post.

5. Podcasting - MP3s for on-the-go listeners. Podcast Alley has both a genre directory and how-to resources for setting up podcasts. This is one media area where format standards have not been an issue. Podcasts can often be downloaded to one's iPod, Zune, desktop, or other MP3 player. Businesses are catching on and publishing seminars, tech conferences, and interviews using this web enhancement for distribution and delivery.

Professionals don't have a lot of excess time on their hands. This next short list are tools that didn't make the cut because they add more micromanagement steps, they're hard to use, are not the right advertising medium, or they simply don't make sense in blended media business marketing strategy.

Twitter - A dispatch service for micronets, if you really wanted people to know what you were up to 24/7. It's not just for people. The service can be hooked up to plants (water me), tamagochis (pet me), and vending machines (feed me).

Facebook - This site is slow to change to capture the benefit of having business tools available; also their site policies regarding privacy and user-generated content aren't all that great. It's very limited, and speedwise rather slow. There are plenty of competitors of similar flavor, e.g., Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, etc.

MySpace - purely for personal use unless you work in the entertainment industry; the on-site tools just aren't up to spec for professionals. Sure it's free, but in this case, having a blog or your own web domain would be better than a MySpace account.

SecondLife - a virtual "3D" world environment that allows users to create their own virtual content (clothing, furniture, cars) of various themes, buy virtual real estate (with real US dollars), offers a currency in Linden (game) money. B2C ads from real-world businesses are flat, two-dimensional billboards that are gaudy and distasteful to look at. Slow pixelated movement may give some users vertigo when traveling throughout the SecondLife world.

Tools for the Digital Photographer

If you have ever worked for a marketing or ad agency, you may have been charged with finding images that help convey quality, service, freshness, or some other attribute for a product flyer, advertorial, datasheet, or website, only to find that the world of image rentals is a very pricey business. Thanks to technology, consumer awareness, and the vast plethora of search engine indexes, the web prices for images have come down quite a bit.

Today, it's easier than ever for non-technical professionals to have a professional-looking website without all the design costs. Digital Railroad built a user-interface for photographers (amateur and professional) to market, share, and sell their digital photographs in an easier medium than what is currently offered by sites like Getty Images, Corbis, or JupiterImages, with those who buy digital images.

I use a similar online photo hosting site, Smugmug, for my photography, mostly for the unlimited storage, no ads, registration-free guest viewing, and the ability to convert any of my photos into photo gifts. Aside from its 14-day free trial period, all of its user accounts are paid subscriptions. The site does this because they believe their web tools and services are worth paying for, and the 200,000 mostly paying subscribers agree.

Differences in UI (can you spot them?):
Digital Railroad
Smugmug

Reference links:
http://www.popphoto.com/inamericanphotomagazine/3514/2006-innovators-technology.html
http://www.ephotozine.com/freelance/fullstory.cfm?freelanceid=19

Email Authentication

Today's web surfing takes me to investigate email authentication and its implementation costs. The hooplah that started this inquiry was from a press article about Goodmail partnering with AOL and Yahoo! to essentially get rid of the free whitelist system and replace it with a fee-based system for commercial senders. The concern for a publicly traded bank is whether or not its competitors will adopt such an authentication system to have their emails handled on a preferential basis by a consumer because it contains a "trust" tag.

What does email authentication do? Well, for starters it tries to manipulate how a commercial email is handled by an email service provider. The perception for the consumer is exactly like that of a 1st Class postage stamp versus a pre-sorted indicia, the latter of which almost entirely is for bulk postal mail, like pieces addressed to "Dear Head of the Household" or to "Current Resident." Here's Wikipedia's definition.

Goodmail is new to email authentication and has only been in existence since June 2003; not nearly enough time for it to have developed relationships. Goodmail's online documentation infers that by using their paid token system, it guarantees delivery of a commercial sender's email without blocking html, pictures, or embedded hyperlinks, to a consumer's email inbox. Click here to view their process.

There is a lot of unseen resources consumed by using or considering to use an email authentication service. Goodmail, for example, is a fee-driven company. The more fees, the more revenues. Let's just look at a few of the ones from Goodmail. There's a $399+ signup fee, an accreditation fee, token purchase fees which can rise by 25% if you ever show up on their watchlist as a probationary company, and per-email fees based on email volume.

I asked Goodmail to send me case studies of companies in the banking industry who are currently using their service and a list of references; the basics of consideration for any vendor offering. So far, no response yet.

Best practices are still the way to go, and the FTC has guidelines for business to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.