SES, SEO, Blogs
Blogging the conference has been a great way to test some ideas about blog ranking and watch Google struggle to bring the most relevant content into the main search (they’ve done pretty well with blog search, not so well with regular search which will have all the blog content listed in a week or so, basically too late to be all that helpful to users). More importantly the stuff from *this year* will probably be ranked above the SES San Jose 2009 information that is likely what people using that term are searching for effective next year. I’d think they could simply increase the value of ‘freshness’ for listings tagged as events related.
I had a nice discussion about this “events” ranking challenge with Jonathan from Google at the party. The problem is that to combat spam Google does not push out blog content immediately, meaning that if you search for “SES San Jose”, especially a month ago or so, you would have been likely to get old, dated content rather than the current SES page you’d normally want to find. This appears related to linking issues (newer has fewer), but also I think the regular engine is allergic to new content, which is why you’ll often find the most relevant Google stuff at the blog search if it’s a topic that is covered heavily by blogs such as SES or CES Las Vegas where I noted the same issues of “stale content” in the main search with “great content” in the blog search.
I remain convinced that some of the challenges faced in ranking could be solved by a combination of more algorithmic transparency from Google combined with greater accountability by publishers who’d agree to provide a lot more information about their companies so that Google can get a good handle on the credibility of the online landscape. This webmaster ID is happening now in several ways but I’d think it could be scaled up to include pretty much everybody publishing anything online (ie if you don’t register you’ll be subjected to higher scrutiny).
SES San Jose - Lee Siegel Keynote
Lee Siegel is about to speak here at SES San Jose. He’s the author of “Against the Machine” and a senior editor at The New Republic, and a noted critic of the new media, primarily because he feels anonymity is a threat to intelligent, enlightened conversation.
Although I’m sympathetic to Lee’s points about how abusive the online world can be, and how foolish it is to consider as sacred the hate speech and the junk banter that passes as conversation, he’s missing two key features of the new conversational media that effectively sweep away much of the significance of his legitimate concerns.
First, the high tolerance for abusive and threatening language has become something of a new standard, especially for younger commenters. I don’t like it either, but for many writers this does not reflect the type of threat it would under other circumstances. It is not appropriate to apply old interpretations of this language to the modern usage.
Second is that focusing on the defects of blogging and new media distracts us from the profound and positive changes in communication - changes that represent the early stages of truly democratic and massively participatory conversations.
I don’t think Siegel is so much *wrong* as he is making fairly insignificant points about the new media. I’d certainly agree that there is a danger whenever people are stifled. For me the outrageous online treatment of Kathy Sierra, a noted blogger,is the exception that proves the rule. These cases are very few, and in a broad sense are eclipsed by the thousands of new voices coming online *every day*.
So, is there value in paying attention to these problems? Sure. Should this drive our understanding and appreciation of the most profound transformation in human communication history?
Nope.
More Cuil Search fun. Check out the …ummm… multiple personality finder.
Over at Sarah Lacy’s place she’s reasonable asking “Is it Cuil or Us” in terms of expecting too much from this new search startup. Since I’d been poking fun at Cuil’s failure to find itself I thought I better try a new search. Since Sarah’s is indirectly suggesting that bloggers like *me* might be the problem let’s ask Cuil… about me… Joe Hunkins….
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Now, there is one more “Joe Hunkins” that is fairly prominent online - a real estate guy in New Hampshire - but he’s not pictured here. And neither am I. Despite the fact most of the text does relate to things I have written - though much of it long ago - I’m wondering who the dude is in the first picture? Hey, he’s a pretty good looking guy - maybe I should be him. Nope, the older guy isn’t me either. Hey, the young backpacker dude is more my style. Maybe I should take over his identity? Whoops - Cuil is obviously not gender biased - I also am listed as the two women pictured.
Hmmm - I had an imposter over at Furrier.org the other day - maybe they fooled Cuil, too?
Who ARE these WordPress Guys? Bravo … again.
WordPress is one of those amazing Web 2.0 companies that always impresses you with innovation and quality.
Here, they have created a way to better index WordPress blog content using Google sitemaps. WordPres was was already the best CMS system in terms of facilitatating proper search rankings through categories, tagging, and general structure. Ironically WordPress is better than Google’s own Blogger.com - ie I think it’s fair to say that an identical blog written to the two CMS would rank better in the WordPress version because it is far more robust in terms of crosslinking, creating categories, and with the sitemap feature even pushing out content descriptions to Google. To Google’s credit they do not appear to elevate blogger content above others - in fact I think the algorithm accurately notes that bloggers blogs have far more spam than WordPress.
Of course one of the best aspects of WordPress is that Matt and his merry band of WordPressers don’t charge a dime for all their great WP work. They make enough off of spam blocking “Akismet” which is sold to big companies for enterprise network use, and pick up a few bucks from various add-on features such as domain names and CMS styling at WordPress. This is a perfect example of how innovative entrepreneurship, global scale technology, profit and non-profit can all mix comfortably in systems that work well for every participant.
WordPress dudes, keep up the amazing work!
Knol Knows Ranking
Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert. The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.
Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.
The SMX search folks - I think it was Danny Sullivan - have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well. Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites. If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.
In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank. I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference - SES San Jose.
Later: Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself. Here are listings I created for:
Googley iPhone Goodness
It is obvious that Google is going to embrace mobile applications very, very powerfully in the coming year and it looks like Google has a great first iPhone effort with their new search application featuring a lot of automated guessing so you can avoid the most painful part of the mobile experience - typing.
Of course things are *really* going to get interesting this fall or early next year when a new Google mobile phone will come out. Although Google has produced branded hardware for some time in the form of search appliances these had an extremely limited distribution. The upcoming “G Phone” will be a *huge* success if it offers iPhone functionality at a lower price. I think the latest assumption is that a Google phone will be made by HTC for Dell though I have not checked in on this recently. I think the Google branding factor will be incredibly powerful, and predict that *most* users will choose a “Google gPhone” over an “Apple iPhone” assuming similar features and cost. This isn’t to suggest the iPhone market cannot exist alongside a gPhone, and clearly the iPhone is the mobile device to beat, so the game is very much on right now in terms of smartphone competition. Sprint’s new “Instinct” is an excellent device with many advantages over the old iPhone (e.g. Geolocation), though I think we’ll see functionality in these devices converge as early as next year with no compromises for users. Computing is rapidly moving to mobile.
Here is a demo of the iPhone application at the Google Mobile Blog
Twitter less?
Seems to me that Twitter is, in fact, a very important issue with far too much discussion about downtime and not enough about why Twitter appears to be replacing blogging, Facebook, and email as the communications paradigm of choice for the digital elites, which often means the rest of the online world will soon follow.
Twitter’s system failures have become so common that several of the silicon folks like Mike Arrington are suggesting that people should be moving to other services - most noted is FriendFeed which now allows “room” conversations as a way to sort noise from signal and talk with a group about specific topics. I think if they’d come along at same time FriendFeed would be winning the war for the hearts and minds of the legions of twitterers, but Twitter has such a foothold as the microblogging / communication tool of choice it’ll be hard to unseat Twitter unless their services fail to improve over the coming months. Improvement is likely given their recent Venture capital injection which effectively valued Twitter at about 100 million - enough that money will soon pour in as needed to beef up their shaky infrastructure.
Why is Twitter important? It’s really a form of A.D.D. blogging - fast and furious with links out to full treatments which can be read only if they really look interesting. Because Twitter caters to short attention spans and also throws everybody in regardless of laptop color or digital creed, it’s going to keep catching on fast with the business and tech crowd. I am NOT convinced it’ll be a big hit for grandma or even Nascar dads, who will see Twitter for the time waster it tends to be…
Yikes.. my Twitter Deficit Disorder makes me think a blog post of more than 143 letters won’t generally get read anyway, and makes it harder to write.
Buy before the rumor, sell before the news?
One of the really intriguing aspects of the blogOspheric chatterfest is how the big markets tend to react to rumors from key business related blogs. When TechCrunch reported yesterday that talks between Microsoft and Yahoo had resumed Yahoo stock increased, only to fall after several other blogs reported the rumors as false or weak.
Although I have no reason to believe that Mike Arrington or Henry Blodget are trading options based on their market-moving blog reporting, I’m not at all clear it would be illegal for them to do so as long as they were reporting “real” rumors.
Henry answered at his blog that posting a false rumor to manipulate for investment purposes would likely be seen by SEC as a violation but this leaves a lot of gray areas open for an aggressive options trader/journalist.
Here’s what I just asked Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch:
Mike just to set the record straight the ValleyWag poster “Mike Arrington”, who claims to have made 10k trading on Yahoo rumors, is fake … right?
More importantly I’m very interested in your views on legality/ethics of trading Yahoo options based on the rumor mill. Let’s say you heard a solid rumor that MS was about to offer $37 for Yahoo and Yahoo was going to sell. Could you legally trade on that before you posted it? One second after?
What if you emailed *me* right before you posted, I think I could legally trade based on current SEC rules, right?
P.S. What kind of Single Malt Scotch do you like? : )
Although I have no plans to manipulate any markets, it is reasonable to assume that if a market can be legally manipulated it *will be* manipulated, and soon.
AP Retreats from the North Bridge, but the shots were read around the world
The AP’s tiny battle with Rogers Cadenhead over copyright issues appears to have ended with a whimper and no bang as the AP met with Cadenhead and has issued a vague statement about upcoming standards.
Rogers noted today:
I think AP and other media organizations should focus on how to encourage bloggers to link their stories in the manner they like, rather than hoping their lawyers can rebottle the genie of social news.
He’s right regardless of how the courts will be interpreting upcoming cases of copyright infringement. Unlike the music industry where a case can be made that bootlegging leads to lost revenue, blogging AP stories arguably *improves* APs distribution and presence in journalism. AP is shooting itself in the foot, if not the head, when it fights bloggers with copyright lawsuits and takedowns.
Obviously blogging has a long way to go before it will have the mainstream respect typically reserved for mainstream journalism. Part of gaining that respect will be bloggers taking on more responsibility and accountability with respect to attribution and quoting. Meanwhile the legacy news industry must come to grips with the fact that blogging isn’t just news and analysis, it is a dynamic and powerful global conversation that will throw off any chains as fast as they can be applied.
Social Learning 2.0
Here is a great website about the intersection of education and the internet. One of the concerns of the main author is that educational institutions are ill-prepared to cope with the hurricane of new media information as well as potential new online approaches to teaching.
This is a really fascinating topic partly because for hundreds thousands of years formal education has languished under the province of a priestly class of educators operating pretty much in the same fashion since the Greeks introduced the professor to student lecture model of teaching. Although it’s not a *bad* model, I’d strongly suggest we could do a lot better, especially given the plethora of new online tools readily on hand at no cost to almost everybody.
Where an old, legacy class about global markets would dredge up boring examples from dated textbooks, a new class could use real time stock information such as the Archipelago bidding environment, currency quotes, breaking news, and so much more. In science students should be actively participating in blogs specializing in topics like Global Warming, artificial intelligence, and biology as well as interacting with other students around the globe.
A professor friend of mine who taught an online accounting class said there were challenges with the lack of personal contact, but benefits from student interaction and the fact he could answer the same predictable questions with an FAQ rather than having to deal with them over and over, basically freeing up more time for individualized instruction on the complicated topics.
As with so many online topics education is evolving rapidly within the rapidly evolving overall environment, so it is very hard to predict where things will wind up. However I think it’s easy to say there is a lot of potential for improvements on the current outmoded lecture models, and the internet kitchen is cooking up new solutions every day.
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