Yearly Archives: 2006

Local Search Will Be Huge

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Donna Bogatin has put a $31 billion value on local search and online classified advertising in the US. Greg Sterling has a thoughtful review of some expert opinions and is less bullish, although the figures are still very high. However he feels that it all turns on the 20 million or so SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises) and whether their promotional spend will migrate online. Although the infrastructure now exists to bring a substantial number of SMEs into paid search and other forms of online marketing over time, he feels this is being hampered by the ambivalence of the traditional media, which have the most hooks into the local market.

I believe there is a huge pent-up demand here. Current local search methods don’t work very well in either the traditional media or online. Think of your own experience in trying to find some local supplier or restaurant. At its best it’s only passable. Often it’s a frustrating failure.

That’s why there is so much effort on the part of the major search engines to get it right. It’s good to see a new entrant, Ask City, come on the scene. With more competition, there’ll be even more effort put into this, perhaps the most important area for search.

The majors still have a way to go. Here is how Greg Sterling would rank them in terms of overall usability, data, features and functionality:

  1. Yahoo Local (imperfect but the overall winner; weakness is absence of ratings density)
  2. Ask City (not as complete as Yahoo Local)
  3. Google Maps (fast and smart, but lacking in some helpful features)
  4. Windows Live Local (lots of bells and whistles here but lacking in some basic usability areas)

This is not to say that it’s easy. William Slawski has an interesting post on a Microsoft patent that illustrates the complexity. For example, most searchers for Kentucky Fried Chicken are not looking for it in Kentucky. Such efforts are undoubtedly the smallest tip of the iceberg of effort that is going in to get the winning solution. Donna Bogatin in the earlier reference questioned whether Google would be the winner in this race, and indeed it’s not obvious. Google may be the best at cataloguing the cyber-universe, but that isn’t needed when you come down to local search.

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Copyright, Copy Write, Copy Wrong

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There’s a most interesting item on Slate entitled Dead Plagiarists Society. The subtitle is ‘Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?’ and the author is Paul Collins. I highly recommend it.

Google in its ever-ongoing journey to catalogue all knowledge in the world is well along with the printed word. You can use Google Book Search to find out where in a book you can find a particular quote. If you’re that way inclined, you can also do some detective work on some newly written book to see whether it contains other folks’ work. Of course that’s OK if it’s small sections and the author attributed it to the original author. Otherwise the author may well be liable to be pursued for copyright infringement.

It’s another example of the new transparency that we all must observe in this Internet era. Those spiders are everywhere.

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Walled Gardens

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A walled garden repels visitors.

Walled Gardens is one of the most important metaphors around on the Internet and probably for the foreseeable future. It’s also one of the most apt. The original meaning was a garden surrounded by a wall, as you might expect. The new version, according to Wikipedia, is described as follows:
A walled garden, when referring to media content, refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (a method of creating a monopoly or securing an information system). This is in contrast to providing consumers access to the open Internet for content and e-commerce.

Hugh MacLeod of gavingvoid has one of his usual pithy cartoons to explain what it’s all about. At least that’s what the owners of walled gardens would hope would happen. However building a wall around your garden can be a two-edged sword, to mix metaphors. It keeps people in but it also keeps people out. Provided the garden is so rich and pleasurable that no one would ever wish to leave, then it may work well for those who are inside. However as SeachSecurity.com points out, some may regard the walled garden as a “walled prison”.

This is one of the two main concerns of the “walled garden approach”. It really links in with the whole Permission Marketing philosophy. Permission Marketing starts from the premise that the customer is in control. More and more companies have adopted this philosophy since it was described by Seth Godin in 1999. Some walled gardens are very much appreciated by their visitors, since it may keep out less desirable visitors. Provided that this has value and outweighs any frustrations for visitors created by the walls, then such a walled garden is consistent with Permission Marketing. Not all walled gardens are so appreciated by their visitors. In some cases, the visitor must accept distressing constraints imposed by the walls in order to get some other desirable benefits only available in the walled garden. In this case, the walled garden is operating in a quasi-monopolistic way.

This might seem to create serious problems. However these can be handled if the walled garden owner is astute. Dave Gilbert who is involved in the GNU Classpath project for open source Java recently wrote, “Remarkably and fantastically, Sun has announced plans to bridge the gap between what we have now, and what we’d like to have, outside of Sun’s walled garden. They’re not taking down their walled garden just yet (nor should they), but they’re creating a level playing field outside of it, which is a very smart, brave, and generous move.”

An even more worrying concern about walled gardens is their tendency to isolate their inhabitants from the rest of the world. To operate effectively in the widest space possible requires that most often processes should operate according to generally accepted standards. On the other hand, within a walled garden, there is no need to follow accepted standards. The rules can even be set by the walled garden. This might be considered an advantage to the walled garden but is also a penalty in that it may deter some visitors from entering. It may also reinforce the differences and delay any efforts on creating standards.

These two major problems means that the walled garden approach may have serious problems in the longer term, even though it may seem economically attractive in the shorter term. It is interesting that as time goes on, AOL (America On Line), the most celebrated example of a walled garden is gradually lowering the walls.

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Web Standards And Sitemaps

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Everyone was talking yesterday about the joint acceptance of Sitemaps by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search. They have even supported a new Sitemaps website (http://www.sitemaps.org). It’s well worth a visit and clearly explains what Sitemaps are all about.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Once you have a sitemap file on your website then you can register this with the three search engines. In this way, you have an assurance that your website is adequately visible to these search engines.

What is more significant is that the three have come together around the same approach. In a sense, they have created a de facto web standard way of cataloguing web sites. We’re all the winners when some of the obvious mechanics of the Internet can be done in a standard way. Perhaps it’s another signal of the new regime’s thinking at Microsoft. Would it have happened so quickly when Bill Gates was directing everything that Microsoft did?

It’s an awesome burden when you’re so big and have so much money that you can require that the game should be played your way. Sometimes it can create enormous legacy problems as the world does not accept your view. Microsoft with Internet Explorer version 7 is now trying to work more with web standards but prior versions have created a huge population of non-conforming web pages. The frustrations caused by this non-standard thinking are widespread.

Another smaller example of Microsoft’s “Do It My Way” thinking is those favicons you may or may not see as you surf the Web. Those are the small icons that appear in Favorites or Bookmark lists or in the address field of your browser. Microsoft invented these icons but has presumably by now forgotten about trying to make them work in a standard way. You can make favicons work in Firefox but not reliably in Internet Explorer. Again it’s an obvious piece of Internet mechanics that suffers by lack of standards.

Using economic power to block basic mechanics from functioning in a common sense way is counter-productive and misguided. Hopefully this action on Sitemaps is just another important signal that we all win when everyone tries to make standards work.

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Business Blogging Moves To A Place In The Sun

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Mr. Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc. was pretty happy last Friday. That’s why his blog post that day was titled, “Sunlight on a Cloudy Day…” He was particularly happy because Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox had posted a comment on his blog (and sent the same content by snail-mail). He was disclosing that the SEC will consider allowing companies to push their financial information to the public via blogs.

Since Mr. Schwartz has been pushing for that for some time, it’s good to hear that this very obvious way of increasing the full transparent disclosure of corporate information is getting attention in the right places.

The Internet brings completely different mechanisms for widespread communication into play. Hopefully each time we see another slice of the population smelling the coffee, the next step becomes easier. We’ve always done it that way is often completely the wrong argument in this Internet era.

Tip of the Hat to John Battelle

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