The new Apple iPad doesn’t support Flash or other Web plug-ins. It simply supports HTML5 and other open standards, bringing us back home to some old school fundamentals. Just like viewing websites on an iPhone or Blackberry using an internet connection, if your code is semantic, clean and uses progressive enhancement, it will naturally display pretty well. You still have to test, of course…and you can always do more with a custom mobile template…but it is a solid foundation.

There is a lot of press about how this might be a bad product sales move for Apple because it does automatically eliminate many existing websites from displaying on the iPad. The HTML5 video tag also is still under development since the video codec is not natively supported in all browsers.

As for myself, since I continue to manually code my work instead of relying on WYSIWYG tools, I enjoy following the latest standards and incorporating the new advances into our ever-expanding best-practices. If you are curious about how ready your site is for iPad, check out the iPad development standards,  I know I will be…and upgrading my sites along with CSS3. Happy geeking!

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At a minimum, I’m beginning to appreciate Twitter (and my new fave tool TweetDeck) as a better-than-delicious RSS feed. It is showing me what people that I personally know are smart and on-the-pulse of online activity are doing right now. Assuming they choose to share.

Case in point: Katherine Maynard (@KMaynard_SCC) tweeted about ClickZ’s article on measuring social media metrics: Social Media Sites Force Analytics Tools to Evolve. I was very excited to start reading the article because one of my main roles on the Army’s FOS project was to track and analyze all of the campaigns activity…not just log files and Google Analytics, but what we could learn from visitor activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I was disappointed once again to learn that the samples they cited were either 1) just tracking referrers or PPC Facebook ads, or 2) built their own app to track visitor lifetime value/interaction over time. Another point that caught my attention was that Experience Project gets most of their referrals through organic search.

Learn more about the Army Faces of Strength Campaign.

We found in the FOS project that our external social media destinations were covering about 50% of the first page of Google for our key phrases. We also discovered that half of our campaign activity was occurring on the social media channels we set up and that the statistics available from each varied and had to be manually aggregated with the others to create a monthly analysis report that allowed us to create completely educated recommendations. I got pretty quick at it and produced some insightful reports, but I also know that we will be doing this for every client we can. And I don’t want to do it manually each time!

So starts my quest to automate the aggregation. Awhile back, I learned of tools/companies like ComScore, Quantcast, BlogPulse, Converseon, and BuzzMonitor but have never had the time to conduct research on them that wasn’t directly tied to a paying client project. Now, I have the opportunity to look into this periodically to see what is already out there without paying an arm and a leg, and what could be built. I know that we can use APIs like Facebooks to pull their Insight Statistics and Fan/Group data, but run into issues like Facebook not indexing their FQL page_fan.page_id field which means that it isn’t easy to pull data on your fans through a custom PHP application.

So anyway, I’ll keep you updated on where this goes and what I learn.

My new plastic rabbit, the Nabaztag

With all the news, social media, and individuals contributing to the glut of information generated each day, it is awfully hard to keep up with what is going on around us. Between work and the family, there isn’t much time or interest left at the end of the day to watch the evening news. I find that I am much more interested in niche topics (like most of us) that include technology (online and otherwise), rabbits, toddlers, and teenagers looking at college. Not something I plan on thumbing through the paper to find.

Of course, I bookmark a number of blogs, RSS feeds and podcasts that provide what I’m looking for, but I never take the time to sit and read or listen since I’m always on the computer working (needing my visual attention) and my commute is about five seconds (yes, I know all you DC-metro commuters hate me now.) So what does a wonderful husband get the gal that has every tech gadget get for an anniversary present? A Nabaztag.

This wonderful little creature looks like a plastic mod rabbit, but once hooked to our wi-fi, he will greet me every morning and read me the latest posts from my blog and rss subscriptions and relay my podcasts to me regardless of where I put him. Unfortunately, our home network is above my head and doesn’t work with the standard installation instructions, so Ken (hubby) will have to help. I can’t wait to keep in touch through my new toy. I’ll let you know if it works as promised.