CheezeDMG Blog

SEO is really not such a dark art. Although it has to be said not all companies who offer enhanced search engine results are fully articulate about what they are doing, many of them have grasped the basic truths of living in a search-engine optimized world where the verb “to search” has been supplanted by the new verb, “to Google”. Companies engaged in this business also know that SEO, whilst unpalatable to some, is nonetheless present in many internet marketing meals - like an indispensable, many-layered onion, SEO is crucial to internet marketing success.

Beyond meta-tags there are special landing pages, and beyond landing pages, relevant links in from other sites, and beyond that, the sheer volume of clicks counted from key word searches - all of which is how intelligent, diligent individuals can take on (and sometimes beat) even the riches of Hollywood in the search engine placement battleground.

Which brings me to telling the SEO fable of Lucky Christine.

Christine Herron is a highly web-literate Californian VC. She is one of those rare early-adopter domain-name buyers who actually owns her own first name, Christine.net.

Christine is a rarity in her Silicon Valley world which is dominated by men. She has the requisite dynamism to succeed. She is articulate, well-connected and she blogs frequently around her key interests - which is why her website is not only on the front page of Google for the search for “Christine” but it is second only to one other Christine.

Now, the fact that her website (Christine.net) is above Christine Comaford’s website (Christine.com - a far less impressive blog) by four places is neither here nor there. Christine has the ambition to be number one - she wants to be “Lucky Christine” - i.e. when you go to Google’s front page and hit the “I Feel Lucky” button, she wants that search result to be her website.

But right now, standing in her way is the IMDB reference, and the twin Wikipedia references to the Stephen King authored, John Carpenter directed movie of the same name.

Now consider what she’s up against: this film has scared the living daylights out of people for 25 years, has been shown millions of times around the world, has very probably driven thousands of people to seek therapy for Amaxophobia - but Christine wants to be Lucky Christine, and it somewhat irks her that an evil car horror film/book is pipping her to the “lucky” prize.

You have to admire Christine’s drive, her desire to be top search dog. Her prominent placement is well-deserved, the product of a fine, well-focused offering. She’s there by virtue of her business prominence and her A-list contacts, not because of SEO tricks, and that’s the reason she’s second only to the Hollywood horror movie greats.

Should Christine Herron persist, and Messrs Carpenter and King fall from grace and wane in popularity, and should internet search still be here in another 25 years, well who knows, she might get there. But the chances of Google still serving up its “Lucky” single hit as it does now are pretty slender.

The moral of the story? Second is a great place to be. At least you’re on the podium!

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Many companies benefit from “green” or “ethical” association but how much of it is spin, and how many deserve that status? Such was the rush to adopt the magic green cloak, that skeptics set up the annual Greenwash awards. Still, the concept of ethical brands seems to be growing in direct proportion to people’s awareness that there are good ways to be conducting business, and bad ways, much as there are sustainable ways of living on the planet and unsustainable ones. Ethical and green policies are here to stay, and businesses and brands are adapting to this changed consumer sensitivity.

Brands occupy a huge and growing importance in our lives - the BBC quotes an Association of Teachers and Lecturers report that children are being bullied for not buying the “right” brands, but interestingly it finds that

…children are strongly aware of brands and logos, but pay little attention to the green or ethical values of products.

So are we like children - do we buy brands purely on their strength of their reputation as defined by marketing, or do we adults work with richer concepts which refer to standards of corporate behaviour?

As the UK’s “most ethical brand” The Co-operative has done very well from its ethical / green positioning, which stems from its origins in the labour movement, and which is carried forward via a progressive outlook within a large retail set up - not traditionally an easy fit. They themselves quote GfK NOP to define what “ethical” means to the UK consumer:

When asked what an ‘ethical brand’ meant to them, the UK consumer has ‘treating third-world suppliers and workers fairly’ as their main priority, then ‘good environmental practices’, ‘ethical business practices’ and ‘treating employees fairly’.

It’s fair to say the Co-Op are covering many causes for consumer concern - their ethical policies now extend to food, waste and recycling strategies, reducing own-brand packaging, foreign purchasing policies, supporting Fairtrade, and animal welfare - and they are pleased to reap the marketing kudos for this, as well they might be.

But there is a flip side - businesses these days have to be aware of politics as much as their consumers, because decisions can come back to bite you. For example, BBC Worldwide are now on a boycott list since buying Lonely Planet publishers, who produce a tourist guide to Burma and refuse to stop selling it. The point here is not whether they are right or wrong, but the flak they are drawing when everyone knows the Burma regime are the bad guys. And it gets more complex than that - look further down the list and you’ll also find the Body Shop, who come third on the GfK NOP UK green list, who invented the concept of “Beauty with cruelty” :

Since L’Oreal (26% owned by Nestlé) bought out the Body Shop earlier in the year, campaigns have brought together concerns about animal testing, relations with the Majority World, human rights, discrimination in the UK and the environment.

The lesson here is: if you’re going to be ethical, be wise. Be green if you can, but be aware that it’s not a destination, it’s a journey - for as soon as you hoist that ethical flag, the eyes of the world will be watching to see whether your actions continue to match your declared intent.

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As the battle hots up across the pond in the US presidential elections, sophistication has grown in the use of the web now that viral video can be multiplied out, via widgets and embedding, to proliferate views far away from the original destination. It’s also interesting to note that the web campaigns of the two candidates differ, not always absolutely following the mainstream campaigns in tone and effect.

As is usual in these intense battles, rules are bent or ignored on the web in a way which would be much riskier in broadcast or print media. For the moment, underdog McCain focuses on undermining his “celebrity” opponent, as Obama stresses his statesmanlike credentials, positivity and level-headedness. TubeMogul point out that McCain has just surpassed Obama in viral video views by mocking his celebrity status - proving that everyone likes a good joke, even if they got into trouble from Warner for using music without permission.

There is of fourse a danger that the negative tactic might rebound - the skillful Obama campaign report using the Republican “Celeb” campaign to assist their own (highly successful) fundraising.

It remains to be seen how this will ultimately play with US voters in the key swing states in November.

Republican Viral Video

Democrat Viral Video

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One of the ways in which Web 2.0 can be characterised is by sites which deal with “presence”, i.e. short form communication, which is constrained to bite-sized chunks of information.

Twitter is a contemporary web phenomenon which illustrates the phenomenon very well. Calling itself a “communication utility” Twitter recently announced it has raised US$20.4m of funding. Designed to allow groups of friends to interact via the web, instant messaging and mobile, it has stolen the micro-blogging limelight, and despite its very visible failings and problems scaling, it has become the market leader of a veritable plethora of similar tools, including Pownce, the Google-acquired Jaiku, Plurk, and most recently Identi.ca . All these “Twitter clones” are more noticeable for their similarities than their differences.

Twitter is the daily haunt of an estimated two million people. How has it managed to achieve that level of usage? It’s a free service. It only offers a maximum 140 characters. It doesn’t allow file sharing (like Pownce). It ’s not threaded (like Jaiku). It limits the amount of SMS updates it will send to your phone to 250 per month. And it frequently falls over… Yet, it has attracted the users, and more importantly, the coders, who with access to an easy API have constructed a host of third-party applications from the entertaining (Twittervision) to the useful (TwitterKarma) to the imaginative (TwitterFone) and for every conceivable platform and device.

The fact is that Twitter has become a crowdsourcing application for knowledge - “where can I” “how do I” and “please find me a” are requests more usefully directed to a few hundred “friends” than to a faceless operator working for a TelCo. Twitter has proved a reliable news breaking service, often beating network news by several hours. It’s good for making useful business connections. People have met, got engaged, and even married on Twitter. As a social application, it beats Facebook hands down - less shared information, so more privacy, less distractions, no zombies.

Each of these platforms tends to attract not just the same kinds of people, but the same people. These are typically early adopting, gadget-using, ready communicators, used to screening out noise and often with something to say. As if panning for gold, they sift through the conversations which they monitor, plunging in to extract the occasional valuable nugget, or - and this is most important - providing similar value to their friends and followers. They use the same applications to update them - with Ping.FM or Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) you can send the same information simultaneously to more-or-less the same groups of people on several different platforms at once. If you’re using Friendfeed you don’t need to visit anyone’s website to catch up on anything they might have said anywhere, because the chances are they are feeding everything into a single portal.

Will Twitter retain its dominance? Maybe not, according to Techcrunch, who see the Google acquisition of Jaiku as a stealth “Twitter-killer“. Pownce has a small set of devotees, but it’s scratching the surface of Twitter’s user base - it just hasn’t had the take up. Plurk innovates with its user interface, but annoys by disallowing features until/unless you build sufficient “karma” which makes it too time-demanding. Identi.ca is different because it’s both open source and decentralised - the more servers running it, the better it should become, so perhaps we’ll ultimately have a reliable, flexible tool which we can all use.

Confused as to the value of all this? You should be. Everyone is talking about it.

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Google has been indexing Flash since 2004 but the underlying technology that powers millions of front pages and zillions of banner ads has defied the kind of interrogation that makes it truly searchable, until very recently. At the beginning of July, Adobe released what it calls Searchable SWF technology but although this is a step in the right direction

… only text and links will be searchable. Graphics and video, including FLV files, still won’t be able to be indexed properly, and there’s no capability to search and index metadata embedded in Flash files (even though, Adobe says, SWF and FLV files have metadata fields) or to allow people to link to specific content within a Flash file in order to make search results more relevant. Also, when someone clicks on a search result, they’ll be taken to the beginning of a Flash file and will have to navigate their way to the content they are seeking.

The reality is that while Text is still King for search engines, more and more eyes and ears are engaged with media online other than the typed. In the past three years, by far the largest increase in traffic across the net as a whole has been in streaming video, jumping from 12 % in 2006 to 22% in 2007. Video is predicted to account for as much as 90% of total in five years time, and so current search technology will have to evolve to deal with this situation, or else it will lose its foothold to newcomers.

There are several emerging technologies which would seem to have the potential for searching within video and audio. Blinkx is probably the market leader - it is

…based on technology that was conceived at Cambridge University, enhanced by $150M in R&D over 12 years, and is now protected by 111 patents.

Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video. Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!

Pluggd offers something similar, as does Everyzing (once called Podzinger). These should allow the user to pinpoint key phrases and words within a speech-based soundtrack, find relevant visual objects within video, etc.

The biggest problem is that audio and video has to be analysed before it can be useful, and because of the sheer volume of data involved, this process does not lend itself to the modern, impatient world. My experiences with online speech recognition have been that it works best with well-modulated, carefully constructed mid-Atlantic accents, and the speech-to-text translations can offer up words pronounced “bacon” as “beer can” if spoken in a Geordie or other similarly inflected version of an English accent.

With online video not always being of the best technical quality (and people not seeming to mind that too much either) video search, which works well in lab conditions where objects are clearly delineated and a can of beer looks like a beer can, might also fall into the same trap, so that only the most obvious, simple and clearly produced videos will be properly searchable. How boring would it be if ads (for example) in order to be internet-worthy could only be made in primary colours with slow, unexeptional speech patterns? What will Blinkx make of a Guiness ad?

*UPDATE: July 30th 2008: Blinkx Launches Web TV Search (Guardian)*

BlogDigger on the other hand, like many such smaller search engines, searches via RSS, the ubiquitous technology that underpins blogs, podcasts, and allows anonymous subscription to content. It’s quick, light, and so long as the producers do their stuff, it’s accurate. For the moment, and for the foreseeable future, show notes and accompanying text remain the necessary accompaniment to all forms of internet media, if you want to create a context in which it can be found for the reasons you want it to be found.

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