While this fiasco is being fought out, I'd like to take marketing lens to this. Blackboard and Angel held a meeting in Chicago to engage the uproar (+1 brownie points on this count), and I'd like to point out something subtle, yet very important, in this story. Quoting the Chronicle:

To show their preference for Angel and dislike for Blackboard, some wore blue and black ribbons — the colors of Angel's logo — to the Chicago meeting.

Tell me, how many of your users are willing to wear your colors? How many people are cheering for you just as they would cheer a sports team?

I find this as an awesome example of a company creating passionate users and a *community* around its product, and that to me speaks about just how good Angel's customer interactions are/were. It users are fighting for its independence. If your business was about to assimilated by another much larger and hated company, would your users care enough to fight or just move on? What can you about it now?

Why the move? Three reasons:

• Costs.
• Speed.
• A good opportunity to upgrade the backend.

Yes the third reason is not, alone, grounds for moving servers, but combined in, it's a great chance to do some house cleaning.

I've also closed two tools:

• The Backlink Social Celebrity tool as it was just too broken and not useful.
• Keywords Extractor and Analyzer. This depended on the Yahoo! API which kept changing and it's not worth the time to keep it running. Maybe in the future I will have the chance to resurrect a better implementation.

If you miss either of those too much, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

For example: I keep an alert for [blogsci] because I have a website at blogsci.com. Up till recently, I used to get alerts only when the word "blogsci" was matched in a page. Now, I'm getting Alerts for pages that do not ever mention the word "blogsci" but the spell checked "blog sci". So I get matches for "...blog: sci-fi...". See what happened there?

Another example: I run a website with a domain name of XY.com where X is a word and Y is another word. My Alert is set to match it exactly as [XY]. This was going well until recently when I started getting alerts that match [X Y].

Another example: I have an alert for [cli.gs], my latest web app. I get a lot of spurious alerts for this because it matches [cli gs] which is a very popular combination apparently.

Anyone else seeing this weirdness? Any other interpretations? Thoughts in the comments please!

Hi MyBlogLog!

Part of what makes me so special is my ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest. I have just added you to the following communities:

1) Garbage Bin

http://go2/dev/null

Bonus -- The "Hot in My Garbage Bing" box on your My Home page will keep getting worse and worse with each community I delete my account from.

Rock on,

Me voting with my feet

Obviously, I'm pissed off about MyBlogLog, and anyone who has seen their emails similar to the above can guess why. The reason is quite simple: it's a mediocre service (at best) with a horrible interface and stupidly horrendous default behavior. As a webmaster, what I get out of it is rubbish analytics and an awkward way of building a community. As a user, I keep getting added (by default) to communities that I don't want to join necessarily. See, this assumption that by default I'd like to join any given community, wrapped in a self-gloating email ("Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability") is just plain wrong. I never turned on that feature and I never wanted to join that feature.

On the flip side, If I choose to manually join a community that means a lot more to the community's webmaster than me being added automatically to beef up their community head count. This works for the communities I run too: I don't want to just rack up avatar but I want a genuine community. Granted it's slower to build a community like that, but it will be by the members' choices not some automated "special" "ability". Please, get over yourselves.

So without futher wasting further time fixing stupid default behavior in return for little, I've closed my MyBlogLog account.

The problems?

• The red circles: The suggestion that English (UK) is different from English (GB). Psst. They're the same thing. It's an exceptional reservation in the ISO standard.
• The black circle: The whole message is apparently not in English because the link at the bottom right corner gives me the option to view it in English. When I click it, I get the same message, but instead of suggesting English (UK), it suggests just plain old English. And oh, it gives me the option to change my language to the real English of English (US).

Hey, I have news for you YouTube: English, English (UK), English (GB) and English (US) are all freakin' English.

I was just searching with Yahoo! and I saw a survey request from "Yahoo! Surveys". It was a big purple box to the immediate right of the results list, and it was anchored to the bottom of the screen (so even if I scrolled down, it went down too). I clicked on it before I realized I should have taken a screenshot, but I did take a screenshot of the single question in the survey. The question opens in a new window:

Click for full size, and no, I'm not going to tell you what my answer was :p

But there is a problem: SEOmoz has not disclosed the user agent (UA) of its crawler. Here I will talk about why this is a bad thing, and also take a stab and go out on a limb and say: there is no SEOmoz crawler, at least not in the traditional sense. For the latter, I will offer a viable technical alternative, which may or not be correct, but the fact the alternative exists gives a sensible explanation as to why SEOmoz is not offering a straight answer to the UA question.

Why Disclosing the UA is Essential

Let's not mince words: we as an SEO community like a little mud fight once in a while. We debate and discuss and yes fight. But one thing we all know how to recognize is malicious activity and differentiate it from aggressive activity.

Example: a bot scraping our content for an MFA site is a tolerated nusance. We take steps to negate the effects of scrapers but at the end of the day we don't fight them hard. On the other hand, a bot probing for security holes is treated like a witch in 1209AD.

Which is why the Linkscape's lack of disclosure hurts: We as a community work hard at identifiying bots. SEOmoz is supposed to be a good citizen of the SEO world, and yet the lack of transparency goes against the spirit and the image of SEOmoz. On the one hand we have a company with a strong community doing good deeds (SEO trademark fight anyone?) and yet it behaves in a way we expect out of the shady side of the net we deal with every day.

Not just that: the data collected from us, about us, will be used against us. It's called competitive intelligence.

And not just that: SEOmoz is using the data to make money. The free version is pathetic and the Pro version needs a monthly subscription.

To me, this kind of behavior (stealth, harmful, and to make money) puts Linkscape squarely in the naughty corner. I certainly didn't expect this out of SEOmoz. Tough luck Rand and co: you have a great brand and I for one expect better!

But I won't ask for a UA because I think there isn't one.

How To Build Linkscape

It's actually quite easy on a conceptual level. However, just like cooking, having a recipe doesn't make you a great chef - there are lots of details that SEOmoz must have tackled successfully to build Linkscape. I am not trying to belittle their achievment, and all I can show you is one recipe. This recipe is completely my guess and could very well be wrong. I have not talked to anyone at SEOmoz.

So come on Pierre, what is it? The answer is the Yahoo! Search API. It's an API giving programmers complete access over the Yahoo! index without crawling to a single page. For example, the following URL:

fetches the first two hits from a Yahoo! [site:seomoz.org]. Interestingly, it tells you where the cache URLs are, and they reside on Yahoo! servers (unsurprisingly). So you fetch the cache from Yahoo!, do the analysis, save what you care about (links, titles, etc), and you're done.

You'll need to kick start this somehow with a seed set of sites. DMOZ and Wikipedia are usually good sources that are freely available. Wikipedia can even be downloaded so no one needs to know. Yahoo!'s very own Delicious, Digg, reddit, etc are also good starting points because they tell you what's hot right now. The seed is basically a huge set of URLs from which you extract the domain names and do [site:domain] queries. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Notice that you won't need to crawl a single page yourself. You let Yahoo! do the work for you. Neat, no?

So What Should SEOmoz Disclose?

Above I said two potentially conflicting things: SEOmoz should disclose the Linkscape user agent and then went on to show that it doesn't need to have a user agent. So what exactly am I asking from SEOmoz?

Easy: complete disclosure. If SEOmoz is using a traditional crawler, we must have its UA and the IP addresses. It's only a matter of time for us to find them. If not, SEOmoz needs to explain clearly why not.

Comment below. If you want to remain anonymous, please let me know.

Want an example? @Harith on twitter.

What kind of analytics do you get? At launch right now:

• Cligs gives you tons of traffic data and analytics about the traffic your short URLs get. This includes:
  • Number of hits
  • Referral stats
  • Mentions on twitter, blogs, and the web
  • Mentions of the destination URL on twitter, blogs, the web, and delicious
  And lots more! And if you want a more data, just let me know!
• Cligs forwards with a 301 Permanent Redirect so your destination URL gets full SEO benefits of the link. If you are an affiliate marketer, this means you can hide your backlinks, get traffic, get statistics, and get the SEO benefits.
• With Cligs, you can create an unlimited number of short URLs for the same destination URL. This is great because you can promote the same destination at different sites like twitter or facebook by using different cligs and watch how each source sends you traffic.

That's just the start. There are a ton of new features that are going to be added in the coming few days and weeks, including some SEO-useful analytics.

And, of course, there is a bookmarklet:

Shorten Link @ Cli.gs

So what are you waiting for? Stop using plain-vanilla short URL services and start using Cligs.

Comments and feedback most welcome.

Notice a few interesting details: No user-agent string, the fact it provides an HTTP_REFERER header that's the same page being requested, it comes from *.yahoo.com not the usual yahoo.net for Slurp, and the fact it says "image" and "srch" in the host.

The tracking is very low-level, a few hits a day with lots of one-hit-a-day visits.

What's really interesting is how laser-targeted it is: it's only requested the same two pages many times since May. The pages are the specific blog post linked to above plus the archive page that contains that post, so it's likely something about that post that's of interest to the bot. And yes, the post contains an image, and the image is the only one in the main content of the archive.

I'll dig deeper when I have a chance. Please let me know in the comments below if you're seeing something similar.