Entries Tagged 'Internet' ↓

The almost certain demise of PayPerPost got me thinking again about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Their advertisers were promised an SEO benefit, google saw through their buy-search-engine-position-by-proxy scam and zapped their ass. Damn right too - SEO is a scandalous profession.

SEO specialists are the astrologers of the internet age. The only difference I discern is that most SEO experts believe in the truth of the advice they’re giving. I suppose that gives them a touch more integrity, though it also makes them a touch more stupid than their stargazing brethren. Both professions, if you can call them that, exist because our reptilian brains find it hard to discriminate between coincidence and consequence.

Let’s try an experiment. A thousand people in a room are asked to toss a coin ten times. It’s a contest to see who can throw the most heads in row. Let’s make it a financial contest. They all pay £1 into a pot, and there is a guaranteed prize for anyone who can throw five or more heads in a row. Not five heads in total, but five in a row. Tricky, eh?

How much should that prize be? It must be pretty unlikely, right? A big prize must be on offer, perhaps the whole pot. Maybe no-one will be able to claim it.

Does it surprise you to learn the prize for throwing five or more heads in a row would only be £9? That’s right, nearly 11% of participants are expected to throw five heads consecutively, nearly 50 people will throw six in a row.

But what has this got to do with SEO consultants?

Well, if you took the 46 (or so) people who threw 6 heads in a row, and asked them how they did it, you could be sure that some of them had technique. One of them would tell you it’s important to throw the coin to exactly the same height each time; one of them might tell you to cross your fingers; another that it’s the way they flicked their wrist. All of them of course would be wrong. It’s a coincidence that they achieved an unlikely result, not a consequence of anything they did. There’s no way you can pick which of the 1000 players will win the prize in advance.

And SEO? Most SEO consultants sell themselves on their past record. I did for years. I had rules of thumb, and metrics and tricks and techniques. I read all the right forums, and used all the right jargon. No-one ever knocked my record. But honestly, I was a fraud. The truth is, once a site is moderately well-structured the rest is luck. I once managed to achieve the equivalent of six heads in a row and that guaranteed my ‘expertise’ - I was expert in the same way the 46 coin-tossers were lucky. Not inherently, but by reputation.

It’s pretty simple to structure a site so that the search-engines are receptive to it. It doesn’t take much expertise or indeed much time. After that you’re on your own - if people want to link to your site, they will and the site will improve in rankings. If they don’t, you need to do something different. Um, that’s pretty much it. Honest.

Oh, and don’t go and do anything stupid or immoral - like the PayPerPost advertisers were attempting. You’ll get caught, because it’s not good for the rest of us and Google, at least, cares about that.

You might as well consult star-charts as SEO consultants to improve your search engine rankings. But then, perhaps I’m too harsh here. I’m likely to be much more cynical about these things than you. I’m a Scorpio, after all.

In Prime Minister’s Questions today, Edward Leigh’s question hinted at what may have been the root cause of the security catastrophe facing the government. “Is the prime minister aware”, he asked, “… that when the NAO asked for narrow details—not people’s personal bank accounts—the Revenue said that to disaggregate that information would be too burdensome for the organisation?”

Hmm. It occurs to me that the poor chap who mailed the CDs - he’ll no doubt lose his job - may have been working around an intransigent IT department.

An IT department which you’d hope could muster the meagre talent required to filter a few fields from a text file. Hell, any half-competent programmer I’ve ever worked with could have done this in a few lines of shell script or, if the data were XMhelL with a couple of XSLT matchers.

So, maybe the HMRC doesn’t have IT resource they can deploy on a 10 minute task like that.

Or, maybe they asked one of the cowboy IT consultancies to quote them for the job and received a ‘burdensome’ price - after all, it’s an enterprise-y task that’s much harder to do on a 25 million line file than on a 10 line one. Isn’t it? Umm. Not really.

I can’t help feeling that the real problem may be a lack of agility in their development and IT management. And everyone knows that the harder it is to work with IT departments, the more people learn to work without them. Policies or no policies, skills or no skills, expert or bonehead.

Moreover, I’ll predict that the announced inquiry won’t touch this - instead they’ll suggest management and HR failures and recommend more security training for staff. I hope I’m proved wrong here.

Thankfully, it’s not as if they’ve chosen anyone with links to the IT consultancies I mentioned above to conduct the review - they’ve gone with the chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers…

One last point: I’ve read much suggesting this is a problem specific to the public sector. It definitely isn’t. Most big companies have similar data management issues, IT intransigences and security holes. Most small ones too, I think. More on that anon.

As I sit here, my laptop can see 7 wireless networks other than my own - I suspect many of them have, like mine, been secured.

Here’s a question: what would happen if everyone with password-protected wifi in the UK reconfigured their routers so that up to 25% of their bandwidth was available unprotected to anyone who wanted to use it?

I don’t even know if that’s possible with current routers, but most of them surely have hardware that’s capable - and of making sure there was no route to machines on the the secure network from the public side.

Am I naive in thinking that this would create a sensible wifi commons across most major cities?

Update: James has pointed me to Fon who make a router that already does exactly this.

Parcel tracking is a pain. When I buy something online, I’d like the last page in the purchasing process to give me an RSS feed to which I could subscribe to track the delivery - I find reading feeds much less intrusive than email these days.

But I don’t want that feed hanging around in my reader after the parcel has been delivered. Somehow the feed would have to indicate to my reader that no more updates should be expected, that the subscription had expired.

My reader would then archive the feed for me and stop checking it.

One way to do this would be through the HTTP status codes. There is the 410 Gone return code that, according to the spec, implies that “the requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known.”

But this doesn’t seem quite right - it’s an error code for a start. I suggest we need another status in the 2xx range to imply discontinued or frozen.

Having this simple functionality expands the usefulness of RSS - I might want other things to be published in this way. A few examples - live train times that freeze once the train has arrived at its destination; project feeds that are frozen on completion; customer service cases; and so on.

I’m not sure it’s a killer feature, but I think it would help me in a small way - if a couple of the feed readers with large user bases added support for it, I’m sure that many more services would start using it.

Of course, it wouldn’t take long until the marketeers got their hands on it - they’d probably call it a ‘touch point’ - and started piping spam down the channel, destroying it like they destroyed email. But in the meantime, I can think of all kinds of interesting services that could be built around self-destructing feeds.