Posted on June 8, 2011 by Brian Greer
An important date in the history of the World Web has come and gone and almost no one noticed. How did it get missed?
On February 24th, Google rolled out the Panda update. Amidst great howls of pain and gnashing of teeth, a significant number of websites learned the hard way that having a good website mattered. The Panda update was designed to identify “thin” content…, content that may be “unique”, but really doesn’t add very much to the human experience. I like to call this content the “plastic water bottles” of the Internet. It takes up space, it’s useless, and it won’t go away.
The other thing Panda did was to incorporate an algorithm based on human factors. The algorithm attempted to quantify the results of questioning Internet users about such things as:
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Posted on May 25, 2011 by Brian Greer
For a couple of years now, we have been harping on the obvious efforts of search engines to improve their results. Our advice can be summed up as “build a good website”. With literally trillions of unique URL’s on the web, search engines face daily challenges in trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. For a long time after the introduction of Google, the mantra was “more links”. Links still matter of course, but what really matters is quality.
In the first 48 hours after this blog entry launches, a series of robots will try to post comment links to a variety of pharmaceutical sites, and free download sites. None of these comment links will be posted here, but you can be assured that the only reason comment spam exists is because large numbers of links get generated that way. The inbound link model only makes sense if one measures the credibility of where the link comes from. Google knows this.
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Posted on May 15, 2011 by Brian Greer
Every morning, I spend roughly an hour surfing the web…, looking for trends, interesting stories, and cultural moments. I see it as a key part of my job to be completely current on social trends and phenomena. Some of the major sites that are a part of each day are CNN, MSNBC, The Star, The Globe, BBC, AOL, MSN, Aljazeera, Economist, NYT, and RT. The links I follow will routinely take me to hard news, philosophy, politics, entertainment sites, gossip sites, and in many cases…, absolute time-wasters. So why don’t I restrict my viewing to professional information and topics of interest by using news feeds?
Consider what the Internet is hiding from you.
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Posted on April 23, 2011 by Brian Greer
At the dawn of the web era, we recognized a major design problem. Designers were using local machines and Intranets to test their designs. In the late 90′s a typical user was tethered to the end of 28k or 56k modem. These were SLOW. Designers were adding images and graphics to web pages and viewing the results off their hard drive. Adding a 100kb graphic doesn’t sound like much today, but in 1998 it probably meant your web page took 30 seconds to load. The designer didn’t notice the problem because they loaded the image off a hard drive. The problem was that designers very quickly forgot the technical aspects of Internet use.
Today’s typical designer sits in front of a 27 inch or large screen, and is connected to the Internet with a 15 to 30 MBps download connection. Worse still…, in most cases designers get in the habit of previewing pages on their local machine without ever visiting the Internet. At a minimum, they may preview in Dreamweaver, or you may run a beta platform that has a high speed connection. It’s fast, it looks efficient, and the result is often a lousy user experience.
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