Xianglu Grand, Xiamen China

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I’m hoping that SES China in Xiamen is going to be at the same venue as last year, the Xianglu Grand Hotel.  This hotel looks fantastic and elegant with beautiful rooms and several restaurants.    Food is one of the things I’m really looking forward to in China and I’m sure the Xianglu Grand Hotel won’t disappoint in this area.    I am a little concerned that it’s bad form not to try everything offered by a guest, so if I’m eating with folks who offer me fried canaries or something like that I better be sure to have the pepto bismol tablets handy.    The Xianglu Grand website still suffers from almost bizarre optimizing problems, but the hotel is splendid and I’m really looking forward to the stay.  Current special rates appear to be very low so I’m tempted to book very soon because the rack rates are more than double.   About $80 vs $200 per night with the nice garden suites at an especially large discount.

I missed that conference but this year I will be in Xiamen for SES China April 18-19.     The current plan is to fly in and out of Hong Kong, which is somewhat south of Xiamen, and then make our way up from Hong Kong to Xiamen to Beijing and possibly also Shanghai.

Hong Kong is on the sea in the South, Shanghai on the sea hundreds of miles north, and Beijing inland and somewhat north of Shanghai.    Another very popular destination we’ll probably miss this trip is X’ian, home to the amazing ancient Terra Cotta army – hundreds  of life sized clay soldier statues.

Search Ranking Factors

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Rand Fishkin’s SEOMOZ has been doing some of the best work collecting data from prominent SEO folks and groups of experts and then analyzing that data.     Back in April I missed this report about SEO ranking factors but it’s a great read, especially for those who have little idea about how to optimize a website and web pages for better placement in search engines.    Note that experts do not agree.    Also, my fairly extensive experiences have convinced me that Google changes the ranking rules regularly simply to make it impossible to reverse engineer them.   But it’s still important to follow these basic recommendations which include what I’d argue are now the “prime directives” for optimizing websites:

Create pages that are of high and unique content quality.

Use URLs and Titles that are highly relevant to the queries you wish to rank for.

In bound links are still very important – seek external links and create internal incoming links using your desired keywords as anchor text.

Tend to exaggerate the keywords you are targeting.   ie the best writing will NOT result in the best optimization due to defects in the way machines process word information.     

CES 2008

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Click HERE for the latest on my CES Experience

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I’ll be blogging as much as possible, liveblogging the Bill Gates keynote on Sunday and trying to get a grasp on the big picture at this huge conference.    I’m really looking forward to seeing the latest gadgets and trends in technology.     One of the gadget themes I’ll explore are language translators.   These are important in travel and I’ll hope to test a few during the China trip this April.

Franklin has a translator device that looks like one of the best offerings out there – a twelve language translator where you type in the word and it speaks it back to you.

Google’s got an interesting new language translation “bot” for the Blackberry that Google is blogging about here.   Maybe they’ll have a Treo version later?

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.

2045

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I am SO very interested in how people are going to process the upcoming film about the Singularity as defined by Ray Kurzweil, which is a pretty awesome future for humans:  

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence.  It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality …

And holy string cosmology, that’s not even the singularity part!   Kurzweil predicts that around 2045, after we all become superintellects, the machine intelligences will surpass the total brainpower of planet earth by so much that it’s likely most of us will simply upload into the giant intelligent machine, or some other future we can’t know because….it’s hard to think what we’d do when we are 1,000,000,000 times smarter than we are right now.

Too optimistic?    Too weird?    Maybe, but Kurzweil is arguably the best thinker out there on artificial intelligence, and unlike the past where AI overhyped and underdelivered it is now clear that at least in terms of computational power and memory storage we’ll be reaching human capabilities soon.   

So, are you ready?   

Copy, right?

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I’m writing to so many blogs these days it’s getting hard to keep them all straight.    Here’s my thinking on the Lane Hartwell incident over at the Webguild blog.

Webguild is the Silicon Valley marketing and internet networking group that meets at Google every month and sponsors a couple of conferences each year.   It’s a volunteer effort but run with exceptional professionalism and innovation by Daya Baran (Webguild President) and Reshma Kumar (Webguild Vice President).    I’m looking forward to the Web 2.0 Conference to be held in January.

The Emperor’s New Clothes * * * *

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This beautiful and clever film takes a fanciful “alternative history” of Napoleon’s imprisonment on the island of St. Helene, following a conspiracy to replace him on the throne by trading places with a commoner who looks like Napoleon. Ian Holm is magnificent in one of his best roles, Iben Hjejle is radiant as Napoleon’s thoughful and down to earth love interest. This film uses several very clever, subtle film allusions to add depth and humor to a complex storyline. The Emperor’s New Clothes is a great story and a joy to watch.

Note – this 2001 film is not a remake of film by same name about a Roman Emperor. Have not seen that one.

Google adsense discouraged quality content, Google knol is trying to fix that.

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Google knol is a promising development in online information, where “experts” will write concise, authoritative articles on many topics and the community will rank and comment on those articles.   It may be a great way to combine quality content with social networking, though I’m not clear if the quality content producers will be rewarded with more than just the knol-edge  that they have brought more good info into the world.

Although I don’t think they’d talk much about this, I think Google has begun to understand the degree to which adsense has hurt the online information landscape – basically by rewarding those who are most clever at flooding the web with low quality content rather than those who have provided high quality content.   Likewise with linking, where SEO abuses and excesses and Google decisions have made it increasingly hard to separate the information wheat from the adsense chaff.

Enter knol, which will be a community policed content system.    Basically a good idea, and as I’ve noted many times before Google is masterful at doing good things that happen to help them solve some potential revenue problems.   As Nick Carr noted yesterday Google’s high ranks for un-monetized Wikipedia content aren’t putting many Christmas presents under the tree for Google, and knol may shift some advertising focus back in house.

Hong Kong Harbor, Beijing’s Forbidden City, and the Great Wall of China

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Wow.   Planning the China Trip is really getting exciting for me.   I’m going to get to see some of the things I’ve heard about for most of my life – things that are on “The List” of stuff I just had to do like Hong Kong Harbor, Beijing, and more.  China’s Yellow Mountains are on my list as are is the Terra Cotta army in X’ian, but those will probably have to wait for the next trip because this one is filling up fast and, frankly, I’d rather relax and enjoy things than try to see too much stuff on my first trip over.

It now appears that the best approach may be to fly to Hong Kong.   I’m finding the Hong Kong flights are in the $700 range rather than the $1000+ to Beijing, and Hong Kong is somewhat closer to Xiamen where I’ll be at the SES China conference.    Also, I’ve learned that the train system in China is modern, comfortable, cheap, and extensive.    I like the idea of rolling along between cities rather than just plane hopping, and since I have the time I’m thinking a good route might be this:

Fly SFO to Hong Kong and spend a few days seeing Hong Kong Harbor and the city.  

Get a deluxe sleeper car for the trip to Xiamen.

Continue on the train to Beijing where I’m meeting up with friends.

Train Beijing to Shanghai if we decide to go there.  

Train from Shanghai to Hong Kong, perhaps stopping in any neat places I scoped out during the earlier trip in opposite direction.