Jeffzilla

Last week was then annual Search Engine Strategies New York conference. It’s billed as “the intersection of search, marketing & commerce”, and includes talks, panels and discussion on many aspects of the online search world - both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). I work in SEO, and attended most of the SEO-focused talks on Thursday, March 20th.

I sat in on the Images & Search Engines talk. The talk description was:

Regular search engines can’t understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.

It was moderated by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, and the speakers were Liana Evans from KeyRelevance, Chase Norlin from Pixsy Corporation, and R.J. Pittman from Google.

During the Q&A session, I asked R.J. Pittman of Google about assigning SEO-relevancy to images hosted off-site and served dynamically to e-commerce platforms. I mainly had in mind Adobe’s Scene7, which integrates into ecommerce platforms, and will automatically resize and re-serve product images, based on what section the site and conversion process the user is in. I personally think this is a cool technology - and I’ve even bought from a site that uses it - eBags. Take a look over at eBags, and you’ll notice for many of their product images, you can click and zoom in to a super high res image. This high res image is the same that’s being shown in thumbnails - but it’s being resized to the appropriate size dynamically by Scene7.

I also sat in the “Meet the Crawlers” talk, which featured Sean Suchter from Yahoo, Evan Roseman from Google and Nathan Buggia from Microsoft. At the Q&A, I asked Sean and Evan about the specialized news indexes of the major search engines, and what the criteria/process is for getting content indexed and shown on sites such as Google News and Yahoo Finance. Here’s the audio.

Surfing the web a few minutes ago, I accidentally typed in a URL incorrectly. Instead of a normal 404-not found error page, lo and behold, I got this Road Runner Internet “Website Suggestions” page. What’s going on here? Is Road Runner really snooping my web traffic that aggressively? This is the first time I’ve seen this on my own internet connection, although I’ve heard of it before. Anyone else gotten this? How much information are they collecting on me? Also, here’s links to their FAQ page linked from the “suggestions” page. Finally, after reading a few forums on the issues, I found OpenDNS - a DNS server service alternative to your ISP’s DNS server (Road Runner, in my case). Looks nifty.  (Click screenshot for bigger)

I just read over on TechCrunch that “micro celebrity” videoblogger Sarah Meyers just launched here latest project. Pop17, as its called, is a videoblog looking directly at the age of the internet micro celebrity. Her first official interview is with Jamie Wilkinson, who teaches a class called “Internet Famous” over at Parsons New School for Design. The interesting bent on his class is that his students actually get graded on how “internet famous” they can make themselves. Pretty cool.

Check out Sarah’s first Pop17 interview!

One interesting not about this current age of the “internet micro celebrity”, is that the online an offline worlds of celebrity are slowly but surely merging. It was just a few years back that you could be a huge star on the internet.. but yet have pretty much no recognition walking down the street. Now, I think we’ve entered a stage where internet micro-celebrities are fast becoming internet-macro celebrities, and at the same time becoming “on the street”.

Example? Sure. How about Jessica Rose’s “Lonelygirl15“? She started off with regular supposedly non-fictional video blog posts detailing unfolding drama of “Brie”, a 16 year old videoblogger who frequently gave shout-outs to her online friends. Beginning with those shout-outs, as well as compelling content, “Brie” quickly gained a following. And when the jig was up and people realized it was all fiction, her star power, instead of being stripped, skyrocketed. And now, you’ve got Carmen Electra spoofing her, and Jessica Rose appearing in the ABC Family Network TV show “Greek“. Posting grainy video clips to a then-fledgling site network all the way to syndication on a major TV broadcast network.

Update Update*** Sarah Meyers had a talk with Steve Chen, who confirmed that yes, there will be LIVE VIDEO on YouTube this year. ReadWriteWeb has it too. Now you can become “Internet Famous” in real-time.

No matter how cool or innovative a particular new technology is, without the critical big business adoption process, it’s usually doomed. We’re in the midst of seeing this with Joost, as they can’t sign the big content deals with major providers. We’re NOT, however, seeing this doom with OpenID - it seems to be doing great!!

In a great stroke of luck for Janrain’s OpenID unified user account sign-in technology, Yahoo has just adopted the standard, and is now offering OpenID authentication to all users (read on TechCrunch). It’s a simple and free upgrade to your account, and is available immediately. After upgrading your Yahoo! account, you’ll be able to enter me.yahoo.com/username as your OpenID on supported websites, and have to remember only one password to surf the web. Awesome! (For the record, I currently use MyOpenID.com for my OpenID server)

Given that I currently have approximately elenventy billion user accounts strewn about the web, widespread adoption of OpenID would be great for me. One password to logon to all my web services. And plus, with portable identities, even signing up for new sites is easy.

Finally, somebody today asked me about security.. is having one logon for everything safe? First of all, OpenID is engineered for security, and as of late, has started to support some advanced security protocols, such as Microsoft Cardspace, Passwords, and Client Certificates. And also, if your OpenID is compromised the system is logged, and it’s easy to change your password throughout the whole system. I do think that there should be an ultra-secure protocol for changing a password… so if somebody does get your current password and hack into your base OpenID account, it won’t be so simple for them to change the password and lock you out completely…perhaps multi-factor authentication, etc.

Still confused about what OpenID is? Check out some quick and simple intro videos and guides:

OpenID According to Dave, on YouTube

Simon Willison’s slightly stuffier OpenID screencast

Straight from the horse’s mouth: OpenID primer from Janrain

I’m officially calling the format war finished. Blu-ray has emerged as the clear winner, thanks to two deciding influences - the studios and the porn industry.

The major windfall for Blu-ray from the studios was Warner Brothers’ decision to go blu-ray exclusive.. just the thing that the industry needed to help sway the tide. Before Warner’s decision, it was almost evenly split, and besides the technical factors, the big differences were content and pricing. I think that blu-ray has always had better content, but hd-dvd was still hanging in there because they were able to sell their players cheaper. Now, despite the still less expensive hd-dvd players, blu-ray has over 90% of the movie studios support, which will ensure a win on the format. And regarding pricing? Blu-ray hardware will continue to become less expensive, especially as they introduce new, cheaper player components.

Next up, the porn industry…

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Broitman, I think you’re right on with giving Google the openness award. Your importance of being open article is spot on, but I just wanted to step back a bit to how they got to this new openness.

Google has to free up technologies that can have the most impact in an open environment. Technologies like cellular networks and broad-area wireless coverage, such as the 700mhz networks they helped to free, are the pathway to the future. Additionally, I agree that the opening up of the social networking standards, cell phone platforms, music formats, etc, is all the way of the future. In fact, the very industries that built up these technologies will die without openness.

However, we didn’t get to this point easily, and we definitely could not have gotten here without initially constructing closed, proprietary systems. In fact, I’m all for closed systems and technology, at least for the beginning stages of growth and adoption. When a company develops a new technology and keeps it closed, it encourages that company to pour as much as it can into the tech, building it up to make it the biggest and best. Additionally, fundamental values, operating procedures, and quality control are concentrated. If, for example, the wireless 700mhz spectrum were always a freely available chunk of spectrum, I think that its effectiveness would become diluted. Way too many people would be making half-assed efforts to use it, and it would never be able to concentrate that critical mass of userbase, tech base, and monetary support.

Going forward, I’m eager to see where we go in developing new applications based on formerly closed, now opened technologies. If the industry can break out of the molds already made by the industry, we could begin to see some really killer technologies. Google’s Android and Open Social are just the beginning.

The one potential step back that i see the industry trying to take is Net Neutrality. I’m all for it, and think that the reason the internet is great, and will continue to be great is that its neutral - bandwidth is bandwidth. So let’s keep it open too, ok?