One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.
A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a "Grand Central Station for the social Web."
In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.
Sounds great for everyone, right?
Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down--leading to something similar to when Amazon's S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.
Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.
Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.
(Credit: Gnip)Google is expected to unveil on Tuesday a tool that measures Internet use to help advertisers identify the best places to buy ads that will reach their target audiences, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The measurement tool, which will be offered free to advertisers and their agencies, will compete with services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore. While those services base their estimations on selective surveys or customer panels, the newspaper said, Google's results will be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior. By giving away the new tool, Google could attract more advertising business.
The announcement follows one last week about Google Trends' new service, which lets people type in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site using nothing more than organic user searches. Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session.
After news of the planned tool hit the Web on Monday, ComScore shares fell $1.69, or 6.1 percent, to $26 after-hours trading. Nielsen is a privately owned company.
When it comes to your broadband connection, Google wants you to know that it has your back.
The Internet giant is developing a suite of tools to help broadband users identify traffic discrimination by their Internet service providers, according to a report in The Register.
"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let (ISPs) know that they're not happy with what they're getting--that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google Senior Policy Director Richard Whitt said Friday morning during a panel discussion at the Innovation '08 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. "If the broadband providers aren't going to tell you exactly what's happening on their networks, we want to give users the power to find out for themselves."
Whitt argues that innovation among application developers will stagnate without neutral networks, and he wants to see consumers join an "arms race" for Net neutrality--the idea that network operators shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against content or applications or charge extra fees.
"The forces aligned against us are real. They've been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington," he said. "Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game."
Whitt would not say when the tools will be available or how they would work, but did indicate that Google engineers had been working on them for a while.
The issue came to a head last August when TorrentFreak reported that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as one party and then, essentially, hanging up the phone. Comcast denied the allegation, but tests conducted by the Associated Press showed Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks even if relatively small files were being transferred.
In response, the Federal Communications Commission announced it would investigate the charges, and in May, a bill was re-introduced into Congress that would rewrite U.S. antitrust law to prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from blocking, impairing, or discriminating against "lawful" Internet content, applications, and services or from charging extra fees for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service."
Google has long argued that it's necessary to enact new regulations barring such activity, while broadband operators like AT&T and Comcast counter that the market will solve any perceived problems.
Web site owners might be amazed to learn that one of the biggest sources for duplicate content isn't externally, but rather internally.
Certainly, popular sites and blogs that syndicate a lot of content have to deal with external duplication, but as I already touched on external duplicate content, we know that there are steps to minimize those challenges and to establish your site as the canonical source.
Internal, or on-site, content duplication tends to come in a few key ways, the first of which is within the key page elements. The second is from the content itself; similar to e-commerce sites using stock product copy, you may be using your own copy over and over again on your site. Third, it simply may come from too little differentiated copy.
... Read moreYahoo announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire Tensa Kft., a Hungarian company known professionally as IndexTools, which makes marketing analytics tools for the Web.
Financial terms of the deal were not released, but Yahoo hopes that the acquisition will be finalized by the middle of 2008. Yahoo, currently battling with both a Microsoft takeover offensive and its status as second-string to Google in online advertising, plans to use IndexTools' technology to bolster its existing marketing analytics software. The initial target, a release from Yahoo explained, will be the 150,000 small and medium-sized businesses using Yahoo's marketing analytics tools.
There are also plans to build a third-party developer platform for the Yahoo-incorporated IndexTools.
In addition to its base in Budapest, Hungary, IndexTools also has offices in Frankfurt, Germany, and in New York.
Microsoft thinks it can win the hearts and minds of future developers by giving them free development tools today. This would be a noble gesture but for one, tiny little fact:
There are 150,000+ free and open-source software projects on Sourceforge (and another 80,000+ on Google Code). The day of placating developers with tools is over. Open source has raised the stakes dramatically. Forever.
Bill Gates, forever stuck in the past, declares:
... Read moreXAware, an open-source data integration developer, announced Tuesday that it raised a $7.4 million third round of funding.
That translates into a total of $26.4 million to date in venture funding for XAware, which develops open-source software tools and components designed to reduce complexities in accessing and integrating data from a variety of sources.
VSpring Capital, an existing investor, led the third round, which included contributions from hedge fund GMT Capital and existing investors Sequel Ventures, ITU Ventures, and BMJP. Back in 2002, ITU Ventures led XAware's first round of funding, which raised $2.1 million.
"In the short time since the XAware open-source project was announced, we have had an exceptional number of visitors to XAware.org and thousands of downloads of XAware 5," Tim Harvey, XAware chief executive, said in a statement. "This funding will enable us to focus on rapidly expanding our community development and support activities."
Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.
The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.
Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.
With Volta, developers can make "irreversible decisions as late as possible," said Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs.
The software, which is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008, lets developers write client-side code and then assign with annotations which code runs where, he explained.
Volta is written using Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) which means that people familiar with Visual Studio languages, including Visual Basic and C#, can work with it. It also is integrated with tools in Visual Studio, including the debugger, and can make applications for Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Volta hasn't been integrated into Microsoft product plans yet, but it stands to have a major impact on how they design tools, Daley said.
"This kind of idea--where we can share a single code base across client server and manage the complexity of communicating between them--is pretty new and has big implications on how we build tools," he said.
Having your site rank high in the search engines can be a real boost to traffic for your site. Could anything be better than achieving that top spot in Google? How about getting eight more keyword-rich links up there? What I'm talking about is the highly coveted site links.
Site links have been the icing on the cake for a top listing in Google. Site links are additional links to a site that occasionally appear below the listing. What made these especially sweet was that they haven't been something that you had direct control over, but were like a little gift from Google. And gifts from Google are good.
Speculation was that site links typically appeared on highly relevant searches, often for well-established sites, that also had clean, keyword-rich URLs. In other words, when Google could make a fairly safe assumption that the site links it would generate would lead the searcher to what they were looking for.
What could be even better than having site links appear for your site? What about having the number increase from five to eight links? Or how about the ability to actually have some say in the creation of site links? That would be pretty nice! How nice? Well, take a look at what this does for The Planet. It's like having your own navigation appear within the Google results and increasing the chances that the searcher will see what they are looking for and be able to click right through to it.
Google SERP showing site links for The Planet.
How powerful is this if you were looking for a reseller program or private rack hosting? Based on the result title and snippet, you may not have clicked through to the site to look around on your own. Along with the additional links, site links also make a site appear even more authoritative. Another subtle benefit: notice how the links take up additional room, about another listing's worth of space, essentially moving potential competitor listings further down the page.
Not only is this an exciting development, it's also further reassurance that Google is continuing to develop and implement great features into its Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately, if your site doesn't warrant site links, then this new feature won't give you the ability to make them magically appear. At least for now, what you can and can't do if site links are being created for your site may still be limited, but maybe that will change over time.
You can learn more about site links from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
When you work in, on, or around the Web, you tend to collect tools. A site here, a toolbar there...you really can't help it. Here's a total must-have for your SEO toolbox...but don't tell the developers and designers.
Chris Pederick's Web Developer browser extension.
(Credit: chrispederick.com)The Web Developer extension from Chris Pederick is a hugely popular and useful tool for Web developers and designers everywhere. But this browser add-on is an equal-opportunity tool that should be in every SEO's toolbox as well for quick snapshot views and reviews of sites. It will require the use of one of the following browsers, Firefox, Flock, Mozilla or Seamonkey, but will run on Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux, and it's free.
While you may find many uses for the extension beyond SEO and even more SEO uses than listed here, below are some of the top ways to put it to use. The best way to follow along though is to first install it, view a site that you are familiar with, and then try some of the methods listed below:
Disable Tab
Disable JavaScript.
(Credit: chrispederick.com)Select Disable JavaScript and reload the page and browse the site. Does that fancy drop-down navigation still function? Can you click on all the links? If it doesn't and you can't, then guess what...the search engine spiders probably can't get there either.
Images Tab
Is all that great copy on the page really text that the search engine spiders can eat up and use for indexing the pages, or is it really just a bunch of images? Select Disable All Images and you'll quickly find out.
Displaying alt attribute text.
(Credit: chrispederick.com)Use the Display Alt Attributes feature to view the alt attribute text of all images on a page. You should do this to make sure that none of the images has been stuffed with keywords, which won't help in ranking and doing so may actually hurt rankings.
While text is best for navigation and links, if images are used for this, it's especially important to make sure the alt attributes contain the textual equivalent to capture any value the search engines may give to images used for links.
Information Tab
Select View Link Information to view all the links on a page. Are there more links on a page than you thought? If this is your site, are there any links leading out to sites that you weren't aware of?
Use View Meta Tag Information to quickly see all the meta information for a page to make sure that each page has a unique, keyword-rich and relevant description.
Use the View Response Headers and check the 404 Error page of a site by going to a page that doesn't exist, like yourdomain.com/errortest and make sure that it returns a 404 Error and not a 200 "OK" response.
Miscellaneous
Linearize the page.
(Credit: chrispederick.com)Use Linearize Page to see the order of content based on how search engines will read the content. Is the most important content toward the top or buried at the bottom? Does the content read logically, or are "paragraphs" all jumbled because tables have been used poorly to lay out the content?
Outline
Select Outline Headings and Outline Current Element to see whether HTML headings have been used (e.g., H1, H2, etc.) to help highlight important page elements. Headings will be outlined and when you mouse over them (or any element), you'll see the HTML trail in your toolbar, identifying the HTML tags because of the Outline Current Element function, which will allow you to see whether the heading tag is an H1, H2, or other tag.
Options
Persist Features.
(Credit: chrispederick.com)Bonus...for a little known but very useful feature, select Persist Features if you want to click-through to different pages of a site while maintaining some of your selections, like outlined headings and displaying alt attribute text as you move from page to page.
While the Web Developer extension won't stop the need for a deep dive into a page's code--there's also a View Source feature for that too--it will satisfy and simplify many of the routine tasks associated with a quick SEO review.
