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Search and video

Media search seems wide open for anyone with even mediocre search optimization skills. maybe people who produce media just don't like to write metadata.

Back last August, I wrote about our business blogging bootcamp and the various techniques we used to gain search visibility for local searches. I've done two bootcamps since, and those basic lessons still hold. In later bootcamps, we stressed community development and building networks of sites based on students' interests. About that time, I developed a personal blog about fitness.

One thing I noticed in that exercise was that when I posted video clips, those posts would immediately gain more visibility for relevant search terms. Well, if that wasn't proof enough that video was hot, services like youtube and google video kept on popping up, with Om Malik reporting on constant venture money coming into the category

These services are like little walled communities unto themselves. That changes the dynamics of search a bit. If you just follow the basics of metadata and target areas that are less well covered, you win bigger right away with good search rankings on terms like bodybuilding that are maxed out by optimizers in the regular index. Further, with Google Video, these rankings seem to translate into better search placement in the overall index.

For instance, click on this search for my training partner Nancy Arnold. As of today, this google video and this second google video occupy positions 14 and 15 with 469 and 250 views each in addition to being linked from our video blog.

The key lesson here is that the space is wide open for anyone with even mediocre search optimization skills. Maybe people who produce media just don't like to write metadata. Metadata in these video services doesn't come for free like it does with regular blogging.

Bud posted this on May 25, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Why can't you just produce and consume interaction streams?

I want to see the interaction going on at your site. That way, I'll know whether to give you my attention.

So, I read with interest Matt McCallister's plaint last week about how long it is taking RSS to reach the mainstream. The weird thing is that by many measures, RSS is mainstream but just not widely recognized as such. After all, 31% of the online population use it, it's just that 90% of this group don't know they are doing it.

Given the gnarly technical nature of RSS, Matt wonders, rightly I think, what the sales pitch is to the average user. Why is it useful? Well, it's clear that the idea of being able to subscribe to the sites you want in your portal page is taking off. That's where the 31% comes from. But, it could be better. Instead of treating blogs and other small publishers as junior content producers for aggregation by the monetizing big boys, why not make it just as easy to subscribe to a small site's stream of interaction. I get the site-owner's data as well as the site's stream of comments and trackbacks. That's really where it's at for many small sites I deal with.

Sixapart and Blogger, two of the biggest blog providers could easily provide these streams. Their SPAM controls are adequate that the signal-to-noise ratio on interaction streams should be quite good. That way, as a consumer, I'm free to join community as I see fit without having to visit the site every day. Portal publishers should love it because it is yet more free content. Maybe their allied community sites won't though because it breaks their ownership of the community space.

Bud posted this on February 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

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Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Internet Weightlifting

Our search for good weightlifting blogs hit gold when we used Technorati's blog finder. Once we found one legitimate good blog, that blog led us to many others. In essence, we used that blogger's knowledge of what was good and bad as a guide for avoiding SPAM.

I've been working on a little project with a friend to try to figure out what legitimate weight training resources there are on the Internet. Most specifically, we are looking for weightlifting blogs and sources of practitioner knowledge.

We're doing this because weight training is a sport that is sparsely practiced, making it hard to find good information. Further, the information that is available is a mix of oral tradition and science. In such a situation, a good approach is to look for many sources of information to see what are the general practices and different people's reviews of what works and what not. Blogs would seem like a natural place to look.

Our search was instructive because it shows, even with a good knowledge of search technology, how hard it is to get to find non-spam content when information is relatively scarce and disorganized. The key seems to have been finding one good source of information and then following his links to discover a whole knowledge network.

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Bud posted this on November 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader 2: How I browse the web

Editing is the real trick to manage large volumes of information. To avoid bias, use multiple editing strategies with some referral to raw sources.

My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.

If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:

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Bud posted this on October 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader, I don't get it

Basically, Google portal beats Google reader as a feedreader.

I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.

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Bud posted this on October 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

More on Web 2.0, price discrimination, and commoditization

My continuing discussions with search industry participants at Where 2.0 about the business case for offering your data for free.

As announced at O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Google released their mapping API as did Yahoo. Microsoft is also mentioning that their Virtual Earth will be for free. I'll leave it to others to discuss the key elements of these APIs. From my perspective, the kicker is the licensing terms. For instance, Google is offering their API for free as long as people can use your mapping web application for free.

I had a chance to follow up a bit with Mark Law from Microsoft's Virtual Earth on their licensing terms. In particular, what does it mean to be non-commercial? According to him, non-commercial means you are not making money off the map data, so it sounds like Google. They plan to introduce a tiered pricing structure for access to the data for commercial use, based on volume and number of services used.

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Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats provide immediate search visibility

Unlike structured blogging, microformats offer tangible business benefits that are being realized by companies today. Technorati's use of the reltag microformat to propel itself to high search visibility offers one case study.

Recently, John Battelle and Charlene Li have taken up the subject of structured blogging. The underlying issue is making publishers' data visible to specialized web aggregators. These aggregators make a business of publishing specialized content like movie reviews, typically perceiving revenues from advertising placed around the targeted content.

Most reviewers perceive the discussion so far to be largely theoretical. This perception is actually incorrect. Technorati, a blog search engine, has been making profitable use of a related but simpler technology called microformats for the past six months.

Specifically use of the reltag microformat has propelled technorati to top search results for niche terms like podcasting and “social software”. The increased search visibility translates into more traffic to technorati's pages and more exposure for their sponsored links.

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Bud posted this on June 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Folksonomy makes tag aggregators king of search rankings

Technorati tag aggregation pages are achieving top ten search results for significant, niche terms like podcasting, folksonomy, and blogosphere. Technorati's introduction of the seemingly obscure reltag microformat is at the root of its rise in the search rankings. Competitors seeking to duplicate technorati's results need only adapt the reltag or xFolk microformats to their own ends.

Current wisdom has it that, in web publishing, content is king. As the web has grown to upward of 11.5 billion pages, search has become the default way of navigating the web. Search engines determine a site's ranking based on indexable content, so content as seen by search engines had better be your king if you want to be found.

What current wisdom has not allowed for is the idea that folksonomy tag aggregators like technorati might form an intervening layer between content providers and search engines. There is evidence that this has started to occur in topics related to social software during the six short months since technorati began to aggregate weblog posts by tag.

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Bud posted this on June 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

RSS++, Power Information Consumption beyond RSS

Google's Personalized Home is more than just an RSS aggregator. By combining RSS with discovery, it allows you to stay in touch with the opportunities you have already defined and find new ones.

In remarking on Google's apparent plans to add RSS to their Personalized Homepage (missed by me when I reviewed it yesterday), Richard MacManus makes this remark:

One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators.
Read/Write Web: Google and MSN's Web 2.0 Homepages

My cut is that we are moving to something beyond RSS consumption in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Let's call it RSS++. RSS++ is the combination of RSS with other information services to make for a real power information consumption experience. RSS is the part where you bring your trusted sources to the table, letting you revel in the walled garden of your community.

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Bud posted this on May 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Review of Google Personalized Home Page

I like the Google Personalized Home Page, but it just provides an artificial sample of what I want to watch to anyone interested. Give me the ability to add my own RSS feeds, and you'll get a real picture of the top things I pay attention to. Oh, and by the way, throw in tagging too.

John Battelle reports on Google's new personalized home page which appears to be called just that, “Personalized Home Page”.

Google is launching the kind of personalized integration tool that many thought they'd never do. At first it was thought to be called iGoogle, but the name is uncertain at this point.
John Battelle's Searchblog: MyGoogle Is Coming Today

Well, I've tried it, and for a proof of concept, I think it is great. Basically, it lets you add a limited set of sources to your main Google search page including Google News, Slashdot, BBC, Wired News, Weather, GMail, and Driving Directions. These fit my “quick hit” information needs.

There are no ads!

But, I would like just one more thing.

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Bud posted this on May 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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