mediajunk

Things I learned today:

Søtoroptimalisering is the Norwegian word for Search Engine Optimisation.

For all Norwegians out there, don't forget to buy my book about søtoroptimalisering!

One more time, because I like it so much:

Søtoroptimalisering!

It is now clear that the recent update of Google’s search results (nicknamed the Florida Update) was qualitatively different from any of its previous updates, and has upset thousands of site owners and designers.

The jury is still out on how it has affected searchers. Time will tell whether searchers believe they are getting better or worse results after the drastic action that Google has taken.

Of the various attempts to describe and analyse exactly what that action was (Google never discusses the exact details of changes to its search algorithms), the best I’ve read so far is Barry Lloyd’s article on SearchEngineGuide.com.

He describes the immediate aftermath of the update thus: “All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years ... In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories.”

But, says Lloyd, Google was acting in accordance to its own principles, and in defence of the measures that have been taken in recent years to “game” the search engine’s system for ranking and returning search results:

“Google has seen its search engine results manipulated by SEOs (Search Engine Optimisers) to a significant extent over the past few years. Its reliance on PageRank™ to grade the authority of pages has led to the wholesale trading and buying of links with the primary purpose of influencing rankings on Google rather than for natural linking reasons.

In some instances, people would not link to sites unless they thought it would not harm them or would benefit them for Google.

Google optimisation consisted mainly of ensuring your page had your primary search phrase placed in all appropriate places on your page and that your sought after phrase was inserted in the anchor text of any incoming links. Thousands of SEOs and webmasters followed these simple and basic rules and loved the fact that Google seemed to reward them by giving them top listings.

People forgot the fact that Google really wanted to give surfers the most ‘authoritive’ results. So someone looking for cheap computers found the site that had ‘earned’ a reputation for providing cheap computers - not just that a webmaster had optimised their site to make it look that way.
....

This update was an attempt to redress the balance and get back to the way Google thinks that results should be calculated.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Lloyd’s interpretation. SEOs’ power had grown significantly over the last 12 months, to the point where commentators such as Brett Tabke, expert “Google-watcher” and adminstrator of WebmasterWorld.com recently that SEOs had “got its number”.

It seems that Google heeded this advice and decided to get tough.

When the dust settles however, SEOs will pick up the pieces, lick their wounds, and start to reverse engineer the black box that is Google's search technology once again…

My list of Dos and Don’ts for Website Navigation over at 9rules.com got some good feedback.

Taking that feedback into account, here’s a slightly modified version of the list (I may turn this into a more explanatory article in the near future):

5 Dos and 5 Don’ts for Website Navigation

Don’t Use Frames
Frames are bad for all sorts of reasons, which have been highlighted to the death in design books and sites. Yet frames sites continue to emerge (particularly on sites created by those with tech backgrounds).

Don’t Use Images To Create Menus
Images make page slower to load. They don’t read properly in talking browsers. They are ignored by search engines. Small, anti-aliased text often looks blurred in GIFs and JPEGs. HTML text is crisper – and nice designs/rollovers can be achieved with CSS now.

Don’t Use Pulldown Menus
Menu information should be seen at a glance; don’t make the user work just to see a menu.

Don’t Use Pop-Out Menus
As well as making us do a lot of mouse-work just to see what’s on offer, pop-out menu items often overlap, or cover other choices. We’ve all had annoying experiences where we’ve tried to click on one item in an expanding menu, but keep getting another. Pop-out menus are not compatible with talking browsers or text-only browsers.

Don’t Rely on the Logo as the Homepage Link
Despite now being a convention among designers, users don’t necessarily know that the site logo is a link to the homepage– unless you make it explicit (e.g. Use the word “home” within the logo – though this isn’t a pretty solution).

It is better to include a separate link to the home page as part of the menu.

Do Maximise the Hit Area for each Menu Item
A larger hit area makes it easier for user to navigate into menus. Using CSS, you can create make an entire box a link, not just the text that is contained within the box. We’ve all had to use a dodgy mouse at one stage or another and know how frustrating it is to maneuver it into a small area.

More importantly, a large hit area benefits visually impaired users.

Do Use Alt Tags to Describe Images
This benefits users of talking browsers and text-only browsers, and those with slow connections who must wait for images to download.

Do Use Title Tags to Describe Links
Title tags provide additional information to links and can be useful, particularly to visually impaired users with talking browsers.

But you can't RELY on the information in title tags to explain links, as users may not expect or notice the title tag info. Use clear, informative language in the menus (to borrow an example from Steve Krug, don't say "Joborama" or "Employment Opportunities" when "Jobs" will do).

Do Orientate Users on Each Page
Make sure the relevant menu item is highlighted for each page of the site (remember, a user can enter your site at any point).

For large, complex sites, use breadcrumb trails to give users a “You Are Here” message, and a quick means to navigate to parent directories.

For smaller, simpler sites, provide a sitemap and make it accessible from each page.

Do Ensure Navigation is Consistent throughout Site
Don’t switch menu options or styles, or other navigation elements (e.g. breadcrumb trail), on various pages or sections of the site.

I've been talking about a Google backlash since last February.

Judging by recent comments posted on this site, that backlash is now acute.

The press concurs. Fortune magazine ran an article today entitled “Can Google Grow Up?” which airs some strong criticisms of the company:

“Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways. And talk swirls over the question of who's really in charge: CEO Schmidt or co-founders Brin and Page?”

An article in today’s Boston Globe, meanwhile, opens with the question: Do you hate Google yet?

“Less than a decade ago, you could have said the same of Microsoft Corp. It was once viewed as an heroic American institution, an upstart software company founded by a Harvard dropout who became a billionaire by outsmarting IBM Corp., the world's biggest computer firm. These days, even most loyal Microsoft users don't much like the company, perceiving it as an arrogant producer of slovenly software.
Is it Google's turn?”

Personally, I don’t think so. Google still has a long way to go on the upcurve before the public really gets a taste for blood. All of which reminds me of a great essay by the Toby Young (author of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People) in The Spectator, about a year ago: Why Our Gods Must Die:

“Clark Gable once remarked to David Niven that, when it came to the contract between a star and his public, the public had read the small print and the star hadn’t. All it took was one tiny violation and the adoring crowds turned into a baying mob. ‘Contained within fan worship is the potential for hatred and disdain,’ says David Gritten, the author of a recently published book called Fame. ‘It’s binary. The switch can be flipped at any time.’”

And Google's founders, after all, are now celebrities. So let’s do what we do to all celebs: build 'em up, then knock 'em down...

In the decade since the arrival of the internet for home users, the shape of my day has changed dramatically. I now spend at least five, sometimes as many as ten, hours a day online. Conversely, my television viewing has decreased dramatically. Most days I don’t watch TV at all.

I’m quite happy to swap TV for the internet. The quality of television output grows ever poorer (television, more than any other medium, is responsible for the dumbing down of western culture), while time devoted to TV advertising is increasing (at least you can delete spam!).

There are, of course, exceptions. Some HBO dramas – such as the Sopranos and Six Feet Under (well, the first series at least) – are of a higher quality than contemporary movies. And occasionally a television documentary is produced that can stimulate the mind as well as, if not more than, any book.

“The Theory of Everything,” which was recently broadcast on three consecutive Sunday evenings on Britain’s Channel 4, was a neatly packaged, accessible introduction to a complex but fascinating subject – theoretical physics' “superstring” theory.

I had previously read a couple of books on superstring theory and so was looking forward to the three-part series. The fist two episodes built up to a climactic finale: the third and final episode would fill me in on the most recent breakthroughs in the search for a unified theory of physics (around three or four years had passed, after all, since I’d read those books).

Just after the programme started, I got an important phone call from my sister Louise, which couldn’t be put off. After about half an hour, I sat back down in front of the box, when a visitor called -- so I gave up trying to watch the show.

This is another of television's drawbacks: you have to watch emissions during a certain timeslot. Yes, you can record, but that’s hassle. What I want is TV content that, like internet content, I can access at any time, and view at my own leisure. (We don't have TiVo on this side of the Atlantic, BTW.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that “The Theory of Everything” was available for viewing on the web – under its original title of “The Elegant Universe” (the programme was created by America’s PBS channel).

Each hour-long programme is divided up into eight chunks. You can’t download any of the clips, “due to rights reasons,” but you can view any or all as a streaming video clip.

Could this be the beginning of a (much-heralded) harmonious relationship between the internet and television? I hope so. As broadband increases, resistance to the merger of the internet and TV will be political (from companies who control television content and advertising), not technical.

Though I won’t mourn the passing of television, I must admit that I don’t know what I’d do if I suddenly found myself without internet access.

Pegleg Development Company have made a free trial of their PMS (yes, that PMS) Alert Tool available for download.

Here's how the sincere folk at Pegleg describe their tool:

"Easily synchronize PMS Alert with her natural monthly cycle. Read a simple scale of five colors to get the likelihood of mood swings. Get a real-time estimation of fertility ... Get reminders when conditions are changing. Even get reminders of her next birthday and anniversary. "

!!!

This year, search became the internet industry's red hot sector. Many companies set their sights on emulating Google, whose impressive performance has led to a renewal of business interest in the internet.

But does Google need to worry about increased competition? According to figures published by OneStat.com (via Search Engine Lowdown) Google now accounts for over half of all web searches.

Here's the breakdown:

1. Google 56.1%
2. Yahoo 21.5%
3. MSN Search 9.4%
4. AOL Search 3.7%
5. Terra Lycos 2.3
6. Altavista 1.9%
7. Askjeeves 1.6%

Consider that Yahoo's search is powered by Google (type the same search into both engines and you'll see very similar results), and you could argue that Google's share is actually 77.6% -- over three quarters of all the web's searches.

Google's dominance of the search market is growing, not shrinking. Potential competitors are in for a tough ride.

Then again, Google didn't exist six years ago...

Google has just undergone a major update of its search algorithm, nicknamed “Update Florida” by the ever-growing community of search engine watchers.

Google trawls the web and modifies its results pages on an almost daily basis now. But updates to its algorithm happen less frequently and cause massive shakeups in the results that appear in its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Earlier this year, Google underwent two major updates, nicknamed “Dominic” and “Esmerelda”. The Florida update adds the F to this series and is a much bigger update than its predecessors, with greater consequences for site listings.

A thread devoted to discussing the Florida update, which began last Friday, is already the longest, fastest-growing thread I have ever seen on any topic on any webmaster bulletin board.

The reason the Florida update is causing ructions among webmasters and SEOs (Search Engine Optimisers) is because the company has launched a major offensive against what it calls “spammers”.

In the search engine community, spam does not refer to dodgy email marketing, but to any unfair or underhand tactics used by SEOs to gain high positions in SERPs for the websites they represent.

Not everyone in the webmaster community agrees on what does or doesn't constitute spam. While most agree that hidden links (making the colour of links the same as the page background) is cheating, for example, less blatant tactics such as adding URLs to blogs or guestbooks are approved by some, but frowned on by others.

For Google the situation is clear: any webmaster, marketer or SEO who sticks by the guidelines outlined on its website is a “whitehat” (a good guy, basically), while anyone who breaks these rules is a “blackhat”.

The Florida update has seen a major crackdown on blackhats. In doing so, Google has once again improved the quality of its results, polished its integrity-rich brand, further upped the ante on those who try to cheat its system – and increased its power as the sheriff of the information superhighway

It’s almost hard to believe, but this blog will be a year old tomorrow. The last 12 monhts really have flown.

Since the beginning, Mediajunk has concentrated on new media news and analysis, with particular focus on the identifying “what’s hot” in internet culture.

Of course, technology companies have vested interests in hyping up technologies such as WAP or services such as subscription-based personalised news sites – but such hype rarely reflects the way the internet is used by “ordinary” people across the world.

Among the topics and themes I’ve focused on, blogs and blogging have been top of the list. I genuinely believe that the emergence of blogging has been one of the major events in the evolution of the web. This is what I meant when I predicted, last December, that 2003 would be “the year of the blog” – and so it has been. That blogging came to prominence during the Iraq war was, I believe, incidental – (it would have happened anyway); though Salam Pax’s weblog certainly drew a lot of media attention.

The main surprise, for me, has been that celebrity weblogs have not yet taken off (unless you count US politicians as celebrities), but I think over the coming year or two, when blogs creep more and more into the mainstream, we will see blogs being used by the celebrity industry.

Another theme that I’ve explored in depth during the past year has been the development of search engine technology, particularly by the industry leader Google. Within the last twelve months, search engines have become the “red hot” sector of the internet, and it has become an exciting area to watch, what with all the mergers and acquisitions and, most recently, Microsoft’s moves to enter into the search arena.

Among the most popular entries are those that discuss the differences between male and female bloggers (partly because of prominence in Google for searches related to these topics) and the various posts on celebrity weblogs.

The blog has also built up quite a large readership – over 500 unique visitors now log on to mediajunk.com every day. The site registered over 22,000 page views last month alone.

Most of those page views have come from regular visitors – so thanks to all of you who frequently check in! I hope you keep coming back over the next 12 months, and long into the future…

A tongue-in-cheek article in The Onion, entitled "Mom Finds Out About Blog," has topped the list of popular sites over the last few days. I guess it's close to the bone.

My own mother is a semi-regular web user and has visited all of my sites. But this did not prepare me for the statement, a couple of weeks ago, from my 80-year-old grandmother that she had been “watching” me on the internet the previous night.

So here’s a “special request” to you, Nana ;)

I’m starting to believe that wikis are the web’s next big thing.

I first heard the term wiki during the last few weeks, although apparently it’s been around since 1995. Recent articles have cropped up explaining what wikis are and why everyone should have one, including an essay by Nathan Matias on Sitepoint.com, which does a good job of introducing the subject.

A pretty good job, that is, except for the fact that his opening definition of wikis is too vague:

“Different people have different ideas about what a wiki really is, but whatever angle you look at it, a wiki is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions.”

Well, that could describe anything from online banking to flight reservation software -- neither of which are wikis.

The definition by wiki pioneer Ward Cunningham -- "the simplest online database that could possibly work," doesn't explain very much either.

First and foremost, a wiki is a collaborative website. Visitors can, in some cases, edit the pages of the site. Indeed, some wikis let any visitor edit any page – a crazy decision, you might think, but apparently it works.

The idea is that the wiki is maintained by a community of users who, for the most part, want to see its content grow and evolve so as to be useful to all. Sure, there will always be a few vandals who want to change one of the pages. But one of the great features of a wiki is that any visitor can restore the page to one of its earlier states, so the vandal’s efforts can easily and quickly be undone.

Indeed, “wiki” itself is Hawaiin for “quick”. The wiki tool lets users create pages and hyperlink trails quickly, so that the site evolves in real-time with its community.

The reason I linked to Matias’s article was not for his definition, then, but for his nice explanation of how wikis conform much better to the “hypertext” paradigm -- unlike first- and second-generation websites.

Matias rightly quotes Vannevarr Bush, the person who first envisaged the world of interconnected hypertext documents, in his seminal 1945 article, “As We May Think.” He imagined that the Memex (the name he gave to an imaginary construct that today sounds like the internet) would be an extension of our memory, rich with links between different documents.

One of the trends I have noticed in the evolution of the web during the last ten years is that, in the “early” days, web pages were created like print documents – i.e. much of the web was “brochureware”.

In the late 1990s, Big Business, and the IT industry in particular, jumped on board the internet bandwagon. Realising that the web medium had a lot more power than print, self-proclaimed gurus hyped the coming of “online multimedia," “personalization” and “portals.”

None of these concepts really took off – because they all borrow too heavily from traditional (read: old) media, which use the “broadcast” model. With old media, the organisation creating and disseminating the content has ultimate control over its messages. Not so on the web -- at least, not if you want to engage a community.

The internet was, right from the beginning, about creating and empowering communities. That’s what businesses failed to see, and it cost them dearly when the bubble (built on the hype I mentioned above) burst.

As the dust settles, however, we are seeing the true nature of the new medium emerge. Weblogs – where publishing is effortless and visitor comments, trackback links, etc. are part of the weblog experience – are one example of this.

The shape-shifting techniques used by Amazon, Ryze and Sitepoint (to take three from the top of my head), where the way the information on the site is presented to you depends on your own actions and trails through that site, represent a second example.

Wikis are a third, though they have yet to take off in the way that weblogs have. But as users become more web-savvy, wikis will explode in popularity.

The web hasn’t stopped evolving; it’s only getting started. Watch out for wikis!

Yesterday, as accomplished journalist and author John Pilger complained about the contemporary silence of writers on political issues in Znet (originally in The New Statesman), Patrick Weever of anti-spin.com wrote a damning essay for The Observer on newspapers’ dependence on PR.

The articles share a similar theme – the toothlessness and passivity of contemporary writing, in all its forms.

“For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from politics,” begins Pilger. “Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should command our attention.”

“That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out – a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway.”

So where, wonders Pilger, are today’s Hemingways, Orwells and Steinbecks? Similarly, Weever laments the contemporary dearth of investigative journalism.

“Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post sleuths who exposed Watergate, are a dying breed,” he says.

Is journalism of all forms is being relegated to a by-product of corporate public relations?

“In the Eighties my old City editor on the Birmingham Post was still joking that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR man was that of a dog and a lamp-post. But now the journalist is too often the lamppost and PR has taken over the world.”

Weever makes it clear he is not arguing that PR is inherently immoral or without value to the public, just that journalism needs to wean itself off the drug of PR news.

“The concentration of the media in a handful of multi-nationals is eroding journalistic values. Journalism is expensive, investigative journalism ferociously so. PR news is not just cheap, it is free. In the short term it aids the bottom line, in the long term it destroys the brand … [and] it may be expensive for democracy.”

The lack of political anger that Pilger laments in fiction writing, then, is mirrored in the lack of genuine social commentary that Weever identifies in the press, which in its heydey was described as the “fourth estate,” or the “government’s watchdog.”

But neither essay pointed out that there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The internet has provided us with a new way to produce and disseminate news. It is a medium that cannot, by virtue of its democratic infrastructure, readily be controlled by the corporate forces that now have a stranglehold on so many other broadcast or "one-to-many" media channels.

Already the blogosphere has provided an outlet for alternative voices (like those of the Iraqi warbloggers), while Google News strives to bring us versions of stories from news outlets (often in different countries) that we wouldn’t normally access.

The problem, however, may not lie with the publishing industry – but with the public. Pilger tacitly assumes that there is still an appetite for political writing. I believe the public, in the west at least, rarely hungers for matters that do not involve celebrity; glamour; wealth; the phoney gender war; or "reality" tv.

Maybe we don’t need to wean passive journalists off the drug of PR so much as we need to wean the passive public off the drug of old, conglomerate-controlled media.

I do not believe, as Pilger (in much of his writing) seems to, that we live in an Orwellian world. But we may, as Weever's essay suggests to me, live in a Huxleyian one.

There has been much speculation lately about Microsoft's plans to steal the top spot in search technology by integrating search with all applications, not merely the browser.

Today Google responded to this threat with a pre-emptive strike: the company released a beta version of its Google Deskbar application, which integrates web search functionality with the desktop, without launching a browser. Search results are previewed in a small inset window that closes automatically.

The Deskbar application has been greeted with much hurrah by Google enthusiasts, who see it as a brazen challenge to Microsoft.

In truth, however, the Deskbar application is not a significant development. For me it has a gimmicky feel – much like recent additions to the Google toolbar, such as automatic form filler, which were similarly heralded as "technological breakthroughs".

Just as Google cannot claim to have exclusively developed the features in its toolbar, neither can it claim to have invented deskbar searching. There are already a number of deskbar search tools available. Most notable among these is Dave Bau’s Search Deskbar – which is not limited to results from Google.

While Google is clearly maintaining the quality and integrity of its search results, it has also started pandering to the market, using tactic, strategy and gimmick to keep its brand – and its popularity – to the fore.

The way you write emails may contain clues about your personality. So says Alastair Gill, a 27 year-old PhD student at Edinburgh University.

In an interview for the BBC Scotland website, Alastair explains how people are good at guessing the personality types of email authors, even if they do not know them.

"For example, an extrovert tends to be more informal in his or her messages.

That can manifest itself through exclamation marks and multiple punctuation and the use of the word 'hi' rather than 'hello' and the expression 'take care'."

Alastair is working on software that, like a spell checker, will review emails and make suggestions for making them "sound extroverted, emotional or engage in tough-talking."

Sounds gimmicky, but who knows? Best of luck to him, I say...