Category Archives: Webmasterworld

Pubcon – Feeds and Alternative Optimization session

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Sorry but it’s impossible to keep up with all the news here at WebmasterWorld. For better coverage read Barry Schwartz SEO Roundtable who always does an amazing job covering the sessions here – looked like he had a team of bloggers helping this year.

Greg Jarboe

Amanda Watlington PhD blogger and second lifer

Todd Malicoat The SMM Toolbox

I’ve heard several talks by Todd and he’s one of the few SEOs I’ve met that combines excellent communication skills with a deep knowledge of the latest SEO concepts. Very nice guy as well.

Best of the Web: Greg Hartnett

recommends the study of *networks* via books Nexus and … which discuss the mechanics of what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “Tipping Point”. Recommends using user communities like Flickr to drive interested users to your site. Join groups

Google Video – his son’s little “hocky fight” humorous clip of 1 minute downloaded almost a *million* times.   (But how much traffic to his URL?)

RE: Digg info he recommends:
Pronett Advertising
WolfHowl

Webmaster World Pubcon – Digg’s Owen Byrne, Niall K, Feedburner, Topix

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Here at Webmaster World Pubcon in Las Vegas:

Gred Niland introduced the feedmaster formerly of Technorati and Microsoft –
Niall Kennedy who discussed some technical aspects.

Rick from Feedburner:

Feedburner sends 25 million feeds per day and this is just the beginning. With IE7 RSS feed reader integrated, RSS will explode to mainstream [yes! a critical point!]. Auto discovery must be well-configured.

Feed publishing is diversifying. More podcasters than radio stations.

MEME sites like Techmeme.com are processing the RSS more deeply, looking at linking relationships. Add links if you want to be ‘seen’ at Techmeme. Edgeio as another example of RSS facilitating info movement. Sphere.

Owen Byrne – Digg co-founder: We were not the Guy Kawasaki “sweet spot” startup of Standford PhD students jumping the curve, rather Kevin Rose Screensavers hackin’ dude and Owen webmaster from Nova Scotia.

Owen question: How are people using Digg for marketing? Owen: “Digg this buttons”, “good content” is the best way to get on front page. Also, participating in the community will help.

Kevin’s inspirations: Wisdom of crowds – user driven news. Could not break into Slashdot – frustrating.

Paris Hilton Cell phone scandal spiked Digg into the big time Feb 2005. Major optimization ensued. July 2005 – seed money. July 2006 -more capitalization?

500k ACTIVE contributing users. 20 million monthly uniques(!). [Wow, that’s sure higher than other reports, but Owen’s got the logs so I doubt he’d mislead on this. I had a chance to ask him about this after and he’s very confident (obviously) of the number. I also asked why Comscore’s numbers diverge so greatly from Digg’s but promised I wouldn’t quote his answer – sorry.

Owen’s Bio over at Digg

My (Joe’s)  personal view of Comscore is that they are starting to suffer greatly from measuring things like RSS and gadget activity. We are certainly close to needed new metrics to take gadgets, pops, and scripting activity into account as well as what Scoble calls “engagement”, which is hard to measure but an important notion of how users react to websites.

Rick at TOPIX.net – local is the last mile on the internet. Connecting local to the big corporate sites and companies is where a lot of money is going. RSS feeds are 1/3 of clicks through the service. 20 million story clicks to sites per month. USE Rss to increase distribution. Add comments.

digg it!

Landing in Las Vegas

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Despite the Medford to SFO delay that kicked me to the next SFO to LAS flight, here I am in Las Vegas having arrived about 3 hours later than planned. The Best Western Mardi Gras is turning out to be a super value – I paid about 45 per night for a room that’s huge and clean with a big kitchen. The hotel is one of the closest to the Convention Center which I’ll be able to walk to in about 10 minutes and, most importantly, there’s free WIFI that was not even advertised as an amenity. I should put together a WIFI guide to Las Vegas. I think the major strip hotels charge a lot. Last year at the Hilton I think WIFI was an extra 9.95 per day where the Imperial Palace, if I remember right, has a one time 9.95 fee regardless of length of stay.

Tomorrow WebmasterWorld 2006 begins with a Guy Kawasaki Keynote.

Medford Airport WIFI

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Sure is nice to have the WIFI going here at Medford Airport since my plane just got delayed by over 2 hours.   I’ll need to redo the SFO to LAS connection but hopefully there are many flights and I was getting in pretty early anyway.   Connectivity is somewhat flaky – not sure why but it’s been problematic all along, but it’s still good to have it and get a bit of work (or chess!) done while I sit here.

Webmaster World Las Vegas

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WebmasterWorld is one of the two big conferences with really advanced SEO information and it starts Tuesday.

About 1000 people will gather in Las Vegas for info, conferencing, and interaction with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and ASK folks. Many of the best internet marketing folks in the world are here, and it’s always a fun time.

I’m looking forward to it!

Should Blogging ban Conferences?

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Nielsen banned blogging at a recent conference leading Steve Rubel to ask “Should Conferences Ban Blogging?” I think a much better question is this:

Should Blogging ban Conferences?

Over the last 18 months or so I’ve made a point of attending several internet-related conferences. Some were informative, some fun but one of the most important things I took away was how much more I could have learned by simply spending an equal amount of time in careful online study of new developments.

This was even true at the best conference format from the superb UNconferences held by Dave Berlind and Doug Gold in Mountain View. So, why am I heading down to their latest effort, Startup Camp, next Wednesday and Thursday? … Well, it’s because conferences are a very enjoyable way to meet people and learn a few new tricks and “get out” from the somewhat nonsocial work environments in which many online professionals dwell much of the time, especially independents like me.

But blogging those conferences is really enjoyable, creates highly relevant new content for the web, and most importantly spreads the word to people who can’t attend due to expense or distance or whatever.

The idea of conferences banning blogging is very shortsighted from the conference’s financial success perspective since blogging is free publicity for next year and will encourage the growing legions of citizen journalists to attend.

FAR more importantly, Banning blogging is also turning the internet efficiency on it’s head and suggesting that the goal of conferences is the greedy monetization of the conference itself, rather than the appropriate monetization of the education and social experience.

Hey conferences – if you have something worth saying, it’s worth your attendees blogging about it.

UPDATE:  Max has a thoughtful reply, though I don’t agree:

Max this is a thoughtful argument and correctly separates this case from normal conference blogging as I failed to do in my critical post.
However I remain skeptical of any anti-blogging policy since it defies a new open standard that suggests blogging keeps the online world humming along nicely.  This appears to be too close to asserting that it’s OK to profit from online communities and activities with no obligation to share insights with that same community.

Freemont Street Light Canopy, Las Vegas

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Freemont, Las Vegas

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Just booked for WebmasterWorld Las Vegas coming up next month. These Freemont Pics are from that trip a year ago and make the downtown area look spiffier than it does in person. I’m glad I saw the spectacular light show but the Las Vegas Strip hotels and casinos and general “feel” is much fancier and “cleaner” than the downtown area.

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.