The Internet or the mad cow disease

I often come across people who brand themselves (openly or not) as new media thinkers - very easy to recognise, they are always keen on discussing about the future of the Internet, Web2.0, the benefits of social media, the challenges of setting up business modeles in an online environment, etc .. they blog, set up their own space in second life, are subscribed to loads of feeds, online social clubs, etc.. And I am without any doubt one of them.

I was reading The Soul of Man under socialism from Oscar Wilde today, and I just realised that we are, new media people, taking the risk of spreading mad cow disease, if we keep eating our own flesh. The signs are there - people investing like mad cows in unsubstancial online businesses, developers spending hours on reinventing the wheel, bloggers who think that checking sources is waste of time getting more readers than national newspapers.

Most of my thinking about the future of the web is based on articles I read here and there, on blogs, specialist press, through conversation with other new media people.
And this is the case for the people around me - we end up eating our own meat, canibalising the Internet space with cooked ideas and concepts, quoting people who quote people who quote people who quote...This applies to anyone, even techies.

If you take the example of SEO - some techies back in 96-97 asked themselves: If search engines rank websites for a specific query, there must be a way to find out what criterias they use, and then make sure that my site meets all these criterias. There was some money to be made, and the concept had to be explained with a nice simple picture and convincing arguments to potential clients. Marketers then came in, invented an obscure jargon and drafted silly pictures and started marketing SEO as a service to businesses - they posted 1000s of resources, all contradicting each others, wrote nonsense, and ended up confusing the techies themselves who are now reading Marketing litterature in order to understand what SEO is.. they basically get to eat their own meat. Same applies to javascript (rebranded Ajax by Marketers) for instance.

In order to avoid catching the disease, there is a very simple remedy. get rid of 99% of the RSS feeds, newsletters, specialist magazines, forums, etc .. you are subscribed to, and pick up a good old book instead. The effect is almost immediate, I experienced it today.

advertising in the Sunday press

http://www.webwindows.co.uk/

sitemap standard

All major search engines have finally agreed on a sitemap standard:
http://www.sitemaps.org/

And we can expect most of serious CMS to jump on this opportunity in order to formalise this feature. If you are still coding by hand, probably a good thing to look the site up for hints about how to strcture your sitemap for your clients sites.

Paid per click through newsletter

When you come across a new service, and you immediately think: why didn't I think about it before, it's probably the sign that the service is a great one.

And that's what happened when I came across Hey Amigo.

Paid per click revenue (or channel) through emails. will definitely give it a try.

scale things up, and become a spammer

Google alert is great for market analysis. I can monitor keywords important for my business, for instance: SEO and CMS.

Google sent me a new entry today: (http://)4xuuenf(.)blogspot(.)com (will not provide a link to them).

It is basically a blog, with content automatically generated (provided the subdomain name, the account is probably also generated automatically). I don't personally know anybody doing that, and I am only left with speculations. The best thing I can think of is to use this tactic in order to identify new keywords combination easy to target, and bringing traffic: you stick your analytics code on your dummy site, and watch traffic coming in.

The objective is not to build up traffic, but to figure out what keywords are bringing visitors to the site. Since the site cannot attract natural links, it will basically reveal easy to target keywords which bring traffic.

You then pick up the keywords, and optimise a page on an other site, legitimate site this time.

The usual SEO tactic is to watch what keywords visitors have typed before landing on your site - if you are not already optimising your site for a keyword found in the list (and bringing some decent traffic), you then check your ranking (you may be number 1 without knowing). If you don't rank #1, it means that you can probably generate even more traffic from the keyword easily, and you then create an optimised page for this keyword.

building nonsense for SEO kind of make sense in this context. Spammer simply scale things up, by testing huge amount of data at no cost.

One thing I still cannot figure out why spammers send this kind of content in emails as well?? testing antispam softwares?

myspace generation

Ok, I'll sort out the tape recorder for you, and record the movie this evening, but you promise me to take me to the tennis with my friend tomorrow afternoon.

That's the kind of situation which happened quite often at home when I was kid, as my parents had a hard time trying to figure all these new techno out (tape recorder, microwave, dvd player, etc ..).

That's what happens now...

html - back to basics

Well, not posted for a while...so catching up!

I recently read an interesting article about on sitepoint.com:37 Steps to Perfect Markup

Will not comment much more about this article (hey, doing 2 posts in a row, that's not too bad already!), except by providing a selection of things I took away after reading it.

[...] The reality is that the most commonly used browser, Internet Explorer, does not support XHTML in any way, shape or form

coding a web page in xhtml is achieved by restricting it to its html markups... which is in other words coding in html. So if a web designer comes to you saying proudly, "I develop in Xhtml", you can remind him/her that it doesn't mean anything really... Having said that, it demonstrates at least that this person can code using strict dtd, which is something to be proud of.

The distinction in HTML has to do with semantics and syntax, while the distinction in CSS has to do with rendering and presentation

nicely said.

[...]A line break (br) is mostly a presentational tool, and should be handled by CSS rather than HTML.However, there are a few cases where line breaks can be said to have semantic meaning, for instance in poetry, song lyrics, postal addresses and computer code samples.

must admit that I have often used br for presentation. Good point.

[...]In the Bad Old Days, authors would use b and i to emphasise words.
In the Equally Bad Modern Days, authors use strong and em to make text boldfaced or italic.

again, been using b and i to emphasize text. Will now use strong and em!

[...] The most common "feature" that beginners ask about is the target attribute for links [...] The reason for deprecating those items is that the W3C wants to promote the separation between content (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript)

haaaa, makes sense!



2)

TV is dead?

WebWebdnesday anounced today topic of this month' social gathering: TV is dead. Clever if it refers to nietzsche quote: "God is dead" (meaning that God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology).

One could say that TV is no longer capable of acting as a source of entertainment and knowledge, one could say that most of people now think that the Internet can be the source of all entertainment and knowledge.

Channel 4 announced recently in FT that they were negociating a deal with Google in order to open new distribution channels. The Church is also looking into different distribution channels and often use marketing support to attract new recruits.

So yes, the comparison is clever. And can probably be discussed at length - may try to go to this one.