WebConnoisseur

I attended my first Jane and Robot event on June 25th at the office of Ignition Partners. As you might suspect, a search event geared towards developers & designers attracts your regular assortment of web geeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the audience was dissapointed that they never got to lay eyes on Jane, nor meet the Robot.

Jeff Pollard gave a rapid talk on AJAX SEO pitfalls. Though it was nothing new to me, the audience seemed to receive it well - Jeff’s really knows his stuff. What I was most surprised by was the number of people I hadn’t met before and the Q&A afterwards. People asked very pointed questions like: “Does PPC affect your organic rankings” and “if we are already crawled well, why should we use sitemaps?”

I really appreciate Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia volunteering their time to educate developers on white-hat SEO and creating an opportunity for SEOs to meet up from time-to-time. Jane and Robot is a service that should be embraced and promoted by those in the search industry.

Last year, I gave out some SMX attendee tips which still apply to the 2nd installment this year.

Outside of those tips, this year I recommend using the SMX Connect service by Crowdvine to learn about and pre-set up the people you want to meet. Unfortunately, not everyone is using it, so I also recommend doing what I did last year and am doing with this post: write about SMX Advanced & link to others who are writing about attending as well. I meet some great people last time who I am still closely connected with after doing so.

Other’s excited about attending SMX Advanced whom I don’t believe I’ve met yet:

• Justin Davy
• Sean McMahon
• Dana Larson
• Eric Lander

I finally made my first visit to Google Kirkland a couple days ago for a study. I’ve been to Google’s HQ several times, but had never visited the local campus. Well, I suppose it isn’t really a campus - I’d call it a shared office building with lots of cool Google logo art and not much else.

I didn’t get to tour the entire building, but spent some time in the lobby & in the R&D areas. In the lobby, they were playing what I assumed to be the rolling search ticker I’ve seen at their parties on the wall, but the projector was much too weak to discern the text, so I it seemed like a waste. I imagine the janitors enjoy it when the lights are off. Overall, the space was unimpressive for Google, but I’m sure the new Google Kirkland campus will rock.

The one unintentional piece of humor I discovered was when I was getting my badge. They have you sit down and type in your info, then choose between visitor types:

• Normal
• Government

I joked that I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive.

Photo credit: PRWeaver Blog

We’ve all seen Google change their logo in recognition of holidays, but today marks the most dramatic change I’ve ever seen Google make to their homepage. Take a look at this screenshot (yes, this was Google’s actual homepage on March 29th):

Turns out it was a gesture to raise awareness for Earth Hour - a worldwide conservation effort where everyone turns off their lights at 8pm to 9pm on March 29th. Not sure if it will save much energy, though it probably serves as a visual indicator of those participating (having people turn off their TVs or computers from 8-9pm would probably conserve more energy).

I find the first paragraph comical because it is almost a direct stab at Blackle.com (a customized black version of Google which claims to have saved 536,046.240 Watt hours):

“[in regards to the one-day only black version of Google]… As to why we don’t do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.”

Gotta love how Google tries to be different: once Google went black, it chose to go back.

It appears that Digg is finally closer to being purchased. The leading candidates are Google and Microsoft. While the final owner won’t be known for probably another month, the future of Digg is known:

If Google buys Digg, it will become Gigg.

Rather than trusting pesky humans to digg news stories, Google will implement an algorithm developed by a team of PhDs based on previous digg analytics data. The new algorithm will look something like this:

if (headline ((pro-Microsoft, -50, anti-Microsoft, +50) (“Apple”, +100) (any game title, +35)) + if (content contains (Scantily clad women, +85, -25) (“Hack”, +35, -5) (displays ads, -20)…

If Microsoft buys Digg, it will quickly become Dugg.

Dugg will be the result of the dust that quickly develops on Digg as it suddenly becomes uncool. To make matters worse, Microsoft will implement content restrictions like no Microsoft bashing, no discussions of Apple or Google, and all gaming diggs must be Microsoft-created games only. Within weeks, Dugg will be the wayback machine of the social news site once known as Digg.

Ask will build a competing product to Microsoft Dugg called “Doug” to add a human element to the archive, but you will have to search news stories with questions like, “What male celebrity is a little bitch?”

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be speaking at Searchfest on Monday. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be around for pre & post event networking because my wife is due March 21st, so I’ll be keeping the trip as short as possible.

For those attending, do remember to set your clock forward this weekend or you’ll be an hour late to everything!

For those thinking about attending, I’ve been given a speaker discount that I can pass along to your for $40 off the listed price: Searchfest signup (use discount code: SEMBD)

See you there!

I started playing around with the Google Sites which are definitely part of the Google Apps product suite. I suspect most individual non-corporate wiki creators will quickly be turned off by being forced to provide business information like # of employees (with 10 being the minimum example), business phone #, etc.

As I was reading through Google Sites terms and conditions, I noticed that I wouldn’t be allowed to write about the terms and conditions again as part of the agreement (so I am writing now before I even think about signing up):

“Customer agrees not to issue any public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement without Google’s prior written approval.”

I’m not a big fan of reading terms and conditions, but I decided to read through them and have a feeling these will be deal breakers for many of the potential Google Sites corporate customers:

“3.2.2 Disclaimer Regarding Additional Content. Additional Content may be provided by third parties and may be modified or removed by Google at any time, including at the request of those third parties. Third party providers of Additional Content may include financial exchanges and may be delayed as specified by such financial exchanges or Google’s data providers…Customer agrees not to copy, modify, reformat, download, store, reproduce, reprocess or redistribute any data or information from the Additional Content or use any such data or information in a commercial enterprise without obtaining prior written consent. A broker or financial representative should be consulted to verify pricing before executing any trade. Either Google or its third party data or content providers have exclusive proprietary rights in the data and information provided.”

I’m having trouble understanding who the financial exchange partners are and what they have to do with content, especially considering Google Sites don’t include any revenue share.

Here’s the part that will probably bother most companies & non-company users them most:

“Ownership; Restricted Use. Google and its licensors shall own all right, title and interest, including without limitation all Intellectual Property Rights (as defined below) relating to the Service (and any derivative works or enhancements thereof), including but not limited to, all software, technology, information, content, materials, guidelines, and documentation. Customer shall not acquire any right, title, or interest therein, except for the limited use rights expressly set forth in the Agreement. Any rights not expressly granted herein are deemed withheld. “Intellectual Property Rights” means any and all rights existing from time to time under patent law, copyright law, semiconductor chip protection law, moral rights law, trade secret law, trademark law, unfair competition law, publicity rights law, privacy rights law, and any and all other proprietary rights, and any and all applications, renewals, extensions and restorations thereof, now or hereafter in force and effect worldwide.”

Sounds like you won’t own your own content, though this part provides a little hope:

“Google does not own third party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service. Title, ownership rights, and Intellectual Property Rights in and to the content accessed through the Service are the property of the applicable content owner and may be protected by applicable copyright or other law.”

Strange. Third party content thus far sounded like Google partner or “financial exchange” partner content, but maybe they mean content from site members or participants. I wish they were more clear because I feel like most corporate customers are going to want to own their own content that the write themselves, and want to be able to move it elsewhere, if desired.

Being essentially a wiki, you’d think the Google Sites terms of service would spend more time discussing copyrights, collective content, creative commons license, user submissions, user contributions, and other content creation activity.

If you have a similar or different read on the Google Sites terms of service, do comment with your thoughts.

Never thought I’d see the day that Microsoft would make a bid for Yahoo. There’s so much overlap and the difficulties of becoming to big of a company just got bigger. I’m happy to see Google get stiffer competition, but I’m not sure how it will play out other than Microsoft immediately getting a larger share of search.

For the best coverage of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, hop on over to Search Engine Land.

I’ll be speaking at SEMpdx on March 10th at the Portland Zoo. Still trying to figure out if it is really a ploy to lock me up with the animals. “Oh… look at the cute SEO flicking boogars at the crowd.”

You can catch me at the links session with another Seattlite, SEOMoz’s Rebecca Kelley. You can also take a look at my Searchfest mini-interview with Todd Mintz where I answer these questions:

• 1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
• 2) If a newbie ask you to describe the importance of link-building, what would you tell them?
• 3) Do you see stocks backed by domain names as their principal assets (e.g. Marchex) as good investments short & long term?

Websites everywhere let their copyright footers go out of date, but you don’t expect it of the bigger, more sophisticated sites that could easily justify the 5 minutes it would take to create an automated solution. Especially search engines which crawl, index and rank billions upon billions of web pages with some of the most advanced technology in the world, built by some of the most sophisticated teams of researchers, PhDs, and programmers seen to man. So here it is, January 2nd, 2008 and all five of the top engines still think it is 2007:

Click on the search engine images to see if they’ve updated their site yet, then add a comment when they do so we can document which engines fix it first.