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Kevin Kellys New Old Book

Kevin Kelly is republishing New Rules for the New Economy – Radical Strategies for a Connected World  as a blog to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the book-publication.

Reading it in 1999 was fun – there were many strategic books around, dealing with business, content, businesses. Most of them were already old when you had time to read them. And the message they delivered to beginners, scepticists or your bosses at that time was – if they liked it or not -: This internet-insanity will be over soon; it’s not going to work and it’s not worth bothering about it.

In 2000 I left the printmedia-publishing house I worked for then and joined the online business. My first job was doing contentmanagement for a big portal targeting german speaking europe (as a first step; multiple languages were von the roadmap) with every kind of content you can imagine, a big shopping mall and a big community in chats and discussion boards. That strategy survived three months…

We built the portal anyway and learned a lot about new rules, new economy and radical strategies…

Something new…

I just wanted to write a post about the three hours it took me to teach a colleague how to publish videos on the intranet (and that only covers half of the work), and about that I’m looking forward to calculating a business case for the new solution we’ve been discussing for more then a year.

This morning, I got the amazing news: My project has been approved by the management board. We will build a new intranet. I started to work on the first proposals in November 2007  – so that were really really long discussions.

Now it’s signed; the main requirements we want to meet are:

• build a portal that’s accessible for everybody from every country we’re operating in
• introduce publication processes that talk with one voice to everybody (same content, same time, all audiences)
• introduce permission management and closed usergroups where necessary
• introduce group-personalisation to create different views on the content for different audiences
• enhance the corporate directory towards an enterprise network
• carefully introduce well planned blogs and microblogs with attractive authors
• provide wikis as collaboration-, documentation and knowledgemanagement tools (knowledgemanagement projects are running in parallel)
• use tags as additional navigation- and categorisation tools, introduce rss for easier and for flexible customization
• support and train employees especially with increasing their media literacy

Detailed planning will continue now, I will keep posting and I’m looking forward to comments and discussions.

SEO Self Experiment, Week 3+4

Things are going down. Quite fast, actually. Web catalogs are slow with creating entries, bokmarking is not really a boost anymore once you have reached some basic values – and especially link popularity is quite far behind: 18 confirmed catalog entries, three blogs with over 50 entries each linking to the site – and google only recognizes 10 incoming links? These links contain only 2 catalogs, the rest are quite arbitrary posts from one of my blogs. Only eight from over fifty are counted; they are not the most recent ones, nore the most clicked, they are all from the same blog and they don’t differ from other posts at all – no idea why it’s them and not others (if it’s the pagerank of the linking page, that would mean that most catalogs are cheating about their rank. So let’s not assume that…).

Some conclusions for now:

• It does not grow by itself. You can keep search results growing by adding bookmarks, entries, links, but you can not fully control the growth. The quality of the links is to challenge: it’s usually the same domains that get ranked well.
• There does not seem to have been a page rank update since I’m running my stuff (some sites  say it will be on march 26), and the age (less then three months, which is mostly not registered by seo-analyzers) are further disadvantages.
• Creating bookmarks and catalog-entries is one way to stay visible; it requires a lot of work (or using some tools and spending money) and it creates some background noise.
• Efficieny is quite low – there are only a few directories that really make a change; it’s not that much effort to create an entry there.
• There is a strong hype at the beginning, but the number of search results shrinks down quickly.
• Referrer-analysis proves, that blogs, magazines, communities with high usage are the best traffic sources: you get qualified leads – and creating entries there is not such braindead work as creating web catalog entries
• Other search engines are more generous than Google (especially with link popularity) but for no good: alltogether they bring about ten percent of the traffic google brings.
• And finally: I’m also tracking the “real”, clickable search results from Google. At least they keep increasing (if you don’t care for some hype that obviously happened last week…

Next steps for me will be to create more comments and content oriented postings, and also to spread links in existing networks I built so far (which wil also be some endurance test for the network features).
I also submitted a simple sitemap (urls only) to see if that helps; especially because the results are generally quite old…

More updates next week…

 
 

 

SEO Self Experiment – Week 2

Search results are decreasing – quite fast actually. I keep adding web catalog entries, posting links on digg, delicious and stumble upon, but this does not have any important effect – at least not bigger then the negative effects from sorting out duplicates. That seems to be what the search engines are doing: some very efficient catalogs proved to have their efficiency only over a very short period (less than one week).
The good thing is: the number of real results (that are displayed and not filtered away) keeps increasing. And link popularity keeps rising. The strange thing is, that the link popularity reports do not show one single catalog entry, also many other links are missing – they display only results of an old blog of mine that I created more than two months ago.

The keyword results show a lot of movement: with the top two keywords, I’m still not among the top ten result pages, links to my domain now dropped from page 1 to page 4. The top three keywords deliver results between page 1 and 2 (detailed reports will follow next week).

The top search terms identified via Google analytics for my domain show, that people are obviously willing to click through a lot of pages. If i repeat the searches, I often don’t get any results at all from my domain among the top ten or twelve result pages. Maybe that also shows that there is strong movement among keyword results: Today’s search does not deliver the same results as yesterday’s search.

Search engine’s share in the referring sites is also decreasing (while visitors keep growing) – some people do obviously really click on the catalog entries. Decrease is quite slow; I will have to monitor it for another few days.

The age of the indexed pages does also vary a lot, not really depending from their publication date: some old, not yet beautifully indexed urls are still indexed, some result pages also display old page titles (changed three weeks ago).

Submitting xml-sitemaps will be one of the next steps, but only after a few weeks of further observation.

 

 

SEO Selfexperiment Week 1

SEO Selfexperiment

Facebook Hollywoodifies Our Lifes. And it Shortens Them.

I read news from a friend diving in south africa, participating in the famous london gorilla run and celebrating his daughters fith birthday. – what a life.

 Another Friend is posting pictures from Bali, New Zealand, Australia – that are his three holiday-trips in one year.

And friend 3 posts in his statusnotes that he just arrived from Shangai after a short stop in Berlin, is now having food at Vienna airport, shortly before leaving for Barcelona.

Very glamourous lives.

Everything is so spectacular, it’s happening at breakneck speed – and watching makes you feel really poor.

Some distance puts a lot of shine and glamour on many things. So many nice things are happening so fast – it’s really impressive. If you look at the good things only, that is.

Doing that in real life, too, is plain bullshit bingo. But we could look at it as another benefit of using social networks: they make us clean up our lives as if we were attending a party and having a nice conversation.

That’s a pretty good reason to use them anyhow.

SEO Selfexperiment, Week 1

A promised, some results.

It takes ages until contentmodifications of existing pages get displayed in search results. Some changes in pagetitles and metatags I made February 2 are still not visible (Feb. 16).

Results grow, but vary. Sometimes they grow exponentially to what I’m doing, sometimes slower, sometimes faster.
The same applies to the order of results: They change without any apparent changes on the pages themselves – the same results appear every day, but there ranking is different.

Search engines are very different in what they see: The number of results found reaches from 16 on live.com to 30.000 on yahoo.com (on the same day, with the same query).

Linksearch and Linkpopularity also grow with some delay. It took a few days, until Google found any links at all. The links that arelisted now in the search results are very old – I created them in the beginning of January. All other links are obviously not yet counted.

It’s too early to talk about success and the most important web catalogs yet – I’ll have to collect some more data. Here are just some charts on the basic development of results and links. The only thing I can say is Google may be ungenerous with links and results, but it’s of course the most prominent referrer.

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Blackberry addicted? Or just curious for life?

I heard two colleagues talk about blackberries on Friday; they talked about addiction, changes they bring into our lives and the stress you have checking for mail even in the evening or on weekend.

I think this is not something imposed on us by Blackberry or other mobile email technologies, this is an expression of how we look at life: Are there a lot of dangerous, bothersome, annoying things out there? Are we afraid of what is waiting for us?

Or are we curious for life, are we looking foreward to the things to come? A lot of my life is happening digitally that’s the way to stay in touch, to share something. And looking at work: I want to get things done, getting information earlier leaves me more time to handle things. So I want to get information…

I can’t know everything, I can’t care for everything and I can’t do everything at a time. But it makes me more comfortable to know that I should do something – even if I can’t or don’t want to do it right now. True relaxation is not excluding information, it’s ignoring it…

And efficiency, as we shold know, is not doing as many things as possible, but doing the right things at the right time (this is, once again, why we need information…).

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Too much socialising is quite antisocial

When I’m not sure if I like a website or an application I think of it as a persons who is talking to me. Sometimes that helps to make up my mind.

When I look at twitter, there is a multiple personality talking to me. Or somebody who is just namedropping, without actually saying anything. The more people you follow, the less communication is happening: you don’t see your real friends anymore you hardly care about what all these guys are saying it’s just noise going on…

This turns twitter from a communication to a publication media – the same antisocial stuff as your old tv station.

This tells me

• it’s in the responsibility of the user if a media is an information-, publication- or communication-media. That’s quite a lot of power and can also influence business models.
• I will unfollow all professional twitter users; they just waste my time for too little benefit.

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SEO self-experiment

I started an SEO self-experiment these days: How long does it take to promote a domain (without playing foul or spending money)? How long does it take search engines to react on changes (display new page titles, new meta tags)? How many new links do you get by entering web-catalogues, online-pr-distributors? How many links do you get by using social bookmarking?

The test arrangement

• registered an unusual domain (there are no other search results for this word then my own pages)
• set up around 100 pages with meaningful content
• followed the basic SEO-laws (use page titles, descriptions, keywords in decent length, use many internal links in the body text, name pictures etc.)
• creating three new web-catalog entries per day (I guess I’ll do this for about 3 weeks; it’s all manual work with individual descriptions)
• posting one article everyday on three social bookmarking services (delicious, digg, stumble upon)

What I’m checking daily is

• Number of search results for my domain name
• Number of links to my domain that search engines find

Softer facts I’m interested in are:

• which catalogues are the most efficient?
• which bookmarking services are the most efficient?
• when does it start to grow from alone, when do other users start to post links or bookmark stuff?

I’ll keep posting results on a weekly basis.

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