Obviously there are a lot of issues to be overcome before then, but even with my cursory understanding of the issues I can think of a couple of approaches that the computer science types that I work with haven’t been able to completely shoot down.

We have a project in the shop that has to be able to tag pages so that you can do a lookup and find other related pages by comparing the tags. As simple as this sounds, it turns out that at any scale at all this can take quite a bit of computing horsepower.

So of course that got me thinking, how does Technorati keep up with a million blogs, a million different tags, and 14 Million tagged blog posts? With all of the down time that they have been having they may be struggling with the issue too.

I’ve been interested in tags, and more importantly, folksonomy since it first appeared on my radar some time last year. Wikipedia defines it thusly:

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.

This phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.

With Technorati the issue of tagging is mostly a phenomenon of users tagging their own blog posts, but the idea gets much more interesting with services like furl and Flickr. With these services users create something ( a web-page or digital photo ) and they can tag it. But I can tag it, too, as can you. With an entire community tagging things they have a much better chance of being defined correctly then if one person or entity has to define it.

Labor becomes very efficient when distributing the labor to the users tagging items, and takes advantage of a huge pool of specialized knowledge. Companies like Getty Images have employed tagging for years ( tagging all of their photos ) and it works well on the front end, but is very labor intensive. Paying dedicated taggers is not a sustainable business model when you are trying to tag everything.

While furl and del.icio.us are “bookmark managers”, and Flickr is for tagging photos, Technocrat for blogs, etc. what we need is an open, standard, architecture that allows and enables all of us to tag everything digital and provides an open framework so that everyone can take this info and develop uses for them that no one has even thought of yet.

Why do we need the suits at all any more?

Bare with me here – what if there was a distributed ( think torrent ) IP based “broadcasting” system where content creators could release their work and have people subscribe to their “channel”. If this were the case I could subscribe to the Nip Tuck feed and get to watch it each week by finding a torrent, downloading, and decrypting it with my membership key – the money would be paid to the content creators and not to FX or my cable provider.

I can see folks subscribing to the Prince channel and downloading music, concerts, video’s, etc. Prince would make more money than with traditional distribution as he would not need a record label, retail outlets, iTunes, or anyone else that would take as big a cut of his profits – and he wouldn’t have a huge bandwidth bill as the content would be distributed across all of his other subscribers hard disks. How about a Coen brothers subscription, a Kevin Smith media membership?

Of course this would take more sophisticated file sharing networks then are currently in place ( a another reason not to outlaw P2P ), as well as a centralized system for managing subscriptions, but none of this is more complicated then web services that are being written today. And there would be some costs associated with releasing the initial files and running the centralized server – but these would be negligible compared to the costs currently associated with media distribution.

And if the content creators wanted complete control they could buy a turn key solution ( or download an open source one ) and setup their own shop. As long as there was a standard in place there would be a very small barrier to entry. Couple this service with the media center pc’s and myth boxes that are starting to spring up and you have the beginnings of the convergence of tv’s and pc’s that I have been hearing about for years.

Back in the old days (the nineties) web site operators were focused on publishing information on the web that users of a site consumed. Companies chased banner ad dollars publishing articles and individuals published their home pages – and the visitors of their sites read their content and that was the end of the transaction.

These days’ bloggers use a software platform that allows them to publish content that encourages participation instead of just publishing static content. While most large companies are still publishing content as if the web was just a newspaper in a monitor most individuals are not publishing home pages these days – they are publishing blogs that allow visitors to their sites to participate.

Users can comment on stories, grab the sites RSS feed and aggregate it , write their own blog entries and track back to the original, and do a number of other participatory activities that are simply not possible with the web 1.0 read only model.

Blogs have allowed the average internet user to have a dynamic platform for publishing their information – and that platform creates innumerable uses of their published content. While a decade ago these types of platforms were well beyond the reach of individual users both in terms of cost and technology, these days it is just a simple to set up a blog as it is to publish as traditional home pages, and in many ways, much easier. Further, since the content is published through a platform and not by uploading html pages of varying quality this content has a much better chance of conforming to standards – and the data itself (think RSS) is available in a defacto standard format.

The participatory culture of blogs has lead to a phenomenon called the blogosphere which is the collective knowledge, viewpoint, and chattering of the citizen media. That is, the collective decides what the most important stories of the day are and not the suits that run the traditional, corporate news organizations.

Sites like Technorati try and collect and aggregate all of the information that is pushed out into the blogosphere and make sense of it. While these types of tools are in their infancy they are already having a large effect on the collective consciousness of Netizens. For example the blogosphere was way out ahead of traditional media on the whole Jeff Gannon / James Guckert story and even influenced the traditional media’s reporting of it.

While traditional media has a vested interest in downplaying and even ridiculing the citizen media phenomenon by asserting that bloggers are not journalists, I would suggest that neither is Paula Zahn much less the aforementioned Mr. Guckert. The blogosphere and the collective knowledge therein is an alternative to the incestuous corporate media that holds itself out as the 4^th estate. With a few notable exceptions (Lou Dobbs, PBS’ News Hour, etc.) I find that the blogosphere is much truer to the spirit of Edward R. Murrow then Judith Miller is.

Furthermore the blogosphere opens up a dialog about issues that the strictures of traditional media simply can’t allow. If a well know blogger publishes a story that is complete baloney, he is going to get called (through comments, trackbacks, other posts, etc.) on it and his reputation will be diminished. If Sean Hanity rattles of lie after lie there is no recourse. You could write to Fox News but your letter is not going to read on the air, it’s not going to be posted on their website, and Mr. Hanity is not going to address your comments.

Blogging software not only gives everyone a printing press, but it allows everyone else the ability to interact, mash up, comment on, and help disseminate the original content. More importantly all of this dynamic content comes together to create something else – something larger then the parts – and all of this data is useable by interested parties since it is published in defacto standards. While web logs are not revolutionary, the platform’s that were created initially to enable the publishing of them and the collective data that has been published with them certainly are.

WordPress says:

WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

And while that is true as far as it goes, that is far from the whole story. I would say that WordPress is what you use when you want to create a dynamic website that is standards compliant, easy to use, and relatively simple to customize. While WordPress may not be the right solution for a huge enterprise, it is more than capable of managing the vast majority of websites.

I work with some guys that have chosen Mambo as their defacto standard when setting up dynamic sites for their clients, and while Mambo is not terrible (well, not as terrible as say eZ publish for example) if you ever have to support users that are trying to navigate Mambo (or Joomla) you will quickly begin to understand that its back-end is not simple for non-techies. Moreover it spits out ugly tables in the source code – you can create a valid xhtml template for Mambo, but when the pages are rendered, they are going to have all those 90’s style nested tables in them.

In stark contrast, WP’s back-end is simple, even for web newbies to grasp and it allows them to begin running their own websites with very little instruction. And of course, WP only produces the best source code for your site.

When creating themes for WordPress powered site, you can be sure that WP is not going to spit out anything inside of your theme that is going to interfere with your commitment to web standards. If you want to know why I think a standards compliant site is important read this – but suffice to say that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. Creating sites that validate is the right way to do things, and the creators of WordPress understand this – it is at the core of their thinking.

With version 2.0, WP has introduced features like User management, which makes it suitable as a CMS and not just a blogging platform. User management works by allowing you to create different user-levels. This in turn allows you to control access to different features. For example, one user can edit content in certain areas and not others, can edit but not create a post, etc.

Since WP’s roots are in blogging, you get all of the tools associated with blogging in addition to the standard CMS tools. Features such as comments, trackbacks, pings, etc. allow your site to take advantage of all the things that blogs have been doing for years. You can read why I think that blogs are more than weblogs here.

But you say you want a website, not a blog. No problem. Instead of creating posts, you create pages. WP allows you to create web pages just like a standard website – but you get all of the advantages of having the underlying WP platform goodies. Nobody said that you have to use WordPress to publish a traditional blog with posts in reverse chronological order – use it however you want, I just suggest that you use it.

While this short article does not do WordPress justice, I hope it at least gets you thinking, and that you consider using WP for your next web project. I am using WP for all of the new sites I have published, whether or not they are blogs, and I suggest that you at least give it some consideration as well.

I think they have nailed it with Windows Live OneCare. I have been running the beta on all the PC’s here that run Windows for the last month or so and I have to say that even for beta software it is very good. They have priced it so affordably that once the beta is over I will be signing up for the paid version. The free beta version is only available for the next few days (through until April 30th, 2006), but Microsoft will be offering a promotional deal of $19.95 for the first year of service to beta users. The full subscription will cost $49.95 per year for up to 3 PCs. Compare that to Norton and you can see the benefit – and OneCare offers more then Norton Antivirus does.

Some folks argue that this should be included in the OS, and I can see why they see it that way, but the reality is that Microsoft has decided that they are going to sell it as a service – and it is a better deal then the other major security suites in my humble opinion.

With One Care you get a “comprehensive, integrated, automatic computer health service” – what that means is that Microsoft has bundled antivirus, firewall, spyware removal, back up, tune up together in one application that can help protect your computer from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, hackers, and other threats.

While some of these services are already available in SP2 once care gives users one easy to use interface to all of these serves and continually updates them. If you are one of those guys that won’t turn on automatic updates because you fear what is coming down the pipe into your system (and I am not saying that this is totally paranoid) then this service is not for you. But isn’t it cool that your mom can have one integrated security interface that automatically updates itself and saves you a call because she did not get the Win32/Mywife.E@mm worm?

I have put One Care through the ringer on a test machine and it seems to function as well as Norton at turning up malicious threats and the firewall works at least as well as ZoneAlarm. The backup feature is actually useful; I backed up my main PC to the file server and restored individual files with very little difficulty.

As I alluded to earlier, I am not talking about whether Microsoft is “right” to be offering this as a paid service, or if they are guilty of unfairly bundling apps to destroy other companies offering similar third party products. All I am saying is that Microsoft has addressed a problem with their OS with a good product that is fairly priced – and that in and of itself is news.

Wikipedia says:

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz. He broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999.

Basically a blog is a website where a blogger enters “posts” in reverse chronological order ( meaning that the newest “posts” are displayed first ) using some sort of blogging software that allows readers to comment on posts, effectively adding new content to the blog.

Initially blogs were generally private affairs with bloggers using them to keep online diaries. These days blogs have expanded to a virtually unlimited number of uses, including helping to build businesses. While a number of unscrupulous business men have resorted to publishing “splogs” or spam blogs, we will focus on how you can utilize blogging to help build your business while contributing to the blogosphere.

The blogosphere ( the community of blogs or the social network of blogs ) has a certain set of rules that have to be followed in order to publish a successful blog. The first rule is that your blog must contribute to the blogosphere – that is you must actually publish real content and not advertisements. A sure way to produce a blog that flops is to pump it full of advertisements disguised as content.

While the goal of a business-type blog is to build interest in your product or service, there is a right way to go about it and a way that is sure to fail. Instead of trying to sell products in each of your posts, think about trying to open a dialogue with your customers. That brings up another point – if you are not 100% confident in your product or service then a blog is not for you.

With the way that the blogosphere works if you are not willing to get behind your products and services completely. then you are going to have problems. When your customers or clients post comments to original posts, there are bound to be some problems or issues exposed – it is just the nature of the beast. If these issues are not addressed satisfactorily ( or even worse if comments are not followed up on or even allowed to be posted at all ), then your company is not going to have a very good reputation in the blogosphere. If you are not willing to have an open discussion of your business with the readers of your blog, don’t blog.

The goal is to build up a reputation for your blog that reflects positively on your company. If you can do this, you are well on your way to building a successful blog. If a potential customer comes to your blog and notices your clients that had a problem were satisfactorily appeased, then they will view your company in a better light than they would without that information.

And that brings up a huge advantage to having a blog for your business – you can out flank the media, your competitors and all of the other traditional information outlets with your blog. If you successfully optimize your pages and build up a reputation for your blog ( think Google pagerank ), your posts stand a good chance of coming up first in search results for a particular product or service. Obviously if that page reflects well on your product or service this is preferable to your clients getting their information from a different source.

Another advantage of creating a blog about your industry is that you can set yourself up as an expert on the topic. While this only works if you have substantial knowledge of a given subject, most business owners are well versed about their industry – at least more so then the average reader of their blog. So capitalize on this knowledge by posting “insider” information about your industry – and where appropriate highlight your company’s, products or services strengths.

You have to remember however that your blog is not a press release. If the readers don’t feel like you are posting in the true spirit of blogging, then your blog is doomed to failure. So don’t let your PR guys write the blog; take the opportunity to make real connections with the readers of your blog. Blogging done the right way is one of the best ways to truly achieve 1 to 1 marketing.

Your blog will have to be integrated into your whole net strategy – for example in your online catalog you can have links to posts that discuss that product. If customers contact support, they should be sent links to blog pages discussing the information they are looking for as well as the product pages or the FAQ. And don’t forget to include your blog in your marketing strategies, new product launches, etc.

The bottom line is that if your are confident in your company and its services and/or products, then blogging is an important piece of the online puzzle. If you are not blogging your company, you may be losing out to your competitors who are.

If you need more information or assistance in setting up a blog for your business or industry, please use our contact page and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can help you leverage blogging to help
your business.

Back in the day, we designed sites with tables and hacked those tables into doing things that they were never meant to do. The table tag was designed to display tabular data, not as a way to render the layout of a website. Unfortunately, a better alternative did not exist, so we used tables. This made for inefficient, slow loading sites with code that was very hard to read and maintain. Wikipedia defines semantic markup like this:

Semantic pages: supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers. This could be machine-readable information about the human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)

These days, hip designers and developers use CSS extensively to create beautiful, fully standards compliant sites. CSS-based layout allows us to develop sites that will degrade effectively–that is that they will be viewable on all types of devices such as PDAs, cell phones, T.V.s–and will work correctly on devices that don’t even exist yet as long as they are standards compliant.

Most importantly, developing sites with CSS allows us to effectively separate content and presentation. Have you ever looked at the source code of HTML pages that were created with a table-based layout and wondered what the heck is going on here? You see lots of opening and closing of tables and table rows all mixed together with textual content and graphics. With a clean, CSS-based layout you can create pages that are easily understood by looking at the source, making them easier to understand, maintain, and update. Look at the source of my company site JTkconsulting and then look at the source code of this site that uses a tables based layout: usnx.com. Big difference, huh?

If you have a site with high traffic, you can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth used by transitioning from a table-based site to a CSS-based layout. If a visitor to your site doesn’t have to load all of the code needed to render those tables and spacer gifs, you are transmitting less data.

CSS also offers search engine optimization benefits over tables. If you have a tables based business site that relays on Internet traffic to turn a profit or acquire new clients you will see real advantages by switching to CSS. When a search engine spiders your tables-based site, they retrieve a large amount of content that has nothing to do with you business. When search engines spiders a clean CSS-based site, the majority of content retrieved will be textual content that describes your business. The ratio of content-to-code is higher with CSS-based layouts.

We’ve all seen search engine descriptions that don’t make any sense; that’s because search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving information. Whatever is topmost in your document, the search engines are going to think is the most important part of the document, and therefore should be used as the description. Since we separate content and presentation with CSS, we can put the most important information at the top of a document no matter where it is actually displayed on the page. Try that with tables!

I hope this article gives you an overview of why it is important to transition from your current tables-based layout to a fully valid CSS implementation. If you don’t have a web site, but are planning on launching one in the near future, make sure you tell your developers you want a CSS-based implementation.

Search engine optimization may be the most abused topic in the history of the web. Much (too much) has been written about search engine optimization over the years, but very little is worth being read. I step up to the plate today to pass on some of the wisdom I have gained in the last eight years of Search Engine Optimization work.

First, let me stress that I don’t believe in tricks, cloaking, doorways, etc., and is not SEO my primary vocation. Any advantage gained by those guys who try and game the search engines are temporary and difficult to maintain. What I do believe in is avoiding common pitfalls, properly marking up my pages, and analyzing my log files. Concentrating on good planning and research combined with good content properly marked up is a winning recipe.

I have achieved significant success by:

1. Define target keywords – posting content that reinforces keywords.
2. Using semantic markup to accurately describe that content.
3. Staying as standards based making content as accessible as possible.
4. Posting quality content – I don’t believe in Splogging.
5. Use linking effectively.

Today I am going to talk about #5: Effective Linking. My type of SEO is all about content and linking. I try to create good content and get good inbound links to that content, thereby increasing that page’s reputation. But internal links are important too; your site’s navigation can help (or more often hurt) your SEO efforts.