The incident ocurred at the annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) where Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, got tough questions from Google's Director of Research after his keynote speech. The disagreement was on the Semantic Web, or the future of information on the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal of the Semantic Web is, put simply, that each website provide structured information, i.e. a data feed, of its contents. Same as blogs provide RSS files of their information.

Data feeds are becoming increasingly important ways to transferring information. Witness the rise of RSS as a means of transferring news and blog information. Similarly, online ecommerce is reliant on structured product data feeds to transfer information to and from merchants, shopping portals, suppliers and customers.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of “world wide web” originally conceived Semantic web vision, a architecture design for the web where data feeds follow a universal standard, and W3C is working currently on this under his direction.

The aim of Dr Berner-Lees vision is that all the information on the web be universally machine readable and understandable. Such that generation and processing of ecommerce data feeds, and Gooblebot spidering of the internet, will be disappear and be an automatic part of the internet infrastructure.

Unfortunately, commercial interests are about to intrude on Dr Berner-Lees and the W3C consoritum's work. Already, online retailers are attempting to agree on standards for the product data feeds used to transfer product and price information between suppliers, ecommerce merchants and online shopping portals.

Enter Google and its already heavy investment in data feed standards, namespace and its own Google Semantic Web - Google Base has an intricate semantic definition for its bulk upload feeds.

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google challenged Dr Berners-Lee over problems with his Semantic Web . Dr Norvig's problem is over cheating and incompetent webmasters:

What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first," Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user.

"We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that's not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive," Norvig said.

"While you own the data that's fine, but when somebody breaks and says, 'If you use our enterprise system, we will have all your data in RDF. We care because we've got the best database.' That is much more powerful," Berners-Lee said. To illustrate his stance, he used the example of bookstores initially withholding information on stock levels and purchase price but then breaking them as others did.

Dr. Berners-Lee agreed with Norvig that deception on the Internet is a problem, but he argued that his design for the Semantic Web was complete and also solves the problems of identify the originator of information, and trusted and secure feeds. Dr. Berners-Lee concluded that

"Google is in a situation to do wonderful things, as it did with the Web in general, and add a whole other facet to the graphs--the rules that are testing which data source. It will be a much richer environment

Like it or not, the World Wide Web consortium, will have to keep Google happy with its Internet Information Architecture, as Google is currently the biggest single consumer and provider of information on the Web.

[Related Enclick Service: Enclick data feed service for ecommerce merchants

Technorati Tags: Google , metadata , Norvig , semantic+web , Tim+berners+lee , w3c

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 10:07 PM | Permalink:Google Skirmishes With Founder of the Internet Over Internet Data Standards | Comments (1)

Shopping engines are gaining market share in the ecommerce sector, with users increasingly looking for an independent comparison of prices and products. Online merchants are increasingly turning to these shopping price comparators for qualified high-conversion traffic.

The problem is that merchants looking to be included in these engines need to handcraft a data feed of product information, model number, SKU and price for each one. The IT work adds a considerable overhead since each of the shopping portals has a widely different template for the data feeds.

In addition to the problem of standardised input, shopping engines statistics is also patchy and varies widely. The usability data on clicks and costs varies widely between shopping portals. The variation makes central management of multiple shopping campaigns hard to coordinate and compare.

Merchants often rely on shopping data feed services like ours to generate, submit and manage data feeds of their ecommerce site. They effectively outsource their data feed marketing function.

The National Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has embarked on the Unified Data Feed Standard Project. The standard aims to unify the templates used by all the shopping comparator sites in a comprehensive way. Covering not just the naming of the fields used in the data feeds, but to drill down into the values used, like a unified standard colour values. The three areas in most need of a unified standard for data feeds are:

• Choice and name of Data Fields currently vary widely
• Product Categories: A unified taxonomy of products would reduce the overhead in preparing multiple feeds by half, according to the Enclick team.
• Product Identifiers: Price comparators rely on manufacturers product number in their search of different merchants and prices for that one product

Google's Base Namespace is used in the bulk upload’s data feed is currently one of the most complete definition of compalsory and optional field standard for different types merchants. Naturally, the namespace is totally different from Amazon's Information Tag Standards.

Making these two giants, plus Shopping.com and Yahoo Shopping, to agree over a common standard will take many man-years of effort, but the stakes are high for comparison engines and merchants alike.

In the meantime merchants must generate and optimise their data feeds as best they can. And the stakes are high. In Google's own words

You are strongly encouraged to use as many of the attributes specific to your information type in your bulk upload.

Supplying additional information about your items using attributes defined in the Google Base module will greatly increase your item’s chances of showing up in search results.

Enclick client's pursue the first positions in Froogle's and Yahoo search results seriously, outsourcing their data feed to a dedicated team at Enclick. Appearing in the first positions on price comparators often means a windfall of free high-conversion traffic.

Technorati Tags: data+feed , froogle , yahoo+shopping

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 12:38 AM | Permalink:Universal Data Feed Standard from the Association of Retail Technology Standards | TrackBacks (2)

Link Bait is more or less anything you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it. They can link to it via a Web page, a blog, social bookmark site like digg. In fact, Seth Godin calls it diggbait.

The bait itself can be anything from a controversial blog post that gets people talking and linking, to a Web site that adds something really funny, to a useful application that actually helps people.

Nowadays the term content and copywriting have become old fashioned. People say, “I don’t have time to add real content, I want a viral campaign that is quick and makes everyone link to my site.”

People are getting so caught up in their quest for viral, user-generated links that they will ask for anything. Who cares if it has nothing to do with your long-term business success, your site was on the Digg homepage yesterday!

Non-Sticky Traffic

Linkbait is about writing viral content . But many people are finding with linkbait, the traffic you attract needs to be relevant otherwise the exercise is futile. The linkbait is non-sticky content. The traffic you attract will not convert

The inbound links you gather will be from non-relevant context and subjects. A factor that Google is increasingly factoring into its algorithm.

No matter how clever the Link Bait, if it does nothing more than cause a little buzz or drive-by traffic, then you’ve wasted time and opportunity. A traffic spike with no long term effect.

True viral marketing is more than a gimmick, and best done with relevant and useful content and tools.

Technorati Tags: linkbait

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:38 AM | Permalink:LinkBait Does Not Pay

The first step in controlling an outcome is to measure it. You cannot control what you do not measure. How do you measure your search engine optimisation? By picking a list of keywords and looking at their ranking on Google for each keyword search.

After you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. Then the upward climb reaches a best position. Once you stabelize, you will see the Google Dance, in which your position moves up and down by 5 to 10 positions in a continuous manner. Google Dance is to be endured and ignored as far as possible.

What is important is the long-term trends of search engines positions. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings.

Enclick Aggregate Google Ranking Value

The measure used by Enclick, in our search engine optimisation service is to set up a weighted value of your rankings on Google. Just one number. Like the net-value of your stock exchange holdings as you the financial markets go up and down. This is particularly important when you have hundreds of keywords in play, when you are pursuing the long tail of keywords, as with client's using our seach engine friendly product data services, which gets a catalogue of products into shopping engines.

First, the keyword analysis must generate a long list of keywords in categories then assign an importance value, a weighting value from 1 to 10, to the category and then to the top 10 keywords in each category.

Google's famous ranking algorithm is subject to continuous improvement, and also deliberate modifications. The slight changes in algorithm weightings are meant to throw and confuse the web spammers, who profit from ranking SPAM pages on Google. The key is to monitor your positioning for signficant long term trends, ignoring Google Dance slight up and down movements. And when aiming at the long tail of keywords a single unified value of your Google Ranking Value becomes very important.

Since rankings are competitive; one step ahead of the competition is enough. Your competitive analysis must give your major competitor's standings and the keywords and categories they populate. Enclick provides the Aggregate Ranking Value of your competition.

Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor\s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Your search engine presence is an investment. It is your online brand asset which has value to your business, and needs continuous management to maintain and exploit. The target is generating a good Return on Investment from your marketing budget. The advantage is that for online investment, you can measure how well your Search marketing Budget turns into Sales. The Aggregate SEO Ranking Value, in our Enclick SEO service, provides a way of measuring your online brand presence in a meaningful quantifiable value.

Technorati Tags: Google+ranking , long+tail , search+engine+optimisation , SEO

Posted by Paul Salber at 10:11 AM | Permalink:Measuring your Search Engine Optimisation Performance | TrackBacks (1)

Google is reorganising the way it presents search results on the internet to conform better with mobiles. The research is badly needed as Google's current mobile search service lags behind others in quality. Google's biggest problem is that the mobile search index is not populated with native xhtml (WAP 2.0), mobile content, but rather by wap 2.0 translations of normal web pages. The resulting mobile content served from Google caches is poor to the point of unusable. Enclick provides mobile weather forecast service, which is one of only a handful in the world. Yet Google has trouble ranking and prioritizing a quality weather forecast in its mobile search, serving a cached translation of html content instead.

Time to move onto the full WAP2.0 standard.

Technorati Tags: google+mobile , mobile+search

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:26 AM | Permalink:Google's Mobile Search Lagging Behind

Google's toolbar pagerank and banklinks have updated overnight, the last update being in April. Though pagerank is largely discredited as a reliable measure of authority and ranking, in the absence of other reliable measure, it is still widely used.

More critical is when text link purchase prices are set according to pagerank. As the workings of the google algorithm are secret, many of the Enclick clients purchasing text links have no assurance of their value.

What is a certainty now, is the anchor text and deeplinking have an important weighting in the Google algorithm. We have also gathered strong hints that the wider subject context in which links a placed play a role in the actual weighting of the inbound link

The Enclick team specialises in deeplinking, which is hard technology intesive exercise in getting your website information into a search engine friendly state for the Google spider, the shopping comparison sites and the affiliate networks.

The only answers are to be found in trial and error, and measuring website statistics.

Technorati Tags: deeplinking , pagerank , web+analytics

Posted by Paul Salber at 10:33 AM | Permalink:Google PageRank Update | TrackBacks (1)

The number of keywords the average online shop bids on has risen sharply over the last few years; bidding on more than 30,000 keywords is common place.

Many pay per click management programs are available manage this long tail of keywords. The SearchWorks Bidbuddy is one popular example. But the pay per click long tail suffers from spammers exploiting the low cost traffic, driving up CPC prices for legitimate businesses.

In addition to online shops and merchants, the keyword long tail has also attracted SPAM artists; the clickthrough arbitrage. The scheme is buy low priced keyword traffic on Adwords, and take the visitor to an Adsense populated landing page with an expensive keyword context. The SPAM site makes a margin from the difference in clickthrough price, at the expense of advertisers and visitors.

A recent move by Google has been to increase the minimum price for all keywords, in order to discourage clickthrough arbitrage merchants.

Google has just announced on its Inside AdWords blog that a new algorithm will start penalizing Adsense SPAM sites. Google is increasing the to Adwords landing page quality requirements: Inside AdWords: Landing page quality update. SPAM sites will be penalized with a high minimum CPC in Adwords.

As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.

From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we're launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.

If you do see an increase in minimum bids and you feel that your landing page is providing a great user experience, please contact AdWords support and we'll take a look. Also, for useful guidelines which will help to define what users look for in a high quality site, we hope you'll take a look at the landing page and site quality guidelines, from the AdWords Help Center.

Good news for the long tail pay per click strategy. Good news also for Adsense Publishers, who may now enjoy higher CPCs.

In spite of Google's Landing Page Guidelines, the speculation wiil turn to whether Adsense adverts on your website are harming your Pay per Click traffic prices from Google; you either buy Google advertising or sell advertising, but not both?

Technorati Tags: adsense , adwords , google , pay+per+click , spam

Posted by Paul Salber at 7:05 PM | Permalink:Google Battling for the Pay Per Click Long Tail

Monster.com has launched an Online Marketing section. A search for SEO in monster.com gives rise to 55 vacancies in the UK and ten times that many vacancies in the US. Specialized online marketing recruitment agencies are cropping up like mushrooms. Collecting quotes from around the web:

Total UK online advertising expenditure in 2005 has surpassed all initial expectations by growing 65.6% year on year to £1,366.4 million (£1.4 billion). These record breaking results have taken internet advertising’s market share to 7.8% according to the results of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s bi-annual study --- (IAB).

With the double digit growth of online advertising, staff shortages in the online marketing field are inevitable.

"The online space is exploding," says Adam Hanft, a consumer marketing consultant in New York City. "There are real shortages of online designers, information architects, online producers, and on the media side, buyers, planners and strategists."

"It's hard to find people who can increase conversions and do Web analytics," says Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of SEO Image, a New York City search-engine optimization firm that helps clients improve their positioning in Internet search results. For example, companies are snapping up link strategists and pay-per-click campaign managers, Rabinowitz says.

Computer firms are facing up to the need for dedicated marketers. "Hardware and software makers need product managers and competitive analysis people with solid marketing skill sets, versus the engineering skill set that often filled the marketing void for these companies in years past," says Andrew Fitzpatrick, principal of Cambridge Consulting Solutions in Mill Valley, California.

Signs point to a growing gap between rising demand and a stagnant supply of senior online marketers. "I currently have a VP search that's my fourth online marketing search in a year, and they get more and more difficult," says Kevin Berchelmann, president of Triangle Performance in Bellaire, Texas.

Is the online advertising tsunami finally here?

Technorati Tags: online+advertising

Posted by Paul Salber at 4:52 PM | Permalink:Rising Demand for Online Marketing Staff | Comments (1)

Google has confirmed that it will soon launch a Pay-per-Action (CPA) variation of its Adsense. Adding CPA capability to its existing Cost-Per-Click (CPC) advertising products is an easy move. The CPA option will detract from its current Adsense revenues, but the total revenue from advertisers will likely increase.

Details of Google's announcement were reported by John Battelle, who reports on Google.

As with all of Google's developments, it is good news for some and bad news for others. The good news is for advertisers. The "Cost per Action" mode will be much welcome by advertisers as it will improve the efficiency and the return on investment of their online ad spend. Also, the Cost-per-Action practically eliminates click fraud, as fictitious clicks will not longer be a cost to the advertisers.

Cost-per-Action means more pressure for publishers, advertising netwoks. The current CPA advertising providers are the affiliate marketing networks which are:

• tradedoubler.co.uk - Tradedoubler Affiliate Network
• affiliatefuture.co.uk - Affiliate Future Affiliate Network
• dgm-uk.com - DGM Affiliate Network
• affiliatewindow.com - Affiliate Window Network
• buy.at - Buy.at affiliate Network
• paidonresults.com - Paid on Results Affiliate Network
• webgains.com - Web Gains Affiliate Network
• LinkShare
• ClickBank
• Value Click's Commission Junction

With Google's entry into the game, both advertisers and publishers acquire the option to use Google's CPA-Adsense network. Google becomes a one-stop shop for all modes of advertising, ads based on page views (CPM), ads based clicks (CPC), and ads based on conversions, purchases or acquisitions (CPA).

Google will translate the performance of all these ads into “effective CPMs� in its campaign management panel, allowing publishers to compare and optimize for whichever type of ad produces maximum revenue. WIth Google's dominant client and distributor base, it is bad news for the above affiliate networks.

Publishers will no doubt come under pressure with the CPA model. The pressure of conversion to a sale will be now be also on the publishers. Un-qualified traffic, like those generated by DNP (Domain Name Parking) publishers, will no longer generate good revenue.

The recent move to make Google Base Froogle's Data Feed may be a precursor for the CPA-Adsense to use Google Base as its product feed. The importance of generating a product feed for advertisers may be about to increase

Online advertising is about to get even more efficient, accountable and transpare

Technorati Tags: advertising , cost-per-click , CPC , google+CPA

Posted by Paul Salber at 11:34 PM | Permalink:Google Enters Affiliate Marketing

	The Redbus - Telecity service also hosts some of our customers though they are not on the same floor as Enclick. Redbus Telecity operates seven facilities in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris and Milan and boasts more that 800 clients including AOL, AT&T, BT, Vodafone, City Index, BBC and Google.
Docklands is popular with a lot of telecom and technology companies. Telecity-Redbus as well as Telstra and NCC offer server hosting services in nearby buildings. With its financial center rapidly catching up with the old City in tenants. The picture shows the view outside its Sovereign House datacenter.

Technorati Tags: datacenter , docklands

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 11:14 AM | Permalink:"Enclick Shopping" Server Racks in Docklands