Need an Extreme ebay Makeover?

One of the services offered by ebay for their sellers is their online community workshops. Today's workshop was called "Listing Template Design & Layout Clinic," hosted by Debbie Levitt of the company As Was. During the workshop, Debbie presented some excellent general advice about things to include and things to avoid when designing your ebay templates and listings. To read the complete workshop transcript, go to the ebay workshops calendar page and choose Debbie's workshop from January 22, 2007.

Debbie presented just tons of great information and advice and I feel sure you'll learn something you didn't know by reading the workshop posts. One great tidbit is her advice about running a "wife test" on your listings. She suggests showing a friend or loved one your listing and then asking them these questions:

What are the first and second things your eyes were drawn to?
How much of my description and policies did you read?
How did you feel after reviewing the item?
Did you feel like you knew what you'd be getting and when you'd get it?
Did you feel like you could trust me and you wanted to buy?

As she states, you might be surprised by the answers.

A number of ebay sellers asked Debbie questions about their specific listings during the workshop and I would encourage you to look at their listings and consider her advice. After all, this is a woman who runs a very successful business and charges a nice sum to improve designs for successful ebay sellers - who then become much more successful as sellers.

For some terrific before and after ebay layout examples provided by As Was, take a look at their portfolio pages. Even if you're not ready to invest in an extreme ebay makeover, chances are you'll pick up a tip or two that you can put into practice in your own ebay business. Please feel free to leave a comment here about something you learned and put into practice in your listings and how it worked for you.

This is a test: Video content on AdSense

There are many things in life that go hand in hand -- peanut butter & jelly, wine & cheese, milk & cookies -- and for publishers, AdSense & great content sites. We hope that the next perfect pairing will be "great video content & your audience."

Over the next few weeks we'll be testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers. You may remember us doing a similar trial last year with MTV Networks, where we distributed ad-supported MTV video content to publishers who displayed the content on their sites. This time, we'll be working with a larger set of content providers, grouping together video content from providers such as Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment together with quality ads and offering them as playlists which publishers can select from and display on their AdSense sites. Participating publishers range from small to large, and cut across many different types of content.

While we're unable to invite additional publishers into this test, we still want to share some of the exciting things we're working on in AdSense. We know our publishers are passionate about developing quality content and providing the best experience possible for their users. With this test, we hope to offer you new forms of engaging, relevant content to meet these goals.

Posted by Christian Oestlien - Product Manager

Fear of the Unseen...

Many problems that businesses have with software seem to involve visibility. The role that specific software components play within an organization are often hidden, obscured, or just plain forgotten.

I have been in shops where software has been reliably clunking along for 20 years... faithfully executing night after night, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year... for decades. Undoubtably, this software "keeps on ticking" because it is doing something useful for the business... but I also suspect that some of the things that the software is doing may no longer be necessary. In many IT shops there is a distinct "If it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, and if you aren't sure you just leave things as they are.

My friend Si told me a story about an accounting package that was written many years ago (in the early 1960's) for a machine that has long since become extinct. Rather than rewrite the package when the company upgraded their hardware to the next generation, an emulator for the original hardware was obtained . Years later, when the company upgraded their hardware once again, they continued to run the package, on an emulator for the 2nd generation hardware that ran an emulator for the original hardware.

Si swears that this is a true story... and given the conservatism of a lot of organizations I have no reason to doubt him.

This anecdote relates an extreme case, but I doubt that it is unique. We keep doing things not just because we've always done them, but because we can't always "see" what's really going on. In general, we know what a package does, but we can't see its side effects and interactions with other software package. "Something else" may rely on our package, and there is no real way to know what will happen except to shut down our package and wait to see what happens. That's a scary proposition in a production environment.

Going back to Si's anecdote, continuing to use the legacy accounting package could be held up as a poster-child for software reuse. Did it really matter that the implementation details of the package were unknown as long as the package continued to perform as advertised?

Sound object-oriented engineering principles encourage "hiding things". Hiding implementation details behind published interfaces is essential when building any non-trivial system... When building the system, you really don't need to know how a function is implemented, you just want it to work as advertised... and apparently Si's accounting package did just that.

But my gut tells me that something's not quite right. We don't decouple implementation from interface solely for the benefit of those who consume our software... Interfaces are meant to benefit both parties. Our consumers don't have to worry if the implementation changes, and we don't have to worry about changing the implementation.

In Si's anecdote, the accounting package survived due to fear. Nobody understood the original code, so everybody was afraid to touch it. In a real sense the implementation was hidden (since it was written in an extinct assembly language).

I think we've got a visibility paradox. We need to hide implementation details behind interfaces, but at other times we need to know those very same implementation details.

Our challenge is to have it both ways. An application should never rely on the implementation details of its components... but we must be able to delve into those implementation details when necessary. When we need to upgrade hardware or operating systems, or when we need to diagnose and resolve performance issues, we need to know the details... or we may be forced into bizarre solutions like the one Si relates.

Expedia "Strikes a Deal with Tripadvisor"

Did not mean for the last few days to be so Expedia focused but the deals and stories are coming thick and fast. The latest announcement care of Australian TravelWeekly is that

Expedia Australia has struck a deal with travel community website Trip Advisor [sic] in a move to step up its user generated content and to improve conversion rates.

The natural inclination as an online travel blogger is to poke fun at TravelWeekly for not knowing, realising or checking to find out that Expedia owns TripAdvisor. Following this train I would make particular fun of this sentence in the report

No commercial terms for the deal have yet been finalised.

However there is actually a very serious side to the internal negotiations between the TripAdvisor site owners and each of the Expedia point of sale operators within the EXPE mothership. Kevin May at Travolution broke the European part of this story in October. There is probably a lot of internal ego and P&L ownership behind this. My guess is that this is driven by that fact TripAdvisor staff are measured with a stand alone P&L and want compensation/target reduction for any activity that potentially helps an Expedia Point of Sale (POS) owner obtain traffic that would normally go to TripAdvisor.

There is a bigger picture also for Expedia. Part of the power of user generated content is the natural search/SEO benefits that the unique content provides. TripAdvisor's strength in this area ensures that it is the top ten natural results for now very expensive key words like "Hotels in New York" or "...London" or "...Sydney". This ranking is maintained by the unique and "independent" nature of the content on TripAdvisor (white hat SEO marketing) and contrasts to the activities of other travel content/affiliate providers that build a seemingly unrelated series of websites based on the same content that link to each other to book rankings (black hat SEO marketing). Black hat SEO marketing can be very lucrative as it short cuts the need to build a huge library of content, links and relevance. However it is also very dangerous. When Google finds sites involved in black hat techniques it typically responds quickly and mercilessly by cutting off the sites involved. Therefore if an Expedia POS was simply to cut and paste TripAdvisor content it runs the risk of (in the best case) hurting the rankings of TripAdvisor or (in the worst case) causing both TripAdvisor and the POS from being banned from Google's natural results. I am sure Expedia is aware of this and that is why they are treading very softly (with just Australia and Canada announcing full deals) are promoting the illusion that it is an arms length commercial deal. Expedia needs to do this as the integration of UGC and booking functionality is the number one characteristic of Travel2.0. Expect Expedia Inc to continue to push this strategy but to do so very carefully.

UPDATE - Sydney Morning Herald has also picked up the story in a good PR piece for Arthur and team. However they too have not mentioned the common ownership of Expedia AU and TripAdvisor.

And finally to TravelWeekly, here is a link to all of the brands owned by Expedia Inc so that you can avoid a mistake like this one.

UPDATE 2 - This is a word for word quote from the print addition of Australian business publication BRW in their "Australia Online" addition dated Feb22 - April 4 (cant find an online version so you'll have to trust me).

"In January, Expedia signed a deal with Tripadvisor...The Expedia tie-in with Tripadvisor is another parthership in a sector that seems ripe for consolidation" (my emphasis)

This is the number 1 or number 2 business publication in Australia (depending on how you measure it against the Bulletin) and yet they fell hook, line and sinker for the notion that Expedia and Tripadvisor are separate companies. You'd be surprised how often I see in my search logs "who owns tripadvisor". I should be ranting about how badly this reflects on BRW, but instead, I am impressed by the great sell job Expedia is doing keeping these brands separate in the minds of the general public and "educated" media.

Keep up with Cameron Jones

Nice interview here from eyefortravel with Expedia's Cameron Jones. Not surprisingly he is saying on message selling to hoteliers on the benefits of dynamic packaging and the relatively recent launch of Expedia in Australia and brand spanking new launch in Japan.