General Category Archives

April 13, 2008

We're a Webby Award Honoree

It's nice to be recognized, and I'm proud to say that we're a Webby Awards Honoree 5 times over this year.

This year’s Webby Awards received a record 9,500 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide.

Cisco.com and The Human Network have been designated an Official Honoree in five categories, spanning Websites, Interactive Advertising and Mobile. (Official Honoree means that we were selected as being in the top 15% of entrants... a couple of steps remain in the judging process before the final awards.)

Here are our listings:

Websites

Cisco.com, for the IT Hardware/Software category

The Human Network, for Telecommunications

Interactive Advertising

Cisco.com – Consumer, for Rich Media Single: B to C

The Human Network, for Rich Media Single: B to B

Mobile

Welcome to the Human Network, for Mobile Marketplace & Services

Best of luck to all of our colleagues!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 06:48 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 26, 2007

Privacy and Progress on the Web

There's a big controversy on the web these days, with Privacy advocates fighting with Facebook: http://civ.moveon.org/facebookprivacy/

Facebook, currently the most-talked-about Social Networking site on the web, is using member data in ads that appear on their site to drive business for their advertisers.

For example, if you just bought something on Overstock.com, Facebook places an ad on all your friends' pages, telling them what you bought, in hopes that your friends will then go to Overstock and buy something too. It's a questionable use of data, and it's causing a lot of noise in the blogosphere. Here's one example: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/24/diggingIntoTheLatestFacebo.html

It's an interesting discussion for the percentage of web users who care. And that percentage seems to be growing. Moveon.org seems to care. If you live in UK, where 25m citizens' private data has been "lost," more and more people are caring everyday. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/21/ncustoms221.xml

As we at Cisco develop the capability to use visitors' data to provide a more adaptive, personalized experience on Cisco.com, it behooves us to pay attention to the discussion. The purpose of providing such an experience must be to help visitors have a more successful online experience. Progress in web analytics and data mining have presented us this opportunity. Our success will depend on the way we use this capability to relate to our customers. Another way to think of it is how we're representing the Cisco brand. If we manage our customers' experience in a way that is consistent with our values and our culture, we'll be fine. If we make a mistake, which we may occasionally do, our customers will let us know, and we better pay attention if/when that happens.

Posted by Michael Metz at 09:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 28, 2007

Hello World: The Cisco.com Web Experience

This is a new blog about Cisco.com, from some energetic members of the Cisco.com team.

Cisco.com is comprised of around two million total pages, covering 6,000 products in 470 families in 18 categories (with 20,000+ product-related pages alone). Our sites sport hundreds of embedded videos (a number growing all the time), countless podcasts and subscription videos on many interesting topics, and scads of technical discussions. And, there are 74 country sites... hosted in 35 languages.

As you can imagine, there are some mighty challenges to running a web site like this and keeping the design and content fresh: We'll be writing about these, and we'll give you some ideas about how to solve similar design and development puzzles you might have on your own web sites. Some of the things we're planning to write about are:

-- All of the continuing improvements we're making to the Cisco.com site (so you can keep track and make sure you're not missing anything)
--Behind-the-scenes notes about how we design and develop things with you in mind
--Trends on the web, especially around the human network and user experience
--Periodic sneak previews of early beta features on Cisco.com

Please feel free to chat with us via the comments on this blog, and via your continuing comments into the web sites. We're listening!

Posted by Martin Hardee at 11:31 AM Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)