At the Mile High Social Media Club meeting tonight, speaker Brett Borders mentioned that the google webmaster guidelines had been recently updated to remove a recommendation to submit to “relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.” I tweeted this nugget of information, and @theguigirl asked if I had any more information.

I don’t, officially, but I can speculate, and I also googled

When DMOZ was brought up at the session, I volunteered that I had been an editor back in the day, and I guessed that the recent update to the guidelines was due to the lack of democracy-an editor can maintain their section autonomously. Indeed, I was solicited to serve as editor when I submitted a site I maintained. When the volunteer pool is folks who have a vested interest in their own site(s) being promoted, how objective can you really expect the directory to be? While there are certainly ways to “game” digg and stumble-upon, at the very least one some level the wisdom of the crowd should offer some level of checks and balances.

A secondary consideration is the whole basis of google - the PageRank algorithm (math and stats and computer science). I’ve read a fair amount from the google folks, and it appears their preference is to automate, automate, automate. Yahoo! was a human-powered directory that was super-ceded by Google because Google was able to offer better, more accurate results, more quickly. PageRank is based on authority: inbound vs outbound links, and the quality thereof. As a directory, DMOZ links out far more than it’s linked to. The algorithm must therefore be tweaked to assign a weighting to a directory like this. So how much ‘authority’ do you assign to a listing in DMOZ, when they let anyone, even Canadian college kids, be editors?

I do recall a bit of an uproar months ago about a blog post that claimed that Google was to punish pagerank for digg stories. Although it’s never really been verified as coming from a legitimate Google source, the warning seems to make some sense: sources that were found to be manipulating social bookmarking sites to unfairly promote sites would be blocked. Don’t be evil, kids, and you’ll be fine.

What I feel makes the story really interesting, however, is the buzz shortly following that Google was planning to acquire digg. Was the “leaked” blog post a way to devalue digg in the eyes of SEO folks? Or does google really recognize the importance of social bookmarking? A Stanford 2008 survey actually found that 25% of the sites posted to del.icio.us have not yet been indexed by the major search engines. That’s pretty amazing. I would love to have seen if Google incorporated digg rankings into their algorithm, or kept digg as a complimentary service and simply used it to help find new sites to index more quickly. Assigning authority to individual users would be very, very interesting!

So why did Google update their guidelines? Hard to say. But it may be because:

1. Google sees directories as having equal credibility as other sources, so there is no need to distinguish them in the guidelines
2. Google sees human-classified directories as having less credibility than other sites
3. The Google algorithm needs to take into account many more sources than simply directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ
4. Google wants the demise of all non-Google entities

On Oct 21, I attended my first meeting of the Mile High Social Media Club. The speakers were Brett Borders of Copy Brighter and Jason Cormier of Room214. They did a great job talking about social bookmarking. Their presentation was geared to a broad audience, serving both to introduce the topic and also to offer some more advanced tips and tricks. Brett was particularly engaging to listen to, as his enthusiasm colored his speech with comments that social bookmarking was like heroin!

You can view my live-time Twitter updates, which I tagged with #mhsmc. (not sure what the “#” is? Read my previous post “What’s the deal with hashtags on twitter?“)

The meeting was sponsored by filtrbox, although at Columbus web analytics Wednesdays meetings, being sponsored meant we didn’t have to pay for our own drinks I hadn’t heard of filtrbox before, but many in the room had. It strikes me again that despite the fact we’re engaged in an online space, proximity and geo-location do factor into what we’re exposed to. I spoke with Patrick Cameron of filtrbox afterwards, and was quite impressed with their service. They do brand monitoring and classify their sources as mainstream, blogs or social media. Individual sources can be blocked, or ranked within the app as more relevant. The app was built with flex, and when one of the founders, Ari Newman, showed me an iPhone-friendly report I thought for a brief moment I’d met some geniuses who’d managed to get a flex app on the iPhone! Alas, the guys seem great, but they are mere mortals.

I met a few folks (Rod Saunders of HumanFlow and Jonathan Sackheim of The Booyah Agency.) I was both a bit embarrassed and pleased by the street cred I got when I said I’d been a DMOZ editor back in the day. Jonathan said he’d never met an real editor before!

I made sure to speak with Brett and Jason and thank them for their presentations. I also have to say that Jason Cormier of Room214 officially has the best business cards I’ve seen! It was fun to ‘talk shop’ with others interested in the social media space, but I also enjoyed getting to know the folks beyond that. Once again I’m struck by the friendly nature of Coloradans. It wasn’t long before I had recommended sites to see, and I really enjoyed speaking
with Brett about languages: he can get by in Japanese, took Spanish in school and is now learning Hebrew. We discussed how different languages can really affect how you see the world, and drew a comparison to programming languages.

I haven’t blogged much since arriving in Denver and working to get my feet beneath me, but I certainly feel renewed after the event. I have a few new ideas brewing, and look forward to exploring them here. I missed Refresh Denver last week, but Patrick of Filtrbox recommended I check out the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup, so I may have to do that as well. I look forward to engaging with some new folks (since I can only participate in the Columbus Tweet-up virtually!)

This morning Brian Morrissey asked his twitter followers “should an agency brag about its ‘new all-flash website?’. Before I read his post on AdFreak, I had no idea which agency he was discussing. Indeed, just last night my former colleagues at Resource Interactive launched their own site. However, having been there while they were working through the planning for the new site, I knew that RI had been very conscious not to overdose on Flash.

Anyone who knows my background knows that I have a love-hate relationship with Flash. Years of focusing on accessibility, reuse and search engine optimization had me a bit jaded when I started at Resource. Yet working with a team of strong developers with an awareness of the shortcomings of Flash lead me to a grudging appreciation of the power it did offer.

In 2008, would I advocate an entirely Flash-based site from an agency? Only if it were built in a progressively enhanced manner to account for the different platforms people are using the access the web. Sure, many people have the Flash player installed on their computer.. but what about those of us who love our iPhones?

The folks at Adobe are doing great things to allow Google to index content within Flash.. but it’s still in its infancy. With HTML, you can use semantic tags such as headings to indicate the relative importance of your content. There is currently nothing similar for content that is rendered inside your Flash experience. Google may index it, but it has no idea what’s most important, which may have a negative effect on how your site is ranked.

Can site visitors deep-link into your Flash experience? Even if Google does manage to dig into your content, can site visitors easily find what they’re looking for once they hit your site? Schematic does a good job at this, although I wish having JavaScript disabled didn’t throw you into a stripped down site (looks like this may be their mobile fall-back).

Schematic's website with JavaScript disabled

Resource Interactive's Website with JavaScript Disabled

I’ve written enough on this blog about Flash and accessibility and how it kinda-sorta works in certain environments. Does your target audience really not include anyone with visual, motor or cognitive impairments? Are you willing to ignore them on the off chance they’re not using Windows/IE with JAWS?

Flash may seem engaging and appealing to a client, but can you afford to put all your eggs in a rich internet application basket? Sadly, many clients aren’t aware of the intricacies of the techniques that ensure your site is accessible and usable by all shades of your target audience. Is your agency doing you a disservice by selling you the shiniest car on the lot, with no information on what’s under the hood and how it performs?

I do want to be fair: I took a look at the Razorfish site that Brian posted about, and it degrades gracefully with JavaScript disabled. Indeed, Razorfish (or as it was then known as, Avenue A Razorfish) are the folks who published the white paper on SOFA – Search Optimized Flash Architecture. They know their stuff, they are not building Flash sites at the expense of the other things I’ve spoken about today. But are they educating their potential clients on the quality under the hood?

RIA is about interaction.. make sure your agency can explain to you how different audiences on different platforms can interact and engage with your site and brand. Otherwise, you can just go ahead and print up a few old brochures.

RI_comp_2

Originally uploaded by Resource Interactive

I just came across this old photo from the iCitizen conference held by Resource Interactive last May. I’m working the social media cafe, speaking with David Griner and another conference attendee about lifestreaming.

We discussed wordpress, tumblr, flickr, twitter and digsby.