June 16th, 2008 by Mike Haydon · No Comments
I just read an interview with Nokia CTO Bob Iannucci in the June 2008 Harvard Business Review…
Apparently, Nokia are investing heavily in nanoscience to make things smaller (no surprise there). He sees the future of mobile phones becoming more standardized (FINALLY!), similar to how PCs have gone (your software/hardware for an IBM will work with a HP, etc, so why not between Nokia and Motorola).
He says in response to “Assuming Nokia’s efforts are fruitful, how will people use mobile phones differently in the coming years”:
“Nokia is moving into services and software for mobility. We’re trying to fuse the physical and digital worlds and looking at how wristwatches, sensors in your car, and other types of input devices might interact with your mobile phone so that you can get a whole range of data, from information about hour health, to the status of your automobile, to whether there’s traffic a few miles ahead. 
One particularly exciting technology is the use of the phone as a sensor. Rather than use a text query to search the internet, our researchers use an image captured by the phone’s camera to initiate what they call a “zero-click” search. Point the phone at a shoe in a store window, and in a second or two you can read about it on your screen. Or take a picture of a sign in one language and get a translation of it in another. All we’re trying to do is orchestrate a revolution in the mobile phone industry.”
Now how cool does that sound? I gotta get me one of those! 
Popularity: 12%
Tags: technology
May 12th, 2008 by Mike Haydon · 1 Comment
In writing the Death of NoFollow post, I came across a great post by Dixon Jones on how to go about removing the automatic nofollowing of comments in Wordpress.
Going noFollow free in the comments raises several issues, the chief of which is spam. That ugly thing where low-life types try to take advantage of anything in their way to promote whatever they promote. My solution is as follows:
- Use the Akismet plugin that comes preinstalled with wordpress 2.5.1 (if you aren’t using this or later, why not? Upgrade already!
).
- Turn comment moderation on for every comment. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s better to moderate 100 worthwhile comments than to let one x rated comment through, IMO
- Install Delink Comment Author by Alex King… This allows you to keep those comments that say “nice post” without the nasty X rated link
- Install the NoFollow Free plugin. This removes the auto “nofollow” tag from comments on a wordpress blog
The major positive in going nofollow free on your comments is that you aren’t being stingy with your “link love”. Whether or not it actually give any value is dubious, as I have said before, but because nofollow is so entrenched in many people’s minds, perhaps going nofollow free will make others more inclined to comment, if they KNOW the search engine spiders will check out their site through the link they get by commenting on your post.
So what do you think? Workable solution? Do you propose a better one?
PS If you are using Firefox, there’s an addon from Search Status that allows you to turn on highlighting of nofollowed links, so you can see exactly what’s going on. Check it out, I nofollowed the above link just so you could see it in action
Popularity: 26%
Tags: blog, SEO, Wordpress
May 10th, 2008 by Mike Haydon · No Comments
One of the central pillars of SEO until now has been the html “nofollow” tag. It is used to direct “link juice” to flow where you want it to. Many people in SEO (including myself) are liberal users of this tag. It ties in with the whole PageRank debate and whether PageRank is relevant anymore.
You know what a “nofollow” tag looks like… <a href=”…”
rel=”nofollow”… >. It is a signal to a search engine spider that it must not leave the site to check out that link. The tag has been used for things like affiliate links, links to authority sites like wikipedia (on the theory that they have enough PageRank) and comments on blogs.
I have been wrestling with this issue for some time… now that the web is changing, with Web 2.0 being the way of the future, perhaps the heyday of “nofollow” is at an end. At the very least, I think that it should occupy a much lesser role than it has.
The web and SEO is shifting away from former strongholds, such as just trying to get first ranking on Google, to being focussed on traffic… alone… That’s a big step, because all of a sudden your strategy has to change from on-page optimization to off-page, when it comes to links. The strategy must at least consider the wealth of traffic available from sites like digg.com, stumbleupon.com, del.icio.us, etc.
The entire purpose of the internet is to connect, whether to connect sites, people, places or things. The “nofollow” tag disrupts the connection of sites to give the webmaster more control over the flow of search engine traffic.
As a result, I have decided that I am no longer going to use “nofollow” tags in my links. The decision was triggered today when I realized that using “nofollow” is a “scarcity mentality”, rather than an “abundance mentality”. Sure, you can argue that there really is only so much PageRank coming into the page, so a scarcity mentality is justified, but that is taking too narrow a view of the page.
By leaving off the “nofollow” tag, people are more likely to appreciate it when you link to them. What are they going to do about it? In today’s web 2.0 world, if you have quality content, it is very possible that such a person would digg your page, add it to del.icio.us, stumbleupon it, etc, which is going to boost your traffic. Why wouldn’t they? A portion of any boost in traffic or PageRank they give to your page is going to flow through to theirs.
At the very least, using the “nofollow” tag is becoming redundant. The question remains whether it will become counter-productive…
Could this, then, be the death of the “nofollow” tag?
Check out what the rest of the world thinks…
And my favourite… (make sure to read Jack Humphrey’s comments on the post… FYI Jack created TrackBoost)
Popularity: 57%
Tags: html, SEO, Web 2.0
