Upcoming.org's RSS; my fault or theirs?

I'm really not sure whether this was my mistake or a yellow card for Upcoming.org. The Upcoming.org RSS feed is one of the data streams which gets pulled into the bigmouth friendfeed and the newly set up (still in development) bigmouth tumblr account.

Imagine my distaste then when I saw a generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" appear on our tumblr (where it'll make it way to twitter too).


As you can see it happened to the inspirational Brian Solis too.

As it turns out there are more than one RSS feed for your upcoming events. The RSS button on the left of your profile page is the 'combined events' stream. The RSS button on the right of the profile page is the 'events' stream.

The generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" only appeared in the 'combined events' RSS feed and not the 'events' feed. Needless to say; I've switched over to 'events' from 'combined events'.

I'm not sure "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" belongs in either though - why would anyone subscribing to an individual or company's Upcoming RSS want to get such a generic message? Imagine you've subscribed to a number of Upcoming RSS feeds? You'd get the same generic message dozens of times.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Rare video footage of Slurp, Googlebot and MSNBot in the wild

I should admit to two things. Firstly; I've been so busy I've not posted in a while. Secondly; I've been playing with Spore's Creature Creator for about an hour.

In the process of making a whole host of test monsters I've created...

Googlebot



MSNBot



Yahoo Slurp



Not only was Yahoo Slurp the first spider I created - it looks like the best. I don't know why both MSNBot and Googlebot went so dark! The good news is that I figured out I can use the scroll wheel to re-size limbs.

I may call these 1.0, release them into the wild and then try again...

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Icahn, CNet and Yahoo

You'll have read elsewhere that Icahn has popped onto Yahoo's radar. He's put some cards on the table - 3% of Yahoo's shares and a move to put his team onto the board.

Full marks go to Marketing Pilgrim and their lolcat inspired write up - Icahn Haz Yahoo Board!. (Picture Credit to Marketing Pilgrim too) This isn't a news blog so I'm not going to mull too much into the details except to say that the term corporate raider was pretty much invested for Icahn. Er, I mean, Mr Icahn.

In other news CBS bought CNET. Wow. Old schools swoops in and buys new school. Once again I'll let someone else explain why that's odd - how come CNET was sold for less than $2 billion when it was worth nearly $20 billion just a few years ago. This time it's Mr Arrington who's explaining why CNET isn't the one buying CBS.

Here's the thing... Icahn has had some involvement with CNET himself. I think it's an excellent illustration of what Yahoo now face (and a time when Microsoft is lurking somewhere in the shadows...).

In the States there is a law called the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. The Act means you've got to own up and say when you've bought more than 5% of someone's shares. Have you ever played cards with someone only to discover, all of a sudden, they've won the game... they've got rid of their last card and you didn't see it coming. You didn't see it coming because they kept their hand hidden under the table. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act is designed to stop companies being bought in the same way! With the Act in place no single person can buy a dribble of shares here, a dribble of shares there and sneak into position of strength.

Although; it's worth noting that Icahn (Mr) has 3% of Yahoo and is still in a position of strength.

Given the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act you can imagine CNET's surprise when, all of a sudden, they worked out that someone had managed to sly a full %21 of their company!

No. Icahn didn't lead the charge but he was involved. It is possible for hedge funds to deal with one and other and buy shares for one another. For example, you might buy some Yahoo shares for me - and you'll own them. We'll sign a deal that at a pre-arranged time you'll sell them on to me. We'll work it so that no one looses out if the shares go up or down in value and in exchange I'll pay your a handling fee.

That's what happened to CNET. Mr Icahn was one of the players in the elaborate series of "phantom buyers" who bought shares in the snare the hedge funds circled around CNET.

The New York Times has a more thorough write up than I do.

So Yahoo... Mr Icahn holds %3 of your shares. I wonder how many of your shares his allies hold and have already signed over.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Google blocking Yahoo Pipes - again (again)

We've been here before but Google seems to be blocking Yahoo Pipes again.

Here's the catch. I think Google likes Yahoo Pipes. Google's even demonstrated how Yahoo Pipes can be used. When I pointed out that Feedburner was blocking Pipes I even had MC pop over to the blog to make sure everything was okay.

So I don't think Google intends to block Yahoo Pipes. I think Google constantly fights off RSS scrapers and sometimes Yahoo Pipes gets caught in the crossfire. The screen grab above shows how it's the blogsearch results that are being blocked.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Building your own micro-Sphinn with Yahoo Pipes

I announced to Twitter that I want Sphinn to let me know when people I trusted had started to sphinn a post. Seconds later; oh wait... I think each user has a sphinns RSS and I love Yahoo Pipes.

And so I present the Yahoo Pipe for Micro Sphinn (beta 0.1) which outputs sphinn posts when two or more of the following have voted for the same story.

Danny Sullivan, Rusty Brick, Susan, Patrick Altoft, Philipp Lenssen, Vanessa Fox, Chris Winfield, Bill Slawski, Lisa Barone, SEO Honolulu, Lyndon, Loren Baker, Viper Chill, Chris Cathcart, Sebastian, David Wallace, Spostare Duro, Kevin Heisler, Rach, Mel C and Jeff Quipp


I'll put my hands up and admit - this needs work. I actually probably need to submit more Sphinn users in order to get the "wisdom of the crowds" to work. I can off set this by increasing the 2 or more limit to 3 or more or higher. If you'd like to be added then leave me a comment with your Sphinn URL.

I've also published this Pipe so feel free to subscribe to it or clone and modify! http://pipes.yahoo.com/girdwood/microsphinn

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

SES New York: Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist at Yahoo

I’m sitting next to Lisa Barone and was going to try a live blogging race against her – sadly, the wi-fi is out and so we’ve agreed to draw. At least; I suggested that while Feeder blasted out from the speakers and The Lisa nodded and so I’m claiming the draw! Woot!

Instead I’ll bash this into Word and copy’n’paste over.

Andrew begins by offering us a detailed walkthrough of Yahoo’s vision of the next generation of search.

• Internet firmly moved from a curiosity to a substrate for life
• Content growing, changing, diversify, fragmenting
• Searching evolving in response
• Value migrating to ecosystem
• Semantics of content unlocking the value in the ecosystem

I don’t even know what he means by ‘substrate for life’.

No one ever goes online just to search – he says, wrong, I think as I do! – but Andrew explains that search is a tool that people use to get what they want.

His example begins with someone coming online to book a holiday in Tuscany. They start by searching Google! They hadn’t heard of Yahoo Search yet, he says. Hee. (I said ‘hee’ – I wonder if that’s the Lisa Barone effect). Don’t worry... the searcher winds up at Yahoo Search eventually and develops an addiction to Italian coffee.

Now we’ve got the searcher looking for information on how to make those glorious espressos. Oh no! The searcher really can’t make a decision. He’s no price confidence but finally, after checking a price aggregator, makes a decision and a purchase. Oh no! Now he has a limescale problem... and starts searching again.

Boy! I’m never going on holiday with this sample searcher. What a nervous ninny!

Yahoo thinks today we’re seeing

• Increasing migration of content online
• New formsof mediaavailable online
• Something I was too slow to write down

Things to notice

• Long-running user goals
• Search as a hub:
• Start there
• Return for resource discovery and at task boundaries
• Traverse the web broadly to compete task
• Web service integrated into the task

Gosh! I’m also sitting next to Eric from Stone Temple. Wozah!

Yahoo mentions substrate – should look this up. Oh! Perhaps I’ll twitter it.

How much content is produced each and every day?

• Published Content: 3-4Gb
• Professional web content: ~2Gb
• User generated content: ~8-10Gb
• Private text content: ~3Tb
• Upper bound on typed content: 700Tb

Users began to dominate content creation in terms of quantity five years ago.

Private Text content includes things like emails, IMs and intranet content. Upper bound on typed content is all the stuff that people type every day – you know, at work. Yahoo notes that we’re therefore miles away from getting close to that amount online.

How much 'meta data' is produced each day?

• Anchor text: 100M
• Tags: 40M
• Pageviews: 180GB
• Reviews: 10MB

Anchor texts have been the most important signal in search for 10 years. Tags aren’t likely to change the nature of search because Yahoo expect the data amounts to plateau. By tags he means as on YouTube and delicious; not meta data tags.

The big one will be Pageviews – Toolbars are used to collect trails.

• Content consumption is fragmenting – nobody owns more than 10% of WW of PVs. Yahoo has the most
• No single place will own all the content.
• Best of breed processing will operate on the web version (?)
• Value transitions to ecosystem

Yahoo’s mocking me by showing slides too complex to blog about. He’s talking about content consumption and how it’s fragmented. They’ve... er, scraped(?) LiveJournal interests and matched it against ages. I’m glad I censored all my LiveJournal interests. The over 57s are interested in death, cheese and cats.

Arhg! Facebook slide. Andrew has shared his cell phone with everyone in the MIT group which is 22,504 users. Woah. I wonder if he gets many calls. Andrew’s point is that we’re not used to this level of access control and as we become more aware of this we’ll see stress and tension on the infrastructure.

We’re used to reading whole web pages but now, with AJAX, we’re used to a more fragmented experience. He draws the parallel with the “choose your own adventure” concept. Woot. I wonder if he’s a fellow gamer.

Now we’re looking at the search interface... and understanding that the number of publishers has increased hugely.

• Few changes through 2005
• Entering period of massive change to change more complex content
• Rich media, aggregation, simple task analysis, etc
• Moving beyond the stateless query/response paradigm
• Personalization theory

Although the web grew hugely to begin with the paradigm stayed the same... until now. He’s cautious of the term ‘personalization’ as it’s easy to wreck with rogue data.

Andrew shows a Yahoo slide (I remember what Yahoo looks like – I still go there) and the Yahoo Assist layer. He’s showing someone searching for the movie “the game plan”. What does the searcher want? Do they want show times, trailers, reviews or something else? The top of the Yahoo search space is used to aggregate the ambiguous tasks to try and answer those questions. Not just Yahoo who’ve been trying these things... he shows Microsoft example (good move; keep Microsoft sweet) and then shows Google’s flight search.

• Structured database power a vast majority of pages of the web
• Certainly ecommerce catalogs
• But also user generate content (eg blogs)
• Content owners open to exposing structure, but don’t see how and why
• Microformats adoption at an all-time high
• Yet, it’s produced much more...
• Waaah... he’s going too fast.

The Killer App

• Wide-ranging support for semantic web standards
• Vocabulary to surface structure and semantics
• Community tools to evolve standards and vocabulary

What is the Killer App? Search

• Publishers and search engines collaborate
• Users see richer search experience
• Accomplish their tasks faster and move effectively

Ha-ah? Want an example; let’s look at the enhanced Yelp results (I wonder if he also eats cheese steaks?). The babycenter.com site is similar in presentation; a mashup of images, links and textual advice. In fact there are loads; New York Times, Gawker, others...

Andrew reckons the LinkedIn example is suggestive of what might happen with ‘people search’ in the future. LinkedIn is a Yahoo partner. Didn’t know that...

• Microformats
• hCard, hEvent, hReview, hAtom, XFN
• More as they get adopted
• RDFa and eRDF markup
• OpenSearch
• +extensions to return structured data
• Atom/RSS feeds
• +extensions to embed structured data

Yahoo thinks this is the future; using microformats to prevent structured meta data about content to search engines. So what do we put in this data set?

• dataRSS provides a common framework for embedding structured data
• Use with RDFa, eRDF or OpenSearch
• Preferred Vocabulary includes
• Atom, Dublin Core
• Creative Commons
• FOAF, GeoRSS...
• He’s going too fast again...

Yahoo will be announcing a set of tools and wants people to work together to agree on standards (and not let be dominated by ‘one’ Search Engine. Don’t know who that could be.)

• Yahoo! Open search platform does not modify ranking
• Richer abstracts may provide more information to users and draw higher quality/quantity of clicks
• We want rich abstracts that give users a better experience
• We don’t want misleading abstracts

So Yahoo are really announcing a new form of SEO where content owners try and get shiny and attractive abstracts into the SERPs which attract clicks. Yahoo would like them and content owners to come to an agreement with what makes a good abstract. When that agreement is in place then they’ll work together to keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out.

In fact, anyone on the web can make use of a self-service model to upload their abstracts and then anyone interested in this can subscribe to those recommendations. Ah-ah; this sounds like Google’s Subscription Links offering.

Let’s look at the ‘whole story’

• User needs becoming more complex
• Content growing, changing, diversifying, fragmenting
• Search responding by increase in sophistication
• Value migrating to ecosystem
• Unlock the value by enabling interoperability – expose semantics

Is the HTTP and HTML system the right model any more? Yahoo thinks... maybe not. Something more complex may be needed. As a result the value is moving to the ‘ecosystem’ and therefore the ‘quick win’ here is to expose the data content publishers may have locked away but which could be presented to the search engine.

Wow! What a long write up. I think that was the best key note yet. Andrew shared a lot of ideas and I’ve a really good vision of what Yahoo is up to now.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo Buzz? Ready to launch?

Yahoo, as expected, have relaunched Yahoo Buzz. It lets you 'buzz up' stories which interest you. Content is not submitted en mass, instead Yahoo are reaching out to certain publishers. As you would expect there's an initial US bias/focus. Search for the 'FT' and you don't find stories from the FT. You find stories about the FT or to Yahoo's copy of FT stories like this one.

What's not expected is the lack of RSS feeds. I pounced on Yahoo Buzz with the full expectation to have new RSS fodder to feed into my information slicing/dicing scripts. Nothing. Not even a headline ticker.

Yahoo will tell me that Yahoo Buzz is in beta. I'll tell them that I expect RSS feeds - yeah, even in beta!

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo's loss and others gain

My Yahoo label on Google Reader is a bit of a wipeout. I'm going to have to move a lot of feeds to new employer labels. Lots of really good people have elected to leave Yahoo. Bradley Horowitz explains on this blog that he wasn't laid off, he just knew the time was right to go.

Salim Ismail also decided to go.

Bigmouthmedia benefited too. We've been very lucky to lure Isabell Wagner into the role of our new German MD. Isabell ran Yahoo Search Marketing in Germany. She was the YSM MD.

I've noticed that some of the local press have picked up on the story and are calling it a 'coup'. I suppose it is in many ways but it is also worth noting just how big bigmouthmedia are in Germany. :) People shouldn't be surprised that we could attract people of this caliber.

I'm buzzed about getting to work with Isabella and bigmouthmedia Germany as her reputation is phenomenal and we've a great team over there.

I feel sorry for the thousand who were laid off. I'm pleased that Horowitz comments on the generous packages Yahoo found for these ex-workers. I can tell that there must have been real discomfort in the air, MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy, who survived the cuts, said; "Heads down is a common expression around here".

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

$100 billion for Yahoo - likely

Over at the NMA Will 'the Search' Cooper points out that Microsoft has seen its value drop by nearly $40bn (£20.9bn ) since it began its Yahoo bid.

At the same time we're hearing that Microsoft will raise the bid if needs be. So, already, we're looking at the deal costing Microsoft over $40bn and loosing them nearly the same amount again. Hmm. $80bn. You could buy a lot of AdWords with that!

I would not be surprised if the overall tally comes to nearly $100bn before the economies of the deal start to come true.

Update: That's $100,000,000,000.00

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo Live is dead.

Yahoo Live is... er, launched. Right now it doesn't seem very alive. At least the traffic rush which has pushed it offline is a good initial sign!

I wonder what Microsoft thinks about Yahoo! using a Live branded product.

Update: This is very dead news too. I've just noticed that TechCrunch has it. Therefore, so does the internet.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo's Response

Yahoo have blogged an initial response to Microsoft's advance. In summary; "We're thinking about it".

Yahoo!’s Board is going to evaluate all aspects of this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of the company's strategic plans and alternatives. So it wouldn't be appropriate to speculate about the potential benefits or challenges of a deal. But the review process that's underway won't have any impact on our efforts to deliver value to all of our users, advertisers, publishers and partners – as well as new and exciting opportunities to our employees.

The FAQ is fairly weak and has only four points. It's hard for Yahoo to come out with a strong reply this early. Although it's tempting to be scornful of the short reply, I do appreciate the need for candidness.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo Travel keeps Kelkoo as Provider in the UK

We've read about FaceChase being adopted by Yahoo Travel today and kicking Travelocity into touch for now.

That's the American news. Here in the UK Yahoo Travel's search is still routed straight into Kelkoo results. There's still a lot of catching up to do but at least Yahoo is keeping it in the family.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

YahooPeople.co.uk - Too Much Effort For Me

Here in the UK, Yahoo have been promoting Yahoo People through some display advertising (I first saw the ads over at Brand Republic last year) and trying to push it towards viral status.

I think it's a nice idea but it's too much effort to get started and that's why it's not viral.

With Yahoo People you create an avatar of yourself. This avatar lives in the virtual Yahoo People world and as you interact with different Yahoo services your Yahoo People avatar learns new abilities. For example, to teach your Yahoo Avatar to break dance then you muck around on Yahoo Music.

So, why is this too much effort for me? I have no art talent and you need to draw your avatar. You upload a headshot of yourself, resize it to fit on a body and then you're supposed to trace around the image to convert your photohead to a sketchhead. That's beyond me. I've tried, tried and tried - just can't do it. I don't have the mouse dexterity!

The products that Yahoo are pushing via Yahoo People are Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music. The search engine optimisation crowd will grin because although Yahoo People is a Flash site Yahoo have remembered to include text links to these pages below the Flash. It's also worth noting (with a grin) that the Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music links point to the US address - ie, news.yahoo.com rather than uk.news.yahoo.com. Yahoo Sports points to the European URL of uk.eurosport.yahoo.com.

The banner adverts I've seen for Yahoo People feature different avatars from various participants. What I don't know is whether these Flash banners are static and just chosen at random/with bias for the campaign or whether they're a dynamic element of the Yahoo People viral site itself.

I think it would be much cooler if the system picked the best avatars automatically to appear in the banners. That would then give you a real incentive for your avatars to do well. Just imagine, you could have a dancing Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media capering in the corner of Brand Republic! - that would certainly persuade me to try and draw my own avatar one more time.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Google blocking Yahoo Pipes - again

Did you know that Google has a bot which ignores robots.txt and does so defiantly? It's true. Google's RSS grabber, Feedfetcher, ignores robots.txt as Google reasons a human decided to publish the feed and a human has decided to request the feed. It's all explained over at the webmaster help center. I actually think Google's made the right call here, although it means you can't slam the brakes on an RSS by slapping up a robots.txt block and I'm beginning with this just to set the precedent.

I like to think one of my real scoops this year was when I noticed that Google seemed to be blocking Yahoo Pipes. Only yesterday I noted that I was disappointed that Sphinn didn't like the story but pleased that Wired writer Betsy Schiffman had.

I do believe that this blockage was temporary and accidental. Google have said complementary things about Yahoo Pipes before and you can use Yahoo Pipes to take data from Google Base. In fact, Yahoo Pipes and Google Base have been a featured project on Google Code.

In a quirk of timing, bigmouthmedia colleague and Wonga World blogger, Chris Cathcart pointed out that Google's Feedburner is also blocking Yahoo Pipes.


This time the blockage is certainly not an accident but is a human controlled decision. Why would Feedburners want to keep their RSS out of Yahoo Pipes? One possible answer is that although the publisher is happy to distribute content (or teasers) in a feed they don't want that content to be sliced, diced and mixed up with other content. One of the ways I use Yahoo Pipes is to monitor dozens of feeds but only alert me when a story is gaining a critical mass, this means I don't need to manually review all those feeds nor even look at any adverts inside them.

Here's the plug for Wonga World! Chris is our Senior Strategist in the Finance vertical. He's years of experience working in banks and digital marketing. In fact, he spoke at SMX London this year. Wonga World is written with that savvy financial sector bias which is why he gave me this 'search only' lead. What a nice man.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

That was Search in 2007

The talented editor-in-chief of the bigmouthmedia newsletter has put together a great summary of the year's news in Search in 2007: the year as reported by the news hounds at bigmouthmedia.

As you might have come to expect from reading this blog we've included a statistical review too. Here are some of the cherries:

• over twice as many stories on Google as on Yahoo!
• nearly four times as many stories on Google as on MSN
• three times as many stories on MSN as AOL
• and nearly twice as many stories on AOL as on Ask.com
  

Thanks YS!

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo rolls out animated logos for Christmas

Yahoo are showing off a number of Flash logos for Christmas. Do you think we'll ever see Google with a Flash logo?

Yahoo US Christmas Animation



Yahoo UK and IE Christmas Animation

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo communicates to annoy Google?

The SEO blogs and forums are awash with people discussing their PageRank changes, their link changes and traffic (or lack of traffic) changes.

Google's being typically Google and not communicating. In fact, I'm yet to see a Google post about the new ability to select the geographic target for your site in natural search. If you didn't notice the change on your own webmaster console then you'd likely find out by ex-Googler Vanessa Fox blogging about it on Search Engine Land.

If I was Yahoo and I wanted to rattle Google's cage then I would tell webmasters of an impending or ongoing re-crawl/index at Yahoo. Further more, I'd invite webmasters for feedback. That's exactly what they've done.

Truth be told - Yahoo probably naturally reached the point where an update was needed at this point and they're probably not doing this just to remind webmasters around the world that Yahoo's far more communicative than Google. Probably.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

SiteExplorer Down

Annoyingly, one of my favourite search engine features - Yahoo's SiteExplorer - is having a bad time today.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

Yahoo says that Google is the antichrist

Yesterday, Haochi over at Googlified posted a fun Google Suggest is... screen shot. We can see someone has typed in "Google is" and what the Google Suggest suggestions are. There's everything from "Google is god" to "Google is stupid".

I thought it would be fun (in a copycat sort of way) to see what the new Yahoo Search Assist thought of Google.


As we can see - a similar set of results. The common thread of "Google is down". It's perhaps not surprising that Yahoo gets occasionally gets searches from people who think Google is down.

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit