Introduction

The web is full of hidden treasures tucked away in odd corners.

The trick, sometimes, is simply knowing where these interesting spots are.

For this article, I polled catalogers and e-retailers for their suggestions of lesser-known online resources, information sources, and new ideas related to e-commerce.

The resulting list of 19 links is somewhat eclectic. Hopefully, they’ll trigger a new idea and help with your web marketing.

Search-Within-The-Book And Beyond

www.a9.com

Amazon’s beta search engine, A9, is interesting for several reasons: it remembers your recent searches; it searches Amazon’s “search within the book” database; and the A9 toolbar provides a diary feature so you can save notes on any webpage you visit.

Site Traffic Stats, Gratis

www.alexa.com

Surprisingly, many online retailers aren’t yet familiar with Alexa, a search portal owned by Amazon.

The site claims superior search results via user feedback through their toolbar.

More interesting than the search, however, are the free traffic stats for various websites.

Though the site runs slow at times, and though the traffic estimates are imperfect, Alexa enables you to view statistics and trends across the web, letting you see how your site stacks up against your competition in terms of traffic, speed, and inbound links.

The Rise Of Blogs

www.blogger.com

Freedom of the press takes on new meaning with the arrival of “blogs”, an abbreviation of “web log”.

Blogs let writers publish online with little technological hassle. Blog content ranges from personal diaries to political commentaries.

Now blogs are going corporate: some brands create external blogs to communicate with their customers — for example, Google’s GoogleBlog.

Businesses blog to establish themselves as experts in an area — for example, Hippablog by lawyer Jeff Drummond, discusses medical privacy.

And some employees blog about their employers — for example, marketer John Porcaro’s take on his employer, Microsoft, at johnporcaro.typepad.com.

Feed Your Marketing Brain

www.reveries.com/coolnews/

Cool News of the Day — not to be confused with the movie fan site, Aint It Cool News — is a a daily email newsletter about interesting things in the world of marketing.

Though it focuses on brand advertising and consumer-packaged-goods marketing, direct marketers will find useful ideas here.

Names To Numbers

www.dnsstuff.com

Ever encounter something odd with a web address?

A well-known site disappears, an email to a good address bounces, or a customer tells you your site is down — when it isn’t?

Often the problem can stem from DNS, the system that maps a web name (for example, www.yahoo.com) to its corresponding web location, or “IP” address (66.94.231.98 ).

The DNS Stuff page provides a bevy of free tools for quick DNS checks.

Warning: this site is somwehat technical. Pass this link on to your IT staff when things seem awry.

Good Experience

www.goodexperience.com

Mark Hurst’s focuses on the challenge of providing good customer experience in his email newsletter.

(On the flip side, he also chronicles poor design of things, places, and websites at thisisbroken.com.)

As the consumers’ expectations of web site design and performance continue to rise, usability is becoming increasingly essential to a web site’s closing ratio.

Keep An Eye On This For Me, Please

www.google.com/webalerts

At your request, Google will search itself for your selected query, emailing you new results daily or weekly.

This free beta service is a great way to monitor your brand, your competition, and key ideas in your industry.

New Metaphors For Search

www.grokker.com

While this web search tool requires a large download, and while the free trial is only thirty days long, and while the program isn’t as fast as one would like, Grokker’s graphical approach to search is fascinating: you surf from high level topics (represented as colored balls) down into sub topics (represented as balls-within-balls), eventually down into actual web pages.

This program is a hybrid blend of a knowledge-mapper, a meta-search engine, and a smart browser.

Like Kartoo, Grokker offers an interesting early glimpse of new metaphors for organizing and finding information online.

The connection to online retailing?

Many e-retailers have found organizing products into useful hierarchies surprisingly challenging, yet critical for success in site search, guided navigation, and shopping feeds.

In a few years, search metaphors like Grokker may enable web retailers to offer their visitors easier ways to surf their merchandise and find complementary items.

The Invisible Web

www.invisible-web.net

For all their power, search engines do a poor job at indexing the so-called “invisible web”, the rich domain-specific databases hiding behind government, industry, and academic portals.

To access these databases, you first need to know which site to visit, then run your query on that site.

This site helps you find these databases, and is thus a useful gateway for government statistics, government regulations, and industry data.

Visual Search

www.Kartoo.com

Kartoo is a visual meta-search engine, which runs a query against several search engines and presents the results in a graphical map.

You can see excerpts from the various pages by hovering over them, allowing you to scan many sites without having to click-through to them.

While free visual search isn’t yet fully baked, and while the server-side Kartoo isn’t as sophisticated as the client-side Grokker, Kartoo is an intriguing early glimpse of how search may evolve over the next few years.

Retailing News Served Fresh Daily

www.smartbrief.com

This short daily newsletter keeps you on top of major happenings in the world of retail.

Easy to skim each morning, the email consists of short synopses linked to original articles from various newspapers and magazines.

Email Privacy Made Simple

www.sneakemail.com

When you’re worried a website might not use your email address responsibly, or when you wish to sign for a competitor’s email newsletter anonymously, Sneakemail.com offers free disposable email addresses.

For example, if I didn’t want to entrust you with my real email address, I could ask you to mail me at rguag5t0221@sneakemail.com, and it will forward to my real account.

Because you create a new email for each use, you can determine the origin of any spam to that address and easily turn it off. You can both send and receive from these anonymous email addresses.

Basic service is free; full service adds features for $2/month.

The Wisdom of Nielsen

www.useit.com

The sad truth is many e-retail websites are difficult and unpleasant to use, resulting in lower sales per visitor.

Jakob Nielsen, founder of the “discount usability engineering” movement for web testing, publishes his ongoing insights in his bi-weekly “Alertbox” newsletter.

Past issues are archived on his site. Rate your site against Nielsen’s “Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003” checklist.

Squeaky Clean HTML

validator.w3.org

Challenge your web team to get your site’s HTML as clean as possible.

Well-formed HTML works reliably in more browsers, renders faster, and is preferred by search engines.

The World Wide Web Consortium is the organization responsible for official specs for the web, and they provide free HTML validation programs on their site.

Caution: few web pages are truly compliant to spec. You may need to wade through many minor warnings to find real errors, but it is worth it.

Advertising Games

www.postopia.com

Can you sell breakfast cereal via video games?

While game-based marketing would make sense for very few catalogers, Post’s advertising/game portal is an interesting visit for online marketers.

Kids play free video games here, and the games reference Post brands and logos. Kids collect token codes from Post cereal boxes to get game hints or extra powers.

Though no fan of sweetened cereal for breakfast, I find the marketing here excellent. The brand messaging is restrained, and the games are fun. (My six-year old recommends “Waffle Boy”)

Looking Back Into History

www.archive.org

The folks at the non-profit Internet Archive have stored 30 billion (!) web pages since 1996.

The site offers a powerful search engine to see what a website looked like in the past.

For example, visit the Yahoo! homepage as of October 1996 at http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com.

The site is great for monitoring changes in your competitors’ websites, and also provides a fascinating historical view of the web’s rapid evolution.

Who Goes There?

www.whois.sc

The whois database provides registration information for web domains.

You can use these data to find out, to some degree, who owns a domain and where they’re located.

Whois data is a good way to find contact information for sites harming or competing with your site.

The whois interface at www.whois.sc is particularly comprehensive, providing registrant info, an image of the homepage, related domains, meta tags, DMOZ links, and reverse IP information.

Basic service is free, small fee for advanced features.

Wiki Wiki Wiki

c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

“Wiki” means “fast” in Hawaiian. Ward Cunningham choose this appropriate adjective for his web-based “open editing” collaboration software.

“Open editing” means any visitor can change web page content and site organization.

While this sounds like a recipe for chaos, Wikis are receiving favorable coverage in the business press as low-cost, flexible tools for corporate knowledge sharing.

My firm recently installed Kwiki a simple free perl-based wiki on our intranet. Installation took under 10 minutes, and we find it a useful tool.

Open Source Encyclopaedia

wikipedia.org

The Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia.

As the name suggests, it is implemented as a Wiki. That is, the site has over 300,000 collaborative articles on all subjects, written and edited by volunteers.

The articles are generally of high quality.

This site may interest online marketers for three reasons — it is a vivid example of open source principles in action, it shows the power of web communities, and it is also a very useful encyclopedia.

Conclusion

Hopefully one or more of these sites are new to you, and will spark a new marketing idea.

Was your favorite site omitted?

I’d welcome receiving your suggestions on additional lesser-known web resources useful to e-retailers.