Blogs, Feeds, and Social Search
November 14th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Greg Niland aka GoodROI is moderating the session. He first introduces Niall Kennedy
Niall Kennedy from Technoraiti
You can list out the media types that allows you to publish the same content in different languages, print media, PDF or other types. The feed format allows you to put information in an organized format that can be read in different formats, by different devices. Firefox and opera both use live bookmarks. Publishing afeed allows you to publish updates in a consistent way. Nail then breaks down the different elements in a feed with more in depth details. If you are building your own feed you should use one of the existing format vocabularies like RSS2.0 to make sure all the modern readers can read it. After an update you want to make sure you ping the services, instead of waiting for the search spiders to find you later. You alwsy want to make sure you check your feeds for errors use feedvaidator.org. Make sure you claim your feed. Make sure subscribe to your feed as this get’s you into the news feed aggregators like Bloglines and MyYahoo. You also want to make sure you include a new item if you are updating and not just updating the date. He also suggest adding author data so you can start to build data on your profile.
Rick Klau of Feedburner
He gives a brief introduction of the Feedburner services, and that they are the largest feed distribution company. He feels that IE7 will give huge boost to RSS being used by more and more people. Originally feeds were used primarily by bloggers, now more and more people are using them. Some people are using them to give people that have easy access to their data. He mentions Steepandcheap.com which uses it as a sales tool. He also mentions podcasting is big implementation for podcasts, there are more podcasts than radio stations in the country. Publishing feeds makes it a passive way to get your content in front of people. What feedburner also does is give a stylesheet to XML data that is included so it displays in a human readable format and a code format. The more data you can put into your feed the more you will get out of it, and pinging is very important. Many people do vanity searches, and he got comments on his blog from the other panelists within the past 24 hours. By including information such a s digg, delicious, or comments you can engage you users and get more participation on your content.
Owen Bryce co Founder of Digg
He mentions how Kevin Rose came to him with the idea for Digg.com. The idea grew out of the frustration he had with getting stories onto Slashdot, and he wanted a more democratic editorial process. The first big event for Digg was when Paris Hilton’s cell phone pictures were leaked. Their servers fried under the traffic load. They had to make some changes an optimize the query. They have over 500,000 active users, and over 4,000 stories submitted daily. It was one of Kevin’s goals to be a Slashdot killer. They don’t feel the key is being first to market but first to scale. The API has been widely used on sites like the Washington Post.
Chris Tolles of Topix.net
The team from Topix originally worked on the DMOZ project. They created a news service that was automatically categorized and using artificial intelligence to make the system navigable. Originally they started with about 50,000 news site. They discovered that the niche was in local news based on zip codes, and makes up 60% of their traffic, search for [city name - news] and they rank well. They found people want the ability to talk back and comment on the news. They now get over 16,000 - 18,000 comments a day. He points to the interactivity of other popular sites like MySpace, Friendster as other examples of this. He feels local regional sites are one of the last horizons of the web. Right now over 30% of their clicks come RSS feeds.
Question and Answer Section
Q:How do they get into Topix?
A: Each site is reviewd manually before it’s included
Q:How can we get older content into the engine
A: Backdating the data is best way
Q: How are poeple using Digg for Marketing
A: People are competing to get stories up, using the Digg buttons, become part part of the community, get your friends and family involved, and write great content.
Also see SearchEngineRoundtable
Sphere It
November 14th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Thanks for posting the Q&A!
November 15th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
I really like this format Michael, very nice. Good meeting you yesterday as well!