Is Web 2.0 Bogus as a Business Model?
For all of us who survived the exuberance of the dot-bombs era, a little blog entry by my friend, Randy Weber, entitled “Business Development 2.0 is BS 1.0” could serve as a nice dose of logic amid all the hype going on.
In his post, he lists out some salient points on why some of the Web 2.0 companies’ business plans are woefully lacking. It makes some sense. After all, if you’re sharing your core content and intellectual property (in the form of free apps), anyone can replicate your site, and they might just do it better than you, and you won’t see any of the money they’re making!
Web 2.0 maybe doesn’t have a simple definition beyond “I know it when I experience it”, but at base it seems to be founded on user-generated content and syndication of that content along with application services. So, businesses based on Web 2.0 would seem to be counter-intuitive to the normal mechanics of classic biz, and those businesses founded on it might have a lot more risk associated with them.
I think there are just a few caveats to Randy’s post, though. Read on and I’ll explain.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/30/2006
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Filed under: General AdSense, del.ici.us, flickr, Google, konfabulator, thin-affiliates, Web-2.0, Yahoo
Will Google Keep Minority Report from Happening? Eric Schmidt’s Chat with Danny Sullivan
This morning at the Search Engine Strategies Conference 2006 in San Jose, Danny Sullivan interviewed the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in the conference’s main keynote session. Others such as the Search Engine Roundtable have reported on most of the content of that session, but one little thing Danny mentioned particularly grabbed my attention. Read on, and I’ll elaborate….
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/09/2006
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Filed under: Conferences, Futurism, General, Google, Security, technology cyberpunk, danny-sullivan, Eric-Schmidt, Google, Philip-K.-Dick, PKD, privacy, SES-Conference
A window into Google through error messages: PageRank vectors and IndyRank
There’s been plenty of speculation posted to the blogosphere on the recently discovered cryptic Google error message; my favorites being from Wesley Tanaka and from Teh Xiggeh.
What intrigues me most in the Google error message is the references to IndyRank and to PageRank possibly being a vector. In regards to IndyRank, Stuart Brown suspects it means an ‘independent ranking’ — a “human-derived page ranking scoring, independent of the concrete world of linking and keywords”.
In regards to a PageRank vector, Wesley hypothesizes:
“If page rank is actually a vector (multiple numbers) as opposed to a scalar (single number) like everyone assumes (and like is displayed by the toolbar). It would make sense — the page rank for a page could store other aspects of the page, like how likely it is to be spam, in addition to an idea of how linked-to the page is. The page rank you see in the google toolbar would be some scalar function of the page rank vector.”
Of course the Google engineers are probably laughing at all this.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 07/22/2006
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Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, IndyRank, PageRank, vectors
Yahoo update beefs up on authority sites
Aaron Wall posted a blog about how Yahoo!’s recent algorithm update has apparently increased weighting factors for links and authority sites.
Predictibly, a number of folx have complained in the comments added to Yahoo’s “Weather Report” blog about the update. Jeremy Zawodny subsequently posted that their search team was paying close attention to the comments, which is always nice to hear.
Coincidentally, I’d also just recently posted about Google’s apparent use of page text to help identify a site’s overall authoritativeness for particular keywords/themes.
As they say, there’s nothing really new under the sun. I wonder if the search engines are all returning to the trend of authority/hub focus in algorithm development? It’s a strong concept and useful for ranking results, so the methodology for identifying authorities and hubs is likely here to stay.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/20/2006
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Filed under: General, Yahoo Algorithms, Authoritative-Hubs, authorities, Google, search-engine-algorithms, search-engines, SEO, Yahoo
Towards a New Cyberpunk Reality
I recently discovered something interesting about my company, Verizon.
Do you remember the old Oliver Stone tv mini-series from the early 90s called “Wild Palms”? It was about a dystopian future of America where a fascist political group has risen to power, headed up by a senator who founded a new philosophy called “Synthiotics” or “New Realism”, which apparently involves the next stage of human evolution and virtual reality (VR).
The Senator, named Anton Kreutzer, owns a company named Mimecom which has developed some sort of advanced VR technology and 3-d display technology which they are about to deploy out to households through a television company, called Channel 3, in a new drama series they’ve named “Church Windows”. They seemed to be using Church Windows as a platform for propagandizing Synthiotic tenets, as well. The Senator is seeking one last piece of technology from Japan, a “Go Chip”, which will essentially give him eternal life, and seal up his political power. The Go Chip is named after the game of Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game that has been used by artificial intelligence researchers as a test case for building systems which can learn and immitate human intelligence (though, they don’t really spell out that AI tie-in during the series).
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| Berlin’s Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz reflects the global reach of a Japanese corporation. Much cyberpunk action occurs in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and “city lights at night” was one of the genre’s first metaphors for cyberspace (in Gibson’s Neuromancer). |
The Wild Palms series was likely intended to be a very cutting-edge, conceptual story that was inspired in large part by the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. One of the prime “founders” of the cyberpunk movement, the author William Gibson, actually puts in a cameo appearance in the series, as well. Oliver Stone likely intended the story to use semiotic literary devices as well, since many of the plot items and names seemed to be intended to have multiple layers of meanings.
Here’s where fiction begins to turn into reality. MimEcom was the name of an actual ecommerce/hosting/technology firm that was later started up in San Francisco, and considered IPOing in 2000, though the dot-bombs happened, and it halted plans to go public.
Later, MimEcom changed their company name to “Totality”.
In about 2005, Totality was acquired by MCI. MCI was merged into Verizon later on in 2005. The Totality part was folded under the Verizon Business division of the company. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/14/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, General ai, artificial-intelligence, cyberpunk, future, Futurism, Go-Game, Google, MCI, Mimecom, science-fiction, search-engines, search-pets, semiotics, technology, Verizon, virtual-reality, Wild-Palms, William-Gibson
Toolbar PageRank Update
Yep, it’s that time again.
I don’t usually care that much, but we had a little snafu with our PageRank readout on the toolbar for our netconcepts.com site due to a misconfiguration on our end (detailed on my post “Toolbar PageRank Update Is Currently Underway)”, and happily that’s now corrected.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 07/14/2006
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Filed under: Google, PageRank Google, Google-Toolbar, PageRank
Google Sitemaps Reveal Some of the Black Box
I earlier mentioned the recent Sitemaps upgrades which were announced in June, and how I thought these were useful for webmasters. But, the Sitemaps tools may also be useful in other ways beyond the obvious/intended ones.
The information that Google has made available in Sitemaps is providing a cool bit of intel on yet another one of the 200+ parameters or “signals” that they’re using to rank pages for SERPs.
For reference, check out the Page Analysis Statistics that are provided in Sitemaps for my “Acme” products and services experimental site:
It seems unlikely to me that these stats on “Common Words” found “In your site’s content” were generated just for the sake of providing nice tools for us in Sitemaps. No, the more likely scenario would seem to be that Google was already collating the most-common words found on your site for their own uses, and then they later chose to provide some of these stats to us in Sitemaps.
This is significant, because we’ve already known that Google tracks keyword content for each page in order to assess its relevancy for search queries made with that term. But, why would Google be tracking your most-common keywords in a site-wide context?
One good explanation presents itself: Google might be tracking common terms used throughout a site in order to assess if that site should be considered authoritative for particular keywords or thematic categories.
Early on, algorithmic researchers such as Jon Kleinberg worked on methods by which “authoritative” sites and “hubs” could be identified. IBM and others did further research on authority/hub identification, and I heard engineers from Teoma speak on the importance of these approaches a few times at SES conferences when explaining the ExpertRank system their algorithms were based upon.
So, it’s not all that surprising that Google may be trying to use commonly-occuring text to help identify Authoritative sites for various themes. This would be one good automated method for classifying sites for subject matter categories and keywords.
The take-away concept is that Google may be using words found in the visible text throughout your site to assess whether you’re authoritative for particular themes or not.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/11/2006
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Filed under: Google, Tools Algorithms, Authoritative-Hubs, ExpertRank, Google, Hubs, Keyword-Classification, On-Page-Factors, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps upgrades help webmasters
The Google Sitemaps team just last week announced a number of changes on their blog.
I was really happy and excited that they appear to’ve done a few of the things I suggested in a post on the Google Sitemaps Group.
They did the following things I had suggested:
- Expanded the numbers of top search terms and words commonly found on your site pages from max 20 to 75 (I’d still like to see more);
- They added the ability to see the top search queries lists for a number of the other Google search areas, including Froogle, Google Base, Images, Maps, etc! This is really pleasing!
- They removed common terms that previously appeared in these lists — “html” and “www”.
There were some additonal things they did which are also interesting:
- They show ALL URLs they had trouble crawling now;
- They show top query keywords that your site appears in, broken out by the web properties I mentioned above, AND broken out by country!
- They’ve now provided a robots.txt tool so that the (surprisingly large number of) people who have such difficulty in forming their robots.txt files could have a resource to check their file for them.
- They’ve added a three-value rating scale to each of their main features, allowing one to flag the item as “happy face”, “neutral face”, and “unhappy face”.
I’m sure other folx must’ve requested some of the same things I’d suggested, and Google’s good at providing useful features, but it’s really gratifying to see some of the changes I’d wanted showing up now!
Stay tuned for a follow-up posting from me about some of these changes. Some of these new features actually provide some great intel on parameters/methods that Google uses to rank pages.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/26/2006
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Filed under: Google, Tools Google, Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, SEO
How much traffic does the top keyword position garner on Google?
Have you ever wondered how much traffic the top keyword position on Google can bring a site, for a hotly-contested term? Or, how much traffic does the top slot get you, compared with the second slot?
Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.
The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and Did-It show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.
I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/31/2006
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Filed under: Google, Keyword Research, Market Data, Tools, Tracking and Reporting Google, Google-Trends, Keyword-Analysis, Keyword-Positions, Keyword-Rankings, Top-Position
The significance of GData
Gdata, short for Google Data APIs, promises to be Google’s new standard protocol for transmitting all sorts of data back and forth to Google and its various services. As Google states on Google Code: “All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items.” Imagine for instance, starting with a base feed, then adding query parameters like restricting to a particular category and date range and ending up with a customized feed that specifically fits your criteria. Gdata builds on the RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 protocols.
Imagine your desktop machine — armed with your personal profile — communicating with Google (and even with the Web in general) about your email, search history, RSS subscriptions, calendar, bookmarks, blog posts, and the news… and all through the GData protocol. As Reto Meier states, “Google already has a ridiculous amount of my information. Now with an API that promises access to this information to use the way I want to, there’s one less reason to think about storing it anywhere else.” Kinda scary but also exciting at the same time. Google Operating System here we come!
Will we all be speaking GData in years to come? Will the GData protocol become as ubiqitous as the HTTP protocol? Only time will tell, but I certainly think GData is one to watch!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 05/12/2006
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Filed under: Google, Research and Development APIs, ATOM, GData, Google, Google-APIs, RSS, XML
