I applied for a Business Process Patent years ago because it appeared to be a way to protect a business model that larger, more aggressive competitors could co-opt. It wasn’t. I never knew why, and never got a straight answer from the patent attorneys I dealt with, but it was clear that large aggressive corporations could get business process patents and I could not.

Ten-plus years later, we see the USPTO revising how it awards such patents. We have discussions of how the changes might effect things like Google’s patent on PageRank. Man, if I ever needed a student of the law who could also explain things in the good English that we search people understand, I need one now.

They don’t pay me anything, and so I don’t participate. How much do they pay you?

I’m willing to accept discussions of how much value you get from LinkedIn, if that is what you prefer. I have little expectation that anyone can highlight much real value, although I am sure there will be a handful of “I made a connection that turned out to be worth millions to me” lottery stories and get-rich-quick dreams. in my cirlces (even extended circles), anyone I have ever asked has said pretty much the same thing - “I never saw any value from it“. Of course these days there are some who try and explain it as “it’s social media… you participate and then people know you and you get to be a guest blogger or interviewed on blogs, and your name becomes known… and well you’re part of the conversation… and well maybe you just don’t get social media eh?” I’d rather not go there but if I am forced to I stop when I get to the part about LinkedIn making a fortune and Social Media people working hard for other people for a living. I suppose there are some parallels to that awkward moment when your boss offers you a title instead of a raise. Anyway…

With LinkedIn now partnering with the New York Times, LinkedIn becomes a bigger competitor to search, and LinkedIn members become a more valuable commodity to be pimped by LinkedIn to advertisers and influence-peddlers like the NYT. Ka-ching.
When I am offered a cut, I’ll reconsider participating. In the mean time, if you want to know who my friends and associates are, who my vendors and clients are, what I studied in what school when, where I used to work and what I like to read, well, you’ll have to pony up for drinks, bribe my b.f.f., or hire a private dick, just like old skool.

I don’t have time for this, but I have time to blog it in case anyone else is noticing the same thing… it sure seems to me the new Starbucks WiFi from ATT/SBC is throttling usage at the gateway router. Open Firefox and right-click yourself a bunch of new tabs off your favorite news aggregation page, Techmeme, or your Feedreader, and watch as the connection chokes your throughput. Do it enough and you’ll have to log in again.

It was bad enough when Starbucks took the bait and switched to this new ATT/SBC service, probably drinking the we-can-do-better Kool Aide from the people who allegedly brought us illegal wiretapping. the same people who created a need for the Net Neutrality Movement.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m a paid subscriber. I pay Starbucks every month for unlimited use.

Starbucks shows promise for turning itself around, but I’m afraid the WiFi is really a deal breaker for the mobile consumers like me. I switched to wireless broadband but the groups I meet with still rely on working, accessible WiFi and that includes clients, realtors, and even (gasp) a health professional I met with recently regarding some SEO development work.

Loyalty aside, if the WiFi no-worky, nothing else matters much. If more local municipalities start requiring Starbucks to list the calories in their Banana Javachip Smoothies next to the prices, they’re going to wish they had done more to keep their caffeine-guzzling regulars in the corners. Maybe they can still save the day if they act aggressively and continue to document how much the ATT WiFi sucks, as I am doing here.

Related:
www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Hints-That-UsageBased-Billing-Is-Coming-96276 , ww.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/07/tech-crtc.html

Wordpress 2.6 keeps track of revisions, which is fine, except it does so with a new POST or PAGE ID in the post or page table every single time an edit is saved. For me that’s a total pain, as I craft preconfiguration scripts for Wordpress installs on themes which utilize “sort by” and “order by” on posts and pages. So need to turn off revisions or my ID lists get filled with garbage during setup.
To turn off page revisions and post revisions, just set WP_POST_REVISIONS to false in your wp-config, or in your wp-settings if that suits you better.

In an age when most major media outlets are providing outrage-of-the-hour content, one should not be surprised that the community built around that is also comprised of illogical, emotionally charged drivel flavored with a smattering of generally useless regurgitated trivia posing as genuine information.

Reminds me of a few online communities I know and used to like.

Attribution note: That was a comment posted by “Bunny” (no web address) in a discussion of the importance of community for media. Too bad the hosting website didn’t allow back links for commenters, because if they did I could credit the source. Since the comments belong to the commenter (and not the site), I see no need to link to the site that hosted the comment, and since they don’t allow out links, I choose not to offer one back. The article wasn’t that good anyway… this comment was the best part.

Old but great quote from Kieren McCarthy on the very strange world of IDNs, those “international” domains made up of characters not found in the typical “English” keyboard:

One of the things about researching IDNs is it makes you feel so uneducated….When you start looking at the issue at IDNs though, you realise that even your best languages skills often aren’t up to the job. I kinda like that. I love feeling stupid. Reminds you to keep learning and to never start believing you’re wise about anything, just slightly better informed than you were.

I totally agree. And I add, researching IDNs in *any* language other than the one or two you grew up with will show you quite clearly just how “clever” the domainer mind really is. We tend to take for granted how easily we “just know” that foldingchairs.com is worth more than foldingchair.com, and deckchair.com or patiochair.com are worth more than ChaiseLounge.com, yet that determination is actually non-trivial.

Hat-tip to successful domainers - you’re brilliant. And for the rest, there is still hope, right?

Someone once suggested we should be paying more attention to Amit Singhal instead of always listening to Matt Cutts. Google just published a statement from a “Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google” named Amit Singhal. Last June, Singhal said that Google made about a half-dozen adjustments to Google’s ranking algorithm every week. Now the count is up to just shy of a dozen per week, but those Google engineers have a handle on it:

We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The “keep it simple” philosophy has served us well.

So Google’s engineers can look at a SERP and they know why each page ranks where it does? Amazing. Given all of the factors, and all of the data one would need to consider to make such a determination, these guys at Google are simply that good? Remarkable.

Sorry but I don’t buy it. There are many obvious cases, and cases where select factors have overriding influence, but in most cases, in order to know why a given page ranks where it does, you must do some very careful review of evidence (content, structure, back links, history) no matter who you are. Yes they probably have great tools, but no, they don’t know why any given page ranks where it does.

You can determine for yourself if the following statement is a lie, deceptive, or just evasive via “tricky” language:

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.

Hubris and humility matter a great deal in this world. Until I learn of ex-Google engineers rockin’ the SEO world with their magical powers, I’ll maintain my cautious skepticism of the value of  Singhal’s communications.

Mobile ads work. Bottom line: mobile ads represent the cut-to-the-chase of browser-view advertising. When I surf on my mobile I am typically at most most “in a hurry” ever. I am at my least patient, and most willing to click on an ad if I believe that ad will lead me to the promised land.
Take any aspect of current online advertising, and extrapolate it to the state-of-the-art edge of performance, and you have the current/pending opportunity for mobile ads:

• I have no patience for graphic bloat: show me a big graphic on my mobile and I surf away before it can load completely. Not only don’t I have the time to wait, but I get annoyed that some designer thought it prudent to attempt to load al that bloat onto my device. Do that on a page said to be specific to mobile devices, and I’ll never come back.I’m all for you guys creating a research lab to solve the “how to serve rich media to mobile devices” but don’t run your tests on my device. Ever.

• text link ads work: short, to-the-point contextual ad links are efficient and confidence building. they help me find what I need fast.

• targeted is best: If I am surfing the Enduro page of the BMW motorcycle website on my HTC Kaiser phone, I’m not interested in ringtones for a Motorola phone. Even if I am surfing WasteSomeTimeNow.com, I am still not interested in ringtones, okay? Targeted ads are best on the wbe, but targeted ads may be the only acceptable ads for the mobile web. And if you don’t know what targeted means, hire a statistician and run tests to figure it out. The chances of me experiencing your test should be very, very small, ok? With good design, you shouldn’t have those worries.

• shortest path to endpoint is best: if you know I am interested in a local Thai restaurant, give me the phone number in the ad. Make it clickable if you need to count your conversion, but the click should help me on my way cause you should know that all I want to do is call for a reservation or check availability or get directions…. answer that… that’s your job. Get paid by the restaurant. Yeah… paid inclusion. We’re not talking about Google search engine, we’re talking mobile. Do whatever it takes to drive customers… show me testimonials, show me what Zagat says, show me the specials…. convert me. And get paid.

I think what I am saying is, this mobile web thing is commercial opportunity first, likely followed by free unlimited surfing of the World Wild Web someday, but not necessarily for the masses. It could be TheCommercialWeb. Done well the Yellow Pages could be all I need on my mobile device. If the MobileYellowPages got to the 80% mark, where they did 80% of the job well, I’d accept that I had to pay more to surf the www. Think AOL… but this time, it could work. Lock me in, put everthing you already know about effective win-win advertising to work on a closed-comunity mobile device browser, and make money. Now.

Wait much longer, and everyone and his brother will expect to be able to surf the open web at desktop speeds, on a 3 inch browser, and if they see ads in the way they will complain. I call that LiveSearchMobile Yahoo GO! a missed opportunity.

Whenever I interview or otherwise evaluate an SEO, I eventually find my way to The Flash SEO Question: Name 3 ways to SEO a flash-heavy web site for Google/Yahoo!/MSN, not including “make an HTML version”. I consider it a Fermi question for Competitive Webmasters.

Now Google has formally announced it is indexing the contents of Flash web sites. The Official Google blog announced it as an academic achievement (Google learns to crawl Flash). The Google Webmaster blog practically denies ever having been unable to properly handle flash, with it’s version Improved Flash Indexing. Adobe attempts to take credit with “Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web“, even though it seems to admit what it seems to have always vehemently denied in the past - that Flash websites were failures because people couldn’t find them.

The accurate reality? Google has been struggling to understand Flash for years, has read and indexed the readable text portion of Flash files for quite some time. Last year Google started exploring Adobe’s Flash SDK for better understanding of the meaning of Flash content. Good SEO consultants have devised ways of helping Google understand Flash web pages for years as well, using various techniques beyond the obvious “create an accessible version for search engines”. Some of those methods work very well. Others are risky, because they permit Google to classify them and whenever Google classifies something, it suffers in the risk/reward department.

So why does this “news” scare me as an SEO consultant? A few reasons:

Google says it will not find nor index Flash that is loaded by “certain” javascript which it does not read nor follow. This statement maybe a lead in for future /enhanced discrimination against js loaders, which have already received a fair share of PR attention since they are effective at cloaking Flash content and thus are ripe for abuse by unscrupulous competitive web publishers. It is true that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, but it is also true that Google highly prefers algorithmic approaches to content censorship over anything more cognitively challenging. Hence they are all too often happy to pass on bunches of perfectly good apples in order to avoid one bad one or even the risk of a bad one. I’d love to debate the importance of naturally ocurring acetylsalysilic acid with Google’s engineers, but I doubt they have the patience for my analogy. The truth is that we use js loaders because they are a reliable means of loading Flash in all browsers, under webmaster-controlled conditions. Google’s statement that it “might” not folow “certain” js is all a gray cloud of uncertainty. We can’t trust Google if we don’t know what it is doing. We shouldn’t let Google dictate web technologies to protect Google unilaterally. Let’s not let that fact get lost in the F.U.D. of SEO vs. Google.

Google Gospel Spreads Fast in Web Land. I can already hear the gears of misinformation turning as designers and even so-called SEOs prepare to tell clients “Flash is okay now, Google indexes it“. Truth is Google is trying to understand it, which is more important than indexing. This brings a new frontier to SEO for Flash; a frontier of research that has very little to do with indexing of the content within existing Flash files or the content in Flash files built the traditional way.

SEO for Flash just got more expensive, because it got more sophisticated. Flash websites have always been expensive because they look good and work poorly. Clients of Flash web sites think the site is all included - looks good and self contained within the Flash. But for web sites that demand a search presence for marketing purposes, the up-front cost of a Flash web site is a small fraction of the total cost of making a Flash website perform as intended on the web. Flash-based navigation has never worked well, unless heavily supported by program logic. Where SEO for Flash used to be limited to a reasonable set of success metrics, we now have an opportunity to help Google much more as it seeks to understand what the Flash content means for the user. Flash now plays an important semantic role, where it used to be ancillary. The first thing smart SEOs need to do now is block Google from indexing Flash, simply because we don’t control Google’s interpretation of the meaning of Flash content. I don’t think that is what Adobe intended.

It is early yet, but someday Google will understand a Flash-based mortgage calculator is just that… and grant it relevance accordingly. Until then, SEO for Flash is once again a competitive arena in need of research and SEO attention. Until that hard work has been done, I’m sending Flash back down to the minors for basic training and evaluation. If you have your own, add them in the comments. I’d love to hear your meaningful thoughts on the subject.

Google desperately wants you all to create unique, original content. It needs the ad real estate, but perhaps even more it needs the continuous expansion of creative content to feed the growth of the ad business. Everything we’ve seen out of Google for over a year reflects the Goog’s serious commitment to advertising over search. About a year or so ago, from my own perspective, the sensibilities shifted to a more overt recognition that it was ad space, not accuracy, that mattered most to Google search. Trust, freshness, historical significance.. all of these things mattered most to advertising. Even as search industry TalkingHeads debated how these “signals of quality” led to better SERPs, we repeatedly saw how they directly led to increased ad revenue to Google not as much through more ad impressions as through more commitment from advertisers to the Google platform.

Cloak it any way you like, but the message was less fraudulent clicks, more lock-in of users about which we know more than ever. So even if stalwart historical journalsitic sources generated reams of spam pages deep within their domains, it was “quality” and it ranked because it was good for “economic expansion”. An advertiser branded with the idea that The Denver Post was a quality advertising avenue back in the day, would not object to a large presence of ads on the online Denver Post, even if they were mostly spam pages.

The cloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal and greedy it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us.

Now we see Google sponsoring development of unique, creative content, Hollywood style with the signing on of the Family Guy guy Seth MacFarlane. Expect to see search talking heads proclaim Google is able to be television if it wants, Google is going after Hollywood when it’s ready, Google is replacing newspapers with classified ads and now cartooning, blah blah blah. But the truth is, Google needs unique creative content and knows how to position it. This is a comic widget. Google knows that Widgets work. Facebook works. LinkedIn works. Dilbert works. Copyright is a problem, webmasters who want to fight over their nickels are too much work given the big picture of creative content driving the expansion of the web, and perhaps most seriously… anyone can build a search engine.

I wrote about this last week… you only own what you control. Google may have grown as a robber baron, but it intends to stick around as the industry matures, and apparently this is a good time to test the waters of sponsored creative content before inflation kicks in. Even the best companies suffer when their activities fuel inflationary fires, and this will fuel inflation. Watch how rich this Guy gets. If you think giving away free CDs hurts the recording industry, wait until Google decides to sponsor music videos. Let’s just hope Google has better taste than those conservative families that bought up all of the FM radio stations back in the eighties. I still can’t believe they play 4o year old “classic rock” all day long on so many FM radio stations around the country even today…with ads of course.

Yahoo has acknowledged the importance of TheCloud, and obviously Google knows TheCloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. Web publishing (separate from content creation) has gone from the profit side of the enterprise to the expense side very, very quickly. More quickly than IT, even. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us. Until then, what choice do we have?

I can’t stand to think of the future in the SEO world, where we will no doubt see a new generation of poets and copywriters proclaiming that SEO is simply “unique creative content” but at least they have one aspect of that correct. Content means a helluvalot to Google. In fact, I bet in many cases your content means more to Google than it does to you. Think about that… one man gathers what another man spills.