Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Make your web site faster

This blog loads very, very slowly.  (Sorry.)  It's big, it's full of weird crap that I like to post because it's interesting, and sometimes things break because the weird crap is no longer supported.

If you want it to go faster look at this:

Steve Souders book High Performance Web Sites describes the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. YSlow, the Firebug extension he created, codified those best practices. Now working at Google, Steve discusses the next set of best practices he's discovered, including the impact of iframes and where to place (and where not to place) inline script blocks.

and it you want to understand why web sites that are faster are better, more profitable, and more helpful for users see Andy King's Web Site Optimization

Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

Here's Steve Souders talk at Google.

Lou Rosenfeld's site search analytics workshop slides

Lou Rosenfeld has a new workshop about analytics for the search within sites - the sort of information that is quantitatively and qualitatively different from general search terms and behavior because it's within a closed domain (e.g. an intranet) or because people who are looking for something have already found you.

| View | Upload your own

He's looking for comments and feedback - thanks.

Technorati Tags: analytics, search, louis-rosenfeld, slideshare, workshop

Google quality score rating guidelines leaked

Google Blogoscoped has surfaced a leaked Google Quality Rater Guidelines which purports to show the ranking scale that internal googlers use to assess the quality of search engine results pages. It appears that the document is gone now from the site that hosted it (hm, time to dig through the firefox cache...)

Aside from some insight into what sounds like a day-in, day-out task of reading search results and noting what's wrong (q.v. sisyphus), it gives a sense of the human level of input needed to put the "right" answer top of page.

Abstracted from the text:

Queries are said to be one of three types: navigational (search for known item), informational (research for a topic), or transactional (desire to purchase). There's a set of expectations for each search type; if you type "IBM" the goog wants you to get to IBM.COM on the top of page one. Pages are quality scored as vital, useful, relevant, not relevant, off-topic, didn’t load, foreign language, and unratable,

Technorati Tags: google, search, quality, goog

Every day, computers are making people easier to use (In Formation)

One of my dot-com era relics is issue #2 of the short-lived magazine In Formation. Here's
what the New York Times said about it in 1998: - the hypertext annotations are mine.

It's not exactly Howard Beale, the mad anchor in Network,'' deciding he's opposed to corporate news operations, but a group of Silicon Valley wonks has taken the daring step of going public with an equally heretical notion. The cyber-future can wait.

The medium is a new quarterly magazine -- a print magazine -- called In Formation. Pitched as a hype buster for these high-tech times, the premiere issue, just out, announces its intentions with the acutely paranoid tag line, ''Every day, computers are making people easier to use.'' Whether that spirit takes the form of an article on the draconian implications of a nationwide student database or on the loss of privacy in a cashless society, the subtext remains the same: ''Be afraid. Be very afraid.'' Which is not to say the magazine is humorless. In a parody, ''The Internet Watch,'' the first issue cleverly skewers the hagiographic new-media profile, tracking the rise of the edgy, youthful genius behind a portable Internet device that can, on command, tell you what time it is.

The magazine's editors and contributors have worked at places like the @Home Network, Apple and Starwave, so they know the territory. In Formation's editor and publisher, David Temkin, sees the magazine taking on digital fetishism in much the same way Spy magazine riffed on the go-go 80's. ''Spy was outsiders looking for an in,'' he says, in a line that will probably be repeated often during the magazine's formative months. ''In Formation is insiders looking for an out.''

Issue #2 is a keeper, with stories on "The Internet Wants To KIll Me", the Million Manager March, and a photo essay on the strip malls of Silicon Valley. Plus this ad, from the California Print Association:

Let's be honest: the Internet is a cold, impersonal, cheerless place. No amount of technology will ever make it more human. All those clicks and URLs are confusing and hard to remember. And did you know that 60% of the people who use search engines never find what they want?

So, if you want a medium that can really make an impression, why not rely on the one that was "sticky" long before stickiness was good? With no arcane plug-ins and no long download times, print has warmth, life, and a physical presence that the Internet can't beat.

PRINT: It just smells better!

Party like it's 94115, 1999.

Technorati Tags: party-like-its-1999, party-like-its-94115, in-formation, magazine

Jessica Bowman - Yahoo Alumni Association, SEO Evangelist

from Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker:

Among the 1,000 layoffs at Yahoo was that of Jessica Bowman, who had the dual role of Senior SEO Manager and SEO Evangelist at Yahoo, and received her pinkslip this week.

As you know by now, life at Yahoo! wasn’t pleasant this week and I’m happy to report that that their in-house SEO program is now so good, that I was laid off!

Jessica's blog is SEM / SEO In-house Blog, where she writes about the needs of people who are doing SEO in-house (rather than at an agency) and what that entails.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, yhoo, yahoo-alumni-association, seo, sem, search

Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum

As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.

If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic.  This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.

Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership.  Make it possible for me to make money on your network.  If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo.  I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow.  And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.

Best of Tech 2006 online - call for Best of Tech 2007

Nominate your favorite for Best of Tech 2007 today.

from Steven Levy:

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I had the honor and pleasure of editing The Best of Technology Writing, 2007, an anthology published by the digitalculture imprint of the University of Michigan Press. For those who want to dip in and sample, the contents are available online. Or you can get it sent to you, piece by piece to read on your iPhone or Blackberry or on email, via DailyLit.

Here is where you can read my introduction, where I talk about how technology writing has changed in the past twenty years. I also address where tech writing stands vis a vis mainstream media versus blogs.

I am also delighted to hand over the editing chores for the next volume of the series to Clive Thompson. Reading over the stories for possible selection in this year’s volume, there were several of his that were totally worthy of inclusion. (The one I chose was a terrific story about Gordon Bell’s scheme to preserve our memories.) Clive is a great choice to edit The Best of Technology Writing 2008. But he needs your help. What were the best tech stories you read (or wrote) this year, either online or off? Please send your nominations here.

DailyLit is books by email - their about us says

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistenly than read the paper is read email. Bingo! We put together a first version and began reading "War of the Worlds" and "Pride and Prejudice". We showed it to friends, added more books and features at their request, and presto, DailyLit was born.

Clive Thompson, the 2007 editor, is an awesome writer who blogs at Collision Detection. Here's what he has to say about this year's submissions:

Taking a cue from the open-source movement, we're asking readers to nominate their favorite tech-oriented articles, essays, and blog posts from 2007. The competition is open to any and every technology topic--biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the ideal candidates will:

* be engagingly written for a mass audience;
* be no longer than 5,000 words;
* have been published between January and December, 2007.

Technorati Tags: books, writing, tech

"There's absolutely no bubble in technology".

This video is making the rounds; I got my copy from Lance Carlson.

Technorati Tags: video, youtube, bubble, party-like-its-199x

Brent Hill, Google / Feedburner speaking in Ann Arbor, Dec 4 2007

A talk tonight, 12/4:

Ann Arbor SPARK Hi-Tech Tuesday: Google's Brent Hill Offers Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS

What: Google's Brent Hill presents "Everything You Want to Know About Blogs & RSS"

When & Where: Tuesday, December 4, 2007, 5-7 p.m. at Google, McKinley Towne Center, 5th Floor, 201 S. Division, Ann Arbor

Purpose: As content syndication on the web proliferates, audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. How do marketers leverage RSS feeds to deliver targeted marketing messages? And how do publishers measure and monetize their audience?

Presenter: Brent Hill is a team manager in the Global Media Solutions division at Google. Previously vice president of Advertising Services at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider that was acquired by Google in 2007, Brent has worked in a variety of interactive marketing, e-commerce, and consumer services businesses. He frequently speaks at industry events on the topic of advertising in syndicated content, and his insights have been published in Advertising Age, Adotas, and DMNews. Brent received a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Bradley University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Information: Registration is free.

More infos: Brent Hill bio, June 2007 interview reported by Online Media Daily, 2006 interview at Internet Marketing Voodoo.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, goog, blog, rss, feed

NSFNET reunion, a perspective

I was at the NSFNET 20th reunion last week. Here's some notes after the fact.

I took good notes on URLs mentioned on delicious - look at http://del.icio.us/vielmetti/nsfnet to get the running commentary as I was trying to do it.

History is written by the winners, and thus the NSFNET history was written by the winners - the winners of the 1987 contract to manage it (Merit, MCI and IBM), and those who personally or corporately won out when the backbone was transformed from a research and educational network into a commercial one. The tone was primarily uncritical, self-congratulatory, and celebratory.

History is also written by those who collect and carefully store their papers, and there were several retired academics and network builders who were looking for long term institutional homes for the collections of maps, documents, email, standards and correspondence that they accumulated over the years. Those looking to produce a history would do well to look at collections like the Merit Network Inc. Records 1966-2002 at the Bentley Historical Library, which has not only all of the official publications from the time but also some amazing depth (60 linear feet) of printed correspondence, proposals that did not win, and other parts of the history some forgotten and some simply unspoken.

For a broader context of a part of this time, the Dot Com Archive at Maryland has an (as of yet sealed) collection of dot com era business plans from a failed law firm - again telling the story from the accumulation of documents, and not the selective memory of a few.

Thanks to everyone I saw there (cja, mayabe, dsobeloff, glee, srh) and especially to those who were young enough in 1987 to disagree with the networking orthodoxy of the time (because we had nothing to lose and everything to win).

Technorati Tags: nsfnet, 1987, party-like-its-198x, nethistory, merit, archives, ans, mci, ibm