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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)

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.

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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)

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)

Microformats and the remixable web

To answer Jon Udell and others, microformats enable the remixable web.

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Yesterday, I spent the day at technorati and the evening with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, Jeff Barr, Chris Messina, and a host of others at the second ever (?) microformats group dinner. A lot happened, and I'm not here to give a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I want to convey the one major insight I walked away with (there were many minor ones). To answer Jon Udell, Microformats enable the remixable web.

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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)