All About Content

A while back I asked the question, how does a blog (or blog-like site) bow out gracefully? Not sure if this works for most sites, but this is how Aaron Wall did it on Threadwatch: Closing Threadwatch This Friday. That’s right, Threadwatch is going away (in part because Aaron’s friends shamelessly spammed him?).

A while back I read this in a newsletter (don’t recall which one) and I clipped it. I think it’s a quote from the movie Elizabethtown:

As somebody once said…there’s a difference between a failure…and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure.

But a fiasco…A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folktale told to others… that makes other people feel more alive… because it didn’t happen to them.

Apropos nothing…

Hey fellow Washingtonian Googlephiles, just saw a job on Yahoo HotJobs for a Google Product Marketing Manager. Go check it out if you’re interested or look for other Google jobs in DC (they’ve got stuff for librarians, lobbyists and a few things in between).

Nielsen//NetRatings today reported its market share data for the top 10 search engines. Google, no surprise, continues to lead with Nielsen NetRatings reporting 4.03 billion searches having been conducted on Google last month. That translates to nearly 45% year over year growth and 56.3% of total U.S. market share.

Yahoo Search is in second place with a little over 1.5 billion searches and 21.5% of the total. MSN trails a distant third with only 8.4% of all U.S. searches conducted on the Windows Live search engine. Rounding out the top 5 search engines are AOL Search and Ask.com, with 5.3% and 2.5% of search market share, respectively.

At the bottom of the list is the search aggregator Dogpile, which saw fewer net searches than the previous year, with year over year growth a -10.6%.

HitWise, a competing market research firm, also released its May search data today. According to HitWise, in May Google captured a whopping 65.1% of all U.S. searches, up from 59.3% last year. The number of searches attributed by HitWise to Yahoo are in line with Nielsen’s data: 20.9%, a figure that’s down slightly from May 2006. And MSN/Live Search garnered 8.4% of searches, down from 12.1% of marketshare 12 months prior.

Ask.com fared a little better based on HitWise data, with 3.9% of the market compared to 2.5% that Nielsen reported. Either way, IAC’s Ask.com continues to lose market share to the bigger players.

Okay, so the month is already half over, and it’s a non-binding resolution, and there isn’t any funding to support any initiatives, but U.S. legislators (well, a hundred of them at least) are really, really serious about keeping us safe from cybercrime: I just learned the Senate passed a resolution designating June as ‘National Internet Safety Month’. Wait, let me be more specific — June 2007 is National Internet Safety Month. And to think I wasted the last two weeks not celebrating Internet safety.

The full text of the resolution reads:

Whereas there are more than 1,000,000,000 Internet users worldwide;

Whereas, in the United States, 35,000,000 children in kindergarten through grade 12 have Internet access;

Whereas approximately 80 percent of the children of the United States in grades 5 through 12 are online for at least 1 hour per week;

Whereas approximately 41 percent of students in grades 5 through 12 do not share with their parents what they do on the Internet;

Whereas approximately 24 percent of students in grades 5 through 12 have hidden their online activities from their parents;

Whereas approximately 31 percent of the students in grades 5 through 12 have the skill to circumvent Internet filter software;

Whereas 61 percent of the students admit to using the Internet unsafely or inappropriately;

Whereas 20 percent of middle school and high school students have met face-to-face with someone they first met online;

Whereas 23 percent of students know someone who has been bullied online;

Whereas 56 percent of parents feel that online bullying of children is an issue that needs to be addressed;

Whereas 47 percent of parents feel that their ability to monitor and shelter their children from inappropriate material on the Internet is limited; and

Whereas 61 percent of parents want to be more personally involved with Internet safety: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate–

(1) designates June 2007 as `National Internet Safety Month’;

(2) recognizes that National Internet Safety Month provides the citizens of the United States with an opportunity to learn more about–

(A) the dangers of the Internet; and

(B) the importance of being safe and responsible online;

(3) commends and recognizes national and community organizations for–

(A) promoting awareness of the dangers of the Internet; and

(B) providing information and training that develops critical thinking and decision-making skills that are needed to use the Internet safely; and

(4) calls on Internet safety organizations, law enforcement, educators, community leaders, parents, and volunteers to increase their efforts to raise the level of awareness for the need for online safety in the United States.

1. When you make template changes, you can only preview the homepage, not individual post pages, which might have different elements than the homepage (like AdSense units, for example). In order to see changes on any other page, you just have to publish them live and cross your fingers.
2. Google finally allows you to create “labels” (which is basically a category), but you can’t control the title tags of label pages. The page title for each of the category pages is just the name of the blog — which is a pain both for the SEO and the user, who can’t tell what that page is about unless they look at the URL. See #3.
3. The page file name is auto-generated based on what you named the label/category. But spaces in the label name are encoded %20 in the URL, so your page name ends up being /paid%20blogging.html instead of /paid-blogging.html… unless you put hyphens in all your labels, which isn’t always appropriate.
4. You can’t batch rename a label (once you figure out for example that it converts spaces in label names to %20 encoding). So if you wanted to rename a category, you’d need to retag every post, delete the old tags and manually do a redirect from the old page name to the newly generated page name)
5. Post titles always start with the blog name, not the name of the post.
6. You can’t customize the look of the comments page.
7. Once you approve a comment, you can’t change your mind and delete it without “hiding” all the comments on that post.
8. When you’re approving comments via email or the Blogger interface, you can’t preview if or where the blogger linked the username. So something that looks like a nice innocuous comment when you approve it could link to an adult site on your live page. And then you can’t delete it (see #7).
9. There are no good plug-ins like there are for WordPress

What about it… anyone want to make it an even ten?

Add to: del.icio.us, Digg

My analytics show that someone found this blog at some point searching on something related to why you should blogroll. There isn’t anything on the site to answer that question, and I thought it was a good one, so I thought I’d take a shot at it. So here are 5 reasons to have a blogroll on your blog:

1. Because your readers are interested in what you’re reading, what inspires you, to put your work into more context.
2. Because your readers want more good content; why not be the one to help them find it?
3. Because the third “W” in WWW stands for “Web”… as in a network. That’s the whole point of the intar-web now, ain’t it?
4. Because bloggers like showing up in blogrolls and maybe (just maybe) they’ll link back to you and send you some new readers.
5. Because outbound links can help search engines figure out what your pages are about.

So why don’t I have a blogroll? Another good question. Where would I put it? My site isn’t really designed for more links in the template. I could get rid of my “What Am I Reading” list, but I think that serves a very similar purpose — to provide up-to-date, related content.

If you read this blog and think “this blog is fabulous, but would be so much better with a blogroll!” let me know. If you’re a reader of this blog and think “this is the worst SEO blog ever!” … well, I’ve got a 3-point rebuttal: 1) shows what you know — that honor is already claimed by this blog. 2) Why do you read it if you think it sucks? That’s not very smart. 3) Keep it to yourself. I don’t like to hear from not-smart haterz.

The first SMX Conference is over and I’m back home. Here are a couple of pics from the Google Dance.

More of my photos from Seattle.

Head over to the SMX Blog for a list of all the session coverage.

Tagged: Google Dance

One of the interesting tidbits from this morning’s discussion with Google’s Matt Cutts has to do with how Google diffuses a “Google bomb” (such as the ones that Stephen Colbert recently pulled off with “greatest living American” and “giant brass balls“).

The reason they crop up and then disappear suddenly (as opposed to never succeeding in the first place) does not include any editorial intervention — however suspicious it may look. That’s consistent with what they’ve always said, even when the “miserable failure” results had President Bush’s bio page at the top forever.

Apparently the algorithm that sniffs out Google bombs is not built into the regular ranking algorithm; it’s run separately and only once every couple of months.

Another (valuable?) insight from this conference: Vanessa Fox is a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. (Updated June 15: Vanessa Fox is leaving Google!)

It’s the Sunday before SMX Advanced and Seattle is a mild 75 degrees without a cloud in the sky, and no rain in the forecast. If it proves to be this beautiful for the duration of the conference, it’ll be tempting to play a little hooky… or not return at all to hot and humid DC.