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

Other Related Posts

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

Recently in Boston, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was pushing a theme that is dear to many of us. The Mobile Web should grow with open standards. The Walled Garden approach should be abandoned.

The mobile Internet needs to be fully and completely the Internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards.

The “walled garden” is the metaphor that describes today’s cable TV and cellular data networks, where subscribers can only use devices authorized by the carrier, and can only access content and services authorized by the carrier, the exact opposite of the World Wide Web running over the IP-based Internet, which cell phone users can access from their home and work PCs.

Exhortations are fine but surprisingly he did not mention Google’s initiative with the Open Handset Alliance. Google’s Android project, based as it is on the Open Source approach, should be a powerful de-stabilizer of those walled gardens. Michael Mace, like many others, seems to be excited by what the Android project offers. The $10 million Android challenge announced by Steve Horowitz, Google’s Engineering Director, should be an additional incentive.

Rob Domanski is also excited. He quotes a Wired article that states, “Lockdowns on hardware functionality, demanded by service providers and enforced by the manufacturers, have resulted in a marketplace filled with crippled devices that are only minimally configurable or expandable”. This means that innovation suffers and both the consumer and the mobile industry itself miss out on some serious Mobile Web opportunities. He is concerned that Google’s initiative uses the more restrictive version of open-source as adopted by Apache, rather than the more open GPL, which covers Linux and GNU software. However this is unlikely to save the walled gardens to any great extent.

It would be surprising if everyone welcomed Android. There is perhaps no surprise that Microsoft and Yahoo! are at this point somewhat cool to the project. Frank Pasquale has a different concern about Google’s Open-Source initiatives. Given that the associated ad revenues could be enormous, Google and others will try to make their applications so attractive that no one will want to try anything else. Who could quibble with success? Those wouldn’t be walled gardens.

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Heraclitus over 2,500 years ago said the equivalent of “You can never jump into the same river twice.” In other words, things are always changing. Actions that might have been appropriate at one time may no longer be appropriate at a later time.

This somewhat philosophical thought came up when a web page came up on my radar screen entitled, The “.mobi” Proposal is Inconsistent with Device Independence Principles. Although the document itself bears no date and might appear to be timeless, the URL confirms that it dates from July 2004. The One Web principle is cited as a reason why the .mobi domain LTD should not be allowed. That was part of the ‘river’ of thinking that was flowing at that time. Just over a year later, Cameron Moll and Brian Fling wrote a three part series on Mobile Web Design and discussed the choices that must be made. In particular the third article on Tips & Techniques evaluated the issues around using CSS style sheets for handheld devices and the possibility of designing specifically for the Mobile Web (mobilizing versus miniaturizing). Even then the river was very turbulent and one might have wondered whether the One Web principle would continue to float.

Of course within the last 12 months, the .mobi domain has now come into existence and has been taken up with great enthusiasm. The river is even more turbulent for that One Web principle. Yet it still seems to be supported with the same degree of enthusiasm that was evident in mid-2004. Without going as far as Henry Ford with his ‘History is Bunk‘, history is still history. What may have seemed logical at one time may no longer have currency. Standards only have legitimacy when they are accepted by a significant proportion of those affected. The proportion accepting One Web seems to be dropping.

Related: Will That Be Adaptation Or Alternation?

Tags: Mobile, One Web, adaptation, alternation

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Surveys work best when they sample the widest population. That is surely achieved when a survey is done on the Mobile Web. Sending a survey by direct mail or stopping passers-by in a shopping mall can produce a very biased sample. Cell phones are likely to get to a much bigger audience.

Now Matt Hickey points out that Wirenode has brought out Mobiode, a survey tool for mobile phones. Here’s how it works:

Using the built-in WAP or WHML browsers on today’s handsets, site operators can ask user’s opinions on any range of topics, and get the results fast. In theory, it’s not much different than Web surveys that have been around for more than a decade, but in practice, it’s really cool.

By adding a “sniffer” that determines which phone a person accessing the survey is using, the server can feed pages to the user that are optimized for their phone’s particular browser, in WAP, HTML, WHML, or whatever else will be the fastest and most reliable method. This means that one of the biggest hurdles of mobile Web browsing, compatibility, is no longer in the equation.

This approach is very much in line with the thoughts of Eli Dickinson. In a post entitled ‘Mobile Web revisited‘, he wrote:

The idea of a device-independent “One Web” is an excellent, worthy goal, but in some ways I do believe it is Utopian (and GAP author Luca Passani and I aren’t the only ones who think so).

Indeed Luca Passani has also written a Switcher program, which is ideal for .mobi domains. It redirects the visitor to the appropriate URI for the device being used. That’s a way of following the Alternation approach, which is one of the Basic Concepts here.

Tags: Mobile, alternation

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Luca Passani, the creator of WURFL (The Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) and of Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, contacted me on some of the topics discussed here. He takes issue with some of the thinking involved in the One Web approach of the W3C Mobile Initiative. The Introduction to the GAP outlines some of his thinking.

Without speaking for either side, it struck me that some of the debate might be clarified by introducing a new word. Certain things we’re all agreeing on. We all would like a ubiquitous web where people can access content with a satisfactory user experience whatever the device they’re using. We’re all agreed that this involves different content appropriate to the device and that this can be done either server-side or client-side. Adaptation has been used as the umbrella word to describe that process.

In practice as different entities and companies involved in the Mobile web are setting up their websites, two very different approaches are involved. Some go with the W3C approach that a single URI should give access to appropriate content for all devices. Others are using different URIs for different devices. In other words, they suggest alternative URIs dependent on the device being used. The closest English word to that notion would seem to be the word, Alternation. The thinking is described in greater detail in the article below.

If you have a better word for such a process than Alternation, then let’s hear it. Otherwise why not go with Alternation.

Related: Adaptation Or Alternation

Tags: Mobile, alternation

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You won’t need to sift through both mobile and regular web results, or specify your search type-local, image, web, etc.-as our new search experience will offer you results based on the nature of the query itself. So if you search for [bbc] on your device, you’ll get a link to the mobile-friendly BBC website. Search for [us post office], and you’ll get listings for the branches that are closest to your set location, and so on.

So just mosey over to http://www.google.com/pda and you’ll see how that works out.

Mike Rowehl isn’t yet very satisfied with how that applies to the findability of .mobi domains.

When I hopped online and started talking to some folks there were a lot of reports of the same kind of thing. Google doesn’t rank .mobi sites very high cause it takes domain registration length into account when figuring out how to weight sites. It also doesn’t really pay much attention to the variant of mark-up that a site uses, and has been just shoving everything through the transcoder.

He then goes on to say:

That’s really kinda disappointing. With all the current push in mobile - from mobile browsers finally starting to support sane mark-up languages and palatable variants of CSS up through tools like the Mobi Ready Report and the machine readable mobileOK effort going on at the W3C - it feels like we’re generally getting to a state where site owners can put up a mobile version without too much effort and in a format they find appealing and consistent. But one of the main avenues through which people should be able to find this mobile stuff has actually turned out to be something of a blocker.

The age of .mobi websites as this impacts the Google search algorithm is clearly something Google needs to work on. However the adaptation issue associated with their transcoder is yet another illustration of the difficulty of making adaptation work satisfactorily.

Related: Adaptation or Alternation

Tags: Mobile, adaptation

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Wap Review has an interesting piece on MSNBC’s Hidden Mobile Gems. MSNBC is the cable TV news channel operated by Microsoft and NBC and it has a rather good mobile web site. It’s a multi section news portal somewhat like the CNN and the BBC mobile sites. It does not have in house reporters but draws on the wire services or other publishers like Business Week, Forbes and the National Geographic.

The mobile website would seem to be far from the One-Web principle that the W3C organization is promoting. There is apparently no dedicated URL for the mobile site but if you’re using almost any mobile browser, the site’s browser detection kicks in to serve you mobile pages. Although the front page lists only nine sections (Business, Sports, U.S.News, World News, Politics, Tech & Science, Entertainment, Health, Travel, there are actually a number of additional mobile sections which are more or less hidden. These are the mobile gems that the author talks about. Overall the total viewing experience is most satisfactory and follows many of the recommendations of the Mobile Web Initiative.

In other words, the MSNBC team has decided to create separate web pages for mobile devices rather than making the desktop PC web pages offer a satisfactory user experience on Mobile devices. This seems the practical solution that many website owners will offer. The One-Web principle is just not for them.

Tags: Mobile, one web

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William Slawski has pointed out to me a reference in CiteSeer that applies to the same field. CiteSeer is a Science Papers Publications Research Index hosted by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. It often will produce similar results to those found by Google Scholar. The reference he found is A Study of an Augmented Museum Experience (2001). The Abstract runs as follows:

This paper describes the design of a study of visitors to a science museum who are equipped with wirelessly connected handheld devices. The museum exhibits are augmented with information and services in the form of web pages, and the users can access those pages conveniently when in the proximity of the exhibits as well as from their desktops outside the museum. The goal of the study is to examine use of technologies for `bridging the physical and virtual worlds’.

That sounds like a good example of the Ubiquitous Web in action. Some of the related references below develop the applications from a user point of view. One particularly interesting example applies the same thinking to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (PDF).

They all seem to be following the adaptation approach promoted by the Mobile Web Initiative. If only AGIs had come along earlier, they might have all been following a Multi-Web Practice and might well have had less of a challenge.

References:
Content in a Museum Setting
Electronic Guidebooks and Visitor Attention (2001)
Experimental Platform for Mobile Information Systems (2005)

Tags: Mobile, ubiquitous web

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Mobile Device Detection is a thorny problem on the road to the Ubiquitous Web. Brian Fling of Mobile Design has a good description of this in an item entitled The Mobile Device Detection Problem. The aim is that a website owner should be able to deliver content to whatever mobile device the visitor may be using. This is done by detecting the type of mobile device and delivering an appropriate version of the content. The item points out the difficulties in doing that for most developers. Unfortunately the link is no longer active.

Confirming the connectivity of the World Wide Web, a possible solution is outlined in the comments to the item. Luca Passani of WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) fame suggests that with WALL, a Library to Multiserve Applications on the Wireless Web, the developer’s task will be very much easier.

This still begs the question of whether programming code changes alone can modify the content sufficiently to give good user experiences to all mobile device users. The Multi-Web approach, perhaps even in combination with WURFL, still seems a more viable option.

Tags: Mobile, device

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Walled Gardens, at least the Internet-related version, do not seem to get the respect their owners might think is their due.

Of course walled gardens are created with the economic interests of the owners in mind. They do give value to those who visit the walled gardens but those outside the walls may naturally be somewhat jealous. .. and even those inside may resent the restrictions on their freedom they must accept.

The subject is getting increased intention particularly on the Mobile Web. The walls seem to be lowering or even disappearing. For example at the NMS - Connect 2006 Americas Conference, R. Brough Turner noted the differing views of Cingular and DoCoMo in his note on Open or Walled Garden. Docomo follows the Open model, while Cingular so far is resolutely walled, although there is internal discussion on this.

Now Ajit Jaokar suggests that the future is bright .. The future is 3 .. He’s clearly declared which camp he’s in by the name of his blog, Open Gardens. .. and he’s delighted that Hutchison Whampoa are going Open with 3 and also adopting a fixed fee policy. Their announcement read as follows:

The X-Series from 3 marks the beginning of the Internet via mobile broadband, and heralds a new way of doing business for mobile network operators. It will extend several of the core applications and uses of the broadband Internet to the mobile handset, with a new pricing model. The X-Series from 3 will be supported by the leading Internet companies, cutting-edge handsets from the world’s leading mobile manufacturers and premium customer service. Customers will be able to make unlimited calls from their mobile using Skype, watch their home television via their mobile using Sling, access their home PC remotely using Orb and have access to the best of internet and messaging services from Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger and Google. The X-Series from 3 will be priced like fixed line broadband. It will offer use of mobile Internet services free at the time of use, for a flat fee.

As we all work towards the Ubiquitous Web, we should trumpet the news as the walls keep tumbling down.

Tags: walled gardens, ubiquitous Web

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