Send your comments, letters to the editor, and related articles to seltzer@samizdat.com For information on who we are check www.samizdat.com/who.html
To access other issues, go to www.samizdat.com/ioad.html. The full text of all issues is available for free, with hypertext links to the sites referenced. (Please keep in mind that URLs frequently change. We will attempt to update the information in this on-line edition, but don't expect perfection.)
For plain-text books on CD ROM, a library for the price of a book, visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You can now receive Internet-on-a-Disk by email, by signing up at Yahoo Groups. Either send email to subscribe-ioad@yahoogroups.com , or register at the Web site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad. You can also use that group to discuss related matters and share insights with other readers and with me (Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com).
Off-the-wall ideas
I'm a fan of the TV series "Mr. Sterling". A recent episode led to the following thoughts:
Problem --
We live in a single-family house in Boston, where we've had more than our usual share of cold and ice and snow this winter. Yesterday, on the outside walls of our bedroom, my wife (Barb) and I noticed dozens of dark spots. The walls in that room are painted plasterboard, and there were 3-6 spots at regular intervals of about two and a half or three feet. At first, I was afraid that we might have major leaks in the roof; but the spots were not wet and there were no drip marks and no spots on the ceiling. Whatever the cause, it looked like we'd have to repaint the room.
Joking and wildly speculating, I told my wife the problem was probably "dust magnets", that there were probably icicles outside at those intervals and that because of the icicles those pieces of wall were probably colder that the areas around them, and that somewhere the cold attracted dust.
Then we realized that the intervals were the same as the intervals between studs, and that the spots appeared in the same pattern as nails hammered into studs to hold up plasterboard.
So it turned out that the problem actually was "dust magnets". Perhaps due to a combination of cold and humidity, the nails behind the paint were attracting and holding dust. Fortunately, the solution was simple -- I got a wet cloth and rubbed the spots. They came off right away and were, indeed, dust.
But what law of physics applies here? Is it a matter of static electricity, humidity, and temperature? Or what else is going on?
Many of the search-related articles here at my site focus on AltaVista for examples of what you should do and why if you want your pages to be found. But the same simple techniques also work quite well for Google. For example, at Google, search for:
You can see links to my search-related articles with detailed advice
about being found at www.samizdat.com/search.html
(In particular, I'd recommend www.samizdat.com/brandandtraffic.html
)
The Bombast Transcripts is a collection of newsletter reports that Chris Locke wrote from 1996 until 2001, and which sometimes recount and reflect on events earlier in his life. At times it gets autobiographical, but it also reads in part like an account of the changing business environment as the Web went public and commercial, and soared up and fell down. There are many messages there, as the author's view of what was going on changed, and as the world he was observing changed.
If it is autobiography, the emphasis is on auto as in automatic; not life reflected on from a distance in time and neatly packaged. This book reads like an extended parenthesis which never ends. Locke seems to distrust endings, to distrust writing that is too well polished and packaged, and to distrust as well business plans that are too well polished, too finished, too remote from the ever-changing world of customers. He believes that successful businesses need to engage in continuous dialogue with their customers and continuously adjust what they do based on what they learn, and that the Internet provides the best means that man has yet come up with for carrying on open-ended dialogues of that kind.
At his best, Locke reminds me of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, sometimes even Whitman.
He defines art as "Exploring without knowing. Looking at what's actually there, not what you expect will be. Allowing for the possibility of magic." p. 76
He asks "is it possible to live in a world that is not pre-defined in the kind of philosophic depth you might expect to find articulated, say, on the back panel of a box of Wheaties? A world that is hugely uncertain and whose principles of operation, if any, are largely unknowable? Well, like the man said, when you got nothin, you got nothin to lose. Why not?" (p. 77)
The closest we come to magic or to some higher form of truth is not through some freudian subconscious, but rather through words, through language. "Language, as it transpires, is our only clue to many otherwise occulted truths." p. 32
He defines a dictionary as "fundamental documentation for the mother of all operating systems". p. 58 "It seemed to me that no one really understood what anyone else was saying. It still does. We are locked up in our heads with our ideas: memories, longings, aspirations, disappointments, dreams. We try to explain. We fail. This disconnect is so dependable it has become our closest bond." p. 58
He puts the Internet into perspective as a way to move words, for people to connect with and communicate with other people. "The Internet is not a new thing, though the pipes are certainly faster now." p. 59 "Imagine this expanded literacy as an ability to use technology to tell a different class of stories than the story we've all been handed. Stories that draw people together around a new cultural campfire and hold their rapt attention there amid the gale-force storm of noise that's blowing down the world outside.
"The spookiness derives from the open-endedness of popular narrative. This is atavistic stuff, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, connected to a collective unconscious predating any scrap of recorded history -- notes form the ultimate underground. And this ancient elemental force has just broken loose in the pipes and wires of the late 20th century. Not only is it loose, it's breeding and seething at the very heart of a civilization based on discontent." p. 140
He also has some beautiful moments of mock BS pomposity, when he deliberately lets words get in the way of meaning (making fun of himself as well as of corporate mediaspeak), such as "'Mediaspace is that concatenation of Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist and communication bandwidth that provides new opportunities for wealth creation at any given historical juncture,' I orate. 'It is the constellation of unbridled desire conjunct with the potential for ultimate fulfillment.'" (p. 189)
For me the funniest sections are the ones dealing with IBM and Lou Gerstner back at the time when he was leaving their employ (around 1996): a mock interview with someone from corporate legal at IBM and an imagined interview with "Lew Firstner".
Don't expect consistency. Don't expect either a beginning or an end -- this book is all middle, as if it started with the beginning of a parenthesis, and the end of the parenthesis never appeared. It's a digression without a main story line -- a delightful digression, in ways reminiscent of Tristram Shandy, where the only overall structure is given by life itself, the author growing older in the process of the writing, in the process of sometimes getting "a glimpse of something."
Since his life in recent years has been closely connected with the Internet (he was a "pioneer" and a "visionary" in the 1993 to 1996 era when business use of the Web was new), and since the human dynamics of the Internet are what matter most for online business, his very personal account gives a pretty good picture of the impact of the Internet on business. Much of what he says -- particularly his humorous criticism of typical companies that simply didn't "get" it -- rings very true. When the Web took off ordinary people were rapidly adopting new habits new ways of working and interacting; and the old behemoths were paranoid of change.
One of the major benefits Locke provides in this book and in his others (Gonzo Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is waking people up, disrupting their expectations, not letting them get complacent. His writing is like a cup of strong coffee...
This waking up has to do with seeing the world from a different perspective, like Tolstoy telling a story from the perspective of a horse -- helping you to see the world unhampered by your usual assumptions, taking a good look at behavior that you have taken for granted; preparatory to moving ahead in a new direction.
Chris Locke in the world of business is a stranger in a strange land,
a Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, someone who looks at standard business
practice with wide-eyed amazement, questioning what often goes unquestioned,
both mocking and milking every sacred cow in sight.
Last week, an old friend contacted me wainting help in getting the web pages of the company he works for indexed by search engines. Over the last three years or so, he worked for a couple search engine companies. Now, in a new line of business, his new boss wants him to help make sure that their site shows up better on searches for certain key words. My friend wasn't sure how to do that.
I took a quick look at the site, and immediately saw that it was over-designed -- that the page design was getting in the way of search engines ever seeing and indexing the content.
Content can drive traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. But
many well-established and expensive sites are designed in such a way that
search engines cannot see the text on their pages. In such cases, simply
registering pages with search engines
accomplishes nothing.
Many sites present dynamic pages -- generating pages on-the-fly from
databases. Such pages typically have a ? in the URL,
which serves as a stop sign for search engine crawlers. These crawlers
need to avoid being trapped at dynamic sites, which
could generate huge number of pages, clogging search engine indexes
with useless content.
Other sites use javascript in such a way that very little text is visible
to search engine crawlers. Even the links to other pages at
your site may be buried, so that if a crawler finds one page at your
site, it can't follow a trail of links to discover the rest of your
site.
Other sites use frames or tables, which while not blocking crawlers,
wind up confusing search engine users. For instance, when
a frames page is indexed, each window is indexed separately, so someone
finding a match and clicking on it will be presented
with that window alone, out of context. And when pages dependent on
tables are indexed, the words are interpreted as
appearing in sequential order, left to right, instead of associated
by columns and rows. As a result, phrases get jumbled.
When companies realize that their pages are poorly represented or not
at all represented in search engine indexes, they typically
target the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. They'll
set measurable goals that are irrelevant to their true business
needs -- such as "ranking" for specific key words -- and then hire
experts who try to trick search engines into delivering those
the desired results. In the process, the "experts" may break
the rules that search engines have set up to try to keep their
indexes truly useful, and thereby get the company's pages completely
thrown out. In any case, the experts typically have their
hands tied -- they are unable to add new useful content to the site
and are unable to change the site's basic design.
Today's search engines index every word on every page. And many search
engine users enter multi-word queries. So
the more useful text you have on your pages, the more likely it is
that searchers who want your kind of information will find you.
Instead of spending time and money generating key word metatags, you
should add more and more useful content to your site.
Keywords only matter for advertising -- search engines will sell you
ad space on pages generated when certain words appear
in the query. But for actual searching, keywords are meaningless. Put
your effort into generating more good content.
Also don't waste your time with key-word position checkers -- programs,
like WebPosition Gold that tell you how your whole
site or particular pages rank for particular queries. Such programs
bang away repeatedly and automatically at search engines,
adding an enormous load to those systems and hence slowing response
time for actual users and forcing the search engines to
invest more to keep performance at acceptable levels. While the results
you get from such programs might make you look good to your boss, they
mean little or nothing in terms of how much traffic your pages are likely
to get by way of search engines. For
traffic, you need content, and lots of it.
Since search engines index every word on every page they find, the more
useful text you have at your site, the more likely your
pages will be found by people who are interested in them. This is a
random game -- the more content you have, the more dice
you throw, so the more likely you'll win.
Focus on building content, not on trying to trick search engines.
Large pages are more valuable than short ones -- large in terms of text, not graphics. Graphics are useless for search engines.
For maximum effectiveness, you need plain static HTML pages (not ASP pages), without frames or tables or java applets.
The most important text should appear at the top of the page. In fact,
the first couple of lines of text should make sense as a
description of the page.
And the HTML title (not the file name, and not the headline that appears
on the page, but rather the title in the HTML header)
should be carefully written to mention everything that is important
about the page, in very few words. That title will appear in
search engine results lists as the words that are linked to your page.
And words that appear in HTML titles are typically given
very high priority by search engines -- in other words if two pages
match a given query and one of those pages has the query
words in the HTML title, that is the page that will appear on top.
These static pages can have static graphic images (jpg or gif), if you
like. Such images will not help you with search engines, but
won't hurt you either -- so long as none of the text is embedded in
images.
So, I told my friend, forget about key words. Instead, focus on generating content -- text that is useful to your customers.
(For a full-blown treatment of these ideas, see www.samizdat.com/brandandtraffic.html)
I was running a few experiments studying three search engines for the last year. Here are some results. I hope you might find them useful.
Altavista:
Basic Submit: It took about 4 month for my website to be indexed. Only
the first page and the pages that it linked to were indexed. After that
I added a few unique test words to the title, keywords, description and
the body. None was found even after two month.
Express Submit ($29 for 6 month): Now the changes are searchable in
48 hours. In spite of the AV's claim:
Dear Valued Customer,the test words added to the keywords were indexed too, and the whole first page was indexed, not just the first paragraph, however the second layer (the pages linked from the main index page) were not indexed at all. That was a step back from the free listing. But my biggest surprise was that after my subscription expired, my site was removed from AV index completely. That means that I have to either keep paying or wait for another 4 month to have my site indexed again.
Alta Vista's express inclusion only indexes the webpage that was
submitted. It does not go into the site and index any further site unless
you decide to add them with the express inclusion service also. The words
that Alta Vista uses as the most important data on your site is your Title
tag, description tag and the first paragraph on your site. The keywords tag
is not as important as having the first couple of words within your title
tag to have relevant content to your site."
Google:
It took less that 2 month for my site to appear in their index. Just
like in the case of free listing with Altavista only the first page and
the pages it linked to were indexed. The test words could not be found
on Google even six month later. I also noticed that the guys who have free
pages on some popular sites or have links to their sites mentioned on popular
sites like ezforum.com have much higher placement than the people who have
their own domains hosted by small providers. My eBay shop has much higher
ranking that my own site.
Alltheweb:
It took about a month for them to index my site. All pages on the site,
including those that were not linked were indexed, just like in good old
times on AV. But no test words added after the indexing could be found
on Alltheweb, same as with Google.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business
success.
Reviews.
A
library for the price of a book.
This site is
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, Orange, CT 06477. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
.
<