Yahoo Bing Search Update
UPDATE: Hypothesis appears DISproved. After under an hour Google has correctly posted Technology-Report.com’s coverage of this issue “yahoo bing search” ahead of JoeDuck.com’s at Google Blog Search. This is the RIGHT answer. Good work Google!
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(( This is mostly an SEO test post – please ignore or read at your peril. If you were looking for a political argument, please see other posts ))
OK, so the “real” and meatier post is over here: Yahoo / Bing Search Update, but I predict Google is going to index this one way above that one for the reasons I discuss …. over there! JoeDuck is an old site and has a lot more Google Authority than Technology Report , so even though I’ve got a picture of over there of me hanging with no less than Google CEO Eric Schmidt, I’m thinking this one will get a much higher rank for “Yahoo Bing Search” than the real post at Technology Report which is far more insightful and relevant than this one. Hmmm.
Add Flickr Photos to WordPress Blog
I think I’ve blogged this problem before, but given how great it is to post Flickr photos to a blog (even those from others with credit automatically linked), I think I need to repeat this. My problem after setting up a new blog was not to to this:
In WordPress dashboard under Settings > Writing > Remote Publishing be sure to check both Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC
Which blogging services does Flickr support?
We currently support the following blogs:
- Atom Enabled Blogs
- Blogger *
- LiveJournal
- Manila
- Meta Weblog API Enabled Blogs
- Movable Type**
- Typepad
- Vox
- WordPress***
*Note: In 2007 Blogger moved to a Google ID based login procedure. If you have blog which was supported under the email login schema, you’ll need to delete the existing blog entry in your blog settings and generate a new one. Then you’ll be asked to confirm your Blogsettings on Blogger. Also, at this time, only one Google ID is supported for each Flickr account for Blogger. If you have more than one Blogger blog, they’ll all need to be associated with the same Google ID.
**Note: If you use a Movable Type v4 blog, you don’t use your normal password to log in. When you edit your user account on your blog host, there’s an option called Web Services Password, with an option to reveal it (it’s an MD5-type hash), and you should use that as the password for the configuration on Flickr, not your normal password.
***Note: If you use a WordPress self-hosted blog, in your WordPress dashboard under Settings > Writing > Remote Publishing be sure to check both Atom Publishing Protocol and XML-RPC. Then, in your settings on Flickr for that blog, enter your WordPress API Endpoint; for example: yourdomainame.com/xmlrpc.php
Zuckerberg’s Right. We are dumb ***s. Death of Privacy should be Birth of Transparency
Another mini Facebook Firestorm has come from old messages that suggest Mark Zuckerberg really doesn’t care much about protecting user privacy. For those of you who think there is much care about privacy in any online sector, I have some online oceanfront property for you in Arizona. Privacy is dead, but we CAN BRING TRANSPARENCY and we need that NOW!
Step by step on privatizing your Facebook Info
Although online privacy has been an illusion for some time. I’m surprised how few people understand how their address, phone, emails, home values, and often even pictures of their children, friends, and associates are all online for much of the world to see.
Facebook has quite correctly come under more intense scrutiny for their almost reckless disregard of what users *would want if they knew what was going on*. This is the key to our ongoing quest for reasonable online ethics, and it’s a principle that is routinely and regularly violated by every major player in this space. Google, because they provide such brilliancy in free services, largely escapes the criticism they probably deserve – though it’s impossible to know how much they keep track of personal data – they simply won’t say, which of course is outrageous. Their justification for the secrecy is combating phishers, spammers and other undesirable online activity and I suspect also because the legal issues are very complex and the less we know the less likely we are to bring lawsuits.
The irony is that so many naive and foolish people are now clamoring for “online privacy! privacy!”. That possibility of online privacy – if it ever existed at all – is long gone. You can’t “erase your info” from the internet, and the bad, good, Government, and Google guys all have databases chock full of information about you, your children, your house, your comments, your searches online, and much more. This is NOT reversable.
HOWEVER there is something we can do and should be doing immediately, and that is creating a very simple law regarding the stewardship of YOUR INFORMATION. That law is my proposed
Internet Tranparency Act:
Individuals are entitled to view *all personal information* kept about them by any entity.
Their might be a handful of exceptions such as law enforcement, national security, etc.
The notion that commercial groups should be able to process MY INFORMATION without my consent or knowledge is, in Google’s increasingly hollow mantra ”Evil”. But I don’t want to single out Google here because they are probably the best steward of all based on my limited knowledge of how they process data, which is mostly personalizing searches and matching that with advertising. At a deeper level Google reviews spammy activity by people around the world. I’d agree with them that they have the right and even obligation to crack down on bad players, but I’d disagree that they have such deep secrecy rights, especially when those secrets are used to commercialize the advertising and other aspects of the online experience.
The big problem is that people still don’t get this. If they understood the level of online profiling and surveillance they’d want more transparency. In fact they’d demand privacy as people are foolishly starting to do, but that’s not possible.
Airport Blog
There’s some tweaking and LOTS of changes needed for old pages, but I’m getting happy with the new look of the Airports Blog and Airport and Airlines Directory I’m trying to resurrect after many years of neglect and abuse.
QuickAid.com was initially the web’s largest collection of airport records – about 28,000 database records in an early online version of a failed dedicated system developed to help navigate several airports around the country.
I bought it years ago and despite early successes I managed to offend Google with the link structure and low quality. The irony of the experience was that I actually did NOT deploy a lot of the clever ideas I had for fear Google would lower my good ranking for many Airport related terms. Eventually Google downranked the site but now seems to be happy with QuickAid as a prominent Airport Directory, so it’s time to make it … much better.
This process will take some time, but, like I keep explaining to mom about my real estate projects …. it’s going to be … great when I’m done!
Google Luge Logo Pulled
After a large number of complaints Google pulled the daily Google logo – an Olympic Luge logo – from the home page and now features a very similar snowboarding logo instead. I think this was appropriate, but it’s always odd to me how harshly people react to this type of thing rather than paying attention to the monster issue of our time such as the health catastrophes facing much of the developing world.
But hey… I guess I’m doing that myself with this post? Shame on me, too….
Google Social Circle
Google labs is testing a very interesting new feature within the Google search results which lists and ranks content from people that have connections to your own social networks, websites, blogs, etc. It’s called Google Social Circle and I think this approach has a lot of potential…
More to come at Technology Report
Are you practicing censorship? Yes. Just ask Caesar.
I also would say that if one narrows things to the censorship protections defined by free speech provisions of US Constitution the game changes since the supreme court generally argues that for legal purposes we are generally concerned with political censorship and not commercial speech or “hate” speech. Both of those are legally (and I think usually appropriately) censored.
Your definition of censorship is too narrow, a common frustration of mine. This lets people argue – totally speciously – that THEY don’t ever censor but OTHER people do.
Virtually everybody believes in some censorship – in fact I would argue emphatically that “zero censorship” is a sociopathic condition (e.g. child pornographers should be shot or imprisoned, people who routinely shout loud obscenities in public should generally be stifled).
1 : a person who supervises conduct and morals: as a : an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter b : an official (as in time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered sensitive or harmful
2 : one of two magistrates of early Rome acting as census takers, assessors, and inspectors of morals and conduct
FourSquare, Twitter, and Facebook
As a self-proclaimed social media expert (hey, cuz I have a MASTERS DEGREE in Social Science!), I like to think I understand what is driving the latest wave of online enthusiasm. But I’m increasingly convinced nobody understands it. Rather, like evolution, we work away from failure and wind up with applications and websites that have *survived* and adapted far more than were “brilliantly planned and executed” according to some online success formula.
Of course predicting Google’s success was easy – they’d cracked the nut of “really good search” and even as others caught up to their quality they’d established our habit of “googling” when we needed good info fast and have reaped the enormous advertising revenue rewards from that early success. I had more trouble understanding why Facebook was so appealing yet it has thrived as the key friend and family connector in an increasingly social media world.
I remain skeptical that Facebook can drive advertising revenue to the extent needed to ever compete against Google for online dominance, but we’re still *very* early in the big online game and clearly Facebook is rocking in terms of online influence.
As for many, Twitter didn’t impress me initially but after following a lot of people and capturing a lot of followers I started to understand how important Twitter would be to the online social experience. This was borne out very strongly at CES Las Vegas watching how quickly businesses – even including non-tech businesses like the hotels and attractions in Las Vegas – were using Twitter as a key news, customer contact, and customer relations tool. As mom and pop businesses and “regular folks” begin to understand how active engagement with Twitter can revolutionize the way we do business communication I think we’ll see a second explosion in use and Twitter will rival Facebook in terms of importance.
The latest in the pantheon of very popular “social media” applications is called “FourSquare”. The idea is to know the location of your friends and share your location as well as offer tips about everything from dining to attractions. The basic idea is appealing and intuitive and the service appears to be exploding in popularity, though I’m finding it hard to use I think in part because I’m a rural dweller and things like this are more useful in urban centers where there are a lot more participants. Still, it seems to me this only enhances Twitter somewhat, and is not really a major improvement over what we’d expect from more active use of Twitter, which I see as playing (eventually) the a role as an application that manages how people are relating to other people on an hour by hour basis. Although it’s mostly early adopters who use Twitter in this way now, the fact that tweets are easier than a phone call means to me that eventually we’ll shift from calling to some form of text messaging, the most powerful of which is …. tweeting!
In summary I’m thinking that Google search will continue to thrive and dominate with Facebook and Twitter becoming the key tools for social interaction – Facebook more between friends and family and Twitter between businesses and celebrities and customers / fans. That doesn’t leave much room for Foursquare to become huge, but the online social space has become so large that even a supporting role can be an auspicious one.
Talent Oregon Coffee
The website for the Talent Oregon Coffee Shop called the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop is currently listed far too low by Google’s search algorithm, below two of my posts about the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon. Hopefully this post plus some changes to titles in an earlier blog post (which had Title “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon”, plus some linkage action will fix this problem, but we’ll see. The Whistle Stop’s website is using a Godaddy hosting template now and Google may be downranking for that or fretting over the Godaddy banner at the top which may diminish the content score (I’m just speculating here).
Blog content continues to factor very importantly into search rankings, especially (I speculate) because of the freshness and as a source of relevant links in to other content. Confounding all SEO analyses is the fact that Google appears to treat things somewhat inconsistently to reduce the effects of really aggressive optimization tactics. For example there are tricks that can be used that may lead to a short term big boost in rankings, only to leave a site penalized for months or even years for “manipulation of the algorithm”, which in the eyes of Google is a crime worthy of the harshest punishment.
One of the interesting challenges in search engine optimization is, as the excellent Mr. Matt Cutts at Google likes to say, that ”Googlebot is stupid” that might be paraphrasing but I think it’s a direct quote. He was talking about the fact that good site structure will “help” Google figure out the natural and relevant relationships between links, content, and websites. Matt likes to point out – sometimes to some fairly hostile SEO folks at conferences – that good SEO is mostly just applying a lot of common sense “best practices” rules for websites, aka “building for the user not the search engines”. I often give that good advice to people who ask me how to rank well even though they are usually disappointed (and skeptical) when I don’t give them hints from the bag of secret tricks they think you learn at search conferences. For the record it used to be a lot easier to manipulate ranks and it was a common practice, but now most quality SEO folks will advise you to avoid deception or manipulations and spend your time and money seeking legitimate incoming links and building great websites. That does NOT always work – especially for new sites – but it’s good general advice.
So let’s see if Google can get this one right quickly. The most relevant site for the query “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon” is …
Business Tip: Survival of the Experimentals
Comment loudly and aggressively, but stay on topic! NO POLITICAL COMMENTS on non-political posts!
My two key points here (saving you valuable blog reading time at NO extra charge!).
1. Branding is overrated and usually naively accepted as something that works for small business when generally it does NOT work.
2. Success has no recipe, rather it’s simply survival of the best of many, mostly failed experiments. Predicting which will survive is very hard to do, and successful business models evolve from movements aways from troubles as much as “towards” success or using some recipe for success.
A open bet I have that is the extension of point 2 comes to mind:
I’ll wager $1,000 (or more if you like) against *anybody* who says they can predict the movement of any publicly traded stock or index 2 days in a row. ie you’d have FOUR options “up or down” each for day one and day two. Note: This is a bad bet for you – you’ll lose it about 3/4 of the time. Yes, YOU will!
———– the rest of the story ————
As I age gracefully within the business world I see/meet/study a lot of “success stories” as well as failures. Contrary to the fairy tale notions of success, I would not say that successful people seem to be all that much a result of “hard work” or “brilliancy” or “following a path to success”. I’m not saying there’s zero relationship between smart people or hard workers and success – there does indeed seem to be correlation and I’d guess causation. However the best way to understand success is to look at the paths away from failures rather than to try to apply a bunch of “success rules” that are mostly just talk-fodder for marketeers and motivational speakers. In fact many mega-success stories are notable more for how they defied rules than how they applied them.
In the ”special” report from American Express I just got in the mail they have noted ”Six Branding Strategies that can help Differentiate Your Business” . The advice is generally fine for those who believe in branding as the key strategic concern in small business marketing. I’m a marketing heretic in this respect and remain very skeptical of the whole branding concept with the probably exception of the huge companies that sell national or international products, are marketing to pretty much “everybody”, and have a fairly high potential profit margin on your products (e.g. Coke, ATT, SONY).
Brand may matter at a national level to some extent but even for the big ticket companies I think the ad campaigns are as much about making money for marketing firms as all this “top of mind” stuff that in my view is questionably supported by a lot of self-serving research. Seems to me that most of the global brands are more a product of the company’s early efforts than the campaigns that followed those efforts. It’s hard to tell the primacy of the branding chicken from her egg over time, but clearly Google is an example of a huge global brand which was well known well before any expensive advertising campaigns came along to spread and reinforce the message. Are they the exception or the branding rule?
Branding or not, the American Express advice in a nutshell is OK for the brandy dancers* out there. The recommendations are:
* Perform Background Research
* Define Your Brand
* Ensure Consistency
* Tap Social Networking Tools
* Track Your Performance
* Stay Top of Mind
Well, OK, but I’d recommend to most small businesses that they focus on only two of these nuggets – Social Networking and tracking performance, and most importantly that they be sure to work away from failure. If an ad campaign is not returning positive ROI then dump it - NOW – and find things that do return a positive ROI. Social networking is essentially free. To some extent time is money, but generally this is a great way to apply yourself as the key player in your business and to adjust things at low cost with potential high return. *Every* business should have a website and a Twitter account. NO exceptions to this unless you are a clandestine operative for the CIA or something like that. I suppose Twitter isn’t a great idea in that case. “Clandestine CIA Operative for Hire - Please twitter @SecretsoftheCIA“. From a small restaurant to a mega-corporation, you need to have a path from you to customers and from them to you. Twitter is hard to beat for that purpose.
Based on my travel sector experiences I would argue that local and regional branding is very much overrated as a concept, mostly by the entities (marketing folks) who profit from the misperception that you can usually attain positive ROI on branding campaigns.
Incredibly much of the research in this area is by entities that …. drum roll please …. wait for it …. make their living promoting the idea that branding works. It’s no surprise that a firm hired by agencies to “determine” whether they are effective at something … winds up finding out that …. they are effective at doing something! As with evolution, you don’t survive long if your research tends to conclude your client isn’t doing their job very well.
“I’m sorry Mr. Honest Marketing Research Firm who concluded we waste our money, we’ve concluded we need a new research firm”.
Happy holidays!
* Brandy Dancers are branding enthusiasts and are not to be confused with the Gandy Dancers who use to lay rail in the USA in the 1800s.
Disclaimer: As a Techdirt Insight Community writer I am sometimes paid for American Express project writing over at InsightCommunity.com This post has nothing to do with that and no compensation is expected or implied, and reflects only my views and the views of those who agree with me. You know who you are, and I thank you for reading so far into this disclaimer. For more about potential conflicts of interest as well as a treatise on the notion that transparency and disclosure are more important than the usual pretense of ” I am unbiased!”, see our dislosure policy over at Technology Report. This ends the disclosure disclaimer portion of our program, thank you and good night.
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