Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

Today's New York Times Online Edition ran an article on Google and it's search algorithm: "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine" by Saul Hansell. I read the article and was at a loss to find a lot new, despite Mr. Hansell's claim that his day at Google's headquarters afforded key engineers an opportunity to "[explain] more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works."

What was new for me was the apparent reality (implicit to what Mr. Hansell has to say, but not explicitly said) that Page Rank is merely a contributor to the order of results served up by Google's systems in response to queries. I got to this point from Mr. Hansell"s statement that "Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages. . . " If he has, in fact, gone beyond Page Rank, then I am not as concerned for clients with slipping Page Rank as I would otherwise be.

But Page Rank is not the point of this entry. The point is that, from my perch, Mr. Hansell's suggestion that Google has substantially improved the responses it serves up to queries, is (1) not the case, or (2) fine, but we still have lots and lots and lots of improvements to make. If either (1) or (2) are correct, there are plentiful opportunities in this online search arena.

Consider this query:

what does "sourceid=navclient" mean

What I am looking for is a definition of the phrase "sourceid=navclient." This phrase appears frequently in access logs that I review.

Google's systems never came close to serve a result at all pertinent to the query. The first result, Sacramento Blogs | SacStarts merely includes the exact phrase because the blog is now findable with Google.

So the vaunted algorithm can't do much with the term what; or with the phrase what does; or with the "distributed" phrase what does <> mean
(with a specific "word", "sourceid=navclient" plugged in the middle, within the opposite angle brackets)

In fact, the big picture is that Google does not serve results accurately to human language queries and, in fact, tries to fight the process by prodding posters not to include natural phraseology. For example, if you include the words "a, the, to", etc, within your query phrase to post in conformance with natural sentence structure, the systems' response will tell you that you needn't bother with the words since they are already included. This response is, on the one hand, smug and, on the other highly negative as human beings tend to communicate in sentences. In the case of my query, an inclusion of a question mark at the end did not help. Google's systems still did not "get it". The fact that the query syntax conformed to the syntax of a question was completely ignored by the lexical program.

In sum, unfortunately Mr. Hansell sees a big deal in some stuff that is still far short of the big deal that we all need to improve our searching online.

The flip side is that there is still tons of room for some entrepeneurs who may want to step up to the plate and duke it out with Godzilla.

©, 2007, Mike Blonder. All Rights Reserved. No Reprint without Prior Permission.

If the state of Vermont is a useful example of present-day rural USA, The disparity in the availability of data services to rural and urban markets is exploding. Consider that a very large chunk of Web 2.0 is entirely unavailable to Vermonters who live outside of the center of any of the country towns that fill the state, or the 5 cities: Burlington, Rutland, Brattleboro, Montpelier, St. Albans. Network connections are either too slow to support video, or, ominously, bandwidth is metered. The latter situation is the case for folks who try to get the necessary bandwidth from a Satellite "broadband" data services provider such as HughesNet. We use HughesNet and recently suffered a 24 hr "throttle down" as the result of exceeding a daily limit of 375 MBs of data. Anyone who knows video, or for that matter, MP3 audio, knows that 375 MBs of data is "nothing," hence my assertion that Web 2.0 does not play in this state very well.

Consider also that mobile telephony cannot be characterized, in any way, as ubiquitous in the rural areas of the state, which I ought to note, also comprise in excess of 50% of the geographical area. Vermonters don't like the look of towers on hills (don't ask me, I had nothing to do with it), therefore, service is non existent hereabouts. Non existent mobile telephony translates into no value from internet banking over a mobile telephone, mobile telephone cameras, etc.

The worst to be hit by all of this are the young folks in the rural public school systems. They are growing up in a world where they cannot develop familiarity with services that are easy to find anywhere else . If the job market treats video over mobile as a no-brainer, a young geek from Vermont is not going to make the cut when a content provider fills some high paying slots in its developer roster.

The point of this article is to describe the situation with the hope that influencers (government, private industry, etc) will hear the alarm and move forward, aggressively to get real broadband to these areas right away, not ten years from now.

© 2007, Mike Blonder, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Prior Permission

Lee Gomes writes for the "Portals" column, which runs in the "Marketplace" section of the Wall Street Journal®. Read his article, "PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait for a Huge Success" if you can. The article was published in the Wednesday, May 23, 2007 issue of The Journal.

This "PlentyOfFish" story is the kind of tale that we all want to hear. Markus Frind, a 28 year old online marketer located where he wants to be, in Vancouver, British Columbia, is making lots of dough online and all by himself. His site, PlentyOfFishruns just about all by itself. His staff amounts to one individual, himself. How much revenue? According to Gomes, "the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year."

Gomes looks further and notes more of what I want to hear: "How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple." Music to my ears. Check out Best Plain Web Pages for a look at how I see simplicity working for successful online sites.

So I went and visited the site myself and noted a couple of things: 1) Mr. Frind makes good use of CSS: The simple ad list that takes up most of every page is controlled by CSS and table tags (which do not want to go away) 2) Mr. Frind uses scripts when he needs to: for example to quickly capture page view information via Javascript (AJAX) and .asp for membership and 3) Page addresses are simple URLS without funny characters.

On the marketing side, his objective is clearly the best monetization that he can get from his site. The theme is very popular, dating, with a very, very large market. The revenue generator is advertising. The strategy is twofold: 1) as Mr. Gomes notes, "via Google's small text ads," and through 'affiliate marketing.'

The last bit, affiliate marketing, is of interest to me as I recently dipped my toe into the water of an online marketing approach, StomperNet that preaches affiliate marketing all day. I have mixed feelings about affiliate marketing; however, if you want to make money online, it would seem from Mr. Frind's achievement that the combination of a big, popular and pressing market (theme), together with affiliate marketing will make for lots of money.

Go get 'em

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved. No Reprint Without Prior Approval

On Monday of this week (April 30th), the print edition of the Wall Street Journal® ran an article in its Small Business section on Search Engine Marketing, "In Search of Traffic" by Kelly R. Spors. This article was, in fact, the feature article of the entire section of the paper. Most of the "news" detailed by the article is, however, rather old and stale. "To be successful online, [small companies] must learn to harness one of the Web's most powerful tools: search engines." Duh. This has not been news since, let's conservatively say 1999, 8 years ago.

As well, Kelly R. Spors, suggests a strong ambivalence towards consultants (like me) who work with small companies to improve their rankings with search engines: Spors writes that "[e]ven worse, big competitors can afford to pour lots of resources into [search engine marketing] -- putting small companies at a bigger disadavantage" which is to say that the investment often pays off. In other words the big competitors are making the right move working with SEO types. But later in the same article Spors cautions: "businesses should be careful when hiring an SEO, because not every company offers the same expertise, says Ryan Allis, chief executive of Virante, a Durham, N.C., search-marketing consulting firm." This ambivalence reappears a bit later when Spors notes that "[t]hen there are fees. The prices for SEOs can be bewildering to many small business owners,. Costs can range from $500 a month to several thousand-for what often seem to be almost identical services".

Kelly Spors, I would suggest to you that successful search engine marketing is not the simple process that you suggest when you prescribe the following medicine: "Add lots of relevant descriptions to the site's text, including the search phrases for which you want a high ranking. Have other sites link to it. Offer a blog or other informational content for customers." As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, your prescription, for most sites, will end up a big goose egg (meaning a zero).

Bottom line, SEO expertise keeps pace with search engine technology and, therefore is a constantly moving target. What worked yesterday will not work today, etc. Never forget that you get what you pay for. If a business expects to sell a $1,000,000 or more, online, then, I think, an SEO budget of 5% ($50,000) per year makes sense.

On another note, I was surprised that the writer was not familiar with the "long tail" search notion, referring, instead, to a strategy of using outlying keywords, sufficiently off the track and down the list of keywords for a type of business, but specific enough to attract qualified clicks. If you are going to write for a general audience, then you ought to do them a favor and look into the concept and deliver the "skinny" in a form that the audience can run with. Kind of a drag.

The Journal has done this before, meaning the paper has written on online marketing topics from a very general standpoint. I deal with this stuff day-to-day via my business, best plain web pages and can say that the long tail search stuff does work. I've reviewed logs and have noted highly specific searches for a customer of mine that has a low Page Rank, but is nonetheless booking business.

Picking out of pocket keywords that are somehow quite specific is a valuable tool for smaller businesses to come to the table with some revenue fairly quickly after the launch of an online business. Double surprising is the fact that the title meta tag, together with the file name (whatever.htm or html) itself are heavily weighted; therefore put the specifics of your keywords right there and see what happens.

©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved, No Reprints Without Express Written Permission by the Writer

Life is getting tough for open source. I purchased two bare-bones Intel motherboards complete with Core Duo chips and had the worst time getting the SuSE Linux Distribution (first 10.0 and then 10.2) to run on the platforms. The problem is that the new hardware had some radically different features, specifically a controller located off the motherboard, not supported by the Linux kernel included with SuSE Linux 10.0.

"Not supported" is decidedly bad news for open source. Intel is the largest chip manufacturer and, possibly, the largest manufacturer of motherboards for personal computers. The kind of headache that I experienced trying to install the distribution on the platforms is certainly not the kind of headache that the average user will tolerate.

My initial attempts were met by dark monitors, and repeated failed installations that bounced me back to manual installation screens. Error messages were weird: "Image Not Found" despite the fact that the factory disks were loaded in the Sony DVD/CD Reader Writer that I purchased with each of the systems. My calls to support did not produce a fix. I was pleased, however, to see that the typical brush off from SuSE technical support for folks with older copies of the operating system was not the order of the day. Support was willing to work the problem(s) through, but was at a loss to offer a working remedy.

When I loaded the DVD into our Mac Mini and FTP'd over to the Mac I was able to install the operating system on both of our systems. But, as of yet, I have not gotten the faster of the two boxes (2.4 Ghz processor, 2GBs memory, etc) to work with the Sony Drive and the Operating System.

Think long and hard prior to scheduling linux migrations (for example, upgrading hardware, changing databases, changing web servers, etc). You must understand that planning this type of move includes many more steps than a comparable move for systems built on the Microsoft® Windows® platform.

I am in the process of upgrading hardware for two of my linux servers (both machines running Novell SuSE, versions 10.0 and 9.3) to Intel® Core Duo® hardware, complete with SATA drives and, for one machine, a GForce 7600 graphics card with an NVidia chipset. The upgrades have not been finished. I have hit lots of bumps, as follows:

1. The SuSE YaST installation program will not run (out of the box) on the hardware platform. I am working on a fix with SuSE, but why should I need a fix?
2. I had to remove the GeForce card. SuSE has problems with the NVidia chip set so, to minimize issues, I removed the card rather than attempt the total install with the card in the motherboard
3. Despite using the "tried and true" disk utility application "DD" to image the drive prior to migration, I neglected to open the image prior to the migration and, murphy's law being what it is, the image failed to open properly after the fact. Fortunately, I have the physical disk as well as archives of the critical files.
4. Had my schedule required static page production (check out bestplainwebpages.com for further info on what I do) I would have lost 4 production days this week. Fortunately, I am doing much more with scripts this week.
5. I have been without my MySQL database for 4 business days awaiting completion of the migration
6. I spent 3.5 man days on this "cost" project with no billable result

Given the above, it makes much more sense to design linux systems migrations from the ground up prior to embarking on same. The modus operandi must include

1. Verifying that the shrink wrap version of the Linux Distribution of Choice works with the intended hardware out of the box
2. Creating all images and ensuring quality by successfully opening all images on fall back hardware that will be available, post migration, should there be problems with the new hardware
3. Restricting the timeframe for the migration to after hours

Images are critically important in a Linux environment as, via an image, one has the best shot at preserving file permissions along with data and, thereby, ensuring that stuff works post migration. As well, if any applications have been compiled, imaging the applications within the disk context (complete with all file dependencies in place) is dramatically easier than recreating the dependencies, permissions, etc. after the fact.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

For my work for my page publishing business daily routines include equal doses of image manipulation, text file management and shell scripting. The Mac was the perfect platform given the underlying operating systems (Mac OS X, child of Free BSD) and the long standing relationship with Adobe®. I bought my first Mac, a Powerbook G4 in 2003 and, in the ensuing years have purchased a second Powerbook G4, and, last year a Mac Mini powered by an Intel Processor.

The Mac Mini has, until now, been a disappointment. To cut to the heart of the matter, I am sitting here with several proprietary applications that were written specifically for a Mac powered by a PowerPC chip. Those applications include Adobe® CS2® and Microsoft' Office for the Mac (2003). The Mac Mini performs terribly with both of these packages.

While I find Apple's Mac & PC television ad campaign to be cute, a better word might be "charming" with an emphasis on the verb "to charm." Having purchased a Mac Mini "before its time," I can attest to having been charmed by something devilish. After all, I now sit here post purchase of Adobe® CS3® (out an additional $600.00), when I would have been fine with a machine running Windows (and at least $600.00 richer) had I known that what I had as far as shrink wrap software wouldn't work on the Mac Mini.

Live and learn. Hopefully not the hard way.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

This blog magnetized zero visitors until I set categories and tags for each entry. Curious that tags and categories would be so critical to blog distribution and so little discussed by blog publishing software vendors.

Consider that this blog is published with Movable Type. I couldn't find anything in the Movable Type documentation that highlighted the importance of tags (and categories) to my objective of getting my blog content distributed online. Only when I googled

movable type documentation tags blog distribution

did I come up with an entry from the Movable Type Developer Documentation dated June 8, 2005 where Brad Choate comments

"Today's "Tags" are yesterday's "Keywords". I'm a big fan of metadata and use it extensively both on and off the net. Being able to reference sets of data using a tag or two is extremely powerful. I'm glad to see services like del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati that are promoting and making use of it as they are."

Yes sir. I wonder how many other folks who want to distribute content online have stumbled around not realizing that setting tags and content for entries is critical.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

The O'Reilly® publishing company offers the Safari Online Bookshelf on a paid subscription basis. if you need to learn something about computers, for example, programming, you may want to consider a subscription to Safari.

Pro
Most reference books are expensive, in the range of $30.00 or more and up. At $19.95 per month for a virtual shelf that can include up to ten reference books, the monthly subscription fee, obviously, can be a bargain. Consider as well that access is immediate, saving a trip to a bookstore. Another plus is the online search feature, which can save a lot of effort that would otherwise be required to leaf through pages to find what you need. Finally, electronic books take up no space, putting an end to clutter in an office, library, or even a kitchen table.

Con
Books must stay on a bookshelf for at least 30 days. Why do I need to keep a book for which I need a quick reference on my shelf for 30 days? O'Reilly® Customer Service tells me that I can purchase the flexibility to "skim and can," but at an additional cost of $10.00 per month, $29.95. Another $120.00 per year spent on the service may not make sense; in fact, I decided to pass.

Reading books online would be great if we all had digital monitors with absolute clarity, brilliant contrast, etc. However, we do not all have such devices. For most of us, regular reading online can lead, rather quickly, to an expensive trip to an optometrist for glasses. Forget about the bargain of the service if you have to buy a pair of glass for $300.00 or more as the result of reading online.

The biggest con (no pun intended) is the nature of reference books, themselves. Whether, or not reading a reference book about a programming language will make one a programmer is subject to debate. After all, writing reference material is a tough job. The range of audience is very wide and "you can't please all the people all of the time." Nevertheless for a guy like me, it is a rare reference book that talks about technical stuff for a non technical eye and ear. This is all to say that the ten books on the shelf may not deliver, so be wary.

Recommendation
O'Reilly® ought to offer more flexibility at the $19.95 per month subscription level. As well, more effort should be spent determining the opinion of the subscribing audience about the materials, so "borrowers" can be forewarned prior to putting a book on a shelf for at least a month.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved

Apple's Automator is a curious effort to spread the good word about scripts and task automation to a non programming audience. Apple is to be commended for taking the step, but the tangible effort, itself, is not worth much. What cripples Automator is the entirely counter intuitive manner in which it works. Apparently, though targeted to a non programming audience, the familiar problem is that a programming crew put together the operation of the product and, thereby, left the audience behind.

Let's look at the following: the example workflows work for wierd tasks; for example, resizing images, speeding up yet another itunes task, etc. Real requirements for business types who are using a Mac, like backing up, should have example workflows, but don't.

Without a schematic of how steps are intended to work together to result in hands free and useful actions by the computer, the non programmer can't follow the process and folds. Here we go again, another Dashboard (I will write on this other solution without a problem feature in a later post).

If Automator offers a view of the applescript, or javascript behind the Workflow, I can't find it. The debugger bombs erroneous routines, but doesn't provide a clear indicator of where the problem may be.

I would welcome a useful Automator. Mac OS X is a great operating system that gets a lot of my attention. Much of what I do with Mac OS X is repetitive and certainly a good candidate for a useful Automator, but I need something more useful than today's package. Hint to Apple: make it better in yet the next version of Mac OS X.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved