The NY Times has just announced that Google has acquired a strategic stake in NASA. Described as a "partnership of equals", the move sees Google paying $1.3 million a year to NASA. In exchange, Google founders Page and Brin get to park their private jet on a federally managed airfield 4 miles down the road, as clearly shown by the map below:

View Larger Map

In return, NASA gets three new airplanes to help its non-existent fleet of air-borne experimental platforms. Additionally, it was confirmed that all future NASA missions will be powered by Google Sky, Google Moon, and others. NASA's JPL will be tranformed into a real-time PageRank calculation datacenter.

So Donna tagged me with the task of listing the people I would choose for my crack team of SEOs. The point is to list up to 7 people. Team building is a great exercise to make you really think about mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive skills and personalities you think can work well together. So in no particular order...

• Aaron Wall and Michael Gray for their unrelenting accurate reporting of Google's hypocrisy and arrogance. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm 100% in agreement with them. Of course, no one could wish for better SEOs on the team than both of these gents.
• John Mueller: a very smart guy who recently sold his soul to the devil joined Google. He's an expert experimenter with a true passion to figure out the SEs. In life you don't need to know everything, but you do need to know how to figure things out.
• Matt Webb. Generally expert SEO and smart guy. He likes Linux a lot, so would useful for his server admin skills.
• Kim Krause Berg for the ultimate resource in website usability.
• Chris Winfield as he knows social media inside out.
• Finally, we need some advnaced/darker-than-white SEO tactics. Eli from Blue Hat SEO wins on this front. Why Eli? For generously sharing and explaining in simple terms some clever tactics. Very useful for new-commers.

And this completes the seven. If I had more space, there are a few others I'd like to have join up . So now I get to tag some folks, so come on Kim, John, and Chris.

I just found my invite to the new BBC iPlayer beta service. I got very excited to (finally!) be part of a major piece of online video history and man oh man is it bad. It's so bad, it makes Windows 3.11 look awesome.

Just how bad? Let's start at the top.

• I copied over the link to a new Firefox tab and it asked for my log in details. It uses standard HTTP authentication, so I got a modal window that I cannot make go away interfering with me. Why do I want it to go away? Because I want to copy my username and password. Just so you understand why this is necessary, my username is FBArbkNad (actually, I changed one letter only for security, but that's pretty much it). What kind of username is that? They can at least use the email address as a username. I notice that in the top right hand corner, it has a 'sign in' link. Surely it knows I've signed in, no?
• Fine, I manage to login after a copy/paste shuffle with notepad. Great interface. Very shiny, very sleek, a piece of art. Well done on that front. Browsing through, I picked a program at random and I was offered a download link. I click that, and errr, ummm, an error message. Remember Firefox? Yeah, it's not supported. The service requires Windows XP and IE and Windows Media Player. I scored 2 out of 3.
• Fine. Sheesh, I'll load up IE. Again, copy/paste the URL and neatly, I was browsing at the correct page. At least the URLs are emailable as they point to the correct episode pages. So I click download and it asks me to login again. It's a different server (download.bbc.co.uk instead of www.bbc.co.uk) and it's a setup file. Fair enough, a player is needed. Save it and install it.
• True to any bad installer, it tried to register something for startup in the registry. No, thank you (but thank you Spybot S&D), just run. When the player opened, it tried to register the same thing again. Does this remind you of RealPlayer and why it's so hated? To make it worse, the name of the file it's trying to register is "koh", making it completely obscure that it's related to the BBC iPlayer. Rename the file, willya? As my friends' resident geek, I get to deal with a lot of spyware and adware. You could at least help me by naming the files properly.
• Hey, the player works. Very informatively, it tells me that my library is empty (remember, I asked to download a specific episode). Handily, it offers a link to the iPlayer home. Click that and a new IE7 starts. Now I'm angry: it refused to let me download the player from Firefox only for the player to turn around and start a new IE window? Why can't the player be downloadable from any Windows browser (it is Windows only as far as I can tell...) and then open as many IE windows as possible. This is very bad usability, not to mention annoying.
• So now I'm on my third tab of the iPlayer website (the Firefox one, my IE one, and the iPlayer-started one). Fine. Just let me see a stupid episode. I browse around and click one at random... Oh, I need to log in again. Oh flippin' 'eck. I copy and paste the username and password again... and it says my password is too short. Umm... it your freaking password!

So I give up and decide to write this rant review. Honestly. I've seen alpha software that's better quality than this. Sorry Beeb. I love you, I love your site, but the iPlayer is broken.

Technorati Tags: BBC iPlayer

Time Magazine published a nice article by Bill Tancer (of Hitwise fame) talking about the top 10000 keywords searched for that contain the word 'free' like [free games] or [free myspace layouts]. The analysis is very interesting for anyone into keyword research but amusingly, he found that no one is searching for [free lunch].

It's not long, and well worth a read.

Technorati Tags: hitwise, free, keyword research

A press release just made public covering research by Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology. It's a very succinct write-up, so I'll just quote bits of it:

Researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, ascribing them to four different search engines -- Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study. Then the researchers showed the pages to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.

The whole premise of the press release is that this observation is the result of brand power for both Google and Yahoo!. It's an interesting observation, and certainly makes sense, but I'm still not 100% convinced. The sample size is too small and as the researchers noted, "many of the participants said they used Google to search". The very next thing they need to try is to recruit MSN/Live users to do the experiment. If their hypothesis is true, the MSN/Live users would rate MSN's results top.

Regardless, an interesting note that could explain a lot of the momentum behind the top SEs.

Technorati Tags: search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, research

This is NOT a paid review. I say this because I've done paid reviews before here.

I managed to get a Joost invite from Last 100, giving me a chance to review what the fuss is all about.

What is Joost? To quote their website:

The new way of watching TV

All the things you love about TV, fused with the interactive power of the internet – just the way you want it. Enjoy the ride!

...which doesn't say much. Really, it's a P2P based TV channels distribution network. Think Kazaa but instead of delivering MP3 files, it's actually streaming video. Very neat way to solve the technical problem of serving huge amounts of content.

Does it work? Well, sort of. The picture quality is on the low end of what you can achieve with TV. It obviously uses up a ton of bandwidth on your end, and so it's very sensitive your connection settings. On a wireless broadband here in the UK, it worked acceptably well, but it was definitely choppy at times, and the sound quality suffered. Interestingly, the video would keep running but the sound would grable or jump. I'm guessing that perhaps the Joost software gives higher priority to the video stream (if video and audio are actually split). Also, when a new channel starts playing, the quality is terrible but quickly moves up to good.

Also, the software is very - let me say this again, VERY - demanding. On my dual-core 1.8GHz computer, the whole computer seemed to slow down. The mouse would jump, the screen would take a while to refresh and all other symptoms of high CPU usage. Task manager showed that Joost is using 60% of the CPU all the time.

Content-wise, it's a bit thin, at least for what I'm interested in. Randomly channel surfing, I came across some kind of UK users generated record breaking channel where ordinary folks decided to break world records. I decided it was not good after watching the first segment featuring five men on all fours racing like greyhounds, on a dog race track, chasing the same rabbit the dogs usually chase. Thank you, but YouTube is already filled with such crap. However, this seems to have triggered a bug because everything I would watch afterwards was a repeating cycle of ads: a car, HP, then Nike, then Intel, then back to the car advert and repeat.

The interface is also a bit... mysterious. Lots of buttons and animations but you really have to hover over everything to figure out what it really does. Coupled to the general slow-down I mentioned earlier, I routinely double clicked everything early on because I thought my first click didn't register. The interface looks like it was designed in Flash. However, the controls are small enough not to distract too much from the actual content, a major plus.

By default, Joost wants to run in full-screen mode, and some features demand full-screen functionality. I don't know why it is so picky, but at least you can watch in a window and snap in and out of full screen occasionally. I wouldn't watch full screen given the low quality video.

So big picture: is it a Good Thing? Yes. For all its technological and user experience shortcomings, Joost will undoubtedly grow to be a major force in online video. If they decide to allow ANYONE to broadcast content (like YouTube), then they really could change the game. Can you imagine stringing a bunch of video blogs and creating a channel? THAT would be awesome - your own personalized channel. They would need an API to simplify subscriptions and easy manipulation of channels, but it's not much of a jump given what they've already done.

So: watch this space (if you'll excuse the pun).

Finally: if anyone wants Joost invites, drop a comment below and I'll send one to your email address. I have to do the invites manually, one at a time, so if a lot of people ask, please be patient :).

Technorati Tags: joost, online video, youtube

I saw it on the Internet. It must be true.

So Michael tagged me with the latest meme going around: taking a nerd test to get a score (of course). And my score? Let me use the test's words: "I am nerdier than 92% of all people.". That's right folks, I know my periodic table inside out and can recognize photos of great scientists who passed away hundreds of years ago. I even get a badge:

Apparently, this beats the highest score Michael knows about. If you'll excuse me, I need to go have a walk or something.

So now I get to choose some people to have a go at beating me. Let's hear it for:

• Joe
• Sophie (wonder if switching to a mac has affected her)
• Kim

I can't remember how I got to finding this, but I found the Mozilla project aimed at Windows-based mobile devices. The project is called minimo. It is based on the same rendering engine that Firefox uses, and so I had to try it! Version 0.2 was recently released, so I downloaded and installed it on my trusty PDA phone, an Orange SPV M600. With the built-in WiFi, testing net browsing is very easy, and here are the results.

Installation and Home Page

Installation is very easy and uneventful - you download an installer, connect up your device, start the installer and follow the post-synch installation instructions on the handheld. This creates an icon in the Programs list. Click that, and the minimo splash screen starts up with a progress bar - yes it's quite a large program.

minimo splash screen minimo home page

The default home page of minimo is called homebase. It's quite a tidy and neatly arranged area. At the very top, there is a URL address entry bar with a Google search bar immediately underneath. Below is a list of mobile-friendly services, such as the del.icio.us mobile RSS feed, weather, and Google maps. As you browse, your history gets added to this page, a very cool feature, and certainly a time-saver.

Browsing and Tabs

This is the coolest feature of minimo: built-in tabbed browsing support. When I read about this, my gut reaction was that the screen is too small to have more than one tab. Well, let me tell you that this was a very wrong assumption. The tabs are somehow nicely squeezed in, and make mobile web browsing a true pleasure. I was able to actually browse for an hour or so without feeling cramped.

The other neat thing about minimo is how it managed to display websites in a way that minimized horizontal scrolling. To take two examples close to heart, I took screen shots of minimo displaying eKstreme.com's home page, the Socializer, and OSNews. Very nice and tidy, but it also depends a lot on the underlying HTML; for example, OSNews has a mobile-friendly version that's automtically served to handhelds. For stubborn sites, there is a panning button in the toolbar at the bottom that allows you to use the stylus to pan around the web page. Again, a great feature for small screens, and built right into the interface. Major kudos.

minimo displaying eKstreme.comthe Socializer in minimo OSNews in minimo

Menus and Settings

The minimo interface is very menu driven. If you tap and hold on an empty bit of the page, you get a context menu. Tapping and holding a tab will show the tabs menu. Further, there is a "..." button on the toolbar that displays the global menu bar. Everything in it is straightforward, so I'll just explore the Preferences menu a bit more.

The Preferences are arranged in five categories symbolized by five colored buttons. The settings are easy to understand and change, and once done, just tap the save button. There is one feature worth mentioning though: the SSR. It took me a while to figure out what that means, but eventually, the minimo FAQ explained it best:

What is SSR and how do I use it?

This question has come up several times. SSR adjusts the look and feel of a page via CSS. SSR attempts to adjust image sizes, fonts, and layouts to maximize page space. SSR also attempts to eliminate side scrolling. To use SSR simply click the blue globe and choose SSR. This will attempt to adjust the layout of the page to better fit on your screen.

minimo settingsminimo menu

Bugs

Having said all this, there are a few bugs still be ironed out:

• When I first ran minimo, it complained of low memory. Problem is, that was the last peep I heard: the whole device crashed. The only way to recover was to remove the battery. However, that was the only crash I saw from it, so perhaps it was a fluke.
• As you can see from all the screenshots, the text entry bar that shows up by default in Windows Mobile is not visible. It's supposed to be at the bottom of the screen, but somehow, minimo pushes it off or hides it. This means that you cannot change the text entry method once minimo started. Another bug: minimo doesn't work with the Transcriber entry method. Instead of getting your scribbles showing up on the screen and interpreted as text, minimo interprets all screen taps as interactions with the displayed web page. This means you'll be randomly clicking links or even displaying the context menu. This is the most serious bug I've found.
• Quitting doesn't quit. More specifically, clicking the 'x' button at the top right doesn't close minimo. To quit, you need to click the '...' menu button in the toolbar and choose Quit. That works a treat.
• Gmail has a mobile-friendly interface that works really well in mobile Internet Explorer. However, in minimo, I got an XML error message.
• Finally, more of a feature request than a bug: I don't like Google, preferring to use Yahoo! most of the time. I really would like to have a Yahoo! search option built in, especially on Homebase (the home page). Yahoo has a mobile-friendly search, so it shouldn't be too hard to build it in.

Concluding Thoughts

I was very impressed with minimo. Actually, using minimo showed me that mobile net access might just work. Everyone has been predicting the mobile revolution but I never thought it would happen simply because the screen are too small and the interfaces cramped. Somehow, minimo sidesteps all these and it made a convert out of me.

Granted, there are still a few bugs to fix, some of them serious, but remember this is still a development version. Frankly, it's perfectly fine to use on a daily basis as it stands, but I have great hopes for its future releases. The developers should be commended for their hard work!

Minimo Resources

• Minimo forums
• Minimo FAQ
• Minimo home page

Technorati Tags: minimo, review

Terrible ad placement: here.

A colleague tipped me on this: Google Scholar is now showing patent results. An example: Result 9 for [video compression].

I'm of two minds about this. Sure it's not true to the 'scholarly' spirit of their "Stand on the shoulders of giants" search they developed, but it may be kind of useful to have both databases searchable in one interface (just don't believe it's scholarly). On the other hand, I see this as yet another attempt by G to force upon us a half-baked service that is very inferior to everything else out there. I already had my rant in this Cre8 thread, and I think it's still fairly accurate.

To follow on: is this the web equivalent of 'bundling' that got Microsoft into so much trouble in the 1990's? Any lawyers out there? Pinging Bill!

Technorati Tags: google, patent, scholar, search

The Domain Tools Blog talked about some domain names registered in Google's name. Most of them are quite interesting, perhaps hinting at future services. One, however, was a misspelling of a popular Chinese portal: Google registered Guxiangcom.com whereas the real portal is at Guxiang.com.

Right now, www.guxiangcom.com gives an 'under construction' message.

Technorati Tags: google, typosquatting

I was very excited when a couple of days ago, Kim, one of the founders of Cre8asite Forums invited me to join the moderating team. I love Cre8 (a lot) and without a blink I blurted out "yesssss". I'll be moderating the PPC forums, the Google forums, and the Yahoo forums.

Now it's official: the announcement thread and blog post. A big thank you to Kim and everyone for extending this invitation and for making Cre8 a great place to hang out and talk web stuff.

So come on - join in the fun!

While exploring MyBlogLog, I came across a cool site called Trendio. What does it do? This is how they explain it:

Trendio is the first current events stock exchange. It is a stock exchange where words from the news are the stocks. The value of the words is calculated according to their presence in the media. It makes it possible to visualize trends in the media and try to predict what will make the headlines tomorrow in a cool community-based game.

In essence, you 'buy' keywords betting (hoping?) they will be mentioned in the news in the future. The more mentioned they are, the more they will be worth. This is similar to the idea of predicting future keywords for financial SEO purposes, and I very much like that

So what's in my portfolio at the moment? The usual culprits: Yahoo and Google. Google is an obvious one (everyone wants to talk about Google), and Yahoo will be in the news more because they are launching their new PPC engine code-named Panama. Incidentally, Panama is also in my portfolio because I'm betting people like Time magazine and the Economist will be talking about that when Yahoo's quarterly results are announced. It's a medium term investment.

The last keyword in my portfolio is London. Firstly, we'll have SES London coming up this week, but I'm not sure how well Trendio keeps up with London news. Also, London is a good bet very long-term as the Olympics are coming here. In a few months' time, the 5-year countdown will start and people will talk about it.... a lot, I hope. Over the next few days, I'll be adding the names of popular current events news makers.

So what would you bet on?

This post is about Google's latest move to force personalization on everyone. Please first read their original announcement.

Back? Let's roll.

Google's goal has always been to give you exactly the information we want to give you right when you want it. With the growth of the Internet and all the new information coming online every day, this might sound hard but we rock.

We're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways we're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, we are the ones that know what you're really looking for.

We have two main ways of personalizing your Google experience. First, you can customize products and services like the Google Personalized Homepage. Personalizing your homepage gives you the at-a-glance information that you care about right at your fingertips, just the way you want it. This is not new, really, and there are many others that do it better.

Second, we offer automatic spyware (till 2038, no less!) through things like personalized search and recommendations. Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you knowing about it.

Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Actually, it's not just these two that got combined. If you are signed into any other service, like GMail, you'll still be signed into your Google Account of course, and so now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google—one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage and everything else.

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see our quarterly results triple, and hopefully even quadruple. We can't wait!

By the way, you've always known this was coming. You see, if you actually read our original paper describing Google, you would have found these two gems buried near the end:

• And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the "random surfer" will get bored and request another random page. One important variation is to only add the damping factor d to a single page, or a group of pages. This allows for personalization and can make it nearly impossible to deliberately mislead the system in order to get a higher ranking.
• We are also working to extend the use of link structure and link text. Simple experiments indicate PageRank can be personalized by increasing the weight of a user's home page or bookmarks.

If you don't want to see personalized results, just sign out of your Google Account; yes that includes GMail because we don't think anyone stays logged in anyway. After all, the goal is to give you what you want all the time. So give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Labels: spyware, annoying, stupid, decision

Think that's funny? It's not. Here is why:

• I search because I'm looking for new things; personalization goes against this basic premise. Thus on an abstract level, personalization is a bad idea.
• It's really just spyware. Love it or hate it, Google is now explicitely tracking you, what you like, and what you don't like. Somewhere in the many datacenters Google owns, your life is being stored without any means to access it, edit it, or better yet delete it. OK, you can close your Google account and delete everything with it, but is that really a solution?
• It's annoying. I stayed logged into my GMail account and surf around. Once in a while, I check in to see if a new mail has arrived. It's like having auto mail checks by keeping Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever open all the time. Now Google is forcing me to sign out just so that I don't get tracked by them, therefore adding another step (signing in) when I want to check my GMail. First class annoyance.
• It's tempting to speculate what this means for the ads that will be displayed to you on the SERPs and through AdSense. Suppose you search for something with good CPC earnings, say [adult toys] and several variations of that. When you did that search, you didn't click any adverts, and Google gets upset. Now suppose you later search for [toys] for your children... what adverts will be shown then? This is why I commented about quarterly results above.

And that's it in a nutshell. It's a really bad idea and might be the thing that will bring Google down. People hate being spied on and if enough mainstream media pick this angle, it'll be all over for the big G.

This is too funny: US Patent Application 20060288329 was published a few days ago. The abstract starts with this:

A content syndication platform, such as a web content syndication platform, manages, organizes and makes available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet.

So let me get this straight: the patent is about a system (a syndication platform) that manages content acquired from the internet and makes it available. Hmm... surely not? What's the very first claim?

1. A system comprising: one or more computer-readable media; computer-readable instructions on the one or more computer-readable media which, when executed, implement: an RSS platform that is configured to receive and process RSS data in one or more formats; and code means configured to enable different types of applications to access RSS data that has been received and processed by the RSS platform.

So it's a content management system that gets RSS data and reformats it for other applications. Right.

And who was it assigned to? Microsoft Co.

Technorati Tags: blackhat, seo, microsoft.

I've been tagged... twice! Once by Randall and once by John. Thanks guys! Now I have to post 5 things about me, Pierre...

• I'm not French... nor French Canadian.
• SEO and web design are just hobbies of mine. I actually have a PhD in microbial genetics and in real life, I'm working at an 'innovation consultancy' helping big firms work out new technologies. It's really cool!
• I can't drink coffee as it makes me ill. So how do I program? I started out on apple juice and Pringles but now it's just apple juice. Word on the street is that it doesn't give quite the same kick...
• I've lived in 4 different countries (the shortest stay was 3 months) and visited over 10 countries. My favorite city by far is Frankfurt as it is a great mix of old and new (you can easily be looking at a very old building with a skyscraper in the background!)
• The first computer I ever played with was an XT (i.e. older than a 286). It ran DOS 3.1, and the first thing I typed at the C:\> command prompt was &quot'Give me all your files". Very promptly (apologies for the pun) it replied with 'Bad command or file name'. Bring back those days please!!!!

Now I get to tag 5 other people. MWAHAHAHA! Peter Bowyer (sorry for not keeping in touch), G-Man, James Cook (please do it in a cartoon), Nadir Garouche, and KICHUS. Come on folks, let's hear 'em!

Technorati Tags: blog tags

Here.

What do you think? I can think of some (sane) reasons for this discrepancy.

Some links for your enjoyment.

• Visitor Segmentation in Web Analytics
focuses on using Google Analytics for vistor segmentation and analysis. Very handy intro for the uninitiated. Join the discussion at the SEO Refugee SEO forums.
• How to insert an HTML page into another, without any Javascript or Java or Flash and whatnot. It's actually too simple!

And that's it for now. Web Wibble will be a regular feature on things of sorts from now on. If you have something cool you'd like featured (even if it's your own ), drop me a line.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted a mini how to stay anonymous online in response to the AOL data accidental release. One of the items is a Firefox extension called CustomizeGoogle. I just watched the demo video and I have to say it looks very cool. We'll see how it fares under testing.

Also, the Wall Street Journal has a debate about storing web search data. Good read.

Via John Battelle

David Sifry of Technorati fame (and lots of others) has just posted his latest State of the Blogosphere. The stats are an amazing insight into what's happening right now in the world of blogging, where we came from, and a little eye towards the future. Data junkies should read it!

Technorati Tags: technorati, blogosphere, blogging