JoeDuck's World has moved CLICK HERE

Moving to http://joeduck.wordpress.com

2006-03-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

Time to move my posting to the superior WordPress environment. Given how simple and easy it was to set up and that it's free I'm not clear why Yahoo and/or Google have not scarfed them up or copied that format. I think Yahoo *supports* wordpress but why don't they just buy it and then they'd be better than blogger.

I'm wondering how indexing will be affected as I have copied stuff over to WordPress so now it's running at both Blog spaces. If I were Google I'd favor Blogger over other formats and favor Google's new free pages over others because they are easier to keep track of and therefore harder to spam. Also this would be more stabilizing for the company than simply treating all pages equally. However, much to Google's credit, I think they really tend to favor equal treatment.

Edgeio is brilliant ... and will fail.

2006-02-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

Please CLICK here for the JoeDuck blog, which has MOVED

Edgeio is a brilliant technical idea with brilliant backers and exceptional buzz and it will ... fail.

This is a company made in Silicon Valley by Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley and it simply won't play in Peoria or even NYC.

"Ma and Pa to sell that kitchenware all you have to do is tag your blogs!"

I had a personal demo of Edgeio at the recent MashupCamp from its creator. He's clever and passionate about this very good theoretical concept of using simple blog tagging to develop alternatives to traditional listings/classifieds systems like EBAY or Craigslist. He's also got master VC dude Jeff Clavier behind him.

So how can this fail? Easy. People don't see the small fees at EBAY as a barrier to listing. It's the technology that is the barrier and unless Edgeio can build a MUCH better than current site that consolidates *existing* listings into a free format I don't see this lasting more than a year or so. I actually hope I'm wrong, because Mashups like Edgeio are a nice innovative way to restructure the web.

WordPress vs Blogger & thank you Todd

2006-02-28T12:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the advice of Todd over at his blog suggesting I change formats, and the fact that Uber Blogger Scoble switched to it I'm going to switch to WordPress blogging very soon. The biggest challenge with blogger is that you can't categorize the posts which is VERY helpful even as the author looking back to see what you already wrote.

Todd by the way, has one of the best SEO blogs out there. This is because he's one of the top SEO guys anywhere. He often speaks at conferences about "link building" and is always insightful about complex SEO topics.

Content is ... Pawn

2006-02-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Not only is content's role as KING becoming questionable, I think we may be entering an era where content has effectively very few "rights" attached to it, and instead it'll all be about the aquisition, distribution and organization of data rather than it's creation. I have mixed feelings about this as we spent a LOT of money assembling a LOT of data at Online Highways and it's clear a lot of it got nabbed by other sites and scraped into "made for adsense" sites that use legal snips of information to displace more legitimate and better sites in search rankings.

I think Mashups may become king very soon and that's probably .... OK with me.

Myspace perspectives from Danah Boyd

2006-02-26T17:31:00.000-08:00

Danah Boyd is a social networking researcher who also works at Yahoo. Easily one of the brightest observers in this space though I'm not yet convinced that she is a *wise* observer of these things. I'd read her blog and realized she'd have valuable perspectives on Myspace. Here is a great summary of her perspective, though I'm concerned that there may be a generational issue of "parents have the RIGHT and OBLIGATION to know about those tracking and marketing to their kids (e.g. Myspace.com)" that she can't see cuz....she's young and has not yet had the shot 'o wisdom and insight that comes from having children running around in potentially dangerous environments.

Is Myspace.com a safespace?

2006-02-26T14:52:00.000-08:00

On CNN a child psychologist warned that NO child should have a "web page", and that Myspace.com, a social networking site popular mostly among teens, was a dangerous environment that could be used by predators to "profile" potential victims.

It sure seemed to be an exaggeration, and since I actively encourage my own 16 year old to develop websites I thought I better find out a bit more. The buzz in the industry is that Myspace and friendster are getting replaced by facebook, which I understand is more popular for college students looking for dates. Partly for this reason I hadn't been paying ... enough ... attention to myspace.

But indeed my son had a page and so did many of his friends. Nothing too provocative from that group, but the psychologists concerns were justified in other respects as I learned browsing the listings and content and by signing up for my own Myspace account. Here are the interesting features that I guarantee few parents are aware of and would concern many greatly:

* Extensive personal information, often including pictures and names of friends, crushes, school and city specifics.
* Discription of sexual orientation. This includes the term "swinger".
* Easy picture upload.
* Crappy age verification. Easy to make up things to "get in", so many of the age listings are almost certainly false. This fact or ALONE raises many serious legal issues as minors are posting volumes of suggestive material with no oversight.
* Advertising for adult sites. I didn't see any ads (yet) for x rated material, but prominent were ads for "intimate dating" which is euphemistic for sex match services. I don't object to these ads in the adult space, but actively advertising sex dating to teens and preteens should be of concern to any clear thinking parent.

There's more but I'd urge any parent to browse the site. An upside to the detail is that you can learn about your own kid's friends and other aspects of their life they might not share at the dinner table. I'd argue that the most important factor is whether this environment is getting abused rather than whether it *could* be abused. For that I'll need to research a bit.

Moderation in all things

2006-02-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

Provocative thought for the day:

Change is coming from the WRONG set of ideas. It's coming from both the positive and negative "exciting" stuff like wars and conflict, concerts and rich people. Change SHOULD be coming from a careful examination of what is working the middle class mundane lives that most people in the developed world lead - the tried and true stuff. How do we bring this boring but workable stuff to the rest of the world?

*Bringing mediocrity to the world* is going to require great thinking and great innovation - wild and speculative innovation included. I sure like projects like Dean Kamen's power/water devices which are a great way to make boring mundane but ESSENTIAL change happen in the 3rd world.

.... jeez, he introduced it at the TED conference a few years back... maybe I'm WRONG about TED. If it's spreading this kind of innovation I'm....WRONG.

FOCUS defines a LOT of the world. What we as people, nations, groups, businesses choose to focus on defines a lot about us.

It's much easier to focus on big controversies or big positive events than it is to focus on the mundane, daily grind events. YET, it's our own mundane daily grinds where the stuff is happening that we need to pass along to those for whom the daily grind is .... life threatening.

2006-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Have I been *a bit* too hard on the TED Conference? I've been reading more. It's certainly great to see discussion of the project to document human rights abuses with digital cameras (Peter Gabriel), see the history of TED includes awards to luminaries in smart, scalable development like Bono, and much much more. TED conference blog

But there's still a HUGE problem with such events which provide economic barriers to entry that are so great they insulate the TED community from....the real community. Sure these guys have mechanisms to hear from and about AIDS children in the Congo, poor Chinese factory workers and Indian farmers, but the voices of these folks are absent as conferences like TED set the agenda for what some would call progressive change. (yes they have some free spots but they appear to be tightly controlled and very limited. This is a choir who likes to hear themselves preach).

I'm always amazed how well intentioned wealthly people often create microclimates of compassion that miss the big picture. TED is better than that, but certainly we need to find ways to have the most influential discussions about critical global issues take place on the global stage, not the 1000- at-$4400-per-person-half-caf-cappucino crowd.
(no offense to the full caf cappucino folks)

You say Bobsleigh tomato, I say Bobsled

2006-02-25T09:13:00.000-08:00

Bobsleigh vs Bobsled

You learn something every day. As with Soccer vs Football, we Americans like to name things differently from the rest of the world. Olympic Bobsledding is, for most in the world, Olympic Bobsleigh".

TED conference? Get out your wallet.....

2006-02-23T22:34:00.000-08:00

What a contrast between the hyper energized Mashup Camp with college students, internet legends, and free admission (hey, I did donate some cash!) and the fancy pants Technology Entertainment Design Conference which I ... had to miss because I 1) had never heard of it and 2) didn't care to pony up $4400, by INVITATION ONLY, to hear a bunch of very rich people talking about ... something. With a barrier to admission like that you've got to wonder what these folks take away from the experience.

If your request is accepted you will be entitled to purchase a TED pass for $4,400. We welcome to TED a wide variety of leading thinkers and doers from all fields of endeavor.

... who are rich/gullible enough to pony up $100 per hour 24/7 for the duration of the conference. ... thanks but....I'll pass.

Top 100 blogs

2006-02-23T17:56:00.000-08:00

OK, for the benefit of the few who read THIS blog I thought I'd throw out a list of the "A list blogs" that are read by .... more people than you can shake a stick at.

Interestingly I'm thinking Blogs are quite DEficient as a conversational medium because you've got the blog OWNER in control and the commenters in a very weak position. Tim Berners Lee, who invented the internet even before Al Gore, wanted a "two way conversation". We are NOT there yet and I think a sort of wikified blogging niche mashup forum environment, where people with similar interest sets will come together in unstructured but highly motivating and unstructured but facilitating and enabling ways, will eventually rule the internet.

I hope so and in fact will work towards this goal in the travel space.

From TECHNORATI: Top 100 blogs

SONY Brain Blast ....

2006-02-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

Wow - how did I miss this news from last April? SONY has patented a process by which impulses would be shot into the brain to enhance or even CREATE sensations including tasting and emotion. The idea is that this will jazz up the game experience. Cool.

The extension of this type of technology is taking us out of control of our own senses and placing machines in charge of that department. I think it's neat, but if I were one of those worried about Orwellian developments in technology I'd be worried....

Worried until until SONY blasted my brain with "calm down, don't worry about this, BUY SONY" impulse into my brain and I'd live happily ever after on my couch with a game console and watching SONY TV sets.

Sony's Sensory blast o matic
article in New Scientist

What to make when you CAN make ANYTHING

2006-02-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

Still reeling from the mashup vibe. The game has changed from what type of web environment can we AFFORD to build to what type of web environment do we WANT to make? With only minor exaggeration it's now possible to create pretty much any website application you can imagine online very cheaply using existing APIs and existing data, and only a modest level of programming skill or support.

In the travel space this has huge implications because there are no great sites out there. Expedia and Travelocity are busy pitching vacations to people rather than building a rich interactive travel experience. Better sites like TripAdvisor and Virtual Tourist remain kind of clunky and lack the comprehensive approach though I still think VT is tops due to it's community focus, though they appear to have too few people (of the 600,000 members they claim to have) actively participating to be robust enough to compete on a global scale for traffic. Comprehensive sites like our Online Highways are too dull and closed and lack community.

So, what will we do now that we can do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in travel?

Stay tuned!

Safe at Home after Mashup Camp

2006-02-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

Wow.... my overstuffed brain is still smoking from MashupCamp down in sunny Silicon Valley. As much as I enjoy trips down to the closest thing to a home the internet will ever have via a scenic 6 hour drive, it sure is nice to come home to small town Oregon where mashing is done with potatoes and not computer applications.

At the event Venture capitalist Peter Rip observed that many of the mashup concepts were probably too dependent on other programs and platforms to be viable business models. I think he'd agree that the strongest use of the mashups is to add value to an existing model, allowing it to do VERY complex things with data sources and serve users in powerful new ways that are no longer expensive - in most cases free. All this through the APIs that Yahoo, Google, and MSN are stumbling over each other to get out into the developer community.

I'm loving this aspect of the new web because we already have a viable travel website with tons of data but it still sucks in terms of providing the user with a richly interactive, map and information intense experience. Mashups may allow us to do much, much better.

THIS cost to benefit advantage is, for me, the very profound and destabilizing aspect of mashups, and I think this advantage has yet to sink in outside the development community, where people are really getting .... excited.

Bubble web, aka web 1.0, placed spectacular and foolish values on the *implementation of the idea* behind a website. It assumed, somewhat correctly back then, that it cost a lot in time and money to develop even modest web applications that crunched a lot of information in complex ways. Few of those companies attracted enough user attention to work as the "if you build a clever site they will come" model died in spectacular and well-deserved fashion.

The great thing about 2.0 / Mashup Web is that we are approaching a model where the cost to crunch and publish massive amounts of data is approaching zero, and the number of applications to do this in clever new ways is exploding. A9 search, for example, is adding a new "vertical search engine" every day or so. Ironically A9 still shows Google search results yet Amazon, which completely owns A9, is releasing APIs and the ENTIRE hugely massively gigantic Alexa crawl upon which you can build a true global search engine. Still a confusing world changing at dizzying pace.

Not always FUN but always EDUCATIONAL!

GooglePlex Party? Sure!

2006-02-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

Mashup Party ... at the GooglePlex. MashupCamp ended on a high note with an invite from Google's Adam Sah (who works on the Google Home page API) to head over to Google for a party. I'd been there in July for the Google Dance but this time enjoyed a tour of the main building. I'm always so impressed by the dedication of the Google engineers to quality, their company, and innovation on the internet, and tasty snacks.

I'm still digesting the overwhelming amount of information at MashupCamp. Congratulations to PodBop.org the winner and chicagocrime.org the runner up. Clear is this - Mashups are going to fuel a LOT of innovation and it's happening VERY fast.

Speed Geeking Session

2006-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

Here at Mashup Camp part of the open conference concept is the upcoming "speed geeking" session which will showcase about 23+ mashups that are competing here for the "best mashup" award - a niagra server from Sun, delivered by.... the president of Sun.

If you want NEWS and VIEWS about this event I'm not a good source - go to the project Wiki which is HERE and Programmable Web, John Musser's superb site about Web 2.0 and such things. John is here and very dedicated to providing a great 2.0 resource, though I think he's got a tiger by the tail and may need to choose between that and his day job (consulting) soon.

SpeedGeeks / Mashup Contest entries:
#1 Dave - StrikeIron.com
Dave Brooks - Bungee Labs
Robert - FlySpy - Airfare Search
Yogi Benjamin - GoodStorm.com.
? Mobido.com - mobile phone communities
Taylor - popbop.org - mp3 podcasts, concert info.
Edgeio.com
David - Rrove - social bookmarking with locations. Google maps.
Masterbeta ?
Mapbuilder.net - Google maps.
Universal submit - events data mashup with competitors to add events to eventful and OTHER sites....
Itunes + Ical Calendar - where and when for performers.
Bart and Frank - TrainCheck.com - Mobile phone application sends train times by phone. DC and SF.
CommerceNet Labs - MIFFY micro formats editor. Suckup vs Mashup.
Computer disposal mapping mashup.
#16 Brian - Online Training blogs? for runners, weight training, etc. Mashing with map/topography.
#17 Adrian - www.chicagocrime.org Created BEFORE the Google API. This guy is *good*.
Mosez - mobile ap for ?
Weatherbonk and Skibonk. Weather and maps and satellite stuff.
?
Jeff Marshall, FrozenBear Attendr for MashupCamp. Social interaction at gatherings.
Yoz? NING.com - fast social networking mashup maker
Yoz - UK Govt Data Mashups.
DudeWheresMyUsedCar.com - ebay and maps

Mashed

2006-02-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

Day ONE of Mashup Camp has ended with Yahoo Martinis at the Computer Museum. They were great but I'd have to give Microsoft the kudo of the day for hosting an espresso coffee bar for the duration of the conference - outstanding and the only way I could prepare my brain to absorb the number of companies, mashups, ideas, and APIs flooding this infospace.

This open conference format is very nice. It only took about 30 minutes for the group to pull together an excellent agenda that certainly was comparable to what I've seen at other conferences, and tended to involved the audience to a much greater degree. As organizers Gold and Berlin indicated (and we all have noted) the coffee breaks and bar time are often the most productive part of a conference, so why not build the conference around this and the participants rather than hope to anticipate what they'll need/want/listen to.

I'd have pix if my Treo was synching, which it's NOT....

For details on the sessions go HERE

Are Mashups Napsterization....backwards?

2006-02-20T16:43:00.000-08:00

I can't get over how hard the big guys are working to feed handy APIs to developers at no charge and with little obligation. In the session I'm sitting in right now, led by A9 search which has basically turned over the search key to the vault to developers. Good for them. Disruptive and destabilizing = more fun, opportunity, and innovation.

I get the feeling from developers that people are tired of the current broad, scattered search model. A9's suggesting, I think very correctly, that the future is in vertical search where specialists in various niches use open search models.

Mashup Camp is rocking..

2006-02-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

Kudos to all associated with Mashup Camp here in (chilly) Mountain View CA. This "unconference" has a lot of the normal conference perks but has brought a lot more attendee input to the table by using the "open conference" format. This morning attendees proposed sessions and there was no shortage of great ideas and themes. I'm sitting in the "Monetization" session now enjoying a spirited discussion of how/what/when can you monetize the mashups and how this may impact your relationship to the API providers, many of whom are represented in this session.

Mashups

2006-02-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

Programmable Web is a great resource for more information about Mashups and at the link has a GREAT summary of APIs available to mashup developers.

I'm very anxious to get going on my own mashup which is fairly simple but I think will be helpful and popular as part of my growing Highways.TV / Highways.com project. I'm taking the camera images from Caltrans and some other sources and mapping them to CA roadways along with weather information. Caltrans does this for some districts but not others, and confusingly Caltrans cams are sorted by district rather than roads. Districts may have some bureaucratic logic but travelers are not necessarily going to confine their interest in that fashion. Oregon's TripCheck system is a much stronger presentation of cam info than Caltrans'. Weatherbonk is doing a nice job integrating weather, maps, and some cam info but they are really short on traffic cams and the site seems to be clunky and slow in the display - though I'm not clear if they are simply suffering from popularity and can upgrade to speed things up or if the mashup itself is burdened by too many calls out to the data sources. I'm noting that Caltrans real time TV cams are hard to get to display and the lag time is so great even on a fast connection that it's not a very useful feature even when it does display.

Mashup Camp

2006-02-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you bring together in Silicon Valley:
* A bunch of API, food, and party providers like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Amazon
* Hundreds of people interested in Mashup technologies, and wazzup with web 2.0
* Yahoo and MSN's top blogging dudes Scoble and Zawodny ?

The first Mashup Camp "The unconference for the uncomputer"

Thanks to what must have been a somewhat tireless effort over the past several months by David Berlind and Doug Gold with help from the Friends of Mashup Camp, the event will showcase many new enabling technologies like mapbuilder and ning
along with many mashups to be unveiled at the conference in competion for the first prize - a supercharged Sun Microsystems server delivered to the winners by no less than the president of Sun.

I'll try to post some pictures on Monday of the event.

Brrrreeeport

2006-02-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

When Scoble suggested the Brrreeeport experiment I really thought he'd just made up the term, but Brrreeeport Maine really looks like a happening place!

Leyte

2006-02-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

The news is just coming in about a mudslide on the Phillippines island of "Leyte" that appears to have killed almost everybody in a village of over 1700 people. Only a handful have been rescued as of this morning with 1718 still missing.

Unfortunately there's very little to do in a case like this in terms of "helping". Money and volunteers are not a key issue here. Contrast this with the Tsunami where the world rose to the occasion in spectacular form and donated enough funds to completely rebuild the devastated areas (this according to the Charlie Rose interveiew with the the UN guy in charge). However he noted in that interview that the Pakistan Earthquake, which potentially may affect comparable numbers of people, has only a fraction (I think he said 20%) of the relief money needed.

I think the single most profound contribution to humankind would/will be to find a way to successfully "market" and spread the word in a huge way the simple notion that raising the standard of living for the world's poor is 1) fun, educational, empowering and 2) in the best interest of even the most selfish rich person. Ironically it's becoming the wealthy and powerful who often articulate this case the best. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Pierre Omidyar are among the wealthiest and most influential voices of the American business elite and they'd all agree.

Unfortunately most mainstream media is now mired in the commercialization and monetization of the news and is no longer a friend to clear thinkers, preferring to discuss Scott Peterson's case more than the fact that thousands die *daily* from easily preventable diseases. Major networks largely ignore much of this incredible story - a story which may lead to the most dramatic changes ever seen by humankind as globalization and human rights start to shine in even the darkest corners of a challenged world.

You busy?

2006-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've almost become obsessed with the implications of almost everybody saying how busy they are and *really thinking* they *really are* busy.

But they aren't . YOU ARE NOT BUSY! Sure, you are OCCUPIED with activities and sure a FEW people out there really are busy, but most folks should more honestly report "I'm prioritizing stupid assed things that I hold dear" than complain about how little time they have to get things done.

There are 24 hours in a day and only about 10 of them are taken up by "necessary" things like sleep, dressing, making meals, and errands required for life (groceries). Conventional workers will have another 8-9 hours for work and commute M-F. If you have KIDS then you have more things that are reasonably considered "necessary", but most kid related errands do NOT stem from necessity, rather from choices and preferences and .... stupid assed priorities that are generally not strategically designed to save time. Also, in many families the caregiver for the kids does NOT work full time and/or things like daycare provide some relief from errands.

I'm looking for time and motion studies to see what it is we do during all that extra time we have on our hands. I suspect TV is the big "time eater" for many and for onliners silly things like blogging or news searches.

I'm NOT saying doing things you hold dear is a bad thing - I just wish people would stop acting like they are "prisoners" of their terribly busy life rather than prisoners to their silly assed priorities.

Buying text links - Jill Whalen's excellent summary of the topic

2006-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

I'm reprinting, with her permission, Jill Whalen's excellent summary of what's up with purchasing text links because it's one of the best pieces I've seen on this very important SEO topic. My view is that it's no longer a good idea to purchase links due to the risks often articulated by Matt at Google.

Jill Whalen: Buying text links. It's all the rage.

Buying text links. It's all the rage.

Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?

These are the questions on webmasters' and search marketers' minds. What follows is my take on buying text links. There's nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people's sites are none of the search engines' business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don't need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads. So what's the big deal?

Here's where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I'm sure, and no big news to the search
engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site's popularity for years.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do -- but so do search engines.

To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site
useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true
at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean
something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between
webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for
a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really
gotten complicated for them.

Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today's text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you're going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That's more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.

Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it's not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites -- especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable "footprints" behind in the code. It would be no trouble at all for a search engine to do a little digging into what the latest footprints
are, seek out all pages that have them, and simply not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty, mind you. It would just be a way for the search engines to count only votes and not ads. Your ads would still be worthwhile for the exposure and direct traffic they bring, but not for providing you with link popularity. So although your site wouldn't technically be penalized, its rankings could drop if it was dependent upon the link popularity of paid links.

For those of you who don't believe the search engines can or would do this, you obviously haven't been paying attention over the years. What do you think every major update at Google has been about? They haven't been specifically about purchased link ads, but they have been about finding a subset of pages that all have similar characteristics and no longer allowing
them to count the way they used to count towards rankings. Which means every page using the technique in question suddenly finds their rankings have dropped like a rock.

It's not a matter of *if* this will happen with paid text link ads, but *when*. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we're going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you're buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn't really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time. It's no big deal if you're getting real traffic from your ads, or if you're simply using them to jumpstart your SEO campaign. It's going to be a problem only if your livelihood depends on buying or selling text link ads to boost link popularity.
Jill
Reprinted with permission

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company, Search Creative, LLC.

Wealthiest Foundations

2006-02-16T08:04:00.000-08:00

Interesting below on wealthiest foundations in the world.

Bill and Melinda Gates sure rule the philanthropic roost and they put their time and money to great use. They deserve a LOT more credit for this than they get, and it is an outrage that the news reports so infrequently on the massive efforts by many foundations to alleviate poverty and assist with education and development.

The so called "news industry" has become more of an impediment than a facilitator of progress in this challenged world.

Wealthiest Foundations from Wikipedia:

2004 $ US:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle, Washington $26.8B
Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis, Indiana $10.8B
Ford Foundation of New York City, New York $10.6B
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Princeton, New Jersey $7.8B
W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan $6.3B
David and Lucile Packard Foundation of Los Altos, California $6.0B
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation of Menlo Park, California $6.0B
Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation of San Francisco, California $4.9B
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago, Illinois $4.5B
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation $4.5B
Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania $4.1B
Rockefeller Foundation of New York City, New York $3.2B
Onassis Foundation $2.1B

brrreeeport brrreeport !

2006-02-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

Scoble made me do this. It's an effort to gather a bunch of blogs at Technorati around the term brrreeeport. His blog is down Tue night and I'm wondering if the brrreeeport experiment has overwhelmed his server. I doubt it.

Self Interest Part DEUX - CORRECTED!

2006-02-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

Based on his reply and reputation as a mathemetician, the author of the of Search Index Sizes study has done nothing wrong and the study is NOT yet finished. He's removing the preliminary report from the web today but will get me the link when it's done:

Rajeev Motwani of Stanford to me on Feb 16:
This is an extremely preliminary report of our work that was only supposed to be
circulated amongst our immediate research group for their comments and criticism.
The results reported there are not yet in a form appropriate for public consumption
and definitely will change as we conduct more precise experiments ...

Earlier:
Just as I was validating my concerns about a self interested real estate agent protecting her commission on a home deal I came across this study of Google index sizes <<>>

According to Yahoo's Tim Converse in the cited blog, the lead author is an "early Google investor". The increasing number of relationships of academics to the companies they study , let alone may help launch, should be of great concern to those of us who'd like studies to be done in a strict and objective academic environment.

Here's my note to Stanford:

Is it true that the author of this paper is "an early Google investor"? This was reported in the comment section of this blog:
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=113

If yes he should disclose this fact on studies like this that may have a bearing on the value of Google, or is it Stanford's policy to simply overlook the relationships of professors to companies that they study?

I in NO WAY mean to suggest he's biased in this study, though the mention of "high PageRank" bias may explain Google's spectacular showing vis a vis MS and Yahoo search which are thought by most to factor PageRank (aka query independent rank) far less significantly than Google.

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

2006-02-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

Sure, I'm joining the fun of the v7ndotcom-elursrebmem SEO contest. I don't expect much success but I do want to explore what people are up to which is best done by ... playing the game.

I've set up a blog with that title because I think a blog post is more likely to do well than a website v7ndotcom elursrebmem entry, but I'll be linking to the blog from several high PR pages at my sites. However, Jim Westergren's doing well now at the number ONE spot with a simply subdirectory of his main, low PR site. Who'd have thought that?

The two guys I'm very interested to watch are master SEOs Dave Naylor and Greg Boser, both of whom have been known to tip a black hat or two. For me, their victory would suggest (strongly) that Google's claims about the virtues of white hat optimization are somewhat .... hollow.

IF Web 2.0 > Web 1.0 THEN Yahoo > Google

2006-02-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

I think the most profound issue in the online world right NOW is "where are we going with web 2.0"?

I hope to answer this question, at least in part, at next week's mashup camp
in the heart of Silicon Valley. The event is really shaping up to be great, with 300 developers, observers, and API providers coming in from all over the country to share ideas, mashups, and a few beers. In addition to API folks from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, ASK, and others two of my favorite bloggers will be there - Robert Scoble from MSN and Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo. These guys are among the best known tech evangelists for their companies and what THEY blog about is often what *everybody else* will be talking about in a few weeks or months.

Digg.com .... NOT FUNNY

2006-02-14T17:15:00.000-08:00

WoW, I posted my mildly offensive parody of the Dick Cheney shooting incident at Digg.com and you would have thought I'd shot somebody myself! Spam! cried most of the commenters, suggesting that it was inappropriate to place a parody in the pristine Digg "security" section.

I've never really understood the Digg.com community or, more importantly, why people think Digg is such a big deal. The stories are typically weak and of only minor significance.

I think my recent incident shows that that this particular niche is a very curious combination of people who 1) love trivial BS stories about silly but true things 2) Love gaming and junk computing items 3) are rabidly protective of keeping the community free from anything that does not fall into their subjective categorizations of what makes the world relevant.

So, the question is "can Digg scale to mainstream success?". I say probably NOT. In fact I think the challenge for Yahoo, which is adopting Web 2.0 like it found it's own long lost relative, is sorting the few wheaty items from the huge amount of chaff. If they succeed they could leapfrog Google which is offering more standard 2.0 fare like mapping APIs and minor mashup support. More about "is Web 2.0 > Web 1.0" later.

Cheney spies Osama in Texas backcountry, shoots to kill

2006-02-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

Impatient with the string of failures to catch Osama Bin Laden, Vice President Dick Cheney was overheard at a recent fundraiser saying "Hell, I'll go shoot that motherf** my damn self!"

Cheney headed to the backcountry of Texas on the advice of CIA analysts who confidently predicted Bin Laden would be hiding among a flock of Quail in the Texas underbrush.

"I would have bagged Bin Laden if that moron hadn't stepped in front of my damn gun!", Cheney said as he left the Texas hospital bedside of his former friend Harry Whittington.

v7ndotcom elursrebmem - a new leader

2006-02-13T07:28:00.000-08:00

Jim Westergren who is now FIRST in the v7ndotcom-elursrebmem SEO contest to see who can rank first for the term in Google by May 2006. I'm impressed with Jim's approach and his website which showcases several clever SEO experiments he's worked on over the past months. Clearly he's learned a great deal from them.

He claims and I have no reason to doubt he's using white hat tactics which is encouraging. As I've noted before it would be nice if SEO became "good site building" and saved all of us in the biz a great deal of time, expense, and anxiety trying to figure out quirks in the search routines.

Also tempting is to jump into this fray and plant links at the many high rank pages at QuickAid.com, OHWY.com, and my other smaller travel sites.

Love those Olympics

2006-02-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

The Olympics are always such a fantastic event to watch. Always inspiring is how in a world filled with conflict nations and their people come together peacefully in celebration of sport, competition, team and individual pinnacles of athletic achievement.

In this picture, human Nerve cells and fibers grow on a bioengineered scaffolding in the shape of the Olympic rings. Cool, though you've got to wonder if these scientists have a little too much lab time on their hands.

Self interest vs self awareness

2006-02-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

The idea that the level of self interest among people varies widely is less compelling to me than the idea that self awareness (of one's own self interest) varies widely. I want to write more about this but here's an example:

Yesterday I had a somewhat heated exchange with a real estate agent when I simply wanted to view a listing. She was pressing me for details on who would represent me and suggested if I didn't have anybody her brokerage could do it and her son would be my agent.

Right.... son is going to act in a totally unbiased way to help me lower the price on a house for which they'd be pulling in a 30k commission - and a LOWER commission if he gets the price down for me. I'm NOT suggesting he'd be dishonest or that this type of thing is not a normal part of the real estate game. It is, and I've yet to meet anybody in it that I think is *consciously* dishonest. But salespeople are almost NEVER introspective enough to see how their self interest colors their perception, thus they can honestly...act in a way that is broadly best considered somewhat dishonest.

What was incredible with her is that she didn't even seem all that interested in getting a serious offer out of me - rather in making sure I understood the commission should NOT be a negotiating point and that if I represented myself I would talk ONLY to her and NOT to the owners, MY OWN FUTURE NEIGHBORS! "I wasnt' aware of that law", I said, wondering how far she'd go with self serving suggestions. She admitted I could legally talk to them but said something like "it just isn't done".

Unfortunately I felt forced to get into details better left until later, I explained I wanted to represent myself and although she was not obligated to lower her commission (which the seller "pays" rather than me - though obviously as part of the total proceeds it's really NOT just the seller who is effectively involved in the commission) , I thought it would be a reasonable negotiating point. (yes, keeping total costs low is is in MY interest and I'm happy to admit it)

Whoops.... you would have thought I'd suggested she drown herself in the cute little pond on this property.

The irony is that she seemed more fiercely protective of the commision than interested in making the sale. I'm tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt though and assume she gets a lot of frivolous inquiries and therefore uses "does not like to use brokers" as an indicator of inexperience or insincerity (neither of which even remotely applies to me - I've bought several houses and I'm fairly savvy and serious about this property).

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

2006-02-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin abuse was a big topic some time ago. My feeling is that Limbaugh's drug abuse demonstrated both what a hypocrite he is for suggesting harsher treatment for others than for himself and more importantly how his hapless listeners were not outraged by the whole episode (though I suppose it's a bit silly to think people who swallow his BS are suddenly going to adopt great critical thinking skills). Loyalty in the face of a friend's challenges is a virtue, but loyalty in the face of deceit and hypocrisy is just...pitiful.

I should caveat this by saying I didn't follow the whole thing carefully - maybe, just maybe, he was repentant enough to fall into the category of Bill Clinton's Lewinsky apologies... of course Limbaugh never accepted Clinton's transgressions as anything but close to treason so ...

I'm bringing it up now mainly to test an experiment with blog postings. However, I will say his rantings are always fun and sometimes even educational, though I fear that people like Rush, Sean Hannity, and Mike Moore downgrade the national dialog to such an extent that there is a type of damage to the national psyche that is hard to define. One only needs to listen to GW and Tony Blair talk about the same exact thing to know that even at the pinnacle of global politics the American intellectual experience....leaves much to be desired.

OK, so now I have a post called "Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin". I shall follow with another post referencing this one using the phrase "Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin" and see if I show up for that in a few days. I also want to see if this post affects the listings for "Oxycontin", a valuable search term. I'm skeptical of that possibility for reasons I'll discuss later.

Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin, SEO, and this Blog

2006-02-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

Excuse me but I had to throw in two quick posts about Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin because I'm really curious about how blog posts are indexed by the search engines for "valuable" terms like those relating to drugs and also for fairly unique phrases such as Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

I've been amazed at how fast the content of this blog makes it into Google - usually within a few days. I was assuming that Google applied "nofollow" to the blog links - ie does not give them value in the web at large, but then I remembered that Matt Cutts changed his link to Jeremy Zawodny when JZ started showing paid links, and this indicates that links out from a blog really do matter.

So, if you follow this link you'll hear how I feel about Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin

I'm also providing this link to real info from the Federal Drug Administration about Oxycontin in case you need to know!

Be Alert! The World needs more Lerts.

2006-02-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

For a society what is the optimal distribution of "smart people" vs "creative people" vs "Lerts" vs "action people" etc?

I'd suggest in terms of innovation the number may actually be evolutionarily designed to be something like 1%. ie out of a hundred people only one of them is going to be really , really innovative.

If you have TOO FEW innovators in a society systems will stagnate, growth is hard, and perhaps most importantly the response to big changes in environment may be uninspired and thus lead to the extinction or decline of the society.

HOWEVER I think you can also have TOO MUCH innovation, leading to a glut of good but experimental ideas without enough regular steady folks to implement them.

That said, I'm not sure there are many examples of the "too much innovation" problem because we are a stupid primate and this problem of too much innovation is NOT a pressing one, especially with all the recent concerns over creationism and cartoons that sound more like those of the 12th rather than the 21st century.

Spam those search engines? I recommend....no.

2006-02-08T23:02:00.000-08:00

The usually spot-on Greg Boser (without a doubt one of the top SEOs in the biz) poses an odd directive to the big brands - spam the search engines!

I don't follow Greg's logic because the "perfect storm" for Google is spam from a big brand that allows them to kick them out and force them to use aggressive PPC "while we sort out your problems".

I'm sure this type of "extortion" is NOT practiced directly (though I saw evidence of something like this by Inktomi before Yahoo cleaned up the practice) However there is considerable monetary incentive to leave SOME of the big sites OUT (though not all or relevancy is too compromised).

Over time I think Search engines will actually crack down MORE, not less, on spammy practices because they compromise the index AND cracking down creates the most revenue positive environment for them which is me ONLY finding BMW at the TOP of the PAID listings.

Where's the down side for Google in being punative?

However, SUPPORTING Greg's thinking is the recent BMW spam incident he's referencing where BMW was back in the index before you could say "whoops, we didn't meant to do that Matt!"

all we’ll get is a tiny slap on the wrist to show the world that the particular search engine is serious about web spam. And once our public scolding is completed, we will instantly be allowed to cut to the front of the confessional line.

Still, you must balance risks and rewards and I see little reason to think that agressive WHITE hat SEO is less likely to work than black hat which is *almost certainly* going to create eventual problems, so I say "just say no!"

Superbowl Ads only $80,000! ....per second.

2006-02-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

Last year when Godaddy.com ran superbowl ads and owner Bob Parson's blogged about it I was hoping it would at least shed a big light on the ongoing debate about whether Superbowl spots are worth the enormous cost. I think it was about 70k per second for a 30 sec spot last year. This year it was 80k.

But since that Godaddy commercial was so controversial, featuring scantily clad model Candace Michelle as the "Godaddy Girl" it generated huge buzz before and after the game, and Parsons' insisted it was a spectacular investment, which is hard to dispute when the 2? 30 sec spots were run probably thousands of times in other TV venues and the commercial became "the ad" for that game.

Not so this year with a very tame follow up commercial Parsonts (cleverly) submitted many other far sexier versions which were shot down. These are running at places like Google video and probably are getting a LOT of play time.

Still, I doubt he's going to see an increase of 4.8 million in biz for this investment, which (based on last year's percentage that he shared) represents about 20% of his entire marketing budget for the year.

The conventional wisdom in advertising is that "brand awareness" plays a very key role and justifies a huge investment in superbowl-type advertising that raises that awareness. I've always been skeptical and favored marketing alternatives such as online pay per click advertising and website expansions, which I am almost certain would impact bottom lines to a much greater extent than offline ads in all but a handful of exceptions that really prove the rule - offline advertising is usually a waste of money. That emperor has no clothes.

AOL and Yahoo: "You get the mail and we get the money"

2006-02-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm starting to feel naive about trusting the new age corporations to actually give a sh** about users. AOL and Yahoo are now going to charge companies to bypass their filter in order to solicit users with mail they are unlikely to want. AOL and YAHOO that would be the USERS that have made you successful rich companies!

There appears to be a lot of rationalization going on, and I certainly agree you need to make compromises in business, but I'm no longer convinced that the dialog about "corporate responsibility" is trumping the marketing and revenue and SNEAKY BASTARD considerations, even at places like Google which claim to make that a key operating principle and I think really DID make it a key principle....in the past.

As many have pointed out there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with the ruthless biz first, biz last approach - some would say it's the approach that has made America number ONE. I'd agree that a combination of ruthess capitalism and caring at the corporate level have created our thriving entrepreneur-friendly fast and frenzied business climate, and that on balance this is good for most people in the USA and even most people OUTSIDE of the USA by powering up a thriving global economy which feeds more people than a crappy (or socialistic) global economy ever could.

But why be so hypocritical about this and pretend you care about the users more than the cash? I actually would be a lot more respectful of these money plays if you said "screw the users, we want the money!". But I'm asked too often to give you the benefit of the doubt when you sacrifice my needs for yours. That's over now.

First Google buys a stake in AOL and gives them and other big advertisers preferential treatment in a variety of venues, then it's Yahoo, MSN, and Google helping China censor politics, and now Yahoo and AOL are going to charge businesses to spam people with offers. For a penny you can dodge the filters and get to the users.

The problem is not so much the charging or even the increase in the amount of marginally relevant crap mail we'll see from this. Rather it's that as USUAL the big guys are sacrificing user satisfaction for money WITHOUT enough respect or recognition of the rold of the user in the big picture.

I can only hope this is at the great peril of the big companies.

I'm looking forward to a sort of user/publisher revolution where people start to recognize that commercial considerations are driving the web in irrelevant ways and we need to take back the web which should remain by the people and for the people, with the people reaping the benefits of the new medium more than the company best poised to exploit us.

End of the Spear, a superb film, don't miss it.

2006-02-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw "End of the Spear" which is a simply brilliant film about the complexity of life, the clash of cultures, the heroic passion of missionaries, and more. I don't think I've ever seen a film that dealt as honestly with the portrayal of a very violent native culture, the Waodani of Ecuador.

This is no "Dances with Wolves" and is inappropriate for a sensitive child - there are several disturbing (though not all that graphically violent) scenes of brutal spearings and machete killings as the Waodani and another tribe engage in the cycle of violence that brings them to the brink of extinction.

Like "Black Robe", another brilliant culture conflict masterpiece, this film chooses to honestly portray the disturbing brutal violence that characterized some aspects of native American life rather than censoring those things offensive to our modern sets of sensibilities.

I'm not a religious person but I find the courage of missionaries inspiring as they brave many hardships and dangers to bring their vision to others. In one of this film's many great moments the son and narrator of the film asks his father if he'll defend himself if attacked after first contact with the tribe. "We can't shoot the Waodani" says the father, because they are not yet ready for heaven and we are. Later this choice must be made and the missionaries stay true to their faith.

The film is based on a true story about the Waodani people of Ecuador and their intersection with two generations of missionaries.

There's also documentary about the real people in the film called "Beyond the Gates" I have yet to see.

It's about people....real people....

2006-02-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

Ultimately the internet is about people or it's about nothing at all.

At first glance I think many offline folks would think it odd to see a post of the passing of Jeremy Z's Grandmother on his blog - one of the web's most prominent. But as the posting itself and the heartfelt comments indicate this is a fine statement of respect and affection for a dear member of the family.

Our ability to blend and connect people, emotion, respect and affection with the online tools will define not only our business success, it has begun to define us as successful human beings.

Databases of intentions part XXXIV

2006-02-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

THIS is pretty neat.

It's a chart that shows the number of times "Google" is mentioned in blogs at Technorati and you can use any word to see how the blogging world is addressing the issue.

Try Miers, then Alito.

Battelle talks about Google's database of intentions that is big, growing, and could have monstrous implications for humanity. It's not just Google - it's ... everywhere!

Is Search Engine Optimization art or science? Is it dying or dead?

2006-02-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization, almost by definition, implies that there is a difference between what is good for PEOPLE to see and what is good for ranking in SEARCH ENGINES.

It's certainly true that there is a difference. As anybody who has searched and surfed knows all too well - you often don't find what you need and often find things you'll NEVER need.
It's not clear to me that things are improving as huge amounts of irrelevant and junky content continues to find it's way despite valiant efforts by very sharp teams of spam fighters at places like Google.

However, Search Engine Optimization as "gaming" the engines to give your own results rather than more appropriate ones is dying fast and may soon be dead. Good SEOs emphasize the importance of quality content, natural linkings, good site navigation and tags, and other basics, and many no longer even try to "spoof" results with manipulative schemes which can lead to penalties by the search engines.

Less spoofing and more quality is a good thing as it will allow all of us in publishing to work on better content and user experience. At the point where good SEO is simply creating a great website the entire concept of SEO starts to lose it's value as a marketing framework.

I read and know a lot of REALLY good SEO people - some of the best in the world are regulars at the WebmasterWorld and SES conference series, but it's hard to separate some of the fact from fiction since they feed their kids by promoting the idea that SEO is still a critical piece of advanced internet strategy rather than a dying art.

What is very clear and rarely disputed by anybody is that, aside from the basics (which you'll find HERE with some great technical clarifications HERE and HERE, masterful SEO is art not science and may be a dying art.

That's a good thing as it will allow us to work on better content and user experience.

At the point where good SEO is simply creating a great website I'm not sure the concept of SEO has much value at all.

据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。

2006-01-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

This has been popping up a lot lately at Google.cn, Google's new search engine for China:

据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。

You don't understand? I don't either but I'm told that it basically means "these results are censored" and it is the disclaimer for Google as they post results that have been modified according to specs provided by the Government of China.

I have not been as critical as most of Google's decision to censor results for several reasons. The best have been articulated by Bill Gates at Microsoft. Gates echoes many of the sentiments expressed in this official post by Google about Google Censorship:

Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel for Google notes China's
... embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty ...

China critics give these accomplishments short shrift. Life comes before liberty, and to enjoy both you must have adequate living conditions. It's not clear to me that it's our right or our job to tell China how to meet the needs of the world's largest population.

McLaughlin continues:
But how is that full access most likely to be achieved? We are convinced that the Internet, and its continued development through the efforts of companies like Google, will effectively contribute to openness and prosperity in the world. Our continued engagement with China is the best (perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there.

I'm not as optimistic as Google about the future of censorship in China but I'm also tired of hearing the shrill commentary implying that we've "perfected" free speech here in the USA. "All the free speech money can buy" is hardly a perfect model for a free and open democracy.

Sure, a thoughful speaker has the right to challenge or discuss any political point of view, but even the finest and most intelligent debates are (usually) lost in the din of "news" about celebrity crimes and propaganda by the celebrity spokespeople for the mindless.

Luckily the internet is a far more powerful distributive mechanism than most reckon and the spread of information will flow past most of the roadblocks very quickly. This is happening in the USA thanks to websites and blogs that challenge conventional wisdom and the abundant commercial forms of speech that effectivly censor debate and it's starting to happen in China as people learn to beat the filters and access the "free and open" global internet. China will soon see that censorship will likely have the unintended consequence of focusing attention on the very topics they seek to hide.

The eyes of the dot com storms

2006-01-28T11:36:00.000-08:00

When you are involved with something on a regular basis - in my case internet publishing and marketing stuff - it's hard to determine the extent to which THE world revolves around this stuff as opposed to just YOUR world.

These days it sure feels like I'm a small part of the global storm - now a hurricane - which is growing in intensity, sweeping away old business models like so much straw, and reshaping the way Governments, business, and most importantly people grow, thrive, and sometimes fail in this brave new Xth wave world. Hey - I coined Toffler and Huxley in the same sentence!

Davos' theme this year is creativity and (naturally?) the top idea about the theme came from Google's Marissa Mayer. More about that later...

One little eye of one of the big hurricanes usually called "Web 2.0" is the mashup camp coming in February. I'm very excited about it because I agree with many who suggest that mashups represent a significant new trend in online activity. Blogs and mashups are putting users and small time programmers back in control in powerful and unexpected ways.

Most importantly big online programming behemoths - especially Yahoo and Amazon but also Google and MSN, are facilitating the mashup frenzy with increasingly robust APIs. These often involve mixing maps and other data, but in the case of Amazon they are pretty much releasing the search engine application itself which should lead to a flurry of rich search mashup applications.

Who's going to mashup camp? Yahoo's top blogger JZ will be there, as will MSN's top blogger Scoble and many others from Google, Yahoo, MSN, media. But most important may be the unknown little geeks working away in their garage on the next big idea. Giving away the prize for the best mashup will be no less than the president of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz.

The big guys understand that the little guys are making a big difference. I'm cool with that.

Google

2006-01-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

Google just can't seem to keep out of the big spotlight whether you are talking stocks, global economy, politics from Davos, DOJ subpoenas, and most currently censorship of content at Google.cn, the chinese edition of Google.

Regarding China Google censorship:

What intrigues me is that there is no doubt that the triumverate who rules Google -founders Brin and Page and CEO Schmidt, are excellent guys and their intentions are in line with what most would consider legitimate, in fact lofty, global goals.

To think otherwise is simply to fail to pay attention to the way Page and Brin designed the site and the company, how Google got big, and how it has stayed a global leader. Google's top blog informal "spokesengineer" Matt Cutt's follows the general tendency of Google to be very introspective and even posts addresses of sites critical of Google.

But something is out of whack when they are fighting the DOJ's mundane request for search data yet caving to the Chinese Government's censorship requirements.

I do think onliners generally make way too much of censorship, which we ALL practice in many forms in many contexts. A dirty joke would be fine at a football party, yet it would be an abusive act if told by the same person in a kindergarten class. If a teacher was fired for telling their kindergarten class dirty jokes most would have no objection. This is a form of censorship and it's perfectly legitimate.

Political censorship is anathema to democracy and Americans are rightly very protective of free speech, especially in the political context. But it's hardly absent here. American right and left wing seem determined to brand their opponents as treasonous or deserving of impeachment or worse.

It's an effort to shout down or chill debate and it, too, can be a form of censorship, especially when those who control the means of speech have hidden agendas. Fox News spouts even the most mindless conservative tripe while giving short shrift to intelligent liberal points of view. Fox's Roger Ailes claim they are just helping to "balance" a "liberal media" but this is fodder for the mindless. Any clear thinker would agree that *Fox censors liberals*. That said, pretty much all media outlets censor Nazis, KKK, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, and many other points of view for many reasons.

So, where is the high road? I sure don't think Google's found it, but that may just means they are in good company with the rest of us.

My Four Things

2006-01-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've been "tagged" by uberBlogger YahooMeister Jeremy Zawodny to share "My four things":

Four jobs I've had in my life:

Short order breakfast cook
Grad Student Researcher, Southern Oregon University
Webmaster/Online Marketing
Travel Internet Publisher Guy

Four movies I can watch over and over:

2001 A Space Odyssey
Lord of the Rings I
Hero
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Four TV shows I love to watch:

Charlie Rose
American Experience
NOVA
Boston Legal

Four places I've been on vacation:

Kilauea
Mount Katahdin, Maine
Chartres
Westminster Abbey

Four of my favorite dishes:

Shrimp Scampi
Steak and Potatoes
Chow Mein
Imitation Tupperware

Four websites I visit daily:

Four places I would rather be right now:

2506 A.D.
Nanjing, China
Indigo Girls Concert
Half Dome, Yosemite

Four bloggers I am tagging. I'm skeptical they'll play BUT there are always unforeseen consequences to stopping chain-like viral memetic things. If Jeremy Z can share the mundane details that reflect on one's greater world view... so can ... you.

Brief flickers 'o fame

2006-01-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I thought I was going to get quoted in none other than the Wall Street Journal, but the online story doesn't mention me at all. What am I going to tell my parents NOW!?

They still seem to wonder how I make a living online and I sure could have used the credibility boost from WSJ.

I'd been interviewed about my take on del.icio.us and digg.com and social networking and tagging in general because I'd blogged about how I thought they were cool, and then after using them thought they were overrated. Jessica Vascellaro of WSJ found me on technorati.

But this is some consolation - a few weeks ago I ordered a copy of David Vise's "The Google Story". I was checking out the pictures and there was Matt Cutts talking to a group at SES. Looking closer I could see.... me among the listeners.

Guess I'll just be living in the shadow of fame.

The Demise of Tech TV, or why China is the next global tech powerhouse....

2006-01-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

There used to be a neat show on cable called "Tech TV", which catered to geeks of all ages and discussed computer news, hardware and software items of interest to computer people, and more.

The show's been effectively replaced, or perhaps cancelled in favor of, shows about computer gaming. This is interesting and reflects the growing challenges of a computer generation that is more interested in simulated chain saw massacres than programming and technology.

Yes, there are many who like BOTH these things, but forces have converged now that make it unnecessary to know any programming or hardware skills to become an accomplished gamer.
This was NOT the case in the past when the community needed to do more programming, hacking, and hardware modifications to get things going right.

More importantly gaming is more fun and we have a new leisure class that appears not to understand the relationship of work to fun. Exceptions? Of course there are. I think many of the tech elite are doing fine in all respects. HOWEVER who will be the NEW tech elite - the guys who are spending 60 hours per week playing Halo and the rest watching TV? I think things are changing in dangerous ways.

This is more of the stuff discussed in the brilliant "The World is Flat" by Tom Friedman. Noting the seriousness with which Chinese and Indian Engineers take on the challenge of the new global technologies he observes that in China Bill Gates is "Britney Spears". In America? .... Britney Spears is Britney Spears.

...Ooops, we did it again...

GOOG 2006 = YHOO 1999 ?

2006-01-23T16:58:00.000-08:00

I think Google is a great company but I simply don't get the stock price. Not sure if I'm in good or bad company pretty much agreeing with Henry Blodget on this. He's the Wall Street insider who can't give stock advice anymore, but gives some REALLY interesting comments in his new blog.

Interesting to me is the fact the ultimate Google insiders felt that $85 was about the "right number" for the IPO and the fact nothing really fundamental has changed since that time unless I missed something online. Of course they have great earnings from ads as the online ad market swells, but Google knew this would happen even if Wall Street was slow on the uptake of the implication of massively superior ROI from online advertising.

This sure reminds me of the Yahoo bubble of 1999.

Also interesting is the degree to which Yahoo can affect Google's revenue by manipulating the revenue YAHOO shares from it's Publisher Network which is in beta now.

What if Yahoo decided to pay out a 100% rev share for 6 months as an incentive for Adsense people to jump the Google ship? Google would see a HUGE drop in revenues. Simply HUGE - Adsense was 43% of total Google revenues for 3rd Quarter of 2005!

If this happened Google profit would not be nearly as strongly affected as revenues because most of this revenue goes back to publishers. 78.5 pecent of the total to be exact, thought the rev share varies among publishers. However I suspect even the savvy street folks don't really understand where all this money has been coming from, and would be alarmed to see it dry up as suddenly as it appeared.

Yahoo could keep up this pressure for some time since they don't get nearly as much from their publisher network.

Would it be legal for Yahoo to short Google and then announce this move? I assume the SEC would say "NOT LEGAL" and this would wind up as a complex case of stock price manipulation, but in any case what's Yahoo going to do with revenue share?

Indications at the conferences and from my read of the company are ...... they'll keep them about the same as Google so both Yahoo and Google can turn a good buck, but seems to me if so Google's buck is not going to grow fast enough to justify current pricing.

Are blogs bogging down?

2006-01-23T16:21:00.000-08:00

Blogging has become the rage both as spectator sport and participatory democracy. Yet problematic is today's news that the Washington Post has stopped accepting comments at their blog. Why? Too much junk and too much abusive posting.

Challenges facing blogs are many: they include Commercial Challenges (people use them in junky ways to promote commercial stuff such as setting up a blog called "cell-phones-for- sale" with little or not content except ads. Also blog posts are used to promote linking to sites. The widespread use of the nofollow attribute and nofollow aspects to blogging helped reduce this SEO tactic but it's still going on with affects that appear to vary depending on search engine and blog.

Also a challenge is the Popularity of blogs. Even good bloggers waste a lot of digital ink, and it's hard to sort through the posts at millions of blogs to get the good stuff. Tools like Digg.com help sort the mess but as noted before leave much to be desired as search tools.

My biggest beef with blogs is the one-sided nature of the blog. Most readers are thoughtful people, and I doubt they'll continue to put much time into commenting unless a way can be found to raise the prominence of good commentary. But this of course makes the Commercial challenge an even bigger threat to quality and can lead to actions like the Washington Post's comment ban.

So where's it all headed? I think both websites and blogs are moving in the direction of serving increasingly specific niches of interest rather than the web at large. The popularity of tech centric sites like Digg.com and Technorati support this, as does the popularity of a very targeted blogs like "breaking search news" over at John Battelle's place.

More about Privacy, Free Speech, and the oxymoron known as Fox "News".

2006-01-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

More about Privacy, Free Speech, and the oxymoron known as Fox "News".

I've been surprised by how complacent the Religious right has been about online porn, so maybe the battle over censoring porn won't be coming soon, though I think this DOJ action is the shot over the bow by GW, Gonzales et al.

I'm hoping the online community handles self-censorship better than the movie industry or, far worse, video game industry. I'm not optimistic about it though and expect a lot of chest thumping in the near future as people line up to be for/against "porn"/"free speech" depending on their points of view.

I think there are several interesting forces involved in the coming privacy debate war:

First is the basic freedom of speech, which we value highly in America but pretend to value more than we actually do. Money talks loudly in America as the recent D.C. lobby scandals and huge money politics make clear. Simply prohibiting paid speech obviously won't work, but money threatens the quality of free speech more than any other factor and far more than any Govt in this country ever will.

Another force at play is the battle between right wing and left wing ideologues. Called the "culture wars" by the conservatives, both right and left claim the high ground on freedom issues and speak mostly to those who can't think for themselves. Meanwhile the polarization dumbs down many of the issues to a state of irrelevance.

Always ironic is how quickly those of any political persuasion are to "shout down" or even violently repress competing speech. We've got right wing entertainer-zealots like Anne Coulter and Sean Hannity dispicably making the case that many forms of criticism of the Govt are "treason", while their left wing counterparts like Michael Moore pander propagandistic nonsense to the gullible. Both deflect from the spirited and intelligent debates we should be having about many polarizing issues like Iraq, massive Govt overspending, and helping save the developing world from itself.

Other challenges to the quality of free speech in America are the rise of the right-wing commercial propaganda arm of the Govt (aka "Fox News") and the administration's policy of reporter "embedding" which has cleverly created a system where reporters will tend to report favorably on the American war effort without any censorship at all. You are hardly going to be overly critical of the guys who are protecting you from untimely death. (yes, this is a simplification - a strong counter-argument is the world class reporting of formerly embedded Kevin Sites).

Although it used to be true that there were more "liberals" than "conservatives" in the media they were far, far, far more objective than the media stars of today who are entertainers before patriots and patriots before journalists. It also appears to me FOX may have reversed the trend leading to a net "conservative" voice in overall American journalism, but more importantly has taken greater strides than any liberal ever dreamed in morphing "journalistic objectivity" into "my country, right or wrong".

Another significant force in play in the privacy debate is the fact few mainstream folks understand how the internet works and how sophisticated an average 15 year old is about finding online material. If every teacher and mother of a teen in America did a handful of image searches for highly objectionable porn terms you'd see a groundswell of new legislation, but few teachers and even fewer parents have any sense of what's up online.

It won't be pretty but it sure will be interesting...

Google and all the free speech money can buy

2006-01-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

Scott , over at Matt's blog, writes:

...I am disgusted by some of the comments above. How can anyone who values freedom and privacy not give their full support to Google for doing what amounts to be a courageous thing? ...

I'm struck by how myopic most onliners are about this debate and I replied:

Scott - a thoughtful post but one sided - very odd that you seem to think most of the comments support DOJ's request - onliners all over the web are very much in favor of Google, though I'd guess that most mainsteam folks and the court will wind up supporting DOJ's position and will say "what specific privacy right is violated here?".

The world is complex. You seem to fear Govt abuses more than commercial abuses. My view is that we have far more commercial abuses of info than our (inefficient) Govt could ever dream about. The community has created a very open and virtually uncensored online environment and we better get used to Govt and society at large being threatened by this openness.
------------ end Joe comment-------

The USS No Privacy is sailing in a harbor near you!

2006-01-20T19:03:00.000-08:00

ABC's coverage at Googleplex was weak tonight and Sergey Brin probably did not sway skeptics with his suggestion that we should support Google's refusal to comply with DOJ info request because we would not like the Govt sending agents to come and snoop around our house for playboy magazines. "This is Roberto Gonzales - DROP THAT CENTERFOLD and Welcome to Gauntanamo you helper of the Axis of EvilDoers!"

ABC did briefly interview the insightful John Battelle who is also hosting some of the best breaking news and info about this story at his blog. John's the best Google watcher out there and he really is the guy that seems to know....everybody!

Many are arguing, speciously, that onliners should enjoy total privacy protection.

Does Google have an obligation to turn over info they uncover that clearly indicates a plot to destroy New York? Of course they do - probably even without getting a subpoena.

The USS No-Privacy sailed years ago and we have at best only a modest level of protection. ISPs, Google, NSA, and many related entities are watching.

I'm more concerned with how this is used and establishing legal protections from unreasonable USE of my data rather than worrying about impossible restrictions on COLLECTION of my data.

Google vs Uncle Sam vs Privacy vs YOU

2006-01-20T18:36:00.000-08:00

Lots of superficial reporting of the Google vs DOJ subpoena to turn over search information. I think the Gov't is less interested in the info, which they could obtain elsewhere, than in setting the precedent of making search snooping legal for them to do on a routine basis.

Unlike many onliners, I think the type of online privacy held dear by many is 1) not all that sacred in the first place and 2) an unrealistic expectation in the modern online world. Many don't realize the extent to which your financial, health, education, political, and other information are already available for review by anyone with enough money or cleverness to dig up the stuff.

For me the concern is less about collecting info than how that information is used. For that reason I'm as concerned about commercial abuses of the info (e.g. a search engine could notice my "digital camera" search and direct me to sponsor camera sites without telling me they've manipulated the results)

I think developments at Google and elsewhere have quickly eclipsed the ability of mainstream media to shed much light on the issues at hand.

Build the path where you walk

2006-01-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

A design idea I've always liked is sometimes used at universites and other large campuses.

Rather than build sidewalks where they think the people will walk, they simply wait until people walking around creates many paths from place to place, and build the sidewalks there.

I think this principle has much broader application than sidewalks. With my new office I'm trying to wait on setting up some things until I can tell from experience the best spot (wait..maybe that's just PROcrastination in my case, but not a bad idea.

For internet marketing clearly an experimental approach is called for. Try things out, do more of what works and less of what fails. For organic search rankings his approach is challenged by the fact that Google, Yahoo, and MSN take some time to incorporate changes into the results, but generally experimentalism is a good concept in marketing, and vastly underutilized. Google Blogger Matt Cutts has often noted this in his excellent observations about search strategy.

I've always been amazed how often marketing managers use intuition and even whimsy rather than math to determine advertising buys. With salespeople pressure this leads to a lot of wasted ad dollars.

Online pay per click advertising offers instant feedback which is one of the reason's it's becoming so popular and effective for those who "do the math".

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

2006-01-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

What? You haven't heard of v7ndotcom elursrebmem?

You soon will if you have anything to do with the internet.
It's an SEO contest to see who can get the highest Google rank for this nonsense term.

Initially in what appeared to be part contest, part publicity grab a company called V7N.com offered a modest reward for winning. Hearing about this uberSEOmeister Greg Boser, one of the web's top SEO guys, launched an even larger counter offer that did NOT involve links to his sites. To V7N's credit they removed the requirement of linking to them, which means the winner can now....take it all.... I think there is now 7,000 at stake.

I initially thought I'd jump into the fray, but I think the time is better spent working on *real* terms and getting better ranks for real sites. The level of competition here is about as high as it gets with people like Greg and Dave Naylor from the UK playing the game.

A clever current ploy is a charity site which currently is near the lead in the ranks - the guy is asking for links and promising to donate all the winnings to charity.

Maybe I'm just too old to get it? NO WAY you snippy little whippersnappers!

2006-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

With all the hype surrounding DIGG.com these days I decided to post my critical notions of the service at DIGG.com and see what response it got. Not a lot of Diggs but it got a lot of comments - about 8 within hours. Some thoughtful, some flames, but what interested me was the one that said "he can't get it, he's too old".

My first reaction was "hey, maybe he's RIGHT!" I'm as immersed as most of the young crowd yet I obviously don't have the same feelings about many of the new "cool" things coming online.

My second and correct reaction was that the comment was actually a microcosm for both the problem with Digg and the problem with many in the new crop of young American tech folks.

I think for many in the tech rank and file, wisdom has been replaced by unhealthy skepticism and social concern by hedonism. Their attention span is getting dangerously short, is often hostile to thoughful discourse and analysis, and most importantly most young people have fallen out of touch with many of the realities of modern productive life and global turmoil.

I searched Digg for Darfur and got 2 articles, while "xbox" returns over 270....PAGES.... of articles.

Hopefully maturity will prevail, as it seems to for those few who make it to the big leagues, because I certainly make an exception to this criticism for most of the folks I've met from Google, Yahoo, MSN. They tend to be very globally sophisticated, very sharp, and many have a great sense of world priorities. I'm actually optimistic as the highest levels of the tech corporations - for example the Omidyars of Ebay, Bill Gates of MSN or Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google - express strong ideas about "changing the world" in very positive ways. But in important ways these folks represent the OLD timers rather than the new folks.

So, are we resigning our future to experts in gaming rather than globalization? Well, sort of. The globalization experts are out there, but they are not watching Digg or MTV very much. They are in China and India, studying their asses off in demanding school environments, and getting ready to take over the world.

Based on the lifestyles and superficial drivel coming out of the mouths of many of our young whippersnappers here in America maybe those guys and gals DESERVE to take over the world.

I'm just not digging it enough...

2006-01-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

For a few months I've been playing with some of the new"social" search tools where user input rather than algorithms determine the rankings and some of the content. Most notable of these are Digg.com and Del.ico.us but also rising are reddit.com, wink.com, and others.

I'm NOT a frequent user of these so I'm really in NO great position to comment on them .... but I will anyway....

Overall I'm underwhelmed with the actual tools. Theoretically I see this added user input as great, but using them seems to yield superficial (spend a few minutes watching "DIGG SPY" articles scroll along your screen to see what I mean) and inadequate results.

CAVEAT - I have not put in a lot of time researching with these vs Google. Frankly, my early results just didn't show enough promise to continue.

Using Digg.com and delicio.us I'm just not getting a "much better" list of things than with a faster and easier Google or Yahoo or MSN search. I certainly think the concept of democratic user selection and getting out from under the restraints of the Google algorithm are really profound, so I wonder if it'll be a hybridized search, perhaps one that Yahoo invents now that they bought del.icio.us, that sets new standards.

As blogs begin to replace websites, spread like fire, and pump millions of pages of new content online daily we need systems that can sort and rank this content almost in real time. Google, as well as the other big search engines, fail this test although Google does seem to index blogger (and other blog?) content much, much faster than new website content. But Digg is sorting these articles at the speed of rumor and innuendo, which as we all know is *pretty damn fast*. This brushfire style of ranking leads to excitement but also problems when the rumors or story are false or questionable as OReilly writer Steve Mallett learned the hard way last week.

So, my jury is still out, but I'm not convinced regular folks will find will find del.icio.us all that tasty or dig digg as much as needed to keep all the big buzz going.

Gates hasn't gone soft, he's gone heroic!

2006-01-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

What a disappointment to read New York Magazine's John Heilemann on Bill Gates and what he sees as a softening of Gates that has led to a weakening of Microsoft.

Like most tech oriented folks I've never been a big MS fan, but ever since hearing Gates on Charlie Rose discuss development with a passion he used to reserve for monopolizing the PC industry I've been a huge fan of his and was thrilled to see the media attention, albeit very BRIEF media attention, following the Time award.

Rather than laud him for shifting his generally brilliant focus from software to world health, Heilemann focuses very narrowly on what he sees as the demise of Microsoft.

It's a dubious premise at best (watch their unique Neural Network search triumph in about 1- 2 years as a fantastic tool), but even if it's true that Microsoft is dying the challenges are not related to Gates philanthropy or even Gates himself as much as they are the result of the tidal waves of online innovation and change sweeping away old business structures and new and old companies alike.

I expect more from elite magazines, but like most in our sad and superficial corporate media New York Magazine fiddles while the developed world burns, and like mainstream TV media focuses more on a notable's celebrity while the celebrity, in this case Gates, heroically tackles real and pressing global problems with unprecedented success.

Shame on Heilemann, shame on New York Magazine, and Bravo to Bill Gates.
----------------

UPDATE: John Heilemann very courteously replied to my rant at length in the following email in which he also had to correct my mistake calling NEW YORK MAGAZINE the "NEW YORKER".

> On 1/10/06, John Heilemann wrote:

joe --

sorry you were disappointed, but at least you can let the New Yorker off the hook -- i'm a columnist for New York Magazine, an entirely different publication.

i wrote a book about the microsoft antitrust trial, so i have some views about the company, its past behavior, and future prospects.
maybe we can just agree to disagree on some points there.

but while it's true that i didn't devote the bulk of my column to
praising gates for his philanthropic work -- a point of view i
considered pretty fully covered by Time's Person of the Year cover
story -- it's not like i didn't acknowledge the point:

"By all accounts, Gates has emerged as the most influential philanthropist on the planet; with a $29 billion endowment this foundation is setting new standards for both generosity and rigor in tackling an assortment of the world's most dire maladies, from malaria to HIV."

"Gates's consolation is that his opportunity to be a transformational figure isn't lost with Microsoft's abeyance. This is not a trivial thing. Gates has already changed the world once; now, through his foundation—which is not only disgorging a gusher of funds but inventing a new model for philanthropy, driven by statistics, leverage, and an insistence on accountability—he has a chance to do it again. And as Bono told Time, "The second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more."

sorry if this is insufficient -- but please don't accuse me of
ignoring the good that gates is doing with his charitable endeavors.

jh

SEO to GO II. Travel Site Optimization continued

2006-01-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Most travel sites, especially official ones, are already in existence and therefore don't face the challenges that a new site has simply getting into the Google index. It's currently easier to get into MSN and Yahoo, but in general if you've come to the game this late with a travel site you may want to reconsider your options, associate with existing sites, or take over an old travel site.

* Official information, in my opinion, is valued more highly by search. Most SEOs think that pages from .edu domains are given preference, and I think there are algorithmic benefits to being an "official" travel site for a state, region, or country. This may be primarily due to more links and references out in the web.

* If you are an official travel site you should seek to have all members or other sites affiliated with you link to your site. One good approach, for example, is to create or use an existing "request for travel guide" page and send out linking code to your members or associates for their sites. They can thus offer a printed guide via your site and you obtain more leads and more links.

* Stop wasting so much on print, TV, and other offline advertising! The return on pay per click advertising is likely five to ten times what you consider acceptable ROI for your print campaigns. Most (all?) destinations would benefit from completely reversing their online and print advertising budgets. The caveat is that you should bid on a VERY high number of terms - as many as tens or even hundreds of thousands - to optimize the ROI of your PPC (pay per click) campaigns. More about this in future posts.

* An excellent ranking roundup from Randfish's blog SEOMOZ

SEO to GO I. Travel Site Optimization

2006-01-07T19:14:00.000-08:00

In some ways SEO is a lot simpler than most people think. As search engines have improved, SEO has become more intuitive, simply making sure you write information well suited to the topic. Despite this positive trend, search for travel remains of questionable value, increasingly leading to booking sites when you want information sites and (less frequently) the opposite.

Here are some very basic but fundamental ideas on how to optimize a site so it can gain it's appropriate rank in the search engines.

Overall this is a good guiding principle (write for the users), but it's also important to make sure your pages conform to the broadly accepted "search friendly" structures below plus what you'll read at the Google webmaster guidelines.

* Create real, original, and helpful content.

* Make sure the important words that represent the content of the page, the "keywords", are used fairly often on the page, appropriately, and in context. You can actually ruin a page's rank by "keyword stuffing" which is using important text too often. I suggest as a good very general rule to use the keywords slightly more (I'd suggest two times more) than you would in your normal writing.

* When naming pages use URLs that correspond to the subject of the page. e.g. a page about "Google in China" could be named "google-in-china.htm" or china-google.htm. Most SEOs recommend separation of words with hyphens over underscores but it's likely they are equivalent to most algorithms.

* Work to obtain as many "in bound links" to your site as you can. Buying links is no longer a good technique and even trading with other sites appears to be of questionable value. Ideally your site or article will be SO GOOD others will link to you. Yes, this is a VERY tough part of the game.

* Work to have the "anchor text", that is the linking text, from those inbound links match the keyword of the page it's linking to. e.g. the hyperlink to this article should look something like the following link: Travel SEO

* The TITLE TAG of the page should also reflect the important keywords. e.g. The title of a page about travelling to Nanjing China should be something like "Nanjing China Travel"

There are few "magic bullets" in SEO unless you've screwed up a technical item or do a really bad thing, get a penalty, and then don't understand the reinclusion process. More on those later.

In fact search engines have become so concerned about manipulations of their algorithms (search routines) that in my opinion the best SEO is now done internally by subject experts and NOT by hiring fancy self annointed "experts".

In fact I have a GREAT case study from my own company showing how expert SEOs are not of much (any!) help even with fairly substantial time and money, but more on my very interesting KeywordRanking.com experiment and experiences soon.

The new search engine...is YOU.

2006-01-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to address the deficiencies with search engines, all of which are struggling with the onslaught of spam and manipulations of their algorithms (search routines).

One approach to "new search" that is catching on....like wildfire.... is letting the community of internet users rank, write, submit, and comment on content.

The best example in the technology sector is www.DIGG.com which has gone from obscurity to a site with over 500,000 daily visits. Recent capital from the Omidyar's of EBAY fame will make Digg a household name very soon.

A similar (copycat?) idea is www.WINK.com which is actually taking input from Digg and other "user review" sites to create a sort of metaDIGG. I'm wondering if Wink's bit off a bit too much here, thinking that niche searches and communities are where the web is heading rather than global search tools.

If true than what are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves going to do when people stop using them?

Poor guys. I urge you to send donations to their CEOs so they can feed their kids next year.

http://del.icio.us
http://www.digg.com
http://www.wink.com

Jeremy Zawodny said...

And http://reddit.com/ too.

Surfing for something that isn't there yet....

2006-01-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

Jeremy is always coming up with provocative notions about the way the evolving web is changing things ... and fast. I hope he is right that we are on the verge of a new publishing paradigm that falls largely out of control of the "big guys". He's lucky and wins either way with one of the top tech blogs in the world OR as a Yahoo guy.

It's certainly true that we are not yet close to "great" information environments for various groups of humans.

Forums were becoming great as niche interest sites, but many have become crap now that the smart people all went off blogging.

Blogs have helped to allow more of a focus on good thinkers thinking, but even good blogging is one sided, often superficial and fairly unstructured, and rarely "user centric".

Websites are structured and often info rich but (I certainly include my own sites) working way too hard to please Google, & Yahoo & revenue sources. Money is definitely trumping quality on the web in a HUGE way, I think far more than most users realize. *Most* websites exist to turn a buck, and even great hobby sites are often co-opted by the profit motive. That's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly makes them less inclined to focus on what a user will NEED vs what a user will BUY.

Where are all the users in all this mess?

Surfing for something that isn't there yet.

Attention Wal-Mart bashers!

2006-01-06T16:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of concern over this item at boing-boing suggesting Wal Mart is racist due to a recommendation that suggests an association of "Planet of the Apes" with Martin Luther King and other African American heroes.

...ONLY ONE PROBLEM... (prying the DVD from my cold, dead hands....)

As any fan of both Planet of the Apes and MLK would know, this association is reasonable and flattering if taken in the intended sense.

Yet another great example of how artificial intelligence (ie the algo choosing the similar selections) is better than human intelligence*, but we humans are just TOO STUPID TO GET IT.

The references ARE intentional, but not suggesting African Americans = Apes.

This clever algo has CORRECTLY determined that Planet of the Apes has a powerful allegorical theme suggesting that racism and discrimination are fundamentally wrong .... and that these are the same notions of ... the people on the list!

I can't wait for the computers to take over, there will be so much less explaining to do!

*Example TWO: Try playing chess against a modern computer.
*Example THREE Try playing ANY game of intellect, even those that have a large component of chance, against a computer.

Scalable solutions to poverty. Go Micro Loans!

2006-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Today's profundity is this: We need to create charity giving and poverty reduction mechanisms that are easy to scale. I actually think it's a profound idea. Companies like Wal-Mart, Google, and Ebay are masterworks of complex, scalable, problem solving architectures. The use interchangeable programs/parts/stores/data centers/etc to make it much cheaper and easier to build up capacity, production, and distribution.

Contrast this with, for example, the massive public works programs of the "War on Poverty" or Agency for International Development. Although it's now common practice to avoid massive projects that tend to create their own problems and leave many concerns unaddressed, this may be getting replaced too often with thinking small which leads to labor intensive, small solutions that don't really do much for the big picture.

This began as an exchange with Matt at Google when I suggested taking charity donations in exchange for Dennis Hwang's signed Google logos, which have quickly become one of earth's most viewed art forms. Matt correctly noted that this was a nice idea, but hard to scale (ie there are only so many Dennis Hwang original logos).

So, what are these scalable solutions? For the undeveloped world Micro loans appear to be one such success story. These are small loans that enable "small time" capitalists to get a start in areas where cultural and economic barriers are illogical and substantial. I'm not convinced this approach can work in the USA as well as 3rd world because the barriers here tend to be personal rather than institutional.

A good test of the scalability of Micro loans is in progress now that EBAY founders are pouring money into that effort. Good for them!

Google + AOL = Evil ?

2006-01-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

I just posted the points below note to the excellent Matt Cutts at his blog. Citing the official Google blog, even Matt is characterizing the fact that Google won't change the algo for AOL as an indication they have not jumped the shark or done anything odd.

1) With all due respect to Marissa and Google officialdom, one of the reasons we read you, Zawodny, and Scoble is to get the "real story" rather than the one the PR mavens and corporate legal department have edited. I think I'm still with Battelle on this which means "concerned".

2) The problem points were not clarified by Marissa. If AOL content has ranking problems and is reviewed by insiders it confers an incredible advantage to AOL content. Why? Because the algo has imperfections. If the insider review simply determines that "AOL's dogfood section has 302 redirection problems" Google's given AOL a LOT more than one gets by simply memorizing the guidelines and your posts. I understand this type of help has been given to large advertisers for some time but that is no consolation to the rest of us.

3) I hope Google takes Danny's (SES) advice and initiates a paid review system for all sites. Charge the big ones more to help subsidize the mom and pop reviews. At the point where special treatment was given to the big guys Google slipped. Paid review is a way to regain that trust.

Internet Video? Big deal. I've got TIVO (actually a "MOXI") and cable already and don't want to wait hours for downloads.

2006-01-04T19:09:00.000-08:00

Call me old school, but I can't help but think the current obsession with internet video will prove costly in terms of clogging up networks and will not gain mass popularity for some time.

The information internet is revolutionary while the video internet is simply a change in formats with probable reduction in the quality of signal and content.

I predict that the big deal Video thing Google is announcing tomorrow will result in "no big deal", but... I've been wrong before.

SEO for beginners....and for experts....

2006-01-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization was not even in the lexicon of the internet until recently. Now, "SEO" is big business for many companies and a lively profession for tens of thousands around the world.

Yet, as Google's Matt Cutts often notes good SEO is more the application of common sense than any tricks that run increasing risks of search engine penalties. Hiding keyword text, for example, now can get your site banned completely from Google. Competitors can file spam reports easily if they find this, so Google benefits from legions of website owners and SEOs who are carefully and selfishly "watching the competition" in an effort to get them removed.

Years ago "gaming" the search engines was easy, common, and led to very questionable results. Google's brilliant "pagerank" innovation, which used the linking structure of the web to rank sites, led to superior results. However it also distorted the very linking structure it used as sites sought to purchase text links from high ranking sites to boost their own prominence.

Text link purchases is still used, though far less than in the past. Many SEO's swear by it. However all responsible SEOs would agree that Google is cracking down on this in a big way and it carries the risk of wasting money. Cutts suggests both publicly and privately "do not buy links" though he also indicates it won't confer penalties as much as simply wasting money.

In my opinion this advice should be followed even by websites intent on doing "anything they can" to achieve higher ranks. The time and money is better spent creating better content and seeking deeper and richer link relationships such as those that come from having a good article posted online, blogs and forums, etc. That said it's become virtually impossible to develop large and powerful incoming link campaigns to all but a site that is of extreme relevance and quality in a category. More about that later....

Happy New YEAR!

2006-01-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve brought some great conversation to our dinner table last night.

My holiday tradition is to research things after these talks and send out emails clarifying my views. This year's was a ... long one... and I'm going to blog it over the next few days so all that effort is etched in the eternal stone of the active and archived internet:

The big picture. Geopolitical issues for us are somewhat abstract. Not so for people in Iraq, or the far, far greater suffering people in Africa, India and other areas of extreme poverty across the globe.

Although I engage in the politically charged debates about this stuff and enjoy it I'm increasingly and deeply ashamed and concerned by the polarization and roadblocks to progress that they cause. These debates, on a collective national level, interfere GREATLY with all of us coming together on the obvious "low hanging fruit" solutions to pressing global problems such as "better water supplies for developing world" and "Natural disaster relief". Contention is fun but often it is not productive.

It's ironic, tragic, and very fundamentally immoral that we Americans spend more time on the rights of Jose Padilla than the rights of a starving child in the Congo. We can help change this.

An explosion of technological evolution

2005-12-31T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky to meet some really sharp folks at internet conferences. One such clever fellow is Andy Edmonds - Mozilla Hacker and Microsoft's search relevancy researcher who writes in his blog:

The technological and attentional commons of the internet has created a radioactively boosted level of technology evolution. It sputters and backfires, but through a nefariously faceted backbone of communications, competition, and collaboration infrastructure is resulting in interesting new forms of business and user activity.
In fact, one might view the rise of Firefox in this light.

You might need to read it again to digest it, but these are simple yet profound points:
The internet is increasingly fertile ground for an explosion of technological evolution.

Variations on this theme are what I'm hearing from many of the clever guys at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both the companies and the engineers are passionate about what they are doing and, for the most part, recognize that many of the old rules of carefully guarded proprietary software developments are pretty much out the window.

As if to hammer this last point home Amazon just released the Alexa Search Engine API for pretty much anything anybody wants to do with it. This was not front page news, even online, but reflects what Andy's talking about in a big way....things are changing....fast.

Joe Bio

2005-12-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

No time to blog today so I think I'll just post the bio I just sent to the excellent folks handling the Nanjing Search Conference where I'm hoping to speak in March. This way I'll NEVER lose it!

It's always funny how you focus in on some things more than others depending on your audience, mood, and other factors. It's hard to be modest and sound expert and experienced at the same time.

Hmm - maybe I should have added how I fixed my parents sump pump and garage door today just by jiggling them. That's pretty talented, no?

Joseph R. Hunkins
jhunkins@gmail.com
Age: 46
Residence: Talent, Oregon, USA
541-535-7640 (home/office)
541-324-4800 (cell)

Education:

Masters in Social Sciences. 1990, Coursework in Multimedia, GIS, and Geography.
Southern Oregon State College (Now S.O.University), Ashland, Oregon 97520.

Bachelor of Science. 1981. Majored in Botany and Psychology.
University of Wisconsin at Madison, WI.

Professional Experience 1990-2005.

Coordinated Internet marketing and multiple website development for the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, a large regional tourism promotion group covering seven counties of Oregon and over 14,000 square miles. Developed organic and pay per click search strategies for several websites.

Managed grant and deployment of statewide touch kiosk Internet system for the state of Oregon, a partnership with the Federal Scenic Byways Program, Oregon Department of Transportation, State Tourism, and the Southern Oregon Visitors Association. Developed organic and pay per click search strategies for several websites. Developed the first commercial websites for Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument.

Presented findings of one of the first online Internet conversion studies at the Travel Industry Association of America's (TIA) national education conference in Vail, Colorado. Has also spoken extensively in Oregon about Internet marketing strategy for the travel sector.

Board member: California Oregon Intelligent Transportation Systems project. Helped review policies and deployments of travel technology (such as road web cams) for the Northern California and Southern Oregon regions.

Winner of Oregon's Governor's Award for Innovative Tourism Development for creating the partnership and grant that led to Oregon's first state travel website "TravelOregon.com".

Owner: USA3.com. Joe publishes travel information at several regional and national websites he owns using promotion tools including pay per click campaigns and organic search optimization. His largest site is the QuickAid.com Airport Directory which is currently undergoing extensive changes.

Partner in Online Highways LLC. This Florence, Oregon internet publishing company works in conjunction with two of the Pacific Northwest's leading travel magazines "Northwest Travel" and "Oregon Coast Magazine" to produce one of the most comprehensive online travel resources in the world: "Online Highways" website: www.OHWY.com. In addition to approximately ten staff in Florence the project established an Indian owned and managed support office in the state of Kerala India in 2003.

Joe's work with Online Highways has been primarily in search and company strategy and online advertising development.

"Second Day" working in the new office - how productive can I get?

2005-12-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

Well, I think I'll consider this my first "real" day in the new office. I did work a bit here yesterday but mostly played speed chess. Wireless here is much faster than downstairs, probably due to signal coming through windows vs walls.

I thought I was NOT going to get to speak about Travel internet at SES Nanjing China in March but they may change their minds - apparently they are making it very bilingual and will have translator help. In any case I'll get to China in some capacity over the next two years because it's where the action is going to be - perhaps for the next 100 years. Also a wonderful travel place - or so I've heard.

I started two new blogs today and hope in doing so to create a better system for organizing my interests. The Founders Blog is resurrecting the architects of the American Experiment and has them commenting on the news and events of today. The Founders are BACK.

Actually the founders are pleased with the success of the American Experiment as an engine of entrepreneurial capitalistic success, but deeply concerned about the degree to which both liberal and conservative governance now obstructs their original ideals. These obstructions include an incomprehensibly monstrous socio-military beauracracy, a bully like American Empire, the erosion of personal and collective liberties in the name of homeland security and global hegemony, taxing the country's golden geese as well as the middle class to pay for grossly inefficient implementations of health, social services, and military systems, and perhaps most importantly failing to inspire Americans to make our country a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity in a troubled world.

Yup, The Founders are BACK, and boy are they PISSED!

The second blog project is "dialog", where I'll be experimenting with a .... better way to use blogs.

The Poetry of Change

2005-12-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

Starting to read Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat", which in some ways is about my own little world of technology, change, global economic realities, and how things are changing at the speed of cash and technology.

Advertisers at my travel websites over the past few years have come from all over the world - in addition to Google ads which cover the globe, money will sometimes come in from England, Japan, and other places - easily wired into my bank or sent via Paypal. I've never met or even spoken with most of the people who pay for advertising at the sites.

At Online Highways we have a team of data / text editors working for us in the southern state of Kerala. Language has been an issue and it's not clear that the quality of English is high enough to justify outsourcing for writing, though it appears programming quality is equivalent in all but cost.

So from a business perspective the results of my flat world are mixed, but I'm very optimistic for the poor of China and India who, over time, will increasingly fill the thousands of niche service and industrial markets in USA, Japan, and EEC, bringing a higher standard of living and better infrastructure to many in those countries.

I've never been very sympathetic to the socialist notion that the developed world prospers by exploiting the undeveloped world. On the contrary I think it's the absence of advanced capitalist markets that keep the downtrodden ... down. Excellent "experimental" evidence supporting this comes from a comparison of the "capitalist free" economy of North Korea with the capital intensive economy of South Korea.

There are exceptions to the rule that capitalism is the answer for the poor, but I see globalized entrepreneurial capitalism as a solution far more than a problem, especially for those mired in undeveloped world poverty. The sooner they can get a higher level of participation in the globalized, developed world economies the faster they can bring needed infrastructure improvements to their countries and raise the standards of living.

I expect the forces now swirling in these directions to slightly lower the standard of living in the developed world, but this is a small price to pay and may even have benefits that are hard to anticipate. Are Smoking, Obesity, and Alcoholism correlated positively with affluence? A good research project for later.

Christmas Day

2005-12-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

A fine Christmas Day here in our cozy little world of nice food and family, presents and cheer.

Yet I hope we will all choose to reflect now and into the future about how to better meet the needs of those in this world less fortunate than us, especially the millions who live in abject poverty. Most are victims only of the circumstance of their birth in nations challenged by corrupt rulers, natural disasters, and poor infrastructure.

Edison suggested "There is a better way - find it!" I think...I know...we can.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night

2005-12-24T23:08:00.000-08:00

Being Santa

2005-12-23T22:16:00.000-08:00

Tonight I helped the Access Food drive in Medford by dressing up as Santa while food donations were collected on a street whre every house is beautifully lit with Christmas lights. The neighborhood has made it it a tradition there and the event, which gets many thousands of cars over several nights, raises thousands in food and money for the needy. When the guy came in for the next shift and I gave him the suit and he took over, I noticed how I'd passed the celebrity on to him the moment he stepped out, and realized how being Santa, even for just a few hours, was really something special.

Being Santa is a very unique experience, especially fun with the kids who are about 2-4 who think "wow, this is REALLY Santa Claus". Most of the kids have seen enough Santas that they are polite and enthusiastic, but the look from those few little ones who figure you really are the big guy himself are absolutely priceless. Also nice is the friendliness of almost everybody who drives by, old and young, waving back and wishing Santa a Merry Christmas.

HO HO HO, MERRRRRRRRY CHRISTMAS!

Anagram Server

2005-12-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

I was going to skip posting today but ran across this clever little tool - The Internet Anagram Server. Type in your name or any other word combination and get a huge number (all?) possible variations on the letters.

How far are we from an advanced crossword completer? My most excellent mother-in-law Rhoda and friend Devora insisted you could not use Google to complete any but a simple Crossword. I disagreed but when they sent me a NYT I was stumped very quickly.

I'm hoping this is a step in the direction, since I always root for the machines to win over we humans.

Signed,
Junes Hips Honk

Who's in charge dot com? - sure isn't the publishers.

2005-12-21T21:42:00.000-08:00

The the balancing act going on between the forces I list below is very interesting, and will grow more important as the internet consolidates it's position as the key publishing and communications tool of the times - perhaps of all time.

Users of the internet look for info and click on ads. These guys pay everybody's bills and should be demanding better treatment. Google makes something like 95% of it's money from ... you!

Publishers provide the content and also help make Google and other big company insiders rich in exchange for modest revenue shares to the publisher (probably about 50% for Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Adsense, though neither Google nor Yahoo share this revenue sharing data with the publisher). Over time the rev share should tend to increase as it did with Hotels, which rapidly went from early days at 20% to the current 50% and up on the room commission.

Big companies must maintain profits AND market share, which may compete with each other. e.g. For Adsense and YPN higher payouts mean lower profit but a greater market share of publishers. Loyalty on the internet is a fickle thing - most people are willing to jump from a previous favorite as soon as the strong prospect of greater profit beckons.

Little companies who must promise big profits to investors. Take Squidoo for example - they are trying to minimize the cost of publishing. Will the "experts" cooperate and if YES, how much revenue will they demand? The balance is extremely important to publishers. If Squidoo can get publishing on the cheap from the legions of well qualified yet bored and "ready to write" internet users, most "quality" online publishers may be hard pressed to match that content with even poorly paid writers.

Higher quality, extra interesting publishers may be able to maintain an audience and tap into the type of thing John Battelle is working on with his Federated Media project - a high yield advertising system that matches users/advertisers/publishers in new and better ways.

To Squidoo or not to Squidoo, that is the Question ...

2005-12-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

I've been testing two new ideas in search: Yahoo Answers and Squidoo.com.

Yahoo Answers shows a lot of promise - it allows users to post questions, answer questions, and score points and eventually perhaps payment for participation. However I've been disappointed in the low quality of many of the answers to my test questions and other questions I've reviewed. Projects like this need people to take the project very seriously or it won't have quality.

SQUIDOO is a very interesting idea - basically a variation on the ABOUT.com concept where experts offer high quality articles about all sorts of topics and are ranked and paid as users interact with the information.

I've been testing it a bit and developed a "lens", or Squidoo web page, for Las Vegas. The system is easy to use, but I kept getting the feeling I was just setting up Squidoo to make most of the money from work better put to use on my own websites. Their total claimed revenue share payout is a pitiful few hundred dollars to what must be hundreds and hundreds of "lensmasters".

Unless Squidoo has some great way to optimize for search engines (and I doubt they do), the articles there are probably no more likely to get good ranks than, for example, a blog at Google's blogger.com on which the publisher can run adsense.

Since Squidoo has financing by a major VC firm with a bunch of heavy hitters like Marc Andreesen, a large percentage of the value will flow to them and not publishers.

Verdict so far: Squidoo doo is a no do.

TIME Magazine - RIGHT ON. Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as persons of the year.

2005-12-19T11:26:00.001-08:00

Time's choice of Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Bono as persons of the year could not have been more on the mark. While concern in the mostly mindless newsrooms of national TV swirls around celebrity crime, sex, party girls, politics, drugs and glamour (did I get the order right?), Time's reporting some real news about people making huge positive change in a challenged world.

Newsweek, for example, had a good Gates article but relegated it to the "Society" pages and wasted too much ink about their "royal treatment" rather than what may eventually rank as the accomplishment of the century - the Gates foundation which has already saved over a MILLION lives! In the modern death math since 9/11 that's THREE HUNDRED Trade Centers filled with people...saved!

Bravo Time - you got this exactly right - though I do fear this story, and the thousands of other stories about how those who have almost everything are working for those with little in extremely effective ways, remains lost on the many seriously math-impaired journalists and fine fellow Americans.

This helps me retain my respect for at least some aspects of modern, market driven journalism. Seeking catchy hooks and entertainment value has trumped story significance, but not .... this .... TIME.

Kilauea Lava Falls are ... cool.

2005-12-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

Mahalo, Kilauea!

Recently Kilauea on the island of Hawaii created a spectacular (Dec 2005) lava fall .... cool, and I was there in April. I'd wanted to see lava up close since Geology classes at UW Madison but this was my first trip to Hawaii.

Lucky because they closed the area I was walking around in June due to the danger of ... what wound up happening.

I'm pretty sure I was standing just south of the massive fall shown here, on

the very cliff that fell away in early December: My picture (below) of the area is far less dramatic but I did get to see a "small" but still awesome lava fall in the distance - you can make it out as a tiny stream off the cliff to left in my picture (below) though it was probably about 1-2 feet in diameter. The new falls is about 6 feet in diameter and already busy extending the Hawaiian shoreline.

For more of my lava pix click here.

Google's Got Mail and it isn't going to be pretty.....

2005-12-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

I'm skeptical of the information pouring in about the AOL Google deal.
If the NYT version is true, however, this is very alarming indeed.

If Google's effectively taking on search optimization for AOL, as the article suggests, then Google has begun to sell their soul, which was purity of search results. This seems unlikely though stranger things have happened in the wild web west, always changing at the speed of cash.

From NYT:
....Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas ...

This sounds tame at first but anybody who knows Search Engine Optimization (SEO), knows that insider knowledge about the algorithmic ranking formula is everything. Ranking formulas are complex, fickle, often wrong, and always subject to manipulation. Google has always insisted they cannot reveal specifics about the formula to preserve it's integrity.

Having Google insiders who could even get basic answers to questions about key ranking factors like keyword density, link values, filters, penalties, and thresholds would effectively give AOL the key to the Google search vault.

Also conspicuous was this quote from the NYT article, suggesting MSN refused to offer the same treatment.
Time Warner asked Microsoft to give AOL similar preferred placement in advertising and in its Web index and that Microsoft refused, calling the request unethical.

Earlier in the year I spoke with an MSN search engineer about this very aspect of search (stacking the results to favor paying clients), and he insisted that it was against the interests of search because the engines credibilility is at stake and thus the almost priceless aspect in the equation - market share - would suffer.

I agree with MSN. So will everybody else. Except maybe AOL.

Google is a fine company

2005-12-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

OK, I think I've been too critical of Google lately.

Here's why I think Google is indeed a superb company:

* Larry Page and Sergey Brin's profoundly elegant approach to ranking the web using the linking structure. These insights led to "pagerank" (named after Larry not web "pages"). The Google Algorithm remains the best ranking mechanism on the web. Caveated thusly - Yahoo has pretty much caught up with the help of a lot of human editing and IBM's "webfountain" is probably stronger at answering specific questions but isn't even remotely scalable to Google traffic levels.

* Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. I had the pleasure of meeting him very briefly at the Google Dance 2005 and he was gracious and friendly. In his Charlie Rose interview I found him to be clearly the sharpest technology leader among a very distinguished group. Having the brilliant triumverate of Page, Brin, Schmidt leading the Google juggernaut with loads of cash in the bank is already one of the great stories in global business, and probably has only to get more interesting as competition with Microsoft, Yahoo, and innovative companies yet to hit the scene heats up.

* Matt Cutts, the gatekeeper of Google search. With the power to kill even the some of the largest web projects on earth with a mouseclick, Matt is among the most feared and respected players in search. However, ask *anybody* who's had the pleasure of meeting him and you'll hear that he's a great guy. I've enjoyed talking with Matt at the last two WebmasterWorld conferences and he's always extremely helpful and very interesting. Google could not have picked a better public relations person if they'd .... picked a public relations person. Matt's a top Engineer but makes complexity accessible and has done a huge service in keeping the web community informed via his blog and conferences.

* Google Parties. Man, Google knows how to throw a party. At the Google Dance 2005, a tradition for the past 5? years, they entertain a LOT of the attendees of Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Strategies Conference at the GooglePlex in Mountain View. Ice Cream Stations, Shrimp and other munchables, beer and wine were great, but most important is the chance to talk to the excellent Google search engineers who are always courteous and friendly. In New Orleans they also had a great bash and also had stations to talk to Engineers - very helpful stuff to those of us who roam the online wild west.

* Google Engineers. What a fine group indeed. PhDs and wealth seem to have made many of these fellows more friendly, gracious, and hard working. You can't complain about that.

* Adsense. Google helps feed my kids with their publisher revenue sharing paradigm.

Thanks Google!

A Google Nightmare

2005-12-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Jeremy! Oh no it's happening ..... to .... me .....

I had a talk a few weeks ago at WebmasterWorld Las Vegas with the most excellent Mr. Jeremy Zawodny. We were concerned about the way people are starting to change their writing styles and subjects to comply with search engine preferences.

Today I noticed this happening to me as I was about to NOT POST this note critical of Google. I almost thought "hey, I'm beeing too hard on Google. They are a suberb company and the most excellent Mr. Matt Cutts, Google's new uber blogmeister and global search guru, could not be a better spokesperson for the company as well as being a really great fellow.

Matt was also at Webmasterworld Las Vegas where he went out of his way to answer complex questions and treat everybody with great respect. I've talked with him at some length and Google should be simply thrilled to have him out and about making friends and keeping Google tops on the "coolest company/coolest people" list for many technology watchers.

BUT, greatness brings great responsibility, and here is where I think Google is falling short right now big time. So with apologies to the most excellent Googlers I've met I offer this in the spirit of constructive criticism:

My great fear about Google:

First, massive spam onslaughts cause Google to accept huge amounts of collateral damage for legitimate sites.

THEN, Google's market share insulates them from the needs of the web community and makes them immune to criticism.

THEN, Google fails in their OBLIGATION as a MARKET LEADER to provide basic and thorough support for sites they have delisted or downranked.

THEN, People accept all this and fail to rant against it because people are sheep, sucking up to Google and thinking stupidly that search rather than content is what the web is all about.

THEN, even otherwise intelligent people often argue, in dumbfounded ignorance of historical precedent, that Google has no obligation to the community to work hard to identify the damage it has caused and to effectively deal with the problems it's dominance has created.

Wait - this is not a nightmare - it's happening RIGHT NOW!

Yes, Google has a new program to communicate with damaged sites but it's weak and small. The support system does not provide access to problem solvers, rather to canned info.

Blog Wars - Matt vs Jeremy - "Extremism in the defense of the Google Algorithm is no vice?"

2005-12-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

Two of my very favorite techno blogger all-around-great guys, Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny, have created a very spirited online debate about a recent paid linking experiment at Jeremy's blog. Thanks in large part to Matt's efforts over the past few years paid linking has become a very controversial topic and tactic for SEOs. Most I've talked to still employ the tactic and feel it works, but try to keep it "under the radar screen" of Google.

Search engines, especially Google, see paid linking as a serious manipulation of the ranking algorithm. Matt indicates they have many ways to detect this type of linking algorithmically and I'd guess they have a pretty robust database of sites that offer and resell paid links.

Generally Google recommends adding the "nofollow" tag for paid links, or using alternative forms of advertising. In fairness to some criticism adsense and adwords are effectively "nofollow" forms of ads, not counting in the pagerank calculations for pages at a site.

HOWEVER and importantly, it seems to me the debate is not really about linking, but about *excessive penalties* for things seen as hurting the indexing process.

Matt's posts imply that in the war on spam, Google may be following the very controversial notions espoused by uber conservative Barry Goldwater some time ago talking about Viet Nam War. Goldwater said "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice".

Matt - are you saying: "Extremism in the defense of the Google Algorithm is no vice?" I hope not.

Sure you can execute people for running a stop light, and this will reduce traffic violations, but it's not a prudent social change mechanism for obvious reasons. And it's evil. Google, please don't be evil.

Google, Yahoo, and AMAZON?!

2005-12-13T13:12:00.000-08:00

Holy destabilization of the search landscape Batmen and Batwomen!

Amazon's ALEXA.com has been ranking and archiving the web for some time, creating what may be the web's largest archive of old site info plus a ton of current info. Google guards their algorithm and data stores as trade secrets, as does Yahoo.

NOT SO ALEXA who has announced they are opening up the data store, adding advanced programming routines for the grabbing, and opening up to anybody with a .com and a prayer.

I'll test the beta soon hopefully, but this could be big. REALLY BIG if the routines are powerful. Some have suggested this will be a sort of IBM Webfountain for the masses. Webfountain is arguably the world's most powerful and best search, so if Alexa can scale that power to mass information retrieval some really interesting stuff may happen in search.

This is yet another step to users ruling the roost as they rightly should.

Yahoo's database of ... wisdom

2005-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

Yahoo is collecting a "database of wisdom". I wonder what they'll do with it?

In his book "The Search", John Battelle talks about the "database of intentions" that Google has collected and can now mine to get a sort of "human interest model" and use it to hone services, predict outcomes, serve advertising, and much more.

Yet in addition to analysis of regular search results, Yahoo is certainly going to integrate information pouring in via the new Yahoo Answers plus the new Yahoo del.icio.us tag farm. Taken together these create more than a database of intentions, they create a database of collective wisdom. Yahoo is getting it big time, thanks in no small part to the very clever Jeremy Zawodny and his fellow team members.

What is the critical mass of participants for such information to be useful and relevant?
I'm guessing they are past that point already. Analysis and reporting could be a challenge, however.

Yahoo Answers is a very clever concept:

1) Engage Yahoo's very large search community in the answers without much Yahoo editing needed.

2) Let that large community value the info.

3) Reward very helpful people.

Wondir's mechanics are similar to this model, but this concept had to be embraced by one of the big players with their millions of potential participants.

I have a feeling the Yahoo combination of search and wisdom will be a success. I count a new question approximately every 6-10 seconds. The geek buzz around del.ici.ous has been increasing for some time.

Google will copy this soon and that's a great thing about good ideas - they proliferate fast.

Dad, how are they going to get the camcorder to go up your .... ?

2005-12-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

I suggested in the last post that privacy and the internet don't really mix very well and people should stop worrying about their personal information flowing online (this is inevitable!) or getting used in murderous or malicious ways (unlikely in most cases).

In keeping with this idea I shall share something from the "that is more than we needed to know, Joe" department: A Flexible Sigmoidoscopy is not as uncomfortable as you'd think it would be! If you are putting off a procedure like this, or the more comprehensive version - a colonoscopy - don't put it off any more - early detection can save your life!

Why a Sigmoidoscopy, you ask? Because my wife was the "lucky winner" at our Unitarian Church's silent auction where the very generous Gastroenterologist Dr. Walker put up the service. "Here, look what I got for you", said Kathy. At the office the doctor walked into the exam room with a very big smile on his face "So, you are the lucky winner!".

At least he got the irony of it all.

My daughter asked this morning: Dad, how are they going to get the camcorder to go up your .... ?

I told this story to the doctor and without hesitation he said "inch by inch".

I think the field of Gastroenterology probably confers upon the practitioners a rather unusual sense of humor.

Probably an unusual sense of other things as well.

You made it this far??

Thanks for caring. Yes, I came out with a clean bill of health.

Viva la Revolucion Informacion!

2005-12-11T00:19:00.000-08:00

John Battelle and fellow blogger Bruno have been waxing somewhat dramatically about the implications of a Google-ized information world, where the massive data stores create all sorts of problems as employees or entire companies go gonzo in a sort of WMD-style information attacks on the world.

Me to the bartender:
"I'll have what Bruno and Battelle have been drinking"

These scenarios are fun but totally unrealistic. These guys either have much more provocative, interesting and easy-to-compromise secret lives than most people or they are out of touch with Joe public, who has very limited information of interest to all but close family and friends.

A quick scan over the sea of blogged personal information demonstrates this clearly, especially when you reasonably assume that bloggers tend to be more interesting than .... average peeps(!?)

Most people - and I think most businesses - would not necessarily even be adversely affected in a "total information awareness" world. Some aspects of that world would be akin to the (on balance) positive changes affecting music and publishing industries as barriers to entry, copyright, ownership, and rights are all getting redefined at the speed of cash and enthusiasm.

Frankly I see more advantages than disadvantages - secrecy tends to reward the wrong groups. Transparency is destabilizing in a good way.

Viva la Revolucion Informacion!

Putting COMmunity into dot coms

2005-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

.community is the .key ? You can bet your I.T. department on it.

Perhaps a critical distinction between Web 1.0 and 2.0 is the degree to which 2.0 has (finally) embraced as essential *community* and *participation* as cornerstones of a quality relationship between technology and the people served by technology.

The process has a long way to go, but it's very encouraging to see the *big* players working hard to seduce the *key* players in the online equation - the users.

I'm not a Microsoft basher, especially since the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has heroically challenged the idea that the rich ignore the poor. However it's also true that Microsoft has been by far one of the worst culprits when it comes to ignoring the community in favor of the needs of corporate dominance.

For years MSN kept the broad user community at bay - we were chained to MS out of necessity and not loyalty.

A few years ago this all changed and MS dominance is quickly slipping away. The open source movement has grown in strength, Microsoft's adoption of the internet as the central theme of all things computerized remains sluggish, and Google and Yahoo continue to innovate and provide free and excellent programs to users and developers.

Of the big three in search Yahoo seems to be understanding this community factor the best. Yahoo Answers, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Maps, Aquiring Del.ico.us are all in line with the focus on people more than technology. Google, as the newest, hippest, and coolest kid on the block, gets a LOT of mileage from these factors despite the fact users are serving them even more than they serve the users who have made Google what they are today.

As the big three's search quality converges the advertising revenues will be distributed more evenly across the search landscape. Yet advertising money will also increase dramatically as slow adopters figure out the overwhelming power of online advertising. Everybody can win in this scenario, but the one who wins the most should be the one who best serves the online community.

Google vs Yahoo vs MSN vs AskJeeves

2005-12-09T23:21:00.000-08:00

The search landscape sure changes fast.

Yahoo's purchase of del.icio.us is yet another indication that they intend to highly leverage the participation of the web community in the rankings process. Google remains very confident in their algorithmic approach, perhaps because they see any forms of user participation as too spammable. Yet Google appears to be under the greatest attack by spammers due to their high market share for search.

Google's brilliant "pagerank" innovation counted on an indirect form of community "voting" through site links, but del.icio.us is a much more robust voting system, especially when Yahoo redesigns the interface to be less geeky.

The search battles are REALLY getting interesting now - MSN Search pretty much let's the computer decide. They have what is perhaps the largest Neural Network in the world and appear to be moving towards a system where humans only intervene in the program to fix serious problems. Google's approach is also algorithmic but appears to involve more "programmer participation" and site filtering than MSN's.

Yahoo, with a history of being the first major web directory along with extensive editorial oversight, has adopted a hybridized algorithm plus editor model, and with today's aquisition of del.icio.us they'll enlist the community in direct voting for sites.

MSN's recent discussion indicates they may soon be paying people to use their search. They also will soon compete with Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher network to pay for content based ads.

The search landscape, built almost entirely on advertising revenues, is changing at the speed of cash.

Technology and pragmatism

2005-12-09T19:52:00.000-08:00

I'm not easily impressed with technology. Most of the time new "inventions" are crap - most are designed to be easily sellable, convince people to invest in them, or satisfy the bizarre or odd whim of the designer.

Today, however, I ran into one and used it - probably for the last time in my life - yet I was really impressed. In fact I liked this invention more than the (justifiably well reviewed) Treo 650 phone I got earlier this year and have yet to figure out enough to make it worth the cost.

Oh yeah - the invention was an "insulation blower", used for cellulose blow in insulation we just blasted into the playroom/office we've been remodelling for the past 300 years or so. The device is sort of a reverse vacuum that blows shredded bits of paper through a 50' hose that you swing around up in your attic. The cleverness is in how robust the blow fan was combined with twirling metal bars that chopped up the tightly packed insulation. I'd throw in chunks, break them up with my hand, and the machine would finish off the process and blow it up the hose.

It only took my wife and me about 3 hours to do over 500' of ceiling, the material cost far less than bat insulation and this was much easier than installing it, and now we've got a cozy playroom.

Kudos to pragmatic, effective technology!

Yahoo Answers - Are they outGoogling Google?

2005-12-08T10:50:00.000-08:00

Wow, Yahoo is coming up with some great stuff these days:

Yahoo has just launched a very interesting search experiment, and I predict it will be hugely successful. Yahoo Answers lets you type in a question which is publicly posted, effectively broadcasting it to thousands of people online. Google answers was a "good" idea but it cost money and had a limited pool of responders - a departure from Google's 'free is best' philosophy.

Yahoo trumps this with free answers and plans to actually pay publishers with a history of good answers to questions. This cost structure will not only reward the community members who create quality content but it will reward Yahoo as the system becomes more robust. This is a powerful combination.

Why do I have a hunch Jeremy Zawodny had a lot to do with this concept?

Yahoo Answers

Las Vegas and WebmasterWorld

2005-12-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Viva Las Vegas! ?

One of the things you do when you don't have a regular job is attend conferences with other people who don't have regular jobs so you can discuss how to avoid ever having to get a regular job. Believe me, it's HARD WORK.

A few weeks ago I attended the WebmasterWorld "Pub Con" Conference, one of the key conferences focused primarily on internet marketing. Others are Search Engine Strategies and AD-TECH. All hold several conferences per year at cities all around the world.

Las Vegas is quite a remarkable place by almost any measure. As a tourism guy I thought it might be interesting to compare the tourism economy of the entire Oregon Coast to the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. At 1.3 billion for the coast, they are about the same. The Venetian, another Las Vegas landmark, has about a 700 million dollar economy. Time to get going on that Las Vegas website project.

Here are a lot more pix of Las Vegas and a short history

Just remember - don't split 10s in blackjack.

Why? Because you are a stupid primate!

2005-12-06T15:25:00.000-08:00

Stupid Primate!

We all are. Some less than others, but many, if not most, issues of human consequence resolve to this simple equation: human primate = not very bright. Perhaps the best example is the current debate suggesting, basically, that we are NOT stupid primates. Only a stupid primate could arrive at that conclusion based on the overwhelming evidence available to suggest that in fact we . . . . are.

Now, you might suggest "hey, we invented spaceships, computers, and toasters - you call that NOTHING!?" That's something for sure - but more a legacy of the fact we have a sense of history and a feel for technology than because we are really, really different from, say, a mountain gorilla.

To get a sense of how we'd live without shiny tech history, just check out the lives of aboriginal folks in Borneo or South America. They live pretty much like the rest of us would live but for our "developed world" history of lots of shiny things like cell phones and cars. But more important than shiny things is our tendency to carry on as if thousands of years of observing the world and people around us were for naught.

I'm not a doomsayer and think things are slowly improving in the world, largely thanks to clever innovations in shiny technology, but I'm really frustrated by our inability to solve - or even think much about - the serious problems that face most of our fellow stupid primates ....

...Whoa! Gilligan Island reruns are on - gotta go...

Drinking the Google Kool Aid?

2005-12-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

Sure, I like Google a LOT .... but Gooogle Golly Gee ....

I'm getting tired of people explaining how Google will take over the internet and then the world of commerce. This is the nonsense we heard back in 1999....except they were saying AMAZON was going to take over the world.

What's Amazon? Oh... right.... it's a book selling site.

True, Google's innovations are far more profound, their people are brilliant, and they have approached things in incredibly innovative ways. But there is a challenge for Google that is rarely discussed even though it's the most significant thing about the company:

Almost ALL of THEIR MONEY comes from ADVERTISING!

Google-y eyed analysis seems to miss the fact that Google is not making money because they are profoundly innovative in search and internet, they are making money because they came online at the right time with the best search to date. They combined this with the brilliancy of contextual advertising invented more by Bill Gross of Overture than Google. Read "The Search" by John Battelle for this interesting story as well as a great history of search with a strong emphasis on Google.

With Yahoo now equal in search quality and MSN and AskJeeves equal within months or a year at most, the division of advertising revenues will challenge Google, making it hard to grow faster than the rate offline advertising money pours online.

Sure they are GREAT, but the key questions relate to how they adapt to the ever changing marketplace as much as the ever changing search landscape.

Fair and Balanced? Yes if you are totally INSANE.

2005-12-04T08:38:00.000-08:00

FOX News is good entertainment but terrible journalism. I tend to watch it more than CNN because it's more entertaining to hear Bill OReilly or Sean Hannity (not to mention some of the news anchors!) ranting about "those darn lib'rals!" than the somewhat more balanced and thoughtful reporting I find on CNN. The BBC is better than either by far but it's on the radio and I'd miss the car chases.

"THIS IS A FOX NEWS ALERT -
A POLICE DOG HAS BEEN FOUND TO BE SNIFFING MICHAEL JACKSON'S BUTT"

But what REALLY intrigues me is that during the MONTHS of coverage of a news story such as the Peterson murder or the WEEKS of Natalie Halloway in Aruba, hundreds of thousands died from horrible diseases caused mostly by the lack of abundant clean water in the poorest countries. A fool will suggest "well, that type of ongoing, tragic, and catastrophic death is not really NEWS". Oh, really?