B. Mann Consulting

So, I ended up attending Alex's birthday party this past Saturday night (great Greek food at the Ouzeri in Kits, BTW). I know that he is a big SEO guy, so I thought I would give the "gift of a link". Alex runs a great consulting firm called emarketing 101, and Alex's title is a Vancouver BC Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Expert.

I remember first get interested in search results when I first started with Drupal. I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what worked, and why. I can safely say that I'm nowhere near knowing all of the intricate details and "tricks" of SEO, but I think I still know the basics -- clean HTML code, clean URLs, some logical cross linking of pages (tags are great for this), and so on. And, of course, the three C's -- compelling content constantly.

Will this be a trend? Have other people given links as birthday gifts?

Personal Info Cloud. That's the closest I can come to for what I'm thinking, and as I search a bit I see that PersonalInfoCloud.com is one of the faces of Thomas Vander Wal, perhaps best known for coining the term "folksonomy". We don't say that so much anymore, having devolved into tagging madness.

It seems to be that, even with the "aids" of RSS to more quickly skim through information, and tagging to perhaps help winnow through the particular areas we are interested in, we are reaching a kind of nexus point of signal to noise. I need my filters back. The information -- now in podcasting, photosharing, video blogging goodness in HD quality with surround sound -- is rolling towards us and we are being crushed. I probably shouldn't add something about spam (splogs, etc. etc.).

I had hoped that PubSub.com would be the foundation for something that could help solve this. In part, because its technology¹ was based on a real time infrastructure -- publish and subscribe -- instead of this polling and pinging mess we are faced with "regular" RSS. In my ideal world, PubSub's rich boolean search interface would be available, to easily create field-level searches trawling the entire web -- e.g. return all blog posts with the word "Drupal" in the <title> field. That's an incoming stream that could be vast indeed, but it's what PubSub did best: search the future.

And next is feedback. I would tag, or bookmark, or favourite or "Shift-S" for Google Reader fans, and stick it in my Personal Info Cloud. That could then become the basis for retrospective search aka what Google does really well right now, but filtered by my own sources of information. Ideally, I could expand my cloud to a Local region (geographically, my Placeblogger friends) or my trusted network (tie into the public sources exposed by my communities). I say communities rather than the simpler family, friends, colleagues, etc., because I want to stress that there are going to be more than one cloud connected in.

It's all overlapping networks of networks.

Sure, we've got bits and pieces around. Rollyo and Eurekster's Swicki are little bits of this, allowing people to create curated, pre-populated search collections based on domains. Even Wikipedia is getting in the game with Wikia / WikiSearch².

I keep tumbling a littler deeper into this rabbit hole. Lijit, on my list of "really must dig into this deeper", has a map your world page with...surprise! a picture of a Personal Info Cloud. That ties back into discussions with Ton Ziljstra at BarCamp Brussels.

And here I am, manually re-entering my little bits of identity into different services, looking for the Holy Grail. Perhaps convincing some friends that this time, maybe just this once, won't they also please sign up and enter their information into just one more system, 'cause then it'll be better for everyone.

So. Info Clouds. Personal, Local, Community. Search between communities, each member a pivot into another cloud. Maybe aggregating searches. I didn't really cover ratings and feedback loops, as well as the magic nature-vs-nurture algorithm that gives you a serendipity feed, that will always be magically full of things outside your echo chamber, and you can decide whether to let them in or "thumbs down" them away.

Welcome to 2007. I'm still excited by what's out there. Lots of day-to-day get-stuff-done work that needs to be done. But let's keep talking about and building the big stuff. 

I'm currently at a Yahoo! Canada preview event at the Opus Hotel. I'm actually skipping out on the Vancouver Drupal User Group because it's taking longer than I expected (sorry, guys!).

Yahoo! is going to be focusing heavily on the Canadian market. I've long been convinced that focusing on the Canadian market is a great strategy. Obviously, it's not as large as the US market, but the 'search density' is very low: it's very easy to get top ranks for keywords that include Canadian place names.

Yahoo! Canada has grown from 12 people to over 100. Of course, most of those are based out east: there is a small sales ofice here in Vancouver. Next goal (for me): get an R&D lab in Vancouver. Of course, I still know more people out of SF Yahoo than here in Canada: most of the focus here is on sales rather than technology.

The Panama Search advertising demo was very interesting. Most of the presentation was focused on ad purchasers, rather than inventory providers. It seems to have a much more robust dashboard and great geo-location capabilities, visualization, analytics, etc. -- they actually mentioned 13 provinces and territories.

I'm looking forward to the Google "Behind the scenes" presentation put on by the Vancouver HPC Users Group (note: not a permalink; added to Upcoming.org). It's being given by Narayanan Shivakumar ('Shiva'), a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. The abstract is as follows:

Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We'll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google's various products, and make the products scalable and reliable.

The bio says that Shiva is currently "excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps)".

I see the challenge for Google and all search engines to be "how to search the live web". One of the things I often explain is that I firmly believe that all static web pages will eventually be replaced by dynamic web pages. Another way to say this is that much of the content on the web, especially much of it which is being updated often, is actually being created by web apps.

I made some comments today during Steve Rubel's Gnomedex session. Steve asked, what are PR and marketing professionals doing right and wrong? What do people who blog want/need from such departments?

After much arm waving I got Steve to notice me, and I answered with three P's.

1. Permalinks: folks, this is such a simple one. Don't make your press release page be "press.php" and old news be "archive.php". Have a single, unique link for each press release, news story, product, or (*gasp*) blog post you make. This means not trying to make me figure out a crazy javascript or Flash navigation system, but simply having a clear, single link I can use to directly get to information. URL schemes like /news/2006/07/01/bigstory or /products/coolproduct/model-vw83 are some good examples.
2. Product Info: I like product info. I like permalinks to direct product info. I like tech specs, and I like easily grab-able (and even better, friendly licensed) product photos. Heck, encourage me to hotlink images from your corporate server. Include copy/paste code that includes the permalink and a caption that I can drop into any system that groks HTML. For bonus points, make a little Flash/Javascript/rotating GIF widget that I can put into a post.
3. Personality: yes, I want personality. This one is last, because a lot of corporates just can't get past legal, or want the community to bring in the personality. If you're not going to blog, perhaps upgrade your press release writer to someone with a little more human in their blood, or give me a contact that I can talk to/interview to get more of a human face to the information you're presenting.

It seems so simple. But I know how difficult this can be. Many marketing and PR departments rely on a chain of consultants, contractors, or other folks to manage their web presence somewhere down the line. PR types need to become actively vocal about the needs they have. The three P's might be a good place to start.

I saw this first via Om -- Google has launched it's own feed-only BlogSearch. Feed-only is important, as Niall explains:

I think feed search is just another type of search restricted to a group of MIME types, as previously stated, and as the types of content made available via a feed continue to grow I think a feed-specific search tool will become much more than just blog search.

Niall also talks about how Technorati indexes the entire blog page HTML, not just feed. This is actually less valuable for me -- all I ever get that way are blogroll hits and other irrelevant matches.

In exploring microformats, I actually was checking out Google's support for filetype restrictions. For instance, here is a search for the phrase "test", restricted to vCards (.vcf is the extension). Very interesting...

So, the space continues to evolve. In my TV spot, I demo'd how searches for London Bombing at the time showed results from the 1940's blitz in Google, and realtime results in blog search engines. Google had to respond at some point. This current release is decidedly uninteresting -- the results aren't that great. I do like the hinted-at capabilities of the advanced blog search page, but PubSub's boolean operators are already as powerful or more so.

Aside: Hey, are PubSub SiteStats new? here are the ones for this site.

So, Google, welcome to the community. I'm hoping you'll grow a Zawodny soon...you're starting to feel a bit big and corporate (translation: it doesn't feel like you're engaging your community)

Google Talk is Google's unnannounced (until tomorrow?) Jabber-based instant messaging system. We'll know more tomorrow, but it's fun that Niall figured out how to connect early (via Om, looks like it's offline).

What are some good Jabber clients on Windows? I can't think of any, so I suspect Google will launch a killer Jabber client of their own. This time, us folks on Macs won't be left in the cold, though -- Apple's iChat already natively supports Jabber. Looking forward to see what else Google has up its sleeve for the real release tomorrow.

walkah -- now would be a good time to commit that jabber module for Drupal.

It's up. Check the compatability chart of other IM clients -- it does included voice only in the Windows version that Google offers for download. So...the big thing about Skype is that it is completely cross platform. Does Google once again not love Mac users? Will Apple roll an upgrade that makes iChat work with this?

(via Photo Matt: Google Talk)

So Matt May noticed this experiment.

I think it might be an interesting experiment to collect references
from various people. It’s destined to be more enlightening than the
reference letters I’ll send you. However, as it’s out of my control,
it’s also apt to be more mixed than I might like, which is scary, and
scary is bad.

Ah, what the hell. Tag what you think of me as a
Web geek. If it’s positive on the whole, it could be a powerful
statement to a potential employer. Or it could be an excuse to weep,
drink, and go on medication.

And if anyone sees a job that they
think would interest me, or simply wants to pile abuse on me, they
should tag such advice and abuse “get a job slacker“. I’ll track that and Boris’ feed.

Alex Samuel pointed me to Wendy Koslow's wiki resume, which got me thinking about an old idea I had about XML Resumes and Resume Promotion. That post has some sub-links to various formats, but looking back at it, some of it is implemented by LinkedIn already. SimplyHired has been talked up a bit lately, but unfortunately, zero results for "web geek" in Seattle (and yes, that query string is atrocious, but at least you can bookmark searches). What, no RSS?

I've always complained about LinkedIn not making my profile publically visible: just give me a feed or an XML output or something (we love APIs!) so that I can integrate it in other places. Please?

Tags: hire matt may, matt may, alex samuels, wendy koslow, wiki resume, xml resume

It's either Hare Krishnas, Grand Theft Auto, or a word on motorways in north-west UK.

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!
Neateye
<nitaigouranga@aol.com> via email

If a meme flows and no one knows that it means, is it still a meme?

I've been thinking about this since I heard the news, and CircleID's 10 Things Google Could do as a Domain Registrar post made me remember to post.

Chalk these ideas up in the "rumours/predictions" list, but I think all of the thoughts below are ones that "make sense" for Google.