AUGUST 2003
Welcome to the Rockbridge Global
Village, Inc. Newsletter. We hope that you find
information and topics within this newsletter interesting
and useful.
Topics in this newsletter:
Feds Promise Two-Day Response to E-Mail
Inquiries
Marriott Touts Free Broadband
Universal Music Defends DRM; P2P Litigation
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Bush Promises Cyber Intrusion Reporting Standards
July 30, 2003
Marriott Touts Free Broadband
By year's end, Marriott International will have free
high-speed Internet access in the guest rooms of more than
1,200 mid-range properties, including its Courtyard,
Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites and SpringHill Suites
hotels.
Another of the Washington, D.C.-based
company's hotel chains, Fairfield Inn, will provide the
service at more than 500 hotels by the end of 2004. Of the
1,700 hotels that will offer free service, about 600 are
already wired.
While some other hotel chains are
betting that wireless Internet access becoming the norm,
Marriott is taking a wait and see approach, Marriott
spokesman Scott Carman told internetnews.com.
"Currently we view Wi-Fi as a
complement to wired access," Carman said. "Many
business travelers don't have the technology to access
Wi-Fi and we need to be able to meet the needs of both the
early adopters and the majority who are still carrying
laptops that are not WiFi equipped."
At the company's higher-end hotels,
Marriott and Renaissance, will continue to offer
"Wired for Business" packages which provide
unlimited local and long-distance calls within the United
States with in-room broadband for $9.95 a day.
The hospitality industry, which has
taken a drubbing over the last year, is looking for ways
to fill rooms. High-speed Internet access is increasingly
seen as a must-have amenity, especially for business
travelers.
For example, last month, Starwood Hotels
& Resorts, which operates Four Poins, Sheraton, St.
Regis, Westin and W Hotel brands, is building 750 Wi-fi
hotspots at its properties. At the start, the service will
be free.
Starwood is also experimenting with ways
to use Wi-Fi with staffers to make them more efficient.
July 29, 2003
Universal Music Defends DRM; P2P Litigation
By Ryan Naraine
NEW YORK -- Larry Kenswil, the president
of Universal Music Group's (UMG) eLabs unit, is defending
the recording industry's decision to use Digital Rights
Management (DRM) technology alongside a litigation
strategy to stamp out music piracy, arguing that the
survival of the industry was dependent on copyright
protection initiatives.
In a lively keynote presentation at the
Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo here Tuesday,
Kenswil slammed pundits who have been "trying to
dictate how to reinvent the music business" by
encouraging the theft of copyrighted works.
"We are battling a nasty infection
of image-itis. The tobacco company can kill us. The
package food companies can clog our arteries. The oil
companies can provoke wars. But, apparently, there's no
industry more despicable than the music industry. We are
hated just because we refuse to acknowledge the public's
God-given rights to steal music," said Kenswil,
referring to the piracy epidemic that online file-sharing
represents to the music industry.
The head of UMG's new media and
technologies division also had some choice words music
industry executives who he said were more interested in
fighting among themselves. "The bickering among
record companies, publishers and retailers is impeding
progress. We need to focus on making sure the pie is large
enough to slice in a number of ways," Kenswil added.
Kenswil, who sits on the Board of
Directors of the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), believes it is crucial for the online music sector
to create a business that "makes it easier to buy
music than to steal it."
"Every day wasted is another day
the online guy steals the music. We will have plenty of
time to hate each other in the future but only if there is
a business to fight over," he declared.
For now, he said it was important that
the recording industry control the distribution of music
online and called for a unified approach to making the
"legals" as easy to use as the popular
file-sharing networks. "If it's available on a P2P
service, we want to make sure it's available for sale
legally online."
On the use of DRM technologies to limit
usage rules on the legal music services, Kenswil, argued
that the purpose of copy-protection has been
misunderstood. "At Universal, we really don't care
about how many copies (of tracks) you make. But, we do
care about what happens when the copies leave your
possession. As content companies, we're trying to prevent
unauthorized distribution of music," he argued.
"It's very hard to stop
unauthorized distribution unless you stop copying the
music in the first place. That's why we have the
restriction of copies there."
In the long run, Kenswil said newer
technologies will support personal area networks to
transfer content from the PC to stereo systems, portable
devices and cars but, until that day comes, the industry
will rely on DRM technologies to protect its interests.
Kenswil said Universal Music will insist
that music sold on legitimate services be wrapped in DRM
and tied to the computer. "They can have as many
unprotected CD burns as they like because we recognize
that users want to listen to the music on CD...99 percent
of music in his country is still played on CDs," he
added.
"If someone pays for a download,
you want to be extra careful not to treat customers like
idiots. Eventually, they'll find ways to make as many
copies as they want. We're trying to avoid a PC full of
MP3 files so it's self-defeating to limit burns. If you
enforce limits on burns, you are forcing them to use
ripping software and you're hurting yourself. You are
irritating the consumer," he argued.
His support for unlimited CD burns was
seen as a veiled criticism of rival music labels that
refuse to free up usage rules for the legal services. Some
labels allow unlimited burns while others set strict rules
on how download music can be copied.
Kenswil said Universal Music would
continue to digitize its catalog with metadata to expand
the tracks available on the legal services. "We look
forward to the day when the entire world's catalog is
available legally for consumption globally," he said,
arguing that consumers appear comfortable with the 99 cent
per-song price point.
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Summary: Every year brings new mistakes.
In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design
related to poor email integration. The number one mistake,
however, was lack of pricing information, followed by
overly literal search engines. As the Web grows, websites
continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following
are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at
punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
1. No Prices
No B2C e-commerce site would make this
mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise
solutions" are presented so that you can't tell
whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people.
Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to
understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it
makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of
a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking
"Where's the price?" while tearing their hair
out. Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of
forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages
or search results. Knowing the price is key in both
situations; it lets users differentiate among products and
click through to the most relevant ones.
2. Inflexible Search Engines
Overly literal search engines reduce
usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals,
hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such
search engines are particularly
difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines
prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query
terms they contain, rather than on each document’s
importance. Much better if your search engine calls out
"best bets" at the top of the list -- especially
for important queries, such as the names of your products.
3. Horizontal Scrolling
Users hate scrolling left to right.
Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's
much more common.
Web pages that require horizontal
scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600
pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many
websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser
windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and
the extra five pixels offer little relative to the
annoyance of horizontal scrolling (and the space consumed
by the horizontal scrollbar).
4. Fixed Font Size
Style sheets unfortunately give websites
the power to disable a Web browser's "change font
size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95%
of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability
significantly for most people over the age of 40.
Respect the user's preferences and let
them resize
text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative
terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
5. Blocks of Text
A wall of text is deadly for an interactive
experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.
Write
for online, not print. To draw users into the text and
support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
- subheads
- bulleted lists
- highlighted keywords
- short paragraphs
- the inverted pyramid
- a simple writing style, and
- de-fluffed language devoid of
marketese.
6. JavaScript in Links
Links are the Web's basic building blocks,
and users' ability to understand them and to use various
browser features correctly is key to enhancing their
online skills.
Links that don't behave as expected
undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link
should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the
current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted
pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear
in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in
new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the
link is not a piece of code that interferes with the
browser’s standard behavior.
Users deserve to control their own
destiny. Computers that behave consistently empower people
by letting them use their own tools and wield them
accurately.
7. Infrequently Asked Questions in
FAQ
Too many websites have FAQs that list
questions the company wished users would ask. No good.
FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not
scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked
questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a
useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions
undermine users' trust in the website and damage their
understanding of its navigation.
8. Collecting Email Addresses Without
a Privacy Policy
Users are getting very protective of their
inboxes. Every time a website asks for an email address,
users react negatively in user testing.
Don't assume that people will sign up
for a newsletter just because it's free. You have to tell
them, right there, what they will get and how frequently
it will hit their mailboxes. Also, you must provide an
explicit privacy statement or an opt-in checkbox right
next to the entry field. Otherwise, you have little hope
of collecting email addresses other than mickey@mouse.com.
9. URL > 75 Characters
Long URLs break the Web's social navigation
because they make it virtually impossible to email a
friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is
too long to show in the browser's address field, many
users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks
across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't
know how to glue the pieces back together.
The result? No viral marketing, just
because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
10. Mailto Links in Unexpected
Locations
When you click a link on the Web, what do
you expect? To get a new page that contains information
about the anchor you just clicked.
What don't you expect? To spawn an email
program that demands that you write stuff rather than read
it.
Mailto links should be used on anchors
that explicitly indicate that they're email addresses,
either by their format (donald@duck.com) or their wording
(send email to customer support). Don't place mailto links
on names; clicking on people's names should usually lead
to their biography.
Again, interaction design must meet
users' expectations. The more that things behave
consistently, the more users understand what they can do
and the greater their sense of system mastery. Violated
expectations create a sense of oppression, where
technology rules humans and reduces their ability to steer
the interaction.
Rockbridge Global Village, Inc.
312 S. Main Street
Lexington, VA 24450
540-463-4451
www.rockbridge.net
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