Thursday, June 19, 2008

ClickTale Launches Form Analytics; Optimize Your Forms For Maximum Results

Source: http://www.centernetworks.com/clicktale-form-analytics

ClickTaleIf you've been reading CN for a while, you know we like ClickTale. We said that Omniture should acquire the service and we've also interviewed the ClickTale CEO, Tal Schwartz. ClickTale is basically a worldwide virtual usability lab for your Web site, application, ecommerce site or blog.

Today the company is launching a new product -- Form Analytics. Over my career I've seen several products do something similar but not to the scale that ClickTale is. From the ClickTale blog, "Form Analytics reveals how visitors interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can increase shopping cart conversion, form completion rates and reduce visitor abandonment."

Form Analytics is currently in beta and includes three reports: Time, Blanks, and Refills. Tal tells me that additional reports will be coming out soon. The Time report shows you how long people are spending on your forms. It gets even crazier with the Advanced Time report which shows you how much time was spent with each individual field. Blanks provides you with details on which fields users are leaving blank when submitting a form. And lastly, the Refills report provides details on how often a user is forced to redo some part of their entered data.

Based on their initial testing, they've seen two common errors that developers and content creators are making. One is around ZIP codes and not taking into account non-U.S. postal codes. The other is password fields which don't provide any specifics on the type of password required which forces the user to refill the form.

My hope is that they provide regular blog posts with more form analytics data - optimizing your forms can return huge value and they could offer excellent guidance with the aggregated data.

ClickTale Form Analytics

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Smithsonian copyright-free images on Flickr

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/315324554/smithsonian-copyrigh.html


Carl sez, "The Smithsonian is up and running on Flickr Commons ... the photos are all labeled "no known copyright restrictions" and the photos are high-res. I was particularly intrigued by the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, with photos of famous scientists and inventors. We should all congratulate the Smithsonian on a *big* step forward!" Link (Thanks, Carl!)

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New Sites Match Agencies With Untapped Talent

Source: http://adage.com/talentworks//article?article_id=127681

Employers Can Screen Applicants More Efficiently, Develop New Hires

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Finding talent is a continuing challenge for marketing-services agencies. But a recent rise of online outlets are democratizing talent, letting creative types share and shop around their work to potential employers. Such sites may alleviate some of the pressures for both agencies and job seekers.

NuIdeaExchange, which launched in February 2008, enables agencies and marketers to submit their requests for proposals and then review submissions. On the flip side, media, account-planning and strategy, creative, production or technology specialists can submit their own creations on the site for marketers or agencies to purchase.

The site has already garnered more than 400 registered creative groups, encompassing "a combination of agencies, freelancers and traditional-minded to new-media-oriented talents," said President Dave Evans. The site gives the creative community a chance to show its work to a large audience, he said. On the agency side, NuIdeaExchange enables agencies to keep all of the work in-house without having to share portions of an assignment it may not be able to handle with other agencies.

Nothing to lose
Martin Schell, president-CEO of New Phase Communications, an Oklahoma City-based phone company, is planning to launch his company within the next 60 days. He issued a request for information on NuIdeaExchange six weeks ago seeking a company logo. Mr. Schell said he has received a couple of proposals and is deciding which one to choose.

"The quality of the work was pretty good," he said. "Both of them are pretty promising. Next step is to decide who I want to go with."

Marshall Lestz, a freelance copywriter, plans to use the site. "For a freelancer who is between jobs, this is a great, easy way to see what's out there and potentially land some work," he said. "You have nothing to lose, especially if you're between jobs or after you have called all of your contacts, because you can only call people so many times before you start to annoy them. Even if you're not chosen, you're still going to be able to make a good contact because you're displaying your abilities to a prospective client down the road."

Anand Chopra-McGowan, partner at YouIntern.com, a site that connects aspiring interns with agencies, said given agencies' struggle to find talent, many view intern programs as a way to develop new hires.

"Programs like this allow us to be a college recruiter for agencies who don't already have one," he said.

Filtering applicants
On the site, interns can post reviews about their experiences at past internships that other students can learn from, and agencies can post internship openings. Arnold Worldwide asked YouIntern.com to find four potential candidates for its summer intern program this year. The agency hired two interns who began the eight-week program last week, said Maurice Haynes, VP-director of worklife, Arnold.

"If you equate time with money, then there definitely is a cost-savings involved," Mr. Haynes said. "It's nice to have someone pre-screen applicants that would be a good fit for the company."

Mr. Chopra-McGowan said identifying the right intern can help eliminate one of the biggest issues in the ad industry: a high turnover rate.

"If they're a good fit for the company, they can move on and make them a longer-term offer," he said. "And chances are that person will stay with the company longer."

Drawbacks
So what's the downside to these online talent clearinghouses? "If you don't know what you want and haven't been through the process before, it can be a little tough,"

Mr. Schell said. "The instructions say, 'Tell us what you want,' but there's not a lot of coaching to pull it out of you."

Added Mr. Evans, "I have spoken to holding companies who said this could be a big help to them. The only fear on their side is the dynamics of what it means to the industry," he said. "Some of them are saying they want to talk to us but they are fearful of the fact of how this is going to impact them as an agency. But they have said it's probably better for us to engage in it and work with it vs. trying to fight it."

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Asus Eee PC 1000H Reviewed (Best Eee Yet, Except the Price) [Asus Eee Pc 1000h]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/315058414/asus-eee-pc-1000h-reviewed-best-eee-yet-except-the-price

Asus's Eee PC 1000H is the least Eee-like Eee yet—big, pricey ($649) and it has a regular ol' platter hard drive. Laptop Mag says the extra screen real estate makes it the most productive yet, too, even though the colors don't pop as much as the Wind. And the keyboard: "To say it's an improvement over the cramped keyboard found on earlier Eee PCs is an understatement." Performance from Atom and its 1GB RAM is solid, and the move to a HDD from a SSD doesn't hurt too much, even on startup—battery isn't hit too hard either, 4 hours and 28 minutes with Wi-Fi. Overall, everything's gravier than past models, 'cept the price. [Laptop Mag]



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3D GIFs Made from Old Stereo Cards Are Stupidly Simple, Effective [Cool]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/315319281/3d-gifs-made-from-old-stereo-cards-are-stupidly-simple-effective

Joshua Heineman is obsessed with old stereo cards, those old photographies from the 19th century that contained two different views of the same subject to give the illusion of depth. He converts them into pseudo-3D GIF images which can be seen without glasses, in your monitor. The method is extremely simple, and while the jerking result may seem silly, surprisingly, it works:

Johsua just gets his images from the New York Public Library, and combines them into a single two-frame GIF animation, which quickly flicks between two frames. [Cursive Buildings]


Poll

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