“The sad truth about home pages, on Geocities or elsewhere, is that they were actually a lot of work to set up and maintain,” rues Derek Powazek of Fray.com. “So when blogging started, blogs quickly replaced homepages because they were just a lot less work. Now, with the ascendency of Twitter and Facebook, which require, at most, two brain cells to operate, I fear the death of the truly independent personal site may be at hand. Making something personal, something meaningful, something beautiful, has always been a lot of work. Some things just take time.”

For what it’s worth, I think it’s great that there are ways to participate online that don’t take a ton of time. I just wish more people had more time to do more things that go deeper than “here’s what I ate today.”

Also, today I had a cheese sandwich.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Two Brain Cells Is a Lot in Some Places

First came the web, and it was a mess. Servers went up everywhere, the net connected them all, pages bloomed like flowers, and no one could find a damn thing.

Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google with its rankings of most-linked pages, we were finally able to find the pages we needed, mostly.

The ascendency of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web. I’m going to tell you about the problems, and then tell you the one true way to generate traffic on the web, based on my own 14 years of hits and misses.

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.

Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you’ll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It’s so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.

Occasionally a darkside SEO master may find some loophole in the Google algorithm to exploit, which might actually lead to an increase in traffic. But that ill-gotten traffic gain won’t last long. Google changes the way it ranks its index monthly (if not more), so even if some SEO technique worked, and usually they don’t, it’ll last for a couple weeks, tops.

And when they do reindex, if they determine that you’ve been acting in bad faith (like hiding links or keywords or other deceptive practices) they’ll drop you like a hot rock. So a temporary gain may result in a lifetime ban.

In the end, you’re sacrificing your brand integrity in a Faustian bargain for an increase in traffic that won’t last the month. And how valuable was that increase, anyway? If you’re tricking people into visiting your site, those visits are going to be bad experiences.

2. SEO is poisoning the web.

Google’s ranking algorithm is based on links. So the most effective way to game their system is to plant links on as many sites as possible, all pointing to your site, linked from specific keywords. This is called Google bombing.

SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam. 99% of spam comments to blogs are these kind of links. The target of these links is not the blog readers, it’s Google.

SEO bastards are behind worms that attack blog services like Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type. Some hack into the blog templates themselves to insert links that are hidden from the readers of that blog, but visible to a Google crawler.

And they create programs to grab expired domain names, automatically create websites, filling the pages with content stolen from RSS feeds, creating billions of bad results for users.

It’s a game, and every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients. And every time they win, those of us trying to create quality work and good experiences on the web lose.

Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers. If you want to know why there’s so much remnant advertising on online news sites, it’s because you’re treating the stories like remnants already.

Remember this: It’s not your job to create content for Google. it’s their job to find the best of the web for their results. Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.

The One True Way

Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.

It’ll take time. A lot of time. But it works. And it’s the only thing that does.

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UPDATE 1: SEO FAQ
UPDATE 2: The Green Hair Theory

Post from: Derek Powazek

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

1. Create a new Smart Playlist (File: New Smart Playlist). I called mine “College Years”.

2. Select “Year” and “is in the range” and put in the year you started college “to” the year you graduated. (If you didn’t go to college, use another date range that’s meaningful to you.)

3. Optional: Omit any song that you skip a lot. Click the plus icon, select “Skip Count” “is less than” and put in a small number (I picked 5). Make sure the top says “Match all of the following rules.” In the end, it should look like this.

4. Click “OK” and enjoy the sounds of your formative years.

My playlist turned out to be 9 gigs of awesome and embarrassing musical throwbacks, heavy on the early hiphop and flannel rock. It’s kept me smiling all week.

What’s on yours?

Post from: Derek Powazek

iTunes Geekery: The College Years Playlist

Today at noon I’m playing Layer Tennis with Jason Santa Maria with none other than Jim Coudal doing the play-by-play. This is like the principal of the school being your substitute teacher. Be there! And be sure to Twitter your comments.

UPDATE: That was fun! Thanks for attending the match, y’all.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Layer Tennis

You know all those things you wish you could post to Twitter but don’t want to say with your name on them? Those brilliant angry complaints that would feel so good to get off your chest? Now you can.

Kvetch is an anonymous oracle of complaint. Kvetches are displayed randomly and anonymously. There are no permalinks and no search mechanism. Just enjoy the moment.

Wanna play? First, you’ll need a Twitter account. If you’re not a Twitter member already, go sign up. I’ll wait.

To participate, you have to follow Kvetch. Go to Twitter and type “follow kvetch” or click the “follow” link on this page. Kvetch will automatically follow you back. We need to have this relationship so you can send us private messages.

Now that we’re all set up, just direct message Kvetch with your complaints. To do that, just twitter “D Kvetch Your kvetch here!” or just post it here (you must be logged in to Twitter and a Kvetch contact for that link to work).

Once an hour, the Kvetch website pulls in all the direct messages, strips out the sender, and displays the kvetches randomly. Sweet, sweet release!

But that’s not all! On the Kvetch website, there’s this widget under each kvetch. If you like a kvetch, click the thumbs up button. If you don’t, click the thumbs down. If you’re ambivalent, click in the middle. Clicking any of the three will refresh the kvetch. We use these votes to determine the frequency of the kvetches displayed. Higher rated kvetches will be displayed more often. Lower rated kvetches will be banished to the dustbin of obscurity.

If this seems a little familiar, it’s because Kvetch has existed for over a decade. The site was born while avoiding paying work way back in 1996 as a place to blow off steam (thanks to Christian Mogensen). I redesigned it in 1998 and tricked it out with a realtime chatroom (thanks to Greg Knauss). That’s where I first experimented with the Community Boot – a system that put the chatroom participants in charge of moderating their own space – which I later wrote about in Design for Community.

I shut down Kvetch in 2002 because it’d just grown too unwieldy and I could no longer handle weeding out the dumb posts by hand.

But the ascendence of Twitter got me thinking. Its 140-character limit matched a similar limit we had at Kvetch. And its popularity again created that need for a more temporary, anonymous place to let off steam.

I whipped up the design and gathered a garage band of talented friends. Let’s hear it for Josh Bryant on html/css, Jonathan Snook on javascript, Toby Joe Boudreaux on php/mysql, Alex Payne on the Twitter api, and Media Temple on the server box. They’re all masters of their craft, come from good homes, and are kind to children.

Why do all this? Just because it’s fun. Isn’t that why we started making websites in the first place?

Kvetch! Let it out, baby. You’ll feel better. Promise.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Kvetch! Reborn with Twitter a Decade Later

Post from: Derek Powazek

Hosted by Media Temple

Brad’s also a geek success story, because he distributes his music online for free, allows podcasts and remixing, and even has a “please steal this CD” note on his site. In spite of this (or because of it), his music has appeared on TV and on the radio. He made enough money from licensing that he was able to do a real pressing of his first CD, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing.

Brad just released his second CD, Out of It. You can listen to the whole thing for free online, or download the MP3s for a price of your choosing. I plunked down the recommended $10 for the MP3s (file under: the power of defaults). I’ve given it a couple listens and it’s just fantastic. Give it a free listen, and if you like it too, download the tracks and fill in the price you like. You can even get an old-fashioned round plastic disc for $5.

Post from: Derek Powazek

Brad Sucks is Out of It (in a Good Way)

Let’s be clear about a few things.

1. Outside of fair use provisions like parody, duplicating a whole creative work is a copyright violation, period. That means you can’t take a whole blog post from one site and put it on another. (Take a portion, link to the rest. Duh.)
2. The DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision is not a license to go all douchebag-Napster-crazy. Safe harbor protects sites from getting sued for copyright violation only if they do some very specific things, like having a way for copyright holders to report violations and taking down any infringing materials once reported.
3. Your work is protected by copyright no matter what format it’s in. Syndication formats like RSS do not invalidate copyright. There’s a big difference between one person reading a feed in a reader and republishing content on a public page.

I was putting the full text of my posts in this site’s feed because I wanted people to be able to read it in a feed reader if that was their preference. But some site creators think that gives them permission to republish my work on other websites – sometimes without even attributing it or linking back to the original.

That’s not just a copyright violation – it’s also highly uncool. If you’re running a site that hosts other people’s creative work, you should know better.

I’m sick of explaining this, so to avoid the problem, I’m only putting excerpts in my feeds now. I’m sorry if that means you can no longer read the site in your favorite RSS reader. Blame the current crop of crapware sites that think everything on the web is theirs to monetize. I do.

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UPDATE: I’ve discovered a few WordPress plugins that might help the situation.

• AntiLeech, which allows me to turn off RSS to specific IP addresses or User Agents.
• ©Feed, which inserts copyright information into the posts, as well as a tracking number so I can see where the posts appear online.
• RSS Footer, which puts a link back to the original post at the end of the feed item.

This might be overkill, but what the heck, I’m experimenting.

So I’ve reenabled full-text feeds. To make full use of the plugins, I also had to delete my FeedBurner feed and use the local one instead. So if you want to stay subscribed, please use this feed (FeedBurner should redirect for the next month).

I consider this an experiment. Let’s see if technology can solve the problem that it started. Thanks for all the email, y’all. It’s always nice to know people give a shit.

More thoughts on this from James Duncan Davidson, Scott Jarkoff, and Chris Harrison. Also, thanks to Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today for his fantastic articles on this topic.

Post from: Derek Powazek

It’s 2008. I can’t believe we haven’t figured this out.

1. It’s not semantic!
True. Neither am I. I once slung spacer gifs with the best of them, too. Good thing Heather likes the bad boys.

2. This won’t stop people from cropping it out.
True. Bad actors will always be bad actors. But that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve. The problem I’m trying to solve is how to add visual copyright information to a photo (which photographers want) without cluttering the display on the page (which I want). This is a simple way to do that.

3. Images don’t appear in my feed reader / mobile browser / printout.
True. Thankfully, there are smarter geeks than I. Commenter Dan Sandler posted an iteration of my technique (dubbed “PIFT” which is fantastic, especially when said out loud like “pfft!”) which puts the photo in a good ol’ IMG tag inside a DIV that crops it. Like so:

Code:

<div style=”height:123px; width:234px; border:1px solid #000; overflow:hidden”><img src=”image-url” title=”Title goes here.” alt=”Alt goes here.” /></div>

This way, the photo is available in all browsers, and we just use the DIV to crop its display. If a browser doesn’t support that CSS (because it was released when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), then the copyright just shows. Smart. Thanks, Dan!

4. This isn’t new!
I never said it was. For web dev folks, of course this is not a revelatory idea. CSS 1.0 could do this last decade. But many online photographers probably didn’t know about it. I just wanted to suggest a technique they might employ before the next copyright freakout.

5. No, sir. I don’t like it.
Then don’t do it. It’s a big web. There’s room for all of us.

Post from: Derek Powazek

An Update to a Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging

On the iPhone, the web browser is called Safari, just like on the Mac. This sameness is reinforced by the visual design of both applications. But in the new iPhone software, when they added a search icon, they did it on the left, instead of the right, which puts it out of sync with its desktop cousin.

I know it sounds like a small difference, but small differences add up. Now, when I think I want to search the web, instead of instinctively going for the right side of the screen (like on the Mac), I have to go for the left. Apple has added a layer of decision-making, and any interface designer will tell you, these little additions add up.

Everything is so well thought-out on the iPhone, and the design of the iPhone OS and the Mac OS X is so harmonious, I have to assume there was some reason they did this, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is.

To be clear, this is how I think it should be. Although now, the change would be so disorienting, I can’t see it happening.

Here’s another one. When I think, I want to change my music on my Mac, I click the thing in the doc that says “iTunes”. But on the iPhone, when I click “iTunes” I get the iTunes wifi music store. On the iPhone, I have to tap the thing that says “iPod” to get to music. Confusing. It’s like having to click the “Mailbox” link on my mailbox in order to get mail. (Fortunately the 1.1.3 update finally allowed me to move iTunes to a secondary home screen so I could stop looking at it.)

As our computing experience breaks free from the bounds of the desktop computer and moves into everyday devices, consistent placement of major interface tasks is going to become very important. It’s a testament to Apple that this particular inconsistency stands out as a rarity in an otherwise perfect harmony of interaction deliciousness.

(BTW, the title of this post is a reference to Steve Krug’s required-reading book for web interface designers, Don’t Make Me Think.)

Post from: Derek Powazek

Hey Apple, Don’t Make Me Think