1. Responding rapidly to situations

Not just with a social media celebrity such as Leo, but with all users with problems. Quite often a user familiar with Buzz will just @message one of the Google Buzz Team if something needs some kind of interaction with an engineer to resolve, but quite often the Google Buzz team members get involved without being prompted.

2. Direct interaction

In many ways it reminds me of Friendfeed who were already in many ways looked on as underdogs compared to Twitter and only gained significant traction when Twitter was down. Just like Friendfeed the creators of Buzz are participating in the conversation and in many cases they are leading the conversation as well.
They are users, and creating a platform they want to use.

3. Scale & Community

Obviously Buzz isn’t yet at the same scale as Twitter – it is quite possible it is at a similar scale to Friendfeed. The funny thing is I saw lots of people writing smart comments in replies to Leo’s anguish such as “What’s Buzz?” as if it is insignificant.
There was also this comment in a post on Cnet

Only a few social-media services truly matter at the scale at which Google likes to operate, and Buzz is clearly not yet one of them.

The thing is Cnet isn’t relevant to Buzz – you will rarely see any Cnet content there. Actually you only see Techcrunch content on Buzz because people share it in a fragmented way, or syndicate tweets of Techcrunch to Buzz. Mashable has a much more focused strategy in place and you will regularly see 100+ comments to a Mashable post on Buzz, and they will often be far more interesting than the comments on the blog itself.

Ultimately with any software platform you don’t attempt to scale until you are ready for it. Buzz may not even remain within Gmail long-term, but I have a feeling it will have significant longevity, because Google are not siting on their hands.

4. Speedy of Implementation

Bugs seem to get fixed rapidly on occasion

Google Buzz Team – @Leo Laporte – Thanks for reporting this issue — and sorry we didn’t get to the bottom of it until today. You helped us uncover a very rare bug that has existed for a while, one that only someone with a ton of followers was likely to uncover.

Here’s what happened: If one of your followers deleted their Google Account (this probably happened around August 6th), Buzz failed to deliver your post to all of your followers. Your post still existed in your Buzz stream, it just wasn’t sent properly to the people who wanted to see it.

We’re in the process of fixing this bug now, and it should be resolved in the next day or two. We’re really sorry that you had this experience and really thankful that you reported it to us so we could fix it.9:00 pm

How dare Google ship a product with bugs – how dare they have bugs even 6 months later?

5. Free As In Open

This was pretty much the ethos of Friendfeed as well, but Google have a very much open approach with Buzz. This comment from DeWitt Clinton to me just typifies the approach.

DeWitt Clinton – @Andy Beard Also, we’re going out of our way to make it easy (and free) for anyone who wants to index or archive Buzz posts and comments to do so. We’re using standard Atom and ActivityStreams and PubSubHubbub — if someone wants to build a search engine around Buzz, just subscribe to the hub and off you go, no contract required:

http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/v1/using_rest.html#firehose

Stayed tuned for more features like this coming soon. This type of decentralized, open approach is central to the core values we have in mind for Buzz.

To be honest I am a little freaked out by the concept of a Google Engineer suggesting I build a search engine on top of their platform APIs and mentioned that a little thater in the conversation thread, but the concept intrigues me.

Update

Good to see that the new features in the search API have now been officially announced. (via Techmeme)

Both might be correct in their connections.

Just like you couldn’t see the dark side of the force, and you can’t see the dark side of the moon, you can’t actually see all of your traffic that originates from search on the internet.

This is something that Tim O’Reily seems to be forgetting.

Search is only one way to find things. It’s the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion’s share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch’s traffic comes from search. For the O’Reilly Radar blog, it’s about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that’s just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there’s not much worry about people not being able to find information.

Flour Water or Yeast

Based upon photo by Gene Hunt

Which is the most important ingredient in a loaf of bread?

Search is a vital ingredient in the online ecosystem. It might be possible to get by without it, before the Yahoo directory in the early 90s people did get by without any significant method of searching for information on the internet, but it wasn’t until “meta crawlers” were introduced, indexing individual pages that search really came of age.

Whilst it is easy at this stage of internet development to discount the value of search as only a small percentage of the whole, the source of traffic to your landing pages doesn’t necessarily mean that that was the starting point even for that single internet session, and when you factor in how a visitor entered preceding traffic funnels, you find multiple occasions where search may have “touched” a visitor before they visited your site.

How did a visitor to your site first become acquainted with Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, a subscriber to a blog which linked to you, subscribed to a mailing list, or even come to use Google.

Certainly a percentage of “original origin” comes from offline referrals, but how did the referring offline agent come into contact with the service they recommend?

This is very much like the six degrees of seperation

If you take that diagram, and make 40% of the dots represent a search engine, the path from A to B will very rarely be devoid of direct search engine involvement, amd on a macro scale the chances are infinitely less.

It is great to look on social media sites as a better filter of information, but that isn’t effective unless you again implement some method of searching.

If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient.

“feel free to invite others to this room – as long as they are bloggers and/or are interested in the ProBlogger type topic I’m happy for anyone and everyone to join. I’ve invited all my contacts on FF. Pity there’s no list of public groups for people to join.”

Whilst there isn’t a public list, in many ways Google with a site search query these days provides a very real alternative.

Here is the query I used:-

http://www.google.com/search?q=%3Asite%3Afriendfeed.com+inurl%3Afriendfeed.com%2Frooms%2F&pws=0&gl=US&num=100

Here is a clickable search link for Friendfeed Rooms in Google

You can always add an extra keyword term to the search to find rooms related to specific niche’s or maybe rooms where specific people have interacted.

In other Friendfeed news, it seems Steve Gilmor doesn’t like Friendfeed much, and I love this line:-

Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die)

this seems to be the weekend bitchmeme so I thought I would at least add something useful.

Seth Godin Speaks to Google

In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.

The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.

If the perfect way to market a product is to flip the funnel on its side to become a megaphone, as Seth describes “The fashion permission complex”, then Google is in trouble, because they can’t currently charge for it, and they are constantly denouncing companies like PayPerPost who can make money from buzz marketing.
Google attacks PayPerPost mainly because PayPerPost potentially has the ability to disturb the link balance their algorithms place on the fabric of the internet.

The same is true for PR firms and almost all marketing, PayPerPost however in many cases is cheaper.

Matt Cutts thinks it is good value to do viral marketing, so you pay a specialist $5000 for a few hours work, and you might be lucky to get 100 links. It is not guaranteed.

With PayPerPost you pay $5000, and in general you will only get writers who have some genuine interest in your product writing about it, just like a PR firm isn’t going to persuade a blog on parenthood to write about the latest database system from Oracle. That might be a bad example, I actually know a few blogs that could do such a review justice, who occasionally talk about parenting as well.
PayPerPost delivers 200-300 people writing about your product, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but you are guaranteed the buzz.

The biggest problem? This presentation is from February 2006 – PayPerPost didn’t even exist when this presentation was made, and Google didn’t adapt and fill the void that Seth Godin spotted, because it doesn’t fit with Google’s primary source of revenue.

Thanks for posting the timely video Jack, I had seen it before, but things didn’t connect as well as they do now in hindsight.

Robert Scoble Reinvents PageRank?

Robert Scoble posted 3 videos yesterday along with a short blog post he hopes won’t be noticed on Techmeme, so of course it will ;)

Social Graph Based Search Parts 1, 2 and 3

I couldn’t work out a way to embed each individual video, so I embedded the full channel and provided links to individual parts.

What Robert is saying is that social networks help create a web of trust in the content people refer to, and thus that will eventually play a pivotal role in how searching for content will work in the future.

He didn’t reference Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, but those services also in some situations can provide better search results than Google.

Robert seems to be fixated by the idea that Mahalo provides a list of HDTV manufacturers on their search page, and Google doesn’t.

That fact is based upon SEO, and he seems to think the review sites and trusted vendors such as Amazon are bad results.

Robert blames this on SEOs, when in fact it is the fault quite often of the manufacturers having very hard to navigate, poorly optimized sites, that don’t attract natural linkage.

I think it is testament to Google’s algorithms that some review sites do appear above Amazon.

I disagree with Robert that the Mahalo results page is better, what is missing from the Google search is just a suggested search term “HDTV manufacturers” along with the other suggestions.
Most of the Maholo results were taken straight from the top of Google, and many of the remainder are shopping comparison sites and coupon sites = yes it is those dirty SEOs and affiliates at play again.

You still have to count how many clicks you have to perform until you get the information you are looking for, and for all but general browsing, Mahalo doesn’t offer any advantages.

There isn’t even a decent link to something explaining the difference between the various formats and technology, no links to specific self help forums etc.

The Mahalo page is so good that Yahoo doesn’t even pick up any links to it yet.

Networks of Contacts = PageRank

Networks of friends, contacts and who links to and trusts each other is effectively the same as PageRank, and that is proving to be broken and easy to manipulate.

One of the biggest problems is that “Robert Scoble” as an example might have a lot of credibility when talking about mobile phones, or camcorders, but using one of Robert’s examples a while back, he knows nothing about lawnmowers.

Techmeme overcome this by having separate indices for different topical authority, but that only works partially.
Techmeme certainly doesn’t pick up every important technology story, as an example I don’t think the SES discussion on paid links appeared on Techmeme.

Google Has It’s Failing

Google does have it’s failing, but currently Mahalo and various meme and social networks are only offering a subset of the data Google is dealing with, and Google is slowly making changes to the way it’s algorithms work.
Google does take into consideration topical authority to a certain extent – PageRank is only part of the equation, whereas that is effectively all Techmeme and Facebook could offer as an alternative to improve search.

One of the big reasons Facebook doesn’t open up is monetary, they wouldn’t be able to control search, and the income that can produce.

Rand has already responded, Duncan has already responded on Techcrunch, I am sure others will, and this is already on Techmeme.

Muhammad also has some interesting coverage, from a social network point of view, Google still has a number of its own services yet to be integrated.

David Utter on WebProNews also offers some insight into the TV factor – using Facebook takes some effort to get any kind of quality results.

It also seems that Techmeme seems to have developed some very selective results and doesn’t like me any more, or maybe I have to use specific titles for Techmeme to work correctly, something Robert in his video was suggesting isn’t the case.

Dave Winer has also rumbled and thinks Google is on the top rung and will be hard to shift.
Over a 4 year span I don’t think it would be impossible to take a chunk out of Google, as things are moving faster, but Facebook, Techmeme and certainly Mahalo are not the platforms that will do it.

First of all a short video from SMX Seattle on various things regarding duplicate content and paid links. I am not sure if there is anything new, but it certainly emphasises how you should handle syndication of your content with links back to the original.

Delving back into my archives I have written fairly extensively about link attribution and links over time.
It had a few bumps but was never Dugg or stumbled, but still ranks first for terms like link attribution. Write quality timeless content from day one with your blog, you can always highlight it again at a later date when you have a larger audience, and at the same time reinforce it with new internal links with different keywords in the anchor text.

I should also note that I make sure I get links back to my original articles when they are syndicated on WebProNews (with permission), and with lots of links in feed items, I get links from sploggers daily too.
Thus whilst they are syndicating my content, those are some of the best links I get on a regular basis, because Google knows where it originated, and that it must be good content to also be syndicated on an authority site. Hmm they link to me, I link to them.

I should also note that I like their videos because they play so well on lower bandwidth connections (though mine should have finally been upgraded to something 20x faster over the weekend) – I am much more inclined to syndicate their content than anything on Youtube, Podtech etc, because I can watch it easily.

There is some good coverage at SEO Round Table, and I link to them because… well all kinds of reasons as listed before in my 32 Kinds of Blogging Payola and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Of note so far is the duplicate content summit, more with Matt Cutts, and the SEO Meets SMM/SMO session (though that was deliberately fairly basic)

Jason Calacanis Interview With Loïc Le Meur

This is actually very interesting and has some great tips halfway through about “how to game the hell out of bloggers who lie about everything such as Valleywag”.

That isn’t a specific quote, but Jason did make that abundantly clear. Jason actually comes across a lot more “reasonable” in this Podcast compared to his own, maybe because he was the one being questioned, and not asking the questions.

I do wish Loïc Le Meur had asked some tougher questions, but I gather from the interview that Jason put him up overnight before hand in the pool-house which used to be the Mahalo office for 3 months.

Loïc Le Meur is an investor or on the board of a lot of technology companies – I couldn’t find any direct financial connection but it certainly was a friendly conversation.

Credit where credit is due, I found out about this video on Bumpzee from a message by Bobosse.
You shouldn’t be worried about Bumpzee picking up your content snippets, because there is so much smart interlinking happening on Bumpzee, and so much link love being given back from all kinds of related pages that you honestly can’t lose.

Ah well… as the saying goes, start as you mean to go on!

1. Keyword Stuff Your Meta Keywords

Real cute 1990s SEO… on your home page

Stuff your meta keywords with terms unrelated to the content of the page

<meta name="keywords" content="Main Page,50 Cent,Air Conditioner,Al Gore,American Idol,Apple,Asthma,Beer,Bill Gates,Britney Spears,Cadillac Escalade" />

The words do often appear on the page, but it is hardly content. If Mahalo is a search engine, it should use keywords link “malhalo, search, search engine”

2. Suspicious Terms and Conditions

This might be something totally legitimate, but it certainly looks suspicious to me.

I ran the Terms and conditions of Mahalo through Copyscape. It seems they were written by the same lawyers as Etsy…

Copyscape Results for Etsy

They are even more similar to the terms of service for Odeo

Copyscape Returns for Odeo

Those are both New York based startups, so there is a good chance they are using the same legal team.

Mahalo is based in California as I believe Jason has been for some time (he did originate from New York), and though he could be using the same legal team, you would expect him to have someone draw up custom legal paperwork.

Damn That Is Only 2 Negative Points, Surely I can Find More?

Actually no, not really…

I could criticise it for just being just quickly edited scraped results from another search engine, but having spent a few hours digging around on the pages of lots of search results, I know for a fact that the researchers have really been doing some homework to come up with some of the results.

I could criticise it for the SEO, because the site is clearly intended to in the future rank highly in the search engines, but I couldn’t possibly because I make sites for that purpose daily.
I think I might be slightly better on internal site structure than Jason’s guys, after all, it isn’t that smart to stick nofollow on all the links on a page that is effectively your sitemap.

Mahalo Is Better Than Wikipedia (or will be)

• Mahalo is linking to sites without a Nofollow Tag
• When you search on Mahalo, you will still have to visit other sites if you are searching for information – Wikipedia takes other people’s ideas and research, rewrites it, and doesn’t even give a search engine followable link.
• Mahalo currently seems to have impartial editors – seriously I don’t think Jason and his views on a particular subject are taken into consideration at all. As an example you would think the advertorial page would be heavily weighted towards Jason’s point of view. The researcher has actually taken a lot of time and even included one of my pages that doesn’t rank for advertorial in Google.
• Mahalo has qualified researchers – these documents aren’t being written by students who think it is fun to impersonate university professors. They seem to be using real names, and you can search for them in Google and check their history.

I can see some of the search links being monetized in the future for products with the various engines, but a few I checked currently didn’t seem to be with affiliate links.

Overall – Actually I am impressed

A lot of the concerns website owners have with Wikipedia have been addressed. They are not attempting to write content, just provide relevant links.
It is early days yet, Wikipedia started out relatively harmless too, but I think a lot of the fundamentals are good, I am not worried about Mahalo taking up first position in the SERPS for information gathering.

Oh, but Mahalo will only have No2 for product search, because I definitely intend to have number one slot ahead of Jason.

It is alpha, I started off with a couple of teething problems in this first look, but overall it is looking very solid.

I wonder if Jason is staying with ThisNext, he will be competing against them for search results.

Yep, and here is a link to Mahalo – I don’t mind linking to them occasionally, even without a nofollow, unlike Wikipedia.

Just added a new toolbar button to my toolbar buttons site for Twitter addicts.

There has been so much talk about Freebase.com, but Twitter.com seriously should have some kind of health warning – so many people are becoming addicted.

Twitter Google Toolbar Button

There is currently a case running in the Danish courts that will effectively decide the law in Denmark for linking to a page other than a home page, typically known as deep linking.
We are not talking about hot-linking, pulling an image or video off someone else’s server into the middle of your own content, but linking as you might to this blog article, using the permalink.

There is a mapping company in Denmark that creates web pages based on other people’s data, such as a company address, and provides maps on how to get there.
They then bury deep within their terms and conditions a link to another page that states that they will charge you money if you link to one of their map pages without permission.

I suppose that is similar to me adding a terms and conditions page, and from that a linking page stating that anyone who links to my blog has to pay me $1000.

Sounds like a lot of money doesn’t it?

Krak.dk only charge $940

Krak.dk have been forced / encouraged by their previous outing on Digg’s front page to not charge a blogger for linking to a map, as long as they are not for profit, and providing they ask permission first. As of this writing however I am led to believe they haven’t changed their official paperwork on their site, or improved their notification on the content pages that you could be charged $1000 linking to information about themselves.

Business sites however are not in the clear, and one is currently fighting “the just cause” for the rest of internet users, but is having their plight ignored.

Paul O’Flahery recently wrote:-

The court case between Gauguin (an auctioneer house) and Krak.dk is now well underway and I’m eagerly awaiting the outcome of this. The case is getting good coverage in the Danish blogosphere (just check out Overskrift), and well it should as the outcome of this case could affect us all.

Unfortunately this hasn’t been picked up by any major Search Engine news site, or A – List Blogger.

The consequences of Krak winning this court battle, and maybe for the ruling to have a knock on effect across Europe are extremely serious, and could damage the way the internet works.

Websites would again become insular, not linking where credit is due simply because noone has time to search for hidden terms and conditions requiring you to pay $1000 just to link to a page.

I did my own analysis of all the links currently going to Krak.dk internal pages – their sugar trap will possibly net them $6m if they win.

Here is the current statement of the rules from Krak AFTER all the coverage from the last 2 weeks.

Official Krak answer:
Every blogger in the world is welcome to use deep links to Krak maps for free. But please ask us.
When it comes to commercial use, Krak has the same policy as Google and others. You cannot use our copyrighted maps without asking.
Krak alone decides whether the use is commercial or not.
In the actual case, the site by nature looks like a blog, but may in fact be a business, so we decided he had to pay.
If we were wrong, and if the blogger in question in fact is not selling anything (no animals or accessories), we will reconsider.

Best regards,

Poul Moeller
Kraks Forlag A/S

• This is more serious than a small tweak to a search engine’s algorithm
• A change in the terms for Google Adsense is insignificant compared
• The latest start-up from “Demo” is inconsequential
• Hell this is bigger news than Robert Scoble talking at a new PayPerPost gig (and for the record I respect Robert for doing so, and for his disclosure)
• And for search, no matter how important people might think Wikipedia is, I guarantee the ability to freely link to any web page is of much higher consequence.
• I am not sure how this compares with Britney Spears or Paris Hilton up the skirt pics, but imagine you couldn’t link to the site that just listed them?
• I am not sure how this compares in importance for global warming – hell if people couldn’t link to each other, maybe the internet would become less attractive, and we would all plant more trees.
• Windows Vista? Well you can always read an opinion on Paul’s blog about how his better half liked it (a non-geek)

Maybe I should spend the next hour checking every page of Paul’s blog in Denmark just in case he has a hidden charge for linking to his. I don’t have to do that because he is a normal sane person running a normal legitimate business and doesn’t need to trap people into paying him money.

Seriously, this story need some main-stream international press coverage.

What would be better than Robert Scoble’s OPML file?

The Best Search Technology

Google Custom Search Engine gives great search results, and quite often gives better results than the main index.

Alister Cameron has just launched his new Scoble Search

It does give more current results on Technology news than Google might provide from the main search, though it doesn’t cover as many sources.

Robert Scoble Megite Meme

Megite have had a meme for Robert Scoble for some time, based upon the same OPML file.

It provides a great alternative to Robert’s Shared Feed from Google Reader. You don’t get Robert’s top picks, but the top picks based upon the people Robert reads. It is maybe slightly broader content, but it is automatic, and works at times that Robert is taking some time off to read his email.

Custom Google Toolbar Button

Of course it is a total coincidence that I happen to have a Google Toolbar button that points directly to Alisters custom search, and includes the Scobleizer Meme on Megite.

Robert Scoble – Custom Search | Megite Meme | Toolbar Button

But then my readers might not believe in coincidence ;)

Wikiseek seems to be the hottest news of the day but honestly it is just a poor mashup of the Wikipedia database, a poor quality search engine, and some PPC adverts. Whilst Wikiseek has launched in a huge fanfare, and admittedly is still in beta, my personal opinion is that Wikipedia are taking the wrong direction.

Wikipedia Search – How it could be done

1. Take the Wikipedia dataset – yes I know it is subject to occasional spamming, and frequently there are editor problems over who is notable, or should be included, but at the end of the day the majority of sites linked to are of high quality.
2. Wikipedia API – at the end of the day, the best Wikipedia search will come about by natural selection. If Wikipedia want peope to be able to find the best search results, they should give developers access
3. Shared Revenue – Wikipedia could easily request shared income from any search to monetise the content to help with further development.
4. User Choice – allow a user to select which search they use with Wikipedia – List each mashup that is created and meets the Wikipedia guidelines, and let the users decide which to use.

Collaboration Brings Results

The recent collaboration with the OPML file created by Toprank Marketing, SEO search created by Alister Cameron, The Megite created for the SEO and SEM industry, and my eventual SEO Search Toolbar Button is a good example of how one simple dataset can in a short space of time.

A Wikipedia Equivalent?

• Give Access to Wikipedia Data
• Create an OPML File
• Import Wikipedia Data and linked sites to a Google CSE (Custom Search Engine)
• Share the revenue

A Google CSE based on Wikipedia would be highly useful. Wikiseek isn’t.

SearchMe

SearchMe is the company behind the new Wikiseek.

Through its patented technology and proprietary vertical search engines, Searchme delivers more meaningful and targeted search results to its users.

I would argue that currently the results are not more relevant than the results that can be obtained using Google CSE – maybe that will change in the future, but I don’t have the benefit of hind-sight.

Data Access – a Darwinian Approach

If Wikipedia gave complete access to their data through an API, just like Open Source encourages software development, access to data would improve search.
Developers would be able to create niche specific search engines, encorporating the Wikipedia dataset, but also supplementing the data with their own lists of trusted resources.

Junk Results Examples

Results using Wikipedia’s own search are actually better than these few examples

HTML
Website
Ground Mole
I don’t need it but… – seems they are blocking some searches – Wikipedia’s own search found this.

You have to do a very top level search to gain any reasonable results

Mole

The results for Long Tail are not so bad compared to a normal Google Search, but where did they get those “Relevant Adverts” from?

Wikisearch, Bloggers and SEO

How does this affect you?

My own opinion currently is it doesn’t. Produce quality good enough to be linked to from Wikipedia, and from other people.

If sometime in the future we all get access to the Wikipedia database through an API, then we might start seeing some creative use of the vast amount of data that has been collected.

You should also listen to Danny’s Daily SearchCast – he rips the quality of the search results apart, and also buries them on the placement of the top Wikipedia results. He did a search on the same blue pills as I did.
It looks like he must have performed the search before me, as I wasn’t getting any results, just an error message.

What are your views?