March 14, 2006
Since I spent 5 years working in libraries, I’ve followed the Google Book Search and Google Library with some interest. Today, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch posted a great rundown of the next big development in the area – Google Partnering With Publishers to Sell Online Books. His post is so thorough that I hardly feel I can contribute anything to the discussion.
I’ll be very curious to see what kind of pricing model the publishers come up with. Danny mentions that the program currently won’t allow copies of the book to be saved or printed – it doesn’t mention whether the purchase of these online books will provide permanent access or not, however.
During much of the time I worked in libraries, the debate over e-journals was very hot. On the one hand, purchasing journals in electronic form allowed libraries to deal with one crucial concern – space. On the other hand, the only guarantee of long-term access to these journals were claims by the publisher that access would be permanent. Not every publisher would even offer this – many would only provide access to the e-journal archives for as long as you continued your subscription to the journal.
Publishers have taken advantage of the world of electronic access to rewrite the concept of ownership – you no longer purchase a journal, to have and to hold, until death shall we part. Instead, you license it. You have access to that journal for as long as the publisher agrees to allow it.
The frightening thing about the archiving of e-journals was that for all the claims of permanent access from the publisher, you never had a true guarantee. Has the publisher made arrangements for what happens if they go out of business? Will they honor their licenses if they’re purchased by another company?
If e-journals were actually cheaper than paper copies, I think that people would be more willing to take these risks. Instead, they take them because they must. Electronic access is the way researchers look for new publications. Students expect to find everything online. I have seen academic papers which cited nothing but online resources – sometimes to the detriment of the facts.
It’s not to say that there aren’t other advantages to electronic journals – certainly, the ability to search, index, and sort electronic resources is much more flexible than your options with print. The ability to access your sources without running around four different libraries has advantages. For low-vision researchers, the likelihood a computer may be able to read the article to you or magnify the text is much easier than finding an individual with the time to read an article to you. Still, the issue of permanence, when you cannot control the archive yourself, is a challenging question.
Personally, I will likely only purchase electronic books if the pricing model is cheaper than paper – otherwise, I’d far rather have the comparative security of ownership. Besides – I like a good, old-fashioned book!
March 13, 2006
Pig! No . . . snout! Pigtails? Girl! Eat like a pig! Act like a pig! When pigs fly?
Most of us have, at some time or another, played the game Pictionary. For any who haven’t, it’s a simple game where you are given a pencil, a piece of paper, and a word or phrase – and have to indicate to your ‘team’ what it is that you’re trying to represent by drawing.
It can be a fun game, if you’re a little bit artistic. Less so for those of us with less-than-stellar abilities to draw straight lines.
3d-seek, as mentioned at Search Engine Journal today, is a search engine which gives you the option to search by sketching. It’s a very unique idea, I’ll grant it – but it didn’t do much for me.
To be fair, it was originally designed as a tool for manufacturing firms to find their needed replacement parts. And, to accommodate this better, 3d-seek allows you to upload your 3-d model of a part and use that for your search.
However, to continue being fair, the company wants to branch out into a commercial search tool for small businesses and consumers:
prove equally useful for ordinary shoppers: instead of having to go to the hardware store lugging, say, a specific plumbing joint, a customer could just sketch what he or she needed to find an exact match.
Quoted from 3d-seek as published by Search Engine Journal
So you no longer need to know the name of your part, you merely need to be able to draw it. The site renders your crude sketch and compares it to their stock 3-d models of each part. My tests? Total failures.
Like I said, I can’t draw worth a damn – but at least, given pencil and paper, I can make a pretty good try at it. However, drawing with a mouse takes away even my more rudimentary skills – like drawing a straight line.
I find it more than a little unlikely that many homeowners have 3d-models of their needed parts around. I also find it less than likely that they’re likely to have a Wacom tablet to help them out. Even with their 3-d model in my other monitor, I was unable to reproduce the drawing effectively enough to have the same model occur as a search result.
My conclusion? This is a really neat idea. The average searcher may make use, on occasion, of the option to search through their models to try and find the appropriate part. However, running down to the local hardware store with your broken part will probably continue to be faster and more convenient.
As a further note, the product requires Active-X and, of course, only functions in Internet Explorer.
March 11, 2006
Although I am a firm believer that effective search engine marketing is more about organically developing a site’s content and building a solid brand, at some point you always need to find a few numbers. Analysis tools can be used to tell you how a site stands before you begin work, and give you a sense for priorities.
Many elements of optimization are obvious from a glance, for the web professional – speed issues resulting from excessive scripting, large Flash files or too many graphics are frequently visible to the naked eye. You can often see problems with appropriate headings, alt tags, and code density by a quick glance at the source. However, seeing these elements and demonstrating their importance to a client are two very different tasks.
When the time comes to deliver your initial "state-of-the-website" report, including statistics, ranks, etc., can help provide something for the client to seize on which they understand. Technical terms aren’t really that help – as often as not, an explanation of a site’s information architecture problems results in severe cases of "glazed-eye-syndrome." Finding good tools to help you assemble these numbers is an important needs for the business.
There are literally hundreds of SEO tools (maybe thousands) sitting out somewhere on the web. There are expensive packages such as SEO Elite, clocking in at $167 versus the free edition of Web CEO. And a simple recommendation for any SEO software package? Don’t buy them. (I’m not saying that all SEO software is a scam – I just don’t recommend it.)
Why do I say this? Two reasons – first, analysis tools are only useful if you can take the data a step further and analyze it yourself. I have yet to see a tool which showed any comprehensive understanding of the data. Second, there is so much data available for free that I can’t recommend spending this kind of money.
Oh – and there’s a third reason. And it’s a kicker – one tool commonly offered by SEO software is the "auto-submission" option. A system to send your submissions out far and wide to thousands of search engines. I simply don’t trust this technique – I would rather carefully select appropriate and reliable directories and search engines and submit by hand, where this
activity is even relevant.
Are there any advantages to buying SEO software? There can be. I’m not going to go into them extensively, but many of these software tools WILL provide a good analysis of your site, without your needing to run from page to page, learning new data formats and trying to assemble your analyses yourself. Some tools will help manage link building efforts by helping you find link partners and keeping track of your process. However, all SEO software needs to be taken with a sizable grain of salt.
Read this post at The Web Marketing Blog by Mark Daoust for a well-thought out and fair appraisal of the values of search engine optimization software.
This whole idea came to my attention because I read
this blog post on a new Firefox
extension for SEO. Although I got WAY off track in the actual post, this was the original intent behind this writing! The main tools I use for an initial site analysis are largely embedded in this tool bar – backlink checking from Google, Yahoo, and MSN are here. Alexa rankings, DMOZ checker, etc. For a basic appraisal of a site, this is a great place to start – it puts a whole range of analysis tools at your fingertips. (If you have a touch screen, that is . . .).
Links to a few sites with free SEO tools:
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