Category: Uncategorized

Brand and Branding are tossed about as sterile concepts that people want to dissect on a repeated basis, as if a deeper understanding of the words themselves will allow a view into the soul of a people.
When I step back and examine these concepts, free of involvement in the world of Brand creation and propagandization, Branding and Brands degenerate to the most basic definition of the terms: the painful act of marking an object as something you own.
Viewed in this way, Branding is painful, permanent, and performed against the will of the object/being being inflicted with the Brand. It is a one-way act. A Brand is forced on a being/object, without any opportunity for a reciprocal act.
Corporate Branding is the same. Branding is not a conversation. As I have said previously (here), a Brand and the act of Branding is read-only, closed-source. The Brand is shaped and formed to uniquely identify its owner, and then it is placed with pride wherever the Brand-owner sees fit.
While a Brand is owned, and Branding marks those objects as belonging to the Brand owner, it is not a conversation. Reputation is a conversation. And conversations that occur about Brands seal their Reputations.
Wear your Brand. But then talk about it with others. You may find that the Brand is not what defines the company to the people who see it.

In the end, it’s all about performance. And when times get hard and budgets get tight, performance should be high on the list of online businesses.
The issue that I see when I work with online firms is that the first item to be on the chopping block is the performance budget. Performance appears to be equated with expense.
What name I have in the arena of Web performance that I do have I made during the last economic slowdown in 2000-2002 by writing and evangelizing some very simple facts:

1. HTTP compression is easy to set up and can reduce the bandwidth that your text files require to download. This is even more important as more and more companies build complete applications in Javascript.
2. Allow others to cache what is cacheable. Offload your site to edge and corporate servers, and let them do the heavy lifting.
3. Enable HTTP persistence. Fewer TCP connection requests make downloads run more effectively and take advantage of the benefits of the efficiencies of built into TCP.

Steve Souders’ book reminds people that designers can help this process by designing a proper page. Andy King’s book (my review) reminds people that Business and Technical Operations need to work together to reach the same goal.
So, rather than seeing this time of contraction as a challenge, take it as a chance to solidify your performance position. Retrench, re-examine, and reveal your performance issues. Integrate Web performance into the day-to-day operations of the entire business, and work within your current configuration.
The companies that learn to work more effectively and efficiently with a reduced budget and fewer people will come out on the other side as those poised to take advantage of the opportunities that are still out there.

Two years ago, I bought my first digital camera, and snapped this picture.

Today, I repeated the picture. Much more chaos.

Newest Industry is now upgraded to WordPress 2.7. You will notice no changes. I like that!

In my life as a consultant, I often discuss What Web performance data means and how to interpret it to solve problems. Solving the problems is, however, inherently based on whether the data that is collected is meaningful. In trying to find data that is meaningful, we have found that there are four categories that Web performance measurements fall into: Customer Generation, Customer Retention, Business Operations, and Technical Operations.

Customer Generation

How can you use Web performance measurement data to outperform your competition and impress your prospects. Read it here!

Customer Retention

Impress your customers with your skill and responsiveness, and keep the competition from sneaking in the back door. Read it here!

Business Operations

Know how you are doing against your competition and prioritize what you need to do to stay ahead. Read it here!

Technical Operations

Know what to measure and how often to keep a detailed eye on your internal systems and external performance. Read it here!

Jungle cats of the living roomhttp://seesmic.com/embeds/wrapper.swf

Flying back from SFO after a long and frustrating week introduced me to a new rule that UAL gate staff have been asked to start enforcing. Apparently, my Premier status, which I realize is the lowest of the frequent-flyer levels, means even less now than it did in the past.
Over my career, I had settled on UAL as my carrier of choice. Flying out of SFO for the first 4.5 years in the US meant that UAL was the primary choice to get anywhere. After a while, I became a devoted UAL fan when I realized that in this day of limited overhead bin room having Premier status got you the vaunted 1 on your boarding pass.
I could accept that First-Class and 1K flyers got to board ahead of me – hell, they’re on a first-name basis with most of the flight crews. This didn’t bother me because I knew that I got to board next.
Friday, that changed.
Apparently, the rule is that Premier Executive now rates between the Red Doormat Club and the Premier status flyers.
I have commented in the past about how people who travel a great deal assume too much from their airline frequent-flyer plans. I do not want to become one of these people. All I ask is that this single privilege I had grown accustomed to having be re-instated. I know my travel money doesn’t have a huge effect on your bottom-line, but I stuck with you through thick and thin.
But now this is a really thick move, and my patience has grown thin.

It’s November 14 2008. Charles Windsor is 60 today.
Forty – Oh yeah?http://seesmic.com/embeds/wrapper.swf

I fired up the Boston FIoS measurement location today after a couple of days off, and found that suddenly FIoS doesn’t like the BitTorrent.

The line of purple dots all indicate measurements that reported an error code. All of those measurements come from Boston FiOS. See the real-time graph here.
Accident? Design? That I cannot comment on. I simply report on what I see.

In the last 24 hours, thanks to the help of some willing volunteers, GrabPERF has seen the addition of three new measurement locations:

• Dallas, TX (USA)
• Virginia (USA)
• London, UK

All of these location have been graciously provided by the team at e-planning.
Thanks to all of you who volunteer your machines and bandwidth for this project.
As always, we are looking for as more measurement locations. It would be great if we could get some data from the Asia-Pacific region.