Out with the old, in with the new
September 4, 2010
It’s time for 23musings.com to die (in its current form). I won’t be updating this blog anymore as I have a new home on the web at www.steve-e.co.uk which includes a blog www.steve-e.co.uk/blog.
I will be moving over some of the more popular posts from here (and deleting them off 23Musings. Sadly WordPress.com doesn’t offer a redirection option.
Thanks for reading 23musings over the years, I hope you’ll read my musings over on my new site.
Dear Rupert Murdoch… A suggestion
December 2, 2009
So, you’re not happy with search engines (Google in particular) for exposing your content to an audience who aren’t paying for it. You don’t like the way they include snippets in their search results of your stories and you definitely don’t like them referring visitors to your websites (unless they are paying customers). You seem aggravated with aggregation and less than happy about linking. So here’s a suggestion for you.
Google themselves (yep those folks you keep moaning about) have kindly provided a really easy way for you to get your content out of their search index, and you can just block the news search crawler if you want now too! It couldn’t be easier. Let’s take a fictional website www.rupert4google.com. In the very first directory where the website files are stored (the root) you’ll find a text file called robots.txt (so that file lives at www.rupert4google.com/robots.txt). All you need to do is find that file, open it up in Notepad (or a text editor of your choosing), and add the two lines of text below to it. Save it and your Google problems are over (if this all proves a bit tricky, get one of your lovely web developers to help you (while you’re at it why not ask them if they think it’s a good idea too?).
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Job done, give it a couple of weeks and none of your pages will be in Googles index anymore. That troublesome traffic will be no more. Satisfied?
Now come on, thats not the answer is it? Here’s an idea for you. Why not devote your time, energies, finances and skilled personnel into coming up with a new model to make all this free traffic and advertising work for you? Rather than moan about it, find a way to make it work for you. It’s about time someone made some advances in the world of online display advertising and I’d have thought that with all your web properties you’d be just the man/organisation to do so. The possibilities are endless, start to tap into the rich data you can glean from the tracks your web visitors leave each time they visit. Learn from it, find ways to encourage repeat visitors and new channels to monetise them through. Of course you may want to reconsider my earlier recommendation first, otherwise you won’t have enough traffic to benefit from any improvement to your advertising and other revenue streams.
If you can design experiences that encourage visitors to become loyal users of your content maybe you could even sell them something? Maybe (just maybe) if you make your sites engaging enough some might even subscribe! There are so many ways you could make more revenue from so much traffic. I’ll be available in July 2010 to help if you haven’t worked it out by that time…
What are you going to do? Just block the traffic, alienate potentially loyal users and try and get people to pay for your content? Or move forwards proactively, embrace the fact you get so much traffic to your sites (it’s a good thing, honest) and work out a really viable model to monetise it properly.
Personally, I’d go with the latter (with so many pages, so much content and so much traffic you have endless possibilities). The former just strikes me as the reactionary moves of an industry with so much promise in the digital world that gives off an impression of being on it’s last legs.
Why you (as a brand) need a strong and effective online presence
November 10, 2009
I’m always amazed by the way some brands and even some whole industries still seem to ignore the web as a viable channel for communication, content, sales, PR or even advertising. What does it take to persuade them that they can’t just ignore the online medium and at the very least they need to take steps to engage with their online audience (because they’ll have an online audience even if they haven’t got a website)? So I like to highlight statistics that will help to make this clear. The three charts below are from FEED: The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report. It’s a great report produced by a great agency and in my opinion these stats are very persuasive!
So, how a user experiences your brand online can have positive or negative bearings on how they feel about you. This is going on even if you don’t have a website, don’t do social media or don’t actively do any online PR or advertising. Your potential customers are still having experiences that are linked to your brand in their own conversations and online journey whether you are actively involved or not. Wouldn’t it be better to establish your own presence so you can increase the positive sentiment and work to address the negative?
Now the above is a powerful chart! If 97% of web users could have their purchase decisions positively (or negatively) influenced by your online presence doesn’t that make it something worth investing in?
Again, the above is hugely powerful. If an online experience can turn someone into a new customer then why aren’t you working your digital assets to your advantage?
As I said I aim this at those industries and brands who seem to lag behind the adoption curve when it comes to the web (I’m thinking of a lot of the financial services industry, a surprising amount of the FMCG sector and some service industries). The general message here is that you have a lot to gain by improving your presence on the internet, making it easy to interact with, useful to those you’re trying to attract and engaging so people want to interact.
Suggest you read the report which is available online here.
Link madness; news will eat itself through poor UX
November 3, 2009
What’s that? Traditional news media is having a tough time? So everyone keeps saying and yet still (and this happens often) information emerges which seems to demonstrate that they are trying as hard as they can to destroy themselves with very little help from anyone else.
The main problem facing the news media industry right now is how to keep their coffers full when their advertising revenue has slipped considerably and print circulation has dropped. So you’d think that they’d be trying to engage users, keep them on their websites for as long as they can to get as many eyeballs (and clicks) on their adverts as possible? So that would mean having a site which is heavily user centric, easy to use, engaging and provides a great experience that makes people want to stick around, right?
Wrong I’m afraid. This article from the Guardian demonstrates just how broken the news industries approach to the online experience is. It seems that news websites are guilty of something the big portals used to suffer from (going back 7 or 8 years here and thinking of Yahoo, Excite and Lycos in particular), linkitis (an overwhelming urge to shoe-horn as many self-referencing links as possible into your homepage). News sites average 450 links on their homepage and some have as many as 5,447 words (The Daily Mail) on this single page. The worst offender it seems in the Mirror which has 94% of the total words on its homepage (1,182) as part of a link. That’s utterly ridiculous!
That’s an astounding amount of linkage. I have no idea how humans are supposed to comprehend or make use of that level of information overload. Visually it looks a mess, hierarchically it makes little sense and usability wise it’s plain madness. How on earth is a user supposed to find what they are looking for in that maze of links and references? Perhaps they’re not. Maybe the people who run these websites believe that by populating pages with self-referential (internal) links they are helping entice (trick) users into clicking just one more page and thus increasing the chances of getting more ad revenue. The value to a user of some of these links is questionable.
Roll on engagement ads. The sooner we get away from page-view and click metrics and start to make publishers accept being paid on engagement (or at least more meaningful metrics) the sooner these sites will have to address their user experience and stop practices such as this. Swamping a page with links helps nobody. It lowers engagement in your site, dilutes traffic down routes you maybe don’t even really want them to go, cheapens your content and destroys the user experience. Stop eating yourself news and start thinking about your users and what they might actually want! Otherwise you’re going to end up losing more of those valuable eyeballs as your users increasingly prefer consuming news through other methods (readers, desktop apps, social networks).
It will be a sad day tomorrow as GeoCities is closed down for good by Yahoo. Thousands of websites will disappear offline tomorrow and along with them all the links pointing to other sites. Imagine if your website had more than 50% of its incoming links coming from GeoCities. Is your Page Rank going to suffer in the coming days once those links no longer exist? Quite possibly!
It’s difficult for anyone to know whether this will have any impact on their search rankings. I’ve measured over a hundred links to one of my sites from different GeoCities sites so I’ll be keeping an eye on it and hoping those site owners move their pages elsewhere. Of course, many GeoCities sites won’t be resurrected elsewhere as they are often dead and haven’t been updated in ages so from tomorrow those links are gone. What impact all this will have on SEO and search engine rankings will play out over the coming weeks as Google and co. re-index sites and take into account the missing links.
More importantly than any inbound links though is the fact that a piece of internet history is dying. Jeremy Keith sums it up well so I suggest you read his post on the subject.
OMG! The Nielsen Families will now be measuring the internet
October 22, 2009
The Nielsen Families. A group of selected households (mostly in New England I believe) who are used by Nielsen (the rating’s folk) to give a picture of what the U.S. nation watches on television. Long thought to be a less than random selection of households, some would say a chosen few, the watching habits of these families influences what TV programmes get made, where the advertising dollars get spent and what series gets a second run. Now Nielsen have announced (via Media Post) their intention to start monitoring the same families internet usage. They want to provide a single source measurement of television viewing across both traditional TV and online media which makes sense.
What they watch isn’t so interesting to me. I’d rather hear about how their watching habits differ between TV and online, whether the knowledge that their internet was now being monitored changed their habits (maybe moving them to watch more TV on the web and thus biasing Nielsen’s data) or whether it’s the younger or older viewer who likes to watch TV online. That kind of demographic data on user behavior is much more interesting than what soap opera they watch… Still at least they aren’t measuring their internet usage and they still do that at ISP level where you get broader, more representative results (of course depending on the ISP’s selected), at least I hope they aren’t.
Surely there must be a better way to measure television consumption in these digital days? Can’t they just measure TV through cable, digital and satellite channels at the provider end thus giving them a totally unbiased (depending on the provider) view of a large segment of the population’s television viewing? If decisions on quality/popularity of programming, who to place adverts with and who deserves a second series are being made by TV execs then surely the opinion of 600 homes in New England is not representative enough?
The best, most salient opinion piece on the Nielsen Families comes from one of my favourite authors Robert Anton Wilson have a read of page 59/60 below (just search for Nielsen in the Scribd doc) just for jokes 
Sophisticated blog spam – why bother?
October 21, 2009
I’ve noticed I’m getting an increasing amount of spam comments on this blog that looks almost handwritten (might even be) and is much more difficult to spot than spam of the traditional format. However, it’s still identifiable as the kind of comment that either doesn’t belong, has been hand crafted to try to trick you or is just plain lazy. What’s the point?
Here’s a prime example with my comments in red:
Hi Patrick, (my name’s not Patrick, it clearly says Steve on the sidebar)
Right on target with this post. Customer service/care will always be about hearing the customer, delivering, and learning for continuous growth. Doesn’t matter what size business — even the smallest setup — if you have an online presence it must be a good one! (A relevant comment to the post).
Nice to hear from you again. I am on Twitter as (katenasser). (I don’t know you and you even think my names Patrick). Check out my video on my website for humorous and inspirational customer servie talk. (What? Customer servie? Humorous video?)
All the best from this customer service fanatic… Kate.
I mean, thanks for the comment Kate, but at the least get my name right and it would be nice if you didn’t suppose to know me.
Kate titles her comment as ‘Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach’ and has an authentic looking web presence here katenasser.com but is she just looking for an inbound link and some free publicity? Where’s the value in her comment?
So come on Kate Nasser, get in touch and tell me why I should approve your comment (and why you think my name’s Patrick)?
When it comes to search results do you want relevance or trust?
October 20, 2009
Just came across an interesting post by Bill Slawski on the subject of a patent granted to Google last week titled ‘Search result ranking based on trust‘. There’s been a lot of talk about trustworthiness being the next big factor to be considered in search engine algorithms but it makes me wonder how useful it would be in reality.
When I use Google to search for something what I’m really looking for is the most relevant result I can find which will answer my query. To be honest, I often couldn’t care less how much I trust the source as long as it’s reputable (maybe rep is a better factor?).
Where I can see a trust (or rep) factor being useful is with weeding out spam search results who have got themselves a really good natural search ranking. Beyond that I’m not convinced it’s required for normal web search (except perhaps as an option or it would be useful in a search through social streams like Twitter, but here I’m referring to the kind of search you do through www.google.com).
You see, to some extent trust is in the eye of the beholder and a very difficult thing to turn into a scientific algorithm. A source could be trustworthy to one person and not at all to another depending on many factors. So to really put an accurate trust rating on web pages is going to be extremely difficult (I think).
Would Google’s time be better spent working on relevancy ranking and using trust sparingly as a factor to filter out spam results? Or do you think trust has a bigger place in the future of search algorithms (maybe trust/rep on news/blog search)? Interested to hear your thoughts…
