Category Archives: Web 2.0

SES San Jose “Meet the Crawlers” Session

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SES San Jose “Meet the Crawlers” Session

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
Though poorly attended the SES San Jose “Meet the Crawlers” section offered some give and take with key search engineers from MSN, Google, Yahoo, and ASK. All engines seemed to “agree” on these points:

Avoid paid linking
Use 301 redirection for site moves.  Generally this will pass authority (though IMHO you should avoid 301 moves if possible due to losing rank).

Make sure robots.txt file is in order and is allowing all bots  you want “in”.
In another session it was said that ASK downranks sites without a robots.txt.

L to R in picture: MSN’s Eytan Seidman, Yahoo’s Sean Sucher, Google’s Evan —, and Ask’s Peter? Lindsey (I’ll correct these names later with my notes)

Wrapping up day 3 of SES San Jose Search Strategies Conference

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For great session coverage of SES see the following sites:

SEO Roundtable

Search Engine Land

SEOmoz

Bruce Clay

Technorati “SES” tag

TopRank Blog

Yesterday’s “Is Buying Links Evil” was by far the most interesting and heated of the sessions. Google’s Matt Cutts was under heavy fire from Todd Malicoat and Michael Gray regarding Google’s aggressive policies on paid linking and the application of the NOFOLLOW tag. The best question came from Rand Fishkin who asked Matt Cutts if it would be preferable to do without NOFOLLOW and have better, scalable, algorithmic ways to determine link relationships. Matt indicated it would and this gets to the huge middle ground in the paid linking debate. I think SEO folks, especially those who worked back in the gravy days of massive paid linking, should have expected Google to crack down on the practice but I would *strongly* criticize Google for not bringing more transparency to this issue by clarification of their paid link penalty structure and what appears to be a lot of leniency for paid linking in many situations. Many links, such as those a brief aquaintance might give to another person who opens a new website, are probably in line with guidelines but are essentially identical in structure to a paid link. In this case adding nofollow is totally inappropriate since the goal is to indicate a mild endorsement of the new site. I suspect this type of link is treated favorably by Google and I’m wildly guessing that they err on the side of not penalizing this type of link, but that is not clearly indicated in the policy statements or in the talks I’ve had with Google search folks. This failure to clarify, combined with Google asking for “help” in finding paid links, has led to more frustration in the Webmaster community than Google thinks it has caused. One indication of this was the huge applause given to parts of the “anti Google” presentations yesterday. As always Matt Cutts handles this with great composure and I think a very sincere desire to make things work well for all players, but I’d recommend that Google really examine the linking policies carefully and issue a detailed and full clarification of “legitimate linking practices” with, literally, thousands of examples. Will this be reverse engineered for SEO benefit? Yes, but if it’s written correctly it can improve the web rather than leading to confusion about linking and the rampant continued use of paid linking schemes.

Links are a big theme here and I’m now off to Danny Sullivan’s session on “Search Engine Q&A On Links”

SES San Jose – Jim Lanzone on Ask’s upcoming billion dollar search deal

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ASK CEO Jim Lanzone was the first keynoter here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, and Lanzone gave a lot of insightful answers to Chris Sherman’s excellent series of questions about ASK’s future in search and advertising.   A few highlights:

“It’s not a zero sum game” said Lanzone, noting their cooperation with Google in a 100,000,000 ad sponsorship deal and saying the next deal will be in the billions and could be with other players as well as Google.  

ASK 3d is leading to some interesting findings, esp. that 50% of the ASK 3d activity is not in the search listings portion.  Lanzone feels the sweet spot is in the “Collective Context” that billions of searches are bringing to the table now.    ASK’s new “Edison Algorithm” will seek to make sense of the maelstrom of data ASK has from their search property as well as the dozens of separate IAC online businesses.

“Search is now your co-pilot”, said Lanzone, and suggested that the value of search based ads is still very high compared to traditional media.  

Sherman noted that Lanzone’s “Etour” was similar to StumbleUpon.   Lanzone said it was before it’s time and was “Darwined out”.   No plans to revive it are pending. 

Pligg for sale, Searchmob, and Arabian Horse Breeding

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TechCrunch reports that Pligg is up for sale.   The clone of the Digg project was a great way to easily and effectively set up a user community where people could submit, review, and rank articles.    John Battelle used it nicely over at SearchMob  in an attempt to enhance his excellent search news coverage at Search Blog.

Unfortunately at SearchMob it seemed to me that the reviews became more of a breeding ground for SEO tactics than a clearinghouse for quality search news.    Several participants would primarily list stories at their own sites that were referencing *other* source stories.   This is not necessarily bad but I found at SearchMob that only a fraction of the stories were “high quality”.    That said I’m not a big fan of Digg either because my interests still don’t seem to match the normal onliner demographic very well.

Pligg may not be the best example of how to make money on Web 2.0 because it was an open project and an advanced concept used by tech-savvy folks more than mainstream people.   Mainstream is where the numbers are and therefore, usually, where the money is.   Still, Pligg had buzz, traffic, and a community.   This should be enough to do well enough to keep building the project.   It’s possible the owners really *could* keep running the site and quit their jobs but want to try for a big payoff now while VC money is still flowing briskly into startups.   In fact this makes a lot of sense and if true it means my analysis here is probably flawed – ie they are selling at opportune time rather than for the stated reasons of “too busy to run it”.

Pligg’s founders suggest that they are selling because they have real jobs and don’t have time to manage the growing and thriving Pligg community.    I find this very interesting because they clearly have done Web 2.0 “right” – they created a useful service, got lots of people actively involved and developing for it, and have a powerful community of users.   So why can’t they quit their jobs and just work on Pligg and rake in lots of money?    Don Dodge’s mini-analysis of some time ago has part of the answer.   Even most VC funded startups don’t appear to return enough for the average VC to break even on the investment.    If true this is a really provocative notion – rich people are funding companies and losing money.   Like Arabian Horse breeding or Casino gambling it may be that playing the startup game is so enjoyable – and the potential deceptive enough for many wealthy folks that they continue to fund companies that, on average, will only return a portion of their investment over time.   Are Startups , on average, a bad investment?

The rumors of PodTech’s death may not be greatly exaggerated?

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Update:   As far as I know PodTech is doing fine as of December 2007, and the rumors back in July were bogus or exaggerated.   Just heard from John Furrier that PodTech will again host a “bloghaus” at CES, one of the neatest “social tech” ideas last year in my opinion.    I’m a big fan of all that Robert Scoble has done to evangelize quality corporate blogging and really wish PodTech the best.

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Mike Arrington is reporting that PodTech is in trouble. I think this is consistent with the idea that content is no longer king – it’s a pawn in the big game to leverage the flood of free content and social networking activity, a game where the winners will NOT be the product of doing the “right thing”, rather winners will be the survivors of the evolutionary process that drives our rapidly changing digital ecosystem. Biological evolution works *away from failure* rather than towards success, and it seems clear to me this is also how internet company evolution works.

Mike suggests that PodTech might survive in modified form by scaling back and lowering their “burn rate” and focusing almost exclusively as a production and advertising house focusing on their own clients. I wrote over there:

Good insight as usual Dr. Mike.

“… get their burn rate very low” ummmm – can you cite any examples of a companies that did this in time to survive?

I enjoy Robert’s perspectives and consider him a real blogging leader and a digital inspiratation to the rest of us, but I don’t have the time to invest in his videos or PodTech’s other rich content. (just the facts please!)

Producing quality content is now playing with pawns rather than kings, and for some time it will be the companies that leverage the flood of free content or help people process the maelstrom of content that will win. e.g Facebook, Google, and your personal favorite winner, TechCrunch!

The painful thing if PodTech dies is that they did so many thing exactly “right”. They saw video and blogging as sweeping new online paradigms, they hired Robert Scoble who is nothing short of a digital inspiration to bloggers and video folks – he’s one of the elite onliners who puts his blog, money, reputation where his mouth is and actually engages non-elites regularly and with gusto and stays about as Web 2.0 connected as you can without exploding. Also, PodTech sponsored what looked to me like CES’s best new idea – the Bloghaus.

But planning and quality don’t necessarily breed success in biology or business, and PodTech may be just one more example of the harsh new evolutionary realities facing any digital animal.

As Paul K infectiously notes business plans are overrated. Twitter’s lack of a business plan may be the flip side of the evolutionary challenges – disorganization won’t hurt them and might even be part of the reasons it’s looking like Twitter will be …. hugely successful.

Forbes “Tech Boom, Media Bust”

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Brian Caufield has written a great Forbes piece about the impact of new media on … old media. He notes the rise of GigaOm and TechCrunch and the demise of Red Herring and CNET.

My take on much of the new game is that *keeping expenses low* is far more important than *generating big revenues*. We may be seeing a 180 degree turnaround in many industries where we return to small business, entrepreneurial modes of production that use the internet as the mechanism to cheaply scale from small to large. Scaling up in media industries used to take substantial capital but now it takes almost nothing. Info based industries have only begun to reel from the coming changes.

Zillow Community

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Matt Ingram, in the wonderfully titled “Is Zillow Building a Ghost Town?” is skeptical of Zillow’s new community pages, noting the failure of BackFence. I’m also skeptical of Zillow’s prospects for online community building but I think for different reasons, and both of us are premature to call this so early. Zillow is a big player in the “city information” space and therefore should certainly look for ways to enhance social networking at the site.

I’ll waste a few electrons to duplicate what I wrote over there:

I’m also skeptical but this is no Backfence – here Zillow will not pay to have the content developed so if communities do sprout up they’ll be gravy to the Zillow bottom line which should only have to pay a modest amount to ramp up and keep this going alongside their core competency, RE listings.

However the *idea* of local voices is excellent, in fact I’m hoping to create a more tourism focused approach with local bloggers rather than contributors to a community in which they have little stake. Hyperlocal *news* will keep failing but hyperlocal *blogging* has only begun to flourish, and IMHO could become the dominant form of human communication. (insert trumpet fanfare here)

The Blogging Revolution has begun! (?)

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Kent Newsome has sounded the clarion call for a blogging revolution, and I for one am *in*. Mark July 4, 2007 as the beginning of the revolution that will bring down the tired elite establishment in favor of more prominence for fresh new voices.

I’m tired of reading the same old people who in some cases are too busy chasing dollars to blog nearly as creatively as they did in the old days (ie a year ago). The more ominous case is the new trend in blogging that has “A listers” effectively (even if not literally) shilling for big corporations under the provocative guise called “conversational marketing”.

I’ve already replaced some A listers with some less prominent but more interesting bloggers and over the next week I’m going to remove all the A listers in favor of new voices. In one sense this isn’t fair to the A-list folks who still have interesting and clear voices, but on balance it is sort of like “affirmative action” for blogging. Search engines tend to favor bloggers who have older and abundant links. Early bloggers have both not because they are profound, but just because they were around early on in the linking process when there were fewer voices of any kind and money had not entered (and distorted) the blogging equation. Search ranking quirks have effectively distorted the ranking of bloggers to such an extent that the small number of ‘A listers’ have far too dominant a voice in many tech blog topics. I’d like to see that end ASAP, so I’ll do what little I can to make it happen and encourage others to do the same.

More from Gaping Void

MSNBC on “the A list”

Kijiji starts with a whimper not a bang

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Lots of buzz today about EBAY’s entry into the online classifieds space with Kijiji.com but I don’t think Craigslist has much to worry about. Kijiji is easy to navigate with maps and Kijiji is easy to understand and Kijiji makes it easy to register….but…. there are practically NO LISTINGS! Obviously it’ll take some time for them to promote the service and gear up, but one of the big 2.0 challenges now is that users don’t want to submit listings to dozens of websites or even to two for that matter. Rather, ideally, you’ll submit to Craigslist and have Kijiji pick up the listing automatically. I’m assuming they’ll bring this functionality in at some point but clearly they have not yet – there appear to be very few listings or registrations so far based on the forum and some quick surfing.

Google: Taking the computing out of your computer. Good for Google.

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Google’s increasingly clever and bold initiatives to help people cope with virtual “paperwork” underscore their brilliancy in providing a simple and highly productive computing environment that is *not very dependent* on your own computer or your own computer skills.

Google is by far the most successful of the big players in creating really simple but powerful ways to use computer power *without* messing around much with the computer. Where MS applications sit on your own PC, Google’s site on the internet servers they run and manage. It’s a black box to some extent but it ‘s a box that *works*. Problem solving for the user is simplified to maintaining an internet connection rather than worrying about configuration of programs and hardware.

Perhaps even more important than the applications is that this shifts the perspective of the company in a very powerful way. You can even see this when talking to some of the Google folks who generally are less enamored with *making computers work* as they are with *making systems work*. It’s a bit of a broad generalization but I think it’s true that culturally speaking, Microsoft and MS folks generally talk (and think) in terms of how people need to relate to the computing environment where Google folks talk and think in terms of how they can adapt the environment to meet the needs of the user.

Where MS says “hey, you need to learn to use MS Word” Google says “Hey, we need to make it really easy to do Word Processing”.

Is this obvious? Perhaps, but I think the importance of this distinction is largely lost on MS management despite the fact that most of the new hires probably understand this challenge all too well. Ironically MS is in a better position than Google to leverage the fact everybody is using MS programs now (browser, OS).

Would it be *so hard* to create powerful, socially driven and enhanced software and hardware support sytems? Not really, but I’m guessing MS is very busy trying to protect the profitable paid support systems. Also, it is hard for many people with MS cultural sensibilities to visualize details of the future where they’ll be increasingly challenged by those who want to take the computing out of the computer.