This new Blogger.com template editor reminds me of how Jive manages the in-situ layout designs for its SBS platform. Notice three levels of menus plus horizontal scroll … I’m sure this was the result of some effort.

It’s wild to think of how far mobile technology has come for real estate professionals. See this video to see what agents were anxious about 20 years ago - it wasn’t Twitter or a Blackberry! (Please - no cracks about how I was the kid at the end of the commercial, even though it would be kinda on point :)

SEO strategy (Search Engine Optimization) is one of my main job responsibilities and I travel a few times a year teaching seminars to real estate companies about SEO and online marketing. It's a fascinating discipline - but it can be boiled down to two very basic things: content and links. But when you tell the owner of a real estate company that all they need to do is write a few articles and add them to their site, and make sure their agents link to their home page, they think it's too simple to be effective. They want the 'magic potion' they can pay a lot of money for or 'have the guys work on'. But any of the 'magic' anyone can promise you, in the form of a forum or salesman, is only temporary, generally negated after some period of time, and it may get you banned from the Index (by Google's auto-discovery or your competitors ratting you out .. more common than you think). So anyone selling link farms or 'guaranteed Google status' is selling a load of crap you can't base a business plan on.

So, if you simmer it down to its roots, Google's sole priority is to return the most relevant content to users based on what they asked it for. They sought to improve on what Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Webcrawler, etc were doing in the mid nineties - digest the world of data into a global oracle. But these early engines were easy to scam - I could get a first place rank for anything on Altavista just by pasting white text on a white background a hundred times and mass-submitting to their 'add url' form. But then when I, or anyone, went to the search engine that was easily blasted full of crap by spammers and it just returned junk the natural reaction was to quit using that one and start feeling out the fringes (Momma, dogpile, hotbot, geocities, newsgroups, aol, edited directories) for purity of results. So Google knew from the get-go as they rose from that environment that they needed the best way to filter junk from good, unique content that people would like to read. (I'm feeling lucky = I trust a real, relevant result will be my first option) And they started hiring teams of PHD linguists as they grew to ascertain what's a real sentence, what's relative, what's a natural repeat density of a word in a formatted page, have we seen this anywhere before, etc.

Plus, the core of their patented PageRank algorithm technology, which they wrote in college I believe and effectively started the company, understands a basic concept of popularity: people will link to valuable information. If you buy a domain name and it's crap and nobody knows about it or ever links to it, you're a nobody and nobody cares about you. (firing squad to the wall flowers at the dance ...) So you don't deserve to be on Google. If you have a million friends and everyone links to you from everywhere you must be important. (but the wall flowers with make-believe friends; ie other domain names they own that only link to each other, don't count. nor do people bringing escorts to the dance - ie. buying from link farms. but I digress ...) Let the masses vote for the masses in terms of what they want to see, and in what order. But let the geeks be on top. It also had a nice side benefit of naturally fitting into the design of web spiders, which follow links to discover new pages. Google's spider has evolved to arguably one of the most valuable pieces of code in the world, but still follows links; and when you mix links and site context (linguists + databases) then see which sites link to other sites using what words - you get a powerful combination for systematic sorting of the world's data through word combination.

The algorithm has been evolved to extremes and can't really be followed; it's a waste of time to monitor SERPS incessantly. Play the long tail. You used to be able to watch when it did a Google Dance and you could watch the algorithm update hour by hour around the world's Google Datacenters as they would shuffle the indexes (results change), now it's a constantly rolling revision.

The source of all their money is Google Adwords SEM sales, which all rely on a gigantic worldwide audience of traffic. Very few other Internet companies have survived on advertising alone - while countless thousands have tried and failed. (or adapted, like buy.com). If their organic search results are called into question - for favoritism, manipulation, being evil - then there opens a crack in the market from which a new, more 'pure' solution could emerge; possibly eventually eclipsing them like they have done to the search industry and to some extent Microsoft. Loss of trust = loss of traffic = loss of advertisers ... by the billions.

If you're thinking 'but what about all their other businesses? they threaten MS with GDocs ... there's Google Maps ... other value here!' But how do you pay for your use of their cloud space? seeing ads. How much would you pay if they started charging (you have the Pro version of GEarth, right?); and what if your privacy or ownership of content was ever in question? Will they be happy with a plateau in their strategies to monetize their user base? Hasn't happened yet ... but despite everything that's happened within Google, the organic results have been a sacred ground.

So, I trust them when they say they won't skew anything in anyone's favor (don't rock the boat) and there are millions of watchdogs. I don't touch adwords, but do the hard work of scalable SEO through generating legitimate inbound links with business program design ('link to your blog from your home page'), listings on directories, tons of google sitemaps/rss/url syndication stuff, crazy clean XHTML and interior link structure (skewed slightly to appear to G how would i'd like it to and prettied with CSS) and to do all that you need to be creating a ton of -unique- and valuable content. The big bonus of this is that it'll work for you for 2,5,10 years once you set a good groundwork and content update program. So, my latest product is a blogging platform for real estate agents where we handle all of the infrastructure and SEO and they provide the content. There's a lot to it, but basically if they can email they can blog, and we get them traffic which gets their phone ringing. They do all the hard work once it's set up of just being the market experts they are.

There are a ton of details for managing SEO, but with just the basics - analytics, content gen program (need incentives, continual content growth, improvement, with quality oversight), and solid internal and inbound linking strategy - I was able to get one site from 1200 daily uniques to 15-20,000 daily uniques over a year and a half. (and that's why I love my new juicer?)

Are these

a gateway drug to one of these?

I just got another email from Obama. It's interesting that people aren't following his moves using online communication tools more closely (short of some articles about his campaign). The fact that he's smoothly converted the campaign's online prowess to that of the US's is remarkable, but oh so quiet. I bet I'm just not looking hard enough, but I think there's a need to take notice that this is the first time the government has really gone online with web 2.0 and social. Hell, even email blasts which are oh so old-skool in internet time are a staple of both parties and very effective communications. How about a read only, opt-in listserv to the whole country from the white house, congress, and senate? Cspan should run it. The current use of technology - and all other attempts at it by gov - is all very militaryesque. In a project management class I took the example of how not to run a project was an article about the catastrophic failure of an FBI software design and rollout plan. Never has government and technology=smooth, but it's getting better. The DMV 'pay your fine' web page, city water bill web page, etc. seem to be the painfully extruded result of months of government board meetings, extended deadlines, and failed planning. But then again, the good 'ol US of A did give us the Internet. Lets see what Obama CAN DO to bring the social front end to it!!

People use web analytics, particularly keyword lists, to determine 'what worked?' last month in terms of blog topics resulting in traffic from organic longtail searches. Boring (but useful). A little more interesting is how to derive new topics that you haven't really thought of, and feel out the outer depths in the abyss of long-tail keyword territory.

Well, I've been seeing a bit of 'crossover' or 'crosstalk' between topics, resulting in entirely new ideas - mashups? - that are essentially presented by consumers (through Google queries resulting in an inbound click to the blog) and are intrinsically very, very long tail and under-served by any other site on the Internet. How do we know that? Because no site came up covering the topic in question. My site did instead. Confused?

Here's an example (needs a picture?):

A Manhattan Luxury Homes Blog we run has a writeup about the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and owning a home on the route and how it's such a charming place to be. In a separate article they talk about renting. Well, there was a huge rush of traffic right before Thanksgiving - for people looking to rent homes on the parade route.

Now, I'm not from NY, but in my limited real estate experience hadn't thought that people would rent out properties for one week for people/companies to host parties in. But it makes a lot of sense. It's a new micro-market vertical I hadn't thought of yet. Well - if there's someone in that real estate office who has any access to anything like that, a half hour spent writing a blog about it next summer would surely get a ton of exposure; considering that the market was under-served with web sites.

This is also an example of how blogging can be great for micro-micro niches that you wouldn't want to set up a whole site for and maintain all year. That wouldn't be practical. But with blogging you can be strategic, feel out and plan for the timing of hitting certain verticals and topics.

Ruby on Rails is an interesting rapid development web development platform that uses the Ruby language plus a bit of a web framework layer (favoring convention over configuration - meaning fewest steps to 'hello world' being sent worldwide). I've been working with it for about a year, but primarily using the latest version of the Mephisto blog platform. Stay tuned for some custom plugins I'm planning to release back to the community, once I get some time to comment them and get a public SVN running.

Unfortunately the wiki which held nearly all of the Mephisto blog documentation, both user and developer stuff, was running on a 'free web 2.0 hosting' service that went belly up after all effort was done, with no way to get the data out. I always remember this when people are talking about dumping all energy into some kind of cloud service.

I'm going to make a plant twitter me when it's thirsty

where's the business model?

They desperately need to come up with some 'pro' level services that can help businesses, and help get themselves some damn revenue.

http://www.twittermutual.com/

check these amazing flash sites out. Also, the best ever flash loader collection at prettyloaded.com.

Interestingly, I tweeted about the prettyloaded.com gallery and now they're following me on twitter. The culture of reciprical tweet follow love is still in its infancy, like when AOL only had four or five people in the chat rooms ('94,'95) and you'd say hi to everyone. why care to follow someone just because they follow you? possible assuredness of common interests?

I've heard about Congress going on youtube and didn't think much of it, but when Louis Black on the Daily Show did this mashup comparing the generational ability gap when it comes to video editing, I had to share it.

He also demonstrates something not many corporate decision makers understand about 'playing' with YouTube and other 'free' social networking Web 2.0 toys: that you don't always control the commentary surrounding your content contributions. (At the end of the clip he points out that a congressman's video had a comment proclaiming his looking like the manager of an *hole store. What's your brand-trashing nightmare and how can you control something you don't control?)

I've just finished up a lot of learning and now have a happy newborn OpenVZ Linux server (coinciding with my newborn niece Audrey ) running five virtual slices. I built it on a server we at work are phasing out after being a SQL 2000 server, so it's a little slow (dual 1.4 xeons. yawn) but has a decent accelerated RAID card and separate mirrors so it's great for virtualized web use. It just needs to serve up tiny blog HTML files, run some light Ruby on Rails code, tiny MySQL, video, basic email, and private SVN source control systems stuff. But because we need some HTTP hosting action pointing securely internally (SVN server) and most all else running public web sites on the DMZ secure switch, there was a bit of wrangling with network configuration to have dedicated nics, firewalls, and secure routes for everything (and be able to administer it internally). By default, it seems to be configured for shared hosting provider situations - the clients can't talk to each other or the host whatsoever, but can all easily get their own IP and NAT passthrough from the host's NIC. So I had to reverse a lot of that through special configuration I manage most of it through the Mac Terminal SSH program and Webmin from the LAN side of our network, which only has access to the 'host' operating system, known as a 'hardware node' because it's not supposed to be running anything besides monitoring and maybe mail relay. All child virtual slices are bridged network-wise on a virtual linux switch on the host (like between MySQL slice and Apache / Lighttpd slices) or have dedicated nics on the DMZ. I mange the children through the host command line ('vzctl enter 105' opens command prompt of child from host.) Above is a snapshot of the Webmin status summary screen of the finished product. I'll expand on some of the solutions I came up with through doing this install and be posting them here soon, and then posting more as I figure out some tricks.