Archive for Web

eduWeb 2008 Opening Day Thoughts

// July 21st, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Tech, Travel, Web

Remind me to never allow just three hours to get to Kansas City International airport, particularly in summer, when construction season kicks in.  The trip to eduWeb almost ended before it began, but luckily a dash from check in to the gate caught the plane just in time.  We also managed to catch the train from 30th Street Station to Atlantic City in a similar manner.  But besides the close shaves, we still managed to have a relatively trouble free and smooth trip.  But, that doesn’t excuse having eduWeb in a city that doesn’t appear to have direct access to it by air.  I’m still grumpy about that, and come next year, I think I’ll see about going to Google IO instead if eduWeb is similarly inaccessible (note to attendees, vote for Orlando, FL for next year’s location. Don’t argue, just do it).  Driving + plane + (2*trains) + shuttle = one hell of a long day.  The Amtrak was also a terrible way to see the area, not just because there’s not much of a view, but what you can see is very depressing.  (Update: turns out, when Atlantic City was picked as a location, there were 5 airlines servicing the area, so it’s not really their fault that there’s none now.  They are forgiven…for now.)

PICT0460 PICT0464

Also, the Trump Marina itself appears to be smack dab in the middle of… very little.  I was amused when John discovered a pack of cigarettes was $11.50 though.  But seriously, if you don’t want to gamble or eat at Hooters (which we did), then it looks like a taxi is in order.  There were some cool boats down in the marina though.

If you are keeping up with eduWeb stuff, be sure to look up the tag eduweb2008 in your various social media sites.  Brad Ward started up a Flickr group already as well, so dump your pictures in there if you get a chance.  del.icio.us should also be a good resource to get tracking.

Currently, I’m hanging in the Developer’s Lounge, which has nice couches, power outlets, and wifi.  My room has only one of those, and I’m not paying extra for the wifi.  I’ve managed to bump into a few familiar faces, and to all of you, damn you for not showering me with gifts.  I expect compensation for that insult.  I accept gaming vouchers and cash.  The keynote is coming up soon, so keep your eyes open and I’ll have more information coming soonish…

Update ~3:02PM EDT

The keynote was presented by Mark Greenfield of the University of Buffalo.  It’s very likely you’ve seen his name floating around, as he’s very active in a number of areas, including the UWebD Ning group.  He’s also a damn good speaker.  His keynote was a sequel to a presentation he gave last year, “It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.” Feel free to follow him here, or on del.icio.us, or Twitter.

Mark gives a very good presenation, and ties examples together nicely.  Plus, now I know what his house looks like thanks to Google StreetView.

Update ~3:08PM EDT

His top ten web trends (this week) are as recommended:

10: The End of Print

The Amazon Kindle is brought up as a good example of why this is happening, and I fully agree.  I love a lot of what the Kindle represents, and some some universities, such as Princeton, are already planning textbooks for it.  How awesome is that?  Now… the question is, will the publishing industry follow the RIAA’s example and fight evolution?

9: The World Network

The concept here is the idea of linking things like communications, networking, identification, etc together, for the purpose of having instantaneous access to data you need, regardless of where you are or what you are using.  Think cars capable of instantly adjust to weather and road conditions, or locating lost pets wherever they might be.  The other example is Minority Report: doors that open automatically, lights that respond to the owner, etc.  The iPhone system Loopt is another example.  Another is eSuds, which is the usage of an online tool to tell you the status of your apartment/dorm’s washing machine (are they all in use or not).

8: Virtual Reality

Second Life is the first thought here.  SL is one thing I have never bought in to, at least in this kind of implementation.

7: E-mail is so Dead

Important messages being tagged as spam?  Certainly not a good thing.  As Mark put it, e-mail has been “hijacked by the forces of evil.”  E-mail is a killer app, but is being used for purposes it wasn’t intended. How much I totally agree with this is beyond my ability to articulate.  HTML email is a vicious, evil creature (in my humble opinion).  He’s tagged a bunch of articles on this subject on his del.icio.us.

Update ~3:44PM EDT

6: The Read/Write Web

This goes back to the idea of user generated content, the ability for people to contribute and consume without the types of HTML skills needed in the past.  Plenty of sites are examples: Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, etc.  Mark offers that “audience implies a monologue,” and we should focus on dialogs.  We shouldn’t target people as an audience, but instead as a community.

5: Information Overload

Very simple, information is increasing, tons of it are noise, and how do you filter down to the good stuff.  How do we develop information literacy?  Ambient Findability is a book Mark recommends that I have also read, and I’ll agree that it is something you should check on.  He also recommends aideRSS.com as a filter to get to good stuff.  Also Delver.

4: Redefining Time

Time is changing with regard to what people expectations for instant information are. Students don’t want to wait for things course changes, etc.  It’s very true.  We as a general culture have changing expectations as to when we expect information to change and update.  I also think about bank transactions and why it takes so long for the computers to do the math and approve transactions.  Mark uses the term “synchronicity” to refer to synchronous or asynchronous communications and why you need to distinguish between the two.  Twitter is an example, as it can be used either way.  Check out qik.com.

3: The End of Walled Gardens

Original AOL is an example, where you got just their portion of information on the World Wide Web.  The page was the core component.  That is no longer true, now that tiny portions can be used and shared, outside of an originating “page.” Another idea is how comments to articles can appear other places than at the article, like a lifestream or blog aggregator, so where is the “conversation” taking place now?  Ping.fm (which I’ve mentioned before) is an example of attacking multiple conversations at once.  You must think about your “presence,” not your site.

2: Community

First recommendation is the book The Cluetrain Manifesto.  We have a pack mentality need to connect, even though as individuals we are spreading out more and more.  Social networking should be a feature, not a destination, as Chris Anderson puts it.  Ning.com is a big one for targeting communities.  The UWebD group is at http://cuwebd.ning.com/, which is up over 900 members now.

Update ~3:59PM EDT (55% battery and about 15 minutes left to the keynote)

1: Mobile

The US is a good ways behind the world with respect to mobile, but we’re slowly catching up.  Same places are going so far as to supply people with cheap cellphones, as opposed to cheap laptops.  People are absolutely attached to their mobile devices, and the damage caused when they are cut away from things like cell phones, even if it’s temporary.  There is an idea that mobile platforms will become the seventh mass media after the Internet.  The change is similar in idea to when news became something that wasn’t limited to a movie theater, and moved to being available on a television.  Mobile also links to the idea of 24/7 availability that 3G is bringing us in a more realistic manner.  The largest challenge is form factor.

Lastly, he is discussing strategies to address these issues.  People talk about things by refering to technology, which is not the best way.  You should consider it in terms of relationships and goals.  Look into the book Groundswell.  Another good book is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.  Concepts from this book include: be first, keep it moving, use an authentic voice, tell the truth, build a community, cede control, and believe again.  I haven’t read this, but it’s been one I’ve been meaning to, and it sounds pretty awesome from a political standpoint.

Organizations should start considering a CMO, a community management officer.  This person would would be in charge of consider how, where, and why we engage communities.  Mark follows with a recommendation for The Horizon Report.  The Singularity is Near is a Kurzweil book known to many that is also a recommended read about people and technology and the exponential growth and integration of both.  We must remain responsive to change in order to keep up and remain successful.

Okay, break time for me, time to find an outlet and prep for the next session.

Update ~5:11PM EDT (now on AC power!)

The “Put You Web Site to the Test” session is being presented by Michelle Mierzwa and Matt Dempster from Datatel.

Start with the 5 E’s: Effectiveness, Efficient, Engaging, Error Tolerant, and Easy to Learn.  Use these to guide testing in a one on one environment, with a member from your target audience (or community, as Mark might suggest), have them perform tasks you specify, and you observe, listen, and document the results.  Keep in mind, small testing is better than no testing.  Decide what you want to test and be sure that it is ready to be tested.

Hmm…this folks are talking fast and somewhat quietly.  Straining to keep up.

Continuing on: decide what you hope to learn and be specific, decide if it advances your goals, and ask other people if it matters to them.  Find a list of issues, create tasks that reflect the issue, and then produce scenarios that put the task in context.  You should produce several scenarios for a usability test, they should have tasks, but not be told how to do those tasks.  Some issues, such as whether or not a particular feature is used, do not require a scenario though – they use the example of breadcrumb trails.

The example they use for developing a scenario is:
Issue - Will users click on the links at the top of the page?
Task - Use the directories link
Scenario - You are a prospective student interested in attending this college.  You have a specific question about academic advising. You want to locate an email address for the academic – [damn, I couldn't type fast enough]

Good scenarios are short, clear, and focused on an important issue.  They should know when they have completed the scenario.  You should also have the following roles involved in a usability test: a facilitator to interact and be the face for your test while staying neutral and observing, a note-taker to document the experience and sit behind participants, and lastly participants should match the audience and be unfamiliar with your product and should vary with their levels of expertise.

[Sorry if you've had problems connecting to the blog, my host appears to have epicly failed me and can't take the relatively light increase in traffic this is bringing me. When I get back, I'm switching hosts permanently.]

Be sure to offer incentives like food or gift cards, to show that you value their time.  Get profiles on participants, a release form, scenario scripts, a notebook for notes, and the gifts for the participants.  Some general tips: take time to meet with the participants, encourage them to think out loud, and write down exact quotes from things people say, don’t confuse inferences with actual behavior, don’t take it personally, interview them after the test, ask open ended questions, change scenario order for different participants, take notes on paper, and don’t blame the participant.

Update ~5:27PM EDT

Once you’ve started collecting data, look for patterns across all your users, make specific observations, and group observations.  Be sure to determine your spread and severity.  Spread should consider how many pages and/or users the problem impacts, and severity should help set a priority with regard to addressing the issue (is this a blocker, or just something to enhance when you get time?).

[I've dumped some more photos onto the eduWeb Flickr group a few minutes ago.]

You can then create a plot that let’s you track severity vs. spread, and plan out fixing or changing issues.  It is possible to add a third metric of time to the plot as well.  Once that’s done, you can write up your report, summarizing demographics, examples of what was looked at, etc.  Specify findings, and make recommendations after all that.  So far, this is all pretty cut and dry.  Toss in some appendixes for scenarios, data/notes, and consent forms.  I’m really just wanting to get some food and head to the BlogHighEd social right now, that seems much more interesting.  By the way, if you’re reading this and on Digg, be sure you digg this post, because I’m awesome and smell really good.

Okay, I’m out.  I’ll follow up either late tonight or in the morning with strange tales of partying this evening.  Also pictures that I will try to make as good as possible for blackmail.  Also, if you want sushi, I’m getting a group together.  Meet in front of the Developer’s Lounge between 6:30 and 6:45 Tuesday night and we’ll find a place and get our rice on.  Let me know if you’re interested.

Getting my Fixx

// July 10th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Scripts, Software, Web

I have not, and will not claim to be the tidiest person on the planet.  What I am, however, is a very organized unorganized person.  That is to say, while my desk looks like a mess to you, I absolutely know where every little thing is on it (so don’t touch anything).  Where my failing is, is that I tend to be forgetful, especially through the course of a day where I tend to switch tracks several times going from task to task.  This is especially a problem at work, where I will tell someone I’ll get something done, get distracted by some other problem, then forget about it.  This set me on a mission to find some software to help me out.

Fixx DashboardWhen I’m doing stuff over in dotCMS land, I am usually working with JIRA issue tracking software.  That’s what they use for dotCMS development tracking, and we’re using it to manage tasks on our site redesign project with them.  So I used that as a baseline.  While it isn’t the most clean, modern looking interface, it is very functional.  Besides, it’s also what I’ve gotten very used to, it’s comfortable.  But, it’s also not free.  There are some other systems out there I looked at, like JTrac, Eventum, Bugzilla, and a few others, but for various reasons, I didn’t run with them.  For instance, Bugzilla was too involved to install, and wouldn’t be very portable, Eventum I gave a pretty fair shot, and it  was very nice and very flexible, but had a very dated interface.  Most of the others I came across you had to pay for, or they were just too watered down.  Naturally, I posted to Twitter about my hunt, and along came the name of a product my search hadn’t turned up: Fixx.  Immediately, their interface certainly jumped out as the cleanest of the bunch, and they made used of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) to speed things along.  It supports multiple projects which can have parts/components, you can give client access to projects, create custom resolutions and priorities, manage version releases, and even tie it in to Twitter for notifications.  It even supports OpenID.

Editing a project\'s versionsLike JTrac, Fixx is a Java based system, and with my usage of dotCMS, I’m not uncomfortable working with that these days.  All that means is that you better make sure you have the Java JDK installed, and have your JAVA_HOME environmental variable set.  Fixx is not free for groups, but it is free for single user usage, which is exactly what I was going for (there is an educational license discount if you want to use it at a school or college).  When you download it, it comes prepackaged with Apache Tomcat, and running the startup file will set up a webserver on your machine on port 9000.  So, to access your new tracker, you just open http://localhost:9000/ in your browser.  In my case, I tossed it on my server at home, punched a hole in my firewall, and set up a subdomain on that port so that I can access it from any machine that I’m at.  All said, this was all surprisingly painless.  Before I put it on my server, I was even running it right off a thumb drive for a little while testing it out.

So, with it up and running, I jumped right in.  I’ll give them credit, they took their goal of a simple but flexible issue tracker to heart, and seem to have made a nice run of it.  While Eventum is pretty crazy powerful, the interface is dated and cludgy.  Fixx isn’t so flexible, but it’s just plain nice to use.  It makes me think of why Twitter remains so much more popular than Plurk.  Plurk is better, with more options and features, but there are times when simplicity really sells.  And Fixx still gives you enough options and controls to make it worthwhile.  You can do unlimited projects, set project leads, make your custom resolutions and priorities, set sub areas, move tasks to new projects, and plenty more. Basically, all the “important” functions are there.

Viewing a taskCreating a task is as simple as most others: click the link, fill in the fields, and save.  But the interface that displays the task is soft and easy to look at (compare that to Eventum some time).  Information is easy to find, and it’s laid out in a manner that makes sense.  All your controls open up right on the screen, so you can move the task, resolve it, log time, attach files, comment, etc all on the same page without jumping around.  And again, they have tried to keep the options trimmed down a little, and aim more to make it fast, easy, and straightforward.  To me, this is absolutely perfect for the worker or freelancer doing a lot of things on their own.  For a larger group, the Bugzilla or JIRA path makes a bit more sense probably, but even then, there’s not much that those do that Fixx can’t.  The one big exception being nested tasks, or making a task dependent on others.  You can’t designate a task as a parent to another one or such.  That’s one big area I’d like to see change (and I already put in a feature request on the matter).

Overall, I’m impressed.  I haven’t seen another free issue tracker that is nearly as polished as this one is.  It also is perfectly suited to my particular needs.  I think anyone who needs a hand getting some of their tasks organized could stand to benefit from an install of this.  Heck, I even created a project for development of my Grayplicity WordPress theme, so now I can keep a nice bead on what I need to do to improve it, and store recommendations I want to follow up on as they come in.  What about you?  Is there a system that you are partial to, or maybe on online project tracker that you think is very good?  Share your thoughts.

Pingilactic, you say?

// June 6th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Web

Yeah, I have no clue why people feel the need to combine words for the sake of marketing either. Pingilactic sounds like something that happens to your nipples when you don’t change the oil regularly. Or something. Anyway, the masterminds behind this new word for 2008 are Profilactic and Ping.fm.  Profilactic I’ve mentioned before, but Ping.fm was a new one.

Ping.fm screenshotTrying to create order in the increasing chaotic sphere of the social web is getting considerably harder, not easier, lately.  This is surprising in a way, but when you consider the number of competing services coming out, and quickly changing features, it’s hard to marry yourself to one brand.  But the past several days my corner of the web has seen a lot of chatter amongst people about Twitter’s trouble with scaling up to meet the service demands.  This flagship Ruby on Rails application has been struggling with problems in their architecture that is hindering its ability to meet the increasingly heavy demand.  There are a handful of us who have been playing with a new competitor in the microblogging realm called Plurk.com.  It’s one of the dumbest names I think they could come up with for a service, but the site itself is pretty neat.  It boasts the same 140 character limit, but has some natively supported action verbs, threaded discussions, a neat timeline, friends and followers, cliques, and nice privacy features.  The largest complaint is that it lacks the support that Twitter gets from people developing things like Adobe AIR interfaces using Twitter’s API (Application Program Interface).  So far, I don’t believe Plurk has opened their API, and that’s a shame.  And more to the point, there hasn’t been a way to kill two birds with one stone and post to Plurk and Twitter together so that one doesn’t have to alienate an established group of friends to switch services.  The ideal solution would be something like an AIR application that can monitor and post to both, so that you can keep your friends wherever they might be, but not double the effort to keep your thoughts up to date.

Okay, moving on in the same vein.  A similar conflict also came up between the options of using FriendFeed and Profilactic.  Some of my friends are on one, some the other.  Like Twitter and Plurk, those that have chosen their side are pretty married to it.  I’ve been using Profilactic in part because it supports a HUGE number of services, and I like the sidebar widget it creates (that integrates nicely with WordPress).  But, it seemed like more people I know use FriendFeed.  Ahh challenges.  I discovered the easiest way to solve this conflict was to push my Profilactic lifestream RSS to FriendFeed.  So, one down.  Sadly, the Plurk/Twitter deathmatch can’t be solved quite so easily.

Now, let’s bring this all home.  I ended up spending some time going around all four of these services, looking for answers to the question: what to pick?  The Profilactic/FriendFeed debate was simple, since the idea of a Lifestream is pretty straightforward, and RSS is totally portable.  Subscribe to either of my accounts, you’ll get the same information.  Part of what convinced me to kick FriendFeed into the #2 spot though was what I mentioned earlier, Ping.fm.  Ping.fm has partnered with Profilactic to allow you to update supported services from you Profilactic lifestream page.  This is cool, because it helps address the problem of updating several microblogs at once.  It’s not exactly what we had been seeking, but it was an answer nonetheless.

Ping.fm supports many different services, and groups them by things like status (Facebook, MySpace), microblog (Twitter, Plurk), or blogs.  Selecting the group and posting will send your update to all services in that category.  With the partnership, this functionality is now exposed to you right in Profilactic on your lifestream page.  Ping.fm is addressing a central problem of how do you easily update everything you’re in.  I tried to tackle this a while back with Netvibes, but it is surprisingly hard to do since you can never be sure just how much a company will expose in their API (after all, they still want you to go to their site).  Ping.fm is still in beta, and you need to be a member of Profilactic to sign up (or I might let it slip that “profilactic” is the signup key.  Oops).  As it is, Ping.fm is FAR from the holy grail of social web updating, but it has the right idea.  It doesn’t have great handling of services’ custom features (Plurk default verbs for instance), and it doesn’t seem that you have a way to control how it groups services.  Mostly, it’s pretty basic and simple, but it does work.

Hopefully, assuming they are paying attention to how people are using Ping.fm, I suspect they will work to make inroads on some of these ideas.  At the moment it seems like the best option if you want to try and address several sites all at once though.  Then again, it’s a little like using Pidgin or Trillian for instant messaging, where the cost of merging services is losing features.  And as a corollary, just because you update several services at once doesn’t mean you escape needing to read several sites to keep up with replies.  You still need to go to Plurk for threaded discussions, and Profilactic doesn’t necessarily keep up with Twitter’s @ replies.

Ultimately, I think it’s just a matter of waiting.  Ping.fm is a solution, if you really aren’t willing to double up some effort.  Given time, I think Plurk will open up, and I think that Plurk and Twitter have enough in common that someone (smarter than me) will be able to make one application that will handle them both simultaneously.  And even though Plurk is neat, there are a whole lot of people in love with Twitter’s simplicity, downtime or no downtime.  It’s up to the services in the end to provide the APIs necessary so that we can use them the way we want.  But, such interaction is a privaledge, not a right, so we just need to suck up to the developers of our favorite services.


Explaining Profilactic’s new “Post something” feature from sMoRTy71 on Vimeo.

Polling Layout Preferences

// June 2nd, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Web, Wordpress

This is very short and simple. I got an idea for a new WordPress layout, and I want to get some feedback as to your preferences for the structure, assuming you were either designing or reading a site based on the structure. Traditionally, we see a lot of left hand navigation elements on the left side of “normal” websites. Blogs tend to favor the right for sidebars. In this layout I’m plotting out, there will be an “aside” type element that I do not want juxtaposed against the sidebar area, but I also don’t want it hanging free against the right side of a center aligned page because I think it reduces the readability of it. So the options I crafted are as follows.

Option one is a left aligned page, with a left hand sidebar area with the asides floating on the right of the content. Option two is a center aligned page with a right hand sidebar area that allows the asides to come in on the left of the content. Both of these examples are optimized for 1024×768, but I am toying with the idea of making them full width, or possibly flexible width (though I generally find that harder to get “perfect”). Click either thumbnail to view an actual sample page. I welcome the opinions of both designers and random people alike. Also keep in mind, this is just for planning the basic wireframe of the site, it has nothing to do with how the final thing will actually look, from a “pretty” point of view.

Polls follow after examples.

Layout Preference

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Width Preference

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Web Marketing and the New School

// June 2nd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Web

Having been moved into the marketing department at our university, it has afforded me the opportunity to attack some different problems from a new angle, and it has also allowed me to engage some ideas that had been floating around that weren’t necessarily an appropriate goal while in the IT department. Something I am coming to realize is just how different web marketing is from the garden variety, and how it is viewed and approached by those who need it to be successful these days. The reason the web office was transferred was to make the goal of the site redesign easier to achieve, connecting us with the tools and resources that would make this happen. While I firmly believe managing large web sites is worthy of its own, autonomous office, it’s easy to see why a lot of places are beginning to rely heavily on their marketing legs to Get the Job Done.

Hobo Hates NinjasWhen you compare Old and New Marketing, there’s one distinct difference. Old Marketing was a passive attack. You gleaned information that you could get about your target, crafted a message, and tossed it out there, hoping it would stick, thinking you might catch a fish once in a while if they were in the biting mood. This is very passive (not to mention boring, and smelly). But on the whole, that’s how any kind of TV ad, radio spot, newspaper slot, or magazine fold out worked. Hope. The New Marketing that is coming to the forefront is more like a smelly hobo (clearly smelly is just part of the job) that assaults you on the street, screaming in your face and peeing on your shoes. Sure, they might call the cops, but once in a while they’ll give you a buck, or a half eaten sandwich. The difference is, this is active. With the web, you have the opportunity, even the expectation of interaction.

What I find interesting, particularly in our case, is how often web professionals are being relied upon not just to set up and maintain a site, but to also provide insight into marketing techniques. It’s similar to the case of: “Oh, you fix computers for a living? Will you come wire up some light switches for me some time?” (for the record, no, I won’t. 120AC has blown me across a room one too many times). Because we understand the web, we are seen as a resource for determining what is successful for web strategies in marketing. This reflects largely the effect that marketing training has had on the professional population, if it was learned outside of about the past five years.

It’s much more recently that web marketing has gained ground in academic disciplines. That is to say, it’s a must-know subject if you study marketing in college now. Previously, not so much. Even here, marketing students are being required to take rudimentary classes on page design (even though I hear rumors that they are being taught that Frontpage and frames are the end-all and be-all. And Jesus wept…). But students benefiting from this are just now starting to hit the job market, and are hardly dropping into positions to manage web initiatives out of the gates. And even if they are, they know just enough to be dangerous, and way more than enough to be frustrating. So for the time being, us web geeks are the fall back point.

What’s funny is that I don’t think that’s bad. Let’s face it, to be good at our jobs, we are forced to keep up on cutting edge tech, learn how to leverage third party APIs, and understand what people find usable and beneficial. In a way, we are the unofficial web marketing foot soldiers. Web work is one area where you can’t necessarily afford to be behind the curve (often, you’re better off not getting on the curve at all if being behind is the other option), and for marketing professionals whose focus is not 100% on the web, they can’t be expected to know just where in the pool to jump in. We tend to be much quicker to absorb concepts like video editing, sound bite assembly, photo slideshows, and all those techniques that used to be attached to broader, passive media. It’s frequently easier for us to learn about how to place that into social media than it is for a pure marketing person to figure out social media and how it relates to traditional media. More work? Yes. More responsibility? Yes. But all this also makes us a much more valuable resource.

So to those that have been like me, where you might think Marketing isn’t a good place for a web team, keep in mind the value that your skillset can provide, and why such a close proximity can be valuable. Obviously, I still believe that a well poised and staffed web office should be the ultimate goal, but in higher education, such a team is more of a luxury that most places can afford. Instead, we get a few hobos together on the street, and send them out to pee on a few shoes. But ultimately it gets attention, and more often than not, it can get results.