An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

As many of us are wont to do, I periodically perform exact match searches on my full name on various search engines. For neutrality, I use a cache- and cookie-cleared Firefox, and happen to be on OSX. The results I see from Google and Bing today, are surprisingly different. While it doesn't surprise me that Google prioritizes its own sites (of which blogspot is one), the Dogear and Lotus presence are listed in the top SERP, which is a bit surprising, considering how old they are. Bing, on the other hand, doesn't show any of my employer-hosted pages, not just in the top set of results, but anywhere in the 45 listings it provides. Google also claims there are "about 476" hits for my name in double quotes - that's more than ten times the number acknowledged by Bing. Also, due to a combination of its emphasis on Facebook matches and my high security settings, 4 of the Bing hits are of someone eponymous to me, whereas only 2 of Google's points to that same p...

In the early days of the world wide web, most links to external sites were, in my opinion, "legitimate" rather than contrived. My first site dated back to 1994, and consisted of a landing page along with some samples of my academic writing. Back then, besides having no Wikipedia (but a plethora of Usenet newsgroups to refer to), I was able to mainly browse and select what I considered to be quality sites to which to link, and I gave no thought to soliciting inbound links from those destinations. Something that I recall about Japanese sites before the turn of the millennium, is that the cultural concept of " giri " was being commonly applied to making links mutual, and more interestingly, that authors of content gave explicit permission to have their content linked to by strangers, with the proper etiquette that when one created an external link, the owner(s) of the destination page would be notified. Now, most SEO blogs and resources speak of the painstaking ro...

My employer formally arrived at corporate values, several years ago. I actually am not just in agreement, but strongly supportive of these values, fortunately perhaps. One of them is "trust and personal responsibility in all relationships" - and I believe that aligns well with the secular humanist school, to which I ascribe. Growing up as a visible minority in a culturally diverse environment, I recall how often classmates and their parents alike, had pre-conceived notions - what I'd call mainly prejudicial assumptions - of what values I may espouse, all based on my parents' heritage (and statistically, I was more likely to be Chinese, so was often mistaken to be one). What they didn't seem to consider, though, was that my parents had clearly had to have fundamentally rejected some of the strongest values supposedly held by the Japanese: conformity (at least outwardly) and avoiding familial shame, in order to embrace a Westernized country, and become immigrant...

I have a love-hate relationship with Infographics. For those who haven't seen many examples, they're concise sources of information presented with plenty of visual aids. Here's a source of a self-referential infographic, followed by 49 great examples. I love them, because my first language uses a logographic script, kanji , and as I grew up with manga , I'd always known that practically any subject, ranging from history to arithmetic and even abstract concepts such as those covered in philosophy, could be learned via a mix of graphics and text. As an aside, when I mention manga to non- Otaku , invariably I receive two questions: "Aren't comics for kids?" (Answer: not in Japan - there, manga exists for every age and demographic.) And, "What subjects do non-kid manga cover then?" (Answer: what do you think "novels" cover?) However, the concise presentation of information found in many cases also reminds me of "executive summarie...

Casting my mind back to (well) over a decade ago, I still remember being taught some principles of short essay writing: The title should reflect the primary topic. As with well-formed markup language (HTML, XML), the opening and closing sentences should summarize the topic, assertion or opinion.  Each of the middle paragraphs should cover interrelated ideas that expound upon the main topic, and be ordered logically, building upon the prior paragraph. Boldface and italics can emphasize important points, though they should be used sparingly. In looking at Google's algorithm for keyword density and prominence factors, we see that they seem to expect these exact best practices in every web page in order to determine what the topic is for said page: The <title> and <h1> tags should contain the primary keyword - the prominence is also dependent upon overall length of the text strings, and the position in which it occurs. The keyword should occur in the first and closi...

A few years ago, I met a director-level gentleman whom I consider to be quite maverick and not too politically correct, from what I'll call "Geography A". He was known for his habit of opening meetings by saying the following, where I've omitted the nationalities: [Geography A], speak up. [Geography B]. shut up and listen up. Although I can't really feel comfortable saying this myself, I did understand his viewpoint. Behaviourally speaking, I have found that one's experience in school influences how one conduct him/herself in the workplace. Personally, I am mainly a product of the Canadian education system, which akin to the American, emphasized in-class participation ("speaking up" in discussions). However, I also have exposure to the Japanese schooling mindset albeit in a distorted fashion: there, as in what my past colleagues (as well as spouse) describe as the Irish system, classrooms remained predominantly silent except for the teacher's v...

I've seen my share of enigmatic meeting minutes, which usually consist of enumerating topic headings that may or may not be attributed to the speaker(s) involved. I'd always believed that the purpose of minutes was to accurately and thoroughly capture the proceedings of meetings such that those absent could, at minimum, understand the salient points of what transpired. Thus it surprises me to see examples that read like cue cards where, clearly, one had to be there to even get an inkling (to have the slightest clue) of what the meeting was about. Here are my best practice suggestions, therefore, to create minutes that are indeed useful and worth sending to others: Take notes that will jog your own memory, while others are speaking. Specific techniques would vary by individual; I usually take full sentence quotes because I'm able to type quickly enough. While taking the rough notes, focus on action items, decisions, or points that pertain to any subsequent meeting...

I have found  a site  that contained a quote that I agree with:  Search engine optimization is just a means to help distribute your message. Nothing more, nothing less. Calling search engine optimization unethical is similar to calling creating a website or printing a newspaper unethical. When I started in the Web Effectiveness role just over a year ago, the concept of white and black hat practices also became part of my consciousness. The Wikipedia article  on white vs. black hat also mentions the existence of grey hat techniques, which implies that instead of a dichotomy, there in fact exists a continuum of optimizing measures, where web pages can be boosted in SERP (search engine result page) rankings. This leads me to believe that there is no such thing as pure white or black practices in SEO, only shades of grey . Search engine ranking algorithms are not just multi-layered and complicated, but also ever changing. I would describe black hat practices as not so...

One of my blog followers was kind enough to mention to me that my inaugural post had helped someone to execute telephone based communication more effectively (in the context of charity fundraising). Which is why I've decided to make a few more observations about communicating with others in a formal setting (be they virtual or in person). While in school, which was now long enough ago that I'm hoping many of my then-teachers have retired and forgotten about me and thus wouldn't seek this blog out, I began to implement a "planted questions" technique. I chose peers who were typically quieter in the classroom, and requested that they ask me pre-defined questions whenever I had a presentation to make. Since I had control over these questions and thus my responses, this technique killed several proverbial birds with one stone: I would seem better prepared to handle the Q&A part of the work, my classmates would speak up and improve their participation rating, a...

One of my numerous, albeit fairly minor, peeves concerns when someone who "has the floor" (for the non-native English speakers, this equates to "is in the position to be speaking" or "is commanding the audience's attention") chooses to use interjections in a noticeably frequent way. It's a technique we often use to buy thinking time, rather than pausing long enough to fully formulate sentences prior to delivering them. A couple of common ones in my experience are "at this point in time" instead of just saying "now" and "you know". The second example is one I've used on occasion (much to my chagrin), usually when trying to rephrase a point to be made. In German, it seems that the equivalent phrase I hear most often is a  translation of the Latin "id est" or "i.e."; " das heißt" . Another one I used to hear discomfitingly frequently was "to be perfectly honest with you". Af...

Something which by now may have become apparent to my colleagues and friends alike, is that in personal writing I gravitate toward long and complicated sentences. The formality of my writing has also been remarked upon by more than one friend. On the other hand, I also try to optimize diction: that is, I have an old habit of attempting to use whatever word I believe is most appropriate, regardless of how rarely one might hear it. In my Japanese language post from May, I had mentioned that I experience a constant struggle to maintain linguistic competence. In fact, it seems self evident that disuse leads to atrophy in many situations, be they physical (musculature), neural (pathways to access memories) or otherwise. With tweeting, the stringent limit on message length means I struggle with the inevitable prevalence of abbreviations and  (in that case, &) initialisms - and rarely, acronyms - far more in English than I do in Japanese. However, in the latter tongue I clearly ...

When I moved countries, my role focussed on (though it wasn't strictly limited to) managing the web personalization ( p13n ) programme for my employer. This meant that there was pre-existing tooling that I had to promote to various internal adopters and webmasters, along with some supervisory work to maintain data. The succinct slogan I created to describe the aim of the programme was the following: To present the right content to the right audience at the right time. For various reasons, as of last year I joined the ranks of those already involved in what we call "Web Effectiveness" work. Here, usability and organic SEO are the main topics (with a side order of paid search optimization). It occurs to me that, in fact, that p13n slogan that I'd created can directly be applied to what I'm still doing. Sure, the tooling is different, and my stakeholders are also different. But there, the dissimilarities end. My team essentially helps web content owners to op...

That's right folks - localizing text, in particular marketing and promotional copy, is not simply a matter of finding a competent translator who has native fluency in both source and target languages. And I'm sure many of my readers already knew that. So why mention it here? Because I've entered the land of SEO, particularly in the context of a multinational company where most localization starts with a central (and usually English language) source which is then adopted by a subset of our countries. An organically search engine optimized English web page will not be automatically optimized in the localized version. In other words, having the most effective keywords determined for the source language cannot and will not absolve the page owner of the localized version of ensuring that someone performs keyword research for this content. To delve further into the best practices of text localization, I've found that it involves a profound knowledge of how one can reali...