Can technique be so good that it becomes a distraction and blocks content?  Yes, and it happens all the time, we just don't realize it. There are many ways to block content by technique, and most are the enemy of Real Art and Real Communication.  One way to block content is to water it down, as mentioned in SeoBook:

"…The biggest thing that is killing off traditional publishing is the lack of personality, lack of passion, and a lack of bias (or watered down pro corporate bias) which is contained in nearly every piece of content they create."

In Cinema, you can have a film that is well done but might be lifeless, like Gangster No. 1 (I never saw it, I admit.. not my kind of film, to be honest - but the IMDb user comments and review suggest the film is lifeless): 

"…Excellent performances, innovative direction, and clever writing did not, for me, overcome the general loathsomeness of the content."

Well, maybe it's OK emphasize technique when your content really sucks…. so that's a case when it would be OK (except I would not want to see the movie, anyway, no matter how well it was filmed).

My post is more about a post in FutureLab titled: "When Presentation Eclipses Story" by David Armano:

"..Is it possible for design to be too good?  At last weeks Design Research conference, Tania Aldous of Whirlpool gave a stunning presentation called " Winning the Hearts and Minds of Consumers".  I cannot overstate how visually magnificent her presentation was."

".. The display of information was tasteful and well executed.  I'm not exaggerating—it was that good.

Only one problem.  I can't remember what the heck her presentation was about."

Why is technique, the handservent of Art and Communication, also it's main detractor? 

Technique, any technique, is only valuable in so far as it illuminates an idea; if your technique becomes more important than what your saying …. then your saying gibberish - even if your stunning people with your gibberish.

That's what I think David Armano is saying - but not in the same words.   I'll take his post and twist it to make my own point.  Over-attention to technique, any technique, actually interferes with the communication, which is where the Art is.

Here's an example of what I mean in Van Gogh letters to Émile Bernard at the Morgan Library & Museum, which I wrote about in ArtNewYorkCity.com earlier today:

"… the relationship of the artist is with the viewer, across time and space ..and that is the covenant one wants to keep - not other people’s opinions, even if, they, in themselves, are great artists.

The validity of work… is the work itself outside the reality of it was created in."

If you need to read, or see work, in the context of where and how it was created - I believe, in this case, technique and method is overshadowing the true creative content; this is the weakness of contemporary art, but it was also the weakness of 19th Century literary art, and it created a rebellion against Literary Art, by artists that wanted to make works  valid for what they had on them, not for what they were of or for what they were about.

Yet, even there, it's hard to agree when technique trumps content - yet when I look at the exquisite Van Gogh drawing that was sent to Émile Bernard   I am reminded that content in Art, and in communications of any kind, is best seen outside the context it was created in.

Van Gogh's self portrait is pure content, and was rejected by almost all his contemporaries, including other Great Artists, most whom he knew….yet today, there is no doubt of Van Gogh's greatness as a Artist.

Would you say that Van Gogh's technique is what you feel here ….. or is it the message that hits your soul as you look into his eyes?

At the end of the day, the fundamental basis of Art is the Artist's feelings merged with an Idea and that is what should be communicated, not the technique.  But while Feelings and Ideas are more important than technique - technique must still function well enough to communicate the idea and that's how Van Gogh's technique works for me. 

You would not call Van Gogh's technique, above, in any way, acceptable in the context of the time he lived, except to a small number of progressive thinkers and art admirers … and yet, I can't think of anyone that I have met who has a problem with Vincent Van Gogh's technique today.   In that sense, to truly appreciate Van Gogh's greatness, it's much easier to be in a different reality than the one he lived in when he created his works. 

It also supports my idea that if you need to go to Africa to appreciate African Sculpture, or go to Egypt to truly appreciate and Egyptian Ancient Art, or know Chinese and visit Far East to appreciate a Chinese Wall Scroll fully, or working at Whirlpool  to understand Winning the Hearts and Minds of Consumers Presentation - then maybe the presentation itself, was too slick.

Then again, I didn't hear the presentation so I don't know I would have agreed with David Armano or not about the presentation.

Click to Call using VOIP (Voice over IP) has been a very cheap way to make calls, especially long distance calls, and the quality of sound is acceptable in most cases, while almost as good as a land line, at other times.

However, using Click to Call to put make it easier for people to call you has not been that easy before.  Now, it's about to be come much easier with Jahah, according to TechCrunch and written up at Jajah Now Does Click To Call For Anyone.

It will be as simple as this:

"…The call buttons are available to registered Jajah users and come as a bit of embed code you can put on your web page or at the end of an email. They come with several customizations. You can adjust the CSS styling, adjust the number it calls, and restrict which countries can try to call you."

I can think of several applications for an easy to setup Click to Call button and I think it will be used quite alot.

According to Marketing Pilgrim, HackerSafe seal improves sales at Joann.com, or does it?

"…So is this kind of auditing worth it? In my opinion, the jury is still out. First of all, you can sleep easier with their auditing, but you are fooling yourself if you think you are completely invulnerable to hackers. Secondly, our tests have never shown a significant increase in conversion when using the HackerSafe seal."

Last month I noticed that sites using HackerSafe, overall, had a much higher population of "Addicts" according to Quantcast (visitors who come more than 30 times a month).  I wonder if higher conversion rate is tied to the number of visitors who are highly addicted to a site (if that is the right term)?

BTW, I got to see HackerSafe's office headquarters, last week, while I was attending XChange Conference in Napa Valley.

Web Analytics ROI, or WaROI, it occurred to me, is much like Search Engine Optimization ROI or Search Marketing ROI:

"…The analytics tools are great, but the data and ROI you can get are so much greater when the data is shared and used in conjunction with other insights and processes. Now that you've identified your best opportunities, it's time to move into the testing process through either multivariate testing or A/B testing using a tool like Offermatica. But just like the analytics tools, an optimization tool is only as good as the opportunities you identify and the insights behind the solutions to those opportunities."

Also, Jason Burby, in ClickZ, mentions "Recently, there have been a lot of conversations on Yahoo's Web Analytics Forum about the ROI (define) of Web analytics tools. Many people on the board offered suggestions; some were quite good, but nearly all were shot down as not applicable to most sites".

Meanwhile MyMoTech says …There is no ROI for web analytics but what is really meant is Web Analytics ROI or WaROI is a result of using the advice and insight you get from the Web Analyst who uses the Web Analytics Platform and Tools - and the Web Analytics Platform or Tools, without applying and learning from the information provided, is valueless.  

I agree, nothing is worthwhile if it goes into one ear and out the other; if you spend a million bucks to buy a top end Web Analytics Platform and hire a bunch of Web Analysts…but don't listen to them…and don't change anything…the money was wasted and the platform provided no value.

But the problem is not, in this case, with the platform, it's with the organization, the people in it, and the processes that govern it.

It's easy to say there is no ROI for Web Analytics, but it's just a play on words; it's assumed that people will buy a tool to use it - but sometimes, individuals, for a variety of reasons, can't utilize what they have in front of them.  Would it be fair to call the investment in Web Analytics of no value, no ROI, no WaROI?

It's the same thing with SEO/SEM or, anything else…. if you spend money and resources and then, don't do anything with it, opportunities were missed, but the tools themselves, have/had value. 

So, today MyMoTech says Web Analytics has no ROI and last year, Avinash Kaushik said Web Analytics is Dead; those things are spoken and written mostly for effect and to get attention - they're not meant to be taken literally.

Don't buy the iPhone yet, according to CNET Videos (though it's an older clip - the sentiments are still accurate, even more so). Yet today a Salon article says if you care about your rights, don't buy an iPhone as Apple is blocking Unlocking the iPhone by temporarily disabling many of it's features and enhancements; even worse, Apple is breaking the law - as "cell phone portability" is supposed to allow customers to use a different network with their mobile devices, if they so desire:

"…On Monday Apple issued a press release warning people who had unlocked their iPhones from AT&T's network that they were in for big trouble. When Apple issued an update for the iPhone, all unlocked phones would become "permanently inoperable," the company said.

It wasn't lying; the update came out on Thursday, and reports from all over suggest that when people synced their unlocked phones to their computers and then installed the new software, their iPhones were rendered unusable. "

Besides, a Digg Post iPhone Re-Reviewed by Gizmodo (Verdict: Don't Buy) has 1775 diggs today, based on a Gizmondo post iPhone Re-Reviewed (Verdict: Don't Buy):

"…It's understandable for Apple to wage a war on unlocking the iPhone, since the company shares revenue from fees with AT&T. But the truth is, if cellphone service was awesome, like it is on iTunes, there wouldn't be a need to unlock the iPhone. Secondly, bricking these things is totally uncool, and apparently, malicious—according to some early code investigations by the independent iPhone Dev Team, Apple could have avoided this entirely.

I get that Apple might not have wanted to wage a long back-and-forth war with hackers, as the PSP developers are. And this kind of big blow is going to be a devastating and effective scare tactic, even if a fix comes a few days later. Unlike a Sony PSP, people can't go a few days without their phones, without social or work hiccups. This is why I never unlocked my main iPhone, only testing these hacks on a spare 4GB test dummy. But I don't want to be held hostage like this. Did I buy this phone or am I just renting it?

So Apple, in an imperialistic move, would rather disable all iPhones rather than make their services more attractive by adding features that drove many to hack the iPhone in the first place.   In other words, Apple is punishing the wrong thing - they should have allowed all the cracked services and programs to remain until they could provide equivalents…..and they didn't.

Should check out Google Analytics Videos On YouTube which I found out about from Manoj Jasra's site, Web Analytics World.  These are official videos that Google has posted, vs. those others have produced (don't know if that makes them better or not - but I might look at them first, before looking elsewhere).

Eric T. Peterson wrote about Web 3.0 recently as being associated with Mobile Devices and getting data that accurately reflects activity in mobile networks in a post on Web Analytics 2.0? I am more worried about Web Analytics 3.0!. 

Around the same time, it suddenly dawned on me, as I use Google Reader on my handheld device (a TMobile Sidekick 3, till I buy an iPhone one of these days) that I see content on my mobile device with out advertising most of the time.  Often, I find I can read my RSS feed data better on my handheld than I can on my laptop - it's the focus, the small screen, the fact that I'm taking in data in little chunks that helps me.

I got to wonder if I could tell how much of my Webmetricsguru.com traffic is coming from a mobile device/readers and if that's increasing as time goes on?

Tried using Google Analytics to see if I could isolate mobile traffic and found it wasn't as easy as I thought it might be - tried screen resolution and browser type and user agents, but nothing really gave me a good idea of how much of Webmetricsguru.com's traffic was actually due to mobile devices and if the trend was increasing.  I reasoned mobile devices would have little if any Java support but what I found was 1.17% of all my visits came from Java less browsers and the pattern of traffic was essentially the same as my overall traffic.

It seems to me, if we're really going to say Web 3.0 is mobile… then we're going to need to know how much of the traffic we get is mobile … and unless I'm missing something (and maybe I am) we can't tell for sure (mobile devices may emulate an operating system browser, etc).  In any case, for browsers other than IE 6 or 7 and FireFox, I saw pretty low numbers - but I would suspect that there's more mobile activity going on than can be extracted out of my Google Analytics Stats.

Recently I wrote a post about Essay Service - MasterPapers.com that I got some deserved flack for.  Know More Media does accept Sponsored posts and if I didn't write the post someone else would.  Since I'd rather not have someone else posting to a blog associated with my authorship, I took it on myself.

The problem with sponsored posts is that it may not be appropriate to the blog the advertiser has chosen. 

Of the few sponsored posts that I've done that I really didn't have to stretch much to accommodate …. I could say positive things that were also related to Web Metrics in some form.  But with the Essay Service, there really was nothing to say that had anything to do with Web Analytics in any way, shape or form.

And that's the fundamental problem with accepting assignments such as this one  - I did not really want to write it but I didn't want anyone else to either - so I wrote it.

I like a feature the Washington Times just enabled according to a post on Smartmobs by Emily Turretini titled:‘Wash Times’ Site Translates Most Articles Into Downloadable Audio Clips.

I think these kinds of enhancements to site content add value to the site and make it more likely that some will just download a whole section, or set of articles as podcasts and listen to them while moving around.

I know this is not a new idea, others have tried it, and I don't know, offhand, of any metrics around visitor satisfaction over having this feature enabled (podcasting of articles) but I think it's a good idea. 

Perhaps the only improvement would have someone reciting it that would have better quality than an automated voice…but the automated voices are getting better, and sometimes, the robotic quality in the voice transcription is almost absent.

Could Google become Big Brother by 2014 much in the way 1984 envisions "Big Brother"?  It's not so far fetched… in fact, what we dream up, often happens and Corey Doctorow has created a plausible reality … something that "could" happen  and that might actually be on the road to happening now in "What if Google Were Evil"? or Scroogled.

"…The marvels of modern technology," said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration—Powered by Google."

In the story, which is not so far fetched, the government finds it can't do search as well as Google and just ends up using Google to power it's own Immigration Screening.

"…Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

It doesn't take much imagination to see where this all goes:

"…We brokered a compromise with the DHS," she said, reaching for the milk. "They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users."

"…The courts won't let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you're in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for 'suspicious patterns,' using deviation from statistical norms to nail you."

It's not reality, and it's a writer's job to create viable realities - this is a viable reality … like a bad dream…. Google's Search Technology and Ad Network makes us slaves…and the tools are in place to do it, and I wrote about this year and last.

For one thing, Google now keeps 18 months of your Search and Web History - and with DoubleClick, they know almost everything your doing on line as long as the ads and banners are served by Doubleclick or part of their network - including behavioral targeting.

Google is also trying to buy part of the 700 MHZ Public Spectrum that's being auctioned off soon and coming out with a Google Phone one of these days.  There's also a Google Virtual Reality World (Hello World) coming out soon and an in World game advertising network, as well as print and online advertising and even Radio Advertising.

At the backend, Google's infrastructure and search technology is able, more and more to connect all of this activity together with the individual who generates it … meaning they know more about you and me than any other entity.   

If Google were to buy Experian or another Credit Rating Agency (maybe they don't even need to since they already know most of the details about you) they'd have an even fuller picture of your credit and work history.

It would not be so far fetched to see the CIA and FBI interested in having Google connect all that information up for individuals, do a mass search accross the data warehouses that are created by Google for those agencies, and start ferreting out individuals that fall into certain "suspicious patterns".  In fact, the Wire Tapping programs that are going on now for calls that originate outside the US, are dry runs for this kind thing, down the line.

The Wiretapping information isn't that good now, as it's just keyword based, but with Google's extensive collection of information, to put context against any wiretapped information - it's not that far fetched that Google, would end up becoming the partner, and a de-facto, unofficial arm of the intelligence community of countries it operates in.

Now, is that going to happen? To some extent, yes, but maybe not to that extreme, or in quite that way.  

I have nothing personally against Google, in fact, I like Google - but lately, they've become too imperialistic and they're turning off people.  People are scared of what Google is becoming.