Zooming Vs. Scroll And Search: How Will It Effect SEO?
Monday, February 11, 2008
A fascinating article in Newsweek.com caught my eye, about how the future of online naviagation might be in zooming, not the scroll and search with which we are so familiar. This all apparently has to do with the way humans process information, being far more skilled at scanning and picking out information spatially than by navigating lists. This has been a situation that has bedeviled web-developers for years -- but now there is finally headway being done in the area of zooming navigation. Of course, we already have some examples of zoom in the form of Google Earth. But, Google Earth has pauses in its zoom to load up new images. The technology we are referring to in this article, however, involves seamless zooming, like increasing the power of a telescope. The Microsoft-owned Seadragon is a bold step in that direction, and with a sharply increased staff as of late, it is clear the software giant has a great belief in its potential to revolutionize both the Internet and they way we navigate our own desktops. So picture, if you will, a search where instead of lists of links you had a visual “map” of choices. You quickly scan with your eyes this map, lock in on the visual you want, and click a button to seamlessly zoom in on it. Repeat, drill-down, zoom in on result after result. I know what you might be thinking – this sort of navigation might work well on a nice big monitor, but what about a cell phone? Well, wouldn’t this method work better than a list of links? I mean, how many Google links can fit on a mobile device’s “screen?” Five? Of course, Microsoft is also working on its own version of zoom for mobile – Deepfish. But, the $250,000 question for us remains – how does zoom navigation impact SEO? Certainly, there will still be tags and keywords. And apparently a zoom search is more efficient than scroll, increasing the amount of information one can work with at one time, according to the Newsweek article, by perhaps even a thousand. However, I would think there would be certain logistics related to search results that would have to be adjusted. And, since zoom navigation might one day take over from scroll, we will have to anticipate these changes and adapt. Labels: blog, Google, Microsoft, seo
posted by Valerie D'Orazio
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Silverlight Video Search
Monday, April 30, 2007
Will Microsoft be able to make an impact with their Silverlight multimedia offering? Hopefully it has more substance than its current promotional video. Of course Microsoft is guaranteed a small audience for the technology through its own devices. No doubt the Xbox 360 and Zune players will support the plugin in short order. Yet can they seriously challenge Flash? Microsoft has shown before in its bastardization of Java that not every platform it creates is always accepted by the industry. Flash is a product with over a decade of backing in the multimedia industry, and the primary reason Adobe bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion. It's the product that enabled YouTube to be sold for $1.4 billion. Millions upon millions of people have the Flash plugin installed. So most people are probably not going to care what kind of video that Silverlight delivers because Flash has already delivered quality through a codec by On2 Technologies (a former Connors client). The one weakness in Flash is search. Google and its brethren will continue to have difficulty indexing Flash for the foreseeable future. Even if search engines can figure out how to find the text in the animation, what frame do you lead users to? If Silverlight can solve this problem and intelligently incorporate text so search engines can actually find this content without relying on user-submitted tags, then the battle will get exciting. Labels: Adobe, flash, Microsoft, search, silverlight, video
posted by Adam Edwards
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Windows Vs. The Web (and Linux, OSX, Java and Apollo Too)
Monday, April 09, 2007
One of my online heroes, Paul Graham, is getting a lot of attention this week by predicting the death of Microsoft. It was a grandstanding headline, and Paul does reposition the story to making Microsoft simply less dangerous, the way IBM is less dangerous today than it was up to and through the 80's. He says Google is the one to look out for.
And right on cue, BusinessWeek's story is about Google-noia. And Google releases their own 1-800-GOOG-411 service, as if to state "yeah, we're testing the Starship Enterprise voice recognition user interface, predicted by Google engineer, Craig Silverman at Search Engine Strategies of years past (before he was predicting smart yeast). In addition to an advertising-offset delivery platform (the Google phone or GooglePod), voice recognition is what makes Google truly ubiquitous.
But instead of a Google rant, I think I want to linger on the death of the desktop question for a moment. Of course, Microsoft is not dead. I had earlier made this article about Sun's vision of the network being the computer finally arriving. But the point is repeatedly made around the Internet that until Web software works as well as desktop software, the desktop is still king. But then Adobe came out with Apollo. And it's no longer a matter of capability. It's a matter of consolidating an anti-Microsoft camp with sufficient momentum to make a difference.
And as an XP user at the office, and Vista AND OSX user at home, and occasional tester of Linux distributions on VMWare, I've got a pretty good perspective on OSes. Not to mention I was a Mac user since Drexel University was the first school ever to require computers, and have been an Amiga user since 1987. I KNOW what a cool platform feels like.
And the Web ain't it... yet.
Software running in an API closely coupled with the capabilities of the hardware is always the coolest feeling software. And so far in my experience, software written in languages like C++ are by far the snappiest and most fun to use. That's what PhotoShop was, and Amiga software like Deluxe Paint. Java, even with the Swing UI, doesn't even come close. That's that feeling you get in LimeWire and Azureus, where things just don't feel right. That's why Adobe's demo of PhotoShop running on Apollo was such a big deal. Web-based AJAX apps like Yahoo Mail run a distant third.
And it's the Geoffrey Moore technology adoption curve that dictates that until things become significantly better, and acquire enough un-fragmented users in the early mainstream, the desktop as we know it has A LOT of like left in it.
It would take something VERY disruptive to change that.
Like Nick Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative brought to the masses.
Or a tablet PC delivered to everyone's door by Google.
Or Cable companies adopting a REAL program platform for their set top boxes.
It would have to be deployed in a massive way, disrupting all the financial incentives to keep things working the way they are. Making the move off the desktop will have to be easier AND cheaper than a home PC upgrade.
Because despite the obvious dominance of the Web, people love their home PCs. And they hardly know the difference between running a Web app and a desktop app anymore. Desktop Widgets and Gadgets are further blurring the line. And PCs are still just vastly cheaper than Macs. And as a daily user of OSX and Vista, OSX really isn't as much better as all the Mac people say. It's downright flakey when it comes to multi-tasking. Us old Amiga folks know what real multi-tasking is, and today's PC is it. Macs just sort of stick.
So think about what happens when Microsoft makes all the same clever decisions as Google, to release their own uber-cheap advertising-subsidized ubiquitous voice-recognition tablet PC that connects on-the-fly to keyboards and printers, offers coupons, and lets you rent software for whatever ails you, protecting your documents for a lifetime and beyond, using Web Services.
Microsoft is still on much more equal footing that some people think. While yes, PCs are starting to feel a bit like your Grannie's PC, like Paul Graham says, all those baby boomers are about to become Grannies.Labels: Adobe Apollo, Google, Java, Linux, Microsoft, OSX, Paul Graham, Sun, Web 2.0
posted by Mike Levin
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IPv6 and the Convergence Box
Sunday, July 02, 2006
I remember the days of channel-surfing TV. The classic scene from Toy Story 2 comes to mind, where the Pig is flipping channels, passed the one he wanted, and said it's too late and he had to go round again. You could flip channels as fast as you hit a button.
What happened? Well, that was the old-fashioned days of analog cable. Now, we have digital cable and channel guides. The slow channel-flip seems to be connected to the MPEG stream decoding process. I'm not entirely sure about this, but my understanding is that the video stream is encoded for size AND that only one-in-10 (or so) frames carries the full image required to "tune in". Therefore, you've got processing time factors AND time interval "quantization". You can't instantly tune in a channel.
While channel guides are great for getting an overview of what's on TV that appeals to a certain part of your brain, it just doesn't appeal to whatever animal instincts that liked channel surfing. I miss it. There's just something about visually SEEING what's on in a rapid sequential overview that ensures you're not missing what you REALLY want to be watching.
I'm sure that this will be fixed in time. And people are aware of the problem. I bought the HDWonder card for my PC from ATI, and after doing some research about why the interface was terrible, I discovered that they intended to do an "automated" channel surf, and present you a thumbnail of everything that was on, but gave it up because of performance issues. But none-the-less, if graphic cards folks are thinking this way, we can only hope that Motorola, Microsoft, Scientific Atlanta and Sony are thinking this way too.
I feel the digital convergence coming--at least in the home. The desire for one wireless box that does it all is so strong you can walk on it. And I don't think it's only me. I see the XBox 360, PS3 or something from Motorola wrapping in the HD tuner, the gaming console, and a rudimentary computer for email, word processing and the like. The days of the TV not being suitable as a PC monitor are over. Pull up a chair, and fire up Word!
Everything old is new again, and the way the Commodore 64 was so massively popular in its day, coming virtually from out of nowhere, so will this convergence box. It simplifies our lives by making you not need to be a genius to wire up your home system or have a PhD to operate the universal remote. Better yet, it will be built into the monitor as a plug-in console, so it's truly wireless. No need for an extra box sitting somewhere! Bluetooth or something like it will connect it to your controllers and speakers.
Another seldom discussed point, which is amazing considering all the point-to-point broadband video services popping up, is how significant IPv6 is going to be. The next generation Internet supports something that is exactly akin to broadcasting over the airwaves, called IP-multicast. This is significant, because it is the last remaining piece forcibly preventing convergence. Let me explain.
Broadcasting is called broadcasting because you're blasting the same signal out to everyone with a tuner that can receive it. It's a very efficient way of communicating, because one outbound datastream can be tuned in by millions. But everything starts and stops at the same time. On any given channel, everyone is essentially watching the same thing. There is no variation. Today, TiVo and PVR fixes that. But it's fixing a problem we shouldn't have in the first place. Why can't you just ask for any program you want at any moment you want?
And that gets to the way things work on today's Internet that doesn't support broadcast. If you were to send out TV programming the way it is now, you need a separate discreet datastream for everybody who is watching. So, if 1000 people are watching at the same time, it's 1000 times more data than with the broadcasting model. But you can start, stop and pause whenever you like. Everyone's datastream is different, and there is a high degree of customization possible.
And that takes us to how things are going to radically change once the next generation Internet is widely deployed. It will take a whole bunch of Cisco routers being upgraded, but once it's done, broadcasting similar to today's dish networks or public broadcast TV will be brought to PCs... or tuners... or convergence boxes--whatever they're going to be called.
And instead of having to watch the SAME broadcast as everyone else, there will be TiVo-like features built into this box, displacing time as you like. And instead of one broadcast per day of your favorite program (or 5 per day of many cable channels), hot programs will be broadcast hundreds of times per day. Coupled with the TiVo-like features, you will effectively get the experience of true on-demand TV of anything that's "released". The concept of the TV Channel Guide goes away entirely, and all that remains is what moment new episodes are made available. And if the whole world rushes to the latest Lost episode, there is hardly any more strain on the system than if it were one person tuning it in. And there will be different viewing profiles for different family members, because data storage will be virtually unlimited in your home system.
Add to this the fact that "pod" technology like whatever Apple's iPod evolves into will "peel off" a portable copy of whatever is on your home system, so viewing in multiple rooms of your house, or on the go will never be a problem. The pod will be able to update itself with ad hoc Internet connections that it can acquire on the go. And it will have the resolution of ePaper, so it will also be your college text books, your newspaper, and your paperback novels. Voice recognition will be improving all the while, so the need for a keyboard constantly drops. And if Sony has their way, it may even be able to liquefy and be folded up and stuck in your pocket when not in use, only to seamlessly unfold to rigid 8.5 x 11 when flicked on.
All this rambling from missing Channel Surfing! Well, in my lifetime it will be nice just to see some form of the convergence box arrive, so we won't need Electrical Engineering degrees and a weekend put aside to hook up our media centers.Labels: Apple, Microsoft, Motorola
posted by Mike Levin
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Fotolia Partners with Slide
Friday, March 17, 2006
As a PR firm, we have a lot of releases going out on a regular basis and we want to keep you updated on some of the cool things we're working on. So in the future, you'll be seeing some of our client releases posted on the blog to share our latest news. To start this off, I want to include a new release from Fotolia, the online marketplace for stock images.
FOTOLIA and SLIDE Partner to Provide Customized Crawl for Stock Images NEW YORK, NY – March 15, 2006 – In an exciting partnership, Fotolia is teaming up with Slide Inc., making the search for the perfect image or inspiration easier than ever before. Through this agreement, Fotolia ( http://www.fotolia.com/), the global online social marketplace for stock images, is making their entire collection of images viewable on Slide. In turn, Slide ( http://www.slide.com/), a free downloadable desktop program, will allow viewers to watch scrolling slide shows of Fotolia images on their screens. When a desired image passes, a user can click on it to go directly to the Fotolia website and purchase the image for as low as $1. As the first stock image company to partner with Slide, Fotolia is now giving designers and buyers the opportunity to immediately see and review the latest stock images for sale that match specific tags or topics. Designers and buyers can also use Slide to stay current on new photos that have been uploaded by individual Fotolia photographers whose work they find particularly interesting. Fotolia buyers can use Slide to quickly scan and find pictures that pertain to current projects. Photo sellers benefit as well with the ability to display their images in Slide show form on their own professional or personal websites. Clicking on any Slide show will link to Fotolia and give the viewer options for purchasing the desired picture, increasing sales.
Slide is able to offer this unique stock image search option by utilizing the Fotolia API to plug into Fotolia’s photo database, index requested photos, group them into intuitive channels, and play them back via a unique always-on ticker interface. In this way, Slide is expanding the Fotolia community by creating an open invitation that is housed on a user’s personal desktop or webpage. This allows Slide users to easily view and purchase the images that are offered in the Fotolia image library.
”Our partnership with Slide gives designers and buyers another tool to facilitate their search for stock photography. By including Fotolia as part of a personalized “slide”, it allows people to look out for the images they need with out taking hours out of their day to search,” commented Oleg Tscheltzoff, Co-Founder and President of Fotolia.
Max Levchin, Founder and CEO of Slide, said “Slide is very happy to give Fotolia’s photo buyers the ability to constantly stay updated on the very latest stock photographs that match their creative interests. We’re also thrilled that Fotolia selected Slide to syndicate photo content for their user community and we believe that Fotolia’s photographers will be delighted with how Slide brings their photo feeds to life.”
Launched in early November 2005, Fotolia’s digital image marketplace has acquired over 450,000 images in its database and more than 49,000 international members.
About Slide
Slide offers a new visual web browser that automatically keeps viewers up-to-date with the latest content that matches their favorite interests. Slide was founded in 2004 by Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, now an eBay company. Slide is privately held and is located in downtown San Francisco. Slide is currently available in public beta for Windows XP and Mac OSX computers.
About Fotolia Fotolia is an inclusive, global community in which photographers and designers come together to form a marketplace free from traditional royalties and rights management. The web site allows photographers and designers of all levels to share and monetize their passion or profession while allowing graphic artists, web designers, arts directors, marketing professionals, and consumers to obtain high quality, legal digital stock images for as low as $1. Pricing is based on Fotolia’s ranking system, which provides photographers and designers the freedom to set their own prices as well as increase revenue potential based on purchases. For more information about the company and to access the marketplace, visit http://www.fotolia.com/. Labels: blog, Microsoft, Paypal, pr
posted by Jessica Ek
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Is the MIT $100 Laptop GooglePod?
Friday, November 18, 2005
Well, I think the biggest news of the past couple of days has been the $100 laptop from MIT. Sure, it's not a reality today, but 2006/2007 is not a long way off. The price of a Windows license is almost as much as the entire hardware, so of course this thing will be Linux-based. They even passed over Mac OS for it. Such a laptop used in developing nations will result in entire generations of computer-literate low-cost members of the global workforce, which will result in more contributors to open source projects, and so on. Add the rumored solar-powered/wind-powered Internet nodes that could provide virtually free WiFi for these virtually free laptops, and you start to get the picture. And if you look close at the funders of the MIT $100 PC project, you will see none other than... Google! Could this be the ubiquitous GooglePod next generation Yellow Pages? Just crank it up. There's not a lot of room for premium OS pricing. And this announcement just happened to coincide with Microsoft rumors of a completely ad-based free version of Windows. Times, they are a'changin. And that's music to the ears of this old Amiga fan. Labels: Apple, Google, Microsoft
posted by Connors Communications
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