Archive for November, 2009

In August, we alerted webmasters to the news from the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team of the beta 1 release of their excellent new tool, the IIS SEO Toolkit. The public response we received was very enthusiastic and supportive. In response to many requests, we followed that up with a more detailed article explaining how the new tool is installed as an extension of IIS 7.

Since that time, the tool was refreshed in a beta 2 release and, as of November 13, a full version 1.0 release. Given the deserved popularity of the tool among web developers and search engine optimizers, I wanted to take a moment to explore what has changed with the IIS SEO Toolkit since the beta 1 article was published.

Technical requirements unchanged

This remains unchanged from the first beta release. The tool was built as an extension of IIS 7, so you need to use an operating system that can run IIS 7 in order to run the tool. That means you can run any of the following IIS 7 and higher-compatible operating systems:

• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (and higher — you may need to first upgrade the default version of IIS to 7.0)
• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 R2

Because of the toolkit’s core dependency of running as an extension to IIS 7, Windows XP, which cannot run IIS 7, can’t be used as a platform for the IIS SEO Toolkit.

However, make no mistake about this important point. The IIS SEO Toolkit is a client-side tool. Once it is installed on your computer workstation, you can use it to perform a detailed analysis on your website regardless of the web server platform it uses, be it IIS, Apache, or even if the “site” is simply a collection of HTML and associated files and folders stored locally on your computer.

Install the toolkit

Admittedly, the beta 1 product was a bit complicated for some to install. We got some complaints about it in Bing. But that’s beta software for you! The IIS team developers took your feedback and streamlined the process tremendously for the final release. Now the installation of version 1.0 of the IIS SEO Toolkit is an automated process (click the preceding link to start). You don’t even need to uninstall any beta versions! How cool is that?

New and improved features since beta 1

In our first blog article about the IIS SEO Toolkit, we did a decent rundown of the basic features found in beta 1. So what’s changed? Let’s take a look:

Usability improvements

There are many improvements here. First and foremost, after installing the new version of the IIS SEO Toolkit, you can start the tool through an icon on your Start menu (I found it at Start > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0). This provides users with much more intuitive, direct access to the tool.

Other usability improvements include streamlining the query builder interface, the addition of a Violations tab on the Details dialog boxes for direct access to affected pages, new context menus for copying content from the tool, new Help shortcuts, keyboard navigation has been improved, and much more.

Extensibility enhancements

The toolkit has been opened up with a new set of APIs for developers who need to extend the tool’s potential. Now you can create custom modules that can extend the crawling process through augmenting existing metadata reports with your own, parsing new content types, and defining new violations based on user needs. The extensibility even enables developers to add new user interface (UI) elements for both the Site Analyzer and the Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes tools. For more information on how this feature works, check out the IIS developer team’s blog article IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility.

Metadata stored

By using the aforementioned extensibility of the tool, the HTML parser can now store the contents of the <meta> tags from all pages within the analyzed site and use that data for new queries.

Comparison reports

You can now compare two reports side-by-side to track various changed metrics over time from your website. For more information on this, check out the blog article IIS SEO Toolkit – Report Comparison.

Authentication support

The tool’s custom crawler, IISBot, can now crawl secured pages that use either basic or Windows authentication. This will be a significant boon to users who want to use the toolkit on secured intranet sites and on protected staging servers prior to publication.

Canonicalization support

The toolkit supports canonicalization efforts by accepting the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute of the <link> tag. It can look for and identify several new canonical error violations in the site’s code. Support for sub-domain canonicalization is provided. The toolkit also provides link position information for canonical URLs.

Data export options

You can now choose to export a comma-separated-value (CSV) format list of all detected violations, all URLs, or all links from the toolkit.

New reports

New reports include a redirects summary and links depth, which identifies the deepest-linked pages in your site. For more on this, take a look at the blog article IIS SEO Toolkit – New Reports (Redirects and Link Depth).

New Routes query

The routes query is an entirely new type of query, which identifies deeply-linked pages (pages that are buried on your site and require several clicks to finally access from the home page) and more.

Local files cache options

Users now have the option to disable the toolkit from keeping analyzed site files in a local cache. Disabling the cache allows reports to run faster and consumes far less disk space. Note, however, that disabling the cache also prevents the Site Analysis tool from presenting the Content tab from the Details dialog box, disables the contextual position of links, and disables the Word Analysis feature from appearing.

Better robots.txt file handling and management

The Robots Exclusion tool can directly open your robots.txt file for processing.

Better Sitemap.xml handling and management

The Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes tool has been improved with better filtering and managing of canonical URLs.

More information

The IIS SEO Toolkit development team blog lists more details of the features from each successive release of the toolkit, from beta 1, through beta 2, up to the new version 1.0. Check out these articles and their team blog for ongoing, detailed posts on how to take full advantage of the tool for your website.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our SEM forum. Until next time…

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center

Thanksgiving was last week, and I thought about doing a post to thank the people who contribute to WordPress core, since this is a group of people I’m thankful for on a daily basis. I started a draft, and then realized that with 2.9 in beta, we’ll have a release announcement sometime in the next few weeks (barring unforeseen complications, etc), and all the core contributors will be thanked then. Though I think it’s worth giving thanks every day for the people who make WordPress possible, I don’t like to clutter up anyone’s feed readers with repetitive posts, so I decided to wait until today for my post, and to focus solely on the other group I’d planned to include: support forum volunteers.

Forum volunteers don’t get a lot of flashy attention. There aren’t flame wars about whether or not the support forums should be commercial instead of free and community-run. There generally aren’t big arguments and debates over whose point of view is the right one. What the forums do have is amazing volunteers who give their time to help other WordPress users and developers learn. People who only know a little answer easy questions that maybe they’ve only recently learned the answers to themselves. People with more expert skills help troubleshoot larger issues. If someone offers advice that could be better, others will add their solutions to the mix. Of all the WordPress users I’ve met in person, not one person got started without visiting the forums. In many cases, people turn to the forums even before the Codex. In the support forums, I see a lot of what is best about our community, and almost none of that which is not.*

Without further ado, here’s my thank you to the volunteers who make the support forums work. Without them, we would be less than what we are today. I’m listing people by their Wordpress.org usernames, since that’s how you see them in the forums.

Official WordPress.org Support Forum Moderators

These are the people who’ve officially got your back and have been active in the past few months. See them at a WordCamp? Buy them a beer! Otto42,  jeremyclark13, MichaelH, samboll, Chris_K. MichaelH suggested we also recognize Moshu, Podz, Kafkaesqui for past meritorious service.

The Honor Roll
These people are not official moderators, but their knowledge and activity levels have caught the attention of those who are. A big round of thanks to these folks for selflessly sharing their knowledge with other WordPress users.

Most active volunteers, nominated by more than one official moderator for recognition (for the reasons given):
alchymyth – “Overall knowledge”
apljdi – “Overall knowledge and programming skills”
t31os_ – “Programming skills”
whooami – “For her security responses” “Knows her stuff”

Generally active volunteers, nominated by official moderators for recognition:
esmi, ClaytonJames, numeeja, stvwlf, buddhatrance, songdogtech, alism, alchymyth, Ipstenu, RVoodoo, jdingman, kmessinger, ArnoldGoodway, Shane G., figaro, jonimueller, blepoxp, cais, mfields, designdolphin, doc4, greenshady, mercime, mrmist, bh_WP_fan , henkholland, krembo99, jdembowski, pboosten, adiant, andrea_r, GDHosting, Gangleri.

Some newcomers who’ve been getting active:
a_johnson, equalmark, WebTechGlobal, kymac.

And an additional shoutout to plugin authors who take an active role in moderating threads regarding their plugins, again nominated by official moderators for recognition:
scribu, GDragoN, sivel, MikeChallis, GamerZ, alexrabe, arnee, sociable, takayukister, hallsofmontezuma, joostdevalk, filosofo, roytanck, donncha, Hiroaki Miyashita, manojtd, froman118, error, Viper007Bond, alexkingorg, cavemonkey50, azaozz, aaroncampbell, isa.goksu, flipper, joedolson, redwallhp, eight7teen, orenshmu, WebGeek, Otto42, toddiceton, the_dead_one, mywpplugin, MattyRob, markjaquith, TobiasBg, Txanny, elfin, jolley_small, stastoc, anmari, micropat, frekel.

One more time, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who contributes to the support forums at WordPress.org.

As we close out 2009 and get closer to 2010, it would be great for us to start thinking about some ways we could make it easier/more rewarding for people to be involved in the forums and other aspects of the open source project. I’ve started a forum thread to discuss some ideas with the thought that we can try a couple after the holidays and see what takes.

* I say almost because let’s face it, we all get caught in the traps of trolls sometimes, and patience can be hard to keep when someone is a jerk. So a reminder to all who use the forums: be nice to the people who are trying to help you!

P.S. While I’m at it, here’s another tip/request. Search the forums for your problem before posting; if it’s already been answered before (often more than once), you’re kind of wasting people’s time by posting it again without trying the previous solutions first. Please respect the time of the volunteers by searching first (and mention in your post what you’ve already tried).

Google’s relevancy algorithms have largely been driven by taking the “authority” shortcut. Have lots of other domains linking to your site? It must be good. Here is a golden ticket…your site ranks for everything.

That curbed some types of spam (by increasing the sunk cost needed to rank a new site), but it has taken brands only a few years to adjust to that hole in the algorithm. Witness the rise of answer spam, scraper re-purposing spam, social media recycling tools, freelance articles for a nickel spam, machine spun articles that are textually unique, etc etc etc

Increasingly, the biggest role of brand in search publishing is to legitimize stuff which might otherwise seem illegitimate and give them enough scale that it hopefully kicks off enough AdSense revenue that it matters to Google.

Demand Media recently highlighted their business model in Wired magazine:

To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

The article (unlike most eHow articles) is well worth a read, but a quick summary…

• buy up some aged well linked to sites (that were perhaps linked to when it was easier to get links with watered down content and before the web graph was as corrupted by $ as it is today)
• create algorithms to mine their analytics data and Google’s tools to estimate the earnings potential of any piece of content
• pay freelancers crumbs to write write write based on whatever the algorithm spits out
• run the content through a tool like Copyscape to verify it is unique
• pay a reviewer ~ $1 to verify the article is (nearly) legible
• keep refining and optimizing the above components based on feedback from earlier tests
• create sister websites that are heavily cross-linked which host a second page about the highest earning topics

And in opening up their playbook to Wired, Demand Media likely created dozens of additional competitors who will aim to monetize the longtail of search via freelance articles of varying quality. Aol, headed by former Google executive Tim Armstrong, has been talking up a revolutionary media model to the media, which reads exactly like the Demand Media playbook:

The predictions, it says, are based on a wide swath of data AOL collects, from the Web searches people make on its site to the sites visited by subscribers to its Internet services.

The system is designed to track breaking news and trends and identify the best times to write about seasonal events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.

Based on these recommendations, the company’s editorial staff, which totals about 500, will assign articles to a network of free-lancers across the country via a new Web site called Seed.com. AOL says it now works with about 3,000 free-lancers, but it is hoping to sharply increase that number through the Web site, which is open to anyone looking to submit a story. To cut costs ahead of its spinoff, AOL recently said it was cutting about a third of its total staff, or 2,500 employees.

If authors are going to get paid for performance on a freelance basis to churn out junk then they may as well spend a few months learning internet marketing, blogging, and Wordpress…if publishing is algorithm driven you don’t really need to work for someone else to make a few Dollars per article. It is VERY easy to beat that, so long as you are willing to wait 3 to 6 months for your payout.

And the process of scaling automated low quality content generation is only going to make existing media channels reliant on search feel more pain. Dollars become dimes. Dimes become pennies. As traditional media companies go bankrupt companies like Demand Media and AOL will buy up the brands and fill the sites with more good content.

This not only will further harm traditional media models, but it will also pollute up the search results so much that…

• it makes it hard to find quality information via search
• private membership sites and paid niche content will become more popular
• Google will either be forced to change their relevancy algorithms or make an example of a big company in the search (g)arbitrage game, or else searchers are going to have an awful experience over the next half-decade or so

I wish there was an Exchange Traded Fund which allowed me to place a bet on information pollution…until Google stops it, the profit potential will be too great for opportunistic “publishers” to ignore. It is a rare sure bet. And it is entirely up to Google to decide how big they want to let the bubble get before they deflate it.

Here is what the content revolution Tim Armstrong speaks of looks like:

Imagine 8 of the top 10 search results for every longtail query looking like THAT. And yet, it is about to become reality.

Those who know the least yell loudest. And Google is colluding with the likes of Demand Media and Aol to ENSURE every idiot has a megaphone. Ignorance is powerful.

Adoption of the AWS Cloud by mainstream ISVs is underway as you read this. There are numerous posts about IBM’s work to bring their product line into the AWS environment, and today’s is no exception. IBM Tivoli monitoring is now available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that runs as a virtual computer in the AWS environment. It’s one more example of enterprise-class applications from household-name ISVs that run in the Amazon Cloud.

And it’s simple to Use – IBM provides self-install scripts for data collection agents, self-help guides and maintains infrastructure for delivery of Tivoli software Because there is no hardware or software to purchase – and because the hourly price for Tivoli on EC2 includes an IBM license – it’s super easy to get data collection up and running. At the end of the day, it’s the same enterprise-class software that organizations used to buy traditional licenses for – but without the big PO approval required. In fact, it’s as simple as logging in to the AWS Console, and then searching for AMIs with “Tivoli” in the name.

There’s a comprehensive FAQ about Tivoli on AWS on IBM developerWorks.

If you are interested in a close look at IBM Tivoli, there will be a webcast on Dec 15, 2009 at 8 AM PST, or 11 AM EST that features IBM product managers. You can register here.

— Mike

From the phenomenon of BarCamp culture and Yahoo’s own Open Hack Days, hack events have spread through the worldwide tech community at fantastic pace, bringing together people with passion for building new toys, experiments and enhancements, embracing the data open on the web. Working alone or forming teams, people find software bugbears to fix or look for something altogether new and inspiring. One of the more recent and strongest developments in hack culture is the emergence of industry-specific events, such as last weekend’s Boston Music Hack Day, the fourth Music Hack Day (and first in the U.S.).

Given its specific subject matter, Music Hack had focus, expertise, and passion at an intensity you would not find otherwise. Organizers struck a good balance between hacking time and presentations. We ran workshops early, giving crash courses in the APIs and technologies of the event supporters, and the three panels brought together an awe-inspiring array of developers and entrepreneurs–veterans and innovators of music on the web. All attendees shared a love and passion for music, so the quality and intensity of their followups and questions were high.

The panels were outstanding. Music Discovery, Starting a Music Business and The Future of Music, brought together together established social-web successes Last.FM and The Hype Machine; long time music outlets like NPR Music, music education via Berklee College of Music; newer startups like machine-listening outfit The Echo Nest and live music obsessives Songkick; music retailers Amie Street, CDBaby, and Limewire; and music in gaming from Harmonix (of Rock Band and early-Guitar Hero credit) and Conduit Labs (music games for the web.)

Being in the concentrated presence of expertise and experience like this was inspirational. There was no filler and because the audience had music smarts already, nothing was dumbed down.

Anthony of Hype Machine has written a follow-up on the event and his panel over at The Hype Machine Blog, as did Echo Nest’s Brian Whitman.

One aside from panels was: As the current generation of music discovery service grows in popularity, the music world is being changed on a more fundamental level beyond retail methods and the internet/radio balance. In a world where music is discovered through quality, style and any number of user-configured variables, the idea of megastars and glitzy fame taking all the attention of the audience is going to change. Music on the internet, and the ability to build exciting applications using it is going to allow more artists to establish sustainable fan-bases.

The flipside—also highlighted in panels—is that the open nature of the web: the culture of sharing both data and media is in direct conflict with existing industry norms around licensing. How can you hack music if you can’t legally get access to it?

At this Music Hack Day, two new technologies emerged that help with this and are well worth highlighting for everyone who wants to build hacks with music:

Playdar is the new project of Last.FM co-founder and former CTO Richard Jones. The man who invented ‘scrobbling’ is leading development on a project to let applications access and play the music you already have already licensed on your personal machines. A service running on your computer handles resolution of artist and track names into playable URLs. Whether the file is on your laptop or on your media center back at home, Playdar can make it available. Playdar runs a local webservice for applications to authenticate with, and then play back music that you already legally possess. With Playdar, you can build applications that play music, without worrying about licensing files on your own server.

Where Playdar enables access to actual music, The Echo Nest is a service dedicated to providing detailed metadata about all music. Incredibly detailed analysis of the music waveforms allows you to programmatically draw out files based on rhythm, pitch and timbre. Again, it opens up music hacking to many more developers without confronting the murky world of licensing the music itself.

For our part, Yahoo took the opportunity to show off YQL, seamlessly connecting together APIs from Last.FM and Yahoo! Music for music recommendations. You can already pull that in from our Community Open Tables site.

The 12 winning hacks are listed on the event wiki, including my personal favorites: the HTML5-demoing HTML5 Audio Annotating, where lyrics are sync’d to playing audio using JQuery and the Bowie S-S-S-Similarities hack, showing how Musically Intelligent Machines computational analysis of David Bowie’s back-catalogue allows you to find the ‘most Bowie moment’ of his entire career (and also the least). Finally, the overall winner Outlier FM pushes one’s understanding of how the waveforms of music can be broken down by computers, sorted, rearranged and played back live in crazy, sometimes listenable mixes.

With past events in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Boston, Music Hack Day 5 is already in the works. It will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, on January 30-31, 2010. Congratulations to organizers Jon Pierce, Paul Lamere, Elissa Barret and Dave Haynes, as well as everyone who attended and made the event so welcoming, positive, and fun.

You can read back over people’s comments from during the event by searching Twitter for #musichackdaybos.

—Ben Ward