Gaffney3.com

Several non-related posts today got me thinking about the seemingly endless challenges that we as online marketers struggle with to keep both our own and client’s websites highly visible.  Obviously we’re in this space for a reason.  For me, after years on the traditional printing side of newspapers I fell in love with the speed of delivery of online and the allure of not being tied to a legacy system.   But there are days where I wish we would slow down.

This morning the next browser war seems to be on both journalist’s and bloggers’ minds alike as Google announced its forthcoming open-source browser.  Long rumored, Google Chrome is to be released to beta Tuesday, September 2.

Now the geek in me wants to start playing immediately knowing that its using the Webkit rendering engine and to see its source code, however the marketing side of me (remembering IE 4.0 not so fondly) is asking:

• How this will affect the rendering of website design
• What nuance differences will be needed for my CSS
• Will this require additional time and effort to optimize my sites
• Do we really need another browser

It seems like we’ve finally been able to relax a bit on this front with IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera.  I fully recognize the other player especially on the Linux front, but from a design standpoint those are the big four (in descending order no less).  The ideas outlined in the viral comic are intriguing, however I’ll never understand the idea of putting out a press release (in any form) prior to the products release.  Earlier today,

Innovation is one of the most thrilling aspects of this industry and I truly hope that Google Chrome lives up to the hype/hope.  But its news like this second subject that gives me pause.  TechCrunch is reporting on the allegedly amateurish indexing (and bandwidth leeching) of websites by the Cuil.  Apparently, in an effort to retain its total websites indexed mantle, the bot from Cuil named Twiceler is acting over aggressively in its frequency and by psuedo-quessing filenames to find non-linked pages.  Rumors of the Cuil bot bringing down websites are aswirl on the forums.

Again, I would like to see this site succeed inspite of and because of the fact I use Google for everything, but I find myself asking:

• Did this web service deserve the attention it received at launch
• Does Cuil provide an experience better than existing services
• With website owners limiting or disallowing the bot from spidering their sites is there value
• Do we really need another browser

Lastly, ICANN announced on Thursday, August 28 that it has approved the most sweeping changes for new top-level domain extensions.  In simplest terms we expand from the familiar .com, .net, .org to .anything. Although the idea of owning .gaffney3 is intriguing, this just adds to the escalating costs of protecting the brand equity that we’ve built by forcing our hands to purchase (or bid) on these new extensions.

This isn’t that different from Google offering trademarks to smaller companies through their Adsense program.  This practice, termed piggybacking, allows advertisers to use another company’s brand to enhance their ability to draw more qualified traffic from Adsense listings.

• How many of us purchased our existing top-level domain extensions for anything other than preventing another business from acquiring them
• Has .mobi, .biz or .info evolved into ICANN’s conception
• Should be really deveat from established conventions on Internet navigation
• Do we really need more top-level domain extensions

My point is that often times we’re so caught up in keeping up with the latest trends - afraid to miss the next biggest (or cuil’est) thing - that we fail to ask ourselves whether its service is something we actually need.  More likely the next biggest thing will be a service with which we are already intimately familiar but done in a more intuitive manner.

One or more of these three news stories may ultimately amount to something monumental, affecting the very way we design, develop, advertise or sell (my bet would be on two-out-of-three), but as marketers its our responsibility to guide our clients down the appropriate path for the promotion and positioning of their businesses online.  Sometimes that means not getting caught up in the hype, but simply looking beyond the trademarks and the press releases and asking yourself, “Do we really need this?”

Aside:

As always, here is the wordle for today’s post on Google Chrome, Cuil and Icann and their affect on online marketing.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Blogging, Design, Development, Marketing, Technology, Web / Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.