Ampers & Dot

My good friend Dave recently launched a blog for his job at CD Chivas USA, the Carson, CA based soccer team in the MLS (that stands for “Major League Soccer”, for those of you too patriotic to accept soccer into America.  Yeah, that’s right, America has professional soccer.  And you know what?  It’s pretty good.).  His blog is the Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer: an inside look into a professional soccer team, with updates on team news, scores, player profiles, and more.

A little back story on CD Chivas USA: (”CD” = Club Deportivo) the team is considered the “Sister Team” of CD Chivas Guadalajara, a team based out of, you guessed it, Guadalajara, Mexico (ok, I just like writing “Guadalajara” because of the absurd use of  the letter “a”).  The idea of CD Chivas USA is that it appeals to more to the large Spanish speaking population in southern California.  Unlike the local rival LA Galaxy, which appeals to faux-hawk enthusiasts.

Well, seeing as how my daily job often consists of helping companies launch and popularize blogs, it seemed only fair that I offer up a little advice to help the Chivas Blog.  After going through some very broad basics, Dave and I started to discuss Search Engine Optimization. 

Some of you may have seen this coming from this post’s title, but there is an inherent problem in this project.  The problem is that the idea of an Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer, is that it would in fact be bilingual.  My original idea was to write it all in English and install one of those language converters to the site- but Dave, being fluent in Spanish and knowing how horribly those tools actually translate, is aiming to make this a true home for Chivas fans of any background and not alienate the Spanish speaking supporters.  Instead he is writing in both Spanish and English, depending on the topic.

So I’ve been reading up on as many sources as possible about bilingual SEO, but the main thing I’ve learned from it all is that there isn’t that much written on bilingual SEO…

The incredibly broad idea behind a standard SEO strategy is to improve search engine rankings, so that when someone searches for something online (which everyone does…) they’ll find your site first.  BUT- what if your readers aren’t always searching in English?  And what if you are writing half of the posts in Spanish? 

At this point, I should probably warn you that if you came to this page looking for authoritative answers, you might want to leave now… sorry about that.  But the following are a few things I’ve picked up, just by watching the site and some of its click stats.

• In a site with bilingual text, make sure any relevant SEO terms exist in both languages.  If this means repeating information, that’s fine. 
• As with any SEOd page, you don’t want to over do links to piss off the search bots.  You work way too hard to be seen as a Splog, so if you are repeating information and writing things twice, be cautious of how often links appear.
• Bilingually tag images.  By shortening the descriptions but having key words in both languages, both audiences will find what they are looking for.
• If you aren’t writing everything twice then make sure to write enough in each language to appeal to both audiences AND the search engines.  There’s a fine balance of alienating either language’s readers, but keeping relevant stories in each language published often enough will keep all readers happy.

There is still so much to learn about all this and if anyone has any advice on reading material (in English please) comment below.  The one problem I keep going back and forth on is the Page Title and Meta Content.  My instinct is telling me to stick with English because more people are searching for English text, but that just leaves the question: Is it better to get a huge percentage of those searching for Spanish text, or a small percentage of those searching for English text?  The answer is likely “which ever one is bigger”…

Anyway- If you want to check out the Official Bilingual Blog of Chivas USA soccer, then you can click that link or check it out on Google, which after just a month is up to #6 for “Chivas & Blog” and #31 for “Chivas USA”.

During an awesome social media discussion yesterday, I found the meeting sidetracked by a humorously disgruntled conversation about the public perception of Google.  You’ve probably never heard of Google, so let me explain this thing to you.  The best way to put it it’s this super futuristic “website” where you words into a box and it does this little magic trick where it finds ways to sell you products around the words you entered. 

Anyway… the discussion of Google started around the fact that Gmail still has its cute little “BETA” tag on the logo.  What the hell’s that about?  Honestly, it’s about the public perception.  It’s GOOG’s way to trick you into thinking they are this cute little startup, open source company that is trying out a new free product for you to enjoy. 

Fact: Google isn’t a startup.  They were founded in mid ‘98, went public in ‘04 and currently have over 19,000 employees.

Our debate went on to discuss how Google has access to all practically all the data in the world and how it’s nearly impossible not to be evil with that much power.  Then we got to Google’s services and things got a little trickier.

We both admitted to using Gmail, Google reader, and obviously- the search engine.  And we both admitted that we were happy with the services.  The problem in all this being: Google is really, really good at what they do.  Similar to Microsoft’s Outlook- we use it because it’s perfectly functional.  If there were other options as appealing then we’d switch… well you know what?  There aren’t.

And there’s the problem: the discussion kept coming back to the line of “but until someone makes a better alternative, it seems like we’re stuck with Google”.  We both agreed that there is no point in penalizing ourselves just to fight the system.  This is like the year I ran Linux (Kubuntu, to be precise) on my laptop because I wanted to prove that there were better, cheaper, sleeker alternatives to Apple and Microsoft out there.  Well you know what?  There aren’t.

But here’s where things get even more interesting.  Think about a decade ago when AOL was one of the top email services.  Where are they now?  And what about Apple even?  A bit over a decade ago they had almost no market share, but just this week we learn that Apple holds down 32% of operating systems.  That’s just crazy!  And what it shows is that no size of grasp on an industry is safe. 

Google’s 70% share of online searches might be dominate today, but there is just no saying how we where we’ll go to search in the future.  Big Google might own the web now, but it’s fairly safe to say that the next players in the industry are likely infants in the space that can eventually grow into giant killers.  Because keep in mind that in 2007 Google had $16.6 billion in revenue, but just ten years ago today it didn’t even exist.

Or, Google keeps building, keeps buying, and keeps evolving until we live in the Googopoly where we browse on gPCs with gOSs and all Google Apps, while watch GoogleTV (with Google ads, of course), and using gCrowaves eating Google Toast.

And in all fairness: if these services are as good as the ones being cranked out now, it’ll actually be a pretty cool and highly functional world.

If you’ve ever read this blog before then you’re probably overly aware that I enjoy numbers, online video,charts and graphs, and search engine topics. If you already knew I like these things then meet me at section “2″ while we bring the stragglers up to date on things. If you haven’t read this blog before, then go read a few other posts and you’ll immediately learn how geeky I am about these things. Then you can pick up meet me at the next paragraph, labeled “1″… we’ll wait…

1. Oh, hi- you’re back! Thanks for reading a some other posts- I appreciate your time. Wasn’t that great though!? I know, thanks. Ok, well now that you’re up to speed you can resume with the rest of the group at #2

2. Good, now that we’re all together there is just one last bit of required reading: Compete’s chart of top YouTube search terms

Basically, the chart shows you what people were searching for on YouTube in the month of March. I have to say that this is both fascinating and hilarious.

First and foremost, let’s just get this one out of the way. Who goes to YouTube for porn? The site is pretty well known (at least I thought) to have a strict “R” rating… to me this is like buying candy at a health food store. I mean, if you’re going to do it wrong… do it right!

But interestingly, what the chart shows us is that actually a LOT of people go to YouTube for “sex” and “porn”. With over 60 million viewers last month and .21% of all YouTube searches for one of those terms… we can only assume that there are at least two million idiots out there (or one extremely horny dude searching over and over again…).

Anyway- let’s look at another weird part of the chart - the number 10 search term: “Funny”. Do we, as a society, really have that much time on our hands that searching for something “funny” is a good use of time? Don’t get me wrong, one of my favorite sections of YouTube are the hilarious clips (and it’s a pretty well known fact that I’ve seen almost every America’s Funniest Home Videos ever), but I’m more interested that people are searching “funny”.

No real direction, no focus on anything, but something “funny”. If you look at the rest of the top ten you’ll see there are only a three general terms (Sex, Porn, Funny) and the rest are for specific content.

I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. The beauty of YouTube is that it’s all there. All of it. There are videos for anything you can imagine, so of course people are just browsing. On one hand this is a great thing for YouTube because it provides a home for people to find “whatever”. But on the other, this is a huge opportunity for other online video providers.

This is a chance for other video sites to make a name as the authority of content. No, you won’t have “everything” - that’s what YouTube does. So what do you have? This is the reason I love WineLibrary, Funnyordie, or Hulu (no Hulu doesn’t pay me, I just talk about them all the time because it’s awesome). WL is the home of videos on wine- FunnyorDie has much of the comedy I would want online, and Hulu has all the network shows I’d want. I don’t need to go searching because I know the source already.

YouTube channels are only the tip of the iceberg and in the coming months I expect to see many more specialty video sites pop up and declare themselves as an authority on the subject.

If I were creating an online video channel the first thing I would do is look at the Compete chart and see what people specifically want (hint: rhymes with Busic Fideos). The audience is there- they just need a place to find the right content. As YouTube continues to expand it will only become more of a hub for generic searches and less of a place to find what you’re actually looking for.

UPDATE: It turns out that NewTeeVee (great online video site) wrote about a Music Video startup site today.
UPDATE 2: I’m really, really smart.

“Things I like” wasn’t meant to become a weekly segment… but as seeing I’m especially short on time this week (working with a client five hours ahead on UK time), let’s just pretend this was planned.

Without further ado, let’s jump into another thing I like.

Things I like #2: Google Trends

This is an incredibly simply and basic tool that I find myself using daily.  And although I’m sure that everyone in the business is likely well versed with this page and might find today’s post worthless, this segment is about things I like… And I like this.  So I’m writing about it.

The more and more I learn about Search Engine Optimization, the more I’ve become fascinated with what people actually search.  I’ve become naturally intrigued by how people use search engines- from the keywords and strings they are using- to the topics themselves. 

Enter: Google Trends.  Appropriately titled, Google Trends is a repository of information on the most common search strings entered by a given date.  Basically it collects all the common searches from a day and ranks them by volume.  There are a few fun ways to use this:

• The daily top list which shows, believe it or not, the top searches for the day
• Daily top list by date.  What were people looking for on specific days?  How about your birthday?  My birthday last year was the day after a great episode of the office, hence all the DunderMifflinInfinity searches…
• Trends over time.  Enter in a search string of your own to see the volume of searches since the data started being collected (unfortunately, not that long ago).  Here’s a good example: Candy.  Searches for candy spike at the end of October, end of December, and in the middle of February.  Wonder what that’s about?
• Trends by region.  Google, with its omniscient prowess, also breaks down search results by geographic location, which provides for more fun.  Example: Squash.  Big in Connecticut and Massachusetts… surprise surprise.
• Comparing competitors.  Enter in multiple names separated by commas and enjoy some simple market analysis.
• And lastly: News.  Using the daily list, I find use the trends to find out what’s going on out there.  Here’s an interesting thing I’ve picked up over last last six months: 3-4 of the top ten daily searches usually come from Today show topics. Thanks Matt Lauer.  Also, almost daily one of the top search strings is about a sex scandal.  Oh America, we’re so mature…

Anyway- with my obvious affinity for graphs you can see why I like this Google trends.  Give it a go and let me know what you think- and let me know if you find anything funny.  Like the way yesterday morning - five of the top twelve common search strings had to do with income tax forms or extensions…

Those who know me IRL know that along with being a pretty big geek, am also a huge golf nut.  Also, those who know me “in real life” probably have no idea what “IRL” stands for… But being a gigantic golf fan, there is simply no bigger or better week of the year, than the week that is currently upon us.

MASTERS WEEK!

Seriously, I can’t build my love for the Masters up enough.  Without exaggeration, I’ve been nearly too giddy to contain myself for the last month just leading up to this. To me it’s better than Christmahannabirthdayikah of Julysgiving.  It is an uber-holiday.  Four days of true bliss and excitement.  Two of which, are sadly weekdays.  I had contemplated taking the two days off to slob around my apartment and see if I could go eight hours straight without leaving the couch… but after “The Hell Flu of 2008″ I pretty much need to be in the office more…

So what does an insane golf enthusiast do?  Simple answer: Masters.org 

I’ve been a longtime fan of online TV - and I have to say that the Masters site does it better than just about anyone.  There’s nothing worse than slow loading, choppy video.  Or super low-res webcam type shots that make you feel like some kid in a dorm room is about to start lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys. 

Now unfortunately, the Masters site only has rights to Amen Corner, but it makes up for this in the following ways:

• High quality video source.  I’ll just say this now: the consumer market is done with low-res.  Sure, we’re not ready to stream HD yet, but at least give me standard def. 
• Real commentators.  This can make or break a golf tourney- and Augusta National really pulls through- even online.  Having real commentators makes it just as rich to watch as it would be on TV
• Interactive features.  Want to pull up the scoreboard?  Just click that button- and it won’t navigate away from the video, or even slow it down.
• Good buffer.  This will be tested today… but in the past the video stream has been relatively steady and not choppy.  I’ve developed a zero-tolerance policy for skipping online video.  Here’s a note to online video sites: if your video pauses to buffer- I go do something else.  And I’m likely not coming back.

Right now we’re on the verge of online video really taking off.  Sites like Hulu, that I’ve discussed before, are making it simple and desirable to watch TV online.  As more and more video companies are popping up every day- I think that the key to making yourself standout is to follow what the Masters site is doing.

High quality, quick streaming, real TV production value, and some solid interactivity.  You do that and you’ll net yourself a huge chunk of viewers.

Alright, that’s it for me- I better head into work early if I’m going to get anything done today… especially if something might be distracting me… can’t think of what that might be…

For a while now I’ve had the idea to have a weekly column to promote something tech-related that I actually use. As a Social Media Consultant I’m basically online all day long and come across many links, sites, social networks, toys, software, hardware, and so on, that help me be more productive and happier in my daily work. I’ve got the kind of job that has an infinite to-do list, so anything I can pick up to make me work more efficiently, I’ll do it. With hopes that I can help others be more productive on the web, I’ll pass along my knowledge and someday you can buy me a beer to call it even and we can then become less productive together. And thus the Things I Like series was created.

Things I Like #1: TASKBAR SHUFFLE

Let me start off by saying that I’m a bit of an organizational freak. For me to work productively everything has to be in place and ready to go. With my desk, this is pretty easy, as moving papers into folders is a task I mastered years ago. Unfortunately, digital items are trickier and not always movable.

Here was my problem: every day I come into work, start up Outlook, then my to-do list/time tracker, then my RSS feed, then work for clients in order of priority (remember, I didn’t say “organized”, I said “organizational freak”). By doing this, I accomplish a perfect order to everything in my taskbar (the bottom row of open applications in Windows) and I can quickly navigate to any one I needed. From left to right I always have Outlook, Task Tracker, RSS. The three biggies. But what if one of them accidentally closed?

Everything would be screwed up. I’d actually have to quit applications to get things back in order. Enter: Taskbar Shuffle. As the name suggests, Taskbar Shuffle allows you to drag and drop items on your taskbar to put them in any order you want.

This little application has saved me countless minutes a day- being able to open applications in any order- and drag them into the order I like them. Is it silly? Yes. Do I care? No.

Go get it free at the nerdcave

Today I want to talk about the first two Ws in www and how the web is surprisingly not all that world wide.

First off, no I’m not talking about broadband penetration. Obviously there are many places in the world that there will be no internet connection (like Vermont, not that long ago…), but I’m talking about the filtered web.

See, here in America, the land of the free and the home of more porn sites than any other country, we have basically unlimited access to all things online. As is becoming internationally apparent with recent news, this online freedom is not even close to universal.

Take Facebook for example; the entire site has been banned in most of the Middle East, I guess you won’t be poking any of your Syrian friends anytime soon…

YouTube is blocked in these countries and Pakistan, a fact that became overwhelmingly apparent this past weekend, when an attempt to block YouTube in P-Stan took out the global site.

And look, I’m aware that this is a much larger issue than what I’m getting at. In the US we see the internet as this open realm of endless possibilities and inhibiting our right to be able to browse video montages from AFV is simply unconstitutional! But of course, other countries don’t have our constitution…

So I’m not going to get into the philosophical or political differences between us and our international friends, this post actually has a much more directly self-serving focus: how to get around international blocks while traveling abroad.

I’ll be heading off to Japan for the next week (yes, I’ll take pictures of fun electronics and cooky vending machines, don’t worry) and I’ve just learned that Hulu won’t work there. What’s an online video junkie to do?!

Enter: the HotSpot Shield.

In theory, the Hotspot Shield creates a private network on a public wifi connection, but what it also does- is hide your computer’s location- thus providing access to non-international sites, internationally (such as Hulu!).

I’ve installed it on my lappy and will give it a go this weekend (after the 32 hours of travel). If I can get it working- I’ll post something for you. If not- I’ll pretend this never happened..

Ok, enjoy- see you in a few weeks! Hopefully, with fun pictures and crazy stories about weird sushi.

 I want to take a minute to go over all the hooplah that’s hit the web this since I last posted on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal.
Let’s start with some hard facts before moving into complete speculation: Yahoo turned down Microsoft’s $31/share, $44B offer.  They countered with a statement requesting $40/share, valued at a $12B increase.  Yahoo has since fired an additional 1,000 employees.  And as far as I know- those are the only “facts” out there right now.  The rest is just crazy rumors and outrageous claims (potentially made to boost reader commission from Valleywag’s writers’ pay-grade… but that too is just a rumor… that I made up.)

Now that the facts are out of the way- let’s go over the rumors (one that I like, one that I despise).

•  Google wants to buy Yahoo
  • This would help Google completely monopolize the search market, which is basically the bulk of the web these days…
  • Leaving MS in the dust online, letting them own the dying market of desktop applications/OSes
  • Capitalize on the largest webmail client, making all of Yahoo’s users into Google users
  • Stealing the Instant Message market from AOL (the only thing they have left), to take a stab at Facebook in the battle for the social web
  • Flickr + Picassa = awesome online photo sharing.
• Yahoo might merge with AOL (the single dumbest rumor I’ve ever heard- and if this proves true then I’ll write a post every day for two weeks that includes an emoticon)
  • This would be like the last two dinosaurs on earth attempting to mate, only to learn that the plague wiping out their species has already killed off their reproductive organs.
  • This blog post, which I quite literally laughed out loud at.
  • Sure AOL would pick up Yahoo’s email users and Yahoo would pick up AOL’s inexplicable user-base, but for what?
  • One real positive: Instant Messaging would be dominated by the two… oh wait, that’s all possible through web-apps and facebook.
  • That’s all I’ve got.

Ok, now what does this all mean?   Well somehow, Yahoo thinks it is worth $56,000,000,000.00 even though most analysts were surprised it got a $44B bid in the first place.  Microsoft is now rumored to be planning a “hostile takeover” and you know what?  Good for them.  I understand that Yahoo’s board got all excited with all this hype around them- but without MS’s bid in there, Yahoo’s stock would have been sitting in the dumps of tankville.

Here’s what should happen: MS should come back with $33/share and firm handshake agreement not to scrap some of Yahoo’s good assets.  Yahoo should be happy to take it and they’ll actually work together to build an awesome future online.

Here’s what will probably happen: MS will pay more than they want ($35+/share) and just start tossing out excess baggage, which to a behemoth like Microsoft, is a lot.

I’ll leave this topic on a funny note.  This page of tips for “Laid off? So what?” and this one on how to “Bulletproof Yourself Against a Layoff“, both found on Yahoo’s job site, HotJobs…

Hey look! I wrote about something I said I was going to write about… it must be some kind of miracle. Don’t get too comfortable, life’s only getting busier.

So here’s the IT news story of the quarter: on Friday Microsoft offered up $44.6 Billion for Yahoo! (which will no longer have a “!” in behind it, because I think that’s just stupid). Microsoft’s offer comes at $31 a share- a 62% premium above Yahoo’s (then) trade price.

Let me start out by saying: I saw this coming. Ok, now let me be honest by saying: Holy crap that- that was a gigantic lie. As I’ve said before, I like making predictions about tech because it’s always evolving and continuously developing beyond what is actually predictable. Well as much as I think I track tech trends well I missed this one by a mile. I honestly thought this was a two month early April fools joke. Honestly.

For the three weeks prior to MS’s huge bid, all of the big tech bloggers were trying to determine Yahoo’s failing future. Seeing as how just one week ago Yahoo just cut 1000 jobs after its profits were down nearly 25%, it comes as no surprise that the following stories were run: Yahoo Asks Employees to Turn in Computers, At Yahoo even the Layoffs are Botched, and my favorite- Yahoo Shuttle Buses on the Chopping Block?

But it’s been tricky for me to make sense of all of this. If everyone is saying that Yahoo is dead all while it is cutting jobs and losing employees, where the heck did this 62% premium come from? Let’s go through the list!

Reasons Yahoo isn’t worth the money

• It’s a dying company, losing money quarter over quarter
• It can’t keep its employees (layoffs)
• It can’t keep its executives (quittings and poachings)
• It is over spending without returning value (Zimbra was sitting idle until today read on for more)
• It just keeps making failing online services

Reasons why Yahoo is worth the money

• To compete against Google.
• It gets more traffic than Google (due to its large email user base combined with the search function) and could easily be turned for ad revenue.
• Yahoo owns Flickr, the most popular photo sharing site online.
• It has recently acquired numerous smaller companies and open source code projects (Zimbra is a seriously strong application… and strangely, during all of this hoplah, Yahoo has been in recent talks to acquire one of my favorite Cambridge companies, Maven Networks.)
• The acquisition would give Microsoft a casual email client to compete with Google’s gmail.
• Yahoo’s forums and games bring the social aspect of what MS has been trying (and failing) to create with Live.com
• Yahoo’s failed online services (multiple social networks, mp3 services, blog tools, etc) would provide functional code to fan MS’s flame for competing with Google’s open social platform.
• Yahoo Mobile. It actually doesn’t suck and MS could integrate it within Live Search Mobile to make a highly functional device that could compete with Google’s upcoming Android.

Wow, I actually came up with more than I expected there. My original intention was to say that Microsoft overplayed its hand… but huh- with these benefits, a 62% premium doesn’t sound too crazy. Well things are starting to get more interesting, as rumors are beginning to circulate about Google putting a bid in on Yahoo. This is just nuts and I don’t know what sense to make of it. Which is to bad considering the title of this post.

And the biggest part to all of this is the traffic. If 2005-2007 were any predictor of online focus (which of course, they are), 2008 will be even more about targeted traffic advertising through search results. Let’s look at a chart of traffic to see how this makes sense for MS’s failing Live.com (PS - compete.com is awesome)

But to me this all seems somewhat irrelevant. When I see someone on Yahoo mail or searching using Yahoo, my first thought is “wow, I didn’t know people still use that thing”, as if it’s a home phone or something… not yet dead, but just tremendously lacking in the light of better alternatives.

But what do you think? Should Yahoo take it? Is big G going to step in and make this interesting? I obviously need help on this one- chime in and let’s get a discussion going.

In an attempt to continually start every post with a comment on how seldomly I’ve been posting… well you get the point. Excuses: work is especially busy, I’ve been working longer days, I’ve been out of town, I’ve had meetings after work, and been fighting a cold, tired, lazy… etc…

While working with people to help set up blogs, I often say “quality over quantity”. I’d rather see two or three good posts a week than five throw-away posts. I was trying this philosophy out myself and the problem came when I missed a day… or two… or three and it became increasingly difficult to get back in the habbit. So here’s a blogging concept I’m going to try out for a little while (at least until the inevitable failure): quantity with quality, excluding length. I’ll not be focusing on getting as much into each post, but there’s just so much I want to talk about that my goal is to get out shorter posts and more topics.

So let’s try that out. Let me know what you think…

Ok, the Super Bowl is over and here in Boston we’re all pretty bummed. The entire thing just seems surreal and I have three quick arguments about all this: Eli Manning isn’t good. And the Giants defense outplayed the Patriots. Eli Manning isn’t good.

Moving on.

The saving grace of last night’s debacle were, of course, the commercials. It had been two off years in a row, but 2008 turned it around by giving an overall strong performance. In previous years watching a funny commercial during the Super Bowl meant that you would have to keep watching TV to see it again.

Well thanks to the wonders of the web and online video, we can all ignore regular TV and jump right in to watching fun commercials!

Jump on over to NewTeeVee’s site to check out the summary of where to find all the top videos. You can also find them on Hulu, which you all have invites from when I posted them last month… right?

My personal favorites are: the Bridgestone one with the screaming animals, the talking stain, Shaq the jockey, the eTrade baby, and a few others- man it was a pretty good year!

My least favorites: the blatantly racially stereotypical Salesgenie ones, the random one with Carmen Electra, and the horrible Career Builder ones.

And tomorrow… we’re talking Yahoo, Google, MS, and the rest of the ongoing insanity in the tech world this week.