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Showing posts from July, 2011

Another look at my stats: browser use

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Now that my blog has been extant for two months, I thought I'd compare more of the traffic statistics I can glean. Blogger itself provides some basic information (their penchant for only displaying the top 10 entries is starting to bother me), so I've taken a look at the all time breakdown of my visitors' browser choices: Pageviews by Browsers Firefox 480 (49%) Internet Explorer 170 (17%) Safari 155 (15%) Chrome 97 (9%) Mobile 49 (5%) Mobile Safari 19 (1%) Opera 2 (<1%) SimplePie 2 (<1%) Overall, this is what Searchengineland says are the latest stats for browser use courtesy of Chitika, who studied North American usage. IE is (still) just holding the majority of all users: And also from the same article , people who read Searchengineland use these browsers (I'm thinking these numbers represent their global audience, though it wasn't clearly spec

Bing tests mixes of paid and organic results on SERPs

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I was distressed to read in Searchengineland that Bing is testing something similar to Google's SERP structure, where organic result lists are interrupted by paid entries, or compilations of "emphasized" content, often at the "fold" position (4th or 5th place, roughly halfway down the page). Distressed, yes, but not surprised - time will tell whether their trial run reveals that users pay attention to the faint labeling that indicates that a listing is an advertisement, but it seems well established already that the Google practice of placing sponsored links at the very top and to the right hand column in SERPs has led to its users learning to largely ignore the right hand area of the page , along with spending less viewing time on the very top of the main body as well. The presence of "search engine provider-preferred" content at the fold position, also means that listings that fall beneath this visual area are only likely to be noticed by visitor

Another localization pitfall: slang

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I wonder how often product names are vetted by native speakers of languages when considering marketing something in that region. And if they are, how often slang and rhyming words of dubious character are taken into consideration.  Certainly, when my employer purchased an electric hatchback car earlier this year (as a corporate vehicle that can be reserved for client visits and such), I was bewildered by the wave of snickering that accompanied the announcement of its name, and the ever so slightly aggrieved way the speaker delivered the news. It turns out that the acronym by which it's called closely approximates an Austrian slang word for "stench". In looking at National German, I see there's also another (less similar sounding)  slang term , about which I was not told. Product namers, beware!

I'm literally on the ball sometimes while working.

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I was recently re-watching the first season of Frasier , when I was reminded of the misuse of the term "literally". As it turns out, a kindred spirit has conveniently supplied a transcript (and embedded the video excerpt).  As for my post title, yes: I have something like this, upon which I sit part of the time as I work from my home office: Metaphorically, however, I would like to think I am almost always on the ball professionally! ;)

How to pronounce Japanese - a simplified primer on its phonemes

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It's actually interesting to note that for much of the 20th century, many Japanese organizations like schools and some workplaces did participate in radio calisthenics . Even my Saturday morning language schools had them at the start of each school session. In any case, a recent meeting with a UK entrepreneur reminded me of another benefit to living on the European continent: my first name is almost never mispronounced any longer. If you wish to impress your Japanese colleagues or clients, I strongly recommend that you remember the following simple rules: There are only 5 pure vowels in Japanese, which are identical to the Italian vowels: from the way I pronounce (Canadian) English, the sounds are: A as in altruism, E as in elbow, I as in index, O as in olfactory and U as in ulna. The letter y can be seen preceding three of the vowels (ya ã‚„, yu ゆ, yo よ); it's always used as the consonant. Note: having received linking permission, here is  an audio file from a friend

Having a "bad language day"

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Since childhood, I've found that if I devote a certain amount of concentrated effort thinking in one language, there is a transitory period where trying to speak another language is frustratingly difficult. The worst experience I had of this was a few years ago. After a few weeks of only working, reading and dreaming in English, I bumped into a Japanese faculty member at DCU. I sincerely hope she doesn't remember the incident, as it was painfully humiliating for me: practically no Japanese issued from me at the time, but stubborn pride kept me from switching to English. The fact it was a chance encounter definitely exacerbated the situation, but I was no stranger to this phenomenon. When I entered the Canadian school system, I'd had practically no prior exposure to English. This meant that for a few years initially, I'd answer questions posed to me at school in Japanese, and at home it would take about an hour before I'd revert to Japanese with my parents. Saturd

Why spelling and grammar matter

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I once had a brief conversation with a colleague, after I'd co-founded a "Council for Writing Quality" at a previous workplace. He'd scoffed at my efforts, and I can still remember (and recreate) a steep rise in my blood pressure when he said "But, others can understand [the message] anyway. Who cares if there's the occasional typo?" It probably behooves me to insert a disclaimer concerning both people with dyslexia or other linguistic learning disorders and non-native speakers at this point, prior to commencing my rant in earnest. I certainly wouldn't exact the same standards for either writing or pronunciation when I'm aware that they're functionally blind, cognitively impaired, or if the language happens to be someone's second, third or fourth tongue. But the above paraphrase originated from someone who was not suffering from any known linguistic impairment and only knew English natively. Perhaps it's because English was not m

Reminiscences: software documentation

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I feel fortunate that I can't identify first-hand with Tina, the long-suffering tech writer in Dilbert. My desire to provide user and administrator manuals for software applications stem back to even before I entered the professional workforce. The motivations, however, didn't stem from any false hopes that there would be any significant audience for said work. As an undergraduate I eventually ended up majoring in a combination of Technical Communication and what they call Brain & Cognitive Science, which involved neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. I also worked at the university libraries, where I spent one summer cataloguing musical recordings by the various ensembles over several decades (mainly on vinyl). It was the following year, that their adoption of a system from OCLC (I believe it was Connexion, but I could be mistaken) led to an opportunity to create an administrators' concise guide. When later I arrived at a documentation role, I found that str

Tips on business email authoring

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It occurred to me that next year marks twenty years since I first began to use email. Since then I've registered and deactivated well over a dozen addresses. Now I have ten active ones, most of which filter and forward mails into two inboxes: one business, and one personal. If I become more adept at tapping - or Swyping - perhaps I'd want to use my smart phone for most personal communiqués. However, I think it will take considerable time before becoming comfortable using "text message orthography" in business contexts, including instant messaging. This is why I'm not even going to address the basics of formal writing rules such as capitalization, punctuation, and writing out words fully, in the following tips. Use the subject line effectively: differentiate and justify why you're sending the email by summarizing its primary topic clearly. I'd also recommend attempting to be concise at the same time, but it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to d

Who my readers are (so far)... by country

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It should be unsurprising to my readers, that this blog itself has been an experiment in SEO. From its inception (e.g. which service I selected to host it), to its traffic analysis, thus far I've learned a bit and questioned much. For interests' sake, the all-time visitor breakdown by country (which could be skewed by anyone spoofing their IP, of course) is the following: United States         250 Canada                   92 Austria                    74 France                    74 Australia                 45 Japan                      18 Germany                 13 United Kingdom        9 Russia                       8 India                         5 Some counts make perfect sense: I can trace back the majority of Austrian and Australian visits to people whom I know. In the US, I can thank Mick for being such a faithful reader and commenter, although not all the American traffic is likely to be solely attributable to him

Correlation, Causation and SEO

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Much speculation abounds when it comes to reverse engineering which criteria are prioritized in search engine ranking algorithms. In the SEOmoz ranking factors summary  from this year, the correlation of higher page ranks to greater Facebook "like" numbers was noted. As my team lead (co-author of Audience, Relevance and Search - here's its companion blog ) and I discussed, it was clear that there was an implication that people were likely to interpret this correlation as causation - that is, cum hoc ergo propter hoc.  It's a very easy trap to fall into: thinking that we can rely on a quantifiable factor such as SNS-driven endorsement counts to predict how high up a SERP the page would be likely to be found. However, if one examines the use case scenario of a "popular" page, here's what I would easily envision happening: Something that is useful, very entertaining or plain memorable is published. News of its existence begins to virally spread - t

Response to "Ethics of personalized search" SEOMoz blog post

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The Ethical Issues of Personalisation Online  asked the following questions, so I thought I'd present my views here: But, is it rea sonable to expect a corporate entity to act for the greater good? Particularly if providing users with a more balanced SERP results in them high-tailing it straight into the warm embrace of the competition? In any case – wasn’t it always this way? Before the internet people consumed news only via whichever media sat comfortably with their own political affiliation. Plus of course, even if a more balanced mix of results are shown, you can’t *make* people click through to read something they don’t want to. So, what do you think? Should we be afraid of personalisation? Should we push for easier ways to turn it off? Should there be more ‘balanced’ results for certain types of queries? Should I get myself a tin foil hat, cancel my broadband, flush my smartphone and hide under my desk?   First, while I would imagine a for-profit organization would consider

Initial thoughts on Google+, other SNS

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The New York Times covered Google+ recently, as did Reuters: their walk-through is worth a look, and has its funny moments too. Thanks to my MIT affiliation, I was one of the early adopter/invitees for this service, so I've had a day now to peruse its UI (by the time this post is published). Due to the aforementioned privilege, I was an early user of other Google services. For instance, I've had a Gmail account since summer of 2004, and it wasn't generally available until early 2007. Which is why I can vividly recall how Buzz and Wave flopped (although NYT lists Orkut as another instance of defeat, I understand it's still quite a popular SNS in Brazil). The Buzz functionality is still extant despite what some of my colleagues seemed to think: my tweets are forwarded to it along with my networkedblogs -driven automated blog post summaries. However, my audience on Buzz is 6, despite my Gmail contact list which exceeds 250. Speaking of SNS, Orkut, Friendster and My