Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Search engine optimization (SEO)

If you are trying to make money from a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a matter of vital concern. An enormous amount of web traffic arises from somebody, somewhere in the world throwing a search query into Google or Bing or Yahoo (but really Google) and then picking from among the results that appear.

This is perhaps an unprecedented situation in human history, because now website developers have an overwhelming incentive to produce pages that appear high in the rankings of popular search engines, when people put popular queries into them. As a result, these website creators are no longer just producing content designed to appeal to human beings – it also needs to stand out as special to the mathematical algorithms that drive the world’s search engines.

For the most part, I would say this is a bad thing. Algorithms can deal with fantastically more data than a person ever could. Google crawls through an impossible number of blog posts every day. At the same time, people are much more clever when it comes to telling a good site from a bad site. They rely on cues that it is very hard to teach algorithms to respond to.

Certainly, the world is much better off as the result of the existence of powerful search engines. That said, I hope that SEO proves to be a dying industry in the long term, as search engines begin to more closely approximate the behaviours and reactions of real human beings. When that happens, web designers and content producers may start optimizing their work for its human consumers, rather than for the robots that are often the intermediary between humans with a desire for certain kinds of information and the humans who can actually provide it.

(Full disclosure: This site does earn money from advertising, but so far that has very much been a matter of paying the cost of web hosting. In terms of income per hour of work, I would be enormously better off working any minimum wage job.)

Blogging out loud

I have attended and enjoyed a couple of Blog Out Loud Ottawa events, at which local bloggers read one selected post in front of an audience. This year, I decided to give it a try. The event is on July 7th, at 7:00pm at Irene’s Pub on Bank Street, just north of Landsdowne Park.

My contribution will certainly be outside the norm, as most people read posts that are narrative accounts of their own personal experiences. I will almost certainly select one of my posts on climate change.

The post is meant to be from between June 2009 and June 2010, but the selection is otherwise up to me. I want to choose something that is informative and accessible, even for people without much knowledge about climate change, politics, or environmental issues.

Suggestions?

HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft – viral marketing?

Blizzard’s Starcraft must surely be one of the most enduring computer games of all time. It came out when I was in high school, but is still actively played by a large number of people, especially in South Korea. There are even professional matches and tournaments.

Now, Blizzard is in the middle of a long beta release of Starcraft II. I think the key purpose is to balance the three races, so that good players will be approximately equally likely to use all three. The balancing is subtle and detailed: involving everything from the cost and time required for weapons upgrades to the potentially useful hexagonal grid projected by Protoss pylons, which could aid accurate placement of buildings.

Throughout the beta, there have been two internet personalities releasing high-resolution narrated replays of high level matches: HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft. They had one sponsored tournament, but generally don’t seem to advertise for anybody. That, combined with the relative professionalism of their operation and the sheer amount of time they are putting into it makes me wonder if they might be part of a viral marketing campaign run by Blizzard, designed to build anticipation for the forthcoming game.

This is pure speculation on my part but if it is true, it is a clever move on Blizzard’s part. The number of people watching each screencast has been rising steadily, and is now consistently over 100,000. The people watching may end up as some of the most active members of the eventual Starcraft II community, after commercial release. Even if Blizzard has nothing to do with these replays, I think undertaking such an extensive beta release (with more than 13 patches already) shows a good amount of respect for their customers, for whom the issue of balance will eventually be very important.

[Update: 14 December 2010] I no longer think it is at all likely that HD and Husky are part of a viral marketing campaign. Still, it would have been a pretty good idea on the part of Blizzard. I have definitely enjoyed their videos, and they contributed to my desire to buy and play Starcraft II.

Taking political positions in public

U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is not a man who I often find myself in agreement with. That said, I do think a recent comment of his was both true and important. Opponents of gay marriage in the United States are seeking to have their identities kept secret, because they fear that they will suffer for their views. In response, Scalia said that: “The fact is, running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.” He also said that: “you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”

Certainly, it is grossly inappropriate for people to be threatening the personal security of those who oppose gay marriage. That being said, having an active and effective public debate over issues of policy and law does require people to openly and honestly express their views. Furthermore, in a free and democratic society, we retain the right to reach judgments about people on the basis of their views. It is perfectly legitimate for me to think that someone is bad at evaluating complex information, because they are a climate change denier. Similarly, it seems legitimate to say that those who do not support equal rights for gay couples don’t really take human rights or the concept of equal treatment under the law seriously.

Whether you agree or disagree with that specific perspective, I think Scalia’s argument that society benefits when people declare their positions honestly and publicly is a strong one. Serious politics, based around competing ideas, relies on that sort of open discussion and debate. The alternative is a shadowy political world in which people try to advance their preferences obliquely, using whatever underhanded techniques might be effective.

Facebook and data mining

I have written before about privacy and Facebook, expressing the view that people should treat whatever they put on Facebook in the same way as they treat something they put on a completely public website at this one. It may be wise to give people more granular control over who can see what, but it isn’t intelligent as a Facebook user to assume that their privacy controls will always be adequate and that your information will stay safe.

In the wake of the latest Facebook privacy debacle, I have realized that there is an element to the situation that I hadn’t considered before. Especially now that Facebook is working to put everybody’s ‘Interests’ into a standardized format, there is a real difference between how information on Facebook can be used, compared to the wider web.

A person with some time and interest could scan through my blog, figure out about how old I am, learn what sort of books I read, discover my political views, and so on. It would be rather tricky to write an automated computer program that would achieve the same result. Blogs are non-standardized, and comprised of human generated text. By contrast, information on Facebook is increasingly organized in a manner that is easily machine readable. If I want to reach 25-27 year olds who enjoy reading Carl Sagan books and live in Ottawa, it is easy to do via the information on Facebook, but hard to do with information from the general web. That seems to comprise a different sort of privacy violation and/or data mining.

In response, I have stripped my Facebook account of everything that might be of interest to advertisers, at least where it is easily machine-readable: hometown, current location, music and films appreciated, etc. A determined human user could still learn a lot about me from Facebook, for instance by looking at status updates and communication with others, but this will at least make it a bit trickier for machines.

Praise for Teksavvy tech support

For the last few months, my internet connection has been maddeningly unreliable. Oftentimes, it has trouble with basic tasks like loading text-based websites or accessing email. The only mechanism I have found for improving matters was to power down my DSL router, wait a few minutes, and then turn it back on. That made things better for a little while, but it soon got patchy again. TekSavvy is my internet service provider.

Non-geeks may want to skip the next section.

Technical details

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a TekSavvy customer support guy named Peter who helped me break down the problem. Replacing the phone cord between the modem and the wall did nothing. The problem could be the modem, the wiring in my house, or the wiring outside. To know, I would need to test the connection at the demarcation point between the Bell network (which TekSavvy leases) and my apartment’s own wiring. To isolate a modem problem, I would also need to test it with another modem.

Today, I cycled way up Bank Street to the Home Depot beyond Billings Bridge. Despite not having a driver’s license, I convinced the manager there to rent me a 50′ extension cord for 24 hours.

My one complaint about tonight is how long it took to talk to a TekSavvy tech person. I called their customer service line at about 10pm and was told someone would call be back ‘shortly.’ Forty-five minutes later, I called again and was told they had no record of me calling before. I waited some more. Then, at 12:30am, I called their customer support person and told them I had been told two and a half hours before that someone would call me shortly. At that point, the customer service person put me directly through to Todd in tech support.

He was extremely helpful. Out in the rain with my headlamp, modem, multi-tool, and extension cord, I plugged my modem directly into the demarcation point. From there, it synced properly and at the right speed. My heart sank a bit. That meant the problem was with my wiring: Bell would not fix it for free and, in the worst case, it would be necessary to rip out from the walls. I started thinking about switching to a cable modem.

Todd then explained to me that the problem could just be corrosion. The inside of the box at the demarcation point had fine black powder covering every horizontal surface. The male portion of the telephone connector inside was also brown and gunky. After scraping through the gunk on the male portion of the connector, I closed up the box and moved my modem back inside. Now, according to TekSavvy’s diagnostic, it is syncing much better.

The next step is to do a more serious reworking of that demarcation box. Ideally, I should clip the copper wires inside, strip the ends, and wrap those around the connectors. Then, I should cover them with some sort of waterproof, oxygen-excluding gunk (Vaseline?) and seal up the whole box better than it was before. That might allow decent, reliable internet access without the need to tear wires out of my walls. Another possibility for improvement is replacing the telephone jack inside.

Conclusions

All told, I am very pleased with the service from TekSavvy. After all, the wiring in the old house where I live is not their responsibility. Rather than make me pay for some Bell person to come out, test at the demarcation point, and throw up his hands saying that the problem is my wiring, they helped me isolate the problem, and then suggested practical steps for improving the situation and hopefully eventually resolving it.

I called their customer service person one more time and asked her to make a note in the tech guy’s file that he had really helped me out and I appreciated it.

One thing about all this is a bit funny. While it is easy to think of the internet as some ethereal thing that empowers human communication like nothing before it, it is also possible for a gunky little connector inside a sooty grey plastic box to interrupt it, causing months of agitation for a person like myself.

Friends of Gin & Tonic

Friends of Gin & Tonic is an amusing website that sets out to mock climate change deniers. They describe their mission as: “Self Interest and Climate Change Denial” and elaborate by explaining:

We seek to inform the public of the findings of a handful of amateurs of unrivalled capability (but almost no ‘formal’ climatological expertise) that utterly undermine the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ that the planet is warming and that people are causing it. This ‘consensus’, the biggest scientific fraud in history, has been foisted on a gullible public by a politico-scientific elite intent on a single world government with themselves, via control of the United Nations, at its head. Exercising merciless control of the scientific literature by requiring that published work be consistent with such piffle as observations, physical principles, and mathematical models, this evil clique tries to suppress the promulgation of any alternative view. Small fringe groups like our sister organization the Friends of Science are thus reduced to using right-wing blogs, opinion columns of like-minded newspapers, and guerrilla publicity stunts at international meetings to promote their message.

Mockery is certainly part of the set of things richly deserved by climate change deniers, though it is not an adequate mechanism for countering their efforts in and of itself.

They came to my attention via DeSmogBlog.

Tags versus categories for blogs

I have long felt that, while categories play a useful role in organizing information on blogs, tags are just useless noise. I am pleased to see that Matt Cutts, who blogs and works for Google, agrees.

From the words in your actual post, Google and other search engines can tell what it is about. Categories, on the other hand, provide a useful way for someone interested in a particular subject you write about to learn more about it. Someone visiting my blog might only be interested in security, or economics, or photography. Categories let them filter through to just that easily.

They are also a lot less time consuming (though less customizable) than hand-generating an index page or two.

Blackberry Curve versus Nokia E71

I have had the E71 for a while and largely found it disappointing. That said, it was my first smartphone, so I didn’t have much basis for comparison. More recently, I was issued a Blackberry Curve through work. On the basis of using both, I can say pretty clearly that the Curve is superior in most respects.

The E71 is decidedly clunky at multitasking. If you open more than one or two applications (and things like the call log and address book count), it can start grinding slowly and complaining of low memory. By contrast, the Curve seems happy to run a web browser, instant message program, and more with ease. Programs load much faster, and I have never had one crash on the Curve, while they crash often on the E71. My E71 has also been plagued by software bugs ranging from the annoying to the truly infuriating.

Voice quality is comparable between the two, and not especially good in either case. Reception is comparable in both, as are web browsing speeds.

The Curve web browser seems superior both to Nokia’s built-in browser and to the copy of Opera I installed on the E71. Neither really provides an ideal web experience, however. Both give the feeling of accessing websites through a little window in a piece of paper that you need to move around vertically and horizontally. Both also have trouble with some fairly basic web elements, such as logging into content management systems like WordPress.

I cannot comment on third party applications for the Curve, because I have not installed any. Generally, I have found those I had added to the E71 disappointing. A couple of notable exceptions are Google Maps and GMail. The built-in GTalk client on the Curve is rather good. One significant limitation of the Curve is the lack of GPS, which would actually make it much less useful as a primary phone.

Both phones have cameras that are too terrible for any serious use.

Aesthetically, the E71 wins hands down. It feels sleek and solid, whereas the Curve feels chunky and a bit soft. The E71 also looks a lot better, with nice differentiation of colour, the steel back and silver highlights. The Curve is a generic black rubber slab. The keyboard on the E71 is also distinctly better, even though it is a significantly smaller phone. The shape of the keys on the E71 make it easier to type quickly and accurately, while I find those on the Curve awkwardly sized, shaped, and spaced.

In an ideal world, I would put the guts and software from the Blackberry Curve into the body of the E71, with a keyboard and GPS transplant from the Nokia to the Blackberry offering. Given the choice between buying one or the other now, for personal use, I would probably opt for the Blackberry. It falls down on aesthetics and GPS functionality, but seems to be superior in most ways. Regarding my keyboard complaints, it also seems possible that if I had started off with the Curve, I would prefer it now.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.