Lifestreaming

In January of 1995, I took a month-long trip to Australia.

Being an early-twenty-something man, I was looking for adventure and during the "planning" stages of my trip, I decided not to plan anything. And so, after 25 hours of travel time I found myself in Melborune, at midnight, on the eve of the Australian Open. Needless to say, places to crash for the night were scarce. All the hostels were booked and the longer I roamed the city, led only by my Rough Guide, the more likely it became that a park bench would be my bed for the night. My feet aching, the pack on my back weighing heavier by the second, I found a room at last. It was priced considerably more than I had budgeted on a per-night basis, but I desperately needed a bed and a shower soon thereafter.

The next morning I packed up, turned in the key, and headed out into the (day-lit) wilds of Melbourne. Fully awake and refreshed, I reveled in the thought that nobody knew where I was or what I was doing. It was a sense of freedom unlike anything I had experienced - totally disconnected from everybody I knew.

I recently wrote about Information Fragmentation and how the sheer number of information sources and viable vehicles for information consumption can be simply overwhelming. And then I heard the term "Lifestreaming."

Mashable has posted a nice overview of 8 Lifestreaming Services. The thrust behind these services is a solution to the Information Fragmentation issue and an aggregation point for the volumes of information flowing out of our social media accounts and RSS subscriptions. In the interest of science, I signed up for one - FriendFeed. Creating the account was simple and pulling data from across my social accounts took nothing more than providing my username and password for each. I can then, just as easily, subscribe to my friend's FriendFeed to see all of their social media / RSS activity.

Good Lord.

I can't help but wonder - do we really need all this hyper-connectivity? With a service like this, communication can be reduced to a steam of FlickrDiggStumbleTwitters and it's quite possible for me to know what every one of my friends is doing nearly every moment of their online lives. When is it too much? When do the details of our daily existence become so available that we lose our sense of self. If everybody knows everything about you, what's left?

I suppose the argument is that these services are, clearly, optional. For me, I miss that morning in Australia and I've deleted my FriendFeed account.

Related Posts: Aggregation for the Mainstream

Tin Twitter

Like so many others, I've taken the plunge and created a Twitter account. I figure I'll have something more to say about it pretty soon - after having used it for a few days - but I wanted to get out a quick post in case anybody out there is feeling adventerous and wants to follow me on twitter.

One thing I promise, however, is never to use "twit" or "tweet" to refer to a post on twitter.

Web Page Spam Definition

Just when I'm wondering what to write about next, I see this -

Official - Mahalo is Spam, According to Google's Internal Spam Documents

"Wow," I think, "this is going to be good."

In a number of ways, this post on SEOBook.com is great blog fodder (or link bait, which ever you prefer). Let us count the ways:

#1 Final Notes on Spam
SEOBook.com quotes the leaked Google documents as follows:

When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

What is amazingly ironic about this statement is if you ask the same question about any Google search results page, you will undeniably determine that page to be Spam.

#2 Jason Calacanis Venom
I still don't get why so many people with the letters S, E, and O present and sequential in their job title (bestowed upon them or self-proclaimed) have so much built up anger toward Mr. Calacanis. Well, let me restate that. SEOs don't care for some of what Mr. Calacanis has had to say about them in the past, even though he tried to make ammends at SES NY this year. What I don't get is why everybody is so insecure. Surely these folks are true marketing professionals that have well rounded skill sets they can fall back on as the online link-baiting business slowly starts to fall apart. Right? Surely they're not worried that the true foundations of SEO are really quite simple and one day their clients will wise up and the demand for their sevices will decline dramatically as SEO practices become integrated into standard in-house site building / content creation processes.

#3 What should be indexed, anyway?
By their own definition, Mahalo is a search engine. A curious question, then, is why does Google index the Mahalo pages at all? Search results pages from Yahoo! or Ask.com or MSN aren't indexed by Google, and the favor is graciously returned by each of these sites. So why, then, are the Mahalo pages being indexed? As an alternative search engine, shouldn't they stand alone? As a user, there's marginal value to me if I exectute the Google search, only to be directed to another page full of externally pointing links. Unless, of course, the Google search results page is as relevant as it should be. The same question can be asked for other "aggregator" type sites which function, essentially, as search engines. Think of Shopping.com or PriceGrabber.com, for example - the vast majority of the content on those sites is unoriginal, copied from other sites (merchants or product review synidcation), and provide nothing more than a search function to their users.

Should results page from vertical search engines be indexed by the Big Boys? What about results pages from general "alternative" search engines? This is a tricky proposition that will become more complex as the major Search Engines move more toward becoming destination / content sites themselves.

Yahoo Semantic Web Adoption

SES NY closed this past Thursday, leading off the last day with a presentation by Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tompkins. Mr. Tompkins' presentation centers around Yahoo's recent announcement that it is embracing a number of  Semantic Web standards.

As presented by Mr. Tompkins, Yahoo is attempting to shift the focus away from the 10 blue links and aim it's sights on user intent. That is, users are conducting a web search to accomplish a specific task. Whether that is task is to find a good Chili Recipe, get the phone number of the local hardware store, or find the top rated steak house in New York City, these tasks center around specific content consumption. Yahoo hopes to bring that specific information to the surface as quickly as possible, thus satisfying the user intent in the most efficient means possible.

Several examples were given in the presentation and Amit Kumar, Product Management Director for Yahoo! Search, gives a LinkedIn sample on his blog.  For a user search for him, rather than just returning a link back to his LinkedIn profile, the search will see something like this:

You can image similar search results that can surface restaurant rantings, contact information, movies times, and other specific details about the search subject.  To accomplish this, Yahoo!is supporting a few different mechanisms that will allow site owners to send specific page meta data  (i.e. the semantics) to the search engine.

The first of these is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Using RDF, site publishers can embed meta content tags directly into each web page. These tags would describe the key content themes of the page, which the search engines can then pick up and subsequently use to inform search result ranking and presentation. To achieve similar results, Yahoo! is supporting Microformats as well as several semantic web vocabularies  (Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others).

Along with Google Universal Search, this is another example of a major search engine acting more and more like a destination. Yahoo! already brings much of it's own content to the top of the search results. Yahoo! Local content headlines a search for "NYC Steak House"...

... and Yahoo! Food gets top billing for "Turkey Recipes."

You can also now play YouTube videos directly within Yahoo! search results. From the search engine perspective, keeping the user on the search results page longer is preferable. They don't don't monetize those clicks from the organic results, and the longer they hang around the more likely it is they'll eventually click on a CPC ad.

From an SEO perspective, the rules of the game are changing. As the search engines become the information source, organic clicks will decrease. Bucking the trend won't be an option since you can expect sites that open themselves up and provide the rich meta data the engines want will surely find their way to the top.

For some businesses this will work out well. Local businesses should be happy to have phone numbers, addresses, maps, etc. exposed directly on the search engine result pages. After all, they're online to be found and mostly get people into the store / bookstore / bistro. Content producers, however, and other sites whose monetization strategy is largely tied to page views will face a challenge. If the latest scandalous picture or funny video or restaurant rating is delivered to the user without them ever having to leave the search engine, organic traffic to these sites will surely suffer.

Mahalo

I was impressed by the Jason Calacanis keynote at SES NY today. Mr. Calacanis is a serial entreprenuer, current CEO of Mahalo, and has been the center of a fair amount of SEO controversy.

What impressed me most about Mr. Calacanis was his conviction that search needs to evolve and, specifically, algorithmic search is not the right answer for every query. This thinking is the rationale behind Mahalo - a human assisted search engine. Every result page on Mahalo is created by a person, and every request for site inclusion is reviewed by a person. By using people to determine site relevancy for a given search term, Mahalo and Mr. Calacanis have given us a true measure of relevancy and effectively taken away the lion's share of what the average SEO bills her clients for.

Mr. Calacanis also commented that he believed SEOs today are too focused on the near-term win as opposed to a longer term strategy of building value. In defense of SEOs everywhere, they're only partially to blame for this. The link-based page rank algorithms promote a culture of deception. It's either too tempting to try to game the system or there's no choice becuase all your competitors are doing it. How can Mr. White Hat win when all those shades of grey exist and his clients are being promised hundreds (or thousands) of inbound links?

Perhaps this is why te SEO industry has been so defensive when it comes to remarks Mr. Calacanis has made in the past. If SEOs were secure in their craft, why would they care what anybody says? The writing is on the wall and the SEO industry sees the changes that are coming. Universal search, hand edited page rank, human assisted search engines, and even social media threaten to alter the fabric of SEO, and the situation has more than a few people scared.   

Rather than claiming every blog post which questions the current SEO industry is "SEO Hate," it would be better to embrace the fact that search, and thus SEO, are immature industries. Spurred on by advances in technology, the search industry will continue to evolve at a rapid pace and what we consider SEO today will be vastly different just a few years from now - and those that continue to focus on the short term will be left behind rather quickly. 

Universal Search

At SES NY today, the 1:30pm session was focused on Universal Search. The speakers for the discussion were:

• John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media
• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
• Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director, Big Mouth Media
• Jack Menzel, PM for Universal Search, Google

For those not familiar with the term, Universal Search refers to a blended search results page where Google combines listings from its video, image, local, news (etc.) engines with those it gathers from spidering web pages.

The onstage conversation was the livliest and most engaging I've seen at SES so far. Mr. Battelle was persistent in his attack insistance that the continuing trend toward Universal Search was slowly turning Google (and other search engines) into the destination, rather than the road map. Recently released comScore data supported this theory, showing a 3% lower click-thru rate when Universal Search results are displayed to the searcher.

On the surface, this may seem ideal from a user experience perspective. Getting the searcher to the data they're seeking as quickly as possible is what it's all about, right? And that was the position taken by Mr. Menzel. The situation gets muddy with the realization that Google is also, slowly, becomming a media company. In many Universal Search results, you will find Google Finance for stock quotes and Google Video (YouTube) for funny clips of Chuch Norris. Mr. Battelle pointedly asked Mr. Menzel if Google favored their media properties when presenting Univeral Search results. Naturally, the Google stance is to always show the most relevant results. Of course, "relevancy" is determined by Google's algorithm, which relies on many, many data points of which Google is likely to have the best data for their own properties, so you do the math.

For the thoughtful SEO crowd in the audience, the question is this - What happens when Google becomes the destination? Even if the issue of Google showing more of it's own content on the results pages is put aside, where does it leave the average search marketer if the searcher never leaves the results page? In this scenario, the monetization and ROI of SEO goes right out the window as the user never makes it to the content owner's site.

It's an uncomfortable situation to be in. The entirety of the web allows Google to spider their content with no real guidelines on exactly how much of it can be displayed within a Google property. Would it be going too far for Google to allow a video from Break.com to be played direclty from the search results page? The inclination is to say yes, but wouldn't that also be a better user experience? 

On stage today, Mr. Menzel said several times that Google wanted nothing more than to deliver the searched for information to the user as quickly as possible. Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, Google starts to look more and more like a destination. And if that's the case, then we're witnessing the beginnings of a game changer for the SEO world.

Related Posts: Yahoo Semantic Web

SES NY - Day One

The NYC version of the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference and Expo kicked off today at the Hilton on 54th Street and 6th Avenue. I missed the morning session due to work commitments, but made it in time for two sessions.

For the 2pm time-slot, I attended Mobile Local Search: Finding the Way. The session description offered "...best practices for answering needs of today's demanding [mobile] searchers," but I found the session to be largely a marketing jaunt for the companies represented by the four panelists. Nothing really to learn, with the exception that ~90% of callers have no idea what they pay for a 411 call.

At 3:45pm, the only option was Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right, which proved to be more interesting. While, again, each of the panelists spent a fair amount of time working the PR angle there was a reasonable amount of substance to the conversation. A few highlights:

Steven Krien from OrganizedWisdom.com believes firmly that the future of vertical search lies in human assisted search, including an available service layer. As an example, Organized Wisdom (which focuses on the Healthcare vertical) delivers Mahalo-esqe human-curated search results. Also available, for $1.99 a minute, a site visitor looking for more specific information can talk (online) to a doctor. Putting aside the question of what type of doctors are willing to work for a start-up web site at a rate far below what they get paid at their day job, using real people to prepare search results for specific search terms is a strong value proposition. The example he gave was the Johns Hopkins Medical Center Forum on Pancreatic Cancer. According to the researchers at OrganizedWisdom, this forum is the best place to find an active and meaningful community of people dealing with this disease. Despite that, this forum ranks poorly from a natural search perspective and without human assisted search it would go largely unnoticed. Of course this gets to the relevancy question when trying to understand why these forums don't rank and it's not surprising that the folks attending Johns Hopkins Pancreatic Cancer forum have more important things to do than run out and create some back links. If you're not familiar with my views on relevancy, give them a read and let me know your thoughts.

Jason Finger from SeamlessWeb and Paul Forster from Indeed.com both mentioned how difficult it is for general search engines to utilize structured or meta data to help rank search results. The obvious reason for this is that the form of the data will vary from one vertical to the next. A common architecture utilizing an entity design pattern might enable a generic search engine to handle this from a purely technical standpoint, but it's simply not scalable / practical for a company to build the expertise in EVERYTHING that would be required to detail the data structure for all verticals.

It's interesting to watch this online search evolution. The failings of the generic engines shines a light on the need for vertical focus. This is clearly a case where "Jack of all trades, master of none" applies.

Information Fragmentation

Some days, it's overwhelming.

On any given day, and several times each day, I scan the following for new or updated content:

• 1 LinkedIn account
• 1 Facebook account
• 3 news sites (NY Times, NPR, CNN)
• 5 social bookmarking sites (Digg, reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn)
• 7 tabs on my Google home page consisting of
• 32 Google widgets
• 10-20 Blogs for post comment threads I may be following or new posts I may have missed.

Within those, there's some overlap. For example, I have RSS feeds for the news sites on my Google home page, but there's always more to see and read on the site itself. So when I saw this post about TwitterFeed, I couldn't help but wonder if I, or anybody else, really need yet another place to have RSS style content delivered to me. I interpreted Jane Copland as touching lightly on this concept in a recent SEOMoz.com article. When talking about activating a Twitter account for herself, she wrote:

I didn't try to convince myself that I'd signed up in order to keep ahead of the world's breaking news, to connect with important people or follow the torrid happenings at SXSW. I did it to add yet another method by which I can communicate with my friends, because we're lacking those. What I noticed, however, was that there is interesting information to be found via news sites' accounts, but they blend in all too well with the idle chatter.

The intent for a product like TwitterFeed is obvious. Many people are passing much of their day on  Twitter and online marketers are keen to get in front of their audience as frequently as possible. The challenge, however, from a user perspective is that no one delivery vehicle is ever complete. As a content consumer, it's not clear to me why I would want to follow an RSS feed on Twitter when I already have too many content aggregation points. One might argue in favor of TwitterFeed, and in doing so  might say something like this:

"It's just another option for the user, and one of the great powers inherent in digital media is the latitude it provides the customer. No longer can content publishers dictate how content is consumed, but rather the consumer has become accustomed to the wherever/whenever paradigm of content consumption."

That's all well and good, but it creates the problem of information fragmentation for the user - not all information is available via all channels - which in turn exacerbates the problem of Audience Fragmentation. So while the user is spending more time bouncing from channel to channel, online marketers are spending more time trying to reach those consumers, and the content publishers are spending more time trying to find new avenues to deliver their content.

And so round and round it goes. Where so often technology is produced to make us more efficient, a content production-consumption cycle has been created that continually is taking up more time of everybody involved.

Audience Fragmentation

Loren Baker published a post yesterday on how to set up TwitterFeed. It's a good, instructive, post for anybody looking for (more) ways to leverage the social media, but it brings to light an ongoing trend - Audience Fragmentation.

As more and more social media sites crop up, target demographics will become more and more fragmented across these. Online marketers trying to reach these consumers (of content, products, etc.) are quick to embrace the newest gadget that allows them to spread their message far and wide and, on the surface, this seems ideal. However, it's not yet a perfect solution.

Online audience fragmentation, in general, is an issue. Any advertiser looking to target a specific demographic with reasonable reach and frequency quickly finds that they need to run ads across many, many sites. This ends up being highly inefficient and costly from a media buying perspective. As a solution the hot ticket in online advertising right now is the Vertical Ad Network. Vertical Ad Networks were pioneered by such companies as Jumpstart Auto Media and NetShelter Technology several years ago, with perhaps the best known current example being Glam Media. The concept is simple - online publishers interested in the same set of users band together under an umbrella ad distribution platform. This platform is typically run by an interested party who is also a content producer. In the case of Glam Media, they serve as the Ad Sales arm for all the publishers in their network and also provide the technology solution to aggregate and target ad delivery across the publisher base. Adify has also made quite a splash providing an open Ad Network Platform, basically allowing anybody to set up an Ad Network and recruit publishers.

Clearly a similar solution that would enable a targeted marketing reach into the social media sites would be welcome by online marketers the world over. The results would be reduced marketing costs and higher conversion rates - something everybody can appreciate.

Spring Forward

Most years, I forget that daylight savings time has arrived until one of the (many) electronic devices in my home reminds me.

Given the number of devices that will adjust to the time change without prompting, I was surprised to find that many people are using Google to figure out what time it is. This morning, 11 of the top 13 searches in Google are related to the time change - my favorite being the direct-and-do-the-point "what time is it now."

In the early 1990's I would awake on a Sunday morning and not realize what was going on until I turned on NY1 News or ventured out to get a newspaper. Some years, it would be mid-day before my clocks were sprung forward and in a way I liked not knowing. With so many information sources surrounding us these days, it's impossible to enjoy a similar level of ignorance.

This morning I also awoke to find that President Bush has vetoed a bill that would ban waterboarding. It seems we've sprung both forward and backward at the same time.

Sometimes it's better not knowing.