Monthly Archives: August 2008

Fantasy Football for Charity

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Adam Ostrow, from Mashable, put together a fantasy football league with various people from the social media crowd. I guess they all like to lose, since I was invited.

Regardless, the league will be fun and I’ll update everyone on how things are going, along with standings, etc. The reason why this is interesting is that we are all playing for charity, where the winner has all the proceeds donated to the charity of their choice.

For my part, I’m dishing out an ass kicking on behalf of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation based in Annapolis.

Charities represented:

I’m still sorting out other players and their charities and will update accordingly.

The draft is tonight. Contestants, who wants to livestream the draft screen over ustream?

Update: The draft is over and I like my team:

  • Tom Brady (QB-NE)
  • Vince Young (QB-Ten)
  • Braylon Edwards (WR-Cle)
  • Roy Wiliams (WR-Det)
  • Deion Branch (WR-Sea)
  • Joey Galloway (WR-TB)
  • Amani Toomer (WR-NYG)
  • Willis McGahee (RB-Bal)
  • Thomas Jones (RB-NYJ)
  • Travis Henry (RB-Den)
  • Jason Witten (TE-Dal)
  • Bubba Franks (TE-NYJ)
  • Adam Vinatieri (K-Ind)
  • David Akers (K-Phi)
  • Dallas (DEF)

Findability is a Legitimate Concern for Bloggers

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On Saturday, I posted a review of my session at WordCamp on Search and Findability. It was hard to gauge at that time how effective the session was at the time I wrote that. Beside my normal annual attendance at WordCamp as a subject matter expert, and several sessions at different WordCamps around the country over the past few years, I was there on behalf of Lijit.

In fact, when I pitched the session on search to Matt (as a core interest of Lijit), I was firmly instructed (as I suspected I would be) that hard pitching the company was off limits. From my perspective as a member of the WordPress community, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the same approach that we took at b5media. The company was represented. The company was known as a WordPress shop. We shared war stories with other WordPress shops. But no one on stage at any point pitched b5. It’s non-standard, I think, for any company to pitch their wares at any *Camp.

Instead, my session was about findability. Findability is the concept that content can be “found” by readers. This is a common problem that many bloggers wrestle with, and many have tried a wide variety of techniques to make their blogs more findable. This is not the same as SEO, though. SEO is a subset of findability. It’s findability for machines. Findability is as much about the data structure as the content or theme structure or the device compatibility (is it mobile compatible, for instance?)

Our product at Lijit tries to address a lot of the issues of findability. Re-search provides relevant search data to readers coming from the search engines (think landing pages). It makes all the bloggers content findable by indexing not just the site, but all the other related content associated with the user.

What I found interesting, and that I did not know when I wrote my post, was that the rest of the day would reinforce the core principles of my session. Tantek Çelik expounded on Microformats. There was an SEO session. Numerous bloggers talked to me throughout the day explaining solutions that they have come up with for making a blog more findable. Solutions ranged from content practices, to theme structures to custom homegrown plugins that do various things. It was fascinating.

I realize now what I thought I realized then, but didn’t really realize until now. All bloggers are faced with the same core challenges. The challenges manifest themselves in different ways, but at the end of the day findability is on the forefront of everyones minds.

  1. All bloggers want to drive traffic. Whether the traffic is internal, a key interest of those in the SEO/SEM/Ad space, or within their sphere of influence, an interest of bloggers looking to build their personal brand.
  2. All bloggers want to provide value to readers. No blogger wants search engine traffic to go away. Everyone wants to find a way to keep that traffic and convert it into value, whether ad-driven or otherwise, for their blog
  3. Bloggers are grappling with ways to break apart from the pack. 99.999% of blogs (a totally random number) really look the same at the end of the day. I don’t mean the user interface, but I do mean the theme structure. Structures are built in expected way, and modules/widgets are expected to behave similar ways, regardless of the blog
  4. WordPress cannot solve all the problems of all the blogs. Keep in mind that WordPress is a tool, not a lifestyle. (And I’d say the same thing to social media aficionados). WordPress is evolving into something, but much of the value that bloggers can add, allowing themselves to be different or drive more traffic (see point 1 or 2), are created by smart people trying to bring a solution to a problem.
  5. At the end of the day, every bloggers wants a kickass community of readers and commenters that reinforce their worth in the world. Kathy Sierra talks about creating passionate users, and she’s talking about principles of an engaged community. Findability helps the community engage.

Doing a 9am session is hard. Everyone is still sleepy, and/or hung over, jetlagged, etc. At the end of my session, I felt like I said what I needed to say. However, by the end of the weekend, I realized that much of WordCamp reinforced exactly the concerns that I brought up to kick off the opening session. That’s encouraging to me as a WordPress user and as someone who tries to understand the dynamics of the greater community. Of course, it encourages me as a Lijit guy as I see that our product can directly address many of the challenges that I heard repeated throughout the weekend.

Search and Findability

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I’m at WordCamp San Francisco 2008 today and had the distinct pleasure of giving a talk on Search and Findability. Distinct pleasure because it was the first session of the day at 9am. And if any of you know me, then you know that I don’t do mornings well. :-)

My session was about Search and Findability. There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about what the session would be about. Findability is not SEO. SEO is an aspect of Findability. SEO makes a blog findable for search engines.

Really, Findability is all about the right data being available to the reader, whether that reader is human or a machine (search engines). To that end, theme structure is a major area of concerns. Theme developers can setup their themes to have related posts or popular posts functionality, as well as attention to search implementation. I suggested theme authors should provide search results in full format, and not simply excerpts.

Secondly, findability is all about metadata and descriptive data. Microformats provide a human semantic understanding to machine-oriented descriptive data. Examples are

1
rel="nofollow"

,

1
rel="tag"

as well as WordPress built in XFN. Human understanding of machine data.

Multimedia content should take advantage of descriptive content. This means image tagging, show notes for podcasts and caption text for videos. Of course, and understanding of tags and categories is helpful.

Thirdly, I touched briefly on Ambient Findability, a concept introduced by Peter Morville in the O’Reilly publication with the same name. Ambient Findability suggests that no matter what, where or how, content should be easily findable. At b5media the mantra was “the right content, at the right time, to the right person on the right device”. Morville asks three questions:

  1. Can people find your blog?
  2. Can people find their way around your blog?
  3. Can people find your content, products and services despite your blog?

Finally, I suggested four plugins/features that can enhance the findability of a site:

  1. Possibly Related Posts – Only available for WordPress.com users.
  2. Search Everything – makes all areas of WordPress content available for the default search
  3. Microformats plugins – adds additional Microformats support to WordPress: Micro Anywhere, Blog Summary and Save Microformats
  4. Lijit for WordPress – our new plugin that allows registration and configuration from inside of the WordPress admin. Also, it makes it possible to hijack the theme search form.

The slide deck from the session is available below. It is Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licensed. In other words, use the idea, use the concepts, use the deck in it’s entirety as long as you attrbiute me. I’m Aaaron Brazell from Technosailor.com in case you didn’t know. Oh, and if you make money, I expect a cut. ;-)

Findability Abwc2008
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Will I See you in Boston? Or in San Francisco? Or in Boulder? Or in Vegas?

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Just a quick note as I’m getting ready for a meetup in my honor tonight in Boston. If you’re in the Boston area and don’t have any plans for tonight, would love to see you at Boston Beer Works across from Fenway Park. Michelle Wolverton gets all the credit for organizing and pulling the event together on my last night here in Boston (Yes, I did enjoy my first game at Fenway Park the Chapel of Awesomeness, last night!)

San Francisco

Tomorrow morning, I head out to San Francisco for WordCamp 2008. This will be my third trip to the Bay Area for this very special event and I’ll be speaking for the second time (third if you include WordCamp Dallas earlier this year). WordCamp is an exciting event for bloggers, particularly WordPress bloggers. It gives an opportunity for folks to come together and get their geek on with technical WordPress know-how or enjoy the community with other sessions geared toward more generalized topics.

For my part, I’ll be attending on behalf of Lijit along with Micah Baldwin, but will also be speaking on Findability and getting information in front of readers while driving them deeper into the site. I’ll release my slide deck in Creative Commons format after the event so look for it next week.

Mile High, Colliding with the DNC

Though I don’t anticipate participating in the DNC, I will be heading to the Rockies (Boulder to be exact) to work at Lijit World Headquarters. It will be crazy with 50k people coming in to see our next president accept his nomination and all the festivities that are involved. Someone told me there were 400 parties scheduled for the DNC which makes me think that perhaps the political catch-phrase shouldn’t be “Yes We Can” and more “1 Party, 400 parties”. DNC marketing executives have not returned comment on this idea. ;-)

What’s Happening in Vegas Needs to get On Your Calendar

Finally, next month I’ll be in Las Vegas for the annual Blog World Expo. This was one of three events I planned at the beginning of the year to be at. I attended SXSW, but will miss Gnomedex so two out of three isn’t bad.

I was talking to Rick Calvert, the organizer, and he mentioned that August 22 is the absolute drop-dead date for early registration and prices will go up significantly after that. So get registered!

On a related note, I’m looking for a hotel room to crash on the night of the 22nd. Due to Dividend Miles award travel, I ended up extending my stay a day later than most people go home. So if you’re still around Vegas for that night, give me a shout. I am open to splitting a room.

Either that or the fine folks at Southwest or JetBlue, both of whom are doing a fine job in reaching out to the social media community, can comp me a ticket. ;)

So, if our worlds might collide at one of these events, please give me a shout or look me up. My phone number is 410-608-6620.

The Psychology of Gap Marketing

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Gap Marketing. What. The. Heck.

Gap Marketing is the idea that, when you’ve done everything you can to cover the large target audiences, there are still small gaps to fill.

Gap marketing is laptop stickers, teeshirts, even designating wifi network IDs that push the brand.

Gap marketing is finding interesting applications for a product, service or brand outside of the norm.

Gap marketing targets those areas that aren’t covered by targetted advertising buys, radio and television spots, or sponsorship events.

It’s the understanding that not everyone really needs to do their own billing, but Freshbooks (aff) makes a nice tee-shirt.

Gap marketing is understanding that AOL might suck as a company, but Frank Gruber, Christina Warren and Grant Robertson are loads of fun to hang out with.

Gap marketing.

At senior levels of marketing departments, ROI and P&L are the buzzwords. How much Return on Investment will this initiative net. How does an event effect our Profit and Loss sheets.

While always important, gap marketing humanizes a company or a brand in a way that an ad buy cannot. It makes a brand more approachable.

When you’re running a business, the most surefire way to increase sales is to make your customers feel like they know you, your company and your brand. Sure, you might make a sale otherwise, but making the customer feel like they have something no one else has will ensure a brand loyalty. Hey, I know those guys.

Last week, I spent the day at Ford Motor Company. Going into the day, I was not a Ford fan. They were yet another big company with expensive products. Worse yet, they have a history of failure. Does Found on Road Dead ring a bell with anyone?

Spending the day on campus allowed me an insight into a brand that I felt like no one else had. Will I ever be bought and paid for? Not on your life. Do I have a personal identification with Ford now? Hell yes.

You see, Ford engaged in gap marketing. I’m sure no one in their marketing department realized it was called that. Heck, I didn’t before I began this post. Yet they did. Although the day was filled with many typical faces in the automotive press, they brought a gap audience in as well with various bloggers from all walks of life. We weren’t auto bloggers. We weren’t Ford connoisseurs. We were normal people given an opportunity to own something, though small, that made us feel special and important to the big company.

Gap marketing.

Witnesses, Gatekeepers and History

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In an issue Washington Internet Daily last month there is (as one co-worker put it) “double-barreled” coverage of the Senate and House Judiciary hearings on the Google-Yahoo partnership (aka GooHoo, a term I will no longer be using).

I covered the Senate hearing in the morning, coincidentally ending across the table from Kara Swisher, which was pleasantly surprising as you rarely see Valley writers out in DC. There are enough accounts of the hearing out there that I won’t re-hash it, but this morning a coworker sent me a link to a story by a longtime political and technology journalist, who I have deep respect but don’t see very often. I noted that I hadn’t seen him there, and was told he had watched the hearing by webcast.

Whoa. That wasn’t in the story.

Does it matter?

Media serve as gatekeepers to history for many reasons, most of all access. I can go places that the average person cannot, and get into rooms or talk to people by virtue of my status as “journalist.” On the other hand, because this hearing was webcast, a talented writer was able to pick up on the same issues and notice the same things that I did, without leaving his desk.

Why aren’t more people doing this? For all the griping about access to politicians and the exclusion of “citizen journalists” and bloggers from the Capitol press corps, many of the newsworthy events around here are routinely broadcast on the Internet for anyone to watch. For free. Easily.

It’s also easy to keep a record of “what happened.” Recently I was challenged on something that I wrote, and was able to go back to the digital recording I made of the event and confirm that what I wrote was accurate. But anyone who went there had the same capability that I did. Telling me that “I would not have…” means that you don’t know, you don’t have a record.

You’re watched by cameras everywhere you go. If you’re a public figure or politician, there is always a microphone nearby. Webcasting means people the world over can witness events that previously would have been limited to a select few who could get into the room, either by arriving early (or paying a line-stander, something I’ll write about another day) or having the right credential.

In other words, everyday people can bear witness to events, record them for accuracy and document them. Not all of it may rise to the level of what professionals do. But it’s out there.

The little things and the questions may be hard to ask, but the big picture can be painted by anyone now, and that means the truth will always be there. It’s not “social” media, it’s not even “the first draft of history.” If it happened, and you recorded it, it’s the truth.