WebConnoisseur

The 11th annual Webby Award Winners have been announced. 69 sites and 11 videos have been blessed with the web equivalent of an Oscar. As a judge for the awards, I’ve flown to NY for the past two Webby Awards Galas and must say they are THE coolest web event to attend. Unfortunately, this year I’m not making the trip thanks to SMX Seattle being scheduled on the same two days.

Hitwise correctly predicted people’s voice winners for MiniClip Games, Manchester United, TripAdvisor, BBC News, Great Schools and Facebook. If you look at the list of nominees and winners, you may notice some that were notably missing (Zillow for the Real Estate category, for example) and I’d like to make it clear that the sites go through a pre-screening process and sometimes don’t make it to the list of sites for judges to choose from. The people’s voice also has a similar restriction: people can only choose from the 5 nominees.

In the future, I hope the Webbys will re-introduce write-in votes for the people’s voice awards and that Judges can review the voting eligible lists before the voting begins to nominate any noticeable gaps. While I’m giving feedback, I’d like to offer the following advice to judges and people’s voice voters to help eliminate bias:

Webby Judges: please place more weight on site usability and repeat visit likelyhood. Ask yourself, “is this a site that I would come back to?” As a judge, I find it tempting to let the first-visit “wow” factor play too big of a role, especially considering the number of sites we look at. For my vote, sites have to do more than just dazzle me with flash eye-candy.

People’s Voice Voters: please don’t vote just for the sites you are familiar with. Take the time to visit the other sites. Sometimes the best site for a given category isn’t one you are familiar with. Use the awards as a way to discover some great new sites.

Sometimes being so entrenched in the search industry, it is easy to forget how skewed people’s thoughts are regarding search engines. Even people who work for Web companies that rely on SEO & word-of-mouth for all their new traffic. Here’s a great example from my work the other day when discussing article titles:

“There is also a difference between writing for a search engine crawler and a real person. What is attractive to the search engine may not be the same thing as what is engaging to a person.”

I have a feeling she is not alone. Some people think of the search engine as literally an engine or a robot or an appliance. They have trouble understanding why we spend so much time worrying about it and probably hate this non-human thing that rules so many decisions.

Here’s what I told her:

• In my 10+ years of doing SEO, I’ve never written an article for a search crawler.
• Don’t think of a search engine as an appliance or device. Think of it as real people. For example, if you called me on the phone, I wouldn’t think of that conversation as a conversation with a telephone wire – it was a conversation with you!
• There’s no better indicator of what people want, then what they search for and the words they use.

It’s true that SEOs will format a page or architect a site a certain way to aid in search crawlability, but when writing an article, good SEO’s think more about the user, the ways users think about and search for the content (keywords), and then various factors that play into ranking algorithms (which includes engagement more and more each day).

People scan headlines or titles. Titles should include the keywords, concisely tell the user what they are about to read and be attractive enough to draw them in. You can sometimes get away with creative headlines (especially when teamed with images), but in order for an article to have legs (last beyond the one-time editorial push) they should be SEO-friendly and click-through friendly.

The title of this post is a bit silly. Search engines aren’t human. But they do represent humans. Hundreds of millions of them. There’s no better indicator of how humans think or what they are looking for then the searches executed on these “engines.”

The WSJ reports that CD sales for the first three months this year are 20% down from last year. Though digital music purchases are up about 50% Y/Y, overall music industry revenues are said to be down about 25% Y/Y. It appears the RIAA’s lawsuit bully tactics are having a reverse effect on sales. From the Journal:

The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry’s salvation… In recent weeks, the music industry has posted some of the weakest sales it has ever recorded. This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since… 1991.

Whether the music industry likes it or not, things are only going to get worse. The good news is that people still like music—maybe more than ever. What’s really changing here is that those who had control over distribution are losing control. More and more, the middlemen can be cut out and small bands (much like small businesses on the Web) can reach a worldwide audience without incurring much in the way of costs.

The movie industry has just started feeling the sting of a digital world. As it becomes clearer and clearer that Hollywood’s monopoly over movie distribution lessens, Hollywood will be tempted to take control of the inevitable movement towards new distribution models. Hollywood would be smart to learn from RIAA’s mistakes and take a more participatory role in giving people movies the way they want them, at fair prices. $20 New Release DVDs and $10 movie theater tickets may sell for now, but I don’t see that lasting long.

Far too often I hear people quoting Alexa data. Even last week, at the 2007 Omniture Summit I witnessed Tim O’Reilly using Alexa charts to prove Web 2.0 success in front of 1,000 smart web analytics professionals. I know I couldn’t have been the only person in the crowd to notice. For Tim’s benefit, and anyone else who uses Alexa Data, please take note:

ALEXA DATA IS TREMENDOUSLY FLAWED

I touched on this in a competitive intelligence metrics post back in October, showing that Alexa’s data is less accurate to determining true site traffic then the # of characters the domain name, but now I’d like to really illustrate how far off Alexa’s data is.

Many people have pointed out Alexa’s data is biased towards a certain crowd and can be manipulated (see the links at the bottom of this post), but none have illustrated the margin of error that I’m about to. Below I take a look at two very different sites with very different traffic stats.

Site 1: Allrecipes - Allrecipes is a leading food site - as you might expect, Allrecipes users are similar to what you might see on the Internet as a whole, though slightly more female.

Site 2: SEOMoz - SEOMoz is a site that caters to the SEO and online marketing community - a crowd more likely to install the Alexa toolbar.

Using Alexa, you might conclude that SEOMoz receives more traffic than Allrecipes:

Alexa Reach Chart:

Alexa Rank Chart:

Both sites are very popular within their target audience, but despite what Alexa may show, Allrecipes has much more traffic. Let’s face it, more people cook food, then perform SEO! In fact, if you were to populate the above charts with actual data, SEOMoz would be a flat sliver near the x-axis. Here’s some real data from Dec. ‘06:

Allrecipes Unique Visitors: 11,023,187
SEOMoz Unique Visitors: 102,523

If you were to use Alexa charts to draw conclusions about either site based off real numbers for one site, your traffic estimates would be off by approximately 11,842%. Numbers that big are often difficult to grasp, so I like to put it in perspective. A mistake of that magnitude is the equivalent of:

• The CIA mixing up the population of Ohio for China.
• Your accountant saying you owe $1,000 to the IRS, when you really owe $119,417.
• A cop pulling you over for doing 60 in a 30, when you were really going half-a-mile-per-hour.
• Telling your spouse you’ll be home in three hours, then showing up 15 days later.

These are mistakes that none of us could get away with, so why should we let Alexa?

I’m not the first to prove Alexa data is flawed. Here are links to other Alexa skeptics:
Peter Norvig, Paul Stamatiou, Josh Pigford, Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin (thanks for the data!), Greg Linden, Bruce Stewart, Alex Iskold, John Chow, and Markus Frind.

I remember about a year ago I was desperately searching for data on how people printed pages on the web. The reason I was curious, is because I noticed flash ads would often mess up pages printed straight from the browser, often not printing the content of the pages. This is a bad user experience which could cause visitors to start using a competitor’s site instead.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any studies. I thought with the millions of sites that have “printer friendly pages” that someone would have published the results. I decided to do the research myself and slip it into a survey during some pre-redesign research for a top 150 website. I surveyed over 2,000 users, asking them how they printed pages on the web. The results may surprise you.

Here are the results:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

• 19% of users use File > Print in their browser
• 63.1% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
• 2.5% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
• 12.3% of users copy and paste the text into Word
• 3.1% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

A couple notes about the survey participants. The site this was conducted on would be considered a sampling of the average Internet user. A site catering to web-savvy users would have different results. The site has also long had “printer-friendly” links, so long-time users would be more likely to use them. To remove some of the long-term user bias, here are the same results but filtered by only users who have used the site for less than 3 months (over 375 users).

Here are the results for newer users:
When printing articles or pages on the Web:

• 25.3% of users use File > Print in their browser
• 49% of users use the printer-friendly links on the page
• 3.1% of users use the Control-P command on their keyboard
• 17.5% of users copy and paste the text into Word
• 5% of users copy and paste the text into an email or other application

I realize a survey isn’t the most accurate method to get at this data, but this data is difficult to collect any other way because it is impossible to track anything other then the printer-friendly pages of a site without conducting an expensive in-person behavioral study (preferably on the users own computer).

If you know of any other research on this topic, please share it in the comments.

I believe there is an untapped opportunity in video disbtribution for local news stations. When it comes to unexpected events, news station camera crews can not possibly be in the right place at the right time. If someone were to build a video upload service aimed towards local news syndication, I think many stations would be willing be interested in buying rights to the videos.

There are plenty of sites that facilitate the sale of video clips, but I have yet to see one target distribution to television stations. For example, take a look at this video from Oregon after yesterday’s storm hit:

Oregon Drivers Crashing on Slick Streets Video

I imagine the person who captured this video had to go out of their way to get the video to the news station (hopefully they didn’t drive down that street). The local news station may have paid them a small amount of money, then distributed it to their sister stations. Imagine if the user could have uploaded the video to a site, set their own price and let anyone pick up rights to use it or pay extra for exclusive rights.

News stations desperate for video could simply visit the site, preview the video in a flash player, download the video and edit it as they please. Far too often news stations lack video so they pull out old videos or play the same exact video throughout the day, over and over and over. My wife has been filmed working in the lab and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen the same video clip used for every DNA-related piece of news for the past four years. The video distribution service I’m imagining would not only connect traditional media with user-generated videos via the web, but it would be in a good position when the lines between the web and T.V. continue to blur.

Search Engine Watch revealed some information about a Yahoo/Harris Interactive study with surprising numbers. The results of their study show that in a study of ratings and reviews of local businesses, a whopping 67 percent of respondents said they would be likely to post a review.

Yahoo seemed to take pride in that information and I’ve seen the number quoted in a number of places that use it to show that user-generated content is real. I’m a huge fan of user-generated content, but I want to set the record straight: 67% of Yahoo local searchers will not post reviews… especially on every business they frequent.

Having worked for a site that has had user reviews for almost a decade, I can tell you that though a large percentage of people use reviews, only a handful actually contribute reviews. In fact, to get just 2% of your monthly unique visitors to contribute reviews would be a decent accomplishment.

This is a good example of how survey results can be misleading. I’m not sure how they asked this question, but wording it differently could yield much different results. Plus, what people say is not often what they do.

Yahoo Answers has been one of the most successful launches at Yahoo (and one of Google’s rare failures). Starting this morning, you can find “Answers” at the popular business networking site, LinkedIn. Take a look for yourself: LinkedIn Answers

Considering the quality of the business-minded network, LinkedIn Answers has the potential to do really well. However, the early questions could use some self-promotion spam filtering. I’d also like to see a search feature installed so you could search for specific questions or answers instead of browsing them.

Answering questions may be an excellent opportunity for some people to boost their career or “expert status,” but I urge  LinkedIn users to be cautious with their answers. Much like other things on the web, one little slip up could hurt your reputation down the road. LinkedIn Answers would not a good place to get involved in a flame thread. For those looking to boost their connection count, chiming in on a few question & answer sessions could help increase your exposure to new people.

Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” just came out. In 2004, George Bush took the honors. In 2005, it featured Bill & Melinda Gates, plus Bono. This year, Time Magazine decided to feature me! Or you. Depending on who’s holding up the cover featuring a mylar mirror.  

As I read through the feature (on their site of course–I would never pay for the magazine), I noticed it really shouldn’t say you. It should say “Web Junkies” because when they describe “you,” they talk about video bloggers, Wikipedia editors, Flickr posters, Firefox creators and YouTube founders. Hardly an example of your typical American or Time Magazine subscriber.

Regardless, my first thoughts were: Cool. Someone finally gives recognition to those who have contributed to the growth of the Web. But after reading through all their features, I realized this really was just about recent Web hype.

The cover might as well said “YouTube” instead of “You” as YouTube must have been mentioned a hundred times. YouTube is great, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see YouTube decline in popularity in favor of the next wave of Web 2.0 newcommers. It would almost be the online communities’ way of slapping traditional media back in the face. I can almost hear the public now: “You Don’t Determine Who Is the Person of the Year - We Do!” Because let’s face it, should Time editors really get to determine who the person of the year is? Let’s face it, when Time picks the person of the year, it is all really about Time and not the person they pick.

Okay enough dissing Time. I do appreciate them pickin “us” over political figures or CEOs. Ironically, I’m signing off to go cast my nominations for Webby Person of the Year…

MSN Search, being the newest of the big engines, is still trying to get a handle on search spam and had been slowly chipping away at it, but the problems are now getting worse since the switch to MSN Live.

In particular, MSN’s duplicate content algorithm penalties are too sensitive and too severe, causing a simple hack to be an effective way to remove a competitor’s site from the rankings. Let’s hope MSN fixes this right away and even takes notes as to who threw up content hoping to exploit it once it became known.

Credit to ThreadWatch for the find.