Posts

How I syndicate web content

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Like most individuals who are working on establishing an online presence, I have multiple SNSs (social networking services) on which I wish to share content. The four main services that I use currently, along with my audience demographics are as follows: Twitter : mostly topics of professional interest or music, and breaking news, scientific articles and alma mater related newsbits. My twitter follower audience is still small and largely impersonal, which encourages me to be mindful that tweets may be mined publicly by anyone. Google+ : add to my preferred Twitter topics, photos that I've begun to upload to Picasaweb, which is primarily Vienna-related. On + my audience is academic and more professionally allied than on Facebook, with very little overlap. Facebook (The link to my FB profile is not publicly available, which was my deliberate choice): most of the above, plus the occasional "true status" - things on my mind that only actual friends would find of slight int

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Trying out Technorati (claim code)

Their FAQ advises against using redirects, so this may not work - nonetheless, here it is: M467DDBXQN92 I may need to re-claim with my actual domain URL.

Criteria for "quality" from Bing/Yahoo!'s perspectives

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About a month ago, Searchenginejournal.com published this article on things that Bing have disclosed that they penalize web content for from a ranking perspective. Most of the points they made concerned concision, but the final point on actively discouraging machine-translated text caught my eye. I'd posted in the past about how translation did not equate to localization , so I was rather pleased to imagine that someone was incorporating grammar and spelling checks into the ranking algorithm. However, I also have the following questions: Do they verify that the language attribute found in the HTML matches the body text language that people read? If the language is a distinct flavour, such as English as spoken in India or the Kansai dialect of Japan, is that taken into account during the linguistic quality assessment? Do they penalize on slang, profanities or "text-speak" orthography, or will they process them accurately and take that into account in evaluating the

The benefits of trunk.ly

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Some months ago my team lead had mentioned trunk.ly to me. It's a social bookmarking service that aggregates links that the user has shared out via various social media services. As I often try to share web content that I find interesting but rarely spend the time either completing an in-depth perusal of said content, I've found the cumulative archive of what I've been tweeting and publishing via Google+/Buzz and Facebook to be most useful. At the least, it spares me the effort of maintaining browser-specific bookmarks and trawling through my Facebook profile export or tweet history. LinkedIn shares are also supported, but due to the way I cross-publish, I haven't bothered to use it. Furthermore, trunk.ly has a Top SEO Experts group , which I was able to join. Through it I can find not only the most up to date content that benefits me in my current role, but I can see via the number of shares, how popular or vetted the links have been. Now, if only I had the tim

Observations about Twitter hashtags

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I've been spending more time on Twitter lately, and wanted to note two things I've gleaned, rather unscientifically. First, about tweeting topics (or trending hashtags) and culture. In Japan, many trending topics and/or hashtags encourage sharing of personal information, and moreso of interaction between twitter users. Some examples from the last few days are: "how I came to start tweeting" and "what age would you say I am?". What seems far less prevalent thematically in Japan when compared to the other places I've been watching (French, German, Irish, American), are people (celebrities, sports figures), TV shows, and states of mind. Since I don't keep abreast of most entertainment news, and think twice before presenting too many of my rants for public consumption, I'm finding it easier to participate in incorporating the Japanese themes into my tweets, than the Western ones. Second, a tale of two anniversaries and twitter strategies: MIT15

iOS vs Android users - commentary on an infographic

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A former manager of mine shared this infographic on LinkedIn the other day, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the findings it presents. First, it mentions that Android users mainly fit the 18-34 age bracket, which really seems to explain many of the other traits they're more likely to have. Specifically, the survey results reveal that Android users tend to have started using the internet around or after 2000, their incomes tend to be (significantly) lower than iOS users, they're not as well-traveled, and they tend to hold fewer educational qualifications. From the combination of these I suspect that the large portion of the sampled Android users simply haven't completed their undergraduate work yet. Next, let's look at the gender skew -more men than women typically use Android. There's a well-touted gender correlation with math and perhaps stereotypically, with meat-heavy food preferences. Although having said that, anecdotally within my local team, there a