• The Pew Research Center has some of the best research about all kinds of trends shaping the US.  The Pew Internet and American Life Project has great information about technology adoption, Web 2.0, social media and the technology divide.
• Ad Age is one of my favorite sites.  The daily e-mail newsletter is one that I read nearly every day.  This article on Where Digital Marketing is Heading in 2010 is a must read.
• When I’m looking for numbers and visitors demographics for a particular Web site, I go to Quantcast.  For example, Quantcast estimates there are 23.3M Twitter users, of which 53% are female, 44% are between the ages of 18-34, and 75% are Caucasian.  The data can be a stale by a few months, which is a problem for fast-growing sites, but the data is usually pretty solid.
• Although I live in the DC area, I’m a huge New York Times fan.  Check out the 9th Annual Year in Ideas (the best!) and an awesome infographic that shows search terms related to cooking and Thanksgiving, by region of the country.
• TrendWatching.com puts out a monthly briefing on trends related to consumer behavior, marketing and advertising.  Although I’m underwhelmed by their 10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010, the site generally has good onsight into what’s hot or will be hot.
• Ars Technica is one of the best tech news sites/blogs on the Web.  Check out this August 2009 article that showed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer now has a less than 67% market share.
• We often think of Nielsen when it comes to TV ratings, but the company has amazing research about consumers, technology, marketing and advertising.  A study back in March of 2009 reported that social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity, ahead of personal e-mail.
• If you love data visualizations, you’ll love Flowing Data.  I love the perspective you get when you plot data points on a map; the insight grows when you are able to see data change over time, or across geographic boundaries.  I love this data visualization of the State of the World.
• Google Trends shows you the top search terms in the Google search engine and lets you compare the world’s interest in topics of your choice.   Google even maps flu trends based on people googling for search terms related to the flu.

These are just some of my favorite trends/statistics Web sites.  If you’re interested in seeing what else is on my bookmark list, check out my account on Delicious.

How about you?  What sites do you rely on to know what’s hot, what’s in, what’s not, and in what direction the winds of change are blowing?

Cooliris lets me scroll through images and videos on my computer and sites that support Cooliris.  For example, if I want to browse photos from my son’s birthday party, I point Cooliris to the proper directory and the photos will appear as a wall of photos in my browser.  I can scroll through the images by using my mouse to drag images, or I can use the Cooliris scroll tool.

It turns out that many of my favorite sites now support Cooliris, like Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, images from Google,and Getty Images.  I can tell if a site support Cooliris if I hover an image and the double squares appear in the lower left corner of the image.  I can then click on the double squares to launch the photo album, collection of photos or RSS of images and videos in Cooliris.

It’s super fun to browse friends’ albums in Facebook in Cooliris without having to press Next, Next, Next.  And I love being able to surf hundreds of images in Getty Images in one long wall of photos.

Is Cooliris here to stay?  Who knows?  It’s free, it’s cool, it’s convenient and it’s fun to play.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

An analysis of traffic on Matrix Group client sites shows that IE is still the primary browser but Firefox, Safari and Chrome are gaining ground.  For nearly all clients, IE commands no more than 75% of the total audience; this is still a dominant number, but it means that 1 in 4 users is not using IE.  Sorry Microsoft, but the browser wars are far from over and any giant can be toppled (that means you, too, Firefox!).

All of this makes me thankful that my staff, many years ago, convinced me that Matrix Group should not be an IE-only shop. I still remember the staff retreat when the staff had a heated discussion about Web standards.  A few of us argued that writing standards-compliant code was expensive because the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, was mostly not compliant, which meant we had to do double html work to make sure our sites behaved properly in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.  But the vast majority of the staff rightly argued that standards compliance was the right thing to do, it would give us a competitive advantage, our sites would stand the test of time better, and someday, Microsoft would come around.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still grumble when testing shows that one of our sites is behaving differently in IE vs. Firefox because I know it’s costing us and the client time and money.  But IE8 is supposed to be the most standards-compliant browser ever and it’s really great knowing that our Web sites and our association management software, MatrixMaxx, not only look great across browsers, all the functions behave consistently.

How about you?  What are your thoughts on the browser wars?  What’s your favorite browser?  And are you on the standards bandwagon?

1. Your Browser as the New Operating System. The Web browser is increasingly the platform for mission critical applications, like association management systems, intranets, document management systems and e-mail.
2. Conversation is King. We used to talk about creating a communications strategy.  Today, we need to create a conversation strategy because customers are interested in engagement, in two-way conversations.
3. Unified, Integrated Data. I call this the Amazon Effect.  Our customers expect us to know who they are, communicate with them in a personalized way, and give them personalized offerings.  We can’t do this unless we have a unified view of their activities and interactions.
4. Zen Tech Warrior. These warriors want information on specific topics, when they want it, on the device(s) of their choice.  Take me, for example.  I might want my magazine in print, news via e-mail, and alerts via text.  Can your database handle these preferences and can you execute on this information?
5. Green Computing. We all know that we need to do our part to reduce energy consumption and save the planet.  Data centers represent 1.5% of the electricity demand in the US.  Think green when you buy computers and peripherals.

Since my session was an Idealab, I got terrific comments and questions from my audience.  The liveliest discussion centered around creating a communications strategy because it intersects with the need to create a social networking strategy.  My top tips here?

• Monitor what is being said through Google Alerts and Twitter searches (that you can RSS).
• Create a social networking response team.
• Have a blogging strategy.  Even if your organization does not host a blog, what should you do when your organization is mentioned negatively in a blog?

Here’s a link to the handout from my session.  What about you?  What big trends are coming your way and how you are dealing with them?

But remember that even though screen resolutions have gone up, printed pages have remained the same.  So we design all of our new sites to have a print style sheet where the printable content is no wider than 665 pixels.  And if a client wants their site to be PDA-friendly, we add a mobile style sheet where the resolution is typically set to 240 x 320.

There’s lots of discussion around the office about whether or not we should design to a higher resolution.  On the one hand, it’s likely that screen resolutions are only going to go up.  On the other hand, we notice that users with high resolution monitors tend not to maximize their browsers, but rather have multiple, overlapping windows open at once.  So for now, we’ll stick with 1024.

I procrastinated at first but after a few weeks, I finally clicked on the download link. And boy, am I glad I did! Let me tell you why:

• Firefox 2.0.0.16 was bogging down my entire laptop (which had 4MB of RAM) when I had 20+ tabs open. 20 tabs?  Some of you may think I deserved a slow browser for having that many tabs open. But I always have my address book, calendar, intranet, to do list, NY Times, Twitter, Facebook, Matrix Group Web site and Google analytics open, so 20 is nothing by the time 10:00am rolls around.
• I love, love, love how I can simply type a word or two of a site into the URL bar and Firefox presents a list of possible options, including the title and URL.
• The back button is big and prominent, even bigger than the forward button.
• If I close a tab by mistake, I can find the site quickly by going to History to Show All History or Recently Closed Tabs.
• The Password Manager is more graceful, showing up in a bar above the page, allowing me to remember, not now or never on this site.
• I’m told that Firefox is more secure than ever, protecting me from phishing sites and evil scripts on Web sites.

Firefox Usage Growing

BTW, in case you are wondering, a recent review of Matrix Group client sites shows that Internet Explorer (IE) is used by 70-80% of visitors, with the Netscape browsers (including and especially Firefox) garnering anywhere from 12-20% of the traffic.

The W3Schools site shows Firefox as having much higher penetration among users, up to 41% in June 2008. I guess only few of our association clients and their members are part of that statistics.

Regardless of whose stats you are looking at, Firefox using is growing and in a big way.  Check out the review of Firefox by Washington Post Tech Writer Rob Pegoraro who says urges everyone to use Firefox.

My Favorite Firefox Plug-Ins

I can’t blog about Firefox without mentioning my favorite Firefox plugs-in.

I love Pearl Crescent, which lets me take screen shots of complete Web pages, not just the visible portion of the page.  I use this to capture screen shots for presentations and proposals.

The Front-End Developers at Matrix Group convinced me to load the Web Developer Toolbar, which lets me easily see the alignment of elements on a page; enable/disable javascript, pop-ups, cookies; see the properties of an image; resize my window to 800 x 600; and edit the html to see what a page would look like with modified html (without updating the actual page on the server, of course). It’s geeky but cool!

I still automatically open up Firefox and IE each morning.  I browse client sites in both browsers, but for personal browsing, Firefox is definitely my first choice.

What’s your preference? How many of you use more than one browser?