The hub was unveiled during an event in London this morning, as a effort over a year in the making.

“We will follow the athletes’ stories for the next 17 days,” said Facebook’s Joanna Shields. “It’s that discovery through friends that makes things interesting and makes you want to click on media. We want to bring discovery to the Olympics.”

A trip to the hub allows you to find athletes, teams, and even individual sports to follow – as well as suggests that fans “like” the two official pages of the games – The Olympic Games and London 2012. As of now, the Explore London Page offers nearly 200 individual athletes, 60 different teams, and 25 specific sports.

“Liking” any of these pages will set you up to receive updates from the athletes – something that could be really fun for Olympic fans during the games. Although the IOC has a fairly strict social media policy, they will allow athletes to post text and photos while participating. You won’t see any exclusive videos on Facebook, however, as they’ve been hit with the banhammer.

Misty May-Treanor 1 day ago

Congrats to Jake and Sean on their birth into 2012 London Olympics! Powered by socialditto   123 likes ·  14 comments

The goal is that the Olympians will participate in social media while at the games – that way fans can get an inside look into the process with personal status updates, photo uploads, and more. Of course, the success of London 2012 as a true “social Olympic” experience depends on how seriously the athletes and teams take updating the social media accounts.

Facebook is also trying to stay in the spirit of the games by offering up these various Olympic-themed pages san advertisements. Since the Olympic stadium will be a “clean venue” without visible ads, it made sense that the athletes and teams’ Facebook pages followed suit.

The entire London 2012 games will be broadcast live on YouTube, although recent reports predict that online viewership may be lower than expected. A survey also found that only 6% of Brits and 12% of Americans plan to follow the game via a social network. That number more than doubled when it came to the Chinese and the Brazilians.

The smartphone portal is for HTML5-supporting smartphones, providing a touch-driven interface that allows for easy scrolling through articles and content, as well as location-based services for weather, movies, traffic, etc. There is also an app directory for users to find mobile apps, and it supports video content.

The focus on Android is interesting, though. "Android has emerged as a top-tier smartphone platform," says David Temkin, the company’s new Vice President of Mobile.  "So, while we’ll continue to focus on development for multiple mobile platforms, this time, we are releasing an early version of an app on Android first — the AOL app.

"We’re also releasing DailyFinance, one of the most popular apps on other platforms, on Android," he adds, pointing to AOL’s growing library of smartphone-optimized sites and apps as the beginning of a new focus. "Today’s smartphones offer a completely different experience from the previous generation of WAP-based sites, and AOL will be taking full advantage of the possibilities these new devices can offer, both on the mobile Web and in apps."

The AOL app provides content from some of AOL’s most popular sites like PopEater, Engadget and FanHouse, as well as access to MapQuest, AOL Mail, and the AOL app list.

The DailyFinance app lets users receive real-time stock quotes and financial news. Users can track up to 25 portfolios.

The move may make sense as a form of diversification, if not an outright escape plan.  As the American economy continues to flounder, and AOL’s role in this country shrinks, it might as well try to make money elsewhere.

 AOL’s Site For Taiwan

In regards to the Taiwan story, Norman Koo, VP and General Manager for Greater China, stated, "Our industry-leading products and programming combined with our content partnerships will provide a unique experience for consumers and advertisers, as well as an international, regional and local mix of news, finance and entertainment information."

He also hinted, "The launch of AOL.tw is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to provide consumers in Taiwan with the services and content they want."

AOL seems ready to launch about a dozen other portals this year, as well.  Reports appear to indicate that they won’t be anything special (just the standard stories, email, search, and instant messaging mix), but AOL is at least increasing its international profile.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner’s AOL have all together spent $10 billion on purchasing companies and technologies to expand their online advertising networks.

"We’re not interested in building yesterday’s portal," said Ron Grant, AOL’s president and chief operating officer told the AP. "Consumers are finding what they are looking for is coming from more and more fragmented places. We need a way for advertisers to take advantage of that fragmentation."

In the U.S. the four major Internet brands grew over the past year, according to comScore Media Metrix. The downside is the total time spent at Yahoo and AOL fell about 10 percent and Microsoft’s Windows Live services dropped 8 percent. The sites are attracting more visitors but they are staying for shorter periods of time.

Google went against the trend and had a 57 percent increase in total time spent but the company acknowledges that no single property will have all the products and features a user may want.

"The Internet is basically being built and scaling (faster) than any one property on the Internet is," said Tim Armstrong, Google’s head of North American ad sales. "Companies in the Internet space are changing their business models to have models which are consumer driven, not property driven."

As audiences have become more fragmented, advertisers have become wary of focusing all their spending on a traditional portal.

"Advertisers are going to need to start to use the Internet the way people always use the Internet, spreading out in hot pursuit of the things they need and want," said Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media Corp., an independent ad network. "It’s much easier to fish where the fish are."

How to describe visitor behaviour?

Before changing the site layout, it is important to understand the nature of human behaviour on the website. It helps that certain known patterns apply to human behaviour, such as:

• people hunt for information, using words as clues
• people follow a funnel to conversion
• people flow like water, when released on a website

In essence, the metaphors used to describe human behaviour stand on known natural principles, such as animal instincts and a flow of water. Let’s look at them in more detail.

Hunting for information

When a predator stalks its prey, it uses its senses, such as smell and sight, to find the victim. It follows the trail of paw-prints, spots of fur and blood to track the target.

Humans are very similar: they use words, related to their target (be it a product, an article, or a person’s name) to find what they want.

This fact is emphasized by people reading from top to bottom and from left to right, which creates a top-left triangle of attention. It means that in order to get noticed, you’ll need to use the words your people will recognize as useful in the top-left part of the page.

Read more about:

• Information foraging
• Web portals and scent
• Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness (audio and PDF of a presentation on designing for scent of information)
• Getting confidence with every click
• Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval (large PDF) from Kevin-Larson and Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research
• Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (from Jacob Nielsen)
• a very short summary of the above
• A 2001 Wired article: Hot on the scent of information
• Design Secrets of Highly Successful Website

The concept of a funnel is less wild and more down to earth. Here, visitors are compared to water and the funnel represents the pages they visit.

The upper, broader part of the funnel is the entrance page and the bottom part is the page of the final conversion.

The intermediate funnel part is pages a human visits before converting.

The different, in my opinion, lies in that in general, the visitor path may not be linear, because people click on the link that they think will answer their needs most – and people are different. But the funnel theory splits the visitor stream in many springs and guides them with relevant clues, aka in a funnel.

Read more about:

• Advance Funnel design considerations
• Conversion Funnel Folly, Part 1
• Conversion Funnel Folly, Part 2
• Conversion versus Persuasion: What’s Your Challenge?
• Design Your Website for Increased ROI

Water flow

The water flow concept, which I introduce here (or maybe introduced by someone else elsewhere), is based on the fact that water flows the shortest way to the downside. The concept is not different from the other two, but it describes as clearly as the scent trail theory the attitude towards the trail: a visitor only goes where it sees a need to go.

In the water theory, people are compared to springs, which go where they can, and when they can’t go somewhere (no path), they just return to them main stream and flow another way.

In general, this is no vastly different from the two above, but I prefer to see it this way.

The details
All the models, however simple or complicate they are, are based on a couple of principles that people follow:

• the visitor goes where he sees a possible continuation of his visit: a link to a useful resourece/product/action
• if the visitor doesn’t see a way to continue his walk from the page, he goes to the previous page to try another way
• the visitor follows the above principle until he either leaves the site (and thus goes back to the previous useful source) or converts
• people scan from top to bottom, from left to right
• people not read, but scan: quickly check if there’s anything interesting on the page and proceed with their journey
• since people scan, the text should be readable and properly formated for reading from the web page
• you should use the simplest words available: your site should be understood by your every visitor
• the words you use on your site should be relevant to the visitor, he has to identify himself with what you have to offer (or visa versa)
• use of call to action, motivating the visitor to proceed (usually, to the most useful pages) helps guide the visitors further

In essence, you should provide the people the words that they will recognize, associate with themselves and use them to find what they want on your website. Formatting the text, combining the call to action with links should help draw attention to the most relevant pages from the current page.

Read more about providing clear click path.

This goes in line with providing various paths for various kinds of customers, such as researching, comparing or buying, as well as different types of people, such as thoughtful (use facts, well-written articles, figures, graphs) and emotional (call to action, various benefits, etc).

You can read more about various types of customers from the Eisenbergs:

• Various character types
• Personas (more, more and more)

When to think about visitor behaviour
Obviously, the sooner you take into account how people view websites, the better off you’ll be. As it doesn’t take long to understand the basic idea of hunting for information, you’d rather implement such website usability concept before you build a website. 

It may be hard to redesign later, not to mention it’ll take more time and you’ll have other issues at hand.

In essence, designing for natural consumption should work best: it involves clear information, no distractions and positive user experience.

It also goes inline with various values that you provide to your visitors. The more valuable your website/product is to the people, the more likely they’ll stick around and do what they and you want.

Rounding up

Ideally, you need to at least think about the way the information is presented on the website (site, page structure/layout). You can rewrite the text later. In fact, you will have to test your website copy and rewrite it for better effect, so you can simply focus on the page layout first-hand.

But what you need to do as soon as possible is to make it obvious for your visitors where to go next.

Sure, I have lots of online communities – but by themselves they are looking increasingly weak.

So now I’m looking to develop those communities into portals – that means building around the community element to provide news, article, and blog services.

By doing so, I see portalisation adding increasing value to visitors – and making more effort to keep them there.

It’s not a new strategy – heck, MSN and Yahoo! started this years ago, and Google has realised the need for it, too.

The question is, how many webmasters think they need to increase value to their websites through portalisation, and how many think it’s a boat not worth sailing with? And which group will ultimately win out in a human-user driven web?

Comments

Tag:

The report says that 55 percent of the users who are most likely to pay for services could be drawn to an entertainment and communication combination such as MySpace.

"Right now, portals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN dominate online usage and, together with Google, collect 55% of US online ad spending," reported David Card of Jupiter. "For a long-tail market, the Internet is pretty concentrated at the head."

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index found that U.S. consumers were more satisfied with Google than Yahoo, AOL or MSN. It also revealed they had more satisfaction with all portals excluding those three.

The most visited subdomains within each portal shed light on the most popular features. For AOL its instant messaging, and for MSN and Yahoo its email. If the definition of a portal is a gate opening to another place, Google is more of a pure portal than the three large sites, according to Quantcast.

While email use increases portal traffic so does instant messaging. Frequent Internet users are more likely to use IM than social networks, podcasts or RSS feeds, according to a Universal McCann study done with Insight Express.

Video has become an important competitive differentiator among the portals. The video sections of the major portals are major destinations for U.S. Internet users to watch video content according to Piper Jaffray. YouTube, TV network sites and Google video top the list for video destinations.

eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman notes that even MySpace’s wealth of entertainment content doesn’t count the portals out on this front.

"As long as the portals can deliver a fair cut of advertising revenue," said Mr. Hallerman, "TV networks and movie studios will likely be willing to license at least some of their content. Monetizing such content is not always easy, and in this case the broad reach of the portals can make a key difference."

Intranet and portal steering committees face a multitude of challenges when it comes to making decisions about online content. First of all, they must determine which content to provide. Then, they need to develop a linking strategy and establish taxonomy-system of categorization. The Cost and Business Matrix can help committees prioritize, while at the same time serving as a guide for assessing and optimizing links from home and sub-home pages to content across their Intranet/portals. This can be especially valuable for organizations standardizing their corporate-wide intranets or redesigning or establishing new Intranet/portals.

It can be a costly mistake-both in terms of expense and lost business efficiency-for steering committees to automatically migrate existing content to new Intranets/portals. Rather, a committee should analyze the total cost of content versus the delivered business value prior to online publication.

One proven approach to determining the real value of online content is to use our Cost and Business Assessment Matrix. This matrix helps committee members determine the:

• Total cost, including fees for initial development, whether that means generating totally new content or adapting existing offline resources to conform to online models. Additionally, the committee needs to calculate costs related to ongoing content maintenance, which might include updating and, if applicable, translation services.
• Business value. The important factors in determining real business value are “Reuse” (frequency of access in a given period of time) and “Business Efficiency Increase” (the real value to employees in helping them increase efficiency).

As you can see below, it is not necessary to calculate the exact costs in dollars/euros but simply to estimate the appropriate values, which can be expressed as low, medium or high. When steering committee members come to consensus about the appropriate values for these terms they are, in effect, imbuing them with those quantitative values. This approach results in a quantitative measure that allows a committee to prioritize content categories.

Table 1: Simplified Cost and Business Assessment Matrix

Once you agree upon the meaning of qualitative terms like “low”, “medium” and “high”, you can give the terms numerical values ranging from 1 to 3, then add the values of individual cost factors and compare the result to the result of the multiplication of the Reuse Factor and the Business Efficiency Increase. The steering committee should look very closely at content categories with high Reuse Factors. Those are the content categories that can deliver the highest business value, even when their individual increases of business efficiency are medium or even low.

Along with helping you decide which content to publish, this matrix helps you determine whether or not content categories or specific content pieces should be directly linked from the home page (see, PracticeByte “Common Mistakes – Home Page Design“). For example, the steering committee should strongly consider linking highly reusable content directly from the home page. This might include categories such as company templates and forms or specific content pieces such as employee directories. The steering committee can then apply the matrix to sub-home pages. This process can be especially valuable to companies that use link categories on home pages, because it helps them to determine order within link categories; they are able to place highly accessed or strong business-related links at the beginning of category links.

The matrix allows steering committees to drill down still further, by applying the assessment to such content types as forms for various departments, business units or regions. And companies that deploy their Intranets/portals in multiple languages can add “translation cost” as an additional criterion, giving them an accurate assessment of maintenance costs and related translation costs balanced against the Reuse Factor and Business Efficiency Increase. Based on the results of the assessment, companies may decide only to translate some selected content. (For more information, see PracticeByte “Global Multilingual Intranet – You Don’t Need to Translate Everything, But Stay Consistent.”)

Effective use of a Business and Cost Matrix can provide clear competitive advantage as companies develop Intranet/portal strategy; it allows you to make the best use of your content development funds to create real increases in business efficiency.

Learn how we assisted leading companies in building effective Intranets and Employee Portals.

Add to Del.icio.us | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Nicolas Brki is the founder of www.effinfo.com, a European Web-Advisory research company. Before, Nicolas was a senior advisor at Giga (now Forrester). Nicolas helped global companies to increase the effectiveness of their Web sites, Intranets and enterprise portals.

Prior GigaGroup, Nicolas was the technical director of a French consultancy focusing on Internet technology solutions and a consultant at Accenture’s Centre for Strategic Technology.

I don’t know what goes into the guts of a portal that makes it work, but I know it’s complex. Most portals cost about $1 million and take about a year to implement. Customization and personalization are the keys to a portal, particularly the selection of portlets that pull targeted content from anywhere on the network into a box on your screen. Given these options, any employee can collect a page of portlets that contain the information, data, and processes he needs most often. A lot of portal projects fail because the infrastructure works just fine, but there aren’t enough portlets for most employees to make that level of personalization worth the hassle.

I’ve been playing with a service called PageFlakes, another free Ajax-based website that lets you tailor content. Just to look at it, PageFlakes looks like a portal. There are portlets, each of which features controls that let delete it or edit its contents. For example, you can set the number of items to appear in each portlet. The portlets available come in two flavors. There are “flakes,” which most resemble the kinds of portlets available on many intranets. So far there are 37, including one that shows you the mail in your Gmail account, one that displays your local weather, another that gives you a view of del.icio.us and another through which you can conduct online chats.

The second kind of portlet is the one that intrigues me. It’s an RSS feed. Add any URL to an RSS feed, and a new portlet window displays the feed’s most current contents. The combination of “flakes” that are programmed to deliver rich content and feeds works extremely well. You can create tabs in which to collect your portlets. The default setting gives you one called “work,” one called “fun,” and one called “reading.” You can edit these and add new ones. On any given page, you can drag your portlets into different positions, tailoring the view of that page’s portlets to your interests.

All of which makes me wonder if this couldn’t be the future of intranet portals. I suppose the business behind PageFlakes could be convinced to sell their backend to a company for internal use (if that’s not already their business model). I honestly have no idea how long it would take to produce flakes for internal data (e.g., inventory numbers, etc.). I also don’t know how practical it would be to create RSS feeds for much of that data. Could an RSS feed stay updated with information from a sales database? If so, the Ajax approach to portals applied by PageFlakes could signify a quicker, cheaper approach to traditional portals like Plumtree.

Add to DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Technorati:

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

In the early lead we find Google (Search), Yahoo! (maps), ESPN (Sports), and The Weather Channel (Weather) are at the head of the pack. From M:Metrics, they have found that Yahoo! is the most popular mobile content brand.

During the quarter ended December 2005, 12.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed Yahoo’s services in an average month — 4 million more than second-place AOL. MSN and Google follow, with about 7 million subscribers accessing their mobile offerings each month during the fourth quarter. In the area of maps and directories, Yahoo edges Google and Mapquest, but by a slim margin.

More info can be found at mmetrics.com

Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com