Posted by jennita

It’s November! Which here at the mozPlex means a few things: It’s sunny and beautiful in Seattle [wait.. uhm what??], we’re all getting ready for Thanksgiving and most importantly… PubCon is next week! As usual we’re sending a big crew down to Vegas to speak, learn, network and of course party.

Both Rand and Joanna will be speaking on several panels, plus you’ll find Jamie, Aaron, Miranda, Adam and Gillian on-hand as well. You’ll know who they are as they’ll be wearing a lovely SEOmoz t-shirt. I really urge you to seek them out and say hi. Really, stalk them… they’ll all enjoy it!

Oh right… you don’t care about all that now do you? You care about the party info! Ok fine… Here’s the goods:

Happy Hour Details

When: Wednesday, November 10th, 6:00 – 7:30pm

Where: Wynn Hotel in the Alsace 2 room

Who: All PubCon attendees!

Why: We’ll have some cool giveaways [including 3 Kindles!] and free drinks of course. It’s a party for goodness sake, why wouldn’t you come?!

Still not convinced? Check out some of the pictures from last years party (you can see them all here).

Kristy Bolsinger, Kate Morris and Matt Cutts

Chris Winfield, Shirley Tan, Brent Csutoras, Dana Lookadoo, Tim Ash

So be sure to head on over to the Wynn right after Matt Cutt’s Super Session on Wednesday evening. We’ll be tweeting reminders and any updates. We look forward to seeing everyone there!

<3 – The mozzers

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Continue Reading: SEOmoz PubCon Happy Hour 2010

Posted by Danny Dover

 As people in relationships spend time with each other they start to leverage each others natural strengths to efficiently store information about the world around them. "Honey, what is the name of my Aunt’s employer?" "Babe, what do you call that thing that heats bread?" They rely on each other to store information that is mutually beneficial.  Some believe this process is one of the reasons breakups are so hard. “I feel like when s/he left, s/he took a part of me.” It is common to hear statements similar to this because when it comes to memory, it is more true than many may realize.

While this phenomenon has historically happened between two people offline, it is now happening online between people and technology. How many times have you checked Google for a fact that you once knew? How many times have you Googled for a resource that you have already read? Like it or not, Google is quickly becoming a second brain in much the same way loved ones have done in the past. While this search engine has benefits that humans don’t (ubiquity), it does have some severe limitations that should be examined.

The self declared mission of the people who run Google is to “organize the world’s information…”. While they have done a remarkable job of this online, they have failed to do this offline in the tangible world. To understand these unspoken failures, all you need to do is examine the five major senses humans use to organize the world’s information.

Limitations

Sight

“Who is that guy?” “I recognize that place, where was that scene filmed?” “What is the name of that color?” For most people, sight is the primary sense for experiencing the world. While technology does exist for identifying objects within images (facial recognition algorithms, OCR, color detection, etc…) you can’t utilize these tools directly through Google. This may possibly be the biggest limitation of Google. Be it remembering the name of a person after a date or an entire government agency trying to identify a suspect, identifying someone or something by sight is critical for organizing the world’s information.

Smell

Smell is the closest sense tied to memory. Have you ever walked by a stranger and instantly been flooded with memories of a significant other who happened to wear the same perfume or cologne? It can be a jarring experience. Want to identify that scent? Google can’t help you. While the technology exists for detecting smells and there are databases for identifying smells, a method to easily cross reference and identify a smell online is not available.

Hearing

You are watching How I Met Your Mother and you recognize the voice in the opening sequence. Whose voice is that? You hear an obscure tune as a car blaring loud music drives by your home. What is the name of that song? Like the situation with sight, the technology for identifying sounds exists (Shazam, SoundHound, etc…) but it is not available through Google.  While you can search via verticals for text, video and images, you can’t search for sounds. This is almost certainly a legal limitation rather than a technology one. (After all, Google can identify audio clips in YouTube videos.)

Taste

You are traveling in Greece and you order the most interesting looking item on the menu. When it arrives, it looks like nothing you have ever seen. You bite into it and instantly recognize the flavors but can’t remember the name of the meal as it is hidden by an “unique” texture. Again, Google won’t help you (although a napkin might). The same problem happens more frequently with allergies. Want to make sure a meal a friend made for you doesn’t have an ingredient you are allergic to? Some technology can help but Google isn’t one of them.

Touch

BEEP BEEP BEEP! It is 6:00 AM and your alarm clock is screaming. Eyes still closed and crusty, you reach across your bed and use touch to identify the snooze button on your alarm clock. Later that same day, you reach into your bag and navigate its contents by touch to pull out your cell phone. Although more subtlely tied to memory than the other senses, touch can also help you identify objects.

But why would you need to search for something by touch if the object is already at arms length? Good question… unless you are blind. Many blind people use their sense of touch to catalogue the world. Imagine you are not able to see and you find something new and want to know what it is. A friend might be able to help but Google won’t.

And these major limitations are only the beginning:

Where are you?

In the United States, the most common text message is “where are you”. While other websites (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare) have been getting better at answering this question, Google has largely remained stagnant.

Where did I put that?

You are getting ready for work but can’t for the life of you remember where you put your favorite shirt. This type of situation happens daily. Be it car keys, shoes or your little sister, countless man hours have been spent looking for things. When it comes to finding the location of personal items, again Google can’t help.

So Google has some major limitations, why is that a big deal?

These limits are worth writing a blog post about for two reasons; context and awareness.

The great thing about being alive is that everyone is constantly at the forefront of human progress. Right now we are the most evolved we have ever been. And right now, we are even more evolved than when you read that last sentence. It is very likely that while you have read this post, someone, somewhere has invented something that will make your life better moving forward. Google is a great example of that. The limitations I listed above could be fixed with the creation of new features. That is not the point. The point is that while we are currently living in the most technologically advanced time that has ever existed, we still have a long way to go. The Google of today is not the end-all-be-all, it is only a milepost on a much longer stretch of highway.

The second reason I am writing this post is to promote awareness. Whether you like it or not, Google is becoming an important factor in how you experience the world. Just like a person wearing glasses literally sees the world through predefined frames, humans are seeing the Internet through the limits of Google.

Think about that.

If you were a fish living in a fish bowl, would you know the bowl existed? You would certainly know there was an edge to your environment (the glass) but having been enclosed in a bowl throughout your entire existence, you wouldn’t be able to “organize your world’s information” beyond what you could sense. Google is not sensing the world like we do. It can’t see, smell, hear, taste or touch. Yet at the same time, it is largely defining how we experience the Internet. As the Internet becomes an increasingly essential part of our world, the search engine’s limitations become our limitations. These limitations whether noticed or not are limiting your potential to experience the world.

Update 11/4/10 – 9:20AM:

Hey everyone! I want to address some of the comments below. I stick by my argument that Google’s limitations are limiting our potential to view the world but judging by the comments, it looks like I didn’t explain my word choice well enough.

I hold Google to the standard they set for themselves. The company’s mission is to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." When I refer to limits as failures I am doing so in the context of their self declared mission. Google does amazing things with technology but it has failed to do what it set out to do. In this way, these major limitations are failures of their mission.

Although no one brought this up (yet!), I want to note that this post could have easily been about Microsoft. I chose to single out Google simply because they are the dominate market leader. Sitting at my desk right now, I have three devices that have Google set as the default search engine. In my life at least, Google is almost ubiquitous.

Below grasshopper commented: "But as with any utility – and Google is just that, a utility – it’s important to remember to switch it off. "

I like that comment as it illustrates a point I was touching on but didn’t fully hit. (Forgive me as I am taking your comment slightly out of context ;-p) Just like a utility, you can’t actually turn it off. Like gas in your house, you can "turn if off" but this just restricts your access. It doesn’t actually remove the gas from the lines under and around your house. Grasshopper continued "Go for a walk outside, talk with your friends and family face-to-face, etc." This is where the problem of ubiquity comes into play. Odds are you will be going on a walk but taking your Internet-enabled cell phone with you. As the drastic growth of mobile searches shows, even on a walk you are not experiencing the world without Google. (This is not meant to be an attack on your comment grasshopper, rather your word choice got me thinking and I was inspired to make another point ;-p)

If you have any other related limitations that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Continue Reading: Google’s Unspoken Failures Are Limiting Your Potential

When you get to *really* competitive keywords the results typically tend to be fairly stable because the cost of entry into the game is so high & many of the top players keep building additional signals of quality. You might get minor fluctuations from time to time, but large fluctuations on highly competitive keywords are fairly rare.

Over the last day or 2 Google has done yet another algorithm change (the 3rd or 4th noticeable one in 2 weeks), where on some searches they are ranking an internal page over the homepage. It is almost as if the best mental model for the algorithm that is doing this is…

• find the top SITES that deserve to rank well & rank them based on that criteria
• however, rather than ranking THOSE PAGES, instead do internal site searches & back in other relevancy factors to look for other popular & relevant pages on those sites
• test to see how well searchers respond to them

Here is a pretty overt example, where Google changed 2 of the listings for “SEO” to internal pages.

I have seen other examples, some where Google also highlighted a new information-less blog post with only a couple automated backlinks pointing at it. I don’t want to “out” that site though, but this is the type of image Google was showing beneath that entry

Google could conceivably use this sort of process to further adjust the search results based on demographics, searcher location, recent searches, searcher interests, and so on. Add in the ability to send searchers down a known path optimized for profitability, the ability to select vertical databases on the fly and change the titles on the fly and it allows whoever has the most search market share to keep refining the results to make them more appealing to users at an ever increasing level of granularity & greater profitability.

I have no problems keeping up with the increasing complexity of search, but Google is setting up some serious barriers to entry for new players. It is hard to explain in a straightforward manner that page A might be ranking due to relevancy signals pointing into page B, but these are the SERPs through which we make a living. And it is only going to keep growing more complex.

Depending on how far Google pushes with this, it can have major implications in terms of rank tracking, SEO strategy, site architecture & conversion optimization. More on that stuff in the community forums.

Continue Reading: Google Ranking Internal Pages Rather Than Home Pages

Jon Sobel of Technorati has published the latest State of the Blogosphere Report for 2010 including stats from 7,200 blogger respondents world-wide. Started in 2004 by Dave Sifry, this annual report has provided insight into the growth of the blogging community and helps answer questions like: who is blogging, why, what are they blogging about, how often and where are they blogging from.

In 2008 Technorati added insights of individual bloggers to the report with an emphasis this year on women blogging. As a long time blogger and advocate of blogging for online marketing, I’ve always taken a lot of interest and insight from these reports.

For marketers and communications professionals seeking to better understand the changing nature of the social web and the role blogs pay within in it, here are some essential statistics from Days 1 & 2 (of 3) from the 2010 State of the Blogosphere Report:

1% of respondents blog full time and 21% blog for their own company or organization

2/3 of bloggers are male and 1/4 of bloggers have a household income of $100k or more

U.S. States with the highest concentration of bloggers: California (15%), New York (8%), Texas: (6%), Florida: (4%), Illinois (4%)

Most Bloggers update 2-3 times per week

33% of bloggers have worked as a writer, reporter, producer or on-air personality within traditional media

42% of respondents say they blog about brands they love or hate

34% of bloggers say they never talk about brands on their blog

25% of Bloggers blog from their smartphone

42% of bloggers use social media to follow brands

The primary influences on the topics covered are other blogs (25%) friends (16%) news websites (9%)

Bloggers spend more time on social media sites (9.9% computer 5.7% smart phone) each week than they do reading other blogs (9.2% computer 3% smart phone)

The Top 100 bloggers generate almost 500 times the articles as all bloggers

Facebook (49.7%) is more popular than blogs (47.1) as a top influencer of consumer purchases

For consumers, 46.1% trust traditional media less than they did 5 years ago and 36.7% think newspapers will not survive in the next 10 years

Conversely, 39% believe more people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs than traditional media in the next 5 years

28.2% believe Facebook is being taken more seriously as a source of information

Consumers trust friends/family (89.3%) and traditional media more than social media as sources of information

More consumers trust friends on Facebook (51.8%) than blogs (45.6) as a trusted information source

The top success measurements bloggers use are:

• personal satisfaction (66%)
• quantity of posts/comments (51%)
• unique visitors (50%)
• links from other sites (39%)
• blog content shared on social sites (34%)

The top ways blogging has helped individuals with a business are:

• greater industry visibility (64%)
• acquired new customers, made sales (58%)
• built thought leadership (54%)
• asked to speak at conferences (32%)
• helped recruit employees (17%)

78% of bloggers surveyed are using Twitter with the most common purpose being to promote blog content (72%) and share links to interesting content (62%)

87% of bloggers surveyed use Facebook, and the majority (66%) do not have a page for their blog separate from their personal account

The most effective social media sites to promote blog content are Facebook (28%) and Twitter (26%) followed by LinkedIn (4%) StumbleUpon (3) Flickr (2) and YouTube (2)

The most common tactics mom bloggers use to promote their blogs include:

• commenting on other blogs (and hoping for reciprocity)
• Facebook
• tagging blog posts
• Twitter
• linking to other blogs from a blogroll

Obviously there’s a lot more data in Technorati’s full State of the Blogosphere report and more information will be published in part 3. Hopefully you’ll find some of these initial statistics useful for your own blogging efforts.

Parting Question:

Do you agree with the stats above. Do your own blog marketing activities or preferences sync up with bloggers overall or will mom bloggers?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Essential Statistics from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Continue Reading: Essential Statistics from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010

Today at its mobile event, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng gave some (vague) answers as to why there still isn’t an official iPad application.

Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).

Tseng stepped in to add that the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.

Facebook needs a solution that will let it deploy features across multiple devices quickly, so there isn’t a lag time like there has been between the Android and iPhone apps. In other words, we’re going to see a web-based mobile application that’s going to be targeted specifically at the tablet form factor.

Continue Reading: Why Facebook Still Doesn’t Have An iPad App

Today at Facebook’s event in Palo Alto, CA, the company had a lot to say about their mobile platform. Yes, they had updates to their Android and iPhone apps. And yes, the company implemented a new single sign-on process. And yes, they unveiled a new location write API. But the thing they announced that may have the biggest impact is Deals.

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook launching a Deals product ever since talk about them entering the location space began. Some people were disappointed when Facebook Places launched without any deals. Well, they’re not going to be disappointed anymore.

Facebook is launching Deals with 22 premium partners today. And they’ve giving 20,000 small and medium sized businesses on Facebook access to their new simple Deal creation tool. So what are some of the deals?

• Gap is giving away 10,000 free pairs of blue jeans. And when they run out of those, they’re giving 40 percent off of any product when someone checks-in to any of their nationwide stores.
• A smaller cinema chain, Alamo Draft House, is giving away a free pint glass when you check-in. And they’ll have offers for special events for friends.
• The North Face is giving $1 to charity for a store check-in or a check-in to a number of national parks.
• The Palms hotel in Las Vegas is giving away a free third night when you stay for two nights. Or you can get a room upgrade.
• The Golden State Warriors are giving away access to a free event with players if you check-in to a game.

As you can see, these deals are a mixture of nationwide and local. And there are a mixture of deals for products and deals for charity. And there are deals for individuals and deals for friends.

The social element is key to these Deals. There will be a way to share deals with your friends. You can check-in somewhere and tag your friends so they all get the same deal. This is very nice.

And claiming these deals is as easy as two clicks.

It will be very interesting to see what this means for smaller location services like Foursquare, which has been ramping up these types of deals in recent months. Will it be a case of all ships rising or everyone going over to Facebook?

It will also be interesting to see what this means for group buying companies like Groupon. Facebook hasn’t specifically stated anything in that direction — but you can easily see them going in that direction too.

And here’s another key: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook is not getting paid at all for these deals. They’re just doing them because they’re great for users and businesses who use Facebook. (He did leave open the possibility that some partners may choose to advertise with Facebook, but that’s not the main intent.)

Again, this could spell trouble for rivals. Many of them began by offering free access to deals with the intention that they might get paid for them eventually. But who would pay another service for this when Facebook is offering it for free? And Zuckerberg noted today that Places is already several times larger than any other location-based service out there — something which is pretty amazing considering it has largely been iPhone-only up until now.

Facebook noted that in the next couple of months the Deals tools will roll out to all Facebook page owners. Currently, Deals will be U.S.-only for now, it will roll-out internationally over time.

Continue Reading: The Other Location Shoe Drops: Facebook Deals. Will It Discount Rivals?

Move aside Logitech, there’s another solar keyboard in town.

Earlier this week, Logitech introduced the K750, an $80 wireless, solar-powered keyboard made of recyclable plastic and billed as the world’s first solar keyboard. The K750 may be first but it certainly won’t be the last.

This Wednesday, Taiwan’s AU Optronics released details on its own solar keyboard solution. According to reports, AUO’s version is essentially a solar sheet, measuring 2.1 millimeters thick with touch sensitivity. Aesthetically, it looks like the complete fusion of a solar panel and keyboard. The surface is perfectly smooth and somewhat reflective, like a solar panel, with only the hint of a keyboard’s outline.

Similar to Logitech’s K750, the AUO version promises to charge in natural and artificial light. However, unlike Logitech’s freestanding model, AUO’s 14-inch touch keyboard will be built into computer manufacturers’ laptop sets.

AUO will showcase demo models of its solar contraption next week during FPD International in Chiba, Japan.

(Image Source: AUO/via Digitimes)

Continue Reading: AU Optronics Unveils A Solar Touch Keyboard

Today at its mobile event, Facebook has just announced that it’s opening up its Write API and Search API to Facebook Places, in addition to the Read API that launched earlier this year.

So what does that mean? Facebook first launched its location APIs at its Places event in August, but it was split into two main sets of functionality: Read and Write access. Most developers only had access to the former — with a user’s permission, a third-party app could pull in Places data from Facebook. But only a handful of large partners had access to the Write functionality, which lets a user syndicate updates the other direction (for example, a check-in on SCVNGR also updates your Facebook Places status).

Now everyone has access to that feature — any app can use the API to write to Facebook Places.

The other big news revolves around Search. Facebook is given developers access to its database of venues — the developer sends in the coordinate, and Facebook gives back a list of nearby locations. And these aren’t based exclusively by proximity — the list will be ordered based on the relevance to the user.

This database will be competing with Google’s Places API, as well as other sources of location data like SimpleGeo. It isn’t a purely benevolent move, either — Facebook will be able to further improve its database as more people check in.

Continue Reading: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) today released the official 2011 Fuel Economy Guide, providing information about estimated mileage and fuel costs for model year 2011 vehicles sold in the U.S.

For the first time, the annual Fuel Economy Guide includes medium-duty passenger vehicles, generally large sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and passenger vans. These were not previously subject to fuel economy measurement and labeling requirements.

Listings in the 2011 Fuel Economy Guide provide an estimated annual fuel cost based on a vehicle’s MPG rating and national estimates for annual mileage and gas prices. The online version lets users input local gas prices and information about their normal driving habits to get a personalized fuel cost estimate.

The EPA and DOE will provide additional automobile fuel economy information online as more 2011 models, including electric cars— like the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf— and plug-in electric hybrids become available.

The guide arrives as the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and nine others, has accused the EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of setting unattainable goals for vehicles’ fuel efficiency by the year 2025.

The Detroit News reports:

“The NHTSA and EPA said they could propose anywhere from 47 mpg to 62 miles per gallon (MPG) by 2025, achieved by a range of 3 to 6 percent increases annually.

The agencies said the added costs per vehicle would range from $770 to $3,500 by 2025. The move could add $12 billion to $50 billion annually to the price of new cars.

But the automakers said the actual price could be 2 1/2 times higher, based on a National Research Council report. They said under some scenarios, consumers wouldn’t recoup the higher vehicle costs through fuel savings.”

In late October, the EPA and U.S. Department of Transportation released the first national standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from and improve fuel efficiency of heavy-duty vehicles including combination tractors, heavy-duty pickups and vans, and vocational vehicles (such as delivery trucks, dump trucks and buses).

Environmentalists and auto industry officials told Politico.com that they expect “conflict with the administration as government control of GM and Chrysler diminishes, especially when Republicans take over the House next year.”

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to reduce the government’s 61% stake in General Motors to 35% in the next few years, starting with a $10 billion stock offering Nov. 18th. The offering marks the probable end of an era when the U.S. government and auto industry collaborated extensively to save more than an estimated 1 million domestic auto-industry jobs.

With respect to the EPA, the President said in a post-election news conference on Wednesday:

“The EPA is under a court order that says [greenhouse gases] are a pollutant that fall under their jurisdiction…We need to not ignore the science [but] find ways to solve [environmental] problems in ways that don’t hurt the economy, that encourage the development of clean energy in this country, and give us the opportunity to create jobs [while] putting us in a competitive posture around the world.”

Image via: Chego101

Continue Reading: For The First Time, EPA Fuel Economy Guide Rates SUVs And Vans

Today at Facebook’s event in Palo Alto, CA the company wanted to talk about mobile. First, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a few updates to both Facebook’s Android and iPhone apps. But the real key to all of this is the platform, he said.

Zuckerberg invited the head of Facebook’s mobile platform team, Erick Tseng, on stage to talk a bit more about that. Tseng said that Facebook’s vision is to create “a true horiztonal platform“. And the first major component of that is a single sign-on, he said.

This is a button that third-party developers can use to give users a one-click way to sign on. “It removes the need to ever have to type a username or password again,” Tseng noted. This is all about “saving you time from things you have to do, to the stuff you want to do,” he continued.

This is something that Zuckerberg has been talking about for a while now. And back in August, CTO Bret Taylor noted that they have a team called “Platmobile” working on this very thing.

Tseng noted that implementing this is just a few lines of code. In fact, it’s the same permission system that over a half million games and apps use today on facebook.com, he said. And with that, he invited people from Groupon and Zynga to talk about their experience implementing this.

Other partners launching this shortly include Yelp, Loopt, Flixster, Booyah, and SCVNGR.

But it’s important to note that single sign-on is just the first part of the mobile equation. This is also all about some new APIs — such as location ones, with write and search access. And a new Deals element.

Continue Reading: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On