Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat » LinkedIn Archives – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat http://blog.fosketts.net Understanding the accumulation of data Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:40:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Cool Google Spreadsheet XML/XPath Mojo http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/02/cool-google-spreadsheet-importxml-xpath/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/02/cool-google-spreadsheet-importxml-xpath/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:41:12 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=3320 Google Spreadsheet sure isn’t as responsive for a power user like me, but I love the ability to share information with others and cooperatively edit a workbook. It’s become our main tool for planning the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events. I was thrilled to discover that Google’s spreadsheet supports the importXML tag, which allows it to automatically gather information from other web sites. Let’s take a look at how it works!

HTML == XML?

Most web users have heard of HTML, but XML is a much geekier thing. Like HTML, XML is a way of “marking up” a text document to provide hidden clues about the content and how to display it. In fact, modern HTML is (sort of) a subset or category of XML, and HTML documents (the kind you access with your web browser) can be accessed by many XML tools.

Both HTML and XML enclose text in tags. For example, a paragraph would be surrounded by <p> and </p> tags, while a table starts and ends with <table> and </table>. These can be nested within each other, and are commonly deeply nested indeed. Web and XML documents typically have many layers of <div> and <span> tags, for example, and include lists within lists as well.

This somewhat-organized mess creates a “path” through the document leading to pieces of information. This concept is called XPath. For example, a twitter profile page embeds your name deep in the <html><body> path under <div id=”side”>, <div id=”profile” class=”section profile-side”>, <address>, <ul class=”about vcard entry-author”>, <li>, and <span class=”fn”>.

Raw HTML is often organized like this, and this can work to our advantage. If a computer program wanted to pull the full name of a Twitter user out of their profile page, it could look for a <span> element with the class property set to “fn”. It could also look for the <address> tag and pull out some information about the user in the vcard microformat.

importXML

All this becomes very interesting indeed when considering the importXML function in Google Spreadsheet. It will parse a URL as an XML file automatically, and you can tell it to look in an XPath for data. This is very powerful indeed!

Twitter Followers

I think an example will make it clearer. Let’s look up the Twitter follower count of a user. We create a spreadsheet and enter a twitter username in cell A1. Then we put the following formula in cells B1 and C1 and the count magically appears!

B1:

=if(C1<>"",right(C1,len(C1)-10),"")

C1:

=if(A1<>"",importXML("http://mobile.twitter.com/"&A1,"//a[@ href='http://mobile.twitter.com/"&lower(A1)&"/followers']"),0)

This formula looks for a <a href> with the URL including the user and twitter followers, which is a unique HTML element in every mobile Twitter profile. This returns a string like “Followers:1234″, so we use another formula to strip that part out.

Updated 1/22/12 after Twitter screwed up the main page. Good thing the mobile site still works!

LinkedIn Connections

Let’s try something else. How would we pull the number of connections a person has in LinkedIn using importXML? Here’s a function!

=value(substitute(importXML(A3,"//dd[@class='overview-connections']/p/strong"),"500+","500"))

This is a little more complicated. We’re doing the same thing, taking a url from cell A3 that corresponds to the person’s public LinkedIn page, and outputting the content of the <dd class=”overview-connections”> tag. But we’re also using the SUBSTITUTE() function to take the plus sign off a “500+” response and converting it into a value for calculation.

Updated 1/22/12 for new LinkedIn Format

Alexa and Klout

Here are a few more examples. I bet you can follow along now.

Alexa traffic rank:

=value(importXML("http://www.alexa.com/search?q="&E3,"//div[@class='row']/span/a[@href][1]"))

Klout score:

=value(substitute(importXML("http://klout.com/"&C3,"//span[@class='value']"),"klout score",""))

Limitations in Google Spreadsheets

Before you go thinking you can run off and create awesome web applications like this, know that there are some serious limitations. First, Google limits the use of importXML to 50 per workbook. This means you can’t import from hundreds of sources in the same spreadsheet, or even in multiple sheets in the same workbook. Next, importXML is pretty opaque in everyday use. You have to do a lot of trial and error to get the XPath right, and it fails often with #N/A, breaking calculations.

But it’s still pretty useful when creating a spreadsheet that needs to pull in information from outside sources. You can grab all sorts of data this way, from current stock quotes to weather or sports metrics. You have the whole Internet at your disposal – let’s get creative!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Cool Google Spreadsheet XML/XPath Mojo
This post was categorized as Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/02/cool-google-spreadsheet-importxml-xpath/feed/ 3 Vendor Non-Blogs http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/01/20/vendor-twitter/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/01/20/vendor-twitter/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:00:33 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=2638 As previously-independent bloggers are being hired in droves by the major IT infrastructure hardware and software vendors, attention is turning to their independence and credibility. But this extends far beyond blogs: Today’s social media influencers are everywhere!

Biased content isn't just found on blogs - it's much more likely to be found in other areas like Twitter and discussion forums. When does discussion become Astroturf?

Discussions Are On The Move

The new Internet isn’t just about blogs. In fact, the majority of social media discussion and linkage probably happens on Twitter, LinkedIn, discussion forums, and other sites. But non-blog content raises even thornier bias issues than blogs:

  1. Discussions are less formal than blog posts, so off-the-cuff comments are common. The rapid turnaround of Twitter comments encourages “post-before-you-think” thinking, and knee-jerk comments can be damning. Even if one did not intend to but another vendor down, it’s easy to say something inappropriate.
  2. The length of a comment is limited, so subtle nuances get lost. I’ve often had trouble saying what I want in 140 characters, and even blog and forum comment conventions restrict verbosity. Again, sometimes your meaty tweet will really cut a competitor to the bone.
  3. Biographical information is limited. Twitter profiles include just a few words and a single URL, restricting the disclosure of relevant information. Many profiles don’t include the name of an employer or disclosure of other vendor ties. Forum profiles and signatures are similarly restricted.
  4. The Internet scatters content. Even if one is careful to disclose one’s business relationships on a blog, Twitter profile, or LinkedIn page, interactions go far beyond these.

Conferences are even worse. Many attendees switch badges or intentionally list a different company just to get in the door, obscuring their identity. And no one knows who the guy in row 12 is or why he is asking such pointed questions of the panel. The same thing happens with webinars and Internet polls.

All these limits obscure the good folks out there and conspire to allow the bad ones to act with impunity. This makes everyone suspect. Actively comment on a number of industry blogs and you could be accused of astroturfing! Whether it’s fair or not, employees of hardware and software vendors are being held to a higher standard than so-called independents.

Personal Defensive SEO

I’m going to assume you’re a good egg and want everyone to know where you’re coming from when you interact on the Internet. Many businesses actively engage in search engine optimization (SEO) to help them rise to the top of Internet search results. Individuals need to start doing some SEO, too, but the reason is different: Make yourself easy to find and disclose your connections and you won’t look like a bad egg.

  1. Get a LinkedIn profile, keep it up to date, and set your name and company information to public. Go to Settings -> Public Profile, and turn on Basics, Summary, Current Positions, and Websites at a minimum. And make sure Websites includes your current employer and blog(s).
  2. Create a Google profile with links to your LinkedIn profile, blog, Twitter, and other profiles. This helps Google and other search engines disambiguate you from the rest of the crowd. FriendFeed is another great place to set up a profile. I only use Facebook for personal/private connections, so I don’t bother with corporate links there.
  3. Make sure your blog includes links to your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, too. And pepper your blog with your own full name so it shows up in Google searches.
  4. Include your employer’s name in your Twitter “one line bio” and use your blog as your Twitter profile URL.
  5. Set up Disqus, Intense Debate, WordPress, and Typepad profiles and use them whenever possible.

All this effort won’t directly help you, though it might save a few minutes when you try to comment on a blog. But they will make you easier to find, and reduce the likelihood that someone will accuse you of not disclosing your corporate affiliations.

Astroturf car, public domain image by Ingolfson

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Vendor Non-Blogs
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/01/20/vendor-twitter/feed/ 0 Back From The Pile: Interesting Links From Mid-May http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/26/pile-interesting-links-midmay/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/26/pile-interesting-links-midmay/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 18:59:41 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=1897 My travels last week kept me from posting my weekly round-up of interesting web content. So this week’s is a little heavy (and heavily edited!)

Most important: Please register to be a marrow donor, especially if you might be a match for Nick Glasgow of EMC!

Misc

Enterprise Computing

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From The Pile: Interesting Links From Mid-May
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/26/pile-interesting-links-midmay/feed/ 2 Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do? http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/22/google-nofollow/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/22/google-nofollow/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 14:02:26 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=1892 Google is the most important company to the Internet. Hyberbole? I think not! Without Google, the Internet that we all know and love would be a very different place, as would the business of IT. Along with Microsoft and the supporting community around LAMP, Google is the very foundation of modern computing. But the foundation of Google itself, its ability to rank Internet content and present relevant information to its users, is at risk. What will they do to fix it?

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/05/22/google-nofollow/feed/ 3 Ten-Year Trend: Mobility http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/03/11/ten-year-trend-mobility/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/03/11/ten-year-trend-mobility/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:00:41 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=1527 IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the glass house and into the wide world

IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

  • 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
  • 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

  1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
  2. Server Virtualization
  3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

What Is Mobility?

The meaning of mobility, to me, is expansive. It doesn’t just refer to taking a copy of your data with you, ubiquitous connectivity, or portable devices. Mobility is a new paradigm of computing.

  • Your data no longer “sits” in one place – your data lives out there in the network!
  • Your applications no longer “live” on this device or that – your applications live out there in the network!
  • Your productivity environment no longer requires a particular piece of hardware – you expect to be productive everywhere on every device!

This doesn’t sound strange to the modern Internet user. We have completely accepted the role of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the rest in our personal lives. Just as they did in the early days of the PC, business people have transitioned these concepts into the professional world – witness Salesforce and LinkedIn! In all cases, we have endorsed the idea that certain types of information want to live in the cloud because it makes them better!

Once you’ve used these services, old-fashioned email, contact management, encyclopedias, maps, and the rest seem incredibly limiting. A GPS system that can’t update its maps seems antiquated, and we want it to have real-time traffic data, too. An iPod that needs to be physically connected to a PC to add music or applications is simply unacceptable. Time- and place-shifting technologies like TiVo To Go, over-the-air podcast downloads, and Slingboxes reset our expectations about availability and choice of entertainment, but they are mere symptoms of our changing perceptions. We want mobility of data, applications, and platforms, and we are getting it.

Consider two truly revolutionary platforms: the iPhone and the netbook. In both cases, we knowingly accept limitations in the name of portability, knowing that the cloud will give us what we can’t hold in our hands. These devices are limited in ways that would seem inconceivable just a few years ago: Apple has locked their platform up tighter than any in history, and netbooks are too small, underpowered, and cheap in all senses of the word. But we love them because they get us where we want to go, which is up and out!

Mobility and Enterprise IT

The concept of mobile data, applications, and devices is just as applicable to enterprise IT infrastructure as it is to personal technology. Some enterprise data must be kept close to the vest, especially where privacy laws and litigation concerns are applicable. But there is certainly a vast pool of corporate data that wants to be out working in the field! Setting this data free is the enterprise equivalent of the mobility megatrend!

Cloud computing is hype. Server virtualization is hype. Flash storage is hype. XaaS is hype. Web 2.0 is hype. But once the cloud of hype passes, we will be left with solid technologies to enable mobility and transform corporate computing. Why should corporate email have to punch through your firewall? Why should the intranet be limited to internal or VPN users? Why can’t customers interact with a (limited/controlled) set of your corporate records? Salesforce showed us that roaming users (sales teams) need greater access than most IT staff were ready to build. What if we applied the same ideas to other data types?

Many companies are already doing this. Microsoft offers a variety of internal/external services for their customers through Live (see Connect, for example). Many companies are using mail and productivity applications in the cloud from Google, MessageOne, and Zimbra. Backup and archiving as a service to mobile users is widespread (see Iron Mountain Connected and Mozy). And more and more corporate PR relies on blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. Corporate security and legal types are worried about data “escaping” from the eggshell of control they exert, but this cat is out of the bag. Enterprise IT will never be the same!

It comes down to a single core question that IT folks ought to have been asking themselves all along: What should be held internally and what should be let loose? We already “outsource” many non-core corporate functions. Sometimes we do this for cost reasons. But the most effective outsourcing decision is when a third party will do a better job, offering levels of expertise or service that an internal group could never realistically reach. We already buy enterprise software to leverage outside development (remember, this was not always the case!), so why not also buy enterprise services? Corporate-grade outsourced email, groupware, sales automation, and the like is not only more robust and less expensive than internal systems, they enable a disconnected, mobile workforce.

Today, I Was Angry

I bought a new album from Amazon, but I forgot to sync my iPhone with my laptop, so it was sitting at home when I wanted to listen to it in the car. Then I couldn’t find a colleague’s phone number because he moved to a new company and my address book didn’t automatically update. And I couldn’t review a presentation because I needed a special account to access a corporate document system behind a firewall.

These little accomplishments would have seemed like miracles just a few years ago: I remember the joy I felt ten years ago when I could read a web page offline on my Palm Pilot using AvantGo; I was amazed when I first fired up 802.11a wireless networking and could work anywhere in the office; I was gleeful to be able to take 5 GB of music with me on the train. But all this is past. Today, I want to access my portable data and work anywhere. We are in the midst of a revolution in the mobility and ubiquity of computing.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/03/11/ten-year-trend-mobility/feed/ 2 Nine Blog Suggestions from a Grumpy Reader http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/02/20/improve-your-blog/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/02/20/improve-your-blog/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:33:51 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/?p=1452 Attention bloggers! I've got a whole disk of whoopass aimed at your head!

Attention bloggers! I've got a whole disk of whoopass aimed at your head!

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, and read them religiously. According to Google Reader’s statistics, I read about 200 items per day out of over 700 posted to all of those feeds. As you might expect, I’ve got some strong feelings about blogs and news sites after reading that much.

So this message is aimed at all of you content providers out there: Fix your darn blogs and feeds so I won’t be so grumpy anymore!

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

  1. Use full-text RSS feeds! If you’re still cutting off your posts after a few sentences, you’re losing my readership. I hardly ever click through on two-line feed items, and I feel burned when I even bother to subscribe to these. Half the time the heading and excerpt promise more than the article delivers anyway. Switch to a full-text feed so I can read your content right there in Google Reader without clicking through to see your interstitial ads for every post. I promise I will visit and comment if you have valuable things to say. What’s that? I hear you boo-hooing that you will lose readership, visitors, and AdSense revenue? You’re wrong. The best audience is an engaged audience, and readers of your feed are the most engaged folks you will find. They’re also a tiny TINY minority of readers (about 11% last I heard) compared to real search engine and referral-driven traffic. You’re only going to increase loyalty by switching to full-text feeds, whereas your refusal to syndicate more than 11 words is likely to drive people like me away.
  2. No more me-too posts! Here’s a hint: If one of your peers already posted pretty much all you have to say on a topic, then don’t post at all. If you’re a worthwhile writer, there has to be a unique angle you can use for any story. Get your own voice! Bonus hint: Make sure you are reading your peers’ blogs so you know what they are saying, too! And a link back to them wouldn’t hurt either!
  3. Don’t write about your stats! I don’t care about your monthly readership stats or AdSense revenues. Unless your blog happens to be about AdSense or search engine optimization, that is…
  4. Kill the ads! Face it: You’re not getting rich with banner ads on your blog. Yes, I admit that I do run a few AdSense ads on my blog pages. Although the payout is tiny, it’s enough to keep the lights on. But I don’t force ads on everyone all the time – I use Ozh’ excellent Who Sees Ads plugin for WordPress so only search engine visitors see my banners. And I will never pollute my feeds with ads: Treat your (very few) subscribers like the loyal friends they are instead of trying to make a dime from their clicks. And yeah, a dime is about all you are making from your blog anyway, right?
  5. Trim the fat! Are you illustrating your articles with 300k high-definition PNG images? Unless you’re a photographer or graphic designer, do us all a favor and limit your inline images to about 300 pixels wide. I know it’s non-free and all, but JPEG speeds up load times! And do you really need to embed flash animations, auto-playing YouTube clips, and other such junk? I’ll happily click through if I care. Keep the number of illustrations down, too. If the vertical space of your post is more than half graphics (especially cheesy Excel charts) you need to refocus it before you lose your readers.
  6. Edit and format your writing! If I can’t read your post, I won’t read your post. Start by turning on spell check. Then learn the basic rules of grammar. You may be a computer genius, but I’m not going to put up with incorrect homonyms and eggcorns forever! Perhaps consider learning what a paragraph is, and even create some yourself. You can still use bulleted and numbered lists, but how about some context and headings to assist the reader?
  7. Quit moving around! If you’re blogging, you should control your own destiny: Have your own domain name, your own install of WordPress, and your own feed URL. It’s hard for me to take “whoever.typepad.com” seriously, especially when, three months after I subscribe, he moves his feed to “whoever.blogger.com” and makes me re-subscribe. Often, I’ll just unsubscribe and forget him. Don’t want this to happen? Register your own domain name for your blog, set up a hosting account and install WordPress (it’s the best, hands down), and don’t bother me. While you’re at it, private-label your feedburner feed so you can take that with you when you move around, too.
  8. Make commenting easier! Comment spam is a fact of life. Despite using Akismet, Bad Behavior, and clever tricks, I got more comments from spammers than actual readers on my blog. Then I heard that, although I added OpenID, commenting was still too hard. So I switched to Disqus for blog comments to try to make life easier, and have had a much better time of it since. If you’re still using native commenting, you’re missing out on a lot of readers who would like to comment but won’t jump through hoops to do it. Bonus hint: Use BackType to follow comments on other blogs, too!
  9. Let me contact you! Everyone should have their real name and contact information prominently available on their blog. If you’re covering topics that intersect with work, you should disclose your employer, too. If you want to engage your readers, add in a link to your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook account, too. But don’t go crazy – no one needs to connect to you in 800 places. That’s what FriendFeed is for!

Finally, here’s a bonus tip: No more top-ten lists! You’ll probably get to number nine and run out of things to say anyway!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Nine Blog Suggestions from a Grumpy Reader
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

]]> http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/02/20/improve-your-blog/feed/ 13 “Social” Sites: Quit It or I Quit! http://blog.fosketts.net/2007/12/06/social-sites-quit-it-or-i-quit/ http://blog.fosketts.net/2007/12/06/social-sites-quit-it-or-i-quit/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:42:56 +0000 Stephen http://blog.fosketts.net/2007/12/06/social-sites-quit-it-or-i-quit/ I am so sick of social networking sites that send spam, pollute my address book, pry into my life, and otherwise screw up the very social sphere they are supposed to serve.  Since these things are popping up like plastic moles at an arcade, it’s hard to avoid getting sucked into one or two.  And just when you think you’re safe, suddenly another site is impersonating you in an email.  “Since you’re someone I trust…”

I avoided all of these things for years before finally succumbing to LinkedIn.  It seemed like everyone in my (professional, over-30) “network” was on it, and was sending me invites all the time, so I decided to jump in and join just that one network.  LinkedIn was, and remains, just “ok”.  I like that it is focused professionally and that many of my colleagues are in it.  I really don’t like that it’s not really integrated with anything – your network lives on LinkedIn and never gets out much.  And I hate the spammy messages and Ponzi scheme aspect of collecting contacts and luring others in.  But it remains ok.

Then there was Plaxo.  If you disliked the messages from LinkedIn, you hated the ones from Plaxo, especially their embedded “business card” signatures with JavaScript, images, and god knows what else…  I finally joined Plaxo because it purports to keep your Outlook address book in shape for you.  But I’m furious that what it really does is “re-duplicate” all of your contacts, messing up your address book until you have to sign up for their premium service just to get the de-duplication feature.  And don’t get me started about when I switched jobs and it spammed everyone in my address book without my consent!  And Plaxo just re-launched with a more Facebook-y interface called Pulse, which is pretty but mostly empty and highly useless.  I’m considering quitting Plaxo…

Then there are the social social sites.  I “joined” MySpace so I could keep up with one of my favorite bands, but I’ve never really used it.  It’s just so creepy and ugly – a race to see who can come up with the worst home page reminiscent of the way-back days of the world wide web.  I refuse to use it, except to delete the continual spam mail from would-be women friends in Russia…  Come on, Tom, can’t MySpace do something about that?

Next up?  Facebook!  Aah yes, home of 10,000 useless ways to “poke” someone you already know.  And home to exactly 38 people that I kinda know. It was interesting playing with the customization features, and seeing the crowded but much less ugly home pages.  But it’s not for old folks like me, I guess.

So why am I writing this today?  Well, if you’re my friend (and if you’re reading this, you probably are) then you might have just received some more social-spam from me this morning.  And I wanted to apologize.  See, I just tried out Spock, a people search engine that looked kind of keen.  It mines other sites to try to come up with uniform information about people from all those other social networks – a network of networks.  It asked me to add in my connections, so I let it search my address book (which, thanks to Plaxo, is about as crufty and full of surprises as my kids’ toy box) and then told me that 135 contacts were “already on Spock”, so I could “add them to my trust network”.  Sure, I stupidly, thought adding them to my trust network sounds OK!  After clicking “Add to trust network”, it asked if I wanted to email everyone else, and I said no.  Now I am not sure what Spock did to request trust, and I have no way to take it back.

But there was something nagging me at the end of this little interaction with Spock, making me think I might just have spammed everyone yet again.  Maybe I’m just mistrustful or jaded, but I guess I’ve just gotten to the point of assuming that all social networking sites are Ponzi schemes to bring eyeballs to ads by sending out email “on my behalf”.

I’m sick of it.  I’m opting out of the next social network I get invited to, and I suggest you do the same.  I’m thinking of pulling out of Plaxo, Facebook, and MySpace.  And the next site I trust that spams my friends will get the boot, too.  Hear me, social networks?  Quit it or I quit.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | “Social” Sites: Quit It or I Quit!
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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