mediajunk

Online marketing company Marketleap has produced a thought-provoking report on a shift that, it claims, has occurred during the last year in advertising. The power of television advertising is declining as the power of web marketing rises: “Television is losing its relevancy as the single source of information communication because there are better things to do than just unplug and stare. The television model will begin changing dramatically because there are more cost-effective ways to drive traffic and action to a business without a 30 second TV ad.” Marketleap’s claims are based, in part, on the Nielsen for the autumn TV season, which traditionally brings in the largest viewing figures. “One group in particular is showing stunning declines in watching TV -- the American male aged 18 – 34, down almost 10% from last year.” Males, it seems, are leading the shift away from television and towards computer-mediated forms of communication, that give them more power as users/consumers. In Europe too, it is true that TV is no longer the "mass" medium it once was. Advertisers have to work harder to gain mind-space in this fragmented market. Does this mean advertising will go away? Of course not. Worse, we can expect the distinction between 'regular' content and 'sponsored' content to blur even further – just as we are seeing now in those search engines that merge paid listings with bona-fide ones. The practice is not confined to new media. Advertorials are becoming increasingly common in print and, even in current affairs news, it is hard to tell the spin from the reportage (so much so, in fact, that some are calling for ‘content labelling’ to be introduced in journalism). In the future, it will be difficult to tell what's advertising and what's not, regardless of the medium. The word "advertising" could even fall out of use, not because it won’t exist, but because it will be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the infosphere, making it effectively invisible. This article is brought to you by Heraghty Consulting. ;)

Time magazine has published a feature on Google and how it is about to face stiff competition from "a gang of web search companies", in a market that looks increasingly lucrative. Google’s success with its AdWords programme, helped by its recent and controversial algorithm update, has certainly proved that the search market is a cash-cow. But I personally don’t see any other company being able to compete with Google any time soon. Not even Microsoft. The Time article interviewed Kirk Konigsbauer, general manager of MSN Search, who conceded that Microsoft’s much-anticipated foray into internet search is a long way from being ready. "This is a really hard computer-science problem,” he explained. “In fact, our engineers say this is the hardest computer-science problem they've ever had to face." Google realised that internet search was a computer science project right from the outset. That’s why they’ve got so many PhDs on their staff. Google not only got a headstart -- it changed the search paradigm. And as others struggle to catch up, it continues to change it. Like it or not, the Florida update was part of that ongoing commitment to changing the paradigm. It hurt Mom 'n' Pop business -- but the average web searcher doesn't seem to notice that anything has changed behind the scenes. That so many entrants to the web search market are trying to emulate Google’s marketing success -- rather than focus on the quality of their own results -- is testament to the strength of Google’s brand. Names like Mooter and Kanoodle have a, well, coopycat feel. The pack may be chasing. But Google is increasing its lead.

Google has launched a BETA-mode book excerpt search. Excerpts of books, along with ISBN and other information, will be returned in some instances when a user search matches excerpts in its index (usually blurbs). The feature will be called Google Print. The move which has not come as a surprise to Google watchers and has been predicted ever since Amazon launched its search inside the book feature. Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch explains that "publishers participating in the program have granted permission to Google to include book content". This move, I believe, is another step towards the ultimate realisation of an online universal library. Information still wants to be free.

The capture of Saddam Hussein was a victory in the war -- against old media. That’s according to an opinion piece by Steve Outing in Poynter, an online resource for journalists. “The only way someone in the U.S. might have learned about Saddam first from a print newspaper was if their electricity was out all day yesterday, they had no social contact, and they read the news in Monday's edition,” writes Outing. “What this episode signifies to me is that Internet publishing operations of newspapers are now clearly as critical as the printing presses. On Sunday, those papers' websites were more important.” Perhaps. But most people probably fist learned of Saddam’s capture through radio or television -- as I did, in that order. I first heard about it on the RTE lunchtime radio news bulletin, then switched on Sky News to see the live press conference, where I did, admittedly feel senses of drama and participation when the pictures of Saddam (before and after beard) were revealed. I did happen to be online shortly after, however, on a bulletin board that has nothing particularly to do with news or current affairs, and it was a curious experience to see messages appear titled “Saddam Hussein” as participants learned of the capture. None of this, of course, means that new media are replacing old media. Rather, the internet is changing the function of previously-established forms of communication -- just as television changed the function of radio, movies changed the function of theatre, and so on. After all, this year’s new media are next year’s old media.

Nine and a half years ago, when I launched the online version of The Buzz magazine, a colleague of mine – the only Buzz colleague, in fact, who was interested enough to even *look* at the e-zine – got really excited. Sitting in the third floor office on Castle Street, Sligo, Ireland, he clicked from page to digital page, and made a statement I’ll never forget:

“You know Mikey,” he said, as a cartoon lightbulb hovered over his head, “if this internet thing ever takes off…”

I knew that the internet had already taken off. But even I am surprised at the speed with which this communications medium has made its impact across the world.

In North Carolina this week, two men are before the courts, facing up to twenty years in jail for a crime that the internet has made possible, and one of which every reader of this page, I am sure, has already been a “victim” – spam!

One of the men, Gaven Stubberfield, was described by Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore as “number eight on the top 10 worldwide spammer list”.

Cybercrimes are sure to increase in the future, as the internet continues to weave its way rapidly into the global socio-cultural fabric – faster even than television or radio did before it.

Perhaps I will be writing about online identity theft in a decade’s time?

By Michael Heraghty

(I am Michael Heraghty. Honest. Just ask Google.)

The web has given rise to a “renaissance of personal creativity,” claims Steve Bowbrick in today’s Guardian.

“When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he anticipated that we'd all want to write as well as read. The first web browser could edit web pages as well as display them. Later browsers also allowed ordinary users to do it themselves - until Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, decided that the mass of internet users wouldn't want to do that and stripped the edit function out.
…

Blogging has changed all that, though. The web is now properly "writable" again and people who found their voices in their weblogs are now ready for more.”

I mentioned recently in Mediajunk that fully editable and configurable sites such as Wikis may just be the “more” that blog readers (and users) are looking for.

In the meantime, we’re certainly witnessing the rise of editable web elements – not only weblogs and diaries, but photograph collections, bulletin boards, social-networking sites (such as Ryze.com and Friendster.com), etc.

The editable revolution may not be exclusive a single digital medium. Michael Marriott, writing in the New York Times, suggests that computer games manufactures are considering releasing editable versions of their products.

“For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules.”

These teenage hackers have grown up to be mainstream game developers and “are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.”

Both these trends, I believe, reveal an increasing comfort with – and literacy in – computer-mediated communications.

In the future, everyone will be a geek.

I recently gave a talk on website usability to students of the M.Sc. in IT in Education course at Trinity College, Dublin. (You can download the PowerPoint presentation – 954kb. Please link/reference my site if you use it.)

As part of the discussion, I rehashed a point I made on Mediajunk recently: that designers should not rely on the logo as the only homepage link. Not all users know that the logo is a link to the homepage, I argued, despite the popularity of this practice.

It turns out that the practice is even more popular than I'd guessed. A logo that links to the homepage was found on 100% of the sites analysed by Heidi Adkisson for her master’s thesis on de-facto web standards.

De-facto web standards differ from proposed web standards; the latter are proposals and guidelines for designing websites, while the former are the actual practices and conventions that prevail among existing sites.

Among Adkisson’s findings, outlined in her article for Boxes and Arrows were:

• 100% of sites had a logo linking back to homepage displayed in upper left corner

• 93% of sites had a Global Search option, presented as a text field and button.

• 76% of sites used text rendered as graphics for main site menu links.

• 62% of web pages displayed links as underlined text.

• 37% of pages use different colours to differentiate visited and unvisited links.
  

For me the most surprising of the above findings is that the 76% of sites still use graphical menus. I suspect this number will continue to drop as sites become less graphic-oriented and more usable, and use of cascading style sheets grows.

I am against graphical menus for the following reasons:

• They make pages slower to download, particularly if they are paired with rollover images.

• They work poorly if at all in text-only browsers and screen readers.

• Graphic-rendered text cannot be read directly by search engine bots, lowering the page's findability on what are likely to be relevant keywords.

• Too often text rendered in menu images is difficult to read and appears to “bleed” (this is because anti-alias or dither techniques do not work well at such a small scale).
  

Heidi’s analyses are useful; let's hope they are the starting point for more in-depth research on her site webdesignpractices.com

She has also made her masters’ thesis available for download (4.2 MB PDF file)

*****

A similar project, also well executed, is Martijn van Welie’s Web Design Patterns.

Weelie identifies many different types of sites/pages, and groups them in to categories.

For example, in the “e-commerce” category, he lists examples such as:

• Shopping cart
• Login
• Registering
• Product Comparison
• Product Configurator
• Product Advisor
• Case study
• Booking process

… and so on.

He then provides a typical features & functions analysis of each element, along with visual examples.

Both these studies indicate that, after ten years of chaotic growth, the web is finally settling down into conventions and patterns, which will make life easier for designers and users alike.

Recently I posted an entry on whether the recent update in Google’s search algorithm left the door open to mischievous tricks being employed by SEOs (search engine optimisers) to harm their competitors. (See "Florida Update Raises Foul Play Concerns" below.)

On a bulletin board frequented by a spokesperson for the company (who goes by the username “GoogleGuy”), I made a similar point: "GoogleGuy's silence on the subject of blackhats now having the power to sink competitors has been ominous."

GoogleGuy broke his silence and responded to the message, reaffirming the search engine’s pre-Florida position that “webmasters can't really sabotage other people's sites -- that wouldn't be fair.”

Officially, then, Google is still sticking to its fairness policy. Many small business, however, will ask whether its punishing of their sites for certain keywords and phrases is consistent with this fairness principle.

Surprised at the lack of media coverage of the Florida update, I sent an email to a journalist with the "Online" supplement of the Guardian.

He decided to print the letter in today's edition of the paper. Here's the text:

*****
Google Overhaul
What has Google done in its latest update of its search algorithms?

I run a weblog called MediaJunk, dealing with trends in new media culture - particularly blogging and search engines. I have been running it for more than a year, but I have never got as much traffic as I have done over the past week.

The spike started when I posted an article about the recent Google Florida update (the Florida name comes from the tradition of naming hurricanes, as this is the effect updates have on search results!). In short, Google has made a major overhaul of its search results in an attempt to cut out spammers, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of sites have been penalised.

It looks to many people as though Google is targeting small businesses and trying to get them to take out AdWords.

I didn't believe Google's overhaul was malicious but I got so many emails that I began to have doubts. So I checked out some of the cases and I think some people may have a right to be annoyed. See particularly this entry. I'm amazed that no major media source has picked up on this yet.

*****

At lunchtime today, the BBC had a report criticising Google's update. It probalby had nothing to do with my letter. But I like to think it did :)

Concerns have been raised by webmasters across the world since my first post about the Google Florida Update.

Chief among these are: can a mischievous competitor get you dropped from Google’s search results?

One of the main effects of the Florida update is that sites are now getting penalised on specific keywords/keyphrases.

Let’s say, for example, that I was running a toy shop called www.xmastoys.com .

If a lot of my links contain the text “Christmas toys” (especially if they are on pages that otherwise aren’t about toys), I may find that, post-Florida, my site doesn’t show up anywhere for a search on “Christmas Toys”.

My site may otherwise score just as well as it did pre-Florida on other searches.

What concerns webmasters and SEOs then is: if I haven’t been penalised for the keyphrase “Christmas Toys”, my competitors can easily make me disappear from the results for this search by posting a lot of “bad” links to me. (For example, links from lots of Google-banned porn sites.)

Prior to the Florida update, Google’s policy was understood to be that your site’s listings couldn’t be affected by any action that a competitor might take against you. This no longer seems to be the case.

Webmasters are worried that we are on the brink of a new era of underhand SEO tactics – which is ironic, given that Google’s stated intention with the Florida update (as conveyed by its bulletin board representative, GoogleGuy) was to reduce so-called “blackhat” activities.

Those of you who are regular visitors to MediaJunk will know that I have been defending Google in the face of harsh criticism.

I believe that Google did have to take action against spammers. But, the more the criticism pours in, the more I’m starting to believe that Google has gone too far. I’ll even go so far as to entertain the much-touted idea that Google’s recent Update has been as much about enhancing its AdWords revenue as it has been about improving the quality of search for users.

I don’t that the latter is necessarily compatible with the former.

One of the things that’s made me re-evaluate my previous high esteem for Google is the comments I’ve been getting (and still am) on my first post about the Florida Update.

While there have been some unfair gripes in the comments, there have also been some genuine posts from people who run small businesses and who will be hit hard with the loss of traffic to their sites.

Some of them run small, home-based e-commerce sites that specialise in niche market wares.

Like Seth, who has a small business selling “brain puzzles”. Or Bob, who stocks hard-to-get martial arts equipment. Or Kathy, who runs www.weddingAccents.com with her husband, and has grown to depend on previously reliable traffic from Google for her sales.

None of these small business owners have sufficient budgets to run large, persistent AdWords campaigns.

In January of this year, Wired magazine ran a story headlined Google Vs. Evil, which opened thus:

“The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.”

That article is now proving prescient…