Archive for April, 2005

Effectively marketing business blogs

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/4/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Search Engine Optimisation
. 19 Comments

You can significantly mitigate the costs of marketing your blog with some careful (ethical) SEO (search engine optimisation) tactics.

Primary among these is to have a blog which is web standards compliant. Search engines love standards compliance - to this end, WordPress is a great blogging tool as it is standards complaint out-of-the-box. Having said that, if you have access to a developer, you can get the developer to design a standards compliant template for most blog apps.

Secondly, generate inward traffic/links. The only way to do this (apart from paid ads etc.) is to generate content on your blog that is compelling enough that people will link to it. Also leaving relevant comments on other’s people’s blogs will bring curious readers of those comments to your site.

And finally, get your blog listed in a directory like dmoz or LookSmart.

All these take time and effort but they will ultimately pay off and are free!

Google Page Rank updated infrequently

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/4/2005
in Blogging and Search Engines
. 3 Comments

Google (and the other major search engines) visits this site at least once a day and index the content.

However, on the 12th of March this year I moved my blog from the old domain (tomandpilar.net) to this site and this domain.

I put a 301 re-direct on the old site and immediately the new search engines started to visit the new site. It was being returned in search results within four days of the move. I was impressed with the speed with which this occurred.

However, today - a full one and a half months after the move, for the first time, I have received a Page Rank for this domain. At the same time, Google Searches for Links to this domain came up empty until today despite my being linked to by many prominent sites.

So I can only surmise that Google indexes sites on content far more often than it does for PR.

Scoble biting the hand that feeds?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/4/2005
in Blogging and Business blogging
. 5 Comments

There’s an interesting debate happening on Robert Scoble’s blog. The debate is interesting, not because of the subject matter itself, per se, but rather because it seems to indicate that a seed change is happening in the blogosphere.

Background:
Last Thursday (21st) Robert posted a small piece mentioning the allegations that Microsoft was abandoning gays. Robert is personally pro gay rights and so said he was “I’m gonna take this up with the leadership of the company”. All well and good.

But then, on Saturday, Robert reported that Steve Ballmer had written to all Microsoft employees concerning this issue. Steve Ballmer is Microsoft’s CEO and this wasn’t a public communication so Robert said “If someone over in PR could give me permission, I’ll be happy to post the entire letter”.

Later that same day, Robert wrote that “I got permission from PR to post Steve’s email“. He published a link to a copy of Steve Ballmer’s mail and then went on to take Steve Ballmer to task questioning his leadership abilities for taking this stance inviting his readers to comment on this too (which they did, in their hundreds).

Robert then reported that his bosses boss (Vic Gundotra) had responded to Robert’s post about Steve Ballmer. Vic said “Should a CEO pick sides on an issue that is so divisive? Does being “inclusive” and “diverse” suddenly stop when it involves views that are different than the ones we hold?”

In Robert’s reply, he said ” believe that a CEO SHOULD take a position on controversial and divisive issues. That’s leadership”.

Then yesterday, Robert posted several responses from other sites reporting this story (including one podcast).

So why do I think this heralds a seed change in the blogosphere? Well, yesterday I mentioned the BusinessWeek article on blogging and although I liked the article I did think it a little prone to hyperbole. One thing they said “Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it” has been proven very true in the last couple of days with this story and it is only going to happen more and more.

Anyone with an Internet connection and a PC (or even access to a webcafe) can blog. Companies are going to have to come to terms with blogs quickly and develop strategies for how to deal with them. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft deal with Robert Scoble’s very public criticism of Steve Ballmer’s leadership abilities.

UPDATE: - I see Damien has picked up on this story as well.

BusinessWeek article on blogging

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/4/2005
in Blogging and Business blogging
. 0 Comments

BusinessWeek have an article on blogging this week. In the article, they say, amongst other things:

Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later

and they go on to say further

they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours

They’ve also started a BusinessWeek blog, called blogspotting.

Hat tip to Gavin for pointing this out.

Virtual desktop manager for OS X

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/4/2005
in Mac and Open Source
. 2 Comments

I found a great virtual desktop manager for OS X - it is called Desktop Manager (strangely enough!) and is freely downloadable here.

Desktop Manager allows you to have any number of named virtual ’screens’ (up to available memory) to arrange your programs on, Sticky window support (allowing you to have one window on all desktops), status-bar menu, desktop pager, Control switching via configurable ‘hotkeys’ and cool switch transitions.

The software is in early beta so it may well crash or windows may disappear. I had one issue where all my windows disappeared, as did the controls for Desktop Manager - but opening a new Finder window, navigating to the Applications folder and re-launching Desktop Manager brought everything back.

I like it and am hoping a more stable version will be ready when Tiger launches.

Google and world domination

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/4/2005
in Search Engines
. 0 Comments

Google has announced a new service which they are calling My Search History.

Google says

My Search History shows you all the searches you’ve done on Google and the search results you’ve clicked on” and further “you can use My Search History’s calendar feature to check the searches you did on a given day and navigate to any of them with a single click

Google goes on to say

Full-text search over your history means you can easily find any search query or results page. We also show you related history over time; you can review everything Google has ever shown you about “apples”, “bass fishing” or “the wizard of oz,” for instance, by clicking the “Related history” link next to any search term when it appears. My Search History also gives you useful info while you’re searching on Google. Next to your search results, you’ll see how many times you’ve visited a certain search result and the last time you viewed it. And if we think it will help you find what you’re looking for, we’ll grab pages you’ve already clicked on and put them above your regular web results

This all sounds very useful.

Then I read an article on how to use Gmail as a spam filter for your mail (thanks to Matt for the article pointer). Basically the gist of the article was that you should route all your incoming email through a Gmail account and forward the Gmail account back to your normal account - now cleaned of spam by Gmail’s spam filters. Wow! - I’m astonished to think that people trust Google enough to route all their mail through Gmail. Remember that Google’s Privacy Policy explicitly states that you can delete information from My Search History or Gmail, and it will be removed from the service and no longer available to you but Google still keeps the information - it just isn’t available to you anymore!

Gmail is also apparently building an RSS reader into its web interface. So now, they will have access to your email and your RSS subscription info and what articles you are interested enough to click through.

Couple that with the news that Microsoft is afraid of Google because Google is actively hiring people with skills not for search, but for products similar to what Microsoft makes and you now start to get the idea that 1) Google is tracking everything and 2) soon they will be looking to launch a Google Operating System and you start to get the idea that Bill Gates plans for world domination pale in comparison to what Google has yet up its sleeve.

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