Coming right on the back of Mary Hodder’s blog search comparison table is Talkdigger.com which is easier way for you to make comparisons between the results of nine search engines (both conventional and blog search engines are included). But you have to type very specific urls. The results from your url with “www.†and without “www.†will be very different.
Talk Digger: Check who is linking to you
UPDATE: There is now also Uptimebot.com which does the same thing. But they have a better explanation of the results and they include Alexa.com in the search too.
I think the whole point behind converting a feed to a PDF file is to be able to print it out for reading in hard copy. But the PDF output generated by this free online tool looks so plain. I think the next step for RSS2PDF.com is to allow some customisation of the output — for example, changing of the font or the font size at the very least as well as choices of layouts.
Instead of having a set of standard metatags across all the pages of my blog, I wanted to customise the description metatag of each post to the title of the post and the keywords metatag to the categories of each post. I thought I saw a plugin that did this, but when I looked again, I couldn’t find it. Because I’m reading up on Wordpress Template Tags right now, it made sense for me to try do something different with them. So out comes the PHP for Dummies manual. I succeeded (partially) in my goal. If you check the description metatag of each post, they are all customised while the homepage has the standard blog name and description that’s set in the admin interface. But I failed in the categories as keywords because the category template tags don’t work outside of the Loop.
Here’s the code I used. Just copy the description metatag part and paste it between your head tag to achieve the result.
<meta name="description" content="<?php if ( is_single() ) {
single_post_title('', true);
} else {
bloginfo('name'); echo " - "; bloginfo('description');
}
?>" />
I had this feature in my earlier weblog. I had ten posts on the home page and I wanted to show in the sidebar a list of the ten posts that pre-dated the ones on the homepage. You can see the unstyled list on the sidebar right now. I used the get_posts function that comes in Wordpress. Although the_date function is supposed to work only within The Loop, somehow it works here. Here’s the code I used.
<ul id="earlierposts">
<?php
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=10&offset=10&order=ASC');
foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp();
?>
<?php
echo "<li><a href="";
the_permalink(); echo "">";
the_title('', '', true);
the_date('j M','</a> <em>','</em></li>');
?>
<?php
endforeach;
?>
</ul>
Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.
Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.
Feeddigest is finally released and it has all the features I’d been waiting for. It’s like RSSmix and Bloglines in one. You can combine feeds and there’s an interface where I can see and control all my mixes. There’s even a built-in online feed reader. When the statistics feature comes into play, Feedburner will have a competitor.
The McKinsey Quarterly has a good article on tactics for online retailing. The article recommends a strategy of complementary online and offline tactics. Giving the examples of LL Bean and Ross-Simons, it calls the strategy a “triple play” — the online store drives traffic to the bricks and mortar store, while the bricks and mortar store acquires walk-in customers and a direct mail catalog offers traditional from-home purchasing from a hard-copy. In every which way, this strategy targets shopping behaviours and captures the market whichever way that the market likes to shop — with the convenience from the home or the human-contact of offline.
SEO Black Hat has an interesting article on
how to give any website an outward appearance of PR 10. It does work (SEO Black Hat points out a PR10 demo site), but it’s a superficial PR10 that only website visitors are able to see.
As the author of SEO Black Hat also says, Google will not index your site while you are permanently redirecting. So as far as Google is concerned, your PR is the same as before the redirect (and it will probably be lower after the update because it can’t index any of the content on your site). You cannot pass on your “new PR” with outbound links. But your site visitors will get fooled and they won’t know any better (unless they try to Google your site).
Note: This works for Google. But it might also work for Yahoo search and other search engines like AskJeeves too. I’m just not sure if it does, but theoretically it ought to.
Cnet has an interesting story of Gary Mckinnon a London guy who managed to bypass the security of the Department of Defense as well as the NASA computers. And he got caught for it. But his story takes an interesting turn after that.
He makes the distinction between bypassing and hacking because he insists he merely found a “blank system level administrator password” and didn’t cause a breach to happen. Yet he is fighting an extradition order that accuses him of “hacking and causing damage to federal defense systems”. Causing damage is another point of contention. The U.S. Department of Justice have all but labelled him a terrorist and accuse him of willful destruction of irreplaceable information. But the way that Mckinnon tells it, that as he was leaving the system, the damage was accidental and that the damage was far less than what the Americans accuse him of. In other words, Mckinnon is being demonised and made a patsy for things he had nothing to do with. There’s more information on the Free Gary Mckinnon blog.
If blogs are going to be an important part of the marketing and communications mix, then there must be some way of evaluating their returns. Heidi Cohen, a professor of Direct and Interactive Marketing at NYU has written some ideas on how to evaluate corporate blogs. The first step in the blog evaluation process must first of all be determining what the blog is expected to do. Cohen has a list of communication objectives for a corporate blog:
What Cohen leaves out at this point is the crucial part of first establishing the target of the blog communication. Without knowing that in clear terms, the objectives and their measurements lack meaning. Because blogs communicate on a personal level, they must show some return in terms of increase in brand awareness, brand prestige or credibility, likeability of the brand or understanding of the message. Cohen’s idea of return on investments revolves mostly around mainstream media effects.
A few months ago, Kafkaesquà found that like myself the Wordpress Codex was missing a major section — a reference guide to template tags, like the ones in the addendum of most programming manuals. Luckily Kafkaesquà made the effort to rectify that mistake and published his list for everyone. Thanks, KafkaesquÃ!
London’s bombed again. For news of the latest London bombing, I still have the Crisis Feed from two weeks ago ready. It has all the latest news from news sources around the world and from bloggers via Technorati and Flickr.
Does anyone else find it really ironic that a game for minors that advocates the wanton theft of cars, killing of cops and unarmed civilians and the selling of drugs only gets an adult rating in the US when it has sex in it?
Online word processing holds a particular interest for me. To think that whatever I had to do with a desktop application, I can now do within my browser is a clear sign of progress into Web 2.0. The new GOffice is a good example of this. After you set up an account on it, you can word process a document on an interface similar to Microsoft Word’s (which I think must be using Fckeditor or something similar since it can output the document as HTML) and save it as a PDF file. You can also upload your own letterheads in graphic files for customised outputs. In the future, Goffice says they’ll support spreadsheets and presentations too.
Your documents are saved in your account on Goffice, but nothing on the site suggests how much space you can use. I don’t think the owners of Goffice are too fussed over that since word processed documents by and large don’t take up much space. Goffice has a decent business plan — it partners with Amazon for hard copy print-outs and sells subscriptions for commercial use. So I don’t think they’ll go out of business.
The ad hoc nature of tags appeals to me more than categories as a taxonomy system. I’d rather not have my posts conform to a pre-set list of pigeon-holes, but rather flow with whatever’s in fashion. However the tagging plugins written for Wordpress are not recognised by Technorati and the use of Technorati tags is a big traffic driver for me.
Fortunately, Technorati does recognise the internal categorisation system of Wordpress as an alternative to Technorati tags. So I’ve decided on a hybrid system. After much testing of alternative plugins, I’ve installed Jerome’s Keywords plugin to satisfy my taxonomy needs. And I set up broad categories in Wordpress using popular search keywords like ‘Google’ and ‘RSS’. The Wordpress categories will not be visible, but Technorati will still pick them up in my RSS feed. And since it is not my primary taxonomy system, it won’t be a priority to always keep it up to date. When a search keyword falls out of fashion, I can simply delete the whole category without much of a loss.
Simone Carletti of RSS World has done a very nice thing and is maintaining an Italian translated copy of the wiki article Things you can do with RSS. He’ll be keeping it up-to-date as new additions to the wiki are added. Thanks, Simone!
b, or b:. Right now, Diaweblog is in beta so it isn’t ready to open new weblogs, but you can partipate in the ten active weblogs that are open right now.
David Goldenberg of Gelf Magazine has an interesting report about how Google News chooses sources to get its news from. Satire sites like Axis of Logic and Unconfirmed Sources are finding their way into Google News. Problems of misinterpretation obviously arise when they’re presented by Google in the same manner as straight news. Even when Google News applies the satire tag to the news sources, it isn’t always accurate — Goldenberg cites the case of Wonkette which is labelled as satire, yet a similar site like Gawker doesn’t carry such a label.
Some of the reasons why Google News excludes some sites are obvious (foul language, extremist political views), but the criteria for site selection is obfuscated. However, it is clear that reader input into Google News has something to do with it. Goldenberg cites a few cases where Google News has listed or de-listed sites because of emails from readers. So that may be why satire sites and fake-news sites are included at all — because people like them. While Google News arranges their scraped content by algorithm, inclusion is still a popularity contest.
Here’s an interesting discussion on
A few weeks ago, the Optimization Team for AdSense ran an adsense webinar conference call for a few participants on the topic of optimization of adsense for maximum revenue. The tips they shared were from studies they did that allowed them to make some general observations. They’ve released the transcript and I’ll excerpt and organise the main points they spoke about. But you still ought to read the transcript because the team had lots of anecdotes of how slight changes in ad optimization brought about vastly improved ad revenue. There is also a really insightful Q and A at the end - especially the answer to the concern that someone had that the ads may be so attractive that people would click out of the site and perhaps never return.
“The middle, above-the-fold locations perform the best. The idea is to think about what your user is looking at. Since most of the content is in the middle of most pages, the ads that are in the middle, near the content and towards the top of the page is the location that gets most of the attention. However, make sure that you take a look at what users are doing on your site. You want to make sure that you’re addressing how the users are actually looking at your pages. For example, if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful because they’re reading the text and when they want more resources, they can take a look and see, oh, look. There are some ads. I can find out some more information about this particular topic. So definitely make sure that you keep in mind how your users are looking at your site.”
“Our best performing ad format is the large rectangle, 336×280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user. So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336×280; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper. Because there’s a lot of variety with different sites, you want to make sure that you’re using the best format for your site. Don’t try to squeeze in a format that doesn’t fit your site.”
“Here you’ll see a snapshot of Topix.net with the ads by Google. You can see with the colors that they’ve chosen that it blends well with their site. It matches the background and it looks like it provides additional content and compliments the site rather than contrasts against the site. The reason the color palette is so important is because it adds to the content and not separate from the content and what happens is, something that we call ad blindness; so the more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur. Another thing to decrease ad blindness is rotating your color palette. We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.”
“Another important tip is what pages you might want to place your ads on. And what’s important is placing your ads throughout your site. As you can see here, Spine…com placed their ads on forum pages, reference pages and articles pages. And if you look closely, they actually chose different formats for different pages. So don’t be afraid to try out placing the ads on different pages and seeing how it will do for you. As long as they fit into our program policy, you can place the ads on any page of your site, any domain that you have.”
“How do you find out what exactly will work for you? The best way is to use channels. Here is your account view, and by selecting the channels link, you will be able to get to the channels page where you can manage your channels. And what channels will allow you to do is to track all the experiments that you’re doing. For example, if you want to track how one location is doing versus another position, you can use channels to track that or track different colors or different formats. Basically, this is the best way to figure out which test and which experiment is the most successful for your sites. So I highly recommend, for any optimization and any experiment that you do, to use channels so that you are informed about any decision and any change that you make with your ads on your site.”
“Image ads are an alternative to the text-based ads and you want to make sure that in your account, you’re opted in to image ads. And the reason for that is that you basically have the image ads competing with the text-based ads. So if you have more advertisers competing on your site, it basically means more opportunities for you to maximize your revenue. Especially since, in the last few weeks, we’ve launched CPM-based ads for images; we want to make sure that your ads will be able to support those images. So if advertisers want to select to show ads on your site, you will be able to take advantage of that additional CPM-based revenue.”
“They’re great because it actually compliments some of our existing ads. What the link units do is it allows the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear. Another great thing about link units that publishers love is the little space that it takes. So a lot of publishers place it in their menu bars, their navigation bars and it blends in well with the site. And the great thing is that you can place these link units in addition to the three ad units you can have on a page.”
“It provides a service for your users and gives you an extra, a little additional stream of revenue as well. And what it does is, imagine the regular Google search, but instead of having your users go to Google.com, they can access all the results and the technology directly from your sites. And not only search Google.com but specify it to search directly within your site. And then, you also make a little bit of money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. So this is definitely something that you’d want to consider; AdSense for Search.”
“Here are some of the pages of HybridCars.com. As you can see, Brad has placed the ads on his homepage, the articles and the forum. But it wasn’t always this way. Most publishers, or some publishers might be concerned that their users would reject the ads based on the content or that they would clutter the page. But Brad has found that it actually worked very well. He started just by placing the ads on a handful of pages, and with just a few ads, he didn’t really have very many impressions to earn a lot of revenue. However, when he put ads on over 90% of his bytes, his revenue shot up. It went from $80 and $90 days to $250 and $300 days. So imagine what that can do for your site. In fact, he’s noticed that the ads are really relevant to the content of the page they appear on and they’re actually useful to the users. As he said, ‘The targeting alleviates my concerns that the ads clutter the site.’”
“Keep users on your site. You need to make it easy to get around the site and make sure the visitors see the ads as a viable exit route without asking them to click on the ads. You need to make sure that links within the site are clearly visible and that if people want more information about the same topic, they can find it.”
“If you are in the business of selling the content, which is what we are doing here with the sites that we have in the panel; basically you are presenting the content and people are pretty much always in the search mode. They will try to find more information about that somewhere else. And if you just simply beat out your competitors in terms of having the most thorough, the most well-researched, the most compelling, the most Web-friendly content, then people will return to your site and the fact that there may be an ad on there for a competitor and they go off to your competitor, if your content is compelling, they’ll return back to your site eventually. People are going to leave your site and another site is just a click away regardless. So focus on content.”
“How we define [an ad impression] is when the ad code actually gets fully executed. So what ends up happening sometimes is that if some of your users are using a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, or if they have some sort of ad blocker, or if they stop loading the page before the ad code can fully execute, that will cause the discrepancy between your logs and our page impression logs. [Second,] you want to make sure that if you have any other logs, that you’re not counting any visits from robots and crawlers. The public service ads do count towards the page impressions. [And alternative ads also] will be counted by our impression counter.”