Morgret Designs

This blog has a few cobwebs on it, as I’ve not written much in the past year. I’ve not forgotten about it, and have thought of many ideas for posts, but have not felt I had the time to do them justice. The past few months I’ve taken what I might have once blogged and turned it into 140 characters of commentary in Twitter, or sent a tip to an expert blogger in a particular area. I liveblogged SMX West for Search Engine Roundtable, and will make a couple of guest posts on other blogs.

Here’s a laundry list of things I’ve been doing instead of blogging:

• Exhibiting at Maker Faire with the Western Warship Combat Club. We had a 30′ by 60′ pond set up, and battled 1:144 scale model warships. The ships fire BBs or ball bearings, and they do sink each other. Boing Boing TV has a great segment, showing the battles, how the ships are set up, and interviews with club members (our piece starts at 3:00 minutes). Gizmodo also has a short piece, and Wired has a blog post and a video with an interview of my husband (who I can credit/blame for getting me interested in this hobby).
• Listening to a variety of podcasts during my two-hour daily commute. I enjoy listening to Webmaster Radio, but also listen to some lesser-known podcasts about search. Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business was led by Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley in Fall of 2007, and includes lectures by John Battelle, Hal Varian, Dan Russell, Jan Pedersen, and more. Hearst led the same class in Fall of 2005, and Sergey Brin was one of the guest speakers (all lectures in that semester were videotaped). For variety, I add the Amateur Traveler Podcast, and a variety of educational technology podcasts.
• Scuba diving, though not nearly enough. I can walk to the ocean from my work, but our area of the coast is best known for the Mavericks Surf competition with its 50 foot waves, so I settle for going to the tidepools at low tide. I was able to go to the Philippines for a week last year, and try to get down to the California Channel Islands a couple of times a year.
• Getting back into amateur radio. I’ve been licensed since I was in elementary school (N6TME), but haven’t been active for several years. I found a deal on Craigslist on a specific GPS that integrates well with a ham radio and APRS tracker, so I’ll be installing that setup in my truck soon. On the way to PubCon 2006, I stopped in the desert with my brother, and a bunch of us launched a weather balloon that had a GPS, tracker, transmitter, and digital cameras. The balloon went to 106,000 feet before it burst; we recovered the payload and put the 1,100 pictures and details of the project on the web.
• Finding deals at electronics swapmeets, including this weekend’s deal of $5 for a laptop battery that appears to have at least a couple of hours or charge. We didn’t get the expensive soldering iron my husband was looking for, but that just gives us an excuse to come back next month.

Speaking of laundry, it’s time to go back into lurking mode and take care of some domestic chores.

My job at at an educational non-profit leaves little time for blogging, but it also has made me aware of some interesting sources for event listings in Silicon Valley related to the web and search. Here is a sampling of organizations or event listings, with examples of upcoming or recent events. Many of the archived events have notes, audio, or video of the event available online.

Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Instruction has two pages with cognitive science related events, and many gems can be found here. The CSLI weekly calendar, available by email, lists Bay Area events. The CSLI Local Area Events page links to dozens of classes, groups, and organizations with cognitive science events.

Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Seminar is open to everyone, and videos of past events are available. Guest speakers come from Google, Microsoft, IDEO, IBM, and more.

BayCHI has a calendar of HCI events in the Bay Area, and their archive of monthly events often includes detailed notes or audio.

• Learning to create engaging apps for Facebook: What works and what does not, by BJ Fogg, Dave McClure, and colleagues. Dec 11.

UC Berkeley School of Information event page.

• The Future of Search, John Battelle. Dec 3.
• How Search Engines Shape our View of Cyperspace. Nov 26.
• Convergence of User-Generated Content, Social Networking, and Mobile Services. Oct 2.

SDForum: The Emerging Technology Connection. SDForum has monthly general meetings, in addition to 18 Special Interest Groups. The SDForum also has a page for non-SDForum events that are of interest to their members.

• Semantic Web SIG: Intelligence at the Interface. Dec 13.
• Emerging Technology SIG: Friendsters at Work Displaying Social Media Streams in the Workplace. Dec 12.
• Business Intelligence SIG: Do you know what customers are saying about you and your products? Dec 3.
• Marketing SIG: Viral Marketing Unplugged. Nov 12.
• Web Services SIG: Building the Facebook Platform. Oct 23.

PARC Forum is hosted by the Palo Alto Research Center. The current speaker series theme (through March 2008) is Going Beyond Web 2.0.

• Chirs Anderson, The Long Tail. Jan 17.
• Guy Kawasaki, Truemors. Dec 13.
• Garret Camp, Stumble Upon. Nov 29t

MIT / Stanford Venture Lab

• Affiliate Event: Why Mobile? Why India? Why now? Dec 5.
• Introducing the Seventh Sense: Location Awareness. Oct 16.

Silicon Valley Web Guild has monthly meetings at Google HQ in Mountain View. Topics have included Open Social, Online Platforms, and Mobile Advertising. A good way to see the Google campus, network, and pick up little Google schwag items to impress your son/daughter/niece/nephew/parent (yes Mom, I will get schwag for you next time, I promise).

Yes, I’m actually looking forward to doing homework! Last week I attended the trainings at Bruce Clay as part of the contest they sponsored. Just before the training I went to the Community Next Viral! conference.

I came away from the trainings and conference with lots of homework — pages of notes of ideas I want to try and changes to implement for the project I’m a part of (OER Commons) in addition to our organization’s main web page. I’m also part of a committee redesigning the webpage for a non-profit amateur radio convention, so I have three non-profit sites to keep me busy. When my 90 days is up (and I’m sure The Lisa will hold me to that date), I’ll write about progress on all three sites. Presuming I can still write by then. By that time, I may never want to see a computer or website for a nice, long time.

The SEOToolset from Bruce Clay will be of great value for my work on these sites. The Toolset automates some of the tasks I had been doing by hand, and does other tasks I have not had time to even attempt. We’re a small organization and SEO is only a minor part of my duties, so some of my homework will take some time to implement, but it is homework I am going to enjoy doing. Now if I could just get a HousecleaningToolset and LaundryToolset to automate some other aspects of my life, I’d be set!

First, a big thank you to everyone at Bruce Clay. My ticket to SMX was courtesy of them, as part of the prize package for winning the SEO Charity Contest. I also want to thank the great Lisa and Susan (and the other live bloggers), their posts are wonderful material for future reference. Danny and the rest of the organizers are to be thanked as well, especially for the great food and facilities.

At SMX, I did learn a lot, but I realize how much more I do need to learn. I’ve recently become employed full time at a non-profit. The position only has a small amount of time available to dedicate to SEO, and a limited budget for training in this area. My challenge is deciding which aspects of SEO and SEM will have the best ROI for the organization with the time and money I have available. I’m looking forward to the rest of the prize package, which is the SEO training in July with Bruce Clay. After that, I think I will have a better idea of where to focus my efforts.

I am lucky to be in Silicon Valley, with the possibility of attending events by BayCHI, Silicon Valley WebGuild, and Community Next that are inexpensive and can fit into my schedule. I’m also grateful to all of you who share your expertise in your blogs, on forums, and in email (a big thanks here to Bill Slawski). You’ve helped me make it further than I ever could have on my own.

Early Sunday morning, a gasoline truck burst into flames on a connector ramp from the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge and melted that ramp and the ramp above it. That evening, I searched for Oakland 580 fire in Google Images. Fifteen out of 20 results on the first page were images of the fire and damage done to the ramps.

Google Image Search Help confirms that images from news results are now being populated in Google Images. One more reason to take the time to make sure your images have good descriptions.

Google has integrated their URL Removal Tool in the Webmaster Tools console. From here, you can remove content from the Google index, by using a meta noindex tag, having the URL return a 404 or 410 status code, or block the page with the robots.txt file. Previously, you had to use a separate Google website to do this, and the website wasn’t well advertised.

I used this tool when it was on the other page to remove material that didn’t get blocked in a robots.txt right away. I removed about 50,000 pages from the index (count via Webmaster Tools), but only dropped by about 10,000 pages. In addition, the site: command showed the maximum results instead of just a page or two and the “repeat this search with the omitted results included” message.

Once your content is blocked through robots.txt, use the URL removal tool, and (in my experience) the content has been removed from the index in a matter of a couple of days. The only big I see is that the URLs I removed via the external tool did not migrate to the Removed Content tab in the Webmaster Tools.

Update: Vanessa Fox has posted content removal details over on the Webmaster Central Blog.

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging lately is I have a chance to work full time and utilize my degree for the first time in a long time. When I was at my graduate school internship five years ago, MIT was just starting to talk about putting their course materials online. Now, five years later, about 80% of the classes have some material online, and the rest are soon to follow. Many other universities and K-12 institutions are also sharing their material and making it available for use and reuse (most often with a Creative Commons license).

It’s wonderful to see the progress that has been made in five years, but daunting to try to catch up on what I missed in the field while I was away. Thankfully, there are blogs for everything, including several discussing Open Educational Resources, OpenCourseWare, eLearning, and similar subjects. One leader in the field made his opml file available for download, so I added that to my reader and have been going through the blogs and postings. All 3000 postings. I’ve gotten through about half of those in two hours, scanning the titles of each blog, unsubscribing to many blogs that aren’t relevant to the specific work I’m doing.

And probably unsubscribing to some that ARE relevant, but have post titles that are undescriptive. Blogs with post titles such as “Sweet!”, “Hello”, and “Is It Me?” are likely to get removed and never looked at again, while “Required Structure in Learning Environment” gives me enough information to know if it is something relevant and if I should take a look at it.

The lack of descriptive titles surprises me. I’ve grown accustomed to reading SEO and SEM blogs, where people are aware of the value of titles for both their readers and for the search engines, and I can get the gist of a posting from just the title. In part I am surprised because I’m not talking about teenagers and MySpace blogs, but about professionals writing about high-level topics regarding education, learning, and technology.

Twenty questions was a great way to pass the time on long car trips when I was a kid. Twenty obtuse post titles is not the way to get new readers or convince people (or Google) that your posts have some relevancy to a topic.

I’m in the process of moving, have no connection yet at the new house, and have a contract that is keeping me quite busy, so this blog will be quiet for a little while.

Lifehacker pointed to Infopirate.org’s announcement of a Google Co-op created for searching social bookmarking sites. About 75 sites are in the co-op search, including the big ones (reddit, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, shashdot, digg) and lots of smaller ones that I had not heard of.

From the (removed to protect the guilty) blog comes a post “Th [sic] gift that keeps on giving”:

For those having trouble finding an appropriate gift for their Valentine struggling to make it online, the perfect solution is to spend five dollars and buy them a link on the XYZ. It’s a great deal — as one post on the blog states, the webpage “has gained a Google Page Rank of 3 in just 3 months! What this means for owners of links on the XYZ site is that those links pointed to their sites are now 3 times more powerful!”. The site is going for a world record for the longest vertical page of sponsored links, so you need to rush to be sure to be one of the lucky 200,000 people that get links.

If that’s not enough of a gift, you also get software that can automatically cloak your affiliate links, gold membership access to an auction site that has one auction, and to a website that is coming in fall of 2006.

My tagsurfing for SEO on wordpress.com provides no end of interesting SEO facts. In addition to the above, did you know that

• the web’s friendliest directory is one with 22 links and a PR of 0?
• one step for SEO is (in its entirety) “write some algorithms to improve Page Rank of Google”.
• to get ranked in Google, you should get a gmail account as Google uses this for site inclusion, and to put your URL in your signature, body text, and subject line?
• you need separate sitemaps for each subdirectory, and it MUST be in .xml?
• “when dealing with link partners, there’s virtually no point unless you get reciprocal links”?

On a serious note, searching for SEO on wordpress.com often yields scraped content with no attribution. You might browse on through and see if any posts look a bit too familiar. If you have a wordpress.com account, there is a “report spam” link under the Blog Info link when you are logged in. If you are not logged in, the Contact Support form can be used to report spam. In my experience, Wordpress is quite good about removing posts (and sometimes entire blogs) that are violating copyright, especially when the original author or company contacts Wordpress.