Between Stations » social media

Web 2.0 Idea That Screams ‘Uh-Oh’

Julie — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:51:23 +0000

The Romney campaign is doing an advertising mash-up contest in partnership with some online software people and Yahoo.

The chirpy press release assumes that this will be done by supporters. I can’t quite tell if there’s going to be full editorial review of submissions before they post to the site. If not, this just screams ‘bad idea.’ It screams it as loudly and screechily as an auditorium full of tween girls watching the dreamy boy band of the month. Given the high negative ratings, uh, enjoyed, by Romney in polls, this has the potential to be either a big ouch or a big editorial time suck for some poor intern.

Hazards of Web 2.0

Julie — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:04:02 +0000

The greatest hazard of Web 2.0 is a failure to be genuine.

Today’s failure to be surprised moment is that WalMart’s back-to-school foray onto Facebook didn’t ’start a conversation’ on dorm decor. It got them slammed for labor practices. Mind you, they’re claiming future roomies are using the site to coordinate, but it just doesn’t look that way on the surface.

WalMart’s past ’social’ experiments have been a bit lackluster in actual result.

The real takeaways on this are first, it’s risky to be Web 2.0 when you have a lot of bad PR to start with. Second, you can’t change the conversation just by trying to participate. Web 2.0 actions need to be compatible with who you are, and recognize who others think you are. Sure, you can use Web 2.0 to ‘move’ who you are to who you want to be, but depending on where you start… it will take a while.

Social Media is Getting Out of Hand

Julie — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:58:37 +0000

Sure, we all know Digg. Search marketers have Sphinn to play with.

But every niche is getting their own social media site. A cyclist? Become one of the three people apparently using cyclecluster.com! I’m sure there’s something for every niche either in progress, or coming.

How long can search engines pretend this stuff is relevant? It’s a lot like the proliferation of ‘SEO Friendly Directories!’ in my mind.

I know that Squidoo finally got a bit of a spam-slap. I sort of hope to see the same with a lot of social media. I’m having bad flashbacks to UseNet back when AOL opened up access to the real Internet, and not just their locked-up version of things, when something that didn’t suck rapidly began to suck.

Political Search

Julie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:26 +0000

Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Self-Consciousness & SEO

Julie — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 01:58:44 +0000

…or, “Just use the internet to do illegal downloads and porn like the rest of us,” says my pal Jawa.

Being an SEO means being self-conscious about your own actions and the actions of others on the Internet. At least it does for me, possibly because it’s semi-universal, or possibly because I am a freak with a degree in literature and in navel-gazing fiction writing.

A friend posts to their personal blog about the ‘worst online shopping experience ever’ and links the offending retailer? I comment and explain how to no-follow — because even if you go for negative anchor text, there’s still some link equity to it for the site targeted.

I like a book, or a restaurant, or buy a shiny new bike part? Well, I can post about it and no-follow, or post about it and not link it because I like it, but not in THAT way, kind of like being in junior high and liking my square dance partner but not like boyfriend-like, just in that ok-as-a-square-dance-partner and this-phys-ed-unit-is-stupid way.

My mom reads an online review? I do a text analysis to determine if it’s real or totally bogus, written by the owner, and then I tell her about inherent bias in user-supplied reviews.

A friend posts a picture of their cat? I suggest taking it to a LOLCat generator, or using the video feature on their camera phone to help further pollute the electrons of the universe with more grainy video/image of pets.

My bike club has web site hosting problems? I look at the domain headers and sigh a lot.

Life would sure be simpler if I did something sane for a living, like garbage collection.

Reliability of Online Reviews

Julie — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:44:05 +0000

This one’s for the Funk King of Minneapolis, Paul Jahn.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating.

The article is pretty good, so I won’t rehash it here. One thing that notably isn’t mentioned is ‘business owners posting wretchedly fake reviews in some mad faux-SEO urge.’ I’ve seen some awful, awful fake reviews — no real human writes like these reviews, or would say these things about a business such as that reviewed.

The visual range depictions discussed in this article won’t do much about those written reviews, although they’ll show the bias in the starred reviews a little more strongly. On the other hand, Paul and I have discussed that if a reasonable person found these fake reviews, they’d make a sane reader less likely to go to a business. Even though there’s massive response bias in even real reviews, at least they’re real.

Out at SMX

Julie — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:09:41 +0000

I’m at SMX in Seattle this week, experiencing the magic of the Seattle weather and the oddities of my laptop’s battery. A few things I will expound on during my free time later:

why this conference’s food is currently winning the ‘conference prize’ for the recent past, excepting that of the MIMA Summit
Supplemental index
Duplicate content
Kneeling down to speak to Vanessa Fox
The complete weirdness of spending my weekend in a rustic northwoods cabin in Minnesota, followed by a stay in a faux-rustic Seattle hotel with ‘modern cabin’ themed furniture.

I am told that, at home, my little kitten is sad and lonely and is sleeping on my robe, as I now haven’t spent a night at home since Thursday.

Paul Jahn: Still Funk King of Minneapolis

Julie — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:13:54 +0000

This post is explicitly in honor of, and the fault of, Paul Jahn, Funk King of Minneapolis.

Paul says he hates me. I’m ok with that!

New Prominence for Google Notebook?

Julie — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:51:15 +0000

Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but when did Google start showing ‘Note This?’ links in search results for signed-in users?

I know Notebook launched in April 2006, but I can’t recall having seen this show up like this prior to now:

Is this another collaborative filter-Web 2.0-data collection manuever? Or is it just a ‘hey, no one knows this exists?’ moment? And why can’t I find people saying anything about this?

Need more coffee now.

Nostalgia: Web 2.0 is the Old Web

Julie — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:46:44 +0000

Every so often, I get nostalgic for Days Of Olde(tm) and the early days of the Web. Those magical days when the Web was all Webrings (invariably of people’s D-n-D characters), lists of CDs, and pictures of people’s cats. On GeoCities.

Then I consider several things:

In 1996, I wanted to move from Chicago to Minneapolis. I spent Mondays at the Borders on North Michigan reading the Sunday Star-Tribune for job ads. These days, it’s easy to be totally online with hunting.
Webrings DID invariably include people’s gaming characters.
The blink tag. Holy moly. I had to clean up instances of it even in 2000 when I was working on a major corporate portal. Blink was NEVER a good idea.
MySpace and LiveJournal are fundamentally GeoCities 2.0. You can find lots of “I’m listening to…” things (lists of CDs!) and pictures of people’s cats

Sometimes the whole notion of Web 2.0 cracks me up because in some ways, all Web 2.0 represents is a throwback to people making bizarrely-colored pages on GeoCities. This time, though, it comes with the phat broadband connection to allow for massive, poorly sized images of people’s cats. The inbound link algorithim really dates from something like a topical Webring, which explains why it’s so poorly suited to e-commerce. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about democratization of content — taking back control of the Web from corporations and the corporate shills (like myself) who co-opted it for commerce.

It will be interesting to see where business attempts to ‘use’ Web 2.0 go, and what some of this action means for the traditional link model. It certainly changes the process of SEO to be more about building trust. And possibly about providing more pictures of one’s cats: