Category Archives: search

The Best of 25 Tech Voices” vs “The Best 25 Tech Voices”

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Read that title again because there is a HUGE difference that's getting lost online.

I hate to bash the neat new tech feed feature of John Battelle's Federated Media because I think John is one of the most sincere fellows out there and really wants to bring quality AND commercial viability to the blogosphere. I'm for both those things.

Also, I like the collection which appears "good". But this is not the *best* collection of posts because it only reflects those in the Federated stable – a very, very small fraction of intelligent commentary.

I'd be a hypocrite to blame Battelle for compromising online quality in favor of business. HOWEVER when does this cross the line? If Battelle had restricted all quoted people in his excellent book "The Search" to those with whom he did business it would not even have made it out of the publisher's office and even John would agree he'd be horrible to show such bias in a printed book.

Yet online we've all started to expect the worst commercialism and then be relieved – or even inspired – if a company simply pushes out quality and announces that it favors people with whom it has a commercial connection.

One's attention only spans a tiny fraction of total content. As Federated, TechCrunch, and all of us choose to read and post more about our internet home boys than those with whom we have no association then how narrow and commercial is this all going to get?

Isn't blogging supposed to destabilize rather than enforce this narrowing focus of our limited attention?

SPAM is in the eye of the beholder?

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For many the term web spam simply means unwanted junk email, but in the search community the definition of spam tends to be far more comprehensive and, to me, confusing. Obviously totally irrelevant junk is spam, but what about poorly written, marginally relevant information written by a seventh grade student about her class project dealing with asbestosis?

Few would call THAT grade school project "spam", yet most internet professionals would say "spam" if the *exact same information" was prepared by an outsourced team in an effort to rank for the term "asbestosis" becuase it fetches big money on the pay per click market.

In this example intention is defining the material as spam and that approach bothers me. I appreciate he fact that major search engines lean in the direction of objective measurements of relevancy, which probably do not attempt to factor intention into the equation except in extreme cases where, for example, Matt's spam team would ban a site for manipulation.

I suppose in this case they'd probably apply different metrics to the two sites above though I'm guessing they very rarely apply non-objective analysis. For one thing it's not scalable. For another it's hard (impossible?) to define subjective criteria.

Thanks CheapSeats!

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Is started with a frustrating 45 minute session at cheapseats.com where they kept saying my itinerary choice, presented to me 30 seconds before was NOT available.   I ran through this process 3 times but then dutifully followed their instructions and the guy got me the same price and flights.  I don't expect perfection, just consistency with the advertised price and they delivered on it.    The price at $426 from MEDFORD to BOSTON was about $150 less than Delta's own site so I'm happy.

Since I publish a lot of travel information and also run several affiliation deals with TravelNOW, ONETIME, Hotels.com, and many others, people always ask me how to get the best airline and hotel prices.  

The answer is simple but disappointing – you generally need to surf around a LOT and hope to bump into the place that happens to have the best deal of the moment.  

For Airline tix I usually begin with Orbitz (use the matrix feature with 3 days "before and after" for a nice price "map".  Also check OneTime.com to get a good baseline on prices, then move to the airlines themselves to see if they are better.   If the price is good I'll go ahead and book but if it seems too high (as did 500+ for this Boston Trip), I keep on surfing to Travelocity, Expedia, CheapTickets.   This was my first try with Cheapseats and I'll use them again for sure since they came through for me today.  THANKS Cheapseats! 

Generally the BEST way to save money on airline tix is to have a VERY flexible schedule and be able/willing to fly from major airport to major airport.   Rural areas like mine tend to have fewer good deals than metro areas.

Searching for Myspace with John Battelle

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John Battelle is the web's best "search watcher" and he's posted a great summary of recent events in search HERE at Searchblog.

I would note though that he does not address the significance and growth velocity of the Myspace phenomenon, which I'd suggest is the best, and crappiest, website in history.

Myspace proves that much of the Web 2.0 dialog is misguided, still emphasizing technology improvements over human considerations which lie at the heart of the "new" web and at the heart of the ugly but overwhelmingly successful Myspace.

In many ways I'm a big fan of Myspace as I think it's passes many of the tests that other sites fail – easy to join, navigate, and participate. It passed the critical mass of users long ago and continues to grow wildly – now with 66 million online. Myspace is a prime study in "mass appeal". It's ugly because people, on average, aren't very artistic or clever or well-organized. This aspect of the human condition leads to the web's largest collection of junky pages, and to the web's largest community of super active users.

My personal jury is still out on the "evil" side of myspace with the potential for stalking and young people mingling with unsavory or dangerous kids and adults. The user base is now so huge one must be very cautious in the interpretation of recent criminal activity at the site. Whenever you have a collection of 66 million people you'll get crime.

That said, Myspace probably has a greater community responsibility than it currently acknowledges or deals with proactively – this is certainly the case with the web at large where most onliners maintain that companies have few responsibilities outside of policing outrageous abuses of their services.

For the good of the entire online and offline community this must change, and it will change.

Newsweek: Web 2.0 = The Live Web

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I enjoyed Newsweek's article about Web 2.0, which they preferred to call "The Live Web". It was fun to see several of the companies and people I've encountered recently mentioned in the article. Mary Hodder from MashupCamp was pictured and quoted as was Tim O'Reilly who I just met at Mix06.

They gave Tim far too short an interview. He is unsurpassed in his understanding of the new web but I'm guessing he was a bit too old (he's about 50?) to meet Newsweek's editorial slant on the story which was young, hip, and cool. (Whoops – they didn't mention how casual – sometimes downright disheveled – most of the new technorati tend to be.)

Newsweek's Cover girl Caterina Fake was supposed to be at Mashup Camp but missed it. I'd hoped to meet her and her husband who pioneered Flickr and then sold it to Yahoo. Caterina's blog is one of the most insightful personal views about 2.0 along with those of her amazing Yahoo tech dev co-workers Jeremy Zawodny and Danah Boyd.

Although I'm always VERY impressed with folks from Google, it's Yahoo that really seems to be aquiring the companies and minds that lie at the heart of the new Web's "social" vs "technological" emphasis.

Yahoo seems to have a better handle than Google (who in turn beats Microsoft) in understanding the implications of the vast social networking that is forming a new internet backbone. A backbone characterized by people far more than by technology. That said, I'm not sure anybody "gets Web 2.0", because it's changing fast, dramatically, and in unstable ways.

What a fun new world!

Scobleizer vs Mini-Microsoft

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Robert's April Fooling as well. You can never be sure with the new pace of business, but I think the guy who set up the prestigious few who had lunch with Bill Gates last week at MIX06 probably won't be jumping ship anytime soon. I'd be posting a pic here with me and Microsoft's king of Web 2.0, taken at the Myspace party in Las Vegas last week, but it didn't come out well.

Robert's Naked Conversations is intriguing at many levels, one of which has created a stir over at Amazon where the authors were received somewhat .. discourteously.

But Naked Converstation's intriguing points don't make them "right" about blogging. I'd suggest that Israel and Scoble overrate the positive aspects of corporate blogging and fail to note, for example, the significant harm done by bloggers like mini-microsoft , a mystery Microsoft employee with a blog that has become a very prominent whipping post for anti-Microsoft dialog.

I'd suggest blogs are more a reflection of what's up rather than a shaper of what is to come.

Naked Conversations with Robert, Jeremy and Matt

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book Naked Conversations probably should have kept it's working title "Blog or Die", but it's an excellent read nonetheless.   The point they hammer home with many good examples is that corporations better jump on the blogging bandwagon or suffer the consequences of missing what many would say may become the biggest communication bandwagon of all time.

As if to emphasize the power of blogs and the freewheeling nature of the new corporation two of my favorite online guys – Matt Cutts of Google and Jeremy Zawodny or Yahoo have traded blogs as what has got to be the top April Fools online event so far today.

Given that these two represent two of the top public faces of their respective companies, it's obvious that the NEW corporate landscape – blogging and otherwise – ain't nothing like the old one.  

I like that.

The Google Story

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I read two books up at the lake. David Vises "The Google Story" was an entertaining and informative history of Google from humble beginnings as Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Stanford PhD project to the earth shaking internet giant Google.com. I didn't feel I was getting any really "deep" information however. I kept feeling as I often do when talking to people at Google that they are simply too loyal and too enamored with Google to share insights that might reflect poorly on the company. I'm actually in the picture of Matt Cutts taken at SES San Jose last year. The very favorable tone seemed odd because Vise is a distinguished reporter. I'm wildly guessing that he (perhaps even subconsciously) sacrificed some critical observations in exchange for better access and candor about the basic story.

This "guarded" nature of comments about Google dovetails with points made in Scoble and Israel's "Naked Conversations", the second book I read up at Odell Lake which I'll review next.

Overall though I remain convinced that Google is

1) Special, especially with regard to the incredible intelligence, innovation, and involvement of the founders. The rapid ascent of Google may allow more of this "founders energy" to have a positive impact than where a company grew more slowly.

2) Sincere. This is a slippery slope but I think they remain fairly steady and non-compromising about doing great stuff for the right reasons.

3) Overpriced. I simply don't understand the stock price, which seems to assume Yahoo and MSN have no interests or abilities relating to grabbing a bigger share of the online advertising pie.

Yahoo! It’s .community!

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Jeremy is always asking the right questions.  He notes in his blog today:

Yahoo Groups can serve as the collaborative (not just communications) platform for bringing people together in interesting ways…

Yes it can, though it needs to take some lessons from Myspace, which I'd argue is by far the world's BEST crappy-looking website and BEST example of a site that understands the simple and often unexpected needs and desires of a .com community.   The remarkable rise of Myspace should demonstrate that people are FAR more important than the application.  Also that MOST people will express themselves in what most savvy web folks would consider to be very unprofessional, sloppy, offensive, obnoxious, rule breaking and bandwidth breaking ways.  

Yahoo wouldn't have to have such a messy environment to succeed, I'd think all they'd need is better integration with the inspired but largely unused Yahoo 360, easier signups, and perhaps most importantly ways for people to import data into their profiles at other services to avoid the tedious chores of uploading pix and rewriting bios.

Yahoo – "If you build it, they will come … if they can get in very easily"

 

NMohwy.com experiment continues…

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Interestingly, Google stopped the rapid re-indexing of NMohwy.com even though they have recently downloaded the sitemap. What's odd is that the immediate effect of breaking off this domain and setting it up separately with non duplicate (but similar) information was that the NEW pages were indexed with NEW cache dates. No effect on traffic.

NOW the pages at NMohwy.com show OLD cache dates (often Feb 5, 2005) and have been relegated to supplemental index except for Home page. The key event in this experiment will be the reindexing of the "new" pages which look very much like they did years ago before Google started hating these pages.

Were the problems getting properly indexed and ranked from GOOGLE changing it's opinion about our site or from SITE errors WE made as we improved things?

Even after a year of conferences, emails from Google and others, hundreds of questions, site reviews (even one by Google at Las Vegas PubCon!), and many changes made we don't know the answer to this simple question, though I think duplicate content filtering is be the most likely category for our problem.