December 2007 Archives

A comment on The Ojai Post asked about Technorati.

Technorati is a blog and media aggregator.  In other words, they are a central location for finding content, viewing trends and just keeping an eye on what people are blogging, vlogging and talking about.  One might also classify them as a Social Bookmarking service.

Over at The Ojai Post, if you have a Technorati account set up, you can click the "Bookmark" image at the bottom of any entry on the home page, and then click the Technorati link in the list of Social Bookmarking services to bookmark that particular entry in your Technorati account.  The more people do that for an entry, the more visibility it has.  The Technorati homepage aggregates news stories, blog posts and photos by attention, meaning that as web users use Technorati to bookmark stories of interest that they find around the web, it creates more visibility for that story to casual news and blog viewers.

An important way for bloggers to create visibility in the first place is to make sure that one's blog is properly registered with the multitude of blog directories out there.  Many of them will visit, or ping, the website on a regular basis, or monitor the site's RSS feed, and automatically update new content into their directory.

Following are a couple of lists, for any blogger that wants to register their blog in as many places as possible.
Top Rank: RSS - Blog Directories
Search Engine Journal - 20 Essential Blog Directories

A client has two domains pointed at the same website.  My company recently did a couple months of link building on Domain2, which should continue to add backlinks (incoming links from other sites) over the next few months.  A little comparison:

Domain1
0 backlinks - Google
11 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
27 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

Domain2
1 backlink - Google
33 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
59 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

The second domain (remember, same site, same content) is stronger in terms of its ability to rank for targeted keyword phrases.  But Google doesn't look kindly on duplicate content, and so it appears both domains are being penalized to a large degree.  A site that has been around 8 years and has a nice handful of incoming links should be (1) fully indexed and (2) competitive for some key terms if the site has even a modest bit of optimization working (which it does).

So what's the solution?  If the client were to "permanently redirect" (aka 301 redirect) Domain1 to Domain2, then all of those incoming links would be combined into one domain, and Google wouldn't see duplicate content, which should lead to a fully indexed site fairly quickly.  From there, a greater effort can be made to create new content for the site and to do some search engine optimization.

Also of note is that Google distinguishes between www.domain.com and domain.com.  Applying a 301 redirect to one of those (i.e. directing domain.com to www.domain.com) would also help consolidate incoming links and "Google juice."

Some more reading on the subject:
Using multiple domains can screw up your search engine rankings
Ethical SEO
Merging Sites (Search Engine Watch Forums)
Duplicate content in the search engines

eBay has launched MicroPlace, a for-profit low-interest microloan site, aiming to provide funding to very small third world business owners, who historically repay their loans at a 98%+ clip, according to Tracey Turner, the site's founder who sold it to eBay last year.

"What gets me out of bed in the morning is the idea that when you invest in a person it really honors them and enhances their dignity as a human being," Turner said. "Which is different than a hand out."

MicroPlace follows on the heels of Kiva, a no-interest microloan site that has exploded in popularity, particularly since such pop luminaries as Oprah and Bill Clinton have touted the site.

(article source: Yahoo! News, photo credit ncassario)

My good friend and client Jason Womack was recently named one of the "top 100 minds on personal development."  I'm not at all surprised that he is being recognized for his talents in workplace and personal productivity - Jason is dedicated, smart, fun and has a profound ability to stay absolutely present with friends, clients, seminar attendees or whoever he is engaged with.  Congrats on a well-deserved honor.

FreeRice.com is an innovative little site where visitors participate in an endless vocabulary quiz.  A project of poverty.com, FreeRice re-loads a new page, with a new advertisement, every time the user answers a new question.  That cost-per-impression-based ad revenue is used to "end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free"  through a United Nations program.  Each correct vocabulary answer nets the program 20 grains of rice.

It's not much on a per-page basis, but it adds up quickly - over 11 billion grains of rice in the first two and a half months since the site launch.

The site is a loose derivation of one of the giant viral sites on the web, HotOrNot.com.  There, users upload their photos and visitors rate a random photo on a scale of 1 to 10.  Cycling through photos, visitors generate a tremendous amount of page views, ad impressions and presumably ad revenue.  HotOrNot boasts over 13 Billion votes counted and 32,649,000 photos submitted. 

Innovative marketing ideas are by themselves generally neither "good" nor "bad".  The intention and execution, however, is the difference between a vapid, narcissistic cash cow and a philanthropic, educational socially conscious contribution to society.

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to produce 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion batteries.  A laptop that now runs on battery power for two hours could operate for 20 hours.

Daily Kos diarist jimbo92107 writes: "Even the relatively efficient Li-Ion batteries in the Tesla Roadster weigh almost a third of the car's 2400 pound total weight, and the time for a full recharge is three and a half hours. But just imagine what a full extra magnitude of battery capacity does to that equation. Suddenly, from a battery pack that would weigh around 150 pounds (same as a gas tank!) you could get 500-mile range or better."

Lead researcher Yi Cui, Stanford assistant professor of materials science and engineering, says that the nanowire batteries would require "one or two different steps, but the process can certainly be scaled up.  It's a well understood process."

One of my favorite bands in the world, and not just because I was in another band with two of them back in the day (Bryan the bass player and Bosco the ridiculously good lead guitarist with the cowboy hat).  This is "Atomic Anti-Star" off 50 Cent Haircut's Brood or Change album.

After running the one-person show OjaiBlog.com for a while, I started up The Ojai Post as a community experiment, looking to bring together a wide variety of voices from all corners of the Ojai community.  In the last twenty-two months, we have expanded from just a few authors to thirty, and this evening celebrated post #1000. 

The Ojai Post by the numbers:
22 - Months in existence
30 - Authors
2,000 - Percentage increase in traffic since month 1
8,000 - Population of the City of Ojai
16,961 - Current Average Weekly Circulation
804,727 - Total Daily Visitors
1,531,003 - Total Page Views

Way too much yellow for my taste, but Amnesty International relaunched their website, using open-source content management system Drupal.  Of particular note, the site employs language translation features, in this case, English, Spanish, French and Arabic. (hat tip Buytaert)

What is Drupal?  "Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website." 

There are a lot of content management systems (or CMS) out there, some commercial, some free.  Drupal is a powerful freely-available open-source CMS, where the "C" could also stand for community, in that it enables many people to log in, post their own media such as blogs and photos, connect as friends and generally build an online community from the bottom up.

While the software is free, it still takes a fair amount of time and/or money to get a website to do just what you want it to.  Hiring a programmer or team or "Drupal House," you might spend anywhere from $3,000 on up to $20,000+, depending on the complexity of the project.

While this personal website is running on Movable Type, which is a really great CMS that is ideal for blogging, you'll see me talk a lot about Drupal, as I have a number of projects in development right now.

A client contacted me about setting auctions for little paintings - 4x6" and 5x7" original oils.  So we put together a marketing program that allows her to quickly (under one hour per painting) set up an eBay auction, promote it on a blog and announce it to an email list.

If you're an artist, and would like to give this a try, the mechanics of it work as follows.  It will be most effective if you have a decent email list of perhaps 300 or more clients, patrons, friends and family.

A client called me today to get some thoughts on starting a new website using one of two existing domains that both point to the same site.  The existing site will be remodeled into a direct-to-client ecommerce site that does not need any search engine presence, and the new one will be the marketing site.  The domain that has more longevity, authority, incoming links and other attributes that will reinforce the search engine optimization process is the one we want to use for the marketing site.

Matt at SEObook.com (the kick-ass SEO guide) hosts a nice little domain information tool called Xinu.  You can use it to analyze your site or your competitor's sites.  It provides you information on backlinks, social bookmarks, pagerank and some other nice metrics for comparison, along with links to see where the data is coming from.  Using Xinu, we were able to identify which domain was stronger, and proceed accordingly.

So you've started a business, and need a logo.  You've got a limited budget - 400 bucks is burning a hole in your pocket.  What do you do?

There are hundreds of online custom logo design services now available.  For as little as $25 you might get an interesting logo for your business.  The way most of them work is that you receive a couple of different looks from x number of designers.  For example, $400 might get you 8 looks from 4 designers.  Many services now offer unlimited revisions.  The services also will deliver a logo in a number of different graphic formats, for use in print and on the web.

Following are a few services to check out - none of these are explicitly endorsed nor are they clients, but all of them seem capable and have some noteworthy clients.

Logoworks
The LogoLoft
LogoBee
LogoDog
Logo Design Guru