Long, long ago in 2003, Miles Burke was mourning the Lost Art of Conversation and wondering how it could be encouraged. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Online forums, the natural home for conversations, seem to have a questionable future as John Carcutt points out. There certainly is a decline in conversations as opposed to chats and instant messages.

As we will show, there are two main reasons for this happening. The first is a natural phenomenon, while the second is a result of actions by one major player. The natural phenomenon is that the Internet brings with it incredible connectivity. Everyone can connect with everyone, provided they choose to do so. If they wish, they can also broadcast to the world in real time any significant happenings in what some call their Life Stream.

The Life Stream

One of the oldest and most popular is Twitter. Your life can be recounted in a series of short (140 characters) Tweats (newslets) to any of your friends who are watching. It certainly is difficult to have a meaty discussion in such short tweats. Somewhat ironically, a Twitter competitor Jaiku, now owned by Google, is titled Your Conversation. It will shortly be open to all and describes itself as your own microblog.

Perhaps the best illustration of the nature of these life streams is provided by another newcomer, Plurk. Its display looks very much like a river.

As time passes, we move downstream to the left and see the comments of those we have chosen to follow. It’s almost like logs floating down a river. If you wish you can jump onto such a log and add your own comment. It can be amusing but it’s hardly a conversation.

Many are finding this plethora of social media where you can stay connected is overwhelming. Merely staying in touch can eat up a great deal of time. There’s hardly any time left to have any meaningful conversations. This is the natural phenomenon that we talked about.

Google’s First Blow To Conversations

Google is a powerful influence in the way things happen on the Internet. It has taken two major initiatives that have affected both the quantity and quality of the conversations that were occurring. The first is that its highly successful keyword search algorithm gives a major weighting to (hyper)links that point to web pages. Since this was widely known, this opened the floodgate to spammy comments on blogs seeking only to be given a link back to the author’s web page. This was so prevalent that some blog owners would block all comments to avoid this. Overall the Google algorithm has caused a significant reduction in the average quality of web conversations.

Google’s Second Blow to Conversations

The second Google initiative was a natural follow-on to their first. Noting that many website owners would pay others to create links to their websites, Google wished to block this. So they introduced the NoFollow tag. They insisted that anyone who created a page link to another web page for monetary gain should mark that link with the NoFollow tag. In this way, the search robots would disregard the link and it would count for nothing in the keyword search algorithm. The merit and efficacy of this approach for treating paid links could certainly be questioned.

What is more questionable is then using this NoFollow tag in a blanket way to devalue all comments on blogs. Spam comments on blogs are indeed a problem. Google suggested that it should be applied to all blog comments. Wordpress now adopts this as the default position. However unless there is some incentive for a genuine commenter to add a useful comment, it is unlikely to happen. As noted earlier, the flood of new social media leaves little time to add a blog comment that may be read by very few. Another approach is needed here.

Fighting Back With DoFollow

David Harry has pointed out the absurdity of this approach in his Monday morning rant this week.

It is a sad statement on the times
It’s a damned funny preposition really if we think about it. At its core Google is a nodal/link based algorithm that depends largely on the links of the web to establish popularity and to a certain degree, value. Now, what if…. by some strange twist of fate, the majority of the world’s webmasters and site owners decided to Nofollow all of their outbound links in a sort of, ‘better safe than sorry’ manoeuvre?

If more worthwhile conversations are to be encouraged on the Web, then some different approach is needed. If comments are to be accorded links, then there must be a strong process in place to avoid giving value to worthless posts created only for links. Many are now adopting this approach and you can find some of these listed in the following:

• “Do Follow” Blog Directory
• Do Follow List Of Lists
• Courtney Tuttle’s D-List

Tougher Love For Blog Commenters

This Dofollow policy has been running for the SMM blogs for two months now and there has been a very slight increase in the spam comments. Perhaps too many are assuming that comments of little value to subsequent readers will be acceptable. You might assume that from what Digerati Marketing says about its Over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs.

Even for white hatters, I don’t think there’s an ethical issue here. So we’re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where’s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be using the nofollow attribute in the first place.

The SMM policy sets out to deliver best value to our readers. Unless a blog comment is helping that aim, it will be deleted. Merely leaving the blog comment there with a NoFollow tag is the worst of all possible approaches.

Related:
We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

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• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

The Internet continues to get ever more crowded. Google is continually modifying its algorithms and its ways of presenting more personalized results to searchers. It’s no surprise that many feel that SEO, or organic search engine optimization, is getting increasingly difficult. That’s the view you’ll see in many forums. Just check a discussion at Cre8asite Forums for confirmation. It was titled ‘Been Reading That SEO Is Slowly Dying / Changing‘.

A coming SMM newsletter will discuss the state of the nation on SEO. As always, the aim is to create something useful for our readers but also create a memorable and search visible item. As we have recommended, potential titles were checked in both a Google Web search and a Google Blogsearch. The results were intriguing.

One possibility was the notion of a SEO Cash Cow. That kind of talk has not been around for some time. Back in 2006, a website offering SEO Cash Cows claims that all packages were sold out within 15 days of launch. Early in 2007. you could still find other sites that would help you build your cash cow or would turn your website into a cash cow. Since then, the Internet seems somewhat quiet on the subject of cash cows.

Another possible phrase to draw the eye might be fat cow. This seems to be in more current usage. That’s because of the efforts of Garry Conn with his John Cow dot Com website. His tagline is Making Money Online by Milking the Internet. Of course to an extent he is riding on the coattails of the much better known John Chow dot Com website. John Chow is a resident of Vancouver and and has the tagline, I Make Money Online by Telling People How Much Money I Make Online. It was visible on the fat cow query, because of a little sniping at John Chow from Garry Conn. Whether the efforts of either of these gentlemen and their interactions can be regarded as examples of fat cows or cash cows that others might wish to copy is open to question.

Clearly something is happening and webmasters must adjust. Perhaps the final word should go to John Mueller, one of the more visible Googlers who is always delivering eminently good sense, in his post on that Cre8asite Forums thread.

If you “fall” for a product/service that doesn’t deliver close to the expectations that they set in their marketing, you’re not going to fall for it a second (or at least a third time). If a search engine notices that it’s falling for content that doesn’t deliver close to the expectations set with regards to SEO, it’s going to work on recognizing and ignoring that. If you constantly have to adjust your SEO efforts because the search engines aren’t falling for it anymore, perhaps the problem is not the SEO.

What seems quite clear is that SEO is no longer a license to print money. There are increasing challenges which the successful practitioner of SEO must overcome. However, the ROI (return on investment) will still well reward the effort.

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ReadWriteWeb seems to have created quite a furor in publicizing the views of start-up entrepreneur Russell Beattie.

The former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist announced today that he’s calling it quits for his company Mowser because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse.
“I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.

In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP mark-up, no JavaScript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time.”

Many others disagree. Greg Sterling proclaims The ‘Mobile Web’ Is Dead, Long Live the Mobile Internet.

The iPhone and its clones, mobile usability improvements from search engines/portals and pure-play mobile companies, together with flat-rate pricing will drive mobile Internet adoption. Time is the “X-variable.” But it will happen. I guarantee it.

Indeed it’s more fundamental than that. As AmediaCirc.US points out, It’s Not The Mobile Web, It’s The Web. Just see the comment from Dean Collins to understand the possibilities. What we really are discussing is the Ubiquitous Web that the World Wide Web Consortium has promoted so strongly. If you really had any doubts, then check out Google’s philosophy.

Google’s goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they’re at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok.

Their fifth ‘truth’ reads as follows:

You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it’s through their PDAs, their wireless phones or even their automobiles, people want information to come to them. Google’s innovations in this area include Google Number Search, which reduces the number of keypad strokes required to find data from a web-enabled cellular phone and an on-the-fly translation system that converts pages written in HTML to a format that can be read by phone browsers. This system opens up billions of pages for viewing from devices that would otherwise not be able to display them, including Palm PDAs and Japanese i-mode, J-Sky, and EZWeb devices. Wherever search is likely to help users obtain the information they seek, Google is pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions.

With supporters like that how can the mobile Web fail?

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• February 19, 2008 -- Google Moves Ahead In The Mobile Web Race
• November 24, 2007 -- Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?

NoFollow is one of the most contentious tags around. That is because Google has suggested it be applied to all paid links from web pages. It does have a more acceptable usage in attempting to remove the incentive for spammers to add comments to blogs. That is why Wordpress automatically applies the NoFollow tag to links in comments.

Matt Cutts has set out the Google position on the NoFollow tag, and it certainly does not imply that all comments should have the NoFollow tag applied. Recently John Mueller was one of the Google experts in an online chat and the NoFollow tag came up in the discussion. This is followed up in a Cre8asite Forum discussion on When To Remove Nofollow From Blog Comments. For both Elizabeth Able and Donna Fontenot, removing the NoFollow tag selectively seemed to be a preferred route. They recommended using the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. This can be set so that the NoFollow tags are removed after a visitor has made a certain number of comments.

In researching this, the WordPress Codex provides an explanation of Nofollow. Here is some of what is mentioned:

Despite nofollow’s Google backing, there is some very strong criticism from the overall blog community.

• Prepare for more comment spam, not less
• NoNoFollow
• DoFollow No Nofollow Community has been established on Bumpzee, as a means for people to find information on Nofollow / DoFollow and find other blogs in the same niche with which to interact.

To disable nofollow, use one of the following plugins:

• DoFollow
• Follow URL

An excellent and more complete discussion of the issue is given by Andy Beard in his Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins. After reading all this we settled for the tried-and-true DoFollow plug-in mentioned in the WordPress Codex.

SMM DoFollow Policy

Our policy is to encourage more valuable comments by offering their authors ‘linkjuice‘. This is more generous than the approach of the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. At the same time, we accept the burden of removing spam comments. The Akismet plugin already does a good job of removing most spam comments. Other comments are deleted if it is felt that they do not merit being seen by other readers of the blogs. If it is felt that a commenter has written a comment merely to gain a link, then all his comments will be carefully scrutinised and may be deleted. It’s a kind of Tough Love policy but hopefully everyone wins.

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Many people are rightly concerned about their privacy on the Internet. We all leave our virtual footprints wherever we go. Nevertheless we hope that those who have the ability to see those footprints will respect our privacy.

For its AdSense publishers, Google is now requiring that they display their privacy policy. Their announcement sets out the details of this new requirement. Google’s own privacy policy gives an indication of what needs to be revealed to visitors:

Personal information and other data we collect

• Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information. We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you.
• Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.
• Google’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.

It’s not onerous. Jennifer Slegg provides useful text in her AdSense-friendly privacy policy sample for AdSense publishers. The StayGoLinks policy can be seen from the link in the Footer of this post.

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“Yahoo Racing Ahead of Google in Asia’s Mobile Race?” was the question raised in June 2007. For its mobile search service Yahoo! oneSearch, which it then launched in seven Asian countries, including India, Yahoo! was targeting a subscriber base of 100 million through various partnerships. The article raised the question whether Yahoo could manage to stay ahead of Google in the mobile race in Asia. Clearly Yahoo has other things on its mind at the moment.

A much more important victory is heralded by this week’s headline, Google Wins Japan’s Mobile Net Battle. (Hat tip to Lee Messenger of Cre8asite Forums for that.) It suggests that the company’s deals with NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, Japan’s two biggest wireless carriers, have cemented its lead in mobile search. The article does point out that in the long run, the search companies and the carriers have interests that diverge more dramatically. The carriers want to channel subscribers through a proprietary Net gateway using proprietary browser software on mobile phones so they can charge subscribers for services, not just airtime. That’s at odds with Google’s mission: to give everyone Net access and make the online experience on a mobile device virtually indistinguishable from that on a PC.

Another important stage of the race is opening up with Voice Search. Voice Search is poorly understood. What will speech technology support? What applications do customers want? What will they pay for and how viable are ads in voice-search applications? The Voice Search Conference will be held in San Diego, March 10 - 12, 2008, to address these issues. Needless to say this is another area where Google is strongly represented.

As John Roese, CTO Nortel, muses as he returns from the Mobile World Congress 2008 – Oh, what a difference a year can make a:

You cannot consider wireless networks without including the carrier VoIP market, which is the agreed-upon method that will be used to make voice and real-time communications possible in these new networks. And you cannot consider the fate and shape of the wireless industry without including IT companies like Microsoft and Google and technology companies like Apple in the total view of the industry.

To boldly go where no man has gone before: that’s the Mobile Web. .. and Google must be a strong favorite in that amazing race.

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2008 is a good year to think beyond Websites and start thinking about lifestyles—how we live and why we do what we do. The Web isn’t going away—but the way we interact with it, might just turn into a moving target. Actually, it already is.

(Thanks to Jennifer Laycock for this). As Armano says, life is becoming increasingly mobile.

While fully supporting his sentiments, and although Microsoft has some powerful initiatives, I predict that Mobile 2008 will be the year of the Google. They have a number of irons in the fire, but the activities of the Open Handset Alliance will strongly support their mobile thrust.

By chance, the US Patent Office has already published in 2008 a Google Patent Application on a User Interface for a Phone, which Bill Slawski describes:

User interface for mobile devices
Invented by Sanjay Mavinkurve, Shumeet Baluja, and Maryam Kamvar
US Patent Application 20080005668
Published January 3, 2008
Filed June 30, 2006

Since it was filed in 2006, nothing should be read into its appearance now. However I believe it has symbolic importance.

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If you want confirmation that speech technology is the next big technical and economic opportunity, then keep an eye on Google. This year they encouraged the formation of the Open Handset Alliance. This undermines the walled gardens created by the existing telecom companies. The picture now is very much a more level and competitive playing field.

It is interesting to see how Google is now developing its own stake in what will be a highly profitable marketplace. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products & User Experience, in an interview (Google wants your phonemes) revealed one part of the effort.

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up, we can (understand) with high accuracy.

This approach is adopted because Google Is All About Large Amounts of Data. Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, believes the following:

The way to get better understanding of text is through statistics rather than through handcrafted grammars and lexicons. The statistical approach is cheaper, faster, more robust, easier to internationalize, and so far more effective.

We wanted speech technology that could serve as an interface for phones and also index audio text. After looking at the existing technology, we decided to build our own. We thought that, having the data and computational resources that we do, we could help advance the field. Currently, we are up to state-of-the-art with what we built on our own, and we have the computational infrastructure to improve further. As we get more data from more interaction with users and from uploaded videos, our systems will improve because the data trains the algorithms over time.

Google is certainly in a privileged position to gain access to large amounts of data that can be used to improve other services. However it seems somewhat paradoxical to be using number crunching to better understand language and speech.

Others take a different view. For example, Powerset is building a consumer search engine based on breakthrough natural language processing technology licensed from PARC and developed internally. The search engine aims to leverage the structure and nuances of natural language to ultimately transform the way humans interact with computers.

It will be interesting to see which approach wins out.

Related: Can You Hear The Future?

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The big news today is that Google will not have a Gphone but hopes to provide open-source software that will power cell phones around the world. That’s very exciting but apparently Canada is not included.

Google will offer free software to anyone who wants it under the relaxed terms of an open-source license, which will allow developers to view the source code for that software. “Today’s announcement is more ambitious than any single ‘Google Phone’ that the press has been speculating about,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. “Our vision is that the powerful platform we’re unveiling will power thousands of different phone models.” This will all happen under an umbrella group called the Open Handset Alliance.

Eight carriers have agreed to ship handsets based on the Google platform: Sprint and T-Mobile U.S.A. in the United States, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI in Japan, T-Mobile International in 10 European countries and the United Kingdom, China Mobile, Telefonica in Spain and Telecom Italia.

The list of the supporters of the Open Handset Alliance includes most of her the movers and shakers in the industry: Aplix, Ascender Corporation, Audience, Broadcom, China Mobile, eBay, Esmertec, Google, HTC, Intel, KDDI, Living Image, LG, Marvell, Motorola, NMS Communications, Noser, NTT DoCoMo, Nuance, Nvidia, PacketVideo, Qualcomm, Samsung, SiRF, SkyPop, SONiVOX, Sprint Nextel, Synaptics, TAT - The Astonishing Tribe, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Texas Instruments, T-Mobile, Wind River

One perhaps not surprising non-participant is AT&T, the sole U.S. carrier to offer the Apple iPhone. Since Rogers is associated with AT&T in the iPhone and Rogers has been extremely tardy in supporting the Mobile Web, there are no obvious signs that Google Phones will be here any time soon. It would seem to be a glorious opportunity for one of the Rogers competitors to take an end run around Rogers and offer such Google phones. How else will Canada ever develop any strength on the Mobile Web?

Related:
Google unveils mobile-phone software strategy - Mercury News
Google confirms its mobile Linux plans - ZDnet
Google’s Android Arrives: Not Gphone But An Open Source Mobile Phone Platform - SearchEngineLand
A ?phone for Christmas
Where’s my Gphone? - Official GoogleBlog
Mobile Web - O Canada
Mobile Web Canada

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Tom Spring of PC World was able to do a matched comparison. In his opinion, the result currently is a draw. Both services delivered the correct result, with Google taking a little longer since it repeats the request for confirmation. He has an interesting comment that the Google service is much simpler while the Microsoft service is slightly confusing in offering more choices. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this mirrors how both approach the regular keyword search. Google has that beautifully simple search page. Microsoft usually offers search within a portal page that flags the other services they have available.

It would be interesting to know whether either or both do user tests in deciding which format they will follow. Usability or the science of creating satisfactory user experiences regrettably does not receive the attention it should. Watching how typical users complete tasks as they use a particular service or website is an easy way to confirm that the best choices are being made. Given the expense of creating such services, it would seem foolhardy not to spend the limited extra dollars involved in checking whether the users think you have it right.

Related:
GOOG-411, A Harbinger Of The Mobile Web
GOOG-411 or CALL-411 - Voice-actuated Mobile Web
BTW, Live Search 411 Is Taking On GOOG 411

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