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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.

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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)

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.

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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)

spam is automating the social without the social

It's interesting to me that you can set up a mechanism for social interaction, use it, and then discover that voila, you have search visibility.

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Richard MacManus makes an interesting tie between blogging for business visibility and spam in referring to our recently reported bootcamp experience:

This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.

Read/Write Web: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005

Well, I'm glad to be on the good side, but I wonder what that really means? Where did that comparison to spam come in?

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Bud posted this on August 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Innovating for Value in Blog Search

Innovation in blog search will be more and more driven by the extent to which it can be used for business intelligence. Three players, bloglines, technorati, and blogpulse have all made important advances in this regard. Rests to see whether they can capitalize on them.

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In response to my post about blog search imitation on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Peyer of pointblog has asked if we could not benefit from a little more innovation. That seems reasonable, and I'd like to frame my response in terms of where we have already seen innovation based on the revenue potential. I expect that that is where we will see more in the future.

The first thing I note is that blog search engines exist because blogs are different from traditional web pages. Blogs are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average update frequency of once every 10 days, are updated more frequently than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average of 100 outbound links, have more outbound links per site than the rest of the web.

As a result of these differences, the value of blog search engine's indexes is closely tied to timeliness and the ability to represent linking relationships in addition to the traditional elements of coverage and relevance. Businesses in search of market intelligence seem the most easily monetized market for this kind of data. Businesses are typically aware of the need for market intelligence, and they are willing to pay when they perceive significant opportunity. By contrast, monetizing blog readers through contextual ads does not offer significant revenue potential.

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Bud posted this on July 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Imitation is the surest sign of success

I disagree with Jason Calacanis. IceRocket's adoption of tagging using a format invented by technorati indicates that technorati is achieving wide marketplace acceptance. By my estimates over a million bloggers are using the technorati format.

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Today, Jason Calacanis wrote about how icerocket, a blog search engine, had added tagging support.  Jason's remarks were, typically for him lately, riding technorati a bit.

But it's how IceRocket supports tags that's the real kicker.  They're using the reltag microformat invented by Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Derek Powazek of technorati as explained on this IceRocket help page.

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Bud posted this on July 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Microsoft's Virtual Earth and the remixable web

Web 2.0 hacking with things like Virtual Earth is seductive but subject to potential lock-in. What we need are open data formats that can match the speed of hacking development that will make these services more plug and play. I wonder if microformats are up to that challenge.

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I'm at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 today. Microsoft has presented a neat application, Virtual Earth. It's not out yet, but you can see propaganda at the site I linked.

What's neat about this service is that they make explicit allowance for social applications. You will be able to do things like put up reviews of local businesses and integrate them with maps. I had been talking with Ryan King at technorati about this just two days ago in discussing a location microformat. I wanted to find a set of reviews for local gyms near my sister's house in San Francisco. Sure, she and her friends had ideas, but they were not tuned in to the kinds of things I look for (I am a workout addict).

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Bud posted this on June 30, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)