One of my favorite e-jargon words, a “mullet strategy” is named after the haircut. It amounts to a “business up front, party in the rear” approach to emarketing.
What this means, is that there are plenty of ebusinesses (retailers included) that present a reputable public face, but rely on the “party in the rear” to keep things running. YouTube is an obvious example: the site presents itself as a user-uploaded-video-community, but in reality much of the traffic comes from people browsing illegal content.
MetaJacking equates to keyword-theft. It is when you do the following:
- Search for the product or service you sell.
- Identify the top-ranking site which is not your own.
- View the source code of their page.
- Copy their meta-keywords tag content.
- Paste that content into your own site.
In theory, MetaJacking should not have a dramatic impact on your own search engine performance, but you can think of it as a slimy tactic with which to improve your standings. I don’t recommend it, but it might happen to you.
Bacn is a new term (and one which may not be around long) but I like it. It’s used to describe — in contrast to SPAM — email which you want, but not right now. An example? Facebook or LinkedIn notifications, shipping reminders, or Netflix notices of “we’ve received Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” These are messages which you would like to review, but which you’d prefer not interrupt your day.
Bacn is an example of one description of an indication that users want attention relevant computing. For an immediate (and memorable!) example, consider this: toilets know when you are sitting in front of them, but your computer does not.
If the computer could tell when we’re paying attention to it — or if it could automatically assess the attention required for any particular “alert” or message it displayed — then the whole experience would be more fulfilling. Users’ desire to set up rules to do this for themselves is why we see terms like Bacn.
As an etailer, recognize that Bacn is of secondary importance to users — but still important. Make yours crispy.
SSL stands for “secure sockets layer” and its the technology used to encrypt the transfer of critical information (such as credit cards) between a user’s computer and website. SSL represents both a technological “lock” on the data as well as an identity verification guarantee; that is, SSL Certificate vendors seek to verify the site’s/business’s status as “bona fide” before issuing the certificate. (For new or SOHO ventures, this verification process can be slightly frustrating.) The most common (i.e. trusted) vendors of SSL certificates are Verisign, Thawte, and to a lesser extent Comodo.
Etailers (particularly those without a national brand presence) should place a badge indicating their site as being “SSL Secure” on all transaction pages (and perhaps even on the footer of the whole site). It’s an easy way of providing reassurance to customers that their data is secure and the business is bona fide.
These fanciful words represent two emerging rich media technologies: AIR (from Adobe) and Silverlight (from Microsoft). Essemtially, these technologies are designed to enable advanced programmatic features on websites with significantly less development time. Think of them as Flash and AJAX and client-side-Java killers — but they may indeed be the ancestors of the kinds of applications you’ll run on your “desktop” in ten years.
