COGBLOG

A very interesting lesson was delivered tonight about who actually owns a social media space. Like a few million other people I’ve been known to get sucked into one story after another on Digg.com. Those stories are like crack for the curious.

Earlier today a story popped up on Digg about a post on blogger that had been removed because of a complaint from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC). The AACS is an industry group set up to enforce copyright protection for the AACS digital rights management system. This digital rights management system is intended to prevent the illegal copying of content on protected DVDs.

The problem is that someone cracked this protection, and then subsequently released the key, composed of an alphanumeric string. Since then, this group has been sending letters to web publishers warning them to remove any postings that contain this key. They warn that publishing this string of numbers and letters is in fact a violation of the digital millennium copyright act.

Well, the funny part about one of these letters is that it actually contained the printed key, inside the URL of one of the pages in question. Now, the story about this letter on chillingeffects.org started making it’s way up on Digg.com. But, was then suddenly removed by Digg administrators. What’s even funnier is that it was not pulled down before Google indexed the page, and so you can still see the Digg article lead in here in Google’s cache

The post that really set things off was this page, that displays the number. It received over 15,000 diggs (votes from members of the digg community that will propel a story towards the number one position on the first page of Digg.com) but then was removed by Digg admins.

Now, this was soon noticed by the community, many of whom were outraged that Digg was taking it upon themselves to censor content that the community clearly felt was of great interest..

Digg administrators also began banning accounts of people who had also published stories containing the string, and subsequently had them dugg up to Digg’s top pages.

So, guess what happened next? Every new article that diggers began digging up to the top pages somehow contained the very same encryption key! Posts titled “Can you guess the number I’m thinking of?” would lead to images containing the key. Soon, EVERY STORY on the front page of Digg, was related to this HD-DVD key. As I write this, every story is still related to this.

Now, to realize how big that is, you need to understand that reaching the front page of Digg.com can result in a massive crush of traffic. The phenomenon known as the Digg effect is when a story reaches the front page, only to have the site’s server become completely unreachable–crushed under the massive load of traffic directed by Digg.

But, it raises really interesting questions about social media, the people and organizations who run these sites, and what their role is in managing the content published there. Clearly Digg users feel that the Digg homepage is more their property than the property of Kevin Rose (founder of Digg). And, by trying to prevent the distribution of this one bit of information, they have inadvertently sealed their own fate–causing such a tremendous explosion of interest that it really has no hope of containment.

It is a fascinating story. And, no matter how you feel about DRM, you gotta love the way a community can respond like this to a perceived offense. That was a serious social media smackdown!

This was my fourth year as an official blogger for ad:tech San Francisco. Thank you to Steve and Tig at Adrants and MarketingVox for the invite.

Ad:tech is the world largest digital marketing conference, with a full suite of sessions and a very large exhibit hall. I’ve added my posts from this year to my personal adtech blog. All of these originally appeared (and still appear) on adtechblog.com.

It’s interesting when you hear a bit of news that goes against long time widely held perceptions. Comscore has come out with a report that shows, among other things, that there is very little difference between deletion rates for first and third party cookies.

What’s more interesting is that the study shows 27% of users delete all cookies once a month, and 7% do it once a week. So, that could inflate numbers of Uniques in your cookie based analytics tool, or hurt your numbers for other metrics like delayed conversions or repeat visitors.

Some more good discussion here:
Web Analytics De-Mystified

There is an interesting article on the top web application vulnerabilities here. Pretty good. Although it has been pointed out that these numbers come from already identified vulnerabilities.

Here’s a nice chart from the article:

Go here for more.

Take a look at this really interesting flash application.

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

A really fascinating way to compare various economic and social stats by country. I love that this is an example of an extremely useful flash app. The functionality of the tool really does aid understanding of the subject, and it is easy to use.

Good job.

Click China and then hit the “play” button in the lower left. Amazing. Edward Tuft would love this I think.

A couple of days ago we were in a meeting with a client, and we were talking about site usability and the kind of impact a required registration form might have on site visitors. Now, one of the basics tenets of site usability is that the more hoops you force a user to jump though, the less often they will complete a given task. We’ve seen many, many examples of this over the years, but I thought it might be interesting to profile one simple example.

Last year, we wanted to improve conversion rates on a site generating leads for condominium reservations. We drove well targeted visitors to the site via sponsored search, and they would ultimately reach this availability request form:

Conversion Rate: 11.04%

About 11% of visitors reaching this form would ultimately go on to complete it. Now, that’s not too bad really, but we thought it could be improved. So, we did a quick split test with some re-arrangement of some of the form elements. Specifically we wanted to test:

• Form Length: What would be the impact of reducing the amount of required information. Intuitively we know that will improve conversion, but by how much.
• Radio Buttons vs. Select Menu: We thought we could shorten the form even more by moving our # of bedrooms selection to a pull-down select menu.

Here were our test forms:

Version 1: Same number of form elements, changed bedrooms to a pull down menu, re-arranged the head section putting the bedroom selection in a second column.

Version 2: Used the new shortened top section, and reduced the number of form elements. This was the overall shortest version tested.

Version 3: Here we used the original head section, and the shortened bottom section.

The Results : A 94% Improvement

So, our changes definitely had an impact on conversion, ultimately leading to a 94% improvement. But not all changes were positive. Our changes to the head section actually decreased conversion rates, while our shortened for dramatically increased them.

Here are the conversion rates for each version:

Version 3 –original head section, and short form– is the clear winner.

Our revised head section actually hurt conversion rates when all else was the same, lowering the short form from 21.43% to 14.67%, and the long form from 11.04% to 6.43%. And, it makes sense that they did since we did two things wrong from a usability perspective. First, we used select menus instead of radio buttons. Select menus hide all available options from a user until they click on the menu itself, and it requires at least two clicks to operate instead of the one for a radio button. Second, we changed from a simple left-justified top-to-bottom order of completion on the form, to a partial two-column format. We’ve seen this before that people prefer a clear top-to-bottom ordering on a form.

The shortening of the form by reducing the number of elements was the big takeaway from this quick test. That one simple change effectively doubled conversion rates.

One side-note of this is, that even at our improved rates, the form itself is still clearly a barrier. Four out of five visitors are turned back at this point even though they were interested enough to search->read our ad->click the link->then choose check availability in the site navigation. Now, it may be that you are only filtering out those who are not serious prospects, but it would likely be worth some additional testing to explore other options.

Take a look at this interesting map of spam origins on the DiscoverMagazine.com site. Go here for the full world map:
Map of the Spam World

The web spam filtering company Postini developed the map.

I guess all those people in Alberta just have a lot of free time on their hands?

So we were chatting about how popular the phrase “DashBoard” is these days, and I think we coined an important new term:

GasBoard

A “Business Intelligence Dashboard” used primarily to inflate the results of a campaign. There’s always a metric that will show and program in the best light. If it’s not sales, then maybe it is brand awareness or intent to purchase. Just configure your dashboard properly and every campaign is a winner!

In fact, I think quite a few dashboards out there are actually GasBoards.

So I pulled up the Battlestar Galactica site to see if the 8:00 episode would be replaying later tonight…and it’s hacked.

It looks like this guy in Turkey is doing some kind of automatic exploit on Windows servers. Just today, he has successfully defaced over 20,000 sites. Take a look at these stats:
Sites Hacked by aLpTurkTegin

P.S. If you haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica, you can’t judge us for liking it. Honestly, this is one of the best shows on TV. Really, it is.

In the last few months, I’ve learned quite a lot about web application security. Not to say that my knowledge is comprehensive–this is a topic where the more you learn, the more you realize you need to know.

One of the very best blogs I’ve found on the topic is RSnake’s ha.ckers.org. Always a fresh article, lots of good links, and very readable for a fairly technical topic. It is worth checking out.

Thursday, he posted a link to this very nice SQL Injection Cheat Sheet. And, he has his own XSS (cross site scripting) Cheat Sheet as well.

Yay, get paranoid everybody!