French Blogs

Loic Lemeur is a French blogger, who pissed a lot of people off a while ago when he decided to invite Sarkozy at leweb3.

I decided to read about it, and took this opportunity to take a deeper look at the state of blogging in France...and spent about 1.30h, from blogs to blogs, before writing this post.

The taste is different, and I find sometimes people a bit too self obsessed (such as Ron l'infirmier), too opportunist (such as Lemeur who belongs now to Sarkozy's web team... ), but very often original (e.g: Thomas Clement) ... and obviously being outrageously different from the rest of the world ( well, world seen from a UK/US point of view) - using canalblog instead of wordpress, dailymotion instead of Youtube, showing sexy and good singers issued from star academy instead of crap singer issued from X Factor...

Can Google improve search results?

More and more spammy websites are nowadays coming up in the search engines, and Google is struggling keeping up with all the spammers getting more and more savvy.

example:
"cheap herbal tea": loads of noise on first page results in Google. Most of the pages displayed are blogs whose comments have been spammed...

Check out Yahoo, no garbage (well, strictly speaking..)

Google is also pushing spam websites (called "adsense website"!) at the top. if you search for "SEO and CMS) for instance, the Google results are filled with garbage, all subdomain names created on the fly, and usin syndicated content. The algorythm is just not clever enough to keep them out.

One of the method used by spammers until recently was to by 100s of domains, and stick aggregated content on them. Since you could cancel a domain name within 5 days, all they had to do was to check which ones were performing the best after after 4 days, keep them, and get rid of the others. Everything could more or less be automated.

How could Google fight against this type of spammers? If Google decided to refine their terms and conditions, and make the adsense sign up a bit more difficult, ensuring that someone who spams can be banned from using an adsense account, they would definitely reduce significantly the level of spam.

But they would also reduce their revenue. So, at the end of the day, what goes round comes around. By trying to maximise their revenue, Google reduces the quality of their results.

Time to see a new player in the field, interested as Google was in providing with the best results, without compromising with a revenue model too demanding.

new blogger

Upgraded to the new version of blogger. The new version was around for a while, but no migration service was available. Here we google, they have now released the migration wizard, so ready to test their new version!

Google article on sitepoint, providing some insight about us, web develpers. The results of "the State of Web Development 2006" provides with interesting results such as which programming languages are commonly used, use of CSS, technologies used for web projects, etc ... a free preview of the document is available here.

The most interesting bits I found were the anylisis, crossing data in order to extend the profile. Example:

That's not a particularly radical idea, but the survey data actually lets us identify some of these clusters of related practices. As we explored the data, we found that the clearest clusters represented stereotypes of different types of web developers, so we gave them names:

• The "Guru" is strongly motivated toward technical excellence, actively tracks new technological trends, and is interested in learning how to use them to improve the quality and functionality of web sites.
• The "Entrepreneur" is strongly motivated toward building and retaining an audience, and is less interested in using technologies just because they're new.
• The "Designer" is strongly motivated toward the timely delivery of visually appealing web sites that meet the business requirements of clients.
• The "Corporate" is strongly motivated toward reliable, stable performance; the "Corporate works in a larger organization, and faces the unique mixture of constraints and opportunities that the corporate environment offers.

We can't make absolute predictions about what these different groups think, but we can identify clear trends. Our "Entrepreneur," for example, is most likely to say that he or she:

• runs an ecommerce business
• wants to learn about email marketing and search engine optimization
• develops with Dreamweaver
• is planning to get into blogging and podcasting

And the same person is least likely to say that he or she:

• works for a design firm or manages a company web site
• practices versioning, MVC, or OOP
• develops with a text editor, Visual Studio, or Zend
• uses AJAX, wikis, or Microformats

• 
  

What strikes me is that you probably need these 4 different profiles in your company. If you haven't got 4 staff already, well, you need to combine a bit of each. When we started Jazar, we were only 2, but had certainly to ensure that:
- we knew about online marketing, and websites monetisation: I took on the role of entrepreneur
- built a strong, reliable, and performant code: Olivier took on this role
- track new technological trends and decide on which ones should be implemented: I took on the role
- pay attention to design, and offer appealing visual solution: Olivier took on this role

In conclusion, the survey provides with an excellent insight on the state of webdesign today, and what skills are needed and what technologies/tools are available in order to set a succesful web design business.