Notes from a wireframe world

As you may well know, Google recently pulled out of the Chinese market, due in no small part to the Chinese’s hacking of Google’s servers.

Flowers for Google

Well since this blog isn’t currently blocked by china I thought I’d reprint China’s rules on Google reporting.

—- Official Chinese reporting rules —–

All chief editors and managers:

Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market. This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens’ discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period:”

A. News Section

1. Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not use content from other sources

2. Reposting must not change title

3. News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites

4. Do not produce relevant topic pages; do not set discussion sessions; do not conduct related investigative reporting;

5. Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden.

6. Carefully manage the commentary posts under news items.”

B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections:

1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic

2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top

3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.

4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy

5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions

6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents, please report it in a timely manner.

We ask the Monitoring and Control Group to immediately follow up monitoring and control actions along the above directions; once any problems are discovered, please communicate with respected sessions in a timely manner.

Additional guidelines:

– Do not participate in and report Google’s information/press releases

– Do not report about Google exerting pressure on our country via people or events

– Related reports need to put [our story/perspective/information] in the centre, do not provide materials for Google to attack relevant policies of our country

– Use talking points about Google withdrawing from China published by relevant departments

—- End of Rules —-

OK so what does this all mean? Well, I think China is concerned about the effect Google’s pull out will have both to their own citizens (i.e. making them more aware of China’s censorship methods) and other companies (i.e. Microsoft). To do this they are controlling the source of the news, This same line of thinking also explains why it is discouraging investigative reporting — a key pillar of journalism in the western world and online media is being strong-armed as well. The key to this point is that websites cannot have any media or stories that “have a different tune from government policy.”

It’s clear that things like the rows of flowers that Chinese citizens put in front of the Google logo sends the wrong message to its citizens, and China’s relying on the media to clean it up and tow the line.

I’ve complained a number of times about the attitude of some web professionals towards throes who are stuck using IE6 (or 7 or for that matter 8). The convert or your a moron attitude, will always fail to win converts, especially when the people your calling morons have no choose about what browsers they are stuck using.

Thankfully people are starting to lesion and start thinking how throes people who are stuck using old out-of-date browsers can still access high performance websites like Google wave.

First their was the “Hay IT” campaign which still used the same bully boy tactics but at least was targeting the right people.

Now Google have released Chrome Frame a plug in for IE 6, 7 or 8 on the PC (If your using Linux or a Mac and are using IE… then maybe you are a moron… as your default browser will be better) that will allow you to experience the power of a standards complaint web browser without having to upgrade yours.

Chrome Frame won’t over write IE and the Chrome engine is only called if a special meta tag is found on the web page, and it’s unknown if throes IT departments who won’t allow users to use a good browser will allow people to install Chrome Frame, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

OK so your all set, you have a nice web site, you know the basics of how to use social media to your advantage, and now… How the hell do you find the people who may be interested in your project?

The answer… Google

Google has a whole range of free, easy to use tools that can help you make the most of social media and the Internet.

First off iGoogle, Google’s nice and fancy front end. Based on netvibes iGoogle allows you to add widgets to Google’s search front page (only you see your widgets of course) Google mail, Google notebook, Google Calendar, and RSS reader and Google Doc’s (as well as a phase of the moon widget, but I think you’ll be more interested in the others).

This allows me to use Google’s home page as a one-stop-shop for how the areas of interest my customers have is going, as well as my e-mail and project management tools. It’s really what I link everything else in with.

Next Google Alerts, Google Alerts allows you to set up an RSS feed (that goes into my Google RSS Reader) for any keywords, this allows you to be able to comment on any story that Google picks up that relates to your product.

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts – ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’.

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

I recommend you go for A ‘Comprehensive’ alert for the major keywords you found in step 1.

This Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (or whatever your targeted social media sites are) searches should provide you with enough information to start to pick-up on the on-line vibe, and allow you to start making your self known (in the right way) to the community.

It appears some in the music industry at least realise that the UK governments plans to pull the plug on internet file sharers, is a moronic and stupid move.

Despite not normally understanding how the internet work’s Billy Brag said “We should be encouraging people to become music fans, and whether we like it or not, illicit downloading does encourage people to become music fans”.

The problem with the UK Government idea of cutting throes who use P2P services to share files is it won’t work as Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said, “It’s as simple as that. I was talking to a serial file-sharer the other day, who is a friend. He downloads films and he hasn’t paid for music for six years. I asked his opinion of it and he laughed. He said, ‘even if they cut me off I’ll still be able to do it’. It’s something you do not want to take on, so move on.”

If you kill off P2P services people will just carry on ripping MP3’s from Flash movie files shown on YouTube. If you kill off YouTube, people will just share things via another method.

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree says it best when he points out, “The sensible thing to do is to try to see how we can monetise all this file-sharing activity, which is evidence of a lot of interest in music.”

Once you have picked a good set of keywords, and scattered them through you web site, your next task is to get inbound links. The whole Google search engine was founded on idea that, like academic papers, the number of ”citations or backlinks to a given page” is important, if a page has a large number of inbound links, it’s more important, and so ranks higher.

That said, Google extends this by “not counting links from all pages equally” if your linked to from a page that has lots of inbound links (i.e. an important page) your page is more important, than if you where linked to from a page with few links.

Stop their. At this point, the more devious amounts you are thinking, “WOW, maybe I could make a page that has lots of inbound links, from other pages I’ve made then just link to my main page. That would boost my ranking loads”, However believe me your not the first, and Google fairly quickly figured out how to spot this, and they then just removed all your pages from their search. That said if your still interested there is are good resource for ”Blackhat” SEO (Search Engine optimization) elsewhere on the net.

So how, without bringing the wrath of Google down on you, do you get lots of inbound links to your page?

Their is fundamentally only one way to do this, great content. Great content will be cited by others, you can ask people if they will exchange links with you (yes I will, more on how to get a link to your site on my blogroll in a bit), but they will only do so if you’ve great, relevant, content. Stuffing your site full of keywords may help a robot find your site, but it won’t help a human reading it.

Thats all for now, in Internet marketing part 3, I’ll talk about using social media to aid your site.

For anyone interested in exchanging links with this site, I’ll be happy to, you must however have a site focused on either social media, marketing (on or off line). If you do, add a link to either my home page “our-party.org.uk” or this blog “our-party.org.uk/blog” and let me know either via posting a comment here or via the contact me box on my homepage.