Damien Mulley

Someone nominated me for a Bloggers Choice award for best Political blog. PayPerPost sponsor the event.

I think I need some of the Google experts to explain this to me. After reading the interview John Battelle did with Udi Manber -the guy looking after Google Universal Search I remembered I had an email from Dave Davis to answer. I’d asked him some of his thoughts on this whole area. I’m actually getting bad at emails these days and if they are not answered right away I forget about them quite quickly. Anyways, back to the main topic of this post.

Jeff Jarvis talked a bit about universal search here and said:

Until now, you structured your pages and metadata in certain magical ways and — if you were hip — got yourself linked a lot by linking out a lot and — voila — you rose into Google heaven. Now you have to figure out how to put some Google helium into your videos and photos and news headlines — all of which can now appear on the blessed search-result page.

And you also have to figure out what people get when they click on those things: where are your brand, your ads, your links? If you distribute your stuff onto more sites out there — if your video becomes a hit on YouTube and on bloggers’ embeds — does that get it higher on Google? What does this do to destination and portal strategies?

Right. That got me thinking. So if you’re doing stuff now, it might well worth be considering working harder on your videos and photos and so forth and they will show up in the main result pages? Or begin to start doing videos. Would a video with a few tags get to the front page above a well SEOd page? Anyone know how well videos ranked compared to pages?

My biggie though is this: Say you are 9th on Google for the search “banana in pyjamas”. Now with universal search, they find some videos that match that and stick them in 4th or 5th position. I assume you are going to get bumped down the list and your coveted 9th place is now 11th or 12th and with it a big drop in traffic. Is this how it will work, or will you still remain in 9th spot and the vids are stuck on the page too but not in an actual placing? Are they packing the pages more into the same page?

If not, how in the feck are you going to climb that ladder once again, especially if you have to get back on the first page with 10 other ultra-competitive sites?

Actually “banana in pyjamas” turns out to be a good example as a YouTube video is 3rd above the Wiki and IMDB entry. Would have thought they’d rank WAY higher than the vid. So what are the opinions of my well-educated readership?

Edit: Some stats on the effects of Universal search.

Ah screw it, here’s the vid 🙂

Public service announcements about blogs and online stuff. Oh no, oh my!

10 Attributes of Really Lazy People.

I want. I want. Adam also wants.

Lessig’s disclosure agreement is fantastic.

John still has some good domains up for sale. Big prices. I wonder would he “rent” them to someone in return for equity in an idea?

An iron and phone interface. Errr.

Via Walter – The list of 2007.

Terry McAuliffe (Chairman of the Hillary Clinton Campaign) at Google. Talk about a Clinton lickarse:

Via Una of the Rocks.

They are stealing from our artists and affecting the livelihood of many people in the music industry.

Dick, you’d want to be very careful saying that about the people you want to bring actions against. Surely you need proof of that before you make such a soundbite?

Mr. Doyle also warned parents to be ever vigilant with the family computer as many young people were involved in file sharing probably unbeknownst to their parents.

But you’ll still stiff the parents with a whopper of a bill, won’t you Dick? Or will IRMA just forgive the parents for the sins of their poorly educated kids?

Update: Commentary from Digital Rights Ireland. Older commentary 1 Older commentary 2

I’ve registered IWillNotHold.com as a way of documenting poor customer service and ill-treatment by telcos, airlines, shop, rail companies and all the rest. It isn’t quite the Irish Customer Care portal that was previously mentioned since to start with it will just be gripes about services. The design uses some standard fugly theme which needs to be modified to make it look a bit purdy.

Any Irish blogger that wants an account on this blog, let me know and I’ll give you access. Terms and conditions apply to lessen (but not remove) the risk of me getting my ass sued and there’ll be a writing standard too.

Have I mentioned lately I am a little miffed with SAS and Sky Handling Partners? 🙂

My first time seeing it anyway. Both the below videos now automatically suggest other videos to watch, as you watch it, compared to the old choice at the end. Very iTunes looking too the way they are displayed. Also you can copy and paste the embed code direct from the video. Even more reasons not to go to YouTube and a way to make the videos more viral again.

Via Gavin is: Crystal Castles -Air War

Via John is fun with simple digital effects:

Fantastic productivity blog.

Spread the word about your favourite unknown blogs.

And it’s only 2007 and they have come up with a way of allowing sensical personal domain names in the .ie space. The loopholes were so easy that the whole process was a joke.

Watch Russian news on YouTube.

Nice broadside to tech journos/gadget reviewers.

Another weird music selling model. Stream for free, buy to transport on your iPod. I can see them run out of money quickly if they are paying royalties for every stream and not passing the cost on to the customer.

I want. Headphones with a slot for an iPod Shuffle.

The FCC are told cop the fuck on by the Courts.

Paris Hilton – Terrorist:

Via Blogorrah. Cos it’s not like there’s any kind of crime problem in the country. Enda is promising us 2000 more of these pups? These are the same people who bitched about wasting Garda time when someone pranked them? Offline copy made, in case it gets taken down.

Update: Noted Blogorrah nemesis Ray D’Arcy said the video was highly edited and suggested there was no wrong-doing by the Garda. In fact he referred to him as that “poor Garda” because cameraphones are so dangerous. One would have thought Ray realised that sometimes what you see is what you get. Remember those “doctored” O’Gara photos which proved to be real our Rayness?

How many in the list has Ireland got?

HP has decided to do something about printing content from websites and blogs. At long last. They’re realised a lot of these 2.0 websites and most existing sites don’t print well and annoy the hell out of a lot of people so they’re developing plugins for blogs and websites so you can easily print pages or individual blog posts with ease. They’ve signed up BoingBoing into a beta test of this new print widget for websites. This is now the print option on BoingBoing.

People may already be familiar with their online mini-Publisher service on the main Tabblo site. Their developers toolkit for doing this kinda thing is released on June 29th and you can sign up on the site to get access to it. They’re also doing stuff so you can easily add captions to images. Seems quite basic but a great idea as it will encourage people to print off more of their work. Caption of the Day is their show site.

There will also be a plugin available for Movable Type powered blogs available on June 29th. Where’s the one for WordPress? Their own developer blog/site runs on WordPress like.

From a press release, you can see why they want to get into this game:

HP will seek to capture a significant share of the 53 trillion digital pages estimated to be printed in 2010 alone – an opportunity valued at more than $296 billion.

Content from the Internet accounts for nearly half (48 percent) of all printing done at home. Yet, many of the most popular destinations on the web – such as blogs and travel sites – have limited or non-existent printing capabilities. In an effort to broaden and improve the web-printing experience, HP is creating technologies to make it easy to print content from the Internet in a useful format.

HP also own Snapfish.com, an online photo printing service and also recently bought Logoworks so they seem to be getting into more of the content creation side of things too. Good. I think they should go into it a lot more and buy one of those online note-taking or scrap book type sites. Go to a webpage, take a snapshot, add some notes and illustrations and send to the printer. HP should turn the web into a colouring book, if you will. The tech is there, the raw materials for mashups is there and there are plenty of creatives there. Maybe the toolkit will allow people to do this?