I love this blog: Don’t Link to Us!. They link to stupid linking policies around the web. I noticed at least one mention of an association.
Category Archives: Content Management
Anticipating Your Audience
blended perspectives: MT-RefSearch to the Rescue! is a brilliant little script for MT. It detects if an in-bound reader is coming from a google search and displays a local set of search results at the top of the page based on the google query that led to them. This can quickly route users to an MT post that may have slid of the home page since Google last indexed it.
This takes an approach I often use at work in a completely new-to-me direction. I always make sure that our PR folks keep us up-to-date on media mentions of our organization so that I can get a link and/or a blurb on our home pages that will quickly direct those users to info relevant to the media exposure that guided them to us. Gotta grab those people right off the bat if we’re going to engage them.
I had never considered applying the same approach to in-bound searchers from Google and other seach engines. We could even create special messages for certain keywords that are hot-button issues for us in addition to supply our local search results for their query.
I need to think this through a bit more but it is a fascinating idea. Thanks for the idea Eliot!
NPR Linking Policy Update
NPR has updated their linking policy:
NPR : The Ombudsman at National Public Radio
Okay, I think we understand now that NPR policy needed some revision.
I spotted this via rc3.org.
The policy still says they reserve the right to withdraw permission to link to their site. The only problem is that it still isn’t theirs to give or take. Oh well, better than nothing. The wording about welcoming and encouraging linking in general is in the right spirit at least.
davidwatson.org review of amazon web services
www.davidwatson.org has posted a good overview of the Amazon’s new web services API. He even provides a sample script that he integrated with his weblog.
Blogware as Disruptive Tech
Via Terry Frazier’s weblog: Blogs as Disruptive Tech – How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants
This piece is definitely worth a read.
Increasingly, there’s only a thin layer of functionality separating blogware from low-end Content Management solutions. Features like:
* Basic Workflow, so administrators can approve content and templates
* Permission Levels, so you can easily separate content editors from template designers
* Update Histories, so you can track whose updating what (and when)
* Multiple Types of Data, so you can do more than just post blogs (e.g. post Press Releases or Job Listings)A blogging software company that adds those functionalities to basic blogware could start to eat away at Content Management market share on the low-end. It’s already starting to happen with corporate weblogs: knowledge management blogs, corporate communications blog, and marketing blogs are all making a splash in the marketplace without much participation from the low to mid-end content management systems.
I think it represents the growth of more diverse tools to meet the diverse needs that have always been there. Why buy a $100k hammer if you have $0.02 nails?
Pre-click Confidence
How Real People Search – Resnick and Lergier puts forward an interesting concept: pre-click confidence. They have defined this as:
In testing, we measure the Pre-Click Confidence (PCC), which is how sure the user is that the selected link will have the needed information. When the PCC for a link exceeds a match quality threshold, they click. We call this a satisficing constraint because the user is satisfied with the PCC. If the user is in the mood to browse, she can set the PCC threshold low. In this case, she should expect to get lots of false alarms and may not be as frustrated when the link doesn’t have what she is looking for. On the other hand, if she is in a “just the facts” mood (Rozanski et al, 2001), she will set the PCC very high. If she gets fooled by a poorly written description, she will be much more disappointed in the search engine performance.
Here is my summary of the above article’s findings on real people searching:
- Users searching for a specific fact or item have a very high PCC threshold. If none of the search result titles and/or descriptions meet their PCC requirement they will not click on anything.
- Users searching for a general topic compare the perceived PCC value for each result in the set and click on those they have the highest confidence for.
- All searchers want descriptions included with search results.
- Very few people click to see more results beyond the first page returned by their search.
As I think about the search engines and sites that I use, I pretty consistently assign very high PCC values to links posted in weblogs compared to any other source.
www.searchtools.com, who published the article, is an excellent site for researching search technology, btw. I read the reference to this article in their Search Tools News e-mail newsletter.
Content Inventory Article and Spreadsheet
This essay by Jeff Veen (found via Column Two) provides a method with which to catalogue the static html files of a site in preparation for converting to a content management system. The article also includes a download of the spreadsheet, which is handy.
Here is an important bit to read to yourself several times before embarking on this kind of project:
After you’ve filled in a couple hundred lines of the spreadsheet, you’ll inevitably start to wonder if there is something – anything! – that can speed this process up. Surely technology can come to the rescue. Sorry. The best we’ve been able to do is enlist the help of a programmer to write us a script that will crawl a Web site and spit out the URLs it finds. And that merely ensures that we don’t miss any pages. Even with this head start, we always go through the pages by hand. A content inventory is a decidedly human task. In fact, we find that the process can often be as valuable as the final spreadsheet. If you invest the time in scouring your Web site and deconstructing every page (or at least a good selection of pages), you will end up as the uncontested expert in how it all goes together. And that’s invaluable knowledge to possess when redesigning your site.
That matches our experience when we went through this process during our conversion from static files to a database-driven CMS. It was long and tedious but you really know your content afterwards.
The spreadsheet we developed for our project also included some rows that we used for mapping the existing content to a new location since we had redesigned our overall site structure during the conversion.
Hyperreferencing
Found this link (via a Wired article on NPR’s linking policy) to some writing Tim Berners-Lee did about the nature of links:
Normal hypertext links do not of themselves imply that the document linked to is part of, is endorsed by, or endorses, or has related ownership or distribution terms as the document linked from.
So why call it a link? I wonder if this tendancy for the unclued to imply copyright violation or some other tangible impact by hyperlinking comes from the very word itself. To link, in the traditional sense, implies some physical connection or tie. From my copy of Websters:
link vt: To couple or connect by or as if by a link.
If hyperlinks had been called hyperreferences (which is what they are) from the start perhaps the widespread misunderstanding about the nature of linking would be a little less pervasive.
Taxonomy and RSS
The group that maintains the RSS standard is exploring the addition of some taxonomy elements. (Found via Ease.)
At first glance it looks like it will give you the ability to add pointers to related information and/or topics on your own web site or elsewhere. Taking a weblog as an example, you could add category-specific archives links to individual posts in an RSS feed. A news reader could then render links to your category archive for a particular post which the user could then follow if they want to see whatelse you have said on the overall subject.
When Lawyers Control Your Web Site
From Cory Doctorow’s blog:
NPR joins KPMG and other bastions of cluelessness by requiring that anyone who wishes to link to the NPR site fill in this form. No matter how deep or shallow your link is, NPR requires you to fill in this form.
…
Really, it beggars the imagination to think that anyone in this day and age could be this fatally stupid. If you agree, drop a note to NPR’s ombudsman.
Here is the form. Do I need to get written permission to cite an NPR program in a bibliography?
C. David Gammel, CAE 