Category: BlogHer

Guitar Hero Booed off the Stage

guitar hero logo

Guitar Hero has been strumming klunkers for quite a few financial quarters, and the publisher, Activision, has booed it off the stage. As mentioned in Rolling Stone, the game may live on in mobile or social formats, but not in its current form.

According to News Quest Online and The Huffington Post that also means that 500 people who worked on the product are losing their jobs.

Erin Broadley commented in Was the Death of Guitar Hero Inevitable? Slash, Star of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Answers Here

Our inner 13-year-old boy cried yesterday when news broke via Rolling Stone that video game company Activision was officially pulling the plug on popular music game franchise, Guitar Hero. The game that made plastic kiddie guitars cool and launched millions of virtual rock star dreams was declared dead.

My inner 13-year-old boy is crying too. I spent many an afternoon trying to make it all the way through a song with one of my granddaughters beside me hitting every note on her plastic guitar. Even though I was awful and they were masterful, it was fun. Both my granddaughters grew out of the Guitar Hero stage. Apparently there weren’t enough young people coming up behind them getting hooked on the game, because it started losing money for Activision a couple of years ago.

It isn’t all music genre games, as Activision tried to hint. Terri Hemmert, in Guitar Hero R.I.P. reports that

Harmonix is doing well with the competing Rock Band line. If you have Beatles Rock Band at home, you’re not alone. Big seller. And look for future Rock Band games this year with Johnny Cash and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Doesn’t get much cooler than that.

Laura June says, “At least we still have Rock Band, right?” as well, in Activision kills Guitar Hero division to the consternation of fake musicians everywhere.

How did this happen?

On TechCrunch, Nicholas Deleon had a snarky theory in Guitar Hero Didn’t Die A Natural Death, But Was Killed By Myopic Greed.

And what could possibly be the reason for that, hmm? Maybe releasing sequel after sequels after sequel in such a quick succession that you don’t give gamers any room to breathe? Gotta maximize short-term profits! The future? That’s someone else’s problem.

Eurogamer took a more in-depth look at the failure in Why Guitar Hero Died. A few quotes:

In 2009 Activision released five separate SKUs of Guitar Hero and the brand essentially lost its relevance.

. . . the fact gamers could play new Guitar Hero games with the peripherals they already owned proved to be the killer blow.

. . . music related games are becoming increasingly risky investments . . .

During the same time, the incidence of active gamers who like to play shooter games ‘a lot’ has increased from 40 per cent to 47 per cent, with Call of Duty leading the charge.

In the Huffington Post article, Guitar Hero Over: Iconic Video Games Gets the Ax, the theory of the failure was

These days, guns are more popular than guitars, at least when it comes to video games.

If my video game playing family members are any indication of a social trend, then the shoot-em-up theory is right. My former Guitar Hero fanatic is now shooting everything in sight in endless iterations of Halo, a game that seems to have killing things as its only objective.

Did Guitar Hero pass in and out of your life, only to become a box of plastic guitars and drum sticks in a closet somewhere, or do you still rock out to Barracuda on a frequent basis? Will you miss Guitar Hero?

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Changes at Google will Reduce Spammy Search Engine Results

There have been complaints. Loud complaints.

I’m talking about complaints about Google’s search results being full of spammy links that lead to nothing of value. The complaint department window at Google was open for business, because they were listening and they’ve made some changes.

Complaints and Alternatives

Before we get into the changes, check out these examples of the complaints that Google was returning too much search result spam:

Most of the complaints mentioned that Google search results were filled with spam results from content scrapers, marketers, or sites that consisted of nothing but keywords surrounded by useless crappy content.

Often mentioned in relation to spammy results are content farms. Demand Media is a name that come up often when talking about poor quality content. Yet at the same time, many articles like Demand Media Valued at More Than $1 Billion Following IPO also appear. People are investing in Demand media at the same time that people are asking to have its articles removed from search results. In the article about Demand’s IPO, Adam Ostrow said,

Early indications suggest that concerns over Demand — which owns sites like eHow and Trails.com — being at the whims of Google’s search algorithms are not worrying investors. The company increased the size of its offering by nearly 20% and also raised the offering price, with investors pushing shares another 40% higher when they debuted.

Last week, Google wrote about its plans to take on search engine spam and so-called “content farms,” a category that Demand is often lumped in with because of the way it produces its content, with thousands of low-cost freelancers authoring stories that target popular search terms.

I have a few personal things to say about Demand Media, which I will get to in a minute.

As for alternatives to Google, Michelle Rafter organized a chat for writers in WordCount Jan. 26 chat: Google, search spam and search tools for writers that suggested alternative ways for writers to find dependable search results. Her chat announcement:

It follows a series of posts on search skills for writers I’ve done recently, including one on alternatives to Google, an update on Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the website that matches reporters’ requests for sources with companies that could provide the information that Vocus acquried last June, and how to get the most out of a HARO query.

Sounds like a great chat, I’m sorry I missed it.

Alternatives to Google have been popping up regularly. One is a new search engine, Blekko, which specifically claims to remove spammy results from your search. See Blekko De-Spams Search Results with Slashtags. Just yesterday, Blekko announced it will block some sites completely. See Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media’s eHow from its Search Results.

Someone made an extension for Chrome (Google’s browser) that blocks spam results. See Search Engine Blacklist Prevents Spam Sites from Ever Appearing in Your Search Listings.

How Google Stepped Up

As I mentioned, Google was taking note of all this. Their response appeared on the official Google blog in Google search and search engine spam. Here’s part of that announcement.

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.

The Google announcement also reaffirmed Google’s principles that buying Google ads does not increase site rankings and having Google ads does not prevent a site from violating Google’s content guidelines.

Christina Warren quotes Google’s Matt Cutts in Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers, saying the

“net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

Demand Media and Me

For a while, I worked for eHow.com as their expert in the Internet category. I’m telling you this story because eHow is owned by Demand Media. I wrote several hundred articles for eHow that I stand behind as being of comparable quality to anything I’ve ever written for my own blogs.

While I was well paid for each post I wrote at eHow, there were also writers there who were not paid per post but through a system of rewards based on traffic. Eventually, eHow dropped its experts who were paid by the article. I stopped writing for them at that time. Now, writers only receive rewards based on the traffic their articles generate. eHow also wanted people who were writing there to move to writing keyword laden posts for Demand Media. I chose not to do that.

Personally, I am happy about my relationship with eHow and I’m proud of my posts. I’ve read enough articles there to know that the quality is uneven – some are excellent and some are not.  But I think Blekko’s announcement that they are going to block eHow completely is an overreaction. There is some good material on eHow, especially from the various experts who wrote there. A better choice would be to filter eHow results for quality.

I’ve never looked at any of the content produced on the Demand Media side of the business, but I know they generate vast amounts of it. And its making them money, as you saw from the story on their IPO.

The Results

The changes in Google’s algorithm will affect the profitability of content farm sites like Demand Media’s, because it will bring higher quality results back into the top ranked search results.

The changes will also be helpful to many bloggers who are frustrated by sites that reproduce entire blog posts without permission. If the changes are effective, an original post should rank higher than any scraped content reprinted elsewhere.

Cross-posted at BlogHer in slightly different form.

Useful Links: DIY Mobile, 5 questions, do not track, fan pages

DIY Mobile Programming: Get Started with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Good resource.

Five Questions with Zoe Gillenwater.  An interview by Chris Coyier. It is impossible to say enough good things about Zoe Gillenwater. Awesome is a good place to start.

Google and Mozilla Take Steps Toward Do Not Track is a post of my own at BlogHer. I conclude that talk from the browser makers about Do Not Track is mostly smoke and mirrors. What do you think?

Compelling Facebook Fan Pages from Chris Brogan lists shows pages I never heard of and don’t find particularly compelling. But if you’re trying to accomplish something with a Facebook page, go check it out.

Terri Jenkins: entrepreneurial woman in tech

She’s been in the SEO and PPC business for 16 years. Sixteen years! You don’t find that kind of longevity and expertise in many web-based businesses. She owns a company that enables her to do the thing that is closest to her heart: find young women with marketing backgrounds and train them to be both expert marketers and technically confident and authoritative, too.

Terri JenkinsWho is this woman? Terri Jenkins, the owner of W3PR.com. She and her husband, Mark run the company from Albuquerque, with a second office in Los Angeles. Their business involves internet marketing, advertising, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, website conversion, and Google Analytics.

Terri describes herself as a hybrid – both a technologist and an advertising guru. In order to do her work with PPC campaigns, SEO and marketing, she has to keep current with leading edge technology and the technological implications of new developments to her industry. She says her first love was technology and talks with fond memory of having a beta account at CompuServe and being one of the original advertisers on AOL.

Terri and her husband started their business in L.A. During the dotcom boom, they had over 25 employees. After the dotcom crash they struggled, but didn’t give up. They made their office a virtual workplace, with all remote employees. Now their work takes place in the cloud. Recently they moved to Albuquerque, where Terri’s parents live. Their business consists of Terri and her husband, three women who work remotely full time, and one man who is part time.

When we met to talk, she was delighted to share the news that she’d just hired her first new full time employee since 2008, a young woman with a marketing degree. She said the young woman is smart and eager to learn. Terri looks for employees like that. She says, “As part of their training with me, I want to make sure they a cross-trained with the technical knowledge, too.” She adds, “That gives them and me something extra other ad agencies don’t have – a well-rounded knowledge that we can offer.”

Terri said she sees a lot of insecurity and lack of confidence in young women. She enjoys nurturing them and helping them “own what they know and use it unapologetically. Young women need to value their own opinions to be effective and authoritative.”

Sixteen years on the front edge of relevance is impressive in a world of rapid change. I asked how she does it. She said, “I feel like I read for a living.” Her reading is designed to make sure she understands everything in the Internet world that’s being talked about. She uses the knowledge to improve her own business as well as that of her clients. Virtual phone service, cloud based meetings and document sharing, and online project management tools are all concepts she’s incorporated into her business.

She shared a few of her clients. W3PR works with Red Bull to implement SEO and PPC ads for sites like Shawn White and others. They work with Atari on the re-release of old video games from the 80s. They’re working with AMC Theaters on the promotion of the new dine-in theaters going in around the country. There are many other examples from their client list that testify to their success.

In 2010, the New Mexico Technology Council awarded Terri Jenkins a Women in Tech Award, recognizing her longevity and her talent for inspiring others. A perfect award for someone who says nurturing young employees brings her a great deal of satisfaction.

You can follow Terri on Twitter @TerriJenkins. She likes to share what she knows there.

syndicated on BlogHer

How good link text makes you a better blogger

I’m going to tell you a little story and then I’m going to give you a quiz.

A few days ago, I posted a guest article by Lior called Increase your SEO Knowledge in 2011: Must Read Blogs. Lior sent me the post pasted into an email. I use Microsoft Entourage (a Mac mail program that is part of Office) for my email. In Entourage, the links Lior sent all looked like this:

This was a guest post written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software <http://www.iadvize.com/>  company.

I changed all the links when I was formatting the article for the blog post. I changed the links to the various blogs Lior recommended to h3 headings with links to the blogs. And I changed the last line of the article, with the guest author credit and link, to read:

This guest post was written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software company.

I didn’t give it much thought, I just made the site name the link as I had done with the blogs Lior recommended. Big oops.

Shortly after that, I heard from Lior, who didn’t like what I had done with the link in the author credit line. Then it got a little crazy, because every time Lior sent the “correction” to me, Entourage showed it exactly like the example above, with no clickable link text and a URL in brackets. Finally, Lior sent me a PNG, showing exactly how it should be.

How did Lior want it? Like this.

This was a guest post written by Lior who is a marketing advisor to iAdvize, a live chat support software company.

Okay, thanks to the PNG image, (with no help from Entourage) I finally got it.

The Quiz!

Now the quiz. Why was it so important to Lior to have live chat support software be the link and not the name iAdvize or not a URL in brackets with no link text?

I’m going to suggest three answers, any of which you may have thought of, and which may have been the reasoning behind Lior’s patient attempts to get me to do it a certain way.

Being an accessibility person, my first suggested answer is about accessibility. The link text live chat support software is the most descriptive about what to expect when the link is clicked. AT devices can be set to skip from link to link, reading only the link text until the user finds the link to click.  Think about how much more information Lior’s choice of link text gives a user than either iAdvize or a URL to iadvize.com. A link like iAdvize could be to all sorts of advice sites from financial advice to party planning. The words Lior chose tell the user exactly where a click will take them.

click here

As an accessibility aside, it’s not helpful when every link says click here. Nothing descriptive at all about that link text. In some situations, it can be a compelling call to action, but it needs a title attribute (plus alt text if it’s an image) that provide more descriptive information about the link destination.

Back to the quiz. Another possible answer involves search engine optimization. Search engines take a close look at link text. Good link text adds to your search engine ranking. It provides indexable information about where a link is going. That’s important to you in terms of links to posts on your own site. Links to your own internal pages or articles help the search engines find what’s on your site, and the text used for internal links makes a difference in how the information is understood.

Guest posters want credit, because it helps bring traffic and quality links to their own sites. Lior took time and effort to write the guest post and wanted to make it count with incoming link text that would improve search engine rank. Anyone needing chat support software will search on chat support software, and not on a word like iadvize. It can’t hurt to have incoming links with the words chat support software floating around the web when someone asks a search engine where to find chat support software.

Finally, there’s the usability answer. Good link text also improves usability. Clarity in link text removes confusion or ambiguity and makes the site more useful.

What else?

Was your quiz answer the same as any of mine? Or did you think of something else? How else could you answer my question?

I was syndicated on BlogHer.com

Instagram: Is it for you?

Instagram is a photography app for iPhone. Mashable recently wrote Is Instagram the Next Distribution Opportunity for News Media?, which included an interview with Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at National Public Radio (NPR).

Carvin talked about how NPR is using Instagram to connect with photographers. There’s an NPR Tumblr blog where photos from people around the world are displayed, some of them coming in via Instagram.

After the Mashable article appeared, @rafatali claimed on Twitter that creating a distribution scheme based on Instragram was lame. Carvin countered that NPR was looking to connect with great photos and photographers, and kicking the tires of Instagram was a way to get there.

@rafatali: What’s so lame about it? We’re just kicking the tires and seeing if we can gin up anything interesting there. cc @mathewiMon Jan 03 19:07:31 via TweetDeckAndy Carvin
acarvin

Mashable likes Instagram. When they first reviewed it, Jennifer Van Grove called it a genius idea. She said it turned photos into social works of art.

I like Instagram, too. I was so struck by it that I included it in this post: New Tech Toys for your Blog or Browser and iPhone. I’m not convinced that an iPhone app is ready to create a new media distribution channel, but I’m open to conversion, particularly if the app gets ported to Android and BlackBerry soon.

What is Instagram?

Instagram is a free iPhone app that uses filters to make your photos more artistic. Use it to take a photo, run it through any of the eleven current filters, and send it to any or all of Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr with one click. In The words “free” and “amazing” are together way too rarely for my tastes, Metalia praised Instagram’s “easy-ass interface and gorgeous filters.”

Here’s a fern that sits behind my desk. I used the Toaster filter on the photo. Seconds after I took it, you could see it on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram on the web. Anyone who saw it on Instagram’s web page could tweet it or share it on Facebook.

But Instagram is a phone app, so the real action takes place there, not on a web page. In the app, you can see popular photos, as in this screen shot.

While in the app, you can view all your photos, find friends and look at their photos, or follow people. Users can comment on photos within Instagram. It sounds a little like Flickr, doesn’t it? But this is all done through your phone, where Flickr often exhibits high quality camera-based photos.

Should you be using it?

For bloggers with Posterous or Tumblr blogs, Instagram is be a no-brainer method of getting photos posted. Right now that only applies to iPhone users. Blurbed is using it on a Tumblr blog. It isn’t restricted to Posterous and Tumblr. Notes from the Trenches is using it on her blog. And My Little Life is using it on a Blogger blog.

There are two missing bits in this app, which I think will be coming eventually with the app’s increasing popularity. The first missing piece is making the app available on Adroid and BlackBerry.

The other missing piece is to let users of WordPress, Blogger, and other blogging tools post the images directly to those blogs, too. It’s a two step process for those blog platforms now. For example, the screen shot of popular Instagram photos is one I took and sent to Flickr with Instagram so I could use it here. Once it was on Flickr, I grabbed the HTML to post it here. Two steps aren’t horribly taxing, but one easy step will mean wider adoption for the app.

For those of you who’ve already tried it, tell us what you think of the app. For those who have not, do you plan to try it?

Cross-posted on BlogHer.

2010 Tech Trends: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Headed

2010 was a fascinating and fast-paced year for tech. Some trends that have been around for a while reached the tipping point this year, and some new trends are emerging that will dominate 2011.

eBooks and eBook readers

The price for an eBook reader dropped significantly this year. The number of device choices expanded. And the number of books available in that format grew and grew and grew.

Anyone who has the capability to buy an eBook instead of a printed copy is choosing that as the preferred option. There are several reasons for this, among them lower price, instant delivery, and lightweight portability for a reader’s entire library.

I see the eBook market continuing to expand as more and more users turn to digital delivery for all kinds of reading material.

Internet TV

This trend hit hard this year, and I think it’s going to continue to grow. Players like Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix and others have gone from interesting outliers to mainstream. Getting TV shows and movies from what used to be standard sources like cable and satellite subscriptions may become a phenomena of the dusty past. You can stream movies from Netflix to your iPhone!

Of course, you still need a broadband internet connection to your home to use gadgets like an Apple TV, but as Just The Right Things points out, it’s a gadget the whole family can love.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML is the code that is used to markup web page content into headings and paragraphs and lists and such. A lot of geeky drama went into getting HTML5 to the point where it is now – which is a still incomplete set of specs for creating web content. This year, some big players started investing time and development cycles into using HTML5 and making it work on the web. Apple announced it won’t use Flash on the iPad – which translates into using HTML5 video elements instead.

That’s a big ouchie for Adobe, the maker of Flash.

Google announced it supports HTML5 and posted some cool demos at HTML5Rocks. High traffic websites got retuned to run HTML5 with lots of hoopla around the changes. Most browsers are implementing support for HTML5 in at least some ways. Tech bloggers, like myself, are talking about HTML5 daily. HTML5 is important to developers for mobile and mobile apps, too. In spite of the fact that it’s still changing and isn’t going to be an “official” spec for quite a while, HTML5 is going to be rocking the tech world for quite a while.

Facebook: Too Big to Fail?

In spite of all its flaws and all its privacy fails, Facebook now has over half a billion users. It expands and expands like some feature-eating swamp thing that will eventually envelop the entire planet.

Everything that could be considered social media – chat, email, multi-player games, status updates, blogging, file sharing, location based features, photo sharing – is part of Facebook. As soon as a new idea for social networking pops up, Facebook adds it to its feature set.

It’s. Just. Huge.

It’s even a movie. See reviews on Women and Hollywood, Gender Across Borders, and Tennessee Guerilla Women.

Here’s my prediction: for the next year, at least, Facebook is going to continue to grow.

Cloud Computing

Gmail, Flickr, Google Docs, Delicious, Dropbox, Blogspot, WordPress.com – your data, your work, your backups – but not on your hard drive. That’s the cloud, baby. Resources, software, and information somewhere out there in Internetland and separate from your computer. Accessible from any computer or mobile device. You and your information are now device and location independent. What could be more useful in today’s world? Not much, which is why the trend is growing.

Grabbing for Groupon

The localized discount coupon service Groupon exploded this year. Everybody wants to save money and the local savings deals from Groupon are often over 50% off on things like restaurant meals and services. Groupon deals sizzle like flies to honey, like moths to a flame – big savings entices.

Groupon got so big, Google is trying to buy it for $6 billion. Groupon said no, at least for the moment. Whether Groupon stays independent or gets swallowed up by something bigger, services like this are going to grow in the next year.

Mobile apps: smart phones and tablet computing

Smart phone adoption shows no sign of slowing down. It’s penetrating every corner of the globe. In some countries, there are more mobile devices than people. Phones with apps continue to get hotter and hotter everywhere you look.

Tablets don’t make phone calls, but they run software and are eBook readers. The portability and connectivity offered by tablets achieves many of the same benefits as users get from smart phones, only with a bigger screen. Perfect for games and watching video.

Having the Internet in your pocket with a device running mobile apps is a trend that is not slowing in the next year.

What trends do you see that I overlooked? Where do you think we’re headed with tech?

Cross-posted at BlogHer in a slightly different version.