While updating my Netflix queue today, I realized that they have changed the wording on their “recommendations” tab to “Movies You’ll Love”. They actually use a cute little heart image. I like it. I just had to click on it. Whereas before, I would only click on the recommendations tab when I was specifically looking for recommendations.

Language matters.

Maybe I should update the WineLog recommendations tab to “Wines You’ll Love” or something similar. I think I will work on the recommendation engine a bit more before making the change. I need to be more confident in the recommendations. There is a big difference between saying you’ll LOVE a wine and saying, “You might kind of like this wine more than other stuff.”

See CreativeCamp.org for more information. BarCampNYC2 was awesome, but the only reason we treked all the way up there was because Philadelphia-area entrepreneurs hadn’t yet gotten their act together. Well now Philly has an unconference of its own: CreativeCamp.

If you are going to be near (within 3000 miles) Philadelphia December 2nd, think about coming. It should be, well, awesome. I’m not sure yet what I’ll present on, but I’m thinking of doing something hands on. Maybe some microformats stuff. Who knows.

Spread the word.

While checking the traffic stats for WineLog today, I was surprised to see a slice of the executive overview pie reserved for traffic from AOL (2.11% of all traffic for the past week).

After checking the referrals log it seems that we hadn’t been linked to from an AOL page. The traffic from AOL is labeled “organic” (i.e. from a Search Engine). The reason I’m surprised by the number is that, for the same week, I have just 2.06% of my traffic from organic Yahoo Searches. So more people are getting to my site through AOL searches than Yahoo searches. Who are these people searching the web from AOL? Are more people really using AOL’s search these days than Yahoo!’s?

AOL of course uses a branded version of Google for their search (”powered by Google”). This might be part of the equation, as WineLog tends to show up higher in Google’s searches than Yahoo!’s. Then again, maybe there is a rise in use of AOL for searching. I wonder if anyone else is seeing a similar patern in their own traffic.

Here are some more numbers for perspective: Non-AOL, Google searches account for nearly 80% of the traffic to the site in the same period. MSN searches account for less than 1%.

That’s right. I’m installing IE7 with the intention of removing my dependency on FireFox.

I love FireFox. I’ve gotten used to the browser. Using it just feels right. That said, FF used to lock up on me about once per day. Since installing FireFox 2, the browser locks up at least once every 30 minutes. On the one hand, this is kind of cool as it forces me to take a break every half hour. On the other hand, this is extremely annoying.

What about Opera? I have Opera installed on my machine, mostly for website testing purposes. Opera has tabs, the major feature keeping me from just using IE6. But then there is just something about the Opera interface that bugs me (I should figure out exactly what this is). That, and the compatibility issues Opera has with a few websites would bug me to death.

IE7 has tabs! But I’ve been holding back from upgrading because you can’t run IE6 and IE7 at the same time. So I wouldn’t be able to see my websites on the browser that most people (including clients) are using these days. But! I’ve just gotten my laptop fixed, which still has IE6. And so my laptop has been deemed “the testing machine” for website testing, IE6 goodness. I do use the laptop for more than testing though: when I’m out on the road or want to work from the couch. My backup plan if I can’t keep myself from installing IE7 on the laptop is to setup a Virtual Machine with IE6 on it. Anyway…
A perfect storm has been brewing to get me to switch to IE7. And the installation is done; time to restart. Let’s see how it turns out.

We’re working with some pretty interesting clients, and our work on WineLog is anything but boring. Still, we know how easy it is to get burned out on “work”. For that reason, Kim and I are always on the look out for quick, fun projects we can use to keep the energy level up in our office.

After reading a little blurb somewhere about the recent Google Gadget competition, Kim and I brainstormed for gadget ideas. We had never created a Google gadget (or any other homepage widget) before, and thought the format would be good for our goal of finding a simple, fun side project to work on.

We tried to focus on things that would be (1) fun, (2) different, and (3) easy to complete in one week or so. Among some other great ideas, we had this: “A magic 8-ball game where other users answer your questions.” We did a quick search and didn’t find anything like it out there, registered the domain Interactive8Ball.com, and set to work.

It was soon after registering the domain that we found the official rules page for the Google Gadget Awards competition and ran into a couple snags. First, the rules page uses an 8-ball gadget as an example. That’s good because it means we’re on the right page, bad because we’d probably seem unoriginal no matter how much we change the 8-ball formula. The second snag was that entrants needed to be university students. Technically, I think we just needed a .edu email address. Kim just graduated this past spring and we considered entering under her name, but decided against it. If we did end up winning one of the prizes, I didn’t want to deal with the scandal of entering under false pretenses and trying to steal money from starving college students.

So no competition. But here is the gadget we would have entered:

Let us know what you think.