Archive: March, 2009

It is no new theory that language evolves and that trapping changes in word meaning and word association lies at the heart of the phraseology employed by SEO firms to help target a website’s audience. But what’s more important in some respects are the bursts of attention that often precede changes to a language.

In using the term “bursts of attention”, I’m referring to bursts as defined in a paper entitled “Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams” written by Jon Kleinberg of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. The paper examines a fundamental problem in text data mining with regards to targeting and extracting meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. What Kleinberg is referring to in the paper are email and news articles because each of these two delivery mechanisms tends to showcase topics in a brief burst of intensity that eventually dissipate to varying degrees, depending on the permanence of the medium. Kleinberg’s work focused on developing a formal approach for modeling such bursts that could eventually lead to flexible frameworks and establish useful analytics. 

Early in the new year, Ask.com posted an entry on their blog heralding the dawning of a new age at the struggling search engine – the age of semantic searching. Well, it seems like splitting hairs, but the truth is that Ask.com needed to nail the hail Mary for the last quarter heroics – not sure that has happened. According to most SEO analysts, Ask.com is currently residing either fourth or fifth in search engine ranking, even though new directions such as semantic search were aimed at serving users’ needs in a bid to grow market share.

Taking a long, cold look in the mirror, Ask.com admitted in their January post that search engines, including their own, have a fundamental flaw that prevents users from obtaining quick and efficient results. “Many times users have to repetitively rephrase the query before they finally get the answer they want. That’s because today’s search engines are still very sensitive to the way queries are constructed, returning different answers for variations of the same query.”

It is not a surprise that the brilliant minds secreted away on the Google campus have come up with a dandy of a new tool called Knol. If you’ve been following the recent articles I wrote on digital advertising and article marketing you’ll see that what we have here is an avenue to communicate. 

Knol is a blending of research and how-to articles that meekly brands itself as “a unit of knowledge”, but it can very easily be seen more as a power pack designed to take on Wikipedia. Even in the confines of beta, Knol has outpaced Wikipedia’s early growth milestones. Capitalizing on the explosion of social media sites, Knol is an environment where posted material can easily lead to community discussion, or be reviewed, tagged and graded by professionals and peers alike. And addressing some of Wikipedia’s shortcomings, Knol allows individual authors to collaborate with colleagues and edit the work of others in the pursuit of a more complete subject entry.

Check the due date on articles about the economic downturn – no, strike that – let’s just call it a recession. It seems every article you read these days about the recession is lined with projections of how severe the economic hit will be, but the problem is these forecasts only hold water for about a week then dissipate into gas as the downward slide continues. Projections are simply educated guesses, and while they are all generally negative these days, they seem to lack scope. The numbers I tend to look at look at are the hard numbers – 160,000 jobs lost in Canada in the month of January, 600,000 in the US in the same month – these are hard numbers. The other numbers of interest are the indicators – the records of exchanged money – and one that is of interest to those in the SEO field is marketing expenditure. In fact, marketing measurements of any kind are great indicators for gauging the health of the economy, but are also good for noting emerging trends.