What's the Buzz?

Sooner or later every webmaster, freelance writer, and small-time stringer faces a blank page and asks the age-old question, "What should I write about?" It's best to pick a subject you're familiar with. Some webslingers seem to ignore that rule, but there's nothing to say you can't do some research and actually learn something in the process.

Assuming you've already covered your fascination with 9th-century B.C. Etruscan pottery, the latest political scandals, and your cat "Fluffy," you might try standing the question on its head: "What do people want to read about?" Presumably you are writing to be read by others, and not just for the typing practice. Why not find out what people are looking for?

Yahoo! Buzz, is a great place for that. It's a more-or-less daily (6 times per week) summary of the most popular searches performed at Yahoo! There you will find some topics that are here today but destined to be gone tomorrow, some that are (charitably speaking) totally goofy, and some that would obviously require a fully staffed news organization with deep pockets to cover. But somewhere in that pile there should be a story you can pick up and run with.

Google's similar Zeitgeist presents fewer topics less frequently, but is also a good source of ideas. Checking both sources and comparing them over time is a great way to find out what's hot in the world of internet search. From there it's not hard to pick several of the top articles, take a few notes, and then -- summarizing not plagiarizing -- come up with a story somebody will want to read.

"Cloaking" Part I

They're out there ... somewhere. At least one Romulan Bird of Prey lurked in the black void of the sector -- silent, deadly, invisible. Somewhere, the Romulan commander -- his pointed ears and dedication to logic, so charming in a single science officer, malevolent and evil. Blast their sinister cloaking device! Why wouldn't the cowards dress in bright red tunics and present themselves in decent rank and file?

NEWS FLASH! --

There is no "cloaking device." It's fiction. A story made up for entertainment. The same applies to Google's use of "cloaking." A made-up term to describe a grab-bag of perfectly valid practices that googlebot doesn't want to deal with. Let's look at one of these "cloaking" technologies: redirection.

Redirection is part of the HTTP protocol specification, and the http header sent with any web page supports it. It's a very useful function (which is why it was included in the first place) Redirection is NOT some evil plot to thwart googlebot!

So who uses this "sneaky redirection?" Uhmm, Google? Google uses a distributed database for their search spread over dozens of "data-centers" and they're deploying hundreds more. Whenever you access "www.google.com" Google's internal DNS server sends you to one of these data-centers. You don't know which one, or how up-to-date it is, and the redirection never shows on your browser's address line. Is that "sneaky?"

We'll cover DNS in more detail later, but here's a little tease:
What's at: http://wholeed.webhop.biz/amazon/ ?

Amazon Adventures: Biography

Sometimes I feel like Steve Irwin hacking and slashing my way through the Amazon in pith helmet and khakis when I try to make head or tail out of Amazon.com's book searches. It's been one of those days.

Prolonged thrashing about in the "browse category" jungle has given me an eerie sixth sense about [the] Amazon's twists and turns not available to ordinary mortals. The "Biography" category is the case in point.

Just as the navigable headwaters of the Amazon begin at Obidos, Amazon.com was once a tiny trickle of books meandering from the Cascades to Seattle and on to the wider world. Keep that in mind.

As that meager flow swelled to a raging torrent the natives prayed to their heathen gods for some relief from the relentless flood. The waters carved out new categories, slowly at first -- then with an alarming vengence.

There are now dozens of "Biography" categories: Sports Biography, Music Biography, Military Biography -- soon perhaps "biographer biography." Unfortunately, those categories are muddy little tributaries.

The main channel is "People A-Z", an alphabetical listing of selected biographies by subject, the way you'd expect to find them. If you're interested in browsing this is the place.

Amazon has thousands of associates who link to their site. They won't move pages just because a new ordering makes more sense -- it would create dead links all over the web. So no "people" go to the shiny new categories.

Amazon may fix all this someday. For now, though, the specialized biography sections give you a search box and a "top 100" list. After that, you're pretty much on your own.

Cascading Style Sheets

Sooner or later you should learn HTML -- it's not that hard. And while you're at it, learn about cascading stylesheets. The <style> element (and CSS) has been part of HTML since the 4.0 specification, and the browsers currently in common use handle it pretty well.

Except for occasional Webasaurus pages (like mine) you will hardly find the older <table> tags any more. Stylesheets are easier to use, generally load faster, and separate the presentation fluff of a page from its content meat.

If you are using Blogger templates, you will find that they are basically inline stylesheets. If you want to give your Blog a different look and feel to match your other site(s) or to set it apart from others and increase your brand-recognition you will have to edit the stylesheet.

Although there are plenty of online resources, a good book on the subject is extremely helpful. One I can recommend is: HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS by Elizabeth Castro. It's reasonably up-to-date, covers the emerging XHTML standard, and while it goes into considerable detail, it is easy enough for beginners (who are the usual audience of HTML books).

What's Up With This Blog?

When I first heard about Blogs some years ago, I was underwhelmed. They sounded like daily vapor-trails of the HTML-illiterati, and I wanted no part of them. So what, you may ask, has changed?

Google for one thing. Since founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page sold out, there have been several "improvements" to googlebot, the company's spider. Most of these have had to do with reducing the impact of "thin affiliates" on their search results.

The rationale is: "Sites that 'only' point to other sites have no unique content, and therfore web users actually want to see the originating site." Wait a minute! Google 'only' points to other sites doesn't it?

Add a pre-existing prejudice against subdomains (the "free" webspace most ISPs provide is a subdomain.) and you begin to feel that the new Corporate Google is promoting toll-booths on the information superhighway.

Paranoid? I don't think so! Google provides a free "search this site" service for domains only although there is no reason the technology couldn't be implemented for subdomains. If you use a competing search service anywhere on your site, you can't feature their popular AdSense product!

Take a look at our new bookstore. We've developed a method that allows users to quickly find Amazon "browse category" pages -- a feat that neither Amazon nor Google searches can readily emulate. The value added is improved search, not "me too" text.

So how does Google respond? So far the pages are indexed really badly. I'm making modifications to improve their index-friendliness, but basically the thinking at Google seems to be "My way or the highway."

Web sites must have a single theme that googlebot can understand. Affiliate links must be accompanied by lots of text and outside links. (Googlebot is far too stupid to evaluate their quality it's interested only in their presence.)

There are bound to be more posts along the lines of this one, as I am presently heavily involved in making the bookstore "work," but that is not the single unifying theme of this blog. Oh, right, googlebot treats blogs in a completely different way...