Category: internet

• internet

  Microformats on Technorati

  04.03.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: blogosphere, microformats, privacy, technorati

  Just a quick post.

  Technorati (here my Technorati Profile) is implementing Microformats.

  And what’s that? Well, it’s a way to embed collectable data within webpages using just classes and proper rel properties. That way, bots can identify easily your tags, profile or license and offer properly classified searches and directories.

  There’s, of course, the usual trick in it. Microformats beta specification allows for creating profile cards with all sorts of personal data. You know, there will be always something intrinsically wrong with publishing your telephone number in a publicly accessible, highly bot-friendly format.

• internet

  The blogosphere is dead, long live the blogosphere

  04.03.08 | Discuss ( 1 ) | Topics: advertising, blogosphere, social networks

  No, really, I’m just anticipating the events. Someday, somewhere, a big blog will suddenly crash, and some ‘smart’ dude will say: “this day the blogosphere died”. Though blogs will still continue to exist, whatever one meant for “blogsphere” won’t be there anymore.

  But then, what if it had happened already? Three years ago, when I thought “blogosphere” I thought, because it was that way, about a decentralized heavily interlinked community of self-aware individuals —and sorry for the IT slang. Did something change radically either on concept or scale in these last three years?

  Yes. Advertising. And blogs as low quality-high spread commercial platforms.

  Advertising networks, and therefore the Search Engine Circus competition, has moved the network from the blog-to-blog sphere to the blog-to-ads-network sphere, and replaced the core of the interlinking from the «lets form a super-cool bloggers microsphere» to «lets form a cartel to powergame the Google-slot machine». But the worst part of the link-rush fever, as always, is being paid by the small mimicking guys lured by the big promises. The once natural and balanced ecosystem of blog links is now spammed to death by the massive creation of artificial relations between blogs. You don’t know anymore if something is being referred because it’s worth it, or because the blogger wants to place some keywords, or is being paid for linking —which is not evil by itself—, and pretending that it is his sincere personal tastes —which is blatantly shameless. And we cannot forget, too, that the bulk of the chatty-sociable people has moved away of regular blogs to the meat-market of look-at-me web profiles, so they are not greasing anymore the interstices of the read-what-I-think sphere.

  So, is the blogosphere of the old good days dead already? Do we bloggers live in tiny islands in the after global-web-warming apocalypse? Or is that still waiting to happen?

• internet

  Wordpress: Comments in Reverse Order

  03.11.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: blogging, comments, wordpress

  News sources often show user comments in reverse order, with newest comments first. That’s useful when comments aren’t usually threaded or there’s a lot of them.

  For Wordpress, it needs either a plugin or some hacking. The manual tweak is quite simple. Just replace in comments.php this:

  foreach ($comments as $comment) :

  for this:

  foreach (array_reverse($comments) as $comment) :

  There’s more info in the Wordpress support forum.

• internet

  Google Analytics Data Sharing

  03.06.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: google, google analytics

  Today I found a new notice in my statistics page: Google™ is asking users of Analytics to allow sharing their data so they can mashup it into comparative and sectorial statistics. Though I generally trust Google’s will to not to be evil, it seems they aren’t totally immune to falling into small tricks to raise the system to a meaningful results level faster, like activating the sharing by default —or so said the advice text—, and adding only an Accept button, while the option to decline is in a small text link, probably in order to trigger the accept-and-forget effect.

  Anyway, the new options seem reasonablely cool for business sites. From the Google Analytics Blog:

  Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. […]

  Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we’re also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. […]

  You can also elect to share your data with other Google services. This setting will allow us to provide you with additional advanced new features. […]

  The question is: do I want to share my data? I don’t exactly own a business site and, like many people out there, I’m certainly not «powergaming» in the net race to turn innocent bypassers into customers. So, really, the new Analytics toy ain’t helping me a lot aside from giving me a new reason for stat-checking procrastination. On the other hand, I’m not a lawyer and I cannot bother checking how this fits in the Privacy Policy and if it opens any backdoor.

  So, if you are facing the same doubt, maybe you’ll want to do the same I did: think ‘not now’ and wait. It’s the same reason I have for not installing new Ubuntu distros as soon as they are released. The hardcore users that have more to gain from going first will find the issues and within a month or two we the backmarkers will be able to join —or not— safely and better informed. It’s not really like the Google guys are gonna feel emotionally hurt because I don’t share my micro-stats…

• internet

  Geographic Target in Google Webmasters (also, PR update)

  02.28.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: google, google webmasters, pagerank

  It seems that the page ranks are being updated heavily now.

  Meanwhile, I’m testing the recent geographic location tool at Google Webmasters to see how it impacts this site. It and its incoming links are mostly Spanish but it is hosted in the US (Dreamhost) with a .com domain, so during the last six months it has been in sort of a net limbo. Later I may try switching to US and looking how it impacts the incoming visits to the English contents.

• internet

  Wordpress: Google-friendly permalinks

  02.25.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: blogging, google, seo, web design, wordpress

  As Wordpress user, did you ever pay attention to that «Post Slug» box in the sidebar of the new/edit post page? It’s there for a good reason. If you are using the cute permalinks that use the post title as part of the URL, chances are you are letting it pick sometimes more keywords than Google will be really happy about. An interview with the Google guy Matt Cutts makes it clear: if your permalink is too wordy, it will start to look not very specific and, therefore, each keyword in it will hold less than nominal weight for search results. That’s why you edit the post slug before letting it go on air.

  See this same post. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the title, it uses only four meaningful words. But, if I was using the category as a keyword in the post permalink, the word Wordpress would appear duplicated. That would start to look dangerously spammy.

  It’s not just that. Even if I’m talking about how this issue is fixed for Wordpress, the post content is useful for anyone using «google-friendly permalinks» as a query. They may figure how to use this knowledge for their own Content Management System. So, even though I am a nice fellow that blogs for the experience and not to pay bills, I should think this post can help more people if the word Wordpress is removed from the url. After all, it’s already in the page title, the post header, and several times in the body text. If Mr. Google —that octopus dude we know they hide in a box classifying the Internet all day long— really thinks it’s an important keyword, he’s not really going to miss it.

  But, in my opinion, the real issue is the failure of purpose. Did you ever hear this style of permalinks described as «pretty»? Well, when they clutter the URL box, look noisy and, for raw URL links, become div width hostile, they aren’t pretty no more. That’s the third and most important reason to edit it. There’s nice but lazy people out there. They may copy your permalink, paste it and go, and since they are referring you, you don’t want to make their blogs and forums look ugly.

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