Yacy: Web Search by the People, for the People
A press release by Yacy.net, a new, decentralized, open-source search engine has caused some buzz among SEO experts in the search engine world. It’s way, way, way too early to be any threat to Google, but it’s introduction brings up some interesting points, some well made in an article about Yacy in memeburn.com.
The new search engine is a peer-to-peer network. Although you can use the search engine without downloading the software that makes your computer one of the peers in the network, it works better if you download the software. In the article they make the point that Google’s early success was due to adoption by IT Professionals (geeks) who introduced it to the less tech savvy. Now, they point out, ‘Google’s rise to world dominance in the search market, its advertising-oriented business model and its history of collecting user data are slowly pushing it from geeky favor.’ Enter Yacy.
There are a lot of things that make this new search model appealing to Geeks. It is decentralized and open source. The Peer-to-Peer model makes it infinitely scalable if its popularity grew. There is a downside, in that by becoming a peer it could conceivably use resources, both disk space and bandwidth, on your computer. Right now the controls on how much of your resources it could potentially use are not as strong as they need to be, but they are working on that.
But are there things about it that make it appealing to the typical user? Probably not right now. Maybe the appeal to the geeks among us, besides being based in the technical reasons, is also based in a growing mistrust of multi-billion dollar corporations. Corporations that are making their fortunes in trading and selling our personal data that they collect freely in exchange for the use of their ‘free’ product. If that mistrust is growing in the geek population, will it spread to the general population? If it does, it’s nice to know there is a decentralized, scalable, open-source, peer-to-peer model for search, waiting in the wings. Maybe just its presence can keep Google a little more honest in privacy matters than it might otherwise be. So the answer to the question of whether or not Yacy could appeal to the typical user is currently no. But if Google gives it’s users a reason, that could change, and change quickly. It’s nice to know the geeks among us are working on a backup plan. Any tech company that thinks they are too big to fail, too entrenched in the culture to ever go away, should go talk to (what’s left of) AOL.
Is this a trend that Online Presence Managers need to keep an eye on? Let me know what you think. You can read more about Yacy at yacy.net or try out their search at search.yacy.net.
Online Presence Management, Part 5 of 11: Directory Listing
In this fifth part of my eleven part series on Online Presence Management I am going to discuss the next step to consider once you decide to take control of managing your online presence, Directory Listing.
Getting listed in all relevant directories is critical to being found. Getting listed in various directories, and making sure that your website is linked to correctly from those directories actually serves two purposes. You can be found by people using those particular directories, but also links from those websites can improve your search engine ranking. Directories that you want to be found in and linked to from fall into three different categories. Those categories are:
- Search Engine Directories
- Web Based Business Directories
- Local Neighborhood Organizations or Professional Groups
Search Engine Directories
Since all search now has a local component, it is important to make sure that your website is correctly registered in Google and Bing’s local business listings. Search results in these search engines are location based, and being correctly registered geographically is critical to being found by local searchers for your goods or services. Both Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools allow you to manage all of the information and links for your business, and make sure they are accurate and up to date.
Web Based Business Directories
This also includes being listed in all online business directories where people may find you online. This includes all yellow-paged base sites like yellowpages.com, superpages.com and yellowbook.com.
There are also other internet based business directory sites on which you should consider being listed. Some of these sites are free to be listed, many charge to be listed. Here is a good list of the top 40 Web Directories based on inbound link quality.
Local Neighborhood Organizations or Professional Groups
It is also important to maintain current registration in all neighborhood organizations, professional groups, or any business organizations that are relevant to your business. These are going to vary widely depending on the type of business and the community you live in. It is important to spend some time researching any organizations that your business can become a member of, especially organizations that have websites with directories of their membership. You should also research any niche search engine, for example Lawyers.com for the legal profession. These registrations are important for two reasons. First, searches may find you if they happen to find the listings of that organization. Second, the linking to your site by theses other sites provides valuable back links that will give your site credibility, and thus higher ranking, with search engines.
Online Presence Management, Part 4 of 11: Search Engine Optimization
In this fourth part of my eleven part series on Online Presence Management I am going to discuss the next step to consider once you decide to take control of managing your online presence, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is not the only component of a successful online presence, but it is one of the more important, and is often the measuring stick of how successful all the components of your Online Presence Management (OPM) are working. Many of the other components of a successful online presence, such as adding a blog to engage users, will ultimately result in a better search engine ranking.
Search Engine Optimization is a process of refining, measuring, and repeating the process. It is not actions that can be taken overnight with instantaneous results. Beware of anyone who says that it can be done that way. Google has published a great introductory guide, the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
The basic steps in search engine optimization of your web site are:
- Market Research
- Define Key Phrases
- Site Structure
- Web Site Optimization
- Search Engine Submission
- Monitor Search Engine Rankings
- Link Building
Market Research
Before getting started in optimizing your website, it is time well spent to see what others in your market are doing. Think of a few simple key phrases that you would use to search for your website, and see who comes up in the search results. See what their websites look like. These are going to be your competitors. There are some tools to see what they are doing in a little more detail. SEO Tools for Firefox is a set of extensions that you should download and add to you Firefox browser. (Download the Firefox browser, too, if you haven’t already). These tools give you a lot of valuable SEO information for every page you visit. Things like site age, Google PageRank, inbound link count, major directories they are listed in, and if bloggers link to their sites are all reported in a tool bar for every web page that you visit. You can use this tool to see what your competitors are doing, and later to monitor your progress on your web site.
Define Key Phrases
This is probably the most important step in the SEO process. You want your key phrases to be an educated guess at what users who are looking for your business would key into a search engine. You should start by brainstorming a list of all possible things that you can think of that someone may type into a search engine if they were looking for you. One tool that can help in this phase is the SEOBook Keyword Research Tool. Once you have made an exhaustive list, you will probably have 50 or more phrases that could potentially be typed in by someone looking for you. At this point you need to do a little research on those phrases. Using Google’s Keyword Grader Tool, you can now begin to research the key phrases. The keyword grader tool will tell you how many times a month each phrase is keyed in to Google. Key phrases with very high numbers of queries per month are known as ‘short tail’ keywords. They will be harder to win, but will return greater traffic. More specific phrases with lower counts of queries per months are referred to as ‘long tail’ keywords. They will be easier to win but will return less traffic. When selecting the keywords you are going to target, you should have a mix of long tail and short tail keywords. If you pick all of the toughest short tail keywords, you may not be able to crack onto the first page for any of the terms for a while. You should narrow your list of key phrases down to 5-10 key phrases that you are going to target on your web site. Put those keywords in an excel spreadsheet or word document, because you should be referring back to them often.
Site Structure
Evaluate your site structure with your selected key phrases. Your site structure, including URL’s, folder names, and page titles should be evaluated. Determine which pages should be associated with which keywords. Once you’ve determined which pages are associated with which key phrases, the phrases should be uses in folder names, URLS, and page titles whenever possible. Your newly selected keywords should be reflected as much as possible into the structure of your site. You need to make sure that all pages in your site are linked to by at least one other page on your site. You should also make sure that you are using consistent anchor text in all links within your site, and whenever possible, use key phrases as the anchor text for links on your site.
Web Site Optimization
Once you have selected the keywords that you wish to rank for, you must now make sure those keywords appear in the places on your website where Google looks for clues about what your web site is about. The Page title is the first place keywords should be used. The actual content of your web page should be written for your audience, but there some things that you should keep in mind about how the content is structured. Google recognizes certain cues when scanning content. You should make sure that your content is well structured, using headers (H1 tags) for titles, subtitles (H2) and body tags. Google recognizes these when trying to classify content. The Meta Description tag is not a factor in search engine ranking, but will probably be used as the short 25 word description that Google returns when you page is listed in results. Fill out the Meta Description accordingly, with all pertinent information that you want someone viewing the search results to see located in the first 25 characters of the Meta Description.
Search Engine Submission
Once your site has been optimized, it is time to let the search engine know you are ready for them. If your site is new or if you have made changes (like optimizing) you can submit your site to the search engines to be crawled.
Monitor Search Engine Rankings- Once your site has been optimized you need a tool for ongoing monitoring and recording of the performance of your selected keywords in the search engines. The objective in monitoring is to track the performance over time of your web site for all of your key phrases across the major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. There are various tools for performing this type of monitoring. Paid services like SEO Power Suite, SEOMoz.org, and webCEO.com can do a lot of the legwork for you and make monitoring you search engine rankings, as well as the search engine rankings of your competitors, an automated task. There are also free tools that, with a little more effort on your part, allow you to compile some of the same statistics. Two examples of free tools are mikes-marketing-tools.com and webseoanalytics.com.
Link Building- This is sometimes referred to as ‘off page optimization’. You can begin building links to your sites by submitting them to directories that link back to your site. Other link building strategies include:
- Submit your site to general directories like DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com. Here is a list of the top directories.
- Submit your site to relevant local sites like the local chamber of commerce and niche directories related to your business or location
- Join local or national trade organizations and make sure they have up to date information and links to your site
- Create content people are more likely to link to
In conclusion, Search Engine Optimization is a process. You must evaluate your competition, select key phrases that are important to your business, optimize your website for those phrases, monitor your search results, and perform link building activities. The ongoing process of SEO requires continuous monitoring, refinement, and optimization. Building strong search engine results is a continuous process. It can’t be accomplished overnight. Be wary of anyone who says it can.
Online Presence Management, Part 3 of 11: Website Audit
In this third part of my eleven part series on Online Presence Management I am going to discuss the next step to consider once you decide to take control of managing your online presence, a website audit.
A website audit is a comprehensive review of your existing website for all of the technical factors that affect how search engines see your website, as well as other factors that affect your optimization of your website. Search engines routinely use ‘robots’ to spider through your website. That is how they build the complex indices of data that are used to return search engine results. These ‘robots’ expect certain practices to be used and certain structures to exist to be able to find and accurately index all of the pages of your site. Meeting all of their criteria is the first step to being found, and the first step toward search engine optimization, which we will discuss in more detail in a later post.
There are many technical factors that can negatively impact how a search engine crawls and sees your website:
- Broken links
- Un-indexed web pages
- Duplicate content
- HTML code errors
- 404 and other server response code errors
- Titles and meta descriptions that are too long or missing
There are automated tools that can perform a lot of the steps in a website audit. There are also many resources that provide excellent guides or checklists to performing a site audit. SEOMoz.org, a leading search engine optimization website, has a website audit checklist. SearchEnginePeople.com has a 5-minute website audit checklist. SearchEngineJournal.com has a 20 minute (or less) website audit. SearchEngineLand.com has How to Improve Organic Search Results with a Simple Site Audit.
As a means of understanding the process, let’s look at the major components of a site audit. Remember that your main goal in the website audit is seeing how search engines see your site, and making sure that your website is technically sound that search engines accurately and thoroughly index all of the content on your site.
Check the pages that Google currently indexes
Google provides a means to show you the pages that it has indexed for your site. Go to Google.com, and type “site: www.yoursite.com” in the search box. The number of search results returned is the number of pages Google has indexed. You can then use Google Webmaster Tools to also get a count of indexed pages. These results should be similar, or this is a potential red flag that you have an indexing problem, such as duplicate content or pages that did not get spidered by the Google robot.
Check your sites XML sitemap file
Every website should have an XML sitemap. There are many tools available for creating a sitemap. You can then use Google’s Webmaster Tools to make sure that Google has found and indexed your sitemap, so that the indexing and spidering of your site is as complete as it can be. You can directly submit the location of the sitemap for your site to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. Compare your sitemap to the indexing results from the Google “site:www.yoursite.com” results in the previous step to make sure they are similar, and that they both accurately reflect all of the content of your site.
Check your sites Robots.txt file
The Robots.txt file is file that allows you to provide explicit instructions to Google’s robot on how to crawl your site, specifically which pages of your site not to crawl. Make sure your robots.txt file hasn’t inadvertently blocked the crawling of content that should be crawled. Google Webmaster Tools has a built-in robots.txt checker in the Crawler Access section under Site Configuration.
Walk through the site like a user, checking the links and the flow
Step through the site follow the hierarch of the site. Is the site easy to follow? Is the flow logical? Do the internal links easily and logically guide you to all of the available content? The more logical the structure, the better it is for users as well as search engines.
Use a tool to walk through the site like a search engine
There are tools available in Google webmaster tools, and other tools like SEO Browser that allow you to see your pages the way a search engine spider does. Walk through your site with the tools. Are the links crawlable? Is important content visible? The walk through with a tool should be very similar to your walk through with a tool, or there could be a potential problem in how the site is indexed.
Check the content of your site
The content on each page needs to be as unique and thorough as possible. Check for duplicate content across pages. Check that all non-www pages redirect to www version of the pages. Check the amount of content on the page. Too many pages with just links and images are seen as low-quality to the search engines. Check for too much template driven content. If your site is template drive, each page should be customized as much as possible. Duplicate template generated content is also seen as low quality content.
Check the title tags and H1 tags and meta descriptions
Check for missing title tags, duplicate title tags, and missing or duplicate meta descriptions. Google Webmaster Tools provides an automated tool for doing this in the Diagnostics, section. Duplicate title tags can lead to “keyword cannibalization” where pages on your site are competing for ranking on the same search term. Make sure that your keywords are the first words in the title tag and H1 tag. Don’t use your company name to lead off.
Check your sites redirects
It is import that an optimized site redirects requests using a 301 redirect. For example, http://yoursite.com needs to be redirected to http://www.yoursite.com. There are tools to allow you to check those redirects. A tool like Live HTTP Headers will allow you to check the redirects to make sure they are 301 redirects.
A website audit is the first step in make your site search engine friendly. Following the guidelines here will make help you make sure that your site is doing everything technically so that it will be successfully crawled and indexed by search engines.
Google+ and Your Online Presence
If you are a business owner who realizes how important your online presence is to your success, you have probably wondered how social media fits into your online presence management strategy. A lot of business owners react to things they hear. They hear a lot about Facebook, so they think “We need a Facebook page”. They hear about Twitter, so they think their company needs to “Tweet”. The truth is, not every business will benefit from engagement with social media. B2B businesses, for example, will probably only see limited success with any social media campaign.
Once you or your SEO Expert has decided that you can benefit from a social media campaign, decide what the goals of the campaign will be. Then it’s time to decide which social media platform can deliver the results you need to reach those goals. The main platforms for engaging potential customers socially were Facebook and Twitter. The emerging platform is Google+. Google+ recently added the ability to set up business pages. Google+ has struggled, and whether or not it will ever grow to challenge Facebook is a topic that I don’t intend to debate here. I’m just going to say that given Google’s resources and apparent commitment to a social media platform, I wouldn’t bet against them. That being said, a recent article in WebProNews gave some very compelling arguments on why a business page on Google+ is so important, and could be increasingly important going forward.
The main points made in the article are:
- Google likes to rank its own stuff first when it’s relevant.
- Google has hinted that it doesn’t want to rank social media unless there is a signal as to the authority of the author – Google does not index content from Facebook or Twitter.
- Google likes ‘Freshness’ and has added a ‘Trending Topics’ to Google+.
- Google has shown preference to its own properties like YouTube in rankings returned.
- Google does seem to index Google+ Content, and return it in the results, typically on the first page.
Few of those points can be disputed. When you look at those points, you would have to conclude that eventually Google intends for Google+ to be the most authoritative platform for social media, and the only social media platform that can directly benefit you search engine results.
As you consider social media platforms, Google+ may not be the place where you are going to reach the most people. It could be the place where you are going to get the most bang for your buck, in that it could solidify your online presence with Google and give you a stronger search engine ranking.
If you are considering using social media as part of your Online Presence Management strategy, and one of the goals of that strategy is better search engine ranking, you should probably consider Google+ as a platform where you need to be.
Online This Week: Nov. 18, 2011
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Nov. 14-Nov. 18, 2011
Google gives a rare glimpse behind the curtain – On Monday, in its Inside Search Blog, Google released a list of ten algorithmic changes that they had made over the last couple of weeks. They stated that they were “always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500 changes we make to search in a given year” ……Wow, If only that were true, SEO consultants everywhere would be dancing in the streets. The changes announced are not that significant, but hopefully this signals a growing trend for Google to be a little more forthcoming about their inner workings. Anyway, here’s the list of ten items from their blog and a review in WebProNews.
Kindle Fire shipped – The Kindle Fire, which was scheduled to be released and shipped to the huge numbers of customers who had pre-ordered them on Tuesday, actually shipped a day early on Monday. The debate began, is this the people’s tablet? is this an iPad killer? Here’s a summary of some early Kindle Fire reviews from Business Insider. A Wired magazine interview and article titled Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think gives some insight into Amazons long term strategy and how the Fire fits into that picture. That strategy is not to be an iPad killer, but to be a shopping and content delivery medium for the masses. The ‘iPad killer’ question is debatable, but as a shopping and content delivery device, there really is no question that it delivers.
Facebook tracking under scrutiny – In the tech world, Facebook tracking has always been under scrutiny. What makes this story noteworthy is where it appeared, as a lead story Wednesday in the Life section of USA Today. This was not buried in some tech niche publication. It was splashed across USA Today, with big, colorful info graphics, the kind that can scare people who had never heard of a computer’s cookies before. Are Americans beginning to wake up and realize they’ve been passively surrendering too much of their personal information to a giant corporation that is profiting hugely from it? Probably not, but this might be a baby step in that direction.
Facebook porn-and-gore exploit spiraling out of control – In other ‘it was a bad week for Facebook’ news’, a coordinated hacker attack caused hardcore pornographic images and gory violent images to begin filling the feeds of people who had clicked on a spammed rich media message. The hack exploited a security problem in the timeline feature that facebook had recently added. On Monday, ZDNet reported the attack was spiraling out of control. Facebook eventually acknowledged the problem, provided a tutorial on cleaning up the mess if you were involved and said they had taken steps to correct it. CNN reported Wednesday that Facebook said most porn had been removed.
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – The debate over this bill in congress heated up the internet this week. The bill is intended to prevent piracy and copyright infringement. The problem is in its vague wording and the fact that it gives the Attorney General the power to blacklist websites and have them removed from Google. The appeal process to such an action is weak and limited to a 5 day time period. This raises huge censorship red flags and caused an outcry and massive email your congressman campaigns across the internet this week. Then AOL, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook signed a joint letter to congress opposing it. To read more about SOPA and find out what you can do to help defeat this legislation, there is a summary of SOPA at WebProNews.
Take this lollipop – a website that you log into with your face book credentials. It then incorporates screen shots of your facebook data into a video. Not just any video, but a creepy video of your worst nightmare of what could happen if some creepy dude got access to your facebook credentials and stalked you. Go to www.takethislollipop.com and log in with your facebook credentials, if you dare. Hopefully it will make you think next time before you use facebook to log into a questionable website.
Online Presence Management, Part 2 of 11: Business Goal Refinement
Every business has an online presence. Managing that online presence to actually generate new business has become an increasingly more complex task. But with the increasing complexity comes greater opportunity.
In this second part of my series on Online Presence Management I am going to discuss one of the first steps you should take when you decide to take control of managing your online presence, business goal refinement.
The success or failure of your online presence is ultimately going to be measured by meeting some business goal. What is this goal for your business? Increase brand recognition? Generate Leads? Increase Membership? Make Sales? Generate Revenue? The first step in managing your online presences is to define one or more quantifiable business goals for your online presence. The goals should be business related, as opposed to internet focused. Ranking #1 on Google for key search terms is a goal, and it is quantifiable, but it is internet focused as opposed to business focused. It may help you reach your goal, but it is not your ultimate business related goal. A strong vision of what you hope to accomplish with your online presence is important in guiding your priorities when deciding where your money and effort can best be spent. Without a clear business goal, it is often easy to get caught up in creating a strong online presence that may make a good pitch, but just can’t close the deal.
The business goal for your online presence is probably closely related to the core goal of any business, making money. This is where the refinement comes in. You need to refine ‘making money’ down to one of its business components that is critical to your success. To be able to measure the success or failure of your online presence management efforts you need to define specific, quantifiable, and easily measured business goals. Your return on investment (ROI) for money spent in developing your online presence should only be calculated in terms of how well you meet those goals. It is not enough to say you want a strong online presence that makes you money. You need to say ‘I want to strengthen my online presence so that I generate 300 new sales leads a month from my website alone’ or or ‘I want to get 200 phone calls requesting more information’ or ‘I want to generate 100 direct website sales per month’ or ‘I want to generate 50 new customers a month’.
Before moving forward, take the time to define a clear, specific goal that is quantifiable and easily measured. Having a goal will make all of the questions that come with managing your online presence easier to answer. A clear business goal can keep you focused, and help you move towards meeting that goal in the most effective way possible. Pick a prize, and it will be easier to keep your eyes on the prize as you manage your online presence.
Online Presence Management: An Overview (Part 1 of 11)
Every business has an online presence. Managing that online presence to actually generate new business has become an increasingly more complex task. But with the increasing complexity comes greater opportunity. The rise of social media, the increasing use of reputation and review sites, and the constant refinement of search engines all mean that you can more effectively find the people who are looking for you and more effectively put your best foot forward to those people. Inbound marketing to people already looking for you is much more effective than old school outbound marketing, or forcing your message out to anyone who you can force to listen.
Effective Online Presence Management now requires the intelligent application of technology, psychology, marketing, business and strategy. To business owners trying to make sense of this evolving field, it can be quite confusing. Some of this confusion stems from the fact that there are many components that contribute to your online presence. You may have seen a business journal with an article about social media and its use in business, or an article about Search Engine Optimization, or blogging as a means for engaging customers. Most of these articles address the subject they are talking about as the most important part of managing your online presence. You need to remember that each is just a piece of the puzzle. There are many pieces to the puzzle when it comes to creating and managing a successful online presence.
To give you a framework within which to begin thinking about managing your online presence, the following is a list of some of the many things you need to think about doing or managing to have an effective online presence. Over the coming weeks, I will have a blog post that goes into a more detailed look at each component. Today’s blog post is an overview of the topics and components we will be examining in more detail in the coming weeks.
Components of Managing a Successful Online Presence
Business Goal Refinement – The first step in managing your online presences is to define quantifiable business goals for your online presence. The goals should be business related, as opposed to internet focused. For example: increase brand recognition and awareness, generate sales leads, produce sales and generate revenue.
Website Audit – A website audit is a review of your existing website. It is a process in which your website is examined in technical detail to determine how well it meets standards that can determine search engine ranking success.
Search Engine Optimization – Doing everything you can to make sure your web site is found by people searching for you.
Directory Listing – Making sure you are registered and current in all relevant online business directories, including Google and Bing’s local business listings, as well as all the other directories linke yellowpages,com, merchantcircle.com, etc.
Content Creation – How constantly creating new content in blog form or video form can help engage visitors as well as improve your search engine rankings.
Social Media Strategy – Evaluate if social media can be used to target your potential customers. Then create business goals relating to your social media campaign. Implement a successful social media campaign. Monitor the social media conversation involving your business.
Analytics – Tools to monitor the progress of SEO, social media, website traffic, etc.
Reputation Management – Monitoring review, reputation and rating sites to make sure you are fairly evaluated, and containing any negative reviews that may exist.
Pay-Per-Click marketing – Using targeted paid advertising to generate leads and website traffic.
Press Release Distribution- Using online press release distribution channels to generate buzz and/or website traffic when noteworthy things occur in your business.
Kindle Fire is Here
On September 28th Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s full color entry into the tablet computing market. After a month and a half of speculation and hype the new Kindles shipped yesterday, a day ahead of schedule. The hype included stories that reported the Kindle Fire had pre-launch demand numbers higher than the pre-launch demand numbers for the iPad, and analysts estimates that Amazon was losing $50 on every Kindle Fire sold. The reports by October 5th were that Pre-orders for the Kindle Fire had reached 50,000 per day.
This week, reviewers finally got their hands on the Kindle Fire, and the reviews seemed to be mixed, but mostly positive. Most of the reviews that were negative seemed to be when they compared the Kindle fire to the iPad, which hardly seems fair when the iPad still has a $499 price, while the Kindle Fire has a $199 price. Here’s a good summary of the reviews of the Kindle Fire from Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired, and Mashable.
To step back from the hype that is trying to position the Kindle Fire as an “iPad Killer”, you need to think about what Amazon is trying to accomplish with the Kindle Fire. Are they trying to challenge the iPad? If they were, wouldn’t they have made a larger device, raised their price point a little and tried to compete head on? Apples core business is hardware sales. Amazons core business is content. Their goal was to develop a content delivery tablet for the masses, which will then give them a delivery medium for their core business, selling content. If the price point for the Kindle Fire allows them to put the device in millions of hands that will then begin purchasing content, do they even care how it stacks up against an iPad?
While everyone else gets caught up in the hype and the inevitable iPad comparisons, check out this interview in Wired Magazine, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think. It lays out Jeff Bezos’ post-PC vision of the web, and how it is different than Apples vision.
I just received my Own Kindle Fire and have been playing with it for a couple of hours. Initial impressions? It’s like a little slice of an iPad. If you were used to using an iPad, it may seem small. I’ve used an iPad, but I don’t own one, and so to me it seems big enough for what it does. Web sites looked good. I emailed a word document to my new kindle email address and was able to view it. It came pre-registered with my Amazon account and credit card info, so I had purchased a book within 15 minutes of unpacking it, which is< I believe, the whole idea. Also, I tried to load music, and found out that “free” storage in the cloud of all media really means free storage in the cloud of any media you purchase from Amazon. If I want to store my existing mp3 library of music, that would be an additional $20/year for 8 gig of space. I was able to hook the Kindle fire up to my computer and move my 1.5 gig of mp3’s directly onto the Fire, and I am able to play them, but if you have a lot of your own music or videos, don’t expect to move them all to the cloud and store them for free, and the 8 gig will be chewed up pretty quick if you have a large library of media content.
So how does the Kindle Fire stack up? As an “iPad Killer”? Maybe, maybe not, the jury is still out. As a content delivery portal to fulfill Amazon’s vision? A definite home run, no question.
Online This Week: Nov. 11, 2011
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Nov. 7-Nov. 11, 2011
Google+ added pages for businesses, brands, and products – Google+ on Monday announced new Google+ pages for businesses, fan pages, sports teams, etc. You can search directly for a page by typing “+pagename” into Google. Read the Google announcement in their blog, or what they are saying about it on searchengineland.com or on mashable.com.
Is Siri a threat to Google? A big debate this week seems to be whether or not Siri is a threat to Google. An article in Fortune on Wednesday made the case in a post titled Yes, Google, Siri is a Serious Threat. In this article he made some good points that Siri could be a front end conglomerater for search, using Google for some queries, but other niche specific search engines like Yelp for restaurants or Kayak for travel related queries. The counterpoint was taken in a businessinsider.com article yesterday entitled Sorry, But Apple’s Siri Is No Threat To Google Whatsoever. The most informative post I found was posted yesterday in techcrunch.com and was entitled Gary Morgenthaler Explains How Siri will eat Google’s Lunch. Gary Morgenthaler is a partner at the VC firm Morgenthaler Ventures, which was the first investor in Siri in 2008. In the post he explains how Google’s Eric Schmidt seemed to fear Siri in his recent congressional hearings. He also explains how Siri is different than other voice recognition like Google Voice Actions, how opening Siri’s API to third party apps could give Apple an insurmountable edge in voice control, and scenarios for future revenue streams where Siri could usurp Google’s monetization of search.
Is Amazon getting ready to take on Siri?- It was reported this week that Amazon is apparently quietly acquiring North Carolina- based YAP, a voice to text recognition technology company. Are they preparing to mount a Kindle-based challenger to SIri? Read more in businessinsider.com or here at pdfdevices.com
Adobe officially killed mobile flash – HTML 5 becomes the standard – Adobe Flash, which was never supported on iPhone or iPads, finally threw in the towel on mobile support altogether. Read more here.. Even though they claim to still be supporting flash on desktops, they also laid off 750 people this week. Read an analysis of Why Adobe failed at Techcrunch.com. Is this the beginning of the end of Flash altogether?
Firefox Released Version 8 – Firefox announced in a blog post on Tuesday the release of version 8. The new version was for Windows, Max, Linux and Android. Highlights of new features included Twitter search capabilities, better security for 3rd party add-ons, and improved WebGL functionality. Here’s what they’re saying about it on the technolog at MSNBC and in the Tech section of the Huffington Post.