So over the last couple of months people have been noticing some strange behavior in regards to sitelinks.  In December Search Engine Roundtable made note of sitelinks being cut off possibly due to the use of periods in the text.  Then today, exactly a month after the last sitelinks post, Search Engine Roundtable reported that many sites are seeing their sitelinks disappear and reappear.

However, I don’t find any of these things as confusing as the results I discovered last night while looking up information about the Los Angeles Kings hockey game I was attending.  I did a search in Google for ‘la kings’ and when I got there I was presented with the following SERP.  Take a look at the sitelinks for the Kings website.  See anything strange?

If you didn’t catch it, one of the sitelinks goes to ‘Pittsburgh Penguins Team Home Page’, which isn’t exactly LA Kings relevant.  I thought maybe because the team sites are subdomains of nhl.com that maybe that was what caused the problem, though every other sitelink is part of the Kings’ website.

Upon further investigation I found one more oddity in all of it.  The link says ‘Pittsburgh Penguins Team Home Page’ however the link directs you to the Pittsburgh Penguins store.  In this case not only is the sitelink irrelevant to the page being displayed, but it’s either directing to the wrong page or displaying improper anchor text. Clearly something is going on at Google as of late, but what exactly is happening.  With changes in things like indexing and sitelinks it makes me wonder if perhaps we are seeing recent algorithm changes backfire.

NHL Team Stats

One other thing I noticed, which I wasn’t aware previously is that the first result in Google gives me the team stats; wins, losses, ties.  It also gives you information on the last game played and the next game to be played.  What’s even more impressive is that I did some additional team searches and on the day of a game it will show you the score for the games played by that team and includes a breakdown of goals scored in each period.  This probably isn’t new, but it’s new to me, and I think it’s a pretty sweet feature to have for us hockey fans.

Though I was able to get a post up on Musings yesterday discussing what broadcasting radio can learn from social music sites, it may be another week or so before I can give the blog as much attention as I would like to.  I’ve had to shift my writing focus over to a series of posts I had planned for the company blog.  Unfortunately due to recent developments I’m going to have to pump them out faster than I initially anticipated.  The first in the series went up today and is titled I’m a REALTOR®, Not a Writer and it discusses the importance of getting your website content situated before you worry about any other facet of your online presence.

However, while my focus has been elsewhere I didn’t want to leave my readers empty handed.  I was just getting a chance to catchup in my RSS reader, which has also slightly fallen on the wayside, when I came across a post that mentioned the word cloud generating site Wordle.

I had come across Wordle sometime last year, but at the time my cloud wasn’t very impressive so I didn’t do much with it.  Since my blog has obviously grown significantly in the last year I decided I’d give it a whirl and sure enough we’ve got art!  So I present to you Musings in the form of art!

If there’s one thing that keeps my day flowing its music in my headphones; be it through my Zune, Pandora, or streaming a local radio station.  My Zune mysteriously lost all its juice shortly after I made it in the office today so I decided to stream KROQ’s Roq of the 80’s station for a change.  The streaming station plays in a small player developed by the stations parent company CBS, and has a nice little interface that tells you what song is playing, who the artist is and displays the album cover art.  As the day went on I got to thinking; if the CBS player can do all that why not create some sort of voting feature like those found on sites like Last.fm and Pandora to collect listener feedback?

More and more people listen to music via the internet these days and now seems like a better time than ever for radio stations to get in on the social music game.  By incorporating voting features in their players and developing listener profiles, they could easily gather listener data and get to know their audience better.  While sites like Last.fm and Pandora use this data to tailor stations to a specific user, radio stations could collect this data to tailor their stations to their audience as a collective.

I have taken part in a number of surveys for KROQ and I know that they are regularly seeking listener data trying to figure out what people local stations listen to, what songs they like and dislike and more.  I know that one means KROQ uses to gather listener data is through online surveys.  The radio station sends out e-mails periodically to its listeners who have signed up for their street team and asks that they listen to a series of song clips online and state whether they like the song, dislike the song, are unfamiliar with the song, or are tired of hearing the song.

If the radio stations could incorporate some sort of social music structure with their players in combination with their regular survey techniques the stations would be able to generate a continual flow of feedback regarding their music selection.  In turn the data could assist them in determining what kind of listeners they are capturing, what styles of music are most popular with their listeners, what songs are most liked, and what songs should be played less often, or not at all.  This same data could be used for spotting new trends in music, establishing demographics for advertising, and more.

While this concept is in no way new, obviously because we see it in sites like Last.fm and Pandora, it’s something I haven’t seen used in the broadcast radio industry.  While researching this post I took a look at 18 of the major radio stations in Southern California and found that of the 18 stations I looked into 16 of them had streaming broadcasts on their website, and not one of them had any sort of ranking or personalization features.  I think this is a great opportunity for modern radio, and if its not already in place elsewhere who’s going to be the first to do it?