This is unfortunate, because that 17% is missing out on a whole new world of interactivity, design aesthetics, functionality, speed, security, and quite frankly, I can’t understand why.

Internet Explorer 6 has been criticized by web standards experts, internet security firms, and designers since it’s launch in 2001.

In June 2004, the U.S. Government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) urged readers to use ANY browser other than IE6, because of security flaws. Read the article here.

As of 2009, the security firm, Secunia, counted 142 vulnerabilities, of which 22 remained unfixed.  Some of these 22 are classified as moderately critical in security. Read the article here.

In 2005, PC World magazine rated IE6 as one of the 25 worst tech products OF ALL TIME.  This list is going back 30 years.  The list included some older products, but also included AOL and Windows Me, which turned out to be a complete dud.

On top of all the security flaws prevalent in IE6, there is much criticism from web designers and web standards experts regarding the functionality of IE6.

The problem is that IE6 does not support CSS2, unlike most browsers.  This means that developers must write hacks and other coding workarounds to ensure proper display.  This means a longer turnaround time and extra costs that are then passed on to the client.

Jeff Zeldman, author and leading web standards guru says

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”

IE6 does not support transparent PNG files, which are smooth transparent images, that allow for shading and depth on a web page.  Designers must include hacks that display less attractive transparent GIF files that leave a choppy, hard edged outline.  This option certainly lends itself to a less  fulfilling web experience.

Even social networking leader, Facebook, has decided their users using IE6 will receive an inferior user experience, by not allowing many features when using IE6.  They bluntly explain why, and encourage the user to upgrade their browser.

The thing that escapes me the most is the reasons for not upgrading your browser.  Aside from some large institutions and government bureaucracies, that require certain software that will only run on IE6, there isn’t much reason for a normal user to stay with such an antiquated piece of software.

Imagine you got a car in 2001 (internet explorer 6).  This car was comparable to other cars at the time.  It wasn’t the fanciest, it wasn’t the most secure, but there weren’t many other options, and it got the job done.

Now, imagine five years later, you were offered a brand new car. This car was fancier, quicker, safer, and it was FREE (internet explorer 7). You decided to turn it down.

After nearly ten years, you were offered a newer, faster, even more secure car, with side impact air bags and anti-lock brakes, all wheel drive, and stability control (Mozilla Firefox 3)… Completely free. But still, you turned this car down for your ten year old jalopy that was falling apart, had proven safety issues, and frankly was ugly as sin.

The logic escapes me.

As an IE6 user, you may not even know what you’re missing out on.  But, do yourself a favor, download a newer browser.  One of my personal favorites is Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser with lots of add-ons and extras. Google Chrome is a new kid on the block.  If neither of those entice you, you may want to try Microsoft’s replacement for IE6, IE7 here.  However, you shouldn’t get attached to IE7 too long, because version 8 was just released.

Trust us folks, you’ll be happy you did.

The web is an ever-evolving medium and it is impossible to keep up with everything. Jeffrey Veen with Google Analytics discussed information overload at a great conference in New Orleans, An Event Apart. He said every minute on YouTube, 10 hours of video are uploaded. (There goes my life ambition to watch every video on YouTube in one year.)

Let’s start with Blogs (not blobs). The word “Blog” is short for “Web Log”. WordPress & Blogspot are the primary websites where you can get a blog and find other blogs. Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey, I don’t blogs, those things are just for kids.” Well, you’re reading a blog right now. Gotcha!

Blogs started about six years ago as an online, public diary & forum. People would write about what they thought about the world around them, a certain subject or just update family & friends about their life. A blogger (blog writer) becomes an expert on the field they are writing on, such as marketing, web design or even Smurfs. Where else could you find an expert about Smurfs, but on the web?

Now, do you need a blog for your business? Does being an expert in your field help? If you are looking for a house in New Orleans and you need a mortgage, whom do you turn to? You ask your friends & co-workers. You look online and ask some more friends. You may even look in the phone book, but how do you decide? You look for an expert in New Orleans mortgages. If a mortgage lender had a blog where he discussed different options, terminology and benefits; wouldn’t you think he was an expert, especially when you compare him to the other guy who has nothing. I do not know about you, but I’m going for the expert.

About Myface now. Let’s start with getting the name right; or rather – names. MySpace is a social networking website where people have profiles about themselves. These profiles contain information about that person, pictures, favorite songs, list of friends and a wall where friends can post messages. Facebook is a similar website, but a much cleaner system. While MySpace allows you to “design” your profile, Facebook only allows you to “customize” your profile. Facebook started with college graduates as a way to stay connected with college buddies & long lost friends. It quickly spread to high schools, corporations and then the general public. MySpace has always been open to the public, at least ages 13-99. (Sorry great-grandpa.) Traditionally, MySpace was more blue-collar and Facebook was white-collar and college educated, but both of these stereotypes are blurring today.

Now that you have a brief history about MyFace (just kidding), how can you use this in your business? You can add a profile on MySpace & Facebook and connect with others. We live in a word-of-mouth marketing society and this can be powerful (especially in New Orleans). If you are over 50 years old, maybe even 35, you will find it a lonely place at times. Both websites are full of profiles of people under age 30. So, now what? If you want to connect to friends & stay in touch with family, I’d try Facebook. If you want to promote yourself & network your business, check out LinkedIn (learn more) & Pulse by Plaxo. Both are great ways to connect with professionals, business resources & find contacts through friends and friends of friends.

If you have a social business, non-profit or are a politician, both MySpace & Facebook can be a great tool. A cool example of how to use social media is what we’re doing with the Original Dungeon. The Dungeon is a New Orleans bar near Bourbon Street that attract locals & is a tourist must see. We are setting up the Dungeon on MySpace, Facebook & Flickr connecting them with locals that are part of the brand community. Also, with each tourist that posts pictures from their trip to the Dungeon on their Facebook profile or Flickr account, the Dungeon is inadvertently being advertised as a must see bar in New Orleans. Customers can share photos of their Halloween parties, past Tattoo Contests and just every day life at the Dungeon — a unique place on any night.

When asking yourself if you should do something like the Dungeon, ask yourself if you have a fan club. New Orleans Jazz Fest has a fan club; your mortgage company does not. Having these accounts for merely business will not be profitable for the time you spend on them because you must hard sell customers. The Dungeon however would probably not do well with a blog.

If you are still undecided on what to do or are ready to get started, give us a call. It’s easy to get started & can be a powerful way to market your business. If you don’t agree, stop reading this blog.

Here are a few websites that you may have heard of, but may not really know what they do.

MySpace brought this generation of websites to the public eye, but they were not the first website of their kind – Live Journal & Friendster actually kicked things off. MySpace is essentially personal websites linked together through friends. It gives you a voice to share your thoughts, feelings and interests online and your friends can share theirs with you.

MySpace allows you to find old friends that you have not kept up with .. You can see where they work, pictures of their kids and hear songs from their favorite bands. Don’t worry, you can restrict the stalkers, or anyone else from seeing your page with privacy controls. Privacy is a huge part of the web now and for many of these websites, you can block everything or just some things until you establish/ or approve a friendship with the other person. Websites like Facebook even allow you to create limited profiles so you can be friends with your best friends “cool” dad, but he can’t see the pictures of you on Bourbon Street from last weekend.

This is making its way into the human resources department of many businesses, too. Before hiring an applicant, many companies “google” the applicant’s name and might check their profiles on MySpace or Facebook.. Without strict privacy settings, future employers can find out a lot about an applicant and how likely they are to call in “sick” to work.

Facebook started as a web tool to stay connected with college friends after graduation. Now it has snowballed to encompass almost every college and university in the country, as well as high schools, large companies, and most recently the general public. Facebook shares many of the basic concepts of MySpace; it allows users to share interests and connect with each other, but it has gone a step further. Facebook’s “News Feed” feature allows you to quickly stay current with friends each time you login. For example, I saw a friend had changed his relationship status to engaged and within one week nearly 100 friends congratulated him on his engagement.

Imagine calling each of those people to tell them that news. (That is so five years ago.) Also, instead of waiting for Aunt Martha to send you pictures of her precious grandkids in the Christmas card, you can see get a notice from your cousin Erin that she just posted 5 pictures of her son at Easter. Pretty cool!

Also, many non-profits, businesses and politicians have developed groups and fan pages to build their own online communities. In doing so they’ve built an army of supporters, making it easier to “rally the troops.”

LinkedIn is the business networking cousinto MySpace or Facebook. Here, you can create a business profile (similar to a resume) and find connections. You can recommend friends, colleagues or vendors so your network can find similar services and products. If you are looking for a new CPA, you can search your connections and find a friend of a friend that is recommended. Wouldn’t you rather find a CPA through a friend than through the phonebook or web search? If you know what BNI is, then you will easily umderstand LinkedIn, it’s the web version of BNI’s word of the mouth marketing.

Wikipedia is every curious person’s favorite new website. If you don’t know something, you do now. This website is a user generated encyclopedia. Whether you have a term paper on New Orleans’ Jackson Square or you’re curious about the origin of an old wives’ tale, it’s all on Wikipedia. You need to be a bit discerning, however, because its content is user generated, but by being user policed, it is fairly accurate. Controversial issues tend to be a bit opinionated depending on who last updated that item. The accuracy and depth of each item is amazing, considering anyone can update the text. Do not try to add false information because most items are corrected weekly if not daily.

Digg is the newspaper for internet users, but the headlines are dynamic. Users read articles on different websites and if they like it or find it informative, they click the link saying they “Digg It”. Each digg counts as a vote and the news article with the most diggs is the headline for the website. Each headline follows in that order. You may look at CNN or the New York Times and see an article about the 2008 presidential debate while Digg has an article about a cool new video on what you can do with magnets. Digg.com displays what is what is most important to it’s users that week. You may think of it as a joke of a news website, but as the presidential race nears (not 2 years out), it will be the headlining article. This shows the validity of user edited content.

StumbleUpon is similar to Digg in that users suggest websites and articles to other users, but that is where the similarities end. When you find a website you like, click your StumbleUpon link and add it to the list. When you have some free time or want to check out some cool websites in a certain area, you just click your StumbleUpon button and there you go. It’s a cool way to find great websites or even to promote your own website.

del.icio.us is essentially a social bookmark manager. Just as you add websites to your favorites menu, del.icio.us allows you to share your favorite bookmarked websites. This is also a great way to keep track your favorite websites when you use different computers at home, work, and at a friends place.

Flickr is a photo website. Instead of just showing your photos to friends and family, Flicker uses tags to find related images. If you search “New Orleans” you will find over a half million photos taken by people like you and me. How can this be useful? Imagine planning a vacation to St. Louis, you can see what other people are taking pictures of and where you should go. This is also a great way to stay in touch with family & friends. As they update pictures of themselves, their kids, and their vacations or hobbies, you can see waht they’ve been up to. Like Facebook and MySpace, users add groups and can adjust their privacy settings to limit who can see their pictures.

YouTube is best known to the non-web savvy from the headline, “Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock”. For the web savvy, YouTube is a place to view amateur videos (stop it! you’re dirty), clips of your favorite comedian or actor and a place that, most recently, schools are tapping into nationwide. Yes, schools are adding tutorials to help their students with homework.

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Many other websites build communities with funny articles, games, pictures and videos found on the web. Try Ebaums World when you have some time to kill. If you find a video you like, click the Facebook button and seamlessly add it to your Facebook profile or message your Facebook friends with it.

Yes, we are connected more than ever especially as cell phones become internet enabled mobile devices.

Each of these websites use user generated content. Remember writing the text for your website? It is hard, I feel for you, but imagine updating your website daily or hourly. Ouch! With users updating the text, you no longer have to. These developers gave tools and the power to the people to dictate what is news and self regulate themselves. Thomas Jefferson would be proud!

Also, all of these websites are free to their users. You might wonder how they can make millions of dollars or be bought for billions – simply by selling ad space. The internet is the new form of media that targets the 13-30 crowd. Just like the radio, TV and newspaper, advertising makes it all possible.

One great part about advertising through many of these websites is the targeted component. If you open a new dress shop here in New Orleans, you can advertise, on Facebook, directly to females in their twenties who are members of the New Orleans network. This actually benefits the user, because the web is giving them ads they can benefit from. That same demographic probably doesn’t care about watching the Final Four at a bar in Mississippi, so your money isn’t wasted on the wrong demographic. Try getting your radio station or newspaper to target a market like that!

On another note, many Web 2.0 innovators and developers do not call this a movement, because they have learned from the 90s dot com bubble & bust. They don’t want to repeat history. They see the web evolving, but not in the phases as the media does. The new internet companies of today know why companies did not succeed during the bust – they didn’t have a plan. Many internet companies had a semi-unique idea and would grab as many investors as possible and form a company with no idea how to make money. Many innovators and investors saw companies like Amazon making millions of dollars and the internet as the next gold rush, so they jumped in without slowing down to think about the future. A bank does not give you a business loan without a clear, distinct business plan, but in the 1990s investors were so desperately trying to find the next diamond in the rough that they ignored good judgment. The best survived and left us with Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and the enormous king of the internet – Google.

On the political front, candidates are vying for the younger generations and engaging them using the 2.0 programs previously mentioned. This literally gives voters a voice directly to the candidates (or at least their staff). Imagine being able to tell your Governor how you feel about upcoming legislation or encouraging a candidate to pick your side of an issue. It’s all doable and easier than ever with the new web. Just take a quick look at Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s website bobbyjindal.com or Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s website barackobama.com to see how they’re utilizing Web 2.0 applications.

Call it “Web 2.0″ or not, but we ARE witnessing the evolution of the internet. With the web’s dynamic nature, it will constantly evolve. The only question is “how soon and how far will the web be integrated into our daily lives?” Only the future will tell.

If you would like to know more about these and the other hundreds of Web 2.0/user-generated websites, check out Wikipedia or let me know.