We’ve recently started a reading group at Untyped. As consultants we need to maintain our expertise, so every Friday we tackle something new for a few hours. Given our love of Universities (we average three degrees per Untypist) and our even greater love of grandiose corporate training (hello, Hamburger University!) we have named this program Untyped University.

Broadly, we’re covering the business of the web and the business of building the web. The online business is, from certain angles, quite simple. The vast majority of businesses can be viewed as a big pipeline, sucking in visitors from the Internet-at-large, presenting some message to the user, and then hoping they click “Buy”. At each stage of the pipeline people drop out. They drop out right at the beginning if the site isn’t ranked high enough on search terms or has poorly targetted ads. They abandon the website if the design is wrong, or the site is slow, or the offer isn’t targeted correctly. Each step of this pipeline has tools and techniques that can be used to retain users, which we’ll be covering. The flipside of this is the pipeline that delivers the site, starting with data stores, going through application servers, and finishing at the browser or other client interface. Here we’ll be looking at the technologies and patterns for building great sites.

So far we’ve run a couple of sessions. The first covered bandit algorithms, and the second Amazon’s Dynamo. We’ll blog about these soon. We’ve started a Mendeley group to store our reading (though not everything we cover in future will be in published form.) Do join in if it takes your fancy!