Createlf

Accessing Sysinternals Tools Has Never Been Easiser

2008-05-31

Do you know the Sysinternals tools?

You probably do if you're an IT pro or a developer. For those who don't, it's a series of free utilities written by Mark Russinovich that are essential to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. I even need one of the Sysinternals tools for my classes: ZoomIt allows you to zoom and draw on the screen.

Microsoft acquired Sysinternals some time ago and since then the tools have been available, always for free of course, from the TechNet website. I, like many others, downloaded the whole suite and keep it in USB drives and my "Utils" folder. Even though the website's fine to learn more about each of the individual tools, it's not very practical when it comes to downloading and keeping them up to date.

Fortunately, the Sysinternals Team had the brilliant idea of actually sharing these files like you probably share your files on your home or office network, allowing you to run the tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract them. All you have to do is visit http://live.sysinternals.com/, which is simply a website with "Directory browsing" on or, even better, use the direct UNC link (\\live.sysinternals.com\Tools\) and run the tools directly. You'll probably want PowerShell installed for command line tools then, but those are the exception and all of the Windows apps will execute fine.

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Microsoft Proposes Another Yahoo! Partnership

2008-05-18

Since buying out Yahoo! seemed too expensive, Microsoft is back again with another offer. Microsoft's Statement:

In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.

There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.

From AllThingsD:

The software giant would not give details, but sources at both companies said it involved Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search business and the ad business related to text-based ads.

Kevin Johnson also posted an internal Microsoft memo on News.com.

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Share your screen in 2 minutes with Microsoft SharedView

2008-05-12

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

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Interesting SEO Links...

2008-05-05

Roger Montti offers an insightful post on link building for new websites in 2008. If you have no traction you need to find a way to buy/beg/borrow/steal attention. Use that exposure to spread content that turns people on / gets them excited / evokes an emotional response / ties in with their worldview and identity...and watch the links flow like wine.

Debra mentioned how she sometimes has a hard time telling people that their sites will not get links because they are boring. I actually enjoy doing that because it forces them to take some ownership over their own success (it is hard to drag a company across the finish line if you are an outside consultant - much easier to win if they are at least willingly walking in the right direction).

The way I teach people that concept is I remove them for their ownership role. I ask "If you did not own this website why would you tell other people about and/or want to visit it at least once a week?" Once they can answer that question honestly with something that is inline with their market it means they have something worth marketing.

Steve, an all around great guy and moderator of our forums, made a great thread in our local website marketing forums worth checking out if you are a subscriber.

Predictably Irrational (great blog/book name) has a great post on the power of defaults in emotional transactions.

Google is hyping image pattern recognition technology they call VisualRank in the media. Either they are about to improve their image search or they want us to think they have the most sophisticated technology.

Here is a cool example of a nice image script that helps build links.

Brief synopsis of how AdWords has changed over the past couple years - killing off many of the bottom feeder advertisers. The long tail of SEO keeps growing, but PPC is a winner take most game...from head to tail.

Brent Csutoras shared his social media marketing presentation online.

Firewall Script - a tool used to help keep sites secure, mentioned by DaveN so it is probably pretty good.

SEW published an article about analyzing log files to audit redirects.

The Problogger Book is out. Congrats Darren and Chris. :)

Danny Sullivan has a nice recap of the Microsoft Yahoo fiasco. His forward to Philipp Lessen's new book - Google Apps Hacks is also a great read. Congrats to Philipp on finishing the book. :)

Breaking the Digg Code - free guide to getting the most out of Digg, though if you market an SEO site it is not worth marketing it on Digg. The average small-minded short-sighted Digg user thinks all SEO is spam - they are a reflection of the dumbest and loudest parts of society.

Use Intwition to see what posts from a site got the most Twitter links.

Why whitehats need to know blackhat SEO - as noted in the comments "nothing wrong with having a well rounded education."

Seed Keywords is a cool tool which allows you to pass a question on to friends or customers and ask them what they would search for to solve a particular problem.

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Will Your Website Pass a Google Review?

2008-04-29

Welcome to GoogleNet!

Hitwise recently mentioned that Google controls over 1/3 of UK web traffic.

With that much usage data, if you were Google, would you use usage data in your relevancy algorithms?

An Army of Google Search Editors

They could easily use algorithms to detect

sites that they send a lot of traffic to relative to its total traffic (comparing ratios between toolbar data and search traffic)
sites which have seen a rapid spike in traffic from Google
sites which people quickly bounce away from (and do not later return to)
sites which get a lot of traffic from Google but get few navigational queries

and flag anything out of the ordinary for human review. Marissa Mayer stated they have 10,000 reviewers.

Does Your Site Look Good to Google's Relevancy Algorithm?

As the web keeps getting richer and deeper, and Google increasingly uses human review for demoting spam, all the aesthetic things matter:

domain name
site design
content formatting
branding and public relations

As search evolves so too will spam. Some spam sites will LOOK and FEEL better than most non-spam sites. And so the remote quality raters will be given more data to look at - perhaps eventually even a sample of backlinks or other related data.

False positives will occur - sites and careers built around Google without proper support stilts will crumble. Unless your site is of social significance (you are a big corporation, a non-profit organization, a government institution, an educational institution, a top blogger, an official Google partner, or Youtube/Google house content) then part of the optimization process revolves around not only creating sites that pass a hand review, but also trying to create sites that do not get flagged for review - especially if you are a thin affiliate site.

How do you not get flagged for review?

Build enough quality signals and direct traffic that your site looks like a real part of the web.
Build something people keep coming back to.
Do not make drastic changes to your site unless you are comfortable with it going under review.

How do you pass a review?

Short term I think the aesthetic things matter a lot. Longer term it is best if your site satisfies a few criteria

exclusive content that people value and keep coming back to (Google loses if they remove the best content from their index)
a brand that people care about and search for (Google looks dumb if they do not rank your site)
a meaningful and reliable traffic stream outside of Google (many quality signals may stem from this exposure, which will help keep your overall profile more organic)
you could cause public relations harm to Google and diminish their brand value in the eyes of thousands of people (removing your site has real opportunity cost)

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Improving Google Image Search Using Implicit PageRank

2008-04-28

Image search engines have a very limited usefulness since it's difficult to accurately describe images in words and since search engines completely ignore the images, preferring to index anchor texts, file names or the text that surrounds images. "Search for apples, and they haven't actually somehow scanned the images itself to see if they contain pictures of apples," illustrates Danny Sullivan.

Image analysis didn't produce algorithms that could be used to process billions of images in a scalable way. "While progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged," explains The New York Times.

An interesting paper [PDF] written by Yushi Jing and Google's Shumeet Baluja describes an algorithm similar to PageRank that uses the similarity between images as implicit votes. "We cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying authority nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose an algorithm to analyze the visual link structure that can be created among a group of images. Through an iterative procedure based on the PageRank computation, a numerical weight is assigned to each image; this measures its relative importance to the other images being considered."

The paper, titled "PageRank for Product Image Search", assumes that people are more likely to go from an image to other similar images. "By treating images as web documents and their similarities as probabilistic visual hyperlinks, we estimate the likelihood of images visited by a user traversing through these visual-hyperlinks. Those with more estimated visits will be ranked higher than others." To determine the similarity between images, the paper suggests using different features depending on the type of images: local features, global features (color histogram, shape).

The system was tested on the most popular 2000 queries from Google Image Search on July 23rd, 2007, by applying the algorithm to the top 1000 results produced by Google's search engine and the results are promising: users found 83% less irrelevant images in the top 10 results, from 2.83 results in the current Google search engine to 0.47.

For example, a search for [Monet paintings] returned some of his famous paintings, but also "Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil" by Renoir.

It may seem that this algorithm lacks the human element used to compute PageRank (links are actually created by people), but the two authors disagree. "First, by making the approach query dependent (by selecting the initial set of images from search engine answers), human knowledge, in terms of linking relevant images to webpages, is directly introduced into the system, since the links on the pages are used by Google for their current ranking. Second, we implicitly rely on the intelligence of crowds: the image similarity graph is generated based on the common features between images. Those images that capture the common themes from many of the other images are those that will have higher rank."

For now, this is just a research paper and it's not very clear if Google will actually use it to improve its search engine, but image search is certainly an area that will evolve dramatically in the future and will change the way we perceive search engines. Just imagine taking a picture of a dog with your mobile phone, uploading it to a search engine and instantly finding web pages that include similar pictures and information about the breed.

In 2006, Google acquired Neven Vision, a company specialized in image analysis, but the only new feature that could be connected to that acquisition is face detection in image search. Riya, another interesting company in this area, didn't manage to create a scalable system and decided to focus on a shopping search engine.

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Google Me (The Movie)

2008-04-26

"Egosurfing (also called vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling, self-googling, or simply Googling yourself) is the practice of searching for one's own given name, surname, full name, pseudonym, or screen name on a popular search engine, to see what results appear." (Wikipedia)

"It all started when I Googled my name," says Jim Killeen, described by Washington Post as a "failed Los Angeles actor". "At 38 he was unmarried, no children. The movie stardom for which he'd left Detroit had never materialized; he'd eventually launched a business providing chair massages in poker halls for a dollar a minute. It was surprisingly lucrative but (perhaps not surprisingly) unfulfilling."

In search of his own identity, Jim decided to meet other people who share his name and to find their stories. Google was the most accessible way to find other Jim Killeens from all over the world: a cop from New York, a priest from Ireland, an engineer, a swinger. Google Me (The Movie) is a 96 minutes documentary that describes his cathartic journey. The full video is available for a limited timed at YouTube.

Google Me is an invitation to rediscover yourself by listening to other people's stories. If you can't watch the whole movie, the first 10 minutes are very special.

{ Thank you, Steve Hemmerstoffer. }

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The Informational Distance Between Cities

2008-04-24

Information Aesthetics points to an interesting visualization of the "informational" relation between cities. Two cities are "informationally" related if they are often mentioned together, so the visualization uses the number of Google results to approximate the distance:

Gdistance(w₁,w₂) = (#(w₁)+#(w₂)) / (#(w₁+" and "+w₂)+#(w₂+" and "+w₁)),
where #(w) is the number of Google search results for the query w enclosed in quotes.

This approximation could be improved by replacing "and" with "*", so that the words aren't necessarily separated by the conjunction "and". The Google distance is multiplied with the physical distance between cities to increase the connection between cities that are far away.

Among the cities that have a small "informational" distance: London and New York, Tokio and Sydney, London and Singapore City.

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Kai-Fu Lee on Cloud Computing

2008-04-23

John Breslin highlights some interesting ideas from Kai-Fu Lee's keynote at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference, held in Beijing (Kai-Fu Lee is the president of Google China from July 2005). He mentions six properties of cloud computing from Google's perspective:

1. User centric. "If data is all stored in the Cloud - images, messages, whatever - once you're connected to the Cloud, any new PC or mobile device that can access your data becomes yours. Not only is the data yours, but you can share it with others."

2. Task centric. "The applications of the past - spreadsheets, e-mail, calendar - are becoming modules, and can be composed and laid out in a task-specific manner. (...) Google considers communication to be a task" and that's the reason why Gmail integrates a chat feature for instant communication.

3. Powerful. "Having lots of computers in the Cloud means that it can do things that your PC cannot do. For example, Google Search is faster than searching in Windows or Outlook or Word" because a Google query hits at least 1000 machines.

4. Accessible. Having your data in the cloud means you can instantly get more information from different repositories - Google's universal search is one example of simultaneous search. "Traditional web page search does IR / TF-IDF / page rank stuff pretty well on the Web at large, but if you want to do a specific type of search, for restaurants, images, etc., web search isn't necessarily the best option. It's difficult for most people to get to the right vertical search page in the first place, since they usually can't remember where to go. Universal search is basically a single search that will access all of these vertical searches."

5. Intelligent. "Data mining and massive data analysis are required to give some intelligence to the masses of data available (massive data storage + massive data analysis = Google Intelligence)."

6. Programmable. "For fault tolerance, Google uses GFS or distributed disk storage. Every piece of data is replicated three times. If one machine dies, a master redistributes the data to a new server. There are around 200 clusters (some with over 5 PB of disk space on 500 machines). The Big Table is used for distributed memory. The largest cells in the Big Table are 700 TB, spread over 2000 machines. MapReduce is the solution for new programming paradigms. It cuts a trillion records into a thousand parts on a thousand machines. Each machine will then load a billion records and will run the same program over these records, and then the results are recombined. While in 2005, there were some 72,000 jobs being run on MapReduce, in 2007, there were two million jobs (use seems to be increasing exponentially)."

Kai-Fu Lee thinks that outsourcing IT to a "trusted shop" like Google is the key to make using a computer simple and safe. "Entrepreneurs should have new opportunities with this paradigm shift, being freed from monopoly-dominated markets as more cloud-based companies evolve that are powered by open technologies."

The shift moves from the computer to the user, from applications to tasks, from isolated data to data that can be accessed anywhere and shared with anyone.

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Watch Restricted YouTube Videos

2008-04-18

I've noticed that an increasing number of YouTube videos are restricted to a limited number of countries, probably because the company that uploaded them doesn't have global distribution rights or because it wants to use different marketing strategies in other countries. Even if YouTube says that "this video is not available in your country", you can actually see it using a very simple trick: replace http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID (VIDEOID is the 11-characters video identifier).

Example of video blocked outside US (Madonna - 4 Minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU
To see it, paste this in the address bar: http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU

The same trick works if you don't want to log in when you get this message: "This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up."

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID sends you to the player used by YouTube when you embed the video into a web page and this player doesn't perform country verifications and can't detect if you're logged in.

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Google Maps Predicts Traffic Conditions

2008-04-18

Google Maps can now predict traffic information for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions. By default, if you click on the Traffic button in a supported area from the US, Google Maps shows real-time traffic information. "Comprehensive traffic data is available in over 30 major US metropolitan areas (including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and others), with partial coverage available in many more," according to Google Maps help center. There's also a traffic layer in Google Earth and Google Maps Mobile, but these applications don't include yet traffic prediction.

{ Thanks, Michael. }

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The Value of Small Daily Incremental Improvements

2008-04-18

Building a well known brand and a sustainable business model in a competitive marketplace is challenging, but if you break things down into pieces and do something every day eventually you win marketshare. People who become successful have large goals like "become the leading source in our market" or "increase profits 150% year over year" but most people who actually achieve those types of goals set smaller goals and work toward achieving them every day.

One of my better habits is writing a to do list. When I scratch things off the list there is a sense of accomplishment which drives further activity. Sometimes the accomplishments are moral victories, learning how to create a little bit of code, or improving the graphical interface of something, while other projects are much more complex, like writing a book or hundreds of training modules. As long as growth is sustainable then all is well. If you stop growing in a growing marketplace then you need to evaluate what you are doing wrong.

Are you doing too many repetitive tasks that software or a cron job should be able to do?
Does your site lack viral marketing components?
Does your site do a poor job of prequalifying leads?
Are you selling to the wrong market?
Are you pricing too cheaply and attracting the wrong clients?
Are you dong a poor job building perceived value?
Is your conversion process broken?
Are you doing a poor job of transferring value?

In nearly every growing business at some point in time the answer to every single one of those questions is yes. Each is an area for improvement.

With employees I can come off as being under-appreciating and/or too demanding, largely because I expect people to work as hard as I do, and maybe 2% of people do. When you have the attitude of making incremental daily improvements it is hard for some people to grasp it until you beat it into their heads. I have found it hard to teach most people - especially if they work remotely.

You really need to find that 10% of people who want to add value...and then you need to find the 30% of those who's loyalty exceeds their greed. It is hard to find good workers. As software gets cheaper I suspect it will only get harder to find and retain quality employees as more of the quality people decide to work for themselves, which means that you need to create ways to get customers to do your marketing for you.

I think the key to smoothing out some of the friction with workers is to teach people to set their own score card. Daily contact off the start is needed to set expectations and keep things progressing. But over time have them ask themselves each day what they did to add value, make a difference, and remove market friction. If you are active in your marketplace, are receptive to feedback, are aggressive with push marketing, give away value, and keep trying to build value each day, eventually the profits roll in. It might take a couple years to work out well, but eventually it does.

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How Competitive Will the Web be in 3 Years? 5 Years?

0000-00-00

Introducing Answer Sniper

I just came across AnswerSniper, a $147 software product created to help you find open questions to answer on Yahoo! Answers by keeping you up to date with the latest open questions for keywords you select. Can you imagine paying for software for the privilege of finding questions that need answered, and then trying to be the first person to answer each of them?

If you are committed at that level, why not just create something like AskDaveTaylor.com or your own forum so you at least build content, brand equity, and a traffic stream you own in the process?

Worse yet, on Yahoo! Answers you are not answering questions in a small community where you can build a strong personal brand, but on a huge network where it would take a serious time investment to build a personal brand. Just doable perhaps, but probably beyond the opportunity cost for most folks.

What is even more absurd about buying such software is that Yahoo! Answers offers RSS feeds of new open questions (open SEO questions), so all you need to do is subscribe to the feed to get notifications of new questions. Want to track multiple keywords? Use Yahoo! Pipes and/or subscribe to multiple feeds.

Maybe there are more features I do not see or some things I am not fully appreciating. Do you think AnswerSniper is an unneeded product or a testament to how saturated the web is becoming? Or both?

The Yahoo! Answers Pollution Problem

About a year ago I answered a few questions just to get to a second level rating and learn what the site was like, but many of the top selected answers are people working inside the same companies who asked the exact same questions. And that pollution is only going to grow, especially as more internet marketers create internet marketing products focused on Yahoo! Answers. Plus the link equity keeps getting spread thinner as more questions are asked AND the average quality of the service drops due to pollution by marketers - those trends do not bode well for the long-term viability of Yahoo! Answers as a traffic source.

The issue in not just an issue of being someone else's user generated content versus becoming a destination, but also an issue of supply and demand. There is a lot of supply of low quality content. And there is a lot of demand for the much more select high quality content. And for Google to keep their market position they need to keep getting better at understanding which is which.

Right now a lot of weight has been put on domain trust, but as more sites add user generated garbage to their sites, site authority driven algorithms will require a lot of algorithmic refinement or manual intervention by the search engines.

As the web gets more competitive the answer to sustainability is not more content, but deeper content. In the time it takes to answer 100 Yahoo! Answer questions you could write 10 blog posts. In the time it takes to write 10 blog posts you could write 1 feature. And 5 years from now, content like the Blogger's Guide to SEO is going to be worth far more than 100 of my average blog posts. In a month you will not remember reading this post.*

It is hard to build a lasting brand that changes with the market if you are a username on a large heavily polluted site.

* If you do, leave a comment one month from today and prove me wrong. ;)

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How Much is 1 Website Visitors Worth to You?

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Part of the reason so many people beg, borrow, and steal for search engine traffic is because so many people have the same thin business models offering the same stuff. Rather than thinking of ways to differentiate or look within for ways to increase value, we figure just getting a couple more links will be all we need to do well. And it may be in the short term, but that is not enough to stay competitive.

Most websites are not set up to convert...even many well known sites ran by marketers (who should know better) do a poor job of converting. And improving conversion rates means you can buy more traffic or brand exposure (affiliates, AdSense, direct ads, paid search, partnerships, and public relations). When I changed the business model of this site there was an initial rush of sign ups, but then that fell off quickly. By spending a couple hours of research, writing, and marketing on this site I have since doubled the daily number of sales, not once, but twice.

At a minimum there are still 3 big holes in my sales process which need improved. But within another month or two I can see the daily rate of new sales with a recurring model exceeding the sales rate from a one off product that was sold at a cheaper price point. It almost seems criminal when you think how hard it is that we have to work to gain mindshare and marketshare, and then just throw away the value by not optimizing our sales process and sales funnels.

My wife is at a conversion conference hosted by these guys. Hopefully I can bug her to make a post or two about all the stuff she learns. And hopefully she can help double our daily conversions again, at least until we sell out.

Createlf: Stuff here kicks ass!!!
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