Webbster

TV mega-docs, meet search demand analysis

2012-01-10T21:41:00.000Z

Super-volcano (Source: The Independent)

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday about Jane Root's new venture in the world of blockbuster mega-docs. It occurred to me that there are some parallels between the role of TV commissioning and elements of search engine optimisation, or more specifically 'search demand analysis'. Of course, not in terms of gravitas (who am I kidding) - but at least in terms of how you reach the desired endpoint.

Firstly, what's a mega-doc?

Here's some examples given in the article:

America: the history of us - viewed by a staggering 40m viewers
Mankind: the history of us - coming this year covering topics like the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Easter Island statues, technology breakthroughs, and a super-volcano
How We Invented the World - about great engineering and science breakthroughs

While most websites might not have the budgets of TV, comparisons can immediately be drawn between the types of content themes emerging in these in mega-docs against trends in search demand for knowledge on the web. These 'big life' questions feature very heavily in the knowledge space online and offer a fertile source for further creative development. How do we know this? Because it's already been done through analysis of keyword referrals from any number of free and paid for analytics apps including Google Webmaster Tools. You can read more about we’ve done this at the BBC in a previous post on search demand analysis.

On a slightly different level think 'How Stuff Works' meets ‘Wikipedia’, and to perhaps a lesser extent ‘Qwiki’ and ‘eHow’ etc.

I'd love to know at what point audience appetite falls into the creative development process and what point (if any) real world data is used when developing programme ideas, because search demand analysis would really help reduce the risk of delivering a turkey in a way that focus groups could never do.

Stretching the comparison further: "If you had three big things a year you were talked about”.

Apply that to the search engine landscape where the currency is links - and we're all about performing well in for a manageable number of high-volume terms that we know lots of people are using to find stuff.

These mega-docs have succeeded because “Britain is world leader in premium, high-end, factual programmes,” Meanwhile, being successful in search engines requires high quality, authoritative content that clearly meets audience demand - in their language and that they want to talk about (ie link to).

(Too) much has been written about in this crazy new world of two-screened try-hard transmedia and I can’t help thinking that - while innovation is a great thing - some ideas just get too complicated to the detriment of the main event. Another form of innovation might be to apply what you can learn from the alternative world of web-search insights and weave that into the more creative programme development process.

While it might not be suited to some formats, for factual docs at least it’s surely worth a look. After all, you have to work for your audience!

What is the UK searching for on YouTube?

2011-11-14T13:04:00.001Z

Heatmap showing attention on thumbnail

Most people are well aware that YouTube is the third biggest website in the worldafter Google and Facebook achieving over 3 billion video views per day.

Since Google introduced universal search a few years ago, hardly a search goes by without a large proportion of users being tempted to click on thosevideo thumbnails. And click we do. Eye tracking studies confirm that these thumbnails get deliver healthy clickthrough rates as you can see from this heatmap showing how much attention is focused around the thumbnail on a Google search.

Given the power and influence that YouTube has over both our search behaviour and more generally our overall web consumption, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what people are searching for when they arrive there.

This first post in a series focuses mostly on the broad categories by comparison. Future posts (when I get around to it) will show deeper insights and peculiarities around what we’re looking for on YouTube.

Ten things you never knew about YouTube

1. Kate Middleton is the 100th most popular search term on YouTube.

2. “Peppa Pig” is the third most popular search, with almost twice as many searches as “Lady gaga”.

3. “Justin Bieber” is the most popular artist, followed by “Adele” and “Rihanna”. He receives ten times as many searches as “Rebecca Ferguson” of The X Factor.

4. There’s about the same number of searches for “How to lose weight” as there are for “How to gain weight”

5. “Doctor Who” is about as popular in search demand as “Kate Middleton”.

6. Searches around the Lego franchises like “Lego Star Wars” are huge - about the same amount as those around “...Sport...” and more than those around “...Funny...”.

7. “Anne Widdecombe Strictly Come Dancing” attracted the same level of search interest as “Apple iPad”.

8. There are as many searches for “Funniest thing ever” as for “Gillian McKeith Faints”.

9. Searches for “How to apply eyeliner” are equal to those for "How to w$nk" and twice as popular as “How to annoy people on Black Ops”.
10. There are more than three times as many people looking for ways to convert YouTube material as there are searching for anything "official".

Scroll down for the Top 100 Most popular searches on YouTube.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL VERSION)

About the data

The data is from 100,000 searches performed by UK users arriving at YouTube from search engines over a one year period, ending October 2011. It is from Hitwise, so it’s robust.

I created some deliberately broad clusters (or categories) – things that leapt out at me when studying the data. The combined volume of these groups amounts to around 20 per cent of the 100,000 searches, so while it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I think it’s interesting.

I’ve stuck to common cultural interests and themes and have tried to clean as much junk out of my clusters as possible in order to maintain integrity. For example, in the ‘Life & Death’ cluster I filtered out variants of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ so as to avoid skewing the data. Similarly, the ‘Films’ slice in ‘Moving Images’ includes movies.

The bar chart shows comparative search volume between each of these defined categories, so we can immediately see that ‘Moving Images’ and ‘Music’ categories attract the largest share of search volume. More surprising is that the five artists selected to comprise the ‘Music Artists’ category, are roughly equivalent in search volume to all ‘Games’ related searches, which confirms how powerful YouTube is in terms of exposure for popular artists.

Method

The approach is to filter the 100,000 searches by a given word, say “Winehouse”, and to count the combined number of searches including that word. This reveals underlying search demand and allows us to look beyond the surface of the most popular searches (or the head of the long tail - or those top 100 above if you like).

About the Wordles

Each of the Wordles gives an impression of how frequently a single word has appeared in a category. Where it seemed appropriate, I removed top-level categories in order to look beyond the more obvious and highly generic words. For example in the Music category, the word ‘music’ was filtered out of the Wordle to allow some less generic words to surface.

Top 100 searches over the last year

1- justin bieber
2- adele
3- peppa pig
4- rihanna
5- cher lloyd
6- radio 1
7- sex
8- annoying orange
9- cheryl cole
10- nicki minaj
11- mp3 converter
12- katy perry
13- rebecca black
14- jessie j
15- top 40 uk
16- adele someone like you
17- lady gaga
18- nursery rhymes
19- bruno mars
20- eminem
21- tom and jerry
22- mr bean
23- les paul
24- charts
25- translator
26- jls
27- fred
28- ed sheeran
29- iphone 5
30- royal wedding
31- matt cardle
32- radio 1 playlist
33- selena gomez
34- one direction
35- black ops
36- hit 40 uk
37- arsenal
38- amy winehouse
39- japan tsunami
40- spiderman
41- yogscast
42- swagger jagger
43- lego star wars
44- michael jackson
45- beyonce
46- go outdoors
47- harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2
48- charlie chaplin
49- bluexephos
50- thomas the tank engine

51- the wanted
52- mickey mouse clubhouse
53- charlie sheen
54- fireman sam
55- mickey mouse
56- susan boyle
57- ladslads
58- glee
59- eurovision 2011
60- tinie tempah
61- eastenders
62- susanna reid
63- transformers 3
64- boobs
65- cars 2
67- convert youtube to mp3
68- ellie goulding
69- front
70- call of duty black ops
71- willow smith
72- vue
73- fifa 12
74- eurovision
75- inbetweeners movie trailer
76- teletubbies
77- pingu
79- cinema
80- katy b
81- miley cyrus
82- horrid henry
83- modern warfare 3
84- 2 girls 1 cup
85- pokemon
86- taylor swift
87- gummy bear song
88- pottermore
89- chris brown
90- xhamster
91- freddie mercury
92- twinkle twinkle little star
93- doctor who
94- radio 1 chart
95- chatroulette
96- itv
97- power rangers
98- harry potter and the deathly hallows
99- qwop
100- kate middleton

Do automatically generated pages pose a risk for SEO?

2011-11-01T15:07:00.000Z

I recently read Martin Belam’s post over on Currybet about the IA of Guardian/culture, from this year’s EuroIA conference. I was asked for an opinion on a particular point made about the potential SEO risk associated with what are effectively linked-data approaches to web publishing. Firstly, I recommend Mike Atherton’s presentation, Beyond The Polar Bear, which Martin was referring to below:

Beware of “Panda”

If you’ve seen Mike Atherton’s talk “Beyond The Polar Bear”, you’ll know that the BBC has claimed some great SEO success with densely interlinked automatically generated pages about food, music, sport and television and radio programmes. We expected to see the same. Actually, we now think that the addition of these pages are potentially an SEO danger for our site.
…we have 1.37m pieces of original quality content on the Guardian site. And prior to this project, the site consisted 100% of that type of content. Throw in the automatic books and music pages - and suddenly those 1.37m URLs are potentially swamped by 3m artists and 8m books. On crude numbers alone, the original content on our site begins to look like the exception rather than the rule.

Taken at face value, Martin's point seems like a good one. So I wanted to put this theory to the test. But first let's just acknowledge that the use of the word 'automatic' here is slightly troublesome and potentially misleading. However, as this is the context in which is was raised let's push on.

Annoyingly, tools like Yahoo Site Explorer or Open Site Explorer aren't much help here because they're only really useful at page and domain (or sub-domain) level, as opposed to directory level, which we're interested in here. Instead I favoured a qualitative approach by revisiting Google’s guidance on building high-quality sites.

I set out to answer these questions within the context of some of the BBC’s recent linked-data approaches, to help me gauge how we might feel about these rich internal linking structures and their possible impact on the BBC's domain authority. The areas of the BBC site I was interested in are:

Music – a page for every artist in MusicBrainz, hooked up to music lookup services where they appear in BBC programmes
Food – original recipes as featured in BBC programmes
Programmes – a page for every programme broadcast on all BBC channels
Wildlifefinder – a page for (almost) every species, habitat and adaptation the BBC has content on in the natural history domain

NB: there are others but these are the ones I'm familiar with.

I was immediately confidant that we'd score well on the majority of those questions, but there were a few that I got stuck on when considering we’re at the mercy of an algorithm - albeit one designed by geniuses.

While most were easy to justify to rational human beings, I found myself thinking it must be almost impossible to create an algorithm that could successfully interpret the concept of 'quality' beyond the realms of inbound link/PageRank factors. Instinctively, you’d be slightly nervous about the extent to which the domain authority trickles down to (or is eroded by) the perceived quality of an individual page.

So, should we be nervous? The questions I was less clear about were:

Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
Look at the additional value that this page about Polar Bears offers with unique and exclusive images, video, and semantic links to Distribution, Habitats, Behaviours and Conservation Status information powered by Animal Diversity Web. A no-brainer surely?

Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
Broadly, the aspiration is that BBC content meets a gap or audience need combined with an opportunity to squeeze out extra value on legacy A/V content that our audiences have already paid for. The trouble is, the truly original content is locked inside the clips and is therefore not readable by search engines.

Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
Yes, but again the really unique stuff is locked inside a clip.

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Possibly, maybe? Our domain-driven pages are always unique and permanent, although on a site as big as bbc.co.uk it’s quite possible that there may be some overlap with legacy pages, but this is a medium-term problem which is being dealt with. Good luck with that!

What's less clear though is the issue of duplication of content across different domains. In many of these cases, we do pull content from Wikipedia because it wouldn't make sense to replicate something that is already well-served by them. Instead, as was the case in /WildlifeFinder it was combined with unique high-quality A/V from the archive; or in the case of /Music it was hooked-up to radio programmes that played an artist. But without a transcript (which improves accessibility too), how can we communicate the quality and authority of our material when search engines can’t make total sense of it. Granted they can find a clip on polar bears, but can't really interpret its quality.

Matt Cutts wrote about this when the first Panda update was released. A few key words here make me feel more hopeful:

"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content" Official Google Webmaster Blog

"This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice." Matt Cutts' Blog

So, the targeted nature of this change implies that we're safe on the issue of duplication.

Setting aside those Google quality criteria for a moment, consider a few pertinent and commonly-accepted SEO ranking factors:

Validate all links to all pages on your site (any decent site owner should be doing this anyway)
Have an efficient linking structure (this doesn't get much more efficient with domain driven approaches)
Have appropriate links between lower-level pages
Link only to good sites. Links can and do go bad, resulting in site demotion. Unfortunately, you must devote the time necessary to police your outgoing links - they are your responsibility.
Outgoing link text should be on topic, descriptive
Be fresh with content – ratio of old to new pages
Age of page vs. age of site – new pages on an older site will get recognised faster

Surely a domain-driven approach would serve us well then?

Honest answer is that I don't know. Part of my reason for writing this is to see if others can help square the circle. But during an email discussion recently with @silveroliver, @fantasticlife, and @duncanbloor, our conclusion centred around the importance of a content strategy. My boss (@onpause) once said in a presentation "If you can't link it, don't think it". Wise words.

I'd add that there are no shortcuts when it comes to getting users to follow those links. A richly interlinked domain model is nothing without sufficiently desirable content that people will be compelled to visit. Silver captured the discussion succinctly:

"...there is no benefit in trying to be encyclopaedic, extending beyond the domains in which you truly have something to offer".

In all of this discussion I've also realised that our biggest blocker to getting search engines to interpret the true uniqueness and quality of our pages is that our best content is locked in video, which while being indexed, can't communicate quality and uniqueness itself.

Related links

Afterblog…
In the process of researching this I found a post by Aaron Bradley of SEO Skeptic, who cited Quality Criteria for Linked Data sources, which also looks useful from a tech perspective for anyone releasing Linked Data products. This came about from his concern about Proof and Trust in relation to Linked Data. He was coming at things from a different perspective, but one that is interesting as it points to a potential future need for an equivalent PageRank algorithm for linked data to help crawlers fight future occurrences of SemSpam.

Please leave a comment.

Ladybird 'Made in Me' app review

2011-10-04T13:00:00.000+01:00

Me Books - A cracking new storytelling app from Made in Me on Vimeo.
Here’s something you’ll like. Fans of those old Ladybird books can relive childhood memories - or just pass them onto your minidigital nipper natives - with this new app from Penguin.

Released in August this year, Me Books makes for a great iPad reading experience for littleones.

It comes with one book The Zoo, which is only 69p and the rest are £1.99. Each pagecontains numerous hotspots for sound effects or narration, which play out whentapped. It gets most interesting though when you record your own effects.

“Someone’s been tampering with the porridge!”

I particularly liked Goldilocks and the Three Bears, purely because it’s got Adam Buxton narrating it, though I can’t get the image of his brilliant Country Man series for BBC Comedy out of my head when I’m listening to him. His Goldilocks rendition and references to 'porridge tampering' are worth the price of this one alone, whilebaby bear’s persistent gripes about things smelling of girls is a constant source of parental amusement.

What’s particularly nice about these digital editions is that they retain the printed qualities including original text,illustrations, and even imprint page, which shows when it was first published.

Overall, this app offers a great blendof nostalgia for parents and old world charm with a digital twist for little ones. It’d be tempting to add more features, like the ability to export your story and save multiple versions, but I think they’ve got the balance between old, new and pure simplicity justright.

Planning for Desirable Content

2011-10-03T17:00:00.001+01:00

A few months ago I stumbled on a useful checklist for Creating Valuable Content by Ahava Leibtag. If you're into content strategy, you should check it out. (I hope they don't mind me borrowing heavily from their PDF design but it fits my needs).

Meanwhile, I've been grappling with this issue at work and was looking for a framework to help organise and structure my thinking around content planning in the context of search demand insights, which I've written about previously. While I really liked Leibtag's model, I felt the need to back-up a step to the point before you've decided what content you're going to produce.

Some years ago a training course I went on recommended something called NABC (Need, Approach, Benefit, Competition*). This was in the context of evaluating programme ideas, but it fits equally well when evaluating the potential success of, say, web pages or entire web products if you like.

Download the PDF for Planning For Desirable Content.

Context
Beyond traditional news pages the BBC produces all manner of 'things', particularly in the realm of knowledge and learning. Here we produce web content about People, Places and Events etc. There are many different 'content triggers' for producing pages on bbc.co.uk (ie off the back of a news story or TV show). To a greater or lesser extent, search insights should always be part of that mix.

By combining those search insights with good journalistic skills, the hope is that we'll increase engagement by providing more compelling pages that are increasingly relevant to peoples' needs, while building on our archive heritage and complementing what's available on the wider web.

In a world where over 50% of users come to sites direct from search, any good Editor would surely want to rely on more than just a good nose for a story to be confident that it has more than a fighting chance of long-term survival in search, and that it's valuable enough to attract links. If they don't, there's plenty of other lithe and hungry dinosaurs (no subtext intended), flexing their talons for a share of search-friendly traffic.

Of course, this is absolutely not to suggest that the only reason for producing any content is just to serve users coming via search engines. Nor is it about simply chasing keywords. However, it is very much about using what we know people are looking for as a result of our studies of huge amounts of search data from Hitwise.

All that side, the idea behind this document is that the person commissioning a piece of content should feel happy that his/her team members have done the legwork (aided by our Audience Acquisition team of experts) by considering these issues before embarking on a proposed story - unless of course there are other driving factors that mean we lower the priority of search insights. For example, if we know there's a massive season on the horizon about, say, Afghanistan on one of our BBC channels, then the programmes will likely become the dominant content driver, or springboard, as opposed to us purely relying on search insights.

So, really it's a case of juggling all of these factors intelligently and pragmatically, to give the content a stronger chance of reaching more people over a sustained period of time, instead of just over a short spike around a programme.

Then, once the content is ready to roll, Leibtag's model is entirely relevant for a second pass prior to launch.

Download the PDF for Planning For Desirable Content
Download Creating Valuable Content: An Essential Checklist, from which I have borrowed the format!

*More about NABC
The framework aims to help you understand and sharpen 'the value proposition' of a product or service. It was developed by Curtis Carlson and William Wilmot and has been summarised in their book “Innovation – The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want”. (No idea if it is any good but I like this model anyway).

Reflecting seasonal search demand on BBC Food

2011-09-29T12:16:00.000+01:00

Top searches to UK Food websites over 2010/11

Here’s something for the data viz geeks. As part of a wider piece of work we've been doing across our factual genres, we wanted to turn ourdata into something more user-friendly for our web production teams. I’ve explained how we approach the data research in a previous post.

The process here is slightly different in that it looked at what people were searching for on a month-by-month basis and then captured fastrising terms from one month to the next.

A constant challenge when looking at search insights is in being able to get colleagues to act on it and to really embed what they’ve learned into their production processes and business strategies.

The aim of this chart was to provide an aesthetically pleasing way of getting people to think harder about how they produce, promote and curate the right content at the time when most people are looking for it. In a sense we’re saying to our Food team 'if you only focus on 20 things this month, make it these things, and in this order'. Of course, food is particularly well suited to seasonal trends but we hope to roll out similar visuals for other BBC factual/knowledge genres too.

All credit to Adam Hinks who designed it, and to my colleague Duncan Bloor who did the data legwork. I just gave editorial guidance and feedback along the way.

You can view and download a nice big pdf version for your wall on Duncan's Blog: BBC_Food_Infographic_v5

Blast Theory: A Machine to See With

2011-09-28T09:15:00.001+01:00

I went to the Improving Reality conference last week, which was run by the good people of Lighthouse down here in Brighton. There were some amazing speakers which I'll summarise in a separate post when I have more time. Of particular interest was a talk by Matt Adams, co-founder of Blast Theory. He spoke about their latest work, A Machine To See With. Having kicked myself for missing Uncle Roy All Around You, some years ago I was keen not to miss out this time.

The experience is billed as a piece of locative cinema, where you are the lead role in an interactive heist movie. The idea is that the player will think of their eyes as the screens themselves, putting them at the centre of a unique unfolding drama across the city.

It works using open source call centre software called Asterisk. The adventure unfolds through a mixture of multiple choice options and numerous navigational instructions spoken by a recorded message. While that may sound a bit clunky it's actually a bit of an adrenaline rush - far more exhilarating than an afternoon spent on hold to your average call centre worker.

I won't go into too much detail on the actual experience otherwise it'll spoil it for any future players. But what really struck me was the feeling you got while playing the game. What struck me most was its ability to very quickly transport me into an unfamiliar world. While most of us area aware of how our emotions change when watching films or playing video games, this was on another level. As soon as the game begins you are on alert, checking people around you in the street to see whether they are part of the experience. 'Is that the getaway car?' 'Is she in this too?'. You don't know who to trust.

When we watch a movie, read a book or play a game, the story develops in a more passive way (though arguably less so for a game). With A Machine To See With, you are central to the story, so the decisions you make; the places you go; the things you interact with are all actually happening to you there and then. The effects of all this on your behaviour, thought processes and emotions is unsettling, exciting, challenging and amusing all at once.

The journey took me from from hiding in a pub toilet stashing my money in my shoe, to hiding in a multi-story car park. At one point, immediately after having found a pair of latex gloves in a glovebox, I quickly closed it and rubbed my fingerprints from the handle of the glovebox. Why did I do that, when I knew it was just a game?

All in all, it was a fantastic experience that I urge you to try if it comes to a town near you.

Google +1: the curious case of negative CTRs

2011-09-16T13:42:00.001+01:00

I was wondering what effect the new +1 button was having on the reach of content on bbc.co.uk. A quick look in Webmaster Tools raised more questions than it answered, but I thought I'd share what I learned anyway. Specifically, these are the questions I wanted answered:

How many people are +1'ing our content?
What impact does it have on our content in search?
Who is +1'ing BBC content?
Where do they live?
What types of BBC content seem to get +1’d the most?

Very helpfully Google's Webmaster Tools provides most of the answers to these questions.

How many people are +1'ing our content?
Over 7,000 people +1'ed BBC content in the last month. Given the huge amount of content the BBC produces each day, particularly in the news space, these figures seem quite low, but it's early days. Also, consider the fact that the BBC website does not yet carry the +1 button, so there is arguably a missed opportunity to accrue +1s right at the point in the journey where users have just enjoyed our content. If it did, perhaps there'd be a greater impact?

What impact does it have on our content in search?
Webmaster Tools shows both annotated impressions and annotated clicks and explains the distinction between the two:

+1 annotated impressions: The number of times a user saw that page in search results with a personalised (because someone in the user's social connections already +1'd the page) or aggregated annotation.
+1 annotated clicks: The number of times users clicked on a search result with a personalised annotation.

Impact of +1 presence in search engine results pages

So, somewhere between 15% and 40% of clicks are achieved across three of our most significant pages where an annotated entry appears in search results. But here's the kicker. Bizarrely, the Click Through Rate (CTR) actually falls 2% on average where an annotation is present. Okay, that may not sound like much but for some pages it was as much as 33%, which is a big deal. The homepage and News homepage saw CTR falls of around 10% each. So, what are we to make of that?

Maybe this needs monitoring more by other sites to see whether there is a real trend here, or perhaps we should just put it down to the crazy month of August? After all it has been bad weather.

Who is +1'ing BBC content?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is 77% (geek?) males aged most commonly between 18 and 44.

What types of BBC content seem to get +1’d the most?

I aggregated the urls into buckets that broadly match our online structure, with the results showing in the donut below. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of our +1s are for News pages, followed by TV Channels, Radio Networks and individual programme pages, a small number of which are for flagship shows like Top Gear and Dr Who.

Why is Google reporting +1’s from our site when we don’t yet carry the button?
What I can't understand is why Webmaster Tools is claiming that over 2,000 +1s appeared on our pages. If we don't carry the button are they coming from people +1'ing via a browser extension?

That would be plausible if the figure was taken in isolation, but when compared to our total monthly +1's this implies that just under 20% of all +1 activity happens in this way. (I did pose this question on the Webmaster Forum but haven't received a reply yet). If I get one, I'll update this post.

Either way, the numbers for +1 really aren't big enough to justify all the fuss at this stage - though I appreciate this is going to be a long game and we're only just starting out.

I'd be really interested to hear how other sites are doing in terms of positive or negative impact on CTR where +1 annotations are appearing in search results?

Anyone?

*** UPDATE from Google ***
A Developer Advocate from Google contacted me in response to this. Here's what he had to say:

"Results with +1 annotations generally should have a higher CTR than the same results without them. But in some cases, the people who see annotated impressions are searching for different things than the people who see the non-annotated impressions; and in some cases this may lead them to click on the annotated results less often than the people who see the non-annotated results...
...Users may in fact be making a navigational query, and clicking through on the desired navigational result regardless of an annotation on another link.

Interestingly enough, adding the +1 button to the BBC's site and getting more people to +1 the BBC's content will make it more likely that the people who see annotated results are a representative sample of your general audience and may make the CTR more accurate"

Regarding the question of where those onsite +1's were coming from:

"New +1's from your site' also includes +1's from the Chrome extension as they occur while the user is on your site."

Big thanks to Google for responding to this post with their analysis of the situation. I'll be keeping an eye on those stats too over the coming months, particularly when the BBC gets around to adding that +1 button.

Imaginative storytelling on the ipad

2011-08-30T17:02:00.001+01:00

Just seen this intriguing ipad app called The Infinite Adventure Machine by designer David Benque.

The app generates incomplete fairy tale scenarios, while it's the job of the human storyteller to imagine a story through improvisation. The software components are based on the work of Russian plot scholar Vladmir Propp's 31 narrative structures. (These are interesting in themselves even if you don't check out the video below!)

This reminds me of that old car game we play with our kids where each person in the car, provides the narrator with an object which they have to somehow weave into a story.I've not doubt my kids will look forward to seeing this in the app store. It should also do a good job of developing my two girls' storytelling talents away from poo, wee, willies and boobies.

The Infinite Adventure Machine (prototype 01) from David Benqué on Vimeo.

A story about the Semantic Web

2011-08-26T15:34:00.001+01:00

Google fooling around with Site Links

2011-08-11T15:30:00.002+01:00

Google has started experimenting again with how it treats site links. From testing out a few searches, it only seems to do this where it can identify that your search is of navigation intent.

Personally, I'm really not a fan and really hope it doesn't stick. While I realise it's providing additional info to the user I would wager that as it's a navigational search, most users know exactly where they want to get to and don't need the additional clutter. While the url is useful enough for me the meta-description snippet is a step too far.

Considering the fact that too many sites write fairly pedestrian meta-descriptions at best (I include the BBC in that!), it now means you've got to re-optimise a bunch of meta-descriptions to be useful within the first 40 characters. That's no mean editorial feat. Nor is it feasible to write a meta-description that works for both the standard 150 character max and the 40 character max scenario here.

Read more about this at Search Engine Watch.

Redefining the production process through search intelligence

2011-07-19T22:25:00.010+01:00

Most people working on the internet with a bit of commercial awareness understand the need to make their products or content findable both by search engines and users. With the majority of website visitors often coming direct from search engines, if people can’t find your business (commercial or otherwise), it is unlikely to survive too long without significant marketing and/or word of mouth publicity.

In the BBC's case, you could even argue that one of the reasons its web operations needed to be rationalised was because so many ‘sites’ were produced without any consideration for how findable they might be in search, resulting in some lacklustre weekly stats.

Once upon a time

Historically, a BBC proposition might have come about through various routes: a connection with a TV programme (now done much more intelligently through /programmes); a season; a learning drive; a strategic partnership; a commissioning need; or simply because it’s what we’ve always done. Along the way, audience research might have been commissioned and personas written, marketplace analysis performed and prototypes tested etc. But in all of this, nowhere, not least at the sharp end of content production or audience planning would anyone have spent too much time studying search demand.

Keyword research, evolved

Recently, I’ve been working with a small team of specialists to help communicate, train and evangelise to BBC production teams about best practice SEO among other aspects of web development. One aspect of this has focused on the keyword research process. One of the main aims of this is to increase the product value (or the amount of licence fee spent), ensuring that it reaches its intended audience.

Where once a Producer might have justified their lack of SEO awareness by saying “Well I Googled BBC [insert site name] and it came top so I figured we’re all sorted” we like to think we’ve progressed from there now. In addition to these mostly 'run of the mill' optimisation tactics, we’ve been contributing our search data insights to a forthcoming Knowledge and Learning product.

While recommending that Producers use the Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search, before they even build anything, there’s some much deeper analysis we’ve been doing, which shows considerable promise for helping inform future content strategies and ways of working.

How do search demand insights help us build and maintain better products?

At the simplest level an SEO practioner might say keyword research allows your pages to perform better in search by using precisely targeted words. To me that’s slightly different to the type of search demand analysis our team (Duncan Bloor mostly) have been doing of late.

So what are the benefits of search demand analysis?:

Helps you form an understanding of your audience needs. What are people looking for? What language do they use? Am I meeting those needs? If not, what can I change to do so?
Helps inform the structural design of a product, whether that’s modelling a domain, devising a url strategy, or labelling a navigation system
Helps you see relative popularity of one content topic over another, which in turn helps you tailor the content offer to fit demand, (eg ‘Why are we offering all this content about the Middle Ages when the appetite for Victorian History is ten times greater?’)
Allows you to compare data against insights gained from other marketing and audience research activities or more traditional web analytics data
It offers a broad and immediate snapshot of a subject - (NB - useful when a company is going through significant change, with people leaving, moving or with limited knowledge about a new content area)
You can spot ongoing demand compared to seasonal trends, allowing you to better promote your content at the right time, in the right places
It’s real. While the output of the research is certainly more Art than Science, you simply cannot argue with the data
It’s flexible. No desire to create content about Victorians? What about Royal Weddings, or Code Breaking?

So why isn’t everyone doing this?

Put simply, extracting the gold from them there spreadsheets is time-consuming. It’s graft, and it’s easy for thousands of rows of data to blend into one big meaningless blob. It takes a combination of an analytical mind; editorial judgement; marketplace awareness; and above all the ability to tell a story and then shape it into something that can be easily interpreted at a glance, often by skeptical minds, quick to pick up on the smallest anomaly or quirk in the data.

Seen in isolation, it’s not going to get you far either. Instead we see it as a strong foundation on which to build a happy house, sensibly designed with inviting rooms, each telling a unique and desirable story in a way that captures the imagination, and that people want to tell all their friends about, and want to return to.

The method

Say we’re interested in building a History product (you might not be - but the process is of course the same). Outlined below are the steps we go through to gain search demand insights. You'll need Experian Hitwise data, combined with brief checks using Google Insights and any good keyword discovery tool. Broadly, the steps are:

Identify other websites relevant to you in the History market. If Hitwise doesn’t already have a category of sites you need to define a category by identifying who is already performing well for the most obvious terms. The more sites the better, but they must be relevant to your interests. This can take time and will require constant checking as some sites might skew your data unfavourably (eg sites covering a broad set of topics are less useful than more focused ones.
Download a large set of data from a reasonably long time period.
Once the data has been cleaned, run a card sort on the top 100 or so terms. This might result in historical categories such as Kings and Queens, Famous People, Wars, Victorians etc. This is also time-consuming as you research an area in great detail. For example, do searches around “Victorians” belong in “a category called “Victorians” because the search demand there is so great, or shall we lump them in with a broader period in time. If so, how broad should that period be? (At this stage it's helpful to get help from someone with strong knowledge of the subject matter)
Total up your groups in terms of search volume and compare their relative sizes (as in the chart below)
Visualise it using your software package and method of choice (you could use wordles combined with something like the graph below)

And, in a bit more detail (large version on Flickr):

It’s important to understand that the output is a resource that can be revisited and sliced ‘n diced in many different ways. This is really just the starting-point for discussion and hopefully an inspiring first-cut.

UK Search demand for History

Here we can see that Romans accounts for 9% of the UK history search market (according to our defined Hitwise category).

Wordle showing top terms for searches around Romans

When we sift out some of the more obvious words (Kids, History, Ancient etc) we can gain insights around where the biggest demand lies. Food, recipes, clothes, goddesses, soldiers might be avenues worth exploring. And no doubt there are some more niche areas too that could be transformed into unique content.

We can then compare that to what we get from Google Insights.

Of course any search insights and recommendations then need to be weighed-up against numerous other questions:

Does it fit with the overall content strategy?
Does this capitalise on a user need to learn more about something featured in a programme?
Does this allow us to bring the BBC archive to new audiences?
Does this meet a specific learning outcome?
Can we bring anything new, and of high quality to this topic that is not already well-served elsewhere?
What legacy content do we already have that performs well, and if there is any, can we afford to do anything to improve it?

How can we translate this demand into a compelling story? This isn't about using keyword research to stuff the right words into pages, but instead as a springboard for discussion around content commissioning or product design.

If we compare this activity to things like focus groups or user research, to my mind, this adds easily as much value, not just because the pool of data us so vast (millions of internet users), but because it’s telling us what people are actually looking for, not what they told us they might like.

Where do we go from here
The next step is to figure out how we weave these kind of insights into the production process. I may post something on that at a later date.

For more inspiration about the value of tapping into search and analytics, check the links below.

More about this work: Our thirst for knowledge, from Duncan Bloor
Guardian: The metrics are the message: how analytics is shaping social games
Bank of England: Using internet search data as economic indicator
BBC News: House price changes 'predicted' by web search data
Google: Cartoon about Flu activity vs search behaviour

What types of story are most popular on BBC News?

2011-07-14T15:08:00.003+01:00

I recently did a quick bit of research to categorise the top 200 most read stories on BBC News in 2010. Here's my observations. Check out the super detail version with added wordleness.

Quirky, bizarre story titles make people want to click and share, hence the large number of what I called ‘offbeat’ stories that account for 17% of the most popular in 2010. Here’s 10 of them:

UK Euromillions ticket wins a record £113m
Test drive crash results in £300,000 insurance claim
Swede faces world-record $1m speeding penalty
China traffic jam stretches 'nine days, 100km'
Paul the World Cup octopus dies in his tank in Germany
Segway boss Jimi Heselden dies in scooter cliff fall
Is that woman pregnant or fat?
Having a big bum, hips and thighs 'is healthy'
Pea plant grows inside man's lung
Tesco ban on shoppers in pyjamas

We remain obsessed with crime and death, especially death of public figures. (This explains why they keep recommissioning Silent Witness)
The popularity of politics suggests that BBC News Online serves traditional BBC audiences well, although this is matched by a comparable level of interest in celebrity, again with mostly intriguing titles/angles:

Peter Andre's tearful TV interview draws complaints
Top Gear Stig legal wrangle goes to court
David Cameron's newborn baby 'sleeps in cardboard box'

Weather and Natural Disasters continue to be British obsessions. Combined, they make up 15% of the most popular stories in 2010. (Snow and Ash cloud being main causes)
Somewhat surprisingly, Gadgets and Tech feature low on this scale. Is this because more techie audiences get their news elsewhere or perhaps a suggestion of a slightly older skew?
Sport scarcely gets a look in. Is this because sports fans get their Sport News direct from other sport sources, or just because sport is generally quite dull? ;) (Andy Murray etc)

As this is from quite a small set of data it should be taken with a pinch of salt. However, what's very clear is that a story is only ever as good as the ability of the headline to suck you in with a crafted, intriguing sell.

See full image (on Flickr)

Will Google +1 catch on or not?

2011-06-18T09:32:00.002+01:00

Google +1 buttons are due to launch in Europe some time in July. Commentary both in the US and UK seems cautious, presumably based on the previous failure of Buzz. The central criticism is that the act of +1'ing within SERPs is counterintuitive. In other words someone would only want to +1 something once they’ve viewed that page.

While that’s a fair point, people seem to be forgetting that these buttons are already appearing all over US websites and soon the rest of the world. My interpretation is that they appear in results pages mostly in order to influence what you click on, not so much to make you might want to +1 from there. (Of course Google would love you to do that but they'd be daft to think many people would bother to +1 from within their results pages).

Missing the point?

A skeptic might say +1 is Google’s lame attempt to compete with Facebook and that it’ll never catch on. While Google's approach to social up to now hasn't been a success, when combined with the new social search features it will likely change the search landscape significantly.

Results get personal

Google clearly recognises the enormous influence that social media has had in recent years, and is playing a long game so as to not make the same mistakes made with social up to now.

Meanwhile, in all of the stuff I've read about +1, the majority of people haven’t realised that your +1’s are not just shared with your direct social circle but with your connection's social circles too. Of course, the more connections you and your connections have, the more +1's will appear. And by connections, I mean services like LinkedIn and Twitter just as much as I mean individuals.

So, what does a +1 do?

The act of +1’ing (or let’s face it “Liking”) is a way of telling people what you like, agree with or recommend online. It appears in various places - both on Google and on sites across the web. For example, you might see a +1 button for a Google search result, Google ad or next to an article that you're reading on your favourite news site.

On +1'ing something the button will go blue and a +1 gets added to a tab in your public profile. From there you can decide whether you want to publicly display the +1’s tab. It's also worth noting that as from July 31 ALL private Google profiles will be made public.

Even if you choose not to share the +1 tab on your profile your +1’s will still be visible to others viewing the content that you +1’d. Again according to Google,

"Your +1’s may appear to anyone who sees the pages you’ve +1’d. However, we'll try to display your +1’s to people (specifically those in your social connections) who would find them most useful...

"...For instance, your +1 could appear as part of an anonymous aggregated count of the people who have also +1’d the same thing. Your name could also appear next to the +1 to help your friends and contacts identify which content may be most useful to them."

To be clear here, a "contact" is defined as anyone who has your email address, not necessarily your friends.

Your +1’s and your social connections also help improve the content that you see in Google Search.

Social connections defined

In addition to contacts in Gmail or people you follow in Google Reader, unsurprisingly, you can also connect various services to your profile. These include Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Yahoo, Plaxo, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Yelp, and Flickr.

How does this work across the web?

Again according to Google:

"If you enable +1 on non-Google sites, you can see recommendations from people you know when you view the same content that they've +1'd. For example, say your friend clicks the +1 button on an entertainment site. If you visit the site, you might see your friend’s recommendation next to the +1 button."

Here’s a similar example using Facebook Likes to what that a +1 situation might look like when it appears on a website. (This is from Mashable and shows how your friend's shares are surfaced.

Visit Mashable and view any story to see this in action.

In the case of +1, expect to see something similar appearing in that green box. As an aside, in this case it is not abundantly clear at a glance that the 'shares' on the right of the editorial are domain level, as opposed to those on the left, which are entirely in context to teh editorial article. Alright, I get it but still, it could be clearer.

Why this is +1 big deal for Google?

Not only does it allow Google to deliver more personalised (useful?) results, it also offers enormous ‘endorsement’ potential from an advertising perspective. Of course, you'd hope that's surfaced only at most appropriate level, (ie not at brand/company level). For example, I might +1 ASOS but I don't much care for red espadrilles.

Will it catch on?

It's true that once you’ve +1’d something, that’s it. There’s no discussion among your friends about how good it was. So, currently it's really just a form of bookmarking, a bit like delicious. And that is its biggest limitation. Why would I bother to +1 something? I suppose it's arguably more useful as an ad driver in paid search than an organic one, which is probably where Google sees the most opportunity for its customers.

But there's surely a long-term plan here for Google as it tries to "...better understand the subtleties of social relationships and build such functionality into its various products as it makes them more social".

For a start, what did happen to Google Circles? Still, a slow roll-out of +1 no doubt brings huge insights about the mechanics of social networks and endorsement behaviour that would inform future product developments, say around public profile pages themselves, which are currently a very dry and lonesome affair.

For now I'll give Google the benefit of the doubt. It'll probably take hold, but it will likely bring with it some frustrations too. For a start, I don't much like the way I have poor control over the people I see recommending stuff in my search results.

I've been using it lately on google.com in experimental mode and the same few people keep popping up in my results, to the point that I've already started becoming blind to it. I'm sure when it launches over here and more people in my social circles start recommending stuff it might become more compelling.

Still, I might want to actively stop certain people's recommends from appearing in my results. The only way to do that is to either stop following them on Twitter or disable the services (ie Twitter) that are connected to my Google profile.

On a related note to all this, there's a great TED talk from Eli Pariser which discusses the Personalisation Filter Bubble.

You can read more about +1 and the rise of social search over on SEOMoz.

Fifteen Principles for Good Web Product Management

2011-06-06T13:53:00.000+01:00

I got sent this interesting blog post revealing the apparent failure of a Department for Transport’s Code of Everand. This is a website designed to teach kids about road safety. In his post Simon Dickson reveals that he made an FOI request to find out how much this project had cost the British taxpayer. The answer? A staggering £2,785,695. That’s quite an expensive website, and at over £16 per unique user, hardly looks like good value.

Reading one of the comments, clearly from someone close to the project, the suggestion is that part of the reason for the site’s low usage is due to a lack of sustained marketing and promotion, which, in part came about as a result of the government’s austerity measures.

A few things resonated with that post about why some things we’ve produced at the BBC haven’t been as successful as they might have been. Meanwhile, as certain areas of the Big British Castle face significant cuts and re-orgs, former tech boss Erik Huggers last year put things into context in his explanation on how we’ll approach web Products in the austerity age.

As the webby side of the BBC moves towards a leaner, smarter, more joined up approach, here’s hoping it’ll avoid making some of the same mistakes all over again. With that, I’ve been thinking about what I see as important ingredients for products that have value to users as well as value to the people and companies that make them. It’s in no way intended as a product checklist, more a reflection on things that can (and have) been detrimental to products I’ve either been involved with or witnessed over the years.

1. Start with a simple, clear idea, and then validate it
Think really hard about why this project is going to be better than the next one. Can it be communicated to someone in one sentence?

What makes this product (or story) worthwhile to a user?
What’s the core user need?
What would make people want to not only use it but share it – i.e. link to it?
What’s does the current search demand suggest about this idea?
Study a handful of those competitors in depth? What’s their link profile using Open Site Explorer (who links to them and of what quality are those sites)? How busy is the paid search area of SERPs? If competitors are spending money on advertising they’ll also be spending money on improving their natural search too, so you’d better have an SEO strategy. What can you offer that they can’t?
Take the idea to real (ideally intended) users, throughout the course of the project, even if only in sketch form. Run some interviews or small focus groups to further gauge appetite and requirements for the idea.

2. Be clear about who is sponsoring the project
A sponsor is different to a stakeholder. Ideally you’d have one sponsor (who am I kidding!) that’s almost never the case – particularly when projects are often co-funded from different sources. Still, it helps to know who has most influence and who you really need to keep happy, compared to those just needs to be kept informed occasionally. Being unable to make this distinction is a recipe for confusion, conflict and chaos.

3. Confirm there’s budget for marketing and start talking about ideas and scale of ambition
Historically, and in particular at the BBC, this question often doesn't seem to get asked early enough in the process – largely because there’s rarely a marketing budget available for smaller projects. No marketing means spending a lot more effort building links to your product. So, what’s your linkbuilding strategy? (I’ll post something on this soon)

4. Banish assumptions
Scott Berkun has a sensible view on assumptions in his book on PM - The Art of Project Management. In it he writes that when gathering product requirements, don’t assume that “because it is written by senior stakeholders in an email, that it has been intensively reviewed and scrutinised by everyone”. Ask clarifying questions: “What problem are we looking to solve here?” or “Whose requirement is this?”.

5. Seek out ambiguity
Once assumptions have been ditched, make sure requirements are as specific and measurable as possible. Again, as Berkun writes “words such as fast, big, small, nice, pretty require relative measures to be understood”. It’s fine for them to be left ambiguous, provided that everyone involved in the requirement is comfortable with negotiating the answers later on. Having specific, measurable requirements and objectives then makes it much easier to translate them into user stories that can be handed to developers and subsequently tested against on delivery of a user story.

6. Find out what’s missing
A common mistake of the less experienced producer is to take a requirement as given and then merrily stick it on the product backlog. For example, “As a user I can upload an image”. How far can you break that down further to its most logical and useful elements? Failure to break down requirements early on in the process may result in there being less room for flexibility when it comes to discussing it further down the line. For example, within that image upload requirement are features that would be significant user stories in themselves. (e.g. user interface fields, image processing, moderation, editing capability once uploaded etc). While it’s not necessarily the producer’s job to know how far to break things down, the more clarifying questions they ask at requirements stage, the less likely they are to miss something.

7. Prioritise requirements and make them relative to others
Everyone like bells and whistles but it’s essential to know which requirements are ‘must haves’ and which are ‘nice to haves’, and more importantly the ‘won’t haves’. It makes it easier to prioritise work if you can get a sense of how important one requirement is in relation to another. Also, resist the temptation to add requirements - whoever suggested them - if you don’t think they bring value and usefulness to the product. Framing each requirement against user benefits, you can end up with a much leaner and more deliverable product.

8. Do you have the technology and expertise to deliver it in time and on budget?
Can the underlying technology and the skills you have available meet the requirements of the project? Really?

9. Innovate, but not at the expense of good usability (and a great SEO plan)
In 2007 I worked on Bloom, a website which cleverly allowed the user to transition between Flash and html using iframes. At the time it seemed like a fantastically innovative idea. The mistake (among many that I'd love to share one day) was that we absorbed too much tech time delivering this innovation at the expense of other features. While the intention was to make the application more user-friendly by allowing people to jump in and out of the Flash to read more detail behind the cute interaction, in reality we didn’t quite pull it off. The use of iframes became a cross browser nightmare and we ran into SEO issues in terms of how we handled url states. Now more than ever, in the age of Html 5, be wary about how all of your bells and whistles will impact on usability and sound SEO.

10. Drop the obsession with overnights and whizz-bang launches
Invariably our web offerings at the BBC have had some relationship with TV, which means there’s often a senior stakeholder with that background. With that comes the expectation of a big bang delivery, just like a TV show. This simply doesn’t work online. I still have arguments with people about putting up holding pages to attract links as far ahead of delivery as possible. Many people still fail to understand that without high quality inbound links (as well as internal links – though these carry less weight) you are simply not going to be found in search engines. So, if you don’t have any authoritative links to your pages, how do you expect to be found?

11. If you’re the one paying for the product, consider how long it takes to become a success
In some cases we’ve launched services and then less than a few months later turned our backs on them before they’ve had a chance to find and connect with their intended audiences. A website is a living thing. To find and keep an audience you need fresh, desirable content; to be part of the web conversation, and, yes, links.

When planning and budgeting a new product, factor in how much it will cost to maintain once it’s live - for 18 months at least. With that, accept that bugs will arise and need to be dealt with in a timely way. What other projects are you going to pass up if you decide you’ve got to keep funding this one?

12. Decide on your success criteria and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
In the early days, when the BBC was charged with driving digital uptake, too many BBC web projects had vague and unmeasurable success criteria, or when they have they’ve not been anything that all of the senior stakeholders could agree to. Allowing this to happen makes it easier for them to drop a project, particularly where there is volatility in the organisation. Again, use SMART objectives.

13. Start small and build up
What’s the minimum feature-set you can launch with? The quicker you are to market the greater your chance of success - even if you only launch with a fraction of the proposed features. That way you can be agile about how you approach the remaining stories in the backlog. And while it’s live, it’s accumulating links (high quality ones of course).

Be aware though that there is a degree of risk involved with this approach. If your organisation has lots of senior stakeholders with no clear Product Owner (I mean that in the Sponsorship sense, not the agile one) and all parties are pulling in different directions, it’s quite likely that resources could be pulled onto other projects because on the surface, the product seems finished.

On more than one occasion I’ve come unstuck by ensuring we delivered all top priority features in order to meet a deadline, only to lose the most talented developers to other projects.

14. Experiment with different approaches and tools, but not at the expense of stable team communications
Resist the tempation to experiment with different tools such as backlog within the space of one project (e.g. Pivotal tracker, and others like these). While they might be fun to play with they can confuse the developers who invariably just want a stable way of working for the project’s duration.

15. Live by the Pareto Principle
There is no simpler way of putting this. 20% of the features deliver 80% of the value. End of!

What the world is really looking for on Google

2011-05-28T17:54:00.000+01:00

Towards the end of 2010, just before Google launched its Instant feature I screengrabbed a bunch of suggestions that I found amusing. At the time I was planning on creating a fancy infographic or a video short, but then Instant came a long and the moment passed. Either that or I decided I had more important things to do with my life.

Since Instant arrived, the results have been less intriguing as there's only five suggestions instead of ten. but, one thing I find quite interesting is the role a search algorithm plays in fuelling rumour and gossip.

For example, I wonder how many non-Twitter users found out about Ryan Giggs' 'situation' just by performing a simple Google search.

All that aside, for an insight in what makes the world tick, press play on the slideshow below. From the banal ("why is my astra overheating"); to the sublime ("why does my bellybutton smell"); to the ridiculous ("why does my underwear turn brown"), it's all there plus a few downright disturbing ones.

SMX London. A quick summary

2011-05-18T14:26:00.000+01:00

Drawing by Adliterate.com (which is in no way affiliated with my views on this matter)

Just returned from SMX London. From the sessions I saw (all in organic search area) I was underwhelmed by the overall lack of meaty insights. I was hoping for some more advanced techniques, but this confirmed my views on the conference circuit. Beyond the chance to meet a few folks in the industry, it's just a moneyspinner.

However, there were some notable exceptions beginning with Chris Sherman's Keynote; all of the speakers on Link Alchemy (in particular Kelvin Newman's excellent presentation); Richard Baxter's guide to keyword research; and Bas van den Beld's pres on social/privacy.

With that, my special mentions are as follows:

Richard Baxter from SEO Gadget
Kelvin Newman from SiteVisibility
Rob Millard and David Sottimano from Distilled
Bas van den Beld
Patrick Altoft

I won't bother to write up their sessions as they'll more than likely have done this via the links above, but here's a brief summary on points that interested me, the majority of which were from Mr Sherman:

Google Instant

Query construction and speed is changing as people slow down to check results as they type
The traditional ‘golden triangle’ scanning behaviour is likely to diminish
Page Titles now matter a lot more
Snippets now matter somewhat
Sites that target long-tail may benefit

Thoughts on Google +1

Yes it will have an impact over time and likely in a similar way that personalisation affects things now.

Personalisation and SEO

Some things people have assumed about the ways in which personalisation affects an individual’s search results:

1. It is subtle
2. It surfaces more long-tail content
3. It reflects only an individual’s user-settings

In a recent piece of research, all of these assumptions were found to be wrong. Instead:

• 6 out of 10 of the top results were unique
• Much less long-tail content appeared
• It is personal – individual behaviour PLUS aggregated statistical data

However:

• Recency of search and web history influences results (even if you are not logged-in)
• Google is becoming more focused on helping searchers accomplish short-term tasks by linking multiple related queries

On Social

Social elements now appear in universal search and may cause rankings to change, based on “strength” of social relationships for each individual.

Results can now include content shared, as opposed to created – but this doesn’t include Facebook.

On search neutrality

With videos like this floating around, issues around search neutrality and privacy will become top of agenda at some point in the not too distant future.

On Bing

Updates every 6 months. The focus of late has been on categories and experimenting with low-hanging fruit, such as navigational searches.

Q: Should you optimise specifically for Bing?

A: The only exception is that Bing’s categorisation offers opportunities for customised (landing) pages that may rank better in Bing.

Mini summary from keynote

Personalisation + Social + Freshness means getting top rankings is getting harder.

Long standing, solid, best practice SEO remains the way forward.

SEO stats

Google: 88bn queries per month
Twitter: 19bn tweets per month
Yahoo: 9.4bn queries per month
Bing: 4bn queries per month

75% of twitter traffic is via APIs (I’m sure I’ve read something to the contrary!)

On Facebook

• Facebook has 800m users worldwide
• If it was a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world
• 25% of users are coming from mobiles

(Sources: Morgan Stanley / Burrell)

Useful tools mentioned

Beyond the obvious....

Competitor Discovery tool (dis.tl/smx-london)
Use this for finding out who is competing with you for the keywords of interest

Übersuggest
Get keyword ideas from this keyword tool powered by Google Suggest.

Sony fails to entertain the future

2011-04-25T22:27:00.000+01:00

For the last 5 days over 70m online gamers have been left twiddling their thumbs while they wait for the Sony Playstation Network to be restored. You can read more about it on BBC News or on The Guardian. Even more worrying is the prospect that users' personal data might well have been compromised. This is not just confined to gamers but also to anyone who ever rented a movie on its Playstation Store, or has bought music on it's new Qriocity platform. Worse still, users seem to be unable to stream movies via Lovefilm. And all of this, on a bank holiday weekend gadnammit!

So what does Sony have to say about the matter? Precious little. No apologetic damage limitation emails, just a flimsy statement posted on their blog which does nothing to reassure anyone that they're looking after people's bank details carefully.

A little over 12 months ago my trusty Humax PVR died. The "squeezed middle" in me decided to take a punt on a low-cost media centre in the form of a PS3. I was set to buy a Mac Mini until the Apple Store assistant talked me out of it by recommending the PS3 as a cheaper alternative. It does the same job as the old Mac Mini, but with a considerable saving and quite an elegant user experience by comparison (no keyboard needed for starters). A bit of online research via this excellent post clinched the deal. Of course, since I bought this, Apple have released an updated TV, but that's another story. Perhaps I'll look into that next.

To be fair to Sony, on the whole, the PS3 media centre set-up has been absolutely fantastic. I can now seemlessly stream my music, movies and pics direct from my Mac, all at the cost of just £12 (after the cost of the box of course) courtesy of Nullriver PS3 Media Link software. I can also watch and record all the Freeview channels I need, courtesy of the brilliant PlayTV, all for the one-off cost of £70. And I'm not tied in to an overpriced walled-garden platform as with Apple TV.

I was also lured by the growing number of cool services appearing on the XMB (iPlayer, ITV, 4OD and Love Film). And all these things are free. But therein lies the rub.

The cost of free in this case is that when things go wrong, as software tends to do, there is no form of customer service. For starters, both iPlayer and 4OD have both been running like dogs for months now. In fact, I've not managed to complete a single programme on 4OD.

I'm almost certain these bugs are caused by Sony issues as they coincided with a system update, rather than by software bugs from either Electronic Arts (who made 40D, and numerous video games) or from iPlayer who explained how to fix one particular bug, but which failed to work for me. A trawl on various forums suggests this is indeed a Sony problem. But try getting any useful information or guidance out of them. Because it's free, they're not interested and if you're running the latest software update, what else can they do?

Is it any wonder that Apple and Google are [set to?] dominate our newly converged world, while the likes of Sony and Nokia flounder. I stopped buying Nokia phones for two reasons. First, too many bugs when faced with anything beyond making a call. Second, they're so big a company that when things go wrong it's impossible to get any useful help beyond resorting to a forum.

I do hope that Sony finds a suitable fix soon because the PS3 is a superb subscription-free media centre, in spite of the fact that Sony fails to realise the potential of PlayTV as a marketing device for acquiring new (older?) customers beyond their usual target audience. Then again, maybe I should grow up and start paying for Sky? At least they value their customers.

UPDATE!!!

So, 6 days later they decide to issue a statement which suggests my bank details have been compromised.

"...we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.
For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Sony will not contact you in any way, including by email, asking for your credit card number, social security, tax identification or similar number or other personally identifiable information. If you are asked for this information, you can be confident Sony is not the entity asking. When the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are fully restored, we strongly recommend that you log on and change your password. Additionally, if you use your PlayStation Network or Qriocity user name or password for other unrelated services or accounts, we strongly recommend that you change them, as well."

Not a whiff of an apology on that page either!

I'd have preferred some form of direct communication, like a grovelling, apologetic email at least.

And you didn't even encrypt my details? Shame on you!

I'm reaching for my DPA compliance book now.

Something missing on Schooloscope?

2011-04-19T08:05:00.000+01:00

It's been about a year since the fantastic Schooloscope website launched.

Anyone who's ever had the displeasure of trying to interpret Ofsted reports and schools league tables will find much to admire about the way this data has been brought to life.

However, coming back to this again and again, there is definitely something missing for me in that it relies only on the 'black and white' of hard, official data. What it lacks is a way of representing the murky 'grey' noise of social recommendation.

While that might make for a more confusing and arguably less robust picture, it would at least communicate something about the perils of relying purely on data to make decisions. When I buy a product on Amazon I rely partly on the reviews. While I realise those can be spammed, written by trolls or marketers, I feel able to sift through and take what I need from them before making my purchase. I'd welcome the same feature when it comes to choosing my children's school.

As an example of why Schooloscope is lacking something, our old childminder recently dropped from an "Outstanding" to "Very Good". How did Ofsted arrive at this assessment?

They spent over fours hours on their inspection going through all of the paperwork, and (according to our childminders) just 15 minutes with the kids and carers. During the inspection a couple of minor administrative errors were discovered, so they dropped a few points. I'd much rather the inspector spent four hours studying the quality of care and interaction with my children, as opposed to checking how good the carers administrative skills were.

To be fair, this type of social feature probably isn't really BERG's area of interest, nor is it an easy nut to crack. While BERG wouldn't have created that functionality, they might have integrated a school social recommendation service from elsewhere, if only one existed. So until someone goes ahead and builds one (any takers?), the only alternative must surely be to reform Ofsted?

More about Ofsted, Berg and Schooloscope

Google goes social all over my search results

2011-03-14T14:23:00.000Z

So, Google rolls out their new social search features.

Here's my feedback. This morning I was given the option of seeing snippets from my social graph within Google's search results pages.

As this gets rolled out Google says we'll see the following types of content:

Websites, blogs, and other content that's shared by or created by your friends
Images that are shared by your social connections
Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions
Profiles of people you know beneath results for social sites like Twitter and Flickr

Having opted-in to the above feature, it automatically detects my Twitter profile and starts introducing results from people I follow. Apparently, if you're signed in to Google, it algorithmically detects that a public profile from a social website may be yours. If the profile is yours, you can connect the account to your Google Account to improve the search results that you see. Here's what happens next:

How fitting that the BBC's very own social media geek Dan Biddle should be the first person I see in my results. (It's bad enough that I sit acrosss from him, now he's polluting my results ;))

Another search reveals an entire block of results under the heading "results from people in your social circle"

There's even a Google Site Links equivalent version, which includes people from your social graph, though personally I'd prefer to have some control over that.

Initial feedback is that this is a really nice feature but I'd like to see it do more. For example, it'd be great if it offered you something like the Gmail Priority inbox button in my mock-up below. This would ensure that those people who's tweets I am likely to find more interesting/authoritative get promoted over the rest.

As it is, I can imagine that if your social graph is a bit on the flabby side, it has the potential to bring some unwelcome noise to your results though no doubt google has thought of ways to get around that.

Either way, it's an interesting development in the move towards personalised search engine results pages.

You can find out more about this on Google Websearch help page.

Do we still want a Wii want for Christmas?

2010-12-20T15:52:00.000Z

I was wondering how the usual console war was doing this Christmas.

According to Google Insights, it looks like the Wii has reached saturation point while PS3 and Xbox seem to be chipping along nicely. According to Digital Trends, the PS3 is set to burn stronger and longer than the others though it's too early to tell what impact Kinect may have. One things's clear -the Japanese don't seem to like the Xbox much.

In our house at least, both the Wii and PS3 are due for a bashing when Father Christmas deposits Sports Resort and Sing Star. Fun for all the family - at least unless someone buys me Call of Duty Black Ops!

So how does this compare with the US market?

And in Japan?

Google's whacky monorail

2010-09-30T09:50:00.000+01:00

Image from Inhabitat

Google has announced that it will provide $1m of funding for Shweeb, an innovative new cycling monorail system. The investment is one of five winning ideas that were submitted by over 150,000 people worldwide as part of their admirable 10 to the 100 project.

According to Inhabitat, Google reckons it could transform the way we get around cities.

I reckon maybe they'd been to the free bar at Google HQ when they decided to shortlist this bonkers idea. Haven't people heard of a Vélib, or a Boris Bike, or better still a Brompton*?

Why not just keep it simple? For just over $1m they could give away over 900 Bromptons to city commuters across the world, allowing them to ride wherever they like, and whenever they like, instead of behind couped up in a sweaty plastic pod, attached to a monorail. Have the people responsible for the vote not learned from the legendary Simpsons Springfield Monorail episode?

This is definitely more of a Shelbyville idea.

*other folding bikes are available!

Tokyo Timelapse by Samuel Cockedey

2010-09-08T14:37:00.000+01:00

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

More here - http://www.samuelcockedey.com

How the Met Office predicts the weather

2010-08-05T16:40:00.001+01:00

Running on empty

2010-07-31T12:06:00.001+01:00

What happens when the world runs out of oil?

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.