All About Content

A couple of months ago I blogged about the quality standards DMOZ editors are expected to uphold. It painted the Open Directory Project in a pretty positive light, which at least one person took exception to. In fact, most marketers are frustrated with DMOZ (read: its editors) for having “huge egos” and entirely too much power.

I still intend to enumerate the problems I have with DMOZ and its processes, but that’s going to end up being a pretty long post actually.

So for now there’s just an update about this here site’s inclusion in the Directory: My site is still not listed, but last month my site was moved from the category to which I submitted (/Computers/Internet/Searching/Weblogs) to /Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Weblogs, where it sits unreviewed. I guess I could quibble and say that my blog is not about Web design promotion, but neither are most of the sites listed in that category. I’d be in good company if only my site ever gets reviewed and approved.

So MSN is going to replace MSN Search with Windows Live Search. Windows Live Search is in beta at www.live.com. It’s a radical break in terms of branding, both in terms of the name and the new clean look. If you prefer the clutter of the old SERPs, MSN Search is still available for now.

The Live Search interface let’s you decide if you want to see snippets in the results (or just the title and URL) or determine the size of the thumbnails in image search). The most unique thing is that it doesn’t break the results into pages with 10 results per page; instead there’s this slider thing that basically let’s you scroll down the entire list of results inside a frame. The frame displays 4 to 6 results (depending if you collapse the snippets or not) at a time. I think that feature going to take some getting used to. I’m pretty confident that it’s not going to grow on me — I’ve always disliked having to scroll within a frame.

The nice thing aesthetically, though, is that it all fits above the fold and is beautifully sparse. (I wonder if it will stay that way; Microsoft isn’t known for keeping things clean and simple, as this video so aptly satirizes.)

Plus there are a lot of customization options, including the ability to restrict searches to a set of your favorite sites, which is a feature I really like. (Kind of like Rollyo let’s you do with Yahoo Search results. You can check out my searchroll for SEO hearsay here.)

Wal-Mart has been outted as cozying up to bloggers. Actually, the article is very PR-firm-friendly, saying basically that if the line between PR firms and bloggers is blurred it’s because the bloggers are failing to properly reveal their sources. It could have turned into a mini-scandal, but both sides appear to have come out of it relatively unscathed. (Jeremy Zawodny’s rant notwithstanding.)

The PR firm behind Wal-Mart’s blog outreach is Edelmann, coincidentally the firm Steve Rubel just joined.

Rubel runs Micropersuasion.com, one of the most popular blogs on the Web, which looks at how online trends are influencing marketing and public relations. (Full disclosure: several months ago I asked Rubel if he’d do an interview for this blog, but he declined.)

Steve Rubel participated in an online chat at the Washington Post to discuss Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making, a Washington Post article that was published before the Wal-Mart story ran in the New York Times.

During his chat, Rubel answered some of my questions… sort of. To my question “when do you face bad buzz head on?” he answered “before it’s too late, but not too early.” Insightful.

When I asked if there was anything he would have done differently, and what the plan is now that they’ve been “outted,” Rubel says, “We will continue to build relationships with bloggers and strive to make them as transparent as possible.”

Increasingly, PR firms take the same approach toward bloggers as they do journalists in traditional media. The expectation is that the same standards (of journalistic integrity) apply, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think public relations firms that pursue an aggressive blog outreach strategy are going to have to take some responsibility for making sure their bloggers aren’t just shilling. Otherwise it will reflect poorly on everyone involved and undermine the influence of citizen journalism.

Added March 21: The Economist ran an article February 9 about how corporations can use negative blog chatter to their advantage, The Blog in the Corporate Machine.

Suddenly, there’s a flurry of blog updates from SXSW. I’m jealous; I think SXSW would have been more fun than SES NY was. It’ll be all Internet geek stuff for a few days and then starting on Wednesday we’ll find out what new music is going to be hot. I think this is the only time you’ll ever hear me say that I wished I were in Texas.

The point to stress is that PageRank doesn’t determine how a page is going to rank for any given search; it’s a common misconception because the name PageRank implies something about the ranking of a page. Actually, PageRank is named after Larry Page, its inventor (with a small dose of irony, I’m sure).

So, given that PageRank measures link popularity, how is it that the Google toolbar last week indicated my blog’s homepage had a PageRank of 5?

Even better: Over the weekend, my PageRank (according to the toolbar) dropped to 3. My blog has become less popular over the course of a week? I’d believe it except my blog wasn’t at all popular to begin with.

The point I’m trying to underscore is that Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) is iffy at best. The toolbar is only updated very sporadically throughout the year, while actual PR is, we are led to assume, recalculated continually. Regardless, whether it was calculated yesterday or three months ago, it is highly improbable that www.all-about-content.com rates a 3, much less a 5. (PR values are exponential, so a value of 5 is many times more significant than a PR3.)

I think this example is pretty convincing proof that you shouldn’t put too much stock in TBPR.

The usual disclaimer: I may or may not be right about the specifics (not that my post contains all that many specifics). If you’re interested in how PageRank is calculated and/or the debate over whether PageRank as displayed on the toolbar has any meaning at all, there are more authoritative sites than mine that can provide deeper insights. You can find them by googling the term “PageRank.”

My little local paper, the Washington Post, which has always pushed the envelope when it comes to trying new technologies and new ways of interacting with its readers, recently signed a partnership with del.icio.us.

Registered del.icio.us users can bookmark washingtonpost.com articles right from the page. Each article includes links for tagging del.icio.us, as well as Technorati trackbacks.

This is a good example of an old media outlet “getting” the Web. Instead of getting defensive (like European publishers, or the NY Times, which started restricting access to some articles to non-paying users), the Washington Post is embracing new ways to leverage the Internet for its own advantage.