My friend Peter asked me over lunch on Sunday how Simon and I advertise our blogs, because he's starting to blog more and wondered how to attract readers. Peter gets a page on Wikipedia and he's interesting to read (go argue with his latest post about whether Linus supports DRM), but he noticed that the post he wrote that got picked up on Boing Boing got a lot more comments than other, very similar posts (indeed, when you search for him on Google, you get, in order, the Wikipedia link, a ZDNet blog, his Linked In Profile and a link to just that post).
'I don't bother with SEO,' I said; 'I'm mostly talking to people who are already listening.' Which probably indicates a certain lack of ambition. SE-what, he replied? Well, now I can point him at the SEO-by numbers explanations in this blog on IT Pro, which sums it up as lots of links, phrases people will search for and keep the sentences short so the spider can understand them. There's a company raising venture capital on the basis of promoting link journalism, where you annotate links to other online articles to synthesise the evidence and put your own view in context (kind of an accessible annotated bibliography). And the blog also links to a superbly subtle column by Charlie Brooker for The Guardian that criticises the practice of shoehorning in irrelevant mentions to Britney Spears and Angelina (and of course, in the process, includes them often enough to squeeze out the very Google juice he's decrying).
The comments seem to rather miss this parodic point and criticise the column for being too ivory tower. 'No one is stopping you from having a beautifully crafted article that no one can find,' says one but then claims we need to optimise the superior content to make it stand out from the masses. Quite how pumping it up with the same search steroids will do this, I'm not sure. I know SEO works well enough for people to pay for it, but much of it strikes me as the Emperor's New Clothes of the Web. If everyone with a site on topic X optimises it with the right keywords, how will any one of them stand out? And isn't it actually about making it easier for us to stop assessing the value of sources ourselves, to stop seeking out good writers and just listen to what shouts the loudest and flashes the brightest?
Very little writing is pure, self-indulgent art - except, ironically, blogs. Anything that's written for publication has to make a point, fit a format, reach a reader (yes, alliteration and metaphor help). The length of fiction - flash, short, novella, novel, series - dictates both the depth of plot and character and the structure of scene and climax. News stories have to read from the top and cut from the bottom so you can fit what matters on the page at the last minute - call it a dying art, but more people in the UK read UK newspapers on paper than online. Sidebars and other page furniture break up a magazine article; they're called page entry points because they can get you to start reading, but they can also give you a break from following the thrust of the article and let you absorb it before you return to reading. Any piece needs to speak to its audience; if I pick up a romance, I'm not after the gritty, indulgent gore of true crime. So you can't say 'it's art, I shouldn't have to care about the demands of commerce or prostitute my pure writing to structure'. But much SEO structure is banal and reductive and lazy and lowest common denominator in a way that other writing structure strictures aren't.
What about good SEO structure? Probably, I've seen it and not known I was seeing it. Maybe, like any other writing craft, ars est celare artem.
When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...
Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...
It's hard to find news on Live Search Local - the Microsoft phone search app - by searching on Google. One thing you do find is a page saying you can report local listings to such-and-such an email address. Which bounces.
Bad Microsoft. NO BISCUIT!
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tanais's hand so I can't plug in headphone or microphone connectors or turn the wireless on and off any more, and now it keeps crashing with either hard drive failures or NTFS.SYS STOP errors (where the hard drive driver fails to cope with the hard drive failing). Losing the integrity of the case may be part of the problem; the duct tape isn't enough! Until I can buy the delightful new R400 I'm using an HP as my main laptop so I've been tweaking the Vista installation. Out of the box, Microsoft doesn't let Vista search network drives - but then Windows Desktop Search for XP doesn't do it out of the box either. The add-on for both is here - along with an add-on to search Internet Explorer history files.Microsft's official stance has been that searching remote drives slows things down too much; they have to fix that when Windows Home Server comes out. There's still no option to snooze or restart indexing in Vista the way you can in XP: a little too nanny-knows-best alas.
http://search.ft.com/search?queryText=m
In other news I'm finally out of bed but not really back up to speed - still coughing a lot and not really running on all cylinders brainwise; reading and watching the brainrotter are about my limit.
sbisson ranted about the poor adoption of universal event formats, I've been keeping an eye out for calendar sites that list events and I've found a couple more. I don't think they're going to compete with Upcoming.org or Eventful because they're much more focussed. zvents is very pale-blue-and-orange-with-white-space Web 2.0, similar to Eventful: I'm seeing this look a lot at the moment. Unlike , it only covers the Bay area. You can search by events, venues, tags, groups or people, and when you get the results you can switch the list to a map view or a calendar view. With a lot of results the map and main calendar view show you the number of results rather than the individual events, but you can get a 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 30 day view as well. Here it's the guided tours that dominate rather than the bookstore events, but when you get down to individual events they're very well presented with maps, times, repeat events, similar events, other events at the same venue... More useful details than Eventful.
AllConferences has a hierarchical drill-down of categories and an advanced search, though you can only search by one condition and picking March 2006 without a date produces events from June 2004 as well. There are conferences going back to 2001 and those are what you see when you search by City; the general search box does a better job. Look here for commercial and academic conferences.
These sites tend to be better for finding a specific event on a specific day than browsing through the possibilities for a longer period of time. For that, I want to be able to start with a large pool of results and filter them. The best filtered view of search results I can think of - and it has deficiencies still - is the hotel map view in Expedia; you can zoom in on the map to refine the list of hotels, or remove hotels from the list to clear them from the map view. I'd like the same for events; let me zoom in to an area, or a category of events, or a smaller date range, or to a time range across several days (what's on every evening next week?). Let me remove all the sports events and everything that's recurring rather than a one-off and trim down from any day in March to just these 9 days. It's all about underlying hierarchies of logical units: know that a week is a logical unit of a month, know that Kirkland is within the greater Seattle area. Some of this you can do with a folksonomy, but a categorised hierarchy is going to help for geography, discrete units (today/tomorrow/this week/next week/this month/next month/this year) and distinguishing between broad tags (music) and specific tags (baroque). Organic tagging can define a problem space, but it doesn't structure it well.
Do we have these kind of detailed schemas for describing not just the obvious properties of events (date, time, venue, organiser etc) but also the range of values so we can build the filters?
Scoble’s suggestion for getting attention by gaming the blog search system (and testing out blog search) with a nonsense word like Brrreeeport makes me think of what the researchers said about weak links (people you don’t know very well) providing good connections to people you don’t know at all. People who comment in your journal might be people you know well (more likely on LJ because of the community feel) but often they’ll be weak links. The Mexican wave of people shouting Brrreeeport will showcase lots of people who read Scoble and if the post they create is more than just referencing the word Brrreeeport it might get people to click through to them, or to pick the meme up from them. But blogging feels more like a meritocracy than an oligarchy to me; as long as people can find you, they’ll read you for what you say, not who you know.
To be able to give a user the address of the exact information they want means breaking down monolithic content like video streams and calendars and forum threads. And that means thinking about how things are indexed, and they they're presented. When Blinkx finds a video that matches what you're searching for it could send an offset to start the video playing at the right point - but content owners don't like that because they've put the ads that pay for their service at the beginning of the video. Too many groupware systems give you a link for the calendar, not a link for individual days or events in the calendar. And if a link to a forum comes up in a search you'll usually find yourself at the first post in the thread rather than the relevant post - the whole thread has been indexed rather than the individual posts.
What's the logical addressable unit of content? It's going to vary depending on the content type, but as a consumer I'm going to want more granularity than the producer expects. Often, there's a fragment of information that's exciting or interesting that I want to share rather than pointing someone at a whole work; I'm hoping they'll find the whole thing interesting, but it's the snippet I think will catch them. The smart content provider will see value in letting me push people to the interesting bit in the hope they'll want to see more rather than forcing people to sit through all of it. Addressability might look like losing control - actually it's giving both publisher and visitor finer grained control.
- Mood:pensive
I love treemaps; they're such an elegant representation of both the information itself and the value of the information. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Netscan - the Microsoft Research tool that creates treemaps of Usenet groups. Looking for a nice graphical display of disk space information I found the free WinStatDir which linked to a history of treemaps that revealed they were developed to show disk usage patterns! And that linked to the rather lovely newsmap which could easily be the only way I'll ever want to read news again: the output of Google News as a treemap. Now if only I could pipe the feed of my choice into it: I'd like to use this as an interface for BBC News or CNet or The Onion...
- Mood:
busy
Marc is behind Netscan - software that measures and maps social spaces like Usenet; they're planning to turn it into a community reputation tool that could work for any threaded social space. Picturing Usenet - an article from the group in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication - has lots more visualisations and identifies various online personality types: questioners, answer people, trolls, locals, cynics, conversationalists... The treemaps that they produce apply to any hierarchical information - like the classic sales territories so many people track in Excel - so the Microsoft Treemapper with Excel Add-In they've made available could be handy.
Computers have the ability to slice, dice, drill and map so much data from the information we store of them and the monolithic way so much information is presented is a real waste. After playing with the colour categories and To-Do tags in Outlook 12 and the visualisation of conditional formatting in Excel 12, I'm rather hoping that 2006 could be the year of data visualisation. Marc mentioned the ClearContext Inbox Manager as a way of getting Outlook 12-style goodness now, and I notice it works with ActiveWords which I must make time to play with (I got distracted by being able to use shortcuts in the Windows Search deskbar to get verbs - so I can type lj or flickr and a username to jump straight to someone on either service).
I'm now looking forward to the two new versions of SNARF we'll get this year and the new features planned for them... luckily for me, some of the things I thought it would be neat to see (like tagging people who matter to me irrespective of the statistics of our email exchanges) are already on the list.
*best parts of my job, the conversations
**SNARF and the Treemapper have their own pages but they're also on http://research.microsoft.com/research/d
- Mood:drinking from a firehose
And my usual complaint about Windows Live: all US all the time. If I search for London Eye, I get an eye clinic in Kentucky - and an advert for the South Bank. OneCare Live doesn't show up to anyone outside the US. I have no idea when non US applications will get to try Windows Live Mail. Guys: the Internet crosses national boundaries. The Internet business model isn't the only thing that matters here.
- Mood:busy
NB Fixtureferrets sounds similar but it digs out all the 3 for 2, BOGOF, 2 for £5 and other price reductions at the supermarkets. I'm not sure spending £300 on fuel to get a £5 Morrisons voucher is a bargain and I don't want Bernard Mathhews frozen turkey breast steaks at any price but I am tempted by the reduction on Caol Isla whisky at Waitrose (and maybe the 3 for 2 Ame for the morning after)...
- Mood:snuffly
Is this blog a UK site? I'm in the UK (well, most of the time) but the server isn't, so no. Is Simon's IT PhaseChange blog a UK blog? By the same reasoning, no. Which means that Seekport - which has just announced it's added blog search for UK and European blogs - doesn't find us. It doesn't let you look for blogs specifically thought it marks them in the results with an icon, and it finds www.sandm.co.uk and a few of my writings - including the sadly defunct www.aboutfood.co.uk and the page for sending my piece for Computing about the telco market in 2003 After the dotcom hype comes the consolidation to a friend, but not the actual article itself, and a single Guardian feature.
Should it find our blogs because we're UK bloggers on an international site? (rhetorical!) How many UK bloggers use LJ, or Blogspot, or Blogger, or MSN Spaces, or WordPress &etc? I'm guessing it's a fairly high proportion. Sites like Technorati don't discriminate against group blogging sites - Dave Sifry says he likes them because the HTML is cleaner! - so you can find LJ blogs through tools that specifically search blogs. Finding UK and European blogs is a good feature - because while for blogs I don't usually care where you are if I respect what you say if I'm interested in, say, Dell customer service I'd rather hear UK horror stories than US Dell Hell. But it's going to take a lot more work to spot what's a UK blog, not just a UK hosted blog.
- Mood:impatient for Office 12
- Mood:
thoughtful
- Mood:travelling
- Music:cats laughing - or miaowing, I can't tell
- Mood:geeky
- Music:Suzanne Vega - Predictions
"Speaking of search, lots of debate goes on around MS-land about which search engine is the most accurate. In an effort to put an end to the debate, I did a search for "search" on various engines to see which engine gets returned most often. Here are the results:
MSN returns Google as the first result.
Google returns AltaVista at the top
AltaVista returns MSN Search first (actually after CNET Search, but seriously.)
Incidentally, all of them, except Yahoo itself, return Yahoo at least somewhere on the first page."
http://spaces.msn.com/members/IMUnplugge
I checked; modestly, Google is the third result after Altavista and Lycos, followed by My Excite... it puts Search Engine Watch on page 1 but MSN Search is on page 3. Hmmmmm
- Mood:packing
- Music:Joe Jackson - Me And You (Against The World)
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