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SUPINFO wins special prize at Imagine Cup 2008

2008-07-16

The award ceremony of imagine Cup 2008 took place on Tuesday, July 8th in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. SUPINFO teams were competing in two different categories: Game Development and Software Design.

Traditionally, prizes are handed out to the three first places in each of the nine categories of the competition. However, this year many special prizes were also awarded. One of these, an invitation to participate in the “BT Innovation Accelerator” program was won by Régis Hanol and Gauthier Chanliau–SUPINFO Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier, Sébastien Warin–SUPINFO Nord-Pas de Calais in Lille and Jean-Noël Gauthier–Ecole des Gobelins, of team Well’k Home.

The winners of this program, growth catalyst for innovative projects, are invited to work directly with the BT teams that will help them take their student project and transform it into a business plan. For them, Imagine Cup is only the beginning of the adventure!
I would also like to congratulate Frédéric Pedro, Anthony Chen Kuang Piao and Nicolas Gryman – SUPINFO Ile de France, and Maximilien Paitel – SUPINFO UK of the ECOThink team, who were able to distinguish themselves among 200 000 competitors and made it to the world finals with a few other privileged teams.

Finally, I’d like to encourage all students to follow these exemplary teams by registering today for the next edition of the competition, the world finals of which will take place in Cairo and Alexandria, in Egypt. The theme will be “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Students will be asked to create software solutions that are aligned to one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). More information about the MDGs can be found at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals.

Registration for Imagine Cup 2009 is already open. You’ll find more information at http://www.imaginecup.com.

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Misinformation / Information Pollution Adds Value to Paid Content Business Models

2008-07-14

The SEO market is flush with free information, but many times the free information is factually incorrect, which can cost a lot of money to anyone building a business based on such information. The cost is not immediately readily transparent, but eventually it appears. By the time it does many people who lost money from it may not be aware of what happened, as their attention is already elsewhere.

There are a variety of reasons for misinformation to spread

stale search relevancy algorithms that rank old information because it was published on a leading site in 2001
intellectual laziness, reductionism, and lack of openness to the experience of others
affiliate programs and business models rendered useless by marketplace changes, but still profitable because they can be sold at a low price point and have no real costs associated with them
search engines trying to hide their secret sauce

I thought I would give a few examples of commonly spread misinformation.

There Was No Ranking #6 Penalty / Filter

If you read the comments here you will see how bad I was roasted for suggesting that there was a #6 ranking issue on Google. Matt Cutts stated that he was unaware of such a penalty, and that was the official word until Matt came said they found and fixed the issue.

Where is the harm in that? Well, if you took Google's official word as being accurate, you never had a chance to survey this glitch. Glitches often reveal engineer intent and give you an early warning to make the changes necessary to keep your sites ranking before the new relevancy algorithms launch.

Google Does Not Care About Domain Names or TLDs

Some people believe that domain names and domain extensions do not matter. After seeing Google temporarily drop .info domain names that was a pretty clear indication to me that they did not think as highly about .info names as they do about some other extensions.

For years current and past Google employees have denied that domain names mattered much in the relevancy algorithms, going so far as calling the domain name "a relatively minimal factor" (in 2008 no less).

Matt Cutts eventually confirmed that domain names have value at a domainer conference

Generic domains that users are likely to remember, will indeed carry more weight than others. There is a real value to those FuneralHomes.com for example. Google does give keywords in the URL a certain amount of weight, but you don’t need it in order to rank.

But people still blog discounting it because they have not tested it.

.edu Links do Not Matter Much

Here is a lovely SitePoint forum thread where the moderator claimed I was full of crap and I responded with more background context on his claim. He deleted my post and banned me for life. About 5 months later Matt Cutts confirmed my hypothisis:

But, certainly, all of the things that have good qualities of a link from a .edu or a .gov site, as well as the fact that we hard-code and say: .edu or .gov links are good - and when there are good links, .edu links tend to be a little better on average; they tend to have a little higher PageRank, and they do have this sort of characteristic that we would trust a little more. There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu - give that link more weight.

But I still have a lifetime ban from the SitePoint forums for being more open-minded than the moderator is.

Free & Easy is Often Wrong!

The simple / easy answer is often the incorrect answer. Many algorithmic changes (-30, -950, the sandbox effect) are written off as anomalies by many people who do not experience or understand them. But, for the sandbox effect, a couple years ago if you knew that you could create a subdomain off an established site and then later 301 redirect it to a new domain you were able to rank quickly while competitors thought there was a 6 to 12 month wait needed in order to rank.

It is not that forums need to go away, but we need to do more experimenting on our own, and we need to learn who is trustworthy. The web is still a highly inefficient marketplace, but each day it moves a bit closer toward being efficient. Google believes in security through obscurity, so if you have to wait for an official comment by Google then much of the arbitrage opportunity of a technique is already gone!

The 200% to 1,000% year on year ROI you and I currently enjoy will not last forever. Getting correct information early in context helps ensure you have better information than the general public, which should help boost your ROI if you act on it.

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The Grass is Greener...

2008-07-14

One of the easiest ways to scale a business model is to rely on user generated content. This effectively turns readers into writers (free content) and marketers (brand evangelists promoting their own work). But at the same time it makes it hard for readers to keep reading all the content produced from those sources.

We subscribe to personalities and known shared biases. I read everything that John Andrews writes. I read everything Barry Ritholtz writes. The same can't be said for many group blogs. The option to water down what you are doing for a short term revenue boost will always be there, but the ability to re-gain attention and trust that was thrown away in the process is not.

Yahoo! watered down their search marketing program with fraudulent arbitrage, and now some advertisers chose to spend more with Microsoft adCenter.
eBay watered down their auction service through a lack of innovation by taking away user feedback mechanisms and driving out small merchants with higher fees. They are fighting off their irrelevancy by making themselves a watered down me-too ecommerce platform for large retailers, while driving out the niche sellers that made their service remarkable. They will never be Amazon.com, and only make their competition stronger by following them.

The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be. - Robert Fulghum

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The Value of Perception (and the Perception of Value)

2008-07-14

Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely. The recording is freely available online here. In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book.

The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers, but are relatively good at valuing relative deals. The example Dan uses to discuss the decoy is the pricing of The Economist.

Lets say the pricing is

web $60
print $120
both $120

Given the above virtually nobody will order print, but adding the false choice of print only will make many people buy the both option, whereas if the print option were priced lower or the print option were not there more people would be inclined to opt for online only instead of the web +print combination.

Non-commodity based value is largely a game of perception. You can build perceived value by

building exposure and trust in the marketplace by giving something of value away for free (people will think "if this is free imagine how good the stuff they are selling is")
minimizing downside risk (through the use of payment plans, refund guarantees, etc.)
comparing yourself to higher priced offerings (the words SEO training are considered far more valuable than the words SEO Book - something I wish I would have considered in 2003!)
expanding your target market and resonating with niche brands (what is the difference between Prozac and Sarafem?)
breaking the language of a commodity product and reshaping it to associate it with higher value fields or fields with less competition (Starbucks language sounds more like fancy tea than a I need caffeine cup of coffee)
using scarcity (how much did Beanie Babies, Pet Rocks, and Tickle Me Elmo dolls sell for?)
requiring prompt action (when we ran a discount during the launch of our membership site people joined at a much faster rate before the price increased because the price increase was a real tangible cost of not acting quickly)
adding bonuses and benefits that are unique to your offering

Everything around us is a collage of overlapping value systems competing for attention and resources. What backs the value of the U.S. Dollar? Why has it fallen 20% in the last couple years? Housing prices went up for a long time, and then they stopped. Last year Indymac bank was a top 10 mortgage lender and now they are bankrupt.

Many investors shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In response to deteriorating business conditions the U.S. federal government offered to allow the companies to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve and increase their borrowing limits. That help stabilize their stock prices a bit.

What really scared investors away from shorting the stocks further? A proposal from the White House to Congress would give the U.S. Treasury authority to buy the stocks to provide needed liquidity. Imagine betting on a company failing when your government says that they are interested in buying stock in the company if the company gets in a pinch. That is the sort of news that can send a stock price up 40% before the market opens.

Why would the government care about the stock prices if they have little to do with the functionality of the businesses? It all comes down to perception. A healthy stock price gives the perception that all is well and helps keep the housing market as fluid as possible, whereas low stock prices erode confidence and evoke a sense of fear, which adds a lot of risk to an already unstable housing market. Perception becomes reality.

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Writing for Buyers vs Writing for Cynics

2008-07-12

6 fundamental laws for online publishing

Most popular free online content contains factual errors, but it is still popular due to an affinity readers have for the author, and/or the ease of understanding what they are writing.
The more you know the easier it is for you to denounce someone who knows less than you in your field, though doing so will rarely build brand loyalty, and often attracts the wrong kinds of customers. Call this phenomena the Threadwatch effect...good for attention, but bad for monetization. This is especially true since people new to the market are willing to spend money to build their businesses, but more established market players are more ad blind and more cynical to most commercial offers.
If you are selling stuff online you are not your own target audience. Every field has far more novices than experts, and experts rarely buy because they feel they already know everything and have got burned so many times in the past.
Most online content is recycled. Local substitution is a fact of life, and probably has been for thousands of years, only now it is faster and cheaper. Unless you add pretty pictures, write for novices, and aggressively market your best content at launch someone is going to recycle it (with errors) and get credit for your work. Competing publishers can polish up posts you wrote *years* ago and be called a visionary for doing so! If you are not making your work accessible to novices then you lose.
The more mindshare you have in your space the easier it is to get weak references from people outside your space who occasionally graze upon your topic. When people who know little about your topic look at your field they care more about format than accuracy because they typically do not realize when they are reading factual errors.

From a business perspective, one of my bigger errors with this site is that I tend to write more for the cynical person who loves SEO than for people newer to the field who are more likely to buy. That is not to say that we do not have people sign up every day, but that we are only targeting the fraction of the customers that we could.

The hard part about changing is that I typically write about what interests me the most, using my own interests as a filter. Dumbing things down would be walking / swimming in uncharted territories, and I don't think I would enjoy it all that much.

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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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Google Buying Links From SEMPO?

2008-05-04

Google, which has arbitrarily forced its will to use nofollow on the web (and declared link buyers and sellers who do not use the tag as spammers) is buying a PageRank 7 link from SEMPO.org.

You would think that if Google wants to set new proprietary standards they would follow them as well. And what better spot to start following them than with a trade organization promoting search engine marketing?

Who Should Get Penalized For The Shady SEMPO/Google Bought Link Deal

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How Much is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

2008-05-01

I just wrote a ~15 page article aimed at helping SEOs estimate how much a top rank in Google is worth.

I would appreciate any feedback you have on making it better. If you like it please hook me up with a Del.icio.us or Stumble. Any and all mentions are appreciated. :)

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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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