Monkey: Journey to the Web

Please note that I’m not a developer or member of the Midgard team. I have very little knowledge of the discussion in the community, so the text below may very well be worthless drivel.

Target audience

Midgard can mean many things. As Bergie points out:

For some developers Midgard means the libmidgard object persistence and replication library, and its various language bindings. For some it is MidCOM, an MVC framework for PHP that can be used to build any kind of web services. For some it is a component specific for a task like event registrations management or direct marketing. And finally, for some it is a full end-user application suite like Midgard CMS or OpenPsa.

I see the CMS as the primary product.

It should be noted that I’m an ex-Midgard consultant and a hobbyist site builder. I’m kind of an “end user” for the product - able to install and operate it on a reasonable level, but seldom really participating in the community discussion or development. I’m exited of new development around Midgard, but probably not going to utilize much of the new functionality. I use other tools for direct marketing. To put it bluntly: for me “Midgard” means “Midgard CMS”.

Midgard is quite complicated system in all, with a lot of potential to build on. The installation has gotten much better in the last year or so, but the system does and will require root access, therefore making it quite hard to compete with PHP content management systems that are installable on any hosting account. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing - just that the typical user is quite probably not like me, but a developer. Perhaps the whole thing would be best marketed to the developers, thus leaving the CMS as “just another module”.

I see these as the essential questions:

• What is the target audience for Midgard? Are you going to market for a person like me, or a hardcore developer - or both?
• What about companies or corporations?
• What is the core benefit or product highlight for each group?

Choosing the right target audience is an essential thing in marketing, even if the marketing doesn’t cost you any money. It helps to organize the scarce resources better, but also to keep the message clear and easy to comprehend. Of course, you can have several target groups and marketing points, or even “paths” for different target groups if that’s needed. I would keep one main message, and keep the other interesting points under it.

Targeted marketing also helps to present different message on different forums: for example “Midgard CMS” for generic use, and “Development platform” for developers. The point here is that you should tailor the message to the person you’re communicating with.

On naming and name changes

Midgard 2 and MidCOM 3 are bringing significant changes that may reposition the CMS and platform on the market. Name change could communicate that there’s something fundamentally new and different about the product. A “new beginning” with a new name might even spark newfound interest in the CMS or project.

On the other hand, launching and keeping several separate brand names is often thought to be expensive. In open source software, it’s not about money, but the hard work, resources, time and persistence to get the new name out. Midgard is “brand name” for the project. Even though not as well-known as Drupal or Plone, it’s been around for years, and can be found around the net. Simply throwing in a totally new name may not lead anywhere, unless you’re prepared to market it, and a name change might confuse the existing users.

You need go no further than Mashable to get a daily torrent of new and exiting startups and webapps, all with cute and clever names that no-one can remember. It’s getting hellishly difficult to present and differentiate your newly branded software and profile in this crowd.

Names like “Midgard Platform” and “Midgard CMS” are somewhat dull, but they have advantages: they tell what the product is, and they contain the main brand name. In my opinnion, underlying techical stuff is not that important when naming or marketing a product such as this. The audience is usually interrested in the features and benefits - not the exact components, interfaces and whatnot. You should avoid cramming too much information in the marketing message.

I see renaming and rebranding as a two-edged sword. Also: Viking-style names are not the easiest to remember.

Recommended reading for anyone trying to come up with a new brand name: Igor Naming Guide has some nice points about naming stuff in a memorable way.

Planet PHP:n kautta löytyi tämä Michael Kimsalin blogimerkintä, joka erottui sivun tavallisesta viestivirrasta. Hän esitti kuntoiluun liittyvän haasteen. Ideana on treenata itsensä sellaiseen kuntoon, että pystyy tekemään 100 punnerrusta yhtäjaksoisesti. Kunnon kohottaminen tapahtuu punnertamalla.

hundredpushups.com-sivuilta löytyy ohjeita. Sain alkutestissä vain 16 suoritusta, joten parannettavaa olisi roimasti. Eritoten kilpikäsi joutuu viikinkityylisessä taistelussa koville.

Toki huono tulos johtuu osin käsien heiluttelusta ja muista musiikin kuuntelun oheisaktiviteetteista. Ihan varmasti!

Restaurant Nuevo Latino (Helsinki, Finland) is threatening a Finnish blogger Mikko Eerola who has criticized their service in Jaiku and Eat.fi. In Eerola’s opinion, the restaurant is expensive, food is average and the service is poor.

So, what would the restaurant owner manager do? Apologize? Improve the service? Perhaps even take an active role by trying to impress the critic?

Nope. Sending nastygrams is the core of their strategy. They also threatened his wife through her employer. Translated from Eerola’s blog:
“Today representative of the restaurant called my wife’s employer the [Peruvian] embassy, and shot them a full blast. It’s peculiar that my activities as a private citizen are affecting her job as an assistant of the embassy.”

I would call this harassment, but I am not a lawyer.

I can understand the frustration of the restaurant staff. Googling their name brought stuff that they did not want there. But the transition from “a slightly negative review” to “a PR disaster” is a direct consequense of their own harsh actions. Take a wild guess what Google brings up now.

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O hai!

It’s the Firefox Download Day. Mozilla is trying to set a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours. As of writing this, you still have 18 hours to go.

Sampo Pankki moved to a new platform during easter weekend. This was not just about the web bank, but the whole information system was integrated with the Danske Bank’s system. As everyone has probably heard already, it didn’t go that well.

This page is here mainly for the screenshots on the right. “404 multifail” is an error message on one of their pages - and predicted the situation amazingly well. Update 2008-03-31: Added 404 Multifail, thanks to KuvatOn.

Comments

Sampo had to move to a technically inferior system for business reasons. The real WTF-ness of this platform has not made it to the mainstream media, and Sampo/Danske have been only repairing the visible cross site scripting vulnerabilities. On a more positive note, some other XSS-vulnerabilities have surfaced, and there has been discussion on the subject.

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This is not news anymore. I just have kind-of looked elsewhere, minding my own business and pretending to not see. Almost every time Finnish politicians try to legistlate something internet or computer related, they fail miserably.

Finland has implemented a child pornography block list that ISPs can semi-voluntarily use. It’s marketed as a tool against pedophiles. This far it doesn’t sound too bad.

But: the list is quite new and is already known to contain activist sites, violin shops, and some other collateral damage. The bulk of the list seems to be legal US-based porn sites (from what I’ve heard). If the sites did really contain illegal material, the right way to handle it would be contacting FBI.

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Standfordin yliopiston Keinoälylaboratorion kehittämä VectorMagic-nettisivusto muuntaa rasterikuvat vektorigrafiikaksi. Systeemi ottaa vastaan alkuperäisen kuvan, kysyy muutaman asetuksen ja pulauttaa valmiin. Asetuksia voi jälkeenpäin säätää.

Kokeilin tietenkin Harmaasusien logoon. Weppisivujen ylälaidan pikkukuvasta on niin pieni, että lopputuloksen ei voi olettaa olevan kovin kummoinen. Continue reading →

You may notice that there are Google AdSense adds on the right-hand side. My blog doesn’t get much traffic, and I’ve been way too lazy to add new content recently. I have no illusions about the income - quite opposite, I don’t expect to make a dime. So why, then?

This may win the “most stupid reason to bring that ‘monetizing’ crap to your site” contest, but the real reason is that I want to see the AdSense in action. Nowadays I manage some AdWords accounts. This is the other side of the coin.

Harmaasudet - Greywolves is a live-action role-playing and viking age re-enactment society.

Greywolves published new and completely redesigned website yesterday. The previous design was several years old, and visually quite conservative. The new layout uses colours other than grey. “Branding” images are much more prominent. I find the new layout pleasing to the eye, and consider it a huge step forward.
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On last week I found this in my inbox:

“Hm, what is this?” Couple of seconds pondering if the sender is trustworthy, then the “Load Images” button:
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