Who and What rises to the top?

Recent research suggests that people are not aware of the market forces that are shaping their browsing experience. People are aware of ads in the side bars that look like ads. Most of them understand that money speaks, and it is possible to "buy" the top position of the ads being shown. But there is a major difference in the way various search engines treat their advertising and searches.

• Yahoo's search (2004) results are heavily influenced by their indexes, which business joins via paid subscriptions. Historically, their directory contents were determined by a person to made decisions on the sites to include, Today they use an indexing crawler) Commercial submissions to Yahoo are paid on a yearly basis. Non-commercial URLs can submit their site if they "register" with Yahoo.


• Ovature(GoTo), AlltheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi are now all owned by Yahoo. Commercial sites pay for listings.


• Google's search results are determined by an algorithm (formula) that looks at a site' external links, total volume of visitors, and the degree to which the site content meets the search criteria keywords. Site for inclusion is free and Google has hundred of categories to help you position your site to reach the proper audience.


• Infoseek garners links by crawling submitted sites with automated programs called "robots", that follow the links.


• Hotbot lets you search Yahoo, Google and Teoma all at once. Owned by Lycos, which didn't make searches a priority, HotBot was revised in 2002.


• Ask Jeeves, uses the Teoma search engine, once know for it's question based interface, Ask Jeeves has been working on smart search technology


• AOL search uses Google. Their internal version limits searches to sites within the AOL online service. Their basis for this is that they censor offensive material, but that remains open to question.


• MSN is developing a search engine


• LookSmart, has a human edited directory, commerical sites pay to list


• DMOZ - human edited directory. Free to list, but think of it as an encyclopedia rather than a commercial vehicle.

What does this have to do with the viewer? Could it be that paid indexes present their own indexes first? Whether this is good or bad depends on how you view the search engine's willingness to grant access for payment. Perhaps a human edited index is going to have more "relevant" listings, or perhaps its content will reflect business with deep pockets. If you are looking for the most informative choice of information, it would seem obvious that relevance should be the first criteria. Ranking that focuses on outside recommendations and popular consensus is likely to bring up information, not just sales pitches.

The treatment of ads also has some differences depending on search engine and site. Some ads are presented upfront. They are clearly labeled, and they are not mixed with the search result. Both Google and Yahoo look at whatever personal data you leave laying around. Google uses your search criteria to present AdSense, which brings up ads whose content is coordinated to the search keywords. Yahoo looks at your personal demographic, and presents you with search results that try to sell you to the highest bidder, whether or not you have indicated an interest in the topic.

While my personal vote is for relevancy to search criteria, the fact that the search results are determined by formula leaves it open to "Google Bombing".How Weblogs Influence a billion Google searches a week By posting the same link on multiple blogs, it is possible to distort the formula's "outside link" factor, and vault it into the upper pages of the search results. While multiple links could reflect actual popularity, it can also be a result of dirty tricks.

So the next time you look at search results, if you don't get the information you need, try another search engine. Google, Yahoo, Hot-Bot, Ask Jeeves, Go, Alta Vista, there are a lot of them, and they don't all return the same information. There are significant differences in the way they search. (This post is from 2005, and much has changed from then.)

Marketing Buzz

Having explored some of the difficulties with creating a blog, here are some of the good points as seen by www.clickz.com, talking about Business blogs.
"Enormous Marketing Potential

B-blogs are highly strategic, here-to-stay desktop tools that can strengthen relationships, share knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding. Think of the potential for your e-newsletter strategies:

• Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog, extending life and creating a massive conversation.


• You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get true, personal opinions on your products and services.


• Company experts can start a blog and become industry experts, helping your company edge out competition and, through this interactive forum, draw customers into another exchange of information and thoughts."

Although I agree that a blog can extend your ability to reach customers, I have some difficulties with "massive conversation", and "become industry experts". The likelihood of massive conversations depends on your readership, and the controversy of the topic. If you are extending invitations to company "seminars", rather than publishing political or entertainment pieces, your content may not be the kind that generates "massive conversation".

It's also strange that company experts become industry experts by virtue of a blog. One would think that becoming an industry expert is due to having your knowledge recognized by other industry experts, rather than making a reputation as a blog writer for customers. Maybe the article simply meant that customers often look to popular writers for their technical information.

A more important point is made by www.jupiterreasearch.com

"For unsigned artists (as these guys seem to be) P-to-P (peer-to-peer) distribution has an even stronger appeal. It’s a quasi mass media marketing channel that can give them the exposure that makes A&R execs take notice. (Mark Mulligan, Why Some Bands Want you to Copy their Music, how the Internet can be used to make what were once small scale interactions into mass media interactions)"

This is the kind of content which may actually generate "massive" conversations. Record companies and publishers control access to their markets, asserting that they winnow out the best so that the audience has a reasonable expectation that what is published will be good.

Indeed, there are only a few excellent artists, and lots of mediocre ones. But by allowing a few company execs to be the final judge of what is good, customers lost variety. Being able to get content where people can hear it may let make the small artist reach his audience. Customers and artists win, and company execs may complain that they don't get to make the decisions anymore, but is it their market, or does it belong to the consumer?

The question is, can the "massive conversations" that occur in P-to-P blogs be generated in Business blogs talking to customers? People are more interested in the opinions of other people than they are in reading ads, company policy, and infomercials. Trying to extrapolate from the results of P-to-P blogs to the results of business blogs is comparing apples and oranges. One has to ask what drives the conversations. Assertions about "enormous marketing potential" should be taken with a grain of salt, and a judicious look at the content you intend to present.

Here comes Wiki

Now that you've made room for blog and RSS in your vocabulary, don't get too comfortable, because here comes wiki. Used to great effect in the 2004 Presidential elections, wiki software creates a participatory web page that allows their pages to be edited by their viewers browser. Click the edit button, and the page simply opens up, ready for your editing.

Although it is possible to require some form of reqistration to post, the whole idea is that your community trusts you, and you respect the pages and the ideas therein. In theory, this leads to the free exchange of ideas between participants. In practice, the deliberate lack of security controls leaves the pages open to problems of "kiddie spam".

How to create them, their set-up, their problems are topics of covered July 27, 2005 at the joint SDForum.org - SofTECH.org meeting. Producer Ron Lichty, co-chair of SDForum's Software Architecture and Modeling SIG, discusses the ideas surrounding this adventure in community.

Whether this type of site can survive as a set of pages open to the general public is still an open question. As an expiriment, The Los Angeles Times tried a wiki, and had to shut it down after three days after they were overwhelmed unwanted abusive posts. Within a secure community, it may be that the ease with which people can "talk" to each other will make this type of utopian page possible.

For more information on the topic, visit Softech.org

Intrusive Marketing

I suppose it was inevitable that aggressive sales people would invade the Internet. They have all but overwhelmed basic television which has become so larded with commercials that it's hardly worth watching. They use boiler-room techniques, and auto-dialers to call your home at meal times. They fill your mail with junk, your e-mail with spam, fish for your personal information so they can add you to their "mailing lists" (or worse), send out spyware, adware, and malware.

They think of themselves as entrepreneurs and businessmen. The people they harass see them at best as petty annoyances, and at worst as muggers.

A common instances of intrusive marketing is the tracking cookie. Normal cookies belong to the site you choose to visit, and are useful for shopping carts, sign-ins, and custom settings. But tracking cookies are set by third party sites that have banners on multiple sites. www.spywareinfo.com/
They can track you as you browse. Marketeers protest that the tracking is anonymous, and only intended to let them optimize your internet experience. But should you believe them? Spywareinfo.com notes that Double Click once bought a large database of names and addresses with the intent of identifiying indivduals, and spying on their browsing habits. The threat of lawsuits from state attorney generals evidently forestalled them. So it's clear that cookies can become an ugly privacy issue.

The normal advice to limit cookies to clean your cache on a regular basis, and block third party cookies. But that doesn't get rid of all of them. Recognizing that consumers don't like cookies and use programs to clean them out, United Virtualities is offering flash based cookies (PIE, or persistent identification element) that can't be deleted by normal cleaning.spywareinfo.com/ offers a couple of links to macromedia's flash control panel, which lets you set whether you will accept flash cookies.

There are other ways to plant spyware on your machine. One current ploy is to

"entice end users to download free software in exchange for being served advertising." “It’s intrusive, evasive and it’s just a very nasty thing to do; and it’s fast becoming one of the hottest ways to generate traffic on the Net,” says Jason McClain, president and CEO of PrimeQ Solutions, an Internet marketer and lead generator....these free applications often replace ads, redirect links and disable existing browser cookies. "revenuetoday.com

Without the end user realizing what is happening, spyware/malware can steal his attention, steal his keystrokes, see the page he is viewing, and hijack his browser, or even his computer. There are studies that show an average computer has 20 intruder programs. The widely publicized, bizarrely frightening visions of midnight Zombie computers operating under remote control make one wonder about leaving your cpu connected to the DSL while you sleep.

So how did we get from pushy ad men to internet muggers? Some people realized that there was the smell of money to be made, legally or illegally, and that most people cruising the web are babes in the woods about security. The invasive techniques that serve the purpose of the aggressive salesman, serve other purposes just as well.

The solutions to this are not clear. Software makers should make an effort to build in safeguards. But as fast as they build them, people think of ways around them. Then again, sometimes the maketeers make friends. Microsoft "softened" its position on a company which has been involved in spyware.

One partial solution is to get Firefox. It has built in pop-up blockers, controls for cookie acceptance, and extensions that let you block flash and ads (Adblock). Another is LavaSoft, which helps you look for spyware. But these tools can't help you if you open your arms and welcome intruders.

In fact, the whole cycle is a business unto itself. What would firms who make security programs would do for a living if there were no security threats?

I suppose that in time, this period of the internet will be looked upon much as we do the wild west of the early - mid 1800s, exciting, full of opportunity, a frontier community where honest people helped each other and law and order wasn't yet established. Eventually, Marshall Earp has to show up. But at the moment, the internet is something of a frontier wilderness, with lurking varlets, and highwaymen. Watch your address bar to see where you are being taken, and look out for varmints.

Blogs as Cash Cows

You've heard the phrase "monetize your content", but have you looked at the product? The idea is to "turn your blog into a revenue stream by intelligently inserting contextual advertisements into your feed or individual posts. "feeddirect.com/rssads


Kanoodle's BrightAds and a number of other sites offer to connect you with advertisers looking to reach their customers via your content and feeds. So far, so good. Google's ads on the pages of their search results are tuned to the keywords of your search, and while they may be ads, they are not mixed in with the search results. They are also fairly relevant. If you are searching for Olive Oil, Google's Adsense doesn't come up with used cars in the sidebar.
The problem comes when the "service" inserts non-relevant ads into feeds that the subscriber chose for the content.



One can imagine entertainment headlines, prefaced with a dose of
"URGENT - WHY YOU NEED LIFE INSURANCE"
delivered direct to your desktop. Since subscribers can quickly opt out of ham-handed feeds, this may overstate the problem, but like any foot-in-the-door technique, once a salesman gets you used to a level of annoyance, and can convince the market that you will tolerate it, he will raise the level. Basic television, which used to have one advertiser per 1/2 hour segment, now has multiple ads whose total time rival that of the programing.

"Maximum Distribution = Maximized Revenue"

When biz talks to possible content providers, and to business owners who want to dish ads, the conversation doesn't turn on the needs of the end customer, but gets straight down to the real project, maximizing money. This is to be expected. Big business (particularly aspiring BigBiz) likes to pretend it is concerned about the customer, but in a lot of cases sales are a case of Caveat Emptor. If you can't protect yourself from the people who are trying to "sell" you, that's tough.

We can only hope that the insertion of non-relevant ads into feeds goes the way of the pop-up ads fiasco, where intrusive jump up ads or downloads without your express permission, have spawned pop-up blockers that smack down the nasty, in-your-face things.

(If you hate pop-ups and you haven't downloaded FireFox yet, you are missing out. FireFox has a built-in blocker. Maybe FireFox or Tivo will invent a tool that looks at the content of a feed as it loads and filters out the extraneous ads!!!)

To expect that blog owners will prove immune to the blandishments of $$$$ is asking too much. Eventually a lot of the community based openness will be lost as authors are coaxed into sponsored feeds. About all you can hope is that class acts will insist on sponsors whose products are in the interests of the audience, and that as a consumer, you will be able to tell the difference between sponsored inclusions and real content.

RSS and Howdy Doody

A recent slashdot.org post, under the department of "so-sick-of-blogs", referenced FeedForAll's opinion that RSS, not blogs would be the marketing tool that would survive to help business:
" bring new site visitors, increase search engine positioning, and generate product interest."

The article mentioned the difficulty blogs face trying to generate "fresh, constant, unique content and... significant revenue" and says they will fade away, while RSS, by virtue of its ability to facilitate re-packaging of existing and new content will thrive.

It also postulates that "users..skimming content that *they* choose in a single centralized location..(will be the) driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent."

Yet somehow those consumers (remember, "advertisements to a minimum"), will subscribe to RSS products that present business "specials, discounts, product announcements, technical support tips, news and industry studies". If content is re-packaged so business can deliver etc to the consumer, that sounds like advertising to me.

RSS is a distribution system with the promise to let the little guy rise or fall on the merits of what he can produce. If he has content that is funny, or analytical, or just plain interesting, RSS lets him offer the feed for free, or very little.

But when a new delivery system is seized on as a vehicle for business, companies will spring up that "re-purpose and re-package existing and new content". They will try to put the good content behind barriers to entry, and monetize it. Then business will have a way to deliver their "specials, discounts, product announcements, technical support tips, news and industry studies".

Somehow, this is reminicent of the early days of 1950s television, where the entry barrier for content was low enough that community TV stations could produce their shows in a cinderblock building. The results might have been home grown, but if you wanted to watch, you stuck an antenna on the roof. Live television was the norm, and programs like "The Howdy Doody Show" were extremely popular.

Then came sponsors, and big TV networks, where content was centralized and monetized. Ads crept in, content was put behind barriers of entry, and good TV became big business.

The thousands of small stations producing homegrown TV found it difficult to produce "fresh, constant, unique content and... significant revenue" so they crawled into bed with the networks. And you know how sucessful the consumers "skimming content in a single centralized location" were when it comes to limiting the ads in what they view. It's hard to get decent reception with a roof antenae today, and the content distribution system belongs to business.

The question is not if, but how are the new content and delivery systems going to become the stomping grounds of big business? If the rich, live-action content produced by the best of the blogs is turned into fodder to deliver business ads, it will be a sorry end to what could be a revolution in community involvement.

"Although extremely popular, the demise of
The Howdy Doody Show demonstrated the financial realities of the new medium. ..Although it continued to receive high ratings, the expense was eventually its downfall, The reality continues to be that the rich, live-action performances that filled early children's programming are too costly for modern, commercial television."

Maybe the sick-of-blogs department has a point. When a new toy is no longer exclusive because everyone can do it, it isn't as much fun. There has been a lot of buzz about blogs, and they are on their way from the realm of cool, to the realm of common. Let us hope that RSS survives because the general public makes sure that there is an internet equivalent of PBS for centralized RSS content, and that RSS and blogs aren't transformed until they are nothing more than a tool for corporate advertisizing.

Blog Composition Building Blocks

This post is a compliation of some of the basic writing advice on the web. For the most part, the points are basic composition, but some ideas are specific to blogs and the internet. More complete versions of these tips for writing can be found at the links at the end of the article.

• Headlines should convey the thrust of the article. Google gives weight to title keywords.
  


• A post's first sentence should contain the basic ideas you mean to develop. The first paragraph should include an introduction, the themes you will cover, and a summary. Keep paragraphs and sentences short and simple. Use white space to break text into focused paragraphs. Large blocks of text are difficult to read.
  


• Use sub-heads, and bullets for important lists. Bold and italics can emphasise key points, but don't overuse them.
  


• Post daily if possible. If your page doesn't change, it dies. The visitors will find other sites to read.
  


• Read your post out loud. If a sentence or idea makes you stumble, rewrite it. Correct your spelling.
  


• Visual content improves a blog, consider graphics, or digital photos, camera phone images are sufficient for the web.
  


• Use links. Use the "trackback" feature.
  


• Have a blog with open comments. User registration discourages comments and the conversation will never get started. Open comments attract trolls. Ignore them.
  


• Mention sources, (blog, media, or personal) and support your opinions with background information. If you include quotes, keep them short and link to the remainder. If you are part of a group blog, have contributors write over their own names-- either as guests or regulars.
  


• Promote your blog. Post comments on other sites, with a link back. Mention it to people. Ask for links, look for blog aggregators. Look for information people need or want to see and post it on your blog.

Speak your mind quietly and simply. Keep your sense of humor, both about others and yourself. Don't be pompus. Don't gossip, don't slander, don't write when you are angry, or not thinking clearly. Support your opinions. If you couldn't repeat it face to face, don't say it. Remember that once articulated, ideas can take on a life of their own, sometimes with unexpected consequences. "Thought leadership" can accomplish good, but power to influence should be responsible.

• blogwrite.blogs.com/


• www.politicsandtechnology.com/


• www.debbieweil.com/archives/2005/05/05/blogging_101


• www.frugalmarketing.com/


• blog-sites.net

Boosting Your Website with RSS

When you've gotten over your annoyance that your high school English teacher is still on your case, you will probably recall that you've also heard about RSS making your site a SEO magnet.

"Use RSS to update your websites with fresh, relevant content- automatically - without writing a single word. You can One of the great benefits of displaying RSS news feeds on your website is that it boosts your position in search engines."
rsstech.info/rss-for-bloggers

Part of this is true. You can add content to your site with RSS. But when you add feeds, You takes what You gets. That may mean volumes of material, more than your page structure can tolerate, and perhaps with only marginal bearing on your topic.

As the aggregator feeds tune the structure of their information, perhaps this will eventually become less of a problem. But unless you are a news site, where the product is simply news, honing that feed into only the articles that are pertinent to your product and services takes some effort.

There is also the matter of cost. For now, some of the feeds are free. But in the future, you can count on the fact that premium feeds will require payment. If those costs are reasonable, you are up against the fact that those low cost feeds are sold to many, many sites, and your fresh content will be the same as the fresh content of a lot of other sites. So the feed will help search engine and RSS directories will find you, and also find everyone like you, and you are lost in the crowd again.

But what about RSS as the wide open distributor for new information. What about Gutenberg? Yes, one of the wonderful aspects of RSS is that there are no longer just a handful of portals for information and opinion. There can be as many sources as there are hopeful writers. But that is a two edged sword. Remember your high school English class? (That again!) Remember that bell shaped curve? There were a few A's, a lot of B, C and D, and a few F's. Or maybe there were no F's because it made people feel bad. Well, those folks are still out there, and just because they didn't do well at composition 101 doesn't mean that they aren't putting their writing on the RSS feeds.

So it is important to sieve the content that is going to show up "automatically". Either you have to spend the time doing that, or you buy the service from someone who spends the time doing it, tailoring the output to your specifications. This blog, RSS stuff is still sounding like a lot a work.

Your English teacher & Gutenberg

If a blog isn't a free search engine magnet, what is it? Think of it as a tool that gives Joe Public the power of Gutenberg's press. The web site owner gains the ability to put current material on his site and the interface is no more complicated than a word processor. So what makes a Blog effective? It depends on.. surprise, ...content.

Whether the blog becomes a SEO magnet depends on the same type of factors that drive web sites. Is the content fresh? Is it interesting? How many unique visitors? How many outside links? Do the keywords and metas match the text, and does the whole shebang meet the search criteria entered by the web customer?

It's possible to try to fake content by filling a web page or a blog with keywords, or common search phrases. Some web sites have pages with code that can pick up the words in your search criteria, and fill their landing page with gibberish using those words. The tactic may draw traffic for a while, but the web customer ends up in a site that is a type of spam.

(If you accidentally click on one of those links, close your internet connection, and clear your cache. The person who would put up that type of page has no scruples about invading your privacy. Clear their cookies, pages and scripts from your browser memory.)

Google frowns on pages filled with pseudo content and can black list pages that indulge in it. Avoid practices that might get your pages ignored. Don't cloak the content, hiding unrelated keywords on a page to draw traffic. Don't pretend buzz words, bioler plate or advertising catch phrases are a substitute for valid content. Keep the ratio of keywords to text reasonable. Don't set up redirects or deceptive links in your pages in an effort to steer customers to irrelevant third party pages. Don't indulge in intrusive or deceptive demands for information. Don't set up multiple mini-sites, all with the same boiler-plate.

Some of those techniques might net you traffic for a while, but eventually unproductive clicks, and content that is unrelated to search criteria will insure that the web will write you off.

So in the end, it boils down to the same thing your high school english teacher was trying to tell you. Get your main idea straight. Write readable, interesting copy. Develop and support your theme. Write a conclusion that summarizes the whole thing.

If you want a blog, learn to write interesting copy that has a point. If it is part of your business, make it relevant to your product. Keep it fresh. Don't mislead the reader, and think why he or she would bother to come back to you. And make it fun, or you won't do it for very long.

TANSTAFL

The problem with setting up a web log, is that you have to find something constructive to say on a regular basis.

Recently, a client forwarded an email that touted the salubrious effect a blog could have on his web site's search characteristics. But when I looked at the message in the email, what I saw was a marketing advertisement, selling the sizzle.

It may be that a blog filled with fresh content can improve a site's visibility. But it isn't enough to have a container; you need something interesting to put in it. Whether information, entertainment, or analysis, the content has to keep the reader's attention. That brings up a perennial difficulty: Who is going to write/ create all that attention grabbing, reader addictive material?

If the blog content is crafted by a writer with an ear for what reads well, and an eye for what is currently in the public taste, maybe your blog will draw traffic. What is more likely is that, after the first burst of enthusiasm, trying to churn out content on a daily (or at least weekly) basis will wear down the blogger's fortitude, and the blog will gather dust.

When someone sends you a piece of advertising that tries to sell you a new product, method, or tool, you need to think about several aspects of it.

• Does the tool improve delivery of your product/services
• Does it offer content, or is it something you have to fill with content
• Has the marketeer clearly defined just how the tool is going to work its' magic for you, or are you being sold a vision based on aspects that aren't actually included in what they are selling.
• Are you willing to provide the ongoing work it takes to make the tool effective?

In the end, what counts is whether the item you are buying improves your ability to deliver product, or whether it adds to day-to-day maintenance. In general, you get what you pay for, and what you are willing to develop. There ain't no free lunch