All About Content

I have to declare that I have a new respect for DMOZ editors. It’s not obvious from the outside the amount of work an editor is expected to put into vetting every submission.

Not only do you have to make sure the submitted site actually fits into your category, but also that it isn’t a better fit in some other very similar category, already listed in DMOZ (only one listing in the Directory per site), using a vanity URL (or a mirror domain), or engagine in any black-hat tricks.

You check that the site is of sufficient quality, that it doesn’t suffer from an excess of broken links and that it isn’t stealing content from another site.

To verify legitimacy, you consider the site’s submission history (oh yeah, we know if you’ve resubmitted the same site to a new category every two weeks) and sometimes even check it out in The Way Back Machine to see if it has been around a while (or if a previously legit domain was recently acquired by spammers). Editors of the commercial categories also need to make sure the site isn’t an affiliate.

In addition to checking, approving, rewriting, moving or rejecting descriptions submitted by the public, you are also expected to go out and find sites that maybe aren’t being submitted, but belong in, any of your subcategories. You also need to go through sites that are already published in your category to make sure they are still legit. If you find any 404 errors, you need to make every effort to find an alternate source for the content that used to be there.

And then there’s creating, merging, deleting or crosslinking categories.

As you can imagine, it’s overwhelming for a newbie editor. Luckily there’s a strong community forum where you can post questions. It can be a really great meta-look at what’s happening on the Web. In one of the World sections, for example, there was very recently a thorough debate regarding where a site about the “fliegendes Spaghettimonster” (that would be the Flying Spaghetti Monster) belongs. Good arguments were made in favor of several subcats; I don’t know which was eventually chosen.

I just submitted this site for inclusion in the Directory. I’m hopeful my request won’t require as much debate. I submitted it to http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Weblogs/ although there are also categories for /Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines/Google/News_and_Media/Weblogs/
(which I thought was too Google-centric) and /Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Weblogs/ (which gives the impression that the content needed to be useful somehow).

But there isn’t an editor for this category. (You can tell because when the category has one, the editor is listed at the bottom of the page, with a link to the editor’s profile.) So I might be waiting a long time.

Every once in a while I clean up my backlog of things worth mentioning by just providing links to other articles. This list isn’t necessarily timely (i.e., this isn’t “this week’s top news”) but they’re interesting. In my opinion. For whatever that might be worth to you.

• Almost 50% of visits to shopping sites originate from other shopping sites
• Yahoo and MSN Strong In Shopping Referrals
• Yahoo teams with analytics firm to let advertisers compare online and off-line ad spends
• Banner Ads on Google? Not Exactly
• Interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz
• Matt Cutts knows if you’ve been buying links
• Blogs beguile corporate America
• Invent your way to 10 million free Overture ads
• Opera and Google Extend Search Placement
• Trojan horse mimics AdSense ads
• A case study in news search engine referrals
• Overview of Google’s acquisitions
• Reviews of search engine marketing books

It’s always interesting to see examples of Google testing changes to the interface. Since only a very small percent of searchers are included in the tests, it’s rare that the average searcher notices the change. If Google ends up not liking the results, whatever it was they were testing just quietly disappears.

Today it’s reported that Google is playing with moving its navigation from the top of the results page to a column left of the results.

Hop on over to Blogoscoped for a screenshot of this latest Google test.

Red Herring has an interesting article about Yahoo’s attempts to catch up in a market it helped to create: contextual online advertising. For example, Yahoo is actively reaching out to bloggers by giving them more control over what ads their readers see.

Yahoo needs more than innovative products; the proverbial middle child needs to step up its PR. As the article points out, “In many cases, Yahoo managed to launch key products before its rival [Google], which is located just a few miles away in Mountain View, California. But the media and the blogging communities have overlooked Yahoo’s innovation as soon as the search giant launches the same service.”

Aside: Something interesting that caught my attention about the Red Herring article doesn’t have anything to do with Yahoo advertising. It’s that the URL they use to point to it reads:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15040&hed=Yahoo+Revamps+Search+Ads

But stripping away the stuff after the numerical article ID takes you to the same page no problem:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15040

In fact, just adding gibberish to the end of the URL doesn’t break anything either. So it looks to me like Red Herring is just stuffing keywords into URLs for SEO purposes.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project yesterday released its latest study. Apparently in Cyberspace, Mars and Venus are wedded to their gender roles. Jason Miller of WebProNews writes: “Women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities… Men are more likely to use the Internet to check the weather, get news, find do-it-yourself information, acquire sports scores and information…”

Other data from the report include:

• 67% of the adult American population goes online, including 68% of men and 66% of women
• 86% of women ages 18-29 are online, compared with 80% of men that age.
• 34% of men 65 and older use the Internet, compared with 21% of women that age.
• 62% of unmarried men compared with 56% of unmarried women go online
• 75% of married women and 72% of married men go online
• 61% of childless men compared with 57% of childless women go online
• 81% of men with children and 80% of women with children go online.
• 52% of men and 48% of women have high-speed connections at home
• 94% of online women and 88% of online men use email

Bizarre Onion-esque article about Wikipedia’s founder:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/17/jimmy_wales_shot_dead_says_wikipedia/

That’s it. No comments. Just pointing out that this is weird.

MSN Search has released a beta version of its own Local Search, with the mapping functionality powered by Virtual Earth. The very first search I did was “cell phones 20038” (a zip code in the middle of DC) and the results were hilariously bad. Not a single result was inside DC; the results that did pull up were located everywhere else from New York to North Carolina — even though the system clearly recognizes that I’m looking for something in Washington DC. Some other searches I did were slightly better, but still not as good as Google Local, which presented only cell phone stores within the 20038 zip code.

What’s happening to the common denominator as the population of Internet users continues to mushroom? How will the trends affect your online business?

Jakob Nielsen — usability guru and publisher of the not-coincidentally- but-yet-unnecessarily ugliest professional website ever — writes about the fact that the number of Internet users in the world has surpassed 1 billion. Based on Morgan Stanley estimates, he reports: “It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia.”

I believe the rest of the numbers are all lifted directly from the Morgan Stanley report, but the report itself is a 60-page PDF née PowerPoint presentation that takes ages to download. So I’m going to prove Nielsen’s point that users don’t bother to look at slow-loading pages by not downloading their presentation to check. So if you’re into fact-checking and that sort of thing, the presentation is available on the Morgan Stanley site under Technology Research.

Analysts are predicting e-commerce sales will at least double from their current level when more of the existing generation of users starts shopping online. Nielsen points out “Users are not like you, and the difference between elite and mainstream users is getting bigger every day…This means that for e-commerce to fulfill its potential to double, sites must be more systematic at following the e-commerce usability guidelines.” The emphasis is taken from the original, so I’ll add my own emphasis: Users Are Not Like You.

“You” in this case would be the type of people who run and design websites, who use the Internet to sell or advertise their own products and services, etc. As important as it has been, it’s going to be even more important moving forward that e-commerce website design focus first and foremost on the user experience. (”User” in this case being people not like you.)

My second Google Analytics account is allowing me to add additional profiles now - although both accounts are still limited to 5 sites each. New sign-ups are still suspended. The sites on the second account are very low profile with negligible traffic, so if there’s any prioritization going on in expanding user profiles this might mean the Google Analytics service might be up to 100% soon.

European Commission Vice President Margot Wallström has accused Microsoft, Yahoo and Google of having flexible morals when it comes to dealing with China.

Writing in her blog, Wallström criticised the search engines for their complicity in helping China silence its domestic critics: “Words like ethics and corporate social responsibility seems to be deleted from their corporate code of conducts – or they have flexible ethical standards depending on where they operate…”

Wallström says she was “very disappointed to learn that Microsoft has agreed to block Chinese blog entries that use words like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘demonstration.’ …Yahoo has even gone further. They collaborated with the Chinese government and gave up the name of a writer who sent an e-mail that commented on a party decision. Based on this information, the man received a ten-year prison sentence.”