All About Content

I’ve been a little behind on my industry reading, so I’m just now noticing that I got tagged last week to participate in a meme that’s making it’s way around the Web. According to one participating post, it was started by Jeff Pulver. Basically it’s a game of blog tag, where a blogger writes 5 things about herself that her audience might not know and then gets 5 other bloggers to do the same.

I’m a pretty private person, so there are plenty of things you might not know about me unless you’re a close friend. And I tend to like it that way. However, it’s fun to play along and I’m sure I can come up with 5 innocuous, non-incriminating factoids.

1. I don’t vote. Now before you get all up in my grill, I have a decent excuse: I’m not a U.S. citizen. I’m a German citizen. As a permanent resident of the U.S., however, I don’t have to worry about work visas or anything like that. The only time it’d be an issue is if I’m looking for work that requires a security clearance or anything for the government. Luckily, pretty much by definition, anything someone is going to want optimized for search isn’t going to be classified info. As for working for the government, that just isn’t appealing to me anymore. Which brings us to #2.

2. Before I came out to DC, I wanted to be a policy wonk. I spent my formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) and I moved to the East Coast to get away from all the engineers. Once in DC, I promptly realized I didn’t want to do policy work and found myself an employer who appreciated that I was conversant in techno-babble (this was before the death throes of the first Internet bust).

3. I prefer WETA’s new format. I’m one of very few people who admits to being happy WETA switched to the all-news format at the expense of classical music. Trust me, this is a big deal to the public radio listeners of the DC area. But sorry guys, WAMU just wasn’t cutting it. So while everyone else laments that WETA dropped classical music, I’m personally pleased to have a radio station that I can listen to any time of day without fear of running into Stained Glass Bluegrass music hour.

4. I once met Jeff Pulver. He was hitting on a colleague of mine. The year: 1998. The event: SUPERCOMM. The dancing: spazzy. Pulver organized one of the parties, but I didn’t realize until later that he was the oddball tearing back and forth in front of the stage with some cringe-inducing euro-dance moves.

5. I hate slugs. Abhor them. Irrationally so. Give me a (reasonably sized) spider or snake and I’m a-okay. But slugs? (shiver). Okay, now I’m really stretching to fill out the list. But there you have it: 5 things about Melanie.

Much like a good ol’ fashioned chain letter, the next step is to pass this on to five more people who each do the same. As for who is next… I haven’t seen any rules about this meme, so I’m going to ahead and tag Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny, neither of whom I know and neither of whom read this blog. Also on the list: Jonathan Sousa, Nick Carter, and Jaimie Sirovich.

I missed this earlier: apparently Google is killing its search API. Not a blow to the spine kind of killing, but a removing the feeding tube kind of slow but assured death. That’s going to be a problem for those of us who rely on the search API to track our rankings (since you can’t track manually as many keywords and domains as I do). Read the discussion on Search Engine Watch, to get other SEO’s opinions on this development.

I was finally able to log back into my DMOZ editor account after a major ODP hardware SNAFU and I noticed something interesting: Only one new entry in my subcategory. Why is this interesting? Because before the crash I had several pending entries in the queue. The one entry now awaiting approval (which, btw, was spam so I deleted it) was new. So basically if you submitted your site for inclusion in the Open Directory Project prior to the the crash, your application is gone and you’ll need to resubmit.

Resubmitting to ODP
If you submitted a few months ago (or longer), this development may actually be in your favor since odds are your site was already deleted from the queue or was languishing in that purgatory of sites that the editor wasn’t quite sure what to do with. Having to resubmit your site now, when there isn’t already an older application for that URL sitting in the queue, gives site owners a chance to make a more compelling case for why their site is worthy of inclusion — without the baggage of your previous failed attempts prejudicing the editor.

Key points to remember when submitting to DMOZ: 1) Be as conservative in your title and description as possible. You want to be objective and factual not promotional. Read the other descriptions in the category to get a feel for the editor’s style. 2) Submit to the right category or subcategory. The more specific the better. I can’t stress that enough. And don’t try submitting to multiple categories in the hopes that one editor is sloppier than another. Editors can see very easily when you do that, and we don’t like it.

And read the DMOZ guidelines carefully before you resubmit. A clean slate is a great opportunity — don’t blow it.

According to ComScore, displaced Yahoo as the world’s second-most-visited Web site in November. Visitors to Google’s sites rose 9.1 percent year-over-year, to 475.7 million in November 2006, just edging out Yahoo site visits which rose 5.2 percent, to 475.3 million. Microsoft, in the meantime maintains its lead with 501.7 million worldwide visitors last month, according to the market research company.

Google was able to edge out Yahoo due to its growing international popularity; Yahoo contines to receive more visits than Google within the United States.

I’ve only noticed this in the last few days, although I’m sure others have been posting about this already (I’m a little behind on my industry reading), but Google seems to be testing the display of related search terms (again). This is something that MSN/Live and Yahoo have been doing for a long time, and a feature I always found particularly helpful as a searcher. Should drive traffic for these tail terms, which might make you happy if you rank well for these types of secondary phrases but not the general one.

In “related news” (har har), Google has also been displaying links from old news stories:

Happy Festivus!

Tagged: Google

The Federal Trade Commission last week issued an opinion that bloggers being paid to engage in word-of-mouth marketing must disclose that relationship. According to the Washington Post, WOM advertising is already covered under existing FTC regulations that govern commercial endorsements. The opinion meant to clarify that “such marketing could be deceptive if consumers were more likely to trust the product’s endorser ‘based on their assumed independence from the marketer.’”

Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear … if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

On Monday, PayPerPost sent its bloggers an email titled “PayPerPost Requires Disclosure / by Marketplace Participants”

Company Follows Disclosure Policy.org Launch with Transparency Mandate

ORLANDO, FL – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace connecting marketers with bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, announced the second phase of its full disclosure model, whereby participating Consumer Content Creators are required to disclose their sponsored status. The new Terms of Service, effective today, will bring greater transparency to the growing Consumer Generated Advertising industry.

Read the full release here

I’m signed up for Blogsvertise, PayPerPost and ReviewMe. PayPerPost is the only service that emailed me about the new requirement (although ReviewMe already had this requirement in place).

Ars Technica reports an update to a May 2006 study on the safety of search engine results:

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines … presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May.

Edelman used McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool to run 2,500 popular keywords through several search engines. SiteAdvisor evaluates web sites based on their affiliation with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and spam.

According to a report released by the United Nations, 97 of the 100 Web sites examined failed to meet minimum accessibility levels for the reading impared (those who are blind or have low-vision disabilities) or individuals who cannot use a computer mouse .

The study looked at five sectors intended to reflect a key area of interaction for people online, and sites from 20 countries were chosen to represent those sectors, forming a matrix of 100 Web sites to be included in the audit. The homepage of each Web site was measured against the W3C’s benchmark for accessibility.

Of the 100 homepages evaluated during the audit, only three reached those minimum standards. Among the findings:

• 93% did not provide adequate text descriptions for graphical content, causing problems for visually impaired people
• 73% relied on JavaScript for important functionality, making it impossible for an estimated 10% of Internet users using the Internet to access key information
• 78% used foreground and background color combinations with poor contrast, making it difficult for people with mild visual conditions, such as color blindness, to read information
• 98% did not follow industry Web standards for the programming code, providing poor foundations for Web accessibility
• 97% used fixed units of measurement, preventing people from altering the size of text or comfortably resizing the page so that content can be easily scaled
• 89% failed to use the correct technique for conveying document structure through the use of headings, making page navigation awkward for many visually impaired people
• 87% caused pop-up windows to appear without warning the user, causing disorientation problems for people using screen magnification software

However, the study, Nomensa, found that a quarter of the Web sites investigated could be brought into line with the international standards quickly and for little expense.

More background on the report.

Tagged: Internet users

Even before social networking became a huge buzz word, everyone knew what online dating was; it generally didn’t enjoy a great reputation. Since then dating has become much more legitimate in the eyes of the public, with major conferences held on the topic, but it still has it pitfalls:

“Match.com officials said they’ve tried to lessen the amount of liars and scammers on their site by screening every member profile and photos. Each month, they reject about 15 percent of the submitted profiles that don’t reach their standards.” (source: Post-Tribune)

Not every psycho killer gets caught by the filters though. According to a recent news story, a man featured on the crime show America’s Most Wanted was apprehended after someone identified his photo on a dating site called Plenty of Fish. He admitted to being a shy guy who loved to cuddle, but conveniently left out that thing about a double homicide. The founder of Plenty of Fish reassures everyone that his profile was taken down.

For more fun coverage of people searching the Internet for a love match, and the industry that loves them, check out Online Personals Watch. And if that’s still not enough, go to Miami, January 15-16. Sponsored link: The Social Networking Conference focuses almost exclusively on the online dating industry. Early-bird registrants save $150.

Hitwise did a webinar today covering social media networks and their relevance to retail traffic. The research company says that sites like MySpace, Facebook and others have become jumping-off points for people to get to a retailer site; up to 5% of the upstream traffic to online businesses came from a social network. (Email, by comparison, drives traffic at nearly twice that rate.)

But to keep it in perspective: 25% of traffic to retail sites starts with a query in a search box, according to the same research company.