Why you should test your ad campaigns

I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget. The traditional way to do this is as follows: Agree campaign budget Build and sign off creatives (PPC...

The desktop, literally

“Layered Desktop,” by Gabriel Radic. The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion. For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder...

Using Google as your address bar

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my mom do this. From ReadWriteWeb: More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to...

Amazon invests in Engine Yard to take Rails further into the cloud

Engine Yard has just closed a second round of funding for $15m, including contributions from Amazon, with the focus on increasing their hosting platform and community-driven open source projects. According to Ezra, “We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the...