Musings For A Darkened Room

This week I decided to take a different approach with the Social Media Moment. Up to this point the posts I showcased have been funny moments. This week I decided to take a plurk from Anna Bourland that I thought had some really good subject matter and some solid feedback from other Plurk users. Anna discusses an article that she read offline about Social Media and how businesses should monitor it’s use.

Social media involvement has to be monitored to make sure your company goals are the focus.

I think this was a great post, and though ‘Audrey the Quotable’ again was in the running for this plurk. I wanted to go in a different direction this week. This weeks Social Media Moment has a great topic and I think any added feedback or thoughts you would like to share on this plurk would add to it’s value.

Finally, I remind you that you can alway feel free to contact me on Plurk or Twitter and let me know about something funny or interesting that you feel should be featured. I can only see so much, other users can be a great outside set of eyes.

So Crystal, one of the admins in the office, called me over to her desk today because she wanted me to look at something. I had assumed that there was a question about a link setup or perhaps a question about the setup of a Google Local account. To my surprise she was simply showing me a captcha from our friends at Google; and this is what it said:

I don’t know that it really needs an explanation, but if it does feel free to contact me and I’ll explain. I mean really Google…

One of the biggest muses of the social networking site Plurk is karma. Karma is obtained by using various aspects of the service, be it inviting friends, regular plurking, or leaving comments on other people’s plurks. The use of karma, which I assume is a way for the service to keep users active, is both a blessing and a curse. While higher karma graces you with various perks from the service, it also results in a timeline full of karma related plurks from other users.

“…been losing karma”, “…thinks my karma is stalled”, and “…getting close to going over 70 karma points” were all plurks that graced my timeline at various points today, all of which resulted in numerous responses about other people’s karma and their disappointment or excitement about it. But in the end what dose karma actually provide us? Sure you get some perks, but how many of those actually add value to the user experience.

Perhaps the most useful karma reward is achieved at 10 karma points. At 10 points you have the ability to personalize your timeline title. From a personalization aspect I think this is valuable, much like adding your age, location, etc., it gives you the ability to give other users an idea of who you are.

At 25 points you are rewarded additional emoticons, while these can add some fun visualization to the plurk timeline I really don’t think it adds any real value to the service. Furthermore the dancing banana was only funny the first 5 times.

The emoticon perks repeat again at 50 and again if you invite 10 of your friends to join. Again these simply add more flare to your posts and in some cases infect your timeline just as much as karma plurks do.

But perhaps the most useless, and in my opinion the one perk that could negatively affect your Plurk experience is achieved at 40 karma points. At 40 karma points you are given the ability to change your plurk display name. To me this is the most baffling concept to come out of a social site. You establish yourself as a specific individual with a specific display name for the first 40 karma points, and then can suddenly change your identity on a whim.

How might this hurt you? For starters anyone who friends you after you’ve changed your display name probably only knows you by that name. Because of this they are probably unaware that you were once JoePlurk, since your current display name is MightyJoePlurk. In turn they may use @MightyJoePlurk when they reference you, which sadly does not link back to your profile. Which brings us to another problem. Let’s say that someone wants to visit your profile, and they only remember you by the name MightyJoePlurk. If they use that in the profile URL they will be sent to a friendly screen featuring our friends in the A-Team.

Sure it’s amusing, but not when you are trying to find someone.

Clearly there is room for Plurk to rethink their karma rewards and provide something that can potentially enhance the user experience. First and foremost if you are going to allow people to choose a alternate display name, then at least make it so that if someone uses @displayname it links to the persons profile, the same should apply to the user URL.

Some additional ideas that stemmed from a plurk posted by bloggeries asking what people would want to see as added perks after 50 karma points included adding additional qualifiers to choose from, customizable qualifiers, and the ability to share karma with friends.

I think of these perhaps the most valuable from a user standpoint would be the additional, or customizable qualifiers. The qualifiers always make it easier to fit what you have to say in 140 characters by saving you a few characters at the beginning. In addition it allows you to express yourself in more ways. I think the ability to share karma, though a friendly gesture, would add to the karma whoring that already plagues people’s timelines.

I think the current perks provided to Plurk users add to the experience of plurking, but the value in them lacks. Especially when you look at the shortcomings of things like changing your display name.

So I’ve got to be honest with this one, this week did not have a slew of tweets or plurks to choose from.  Plurk was filled with mainly pointless banter and the occasional blog push, and with Twitter imploding from the lack of replies you didn’t get a lot of the usual back and forth or amusing comments.  This weeks selection comes from Audrey Seiberling, and though the follow up comments don’t have much strength the initial plurk is golden.

AnAudieMous shares something she said to advancedbourland…

As I mentioned in last weeks Social Media Moment, this is going to be a weekly feature on the blog and since I can’t obviously be on Twitter and Plurk 24/7 (though I wish I could) feel free to send me submissions.  You can direct message me on Twitter or shoot me a private plurk

So I’ve decided to start a new feature on my blog highlighting some of the funniest, most interesting, or most influential posts I find on the various social sites I participate in.  So much goes on with some of these sites that it is easy to miss funny posts or happenings so I am taking this opportunity to share some of my favorites with the masses.  Each week I will note throughout my day various topics or post that catch my interest and on Friday morning I will pick my favorite from the collection.

This week I chose a Plurk thread that I started, not because it is my own, but because of one of the responses in it.  The post started when I unintentionally came up with an incredibly amusing nerdy pick up line while talking with a colleague.  The follow up comment from Melanie Nathan was just icing on the cake.

If I could add people you would be in my favorites, be de.licio.us, and I’d digg you.

Having not participated in the first Google Webmaster group chat I really didn’t know what to expect when I signed up for today’s session. A few of my colleagues at the office had participated in the first chat earlier this year, and felt it was quite beneficial so I decided this time to give it a try.

The sign up and sign in process were painless, but unfortunately Google had some troubles starting the session. After about ten or fifteen minutes of listening to what sounded like Darth Vader raping a cat over the phone, the session began.

Today’s session consisted of three main topics. John Mueller talked about Personalize Search, Maile Ohye discussed case sensitivity in the robots.txt file, and Jonathan Simon talked about how to remove indexed content from Google. The presentations were solid, but as a search marketer there really wasn’t too much take away from the 3 presentations. Perhaps the most useful and sometimes amusing information came from the Q&A section. With that said I have decided to outline the good and the bad from todays event.

The Good

• Maile clarified that the way you present your data in the robots.txt file can make or break your site. The directories and filenames in the robots.txt file ARE case sensitive. By not paying attention to case sensitivity you risk duplicate content problems because as Google crawls your site it will see pageA.html and PAGEA.HTML as two different pages hosting the same content. I figured this might be a useful tidbit since the room was split in the poll 111-70 as to whether or not case sensitivity matters.
• It was clarified that new websites are being crawled by the spiders usually within a week of existance, however linking can speed this up. Also mentioned was that Google’s index is refreshing about once a month.
• The .com vs .everything else conspiracy was cleared up. Matt Cutts explained that .edu’s and .gov’s do not actually pass on any more authority than other domains. Also, .info domains have not be devalued as a lesser domain. Essentially Google says all TLD’s shall be created equal.
• PR plays a critical role in how often your site is crawled. They went on to say that some news sites are crawled every 2 minutes by the search engine spiders.
• Matt Cutts gave the “official” word on whether or not Google thinks that SEO has a future, and the answer is, “Certainly, as long as the SEO is whitehat.”

Here are some of the Questions and answers that stood out that I felt offered some good information or at least piqued the interest of the panelists:

Q: Hi Matt, Are there any guidelines available on keyword density we have pages that are about 1 single subject and the keyword density is quite high

Matt Cutts - 2:27 pm

A: Antony, you may not believe this, but we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow, …

Q: Does google differentiate between searches in lower case and searches with proper capitalization?

John Mueller - 2:28 pm

A: We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query.

Q: Will Google consider giving any incentive to webmasters/users who helps google to fight spam? Maybe some sort of point based system would be interesting..This will certainly motivate all the webmasters to come forward and help google to Keep Spam out..

Matt Cutts - 2:30 pm

A: Saad, I do like that suggestion a lot. Something for us to think about.

Q: Does Google support or plan to support hCard microformats?

John Mueller - 2:42 pm

A: I’m not aware of changes in that regard, but we are always open to new ideas!

Q: Why don’t you include actual search numbers in trends or kw selector tool?

Matt Cutts - 2:52 pm

A: I think we’re worried that some people could scrape or abuse that information. Personally I think it would be cool to offer better/more numbers or stats though. We’ll think about ways that we could offer crunchier numbers to people.

The Bad:

Here are some of the Q&A follies for your enjoyment.

Q: whats matts cats name?
A: I have two cats. One is Emmy (she’s a scaredy cat) and the other one is Ozzie. He’s a handful.

Q: I’ve got 3 cats,.. cindy, caty and penelopy..
A: cute

Q: Matt, I was going to ask you about your cat - I’ve got two Persians - is that cat grooming tool you posted on your blog as good as you make out?!
A: Pete, I wouldn’t recommend the tool unless I thought it was really good. I think it would work well for Persian cats, esp. because they have very long hair.

Q: Hi Matt! It’s me Zafar
A: Howdy!

Q: I just want to know since I am not breaking any rules anymore, is there a chance that I can expect a increase in my PR again? or would Google ignore it in the next update?I am not really a PR fan, btw.
A: Zafar, a reconsideration request would be the best place to do that.

Q: Mariya, I’m in Brazil and listening to the conversation via my cell phone - who’s paying for this international call???
A: Hi Wall-E, WebEx provides toll-free numbers for most countries. I hope you dialled the toll-free number and not the regular number (-:

Q: what does googlebot like?
A: milk and cookies!

Q: spam?
A: no thanks

Q: IS there a problem with URLs that end in .0 like example.com/seo2.0
A: I think this has been resolved.

Q: is position SIX a penalty?
A: Position 6 is always between 5 & 7. One site has to be at #6.

Q: Has Maile been on the Cranberry and Vodka yet today?!
A: Maile looks sober to me, Pete.

The unfortunate part of the Q&A was that a lot of the time was spent answering bogus bonehead questions that basically just wasted the time of the panelists. There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there is such thing as the proper time to ask a question. If you want to talk to Matt Cutts about his cat, see if you can catch up with him at a conference about it. Don’t waste the time of over 400 other people!

Sadly my question wasn’t answered.  I asked, “Is there a rule of thumb to consider when thinking about PR vs the number of links on a page and how many of those links will get some of the link juice passed on?”  This inspired by last Friday’s White Board Friday where Rand discussed how many links you should max out on based on it’s PR.  As a follow up I mentioned in the survey sent out by Google that they should answer the remaining questions in a blog post or group so that everyone gets a chance.  Obviously they could weed out any duplicates to shorten the list.

In conclusion I would say that the chat was a success and thanks to the Q&A actually offered some good information for SEM’s. Google announced that they intend to do more of these based on the success of the first two, and hope to hold them on a quarterly basis.  I hope they do.  While I didn’t feel this one was that informative, it definately has some great potential.

So many of us who are testing the waters of Plurk were greeted by an interesting Plurk page today featuring our friends from the A-Team.

The site was down for over 30 minutes and just recently came back up. Unfortunately Plurk’s blog gives us no insight as to what the downtime was about. Are there new features? Improved features? What did this downtime provide us?

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the lack of outcry on Twitter regarding the downtime. Following recent downtimes on Twitter, Plurk users would fill their timelines with gripes about Twitter outages and the incompetence of the service. In this instance I saw maybe two comments on Twitter about the outage. Aside from that the Twitter timeline was business as usual.

Clearly users have not built up a reliance on Plurk the way they have with Twitter. I think it goes to show that Plurk still hasn’t reached the point of being a big information source like Twitter. Users aren’t looking to Plurk for the latest in industry news and information like they have with Twitter.

I still believe that Plurk has a lot of potential, but the buzz surrounding today’s outage, or lack thereof, seems to show that most people haven’t climbed aboard the Plurk bandwagon just yet.

My mother-in-law recently became Craigslist obsessed. She has always been a sucker for a bargain or getting something for nothing, so naturally Craigslist makes tons of bargains and free goods available at the click of a mouse. During one of her browsing sessions she stumbled across one of the funniest ads I have ever seen. Since the ad has already been taken down I will share the whole thing here on my blog. Needless to say the items went quick, and a lot of it I’m sure had to do with the ad copy.

FREE! $10 Bill (We’ll throw in a couch and chair too!)

Date: 2008-05-29, 3:31PM

That’s right, we’re giving away a free $10 bill! Too good to be true? Not at all! This is a real, non-counterfeit bill, made in here in the USA and usable all over the world! (*but only where US currency is accepted).

How can you get this free $10 bill you ask? I’ll tell you. This $10 bill has two good friends named Couch and Chair, and they must all go to a good home together. If you can come and take Couch and Chair home with you, then $10 bill would love to join. Sorry, the $10 bill cannot be taken to a new home without BOTH of its friends because it would be lonely.

**For those who haven’t caught on, we’ll pay you $10 to take our couch and chair…**

What would you do with these new great things? Here are some suggestions for Couch and Chair: sit on them, lay on them, spoon with a friend on them, watch tv on them, take a nap on them, read on them. Really, your options are endless.

But what about $10 bill? You could buy two gallons of gas and a slurpee, a ten dollar gift card at your favorite store, ten items at a dollar store, a burrito with guacamole and chips and drink at Chipotle, two lunches at McDonalds, etc. Or, you could just go for a free walk in the park with $10 bill tucked safely in your pocket.

Below are pictures of all three items for your viewing pleasure. The couch and chair are tan leather. The $10 bill is greenish and made with whatever materials bills are made of. Though they don’t show in the picture, the couch has a hole on the seat cushion part where it meets the back that we covered with blankets or pillows and no one ever knew. The chair may have a rip or two as well. Other than that, they’re in decent shape and perfect for those in a new home or apartment, college students, rec rooms, or people who like $10 bills. Please understand their condition before you come. If you don’t want a couch with any rips, this just isn’t the deal for you, but we wish you the best in your search! But really, any rips are easily coverable. Or you could just put the $10 towards a slipcover.

If you’ve read through everything and think your home would be the perfect place for these items, there’s one last thing to know. You’ll have to come pick these up yourself. We’ve fit the Couch and Chair together in a minivan with the back and middle seats removed, but they wouldn’t fit into anything smaller. They aren’t very heavy and are easily lifted by two people. We can help you carry it to your car, but can’t do it for you while you just carry the $10 bill.

This is probably some of the most inventive and amusing ad copy I have read in a while. And it just goes to show that with the right marketing technique you can sell just about anything; even a ten dollar bill and some torn furniture.

If you’re like me then you probably jumped on the Plurk bandwagon last week and have spent countless hours wasting the day away in hopes that it will eventually provide you with the same kind of gratification that Twitter gives me when searching for industry news and updates. Sadly the Plurk universe has failed to deliver that same gratification I have come to love with Twitter. Though there are still those few updates here and there that hold some industry relevance; I find that the majority of the information on Plurk is made up of random musings and life updates.

Following some office politics that damn near shutdown much of our Twitter and Plurk use last week, a number of my colleagues and I discussed the differences between the two services and the potential that Plurk holds over Twitter if it takes off for SEO/SEM’s new and old.

Perhaps the most intriguing argument I heard, in favor of Plurk, came from Kristina Sanchez. She had mentioned how many of the updates on Plurk quickly turn into something that simulates a group IM or chat room. She brought up how this would provide a great opportunity for SEO/SEM’s to communicate as a group and share ideas. People from all walks of life, backgrounds, and industries can easily chime in on the topic at hand, and respond to something on your timeline even if the update or subject matter did not originally involve them.

This concept really got me thinking. Imagine if some of the key players in SEO/SEM were as active on Plurk as they are on Twitter. That would open an incredible opportunity for those in the SEO/SEM industry to interact and bounce ideas off of one another. SEO/SEM’s could easily interact and comment on each other’s posts in an environment that often feels like a chat room. And because Plurk groups responses with the original plurk people can follow the updates with ease. Often on Twitter you will see an update and a handful of responses from people, but you don’t always get the whole conversation and a lot of time the update is overlooked completely.

As of right now I still see Twitter has done a great job at providing people with a means of finding out what is going on with the industry and those involved. But Plurk opens the door for a whole world of opportunity. A way for the industry to openly and easily communicate what is going on in the industry and the chance to bounce ideas off one another or ask questions in a real time environment. Twitter provides an opportunity for similar interaction, but not in a community format like Plurk. I still feel Plurk is a huge time waster with a poor UI, but there is clearly a great opportunity that if taken advantage of, could make a huge difference in the SEO/SEM industry.

Following the lead of a friend I decided to give the St. Andrews Face Transformer a whirl. The tool morphs a photo of a person into various nationalities and art styles. I’ve decided to post the best out of my batch for your viewing pleasure. The others were omitted simply because they didn’t look as realistic and you could see the photo effects over the picture.

East Asian Mike

Feminized Mike

Old Man Mike

West Asian Mike