Our thoughts go out to everyone at Copley Square and the Boston Marathon.

If you have news that someone is safe, or are still waiting to hear for sure, both Google and the Red Cross have set up information sharing sites:

• http://google.org/personfinder/2013-boston-explosions/
• https://safeandwell-mobile.communityos.org/cms/

Both sites are operating under a heavy load, but are providing much needed information.

Earlier this month we reported that the website mb/i developed with vCom Solutions won the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Interactive Media Awards.

Now I hear it has also been named a Gold Winner at MarCom Awards in the Website/Small Business Category.

This year’s MarCom entries came from more than 6000 corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, design shops, production companies and freelancers. The competition has grown to perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. …

The new vCom Solutions website (www.vcomsolutions.com) designed by mb/i received the Interactive Media Council’s Outstanding Achievement Award. The site was selected from 42 worldwide applicants in the “telecommunications” category.

The recognition is awarded to sites that demonstrate excellence in five areas: content, design, functionality, usability, and cross-browser compatibility. vCom received an overall score of 473 out of 500.

The highest single criteria score was in functionality (98 of 100), followed closely by content (97 of 100). China Telecom was the only other website …

A greylist is a type of email security protocol designed to protect against spam coming from sources that have not already been identified as malicious. It works sort of like customs and immigration for email.
How Greylisting Works
A server that uses greylisting typically uses three pieces of information – the sending IP address, the sending email address, and the receiving email address. This triplet of information is like a passport. If the security programs have seen them same combination before, the email is allowed on to the next stage of validation.

If this is a new combination, the greylisting …

Are you doing enough to track your online improvement?
Year-over-year comparisons are one of the more common ways to track business success, but not all online analytic suites are designed to support this approach.
Website (or Blog) Performance – Google Analytics

Google Analytics is great for looking at data year over year. So long as you’re only interested in data from after you installed Google Analytics, you look at traffic statistics over any period of time and compare them against any other period.

This even allows comparison of one website iteration against the next so long as …

The Numbers

9% of all US web traffic comes through some sort of mobile device*
That’s more than a 10% growth of market share since this time last year.

Of that traffic:

• 40% used iOS (iPhone, iPad)
• 40% used Android
• 9% used iPod Touch
• 4% used BlackBerry
• 2% used Nokia
• 2% used Opera
• the remaining 3% com from assorted small name browsers

* figures provided by http://gs.statcounter.com/

Mobile Pitfalls

The mobile web has introduced new hazards that should be addressed immediately. Both of these ideas may once have seemed like good ideas, but they are now online poison.
Adobe Flash
Flash is dead …

Drum roll, please! It’s time for Word of the Year, 2011:  Occupy

Each year, the American Dialect Society votes for the “vocabulary item” (perhaps a word, perhaps a phrase ) that was in common use or had a high profile (meaning, all us common folk might not have used it but the media sure did).

Occupy, of course, refers to the movement about…uh, did anyone figure out what it was about? I live near Oakland, which got plenty of media attention for its Occupy Movement, and from what I read, the occupiers  focused on being, to say the least, an enormous inconvenience …

What will 2012 bring? Technology can be extraordinarily fickle to predict but here’s what I see in the coming year.
Cross-Platform CMS
Over the past year Social Media Aggregators and Content Management Systems have become easier to use and increasingly important to maintaining the variety of online properties we each deal with.

Currently everyone builds their own toolkit of solutions, but I think that this year we’re going to see increasingly robust systems until it gets to the point where you can use a single pre-built suite to manage the entirety of your online presence from a single location.
Smartphones Overtake Traditional …

According to CNN the tech elite are struggling to define Google+.  This seems very odd to me, as the premise of Google+ is very straightforward: it is a social media platform that allows you to control where your message goes.

What makes this a radical concept is that no one else is doing it (well, no one aside from Diaspora, but I’ll get to that later).

The problem that CNN’s experts have run into is that they’re trying to define Google+ in terms of other social media platforms.  …

Last month ICANN, the organization that sets internet protocols and website naming conventions, announced that any “established public or private organization” can now register a top level domain (TLD).

Soon .ibm and .union may be join the ranks of .com, .org, and .net. The price tag to set up one of these vanity domains is $185,000, and ICANN is still working on the renewal fees.

TLDs have been introduced before to mixed results. Some TLD’s like .biz have taken a place as …