google « Content Here

Archive for the ‘google’ Category

Google’s Take on the Newspaper Business

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Chief Google Economist, Hal Varian, has an interesting post about online and offline newspaper economics on the Google Public Policy blog. Most of the ideas will be familiar if you read Clay Shirky: cross-subsidization of the news; specialized sites drawing away ad revenue; relative cost of production.

One point that I have been hearing less about was that online news consumption tends to be mostly from work while offline newspapers are read at home on leisure time. In itself, this is not a huge insight; all of my news clients know that they get most of their traffic during the workday. What I had not thought about was that reading time at work is significantly more compressed than at home. The article gives statistics of 70 seconds per day online vs. 25 minutes offline — and advertisers pay for a premium for that longer attention span. The article predicts some good news for newspaper publishers: tablets (like the iPad) and other mobile devices (like the Kindle) will increase the at home consumption of the news and lengthen time spent reading. This should even out the disparity between online and offline advertising revenue. I think the accuracy of this prediction will depend on a) whether advertising formats can effectively adapt to and leverage the strengths of mobile devices and b) the advertisers opinion of the value of online advertising changes. As for the latter, advertisers seem to illogically value the immeasurable benefit of print advertising over the more measurable benefit of online advertising. That is, they probably assume print advertising is more effective than it actually is because there are no statistics to limit the perceived value. There are some great posts about how online advertising is undervalued.. Until this attitude changes, it will be difficult for newspapers to burn their boats.

Posted in google, newsmedia | No Comments »

Yeah, That’s a Favicon

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Content Here’s new Favicon

Marketing Vox has an article describing Google’s plan to show favicons in search result listings (thanks AJ Kohn for the link!). For the uninitiated, favicons are those little pictures that sometimes appear to the left of the URL in your browser’s address bar. This is an interesting departure from Google’s text-only policy on search results and it gives webmasters a new way to distinguish their websites. For now, Google is only going to do this on site specific searches (like when you type “java web content management site:www.contenthere.net“). Google’s sparse style could get very busy looking when cluttered with 10 little pictures per page. Speaking of ugly, does anyone like Google’s new favicon?

Creating a favicon is easy. All you need to do is make a square image and then use a site like HTML-Kit to generate the favicon.ico file. Put it in your web root and then you are done. A little side benefit is that you won’t see any more of those warning messages in your web logs saying it can’t find the favicon.ico file.

Posted in SEO, google | 6 Comments »

Getting your Google mojo back

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

When I migrated Enter Content Here off of Blogger, moving the content and comments was really easy – literally just the click of a button. This was a nice surprise because my expectations were based on a typically painful CMS migration. Because I use FeedBurner, my RSS readership experienced little disruption either. I already had moved my Blogger blog to a custom domain and WordPress allows you to format your own permalinks so it was easy to map the old URLs to the new with a simple Apache Rewrite Rule. Within my blog.contenthere.net virtual host of my hosting provider, I created the rule:

RewriteRule .* http://www.contenthere.net%{REQUEST_URI}

The one piece of the move that proved to be an issue was getting Google to update its index and move entries from blog.contenthere.net to www.contenthere.net. This was particularly problematic because I wanted to use the Google Custom Search Plugin for WordPress so I could include product pages and other content in my search results. I submitted a dynamically updated Sitemap (using the Wordpress Sitemap Plugin), Google ignored all of my entries (see image on top).

I learned from the support forum that Google probably thought that these new pages (under www.contenthere.net) were duplicates of the blog.contenthere.net pages and was skipping them. I don’t really understand why that is because there is no way that the rendered pages could be identical. I just had to take it on faith. The only way to get Google to update its index is to configure your rewrite to send down a status code of 301 (permanent redirect). The updated rewrite rule looks like this:

RewriteRule .* http://www.contenthere.net%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301]

While I was at writing rewrite rules, I added a few more to handle the situations where WordPress’s permalink algorithm was different than Blogger’s. The biggest difference is that Blogger omits “The” and “A” from a post title when building a permalink. There were also discrepancies where I changed the title of the post after publishing.

To improve my custom Google search in the short term, I added the site blog.contenthere.net to the list of indexed sites. This way people using the onboard search can still find the pages that have not yet been re-indexed and, when they do, Google should get the 301 code.

As for my old blogger blog (contenthere.blogspot.com), I did everything I could to make it as ugly and unappealing as possible. I wrote messages explaining the move all over the template. What I really wanted to do was have a link from each post to the new URL. However, there is no path variable that would allow me to construct a new link by concatenating the new domain (www.contenthere.net) to the current path. Blogger just has a tag for the full URL (data:post.url) and I couldn’t find syntax for substrings. I could have done it with Javascript but didn’t want to bother. Instead, I inserted a search form for my custom search in each post and preloaded it with the blog post title. This approach has the additional benefits of potentially giving the visitor more recent content and also sending them through Google to give it another chance to update its index. I have a free statcounter collecting traffic statistics on that site. When it gets down to 0, I will probably delete the whole blog.

Since making these changes, my search based traffic is back to its pre-migration levels. Google still doesn’t seem to take an interest in my Sitemap but that doesn’t seem to matter. Through the process, I have learned that originally hosting my blog on Blogger did not lock me into the platform. Instead, it allowed me to focus on the content and quickly establish a voice in the blogosphere without worrying about infrastructure. Blogger’s support of custom URL’s was critical to minimizing lock-in. When I migrated to a custom domain, Blogger helped route traffic from the blogspot URL to the new one. This put me in a good position to move to the blog to any platform I chose.

Posted in google, wordpress | No Comments »

Google Sites and Sharepoint

Friday, February 29th, 2008

CMSWire has a nice little article on Google Sites and MOSS. The general gist is that, while not as capable as MOSS, Google Sites may be just good enough for basic websites and collaboration. The absence of some advanced features may be compensated for by the simplicity of the platform. Sometimes just good enough is exactly what you want.

Over on the Sharepoint side, I just read Michael Sampson’s excellent report The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft Shareport 2007 Analysis. The report uses Michael’s 7 Pillars framework to evaluate Sharepoint. Not to be a spoiler but MOSS doesn’t do so well.

I am not convinced that you want one platform to try do do everything but Michael assumes that this is Microsoft’s goal (it certainly isn’t building a robust WCM system). So, it seems that Sharepoint is caught in the middle. It is not the silver bullet, one-stop-shop for enterprise collaboration, and it is not the simple, cuddly tool that everyone loves to use. That is not a very fun place to be.

Posted in Web2.0, collaboration, google, moss | 1 Comment »

Google is in my kitchen

Monday, July 24th, 2006

I have taken a certain amount of pride in not being swept up in the Google craze. Yes, Google is the only search engine that I use and when I want to get directions, maps.google.com is the URL I enter. However, I have held back from getting a GMail account or setting up a Google Calendar. That took a lot of will power last year when people were introducing themselves as “Hi, I am so-and-so, do you want an invitation for a GMail account?”

What is my beef against the Goog? Nothing really. I have just had the same Yahoo! mail account for 8 years and I can’t imagine giving it up. In fact, my loyalty to Yahoo! has become a cornerstone of my thinking about digital businesses. The idea is that you can’t compete on functionality because it is less expensive for a competitor to copy your functionality than it was for you to build in the first place. To bring an innovative feature to the market, it takes a lot of design and trial and error. When you copy a feature, you get to learn from your competitors mistakes and take a more direct route to a better solution. What keeps customers is data which translates into switching costs for users.

Email is particularly interesting because it is not just the inbox. That can be easily imported. It is the entry for you in all your friends and associates address books. So, when you change your email service provider, you have to tell everyone your new address and they have to update your contact information. I know there are services like Plaxo but they creep me out too much to use. As an aside, never send out the mail address that comes with your ISP. That will unnecessarily tie you to that ISP even if there is a better option out there. Most of the current AOL users that I know don’t care for the service but just keep paying AOL to keep their email address. Most colleges and universities have free email forwarding services for alumni. If you are not totally ashamed of your alma mater, you might consider taking advantage of their email forward service.

So, back to Google. Hell or high water, I am keeping my Yahoo! mail account. But, recently Google has been working its way into my life. I just got another Dell laptop and, what do you know, Google Desktop was pre-installed. In setting up the computer, I anguished for a couple of minutes over whether to uninstall it (“It is going to slow up my machine.” “It may help me someday and, besides, I want to know what all the fuss is about.”) Google Desktop stayed. Then a colleague from CM Professionals sent me a link to a Google Spreadsheet. Of course, the first step was to create an account.

At first, I thought the temptation of Google was threatening my data theory. But now I am thinking that it is supporting it. Google is trying to lure me with data that I don’t have: indexes of my local files, spreadsheets that my colleagues created. Once they hook me in to registering and using Google tools to collaborate with my colleagues, they will be able to offer me other services. I would have to say it worked. I registered with Google…. Using my Yahoo! mail address .

Posted in google | 4 Comments »