Dan Zambonini @zambonini-blog - Tumblr Blog

"This is an ex-blog, it has ceased to be."

I've moved my main personal blog from Tumblr to Wordpress. The domain stays the same, but if you're reading this via the Tumblr RSS URL, you might want to re-subscribe to my RSS feed at http://danzambonini.com

Thanks!

What's the Value of Great Content?

All good digital content has purpose.

If you sell ads on your website, the purpose may be to attract traffic and increase page views. If you run a museum website, it may be to educate the reader, or to attract visitors. If you're a freelance consultant, it may be tweets or other social media content to help establish your reputation, trust, and expertise.

A quantifiable value can often be placed on the end result (additional sales, click-throughs, RSS subscribers, enquiries, or whatever it is), but the causality - and hence the traceability of value - is uncertain and messy.

If you're selling content-based services (writing, editing, etc.) - like we've started to do - how do you price your services? More importantly, how do you communicate the value of great content, and therefore the value of services that produce it?

Yesterday, we published a blog post ("An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010"), the purpose of which was to generate backlinks to our site. Our site is new (less than a week old), so our short-term goal is to build-up relevant trust in the site (e.g. PageRank), so that we can start to rank for our target keywords, and ultimately sell our services.

Our strategy is a mix of SEO-optimized content (which this was not) and link bait (which this was) i.e. we don't expect this particular content item to show up in search results, but we do want it to generate backlinks from relevant, trusted sites, so that our trust increases, and hence our other SEO optimized content ranks well by association.

It seems to be paying off. This one blog item has already gained us backlinks from trusted, relevant sites, including Boing Boing, Visual Thesaurus, Vocabulary.com, and an .edu domain; for those that don't know, .edu backlinks are probably the most valuable and difficult to gain.

You can't buy this quality of backlink - so how do you value it?

Some might suggest a simple daily rate, but great content is as much about the creative idea (the reason that it's link bait, and not just good content), as the writing itself.

For example, looking at the blog item in question, you may think, "Oh, it's just a few graphs in Excel - that probably took a few hours - so I wouldn't pay more than a hundred quid". But the actual process was more complicated.

Amy originally found a transcript of the UK leaders debates, and later a quote from George Orwell about political language, and connected the two, suggesting an analysis of the leaders debates. I mis-understood, and thought she was talking about parliamentary debates.

After some hunting, I found the data sources on They Work For You, but the API didn't provide the access we needed. I then wrote a PHP script that downloaded the many gigabytes of raw data from the website, and a second script that parsed these thousands of XML files for individual words and inserted them into a database. This process - of data munging - took about four days non-stop on my laptop.

We then had to create queries that we thought would be interesting, and double check all of our statistical reasoning, to ensure that we weren't publishing false results.

We could then create and edit the blog post. After publication, it wasn't a simple case of 'sit back and wait for the traffic': Amy wrote a bespoke message to Boing Boing, prepared a PDF press release, and sent it out to a pre-researched list of journalists.

It's all worth it of course - these links are invaluable and will have a significant impact on the future of our business - but how do you position the 'value proposition' of great content to potential clients?

Our new "Thing On The Side": Content Strategy

In between all the other thousands of things I have on at the moment (including: writing my book and keeping up with blog posts for Amorphous Blog and The Januarist), we've been setting up a website for our new Content Strategy consultancy: Contentini.

Great web content is something that both Amy and I feel passionate about, so when we thought about what kind of freelance work we'd like to do to help fund our current year of travel around the world, it was an easy choice to make.

And just because we don't have enough blogs already, we're blogging over there too - please do go over and subscribe; we'll be semi-regularly publishing interesting tips and research about web content.

Please Update Your RSS for My Blog

If you subscribe to this blog via RSS, please, please update the RSS URL to point to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/danzambonini

At some point in the next couple of months, I'll be moving my blog from hosted-Tumblr to self-hosted Wordpress, because I believe Tumblr is pretty bad for SEO (based on my experience ofrunning 5 or 6 blogs on different platforms).

I first want to transition my lovely RSS readers to Feedburner, to that when I make the switch, I can easily change the RSS to point from Tumblr (where it currently is) to Wordpress, and similarly in the future if I decide to use another platform.

Collecting Test Content to Aid with Web/Software Testing

Whenever I need to test some new code or interface I've written, it always surprises me how difficult it is to easily find a variety of test content; for example, trying to easily find a selection of video files, of different sizes (resolutions and filesizes) and codecs.

So we've started to put together a website dedicated to collecting content useful for testing: Test Content. It's a Wiki, so do please add any files or text that you think would be useful for other people.

Transmutable Hardware Input Device

Does something like this exist?

It seems a bit bonkers to me that everyday objects like mobile/cell phones have little keyboards that work well in certain contexts (dialing a number), but often not in others (sending a text message, playing a game).

Similarly for games consoles - if you want to play a 'beat em up', you may want a very different configuration of buttons (more like the old 8-bit consoles) than if you're playing a flight simulator.

Which is why I'm thinking about something like I've sketched above. This device/module would have an array of programmable buttons (square or rounded) underneath a rubberized, display-capable layer. This would probably use something like e-Ink, a low-power display that only requires power to update the display, and not to maintain it.

The array could then be configured/transformed to raise the appropriate buttons (which would be comfortably 'rounded off' in the raised position by the rubberized layer) depending on the context: want a keyboard? Bzzzz... Qwerty keyboard available. Want a Nintendo D-pad style controller? Bzzz.... there you go. Left-handed? No problem! Bzzz....

Impossible? Stupid? Already exists? Let me know!

We've been in Arizona for a little under a week. Here are some photo highlights from the past few days.

(PS For those who don't know yet, Amy and I are taking a year off to freelance our way around the world. We'll be offering Content Strategy services, so if you need any type of digital content consultancy - analysis of an existing website, content authoring, SEO work, or anything involving online content - please get in touch.)

Visit Original Link

Sounds of The Underground. I recorded this short audio clip from the London Underground as we were taking the tube to Heathrow, to leave London for a year. Like good books, audio can often be more powerful than visual imagery, as you fill-in-the-blanks with your mind's eye.

Not that the tube necessarily holds any great memories, but to me, it epitomises living in London.

AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator

I know there are quite a few out there, but when I tried to use them to generate potential keyword lists for Box UK's User Experience Services, I found them all a little clunky (Why post back to the server? Do it in Javascript!).

So I decided to very quickly create my own AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator. It may not be terribly sophisticated, but it's quick and does what I need it to!

Creating 100 Megan Foxii

A couple of people have asked me how I created the image of 100 Megan Foxii (100 images of Megan Fox superimposed).

It's actually really simple, using PHP. In fact, it only took about 20 lines of code:

<?php

// Get list of all photos $aImg = array_diff(scandir('./photos/'), array('.','..'));

// Create blank white canvas $im = imagecreatetruecolor(400, 600); $white = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255); imagefilledrectangle($im, 0, 0, 400, 600, $white);

// Place each image on to canvas, re-sized foreach ($aImg as $img_path) { $filename = './photos/' . $img_path; $tmpIm = imagecreatefromjpeg($filename); list($width, $height) = getimagesize($filename); $photoIm = imagecreatetruecolor(400, 600); imagecopyresized ($photoIm, $tmpIm, 0, 0, 0, 0, 400, 600, $width, $height);

imagecopymerge($im, $photoIm, 0, 0, 0, 0, 400, 600, 3); }

header('Content-type: image/jpeg'); imagejpeg($im); imagedestroy($im);

Change the 400 (width) and 600 (height) in the code to whatever your output image size is; it just turns out that most of my images were around this size (it doesn't matter if all of them are, as the script re-sizes the images).

You may also need to play around with the '3' at the end of the imagecopymerge() function; it'll need increasing a bit if you have less than 100 images, and decreasing if you use more than 100 images. Just play around and see what gives you the best effect (it defines the opacity of each image that is merged).

Amorphous Blog. Or: "Spreading Myself Too Thinly"

The success of blog posts fascinates me. Sometimes you can post something that you are sure will grab attention, and it fizzles quickly into obscurity. Other times, you can knock out something vapid and it spreads like wildfire.

Last June I wrote a post called Analyzing the Design of Websites: Apple, Microsoft & 37 Signals which I personally thought was quite interesting, but it didn't generate a massive amount of traffic. In the last couple of weeks, Smashing Magazine just happened to mention it in a tweet, and it went ballistic. Thousands upon thousands of new visitors read the piece each day, and it received quite a few backlinks: it now ranks second in a search for the generic phrase 'analyzing design' on Google.

A few of us often put significant effort into writing posts for The Januarist, our collective blog about past and present culture. However, even 6-or-so months after launch, it hasn't received as many back-links as I would have hoped for; probably because we don't spend too much time thinking about link-bait or SEO-optimising our content.

Anyway, just to test a point, I've decided to set up another blog: Amorphous Blog. On this blog, I'm not going to write about ideas that come to me, or interesting nuggets I come across. Instead, I will strategically write about whatever the popular topic of the moment is; I'll be using Google Trends to find out what the rising searches are at any given time. Just to give it a focus, I'll restrict the posts to search topics on popular culture (music, films, sports, art, etc), and will frame each post around a chart, graph, or some other data analysis, all with tongue firmly in cheek.

The RSS Reader Model is Wrong

In the physical world, I buy Private Eye but skip the 'funny' comic section. I buy newspapers, but skip the TV and Sports sections. I'll also infrequently buy other magazines like Wired, The Economist or Monocle and selective scan/read through them.

I certainly don't read everything in each magazine, but am not frustrated that they're still in there: after all, that's a limitation of the printed format. I also don't mind that there's great content in magazines that I'm missing out on, because of the cost limitation.

But when it comes to reading content online, through RSS (I use Google Reader), I'm not sure why I'm suffering from the same problems. We seem to have too-quickly adopted the physical model of 'subscribe to a magazine'.

The simplistic solution would be to use basic filters to remove unwanted content. I'm not sure why Google Reader hasn't built it into the core platform: I don't particularly want to use a clunky solution that relies on a third party, like a Yahoo Pipe or FeedRinse.

As much as I wouldn't mind specifying a '-unicorn -steampunk -disney' filter for my Boing Boing feed, that still only solves half the problem.

The 'pizza' model (the bottom of the three diagrams above) feels like a better method of reading web content: it should all be treated as one amorphous blob (an 'amorphous blog', if you will), which - perhaps using bayesian/machine learning or another sophisticated method - is filtered into my 'stream'.

This might better solve the two basic problems: 1) that there's content I currently subscribe to that doesn't interest me, and 2) that there's content that would interest me, but I don't subscribe to it.

I think what frustrates me most about this problem is that I thought Google was working on it. The "Like" button in Google Reader would seem to be a simple step towards solving this solution (i.e. the training of the learning algorithm). But no... all it seems to do is to flag and identify popular content.

I'm not sure why I'd want to identify and read 'popular' content, any more than I want to listen to 'popular' music or watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster - popularity is generally not a great indicator of quality.

Anyway, that's enough of a rant for a Saturday morning.

You Can't Emulate A Successful Strategy By Emulating The Tactics

The main UK political parties boggle my mind. With access to the brightest minds, and with big wallets, they still seem to think that their future depends on copying as much of President Barack Obama's winning strategy as possible.

But it doesn't work like that.

You can't just start emphasising the word 'Change', or mimic his oration style, or - as I'll get to shortly - decide that you suddenly want to start 'engaging with social media'.

Barack Obama had a great story. People bought into that story, and it empowered them to discuss him and support him at every opportunity.

What story do our candidates have? Three wholly-British, middle-aged, white, privileged men who went to the best schools and universities and entered politics fairly early in their careers.

Your story doesn't have to be about your background, though. You could create your own story by acting differently, suggesting something radical and honest. But no - every candidate speaks the same and promises (basically) the same thing.

And social media? You all just missed out on the biggest opportunity.

The way to 'engage' with 'social media' is NOT to set up a cynical broadcast Twitter stream that pretends that they 'want to hear from you'. Or to set up a Facebook page. Or hold a user-generated content competition.

What you SHOULD have done is given the influential people online a reason to talk about you. To do your job for you.

What you SHOULD have done is to ensure that the majority of your MPs vocally opposed and voted against the Digital Economy Bill. Rather than spending millions on social media content and campaigns, this one act would have given you more good-will and online karma ('whuffie') than anything else you can now do.

But you blew it. So, carry on with your social media charade. We now all know that none of the parties really care about the online audience. So just go ahead and waste your money.

Write-up of "Classic 20th Century Design" Bathcamp talk

I finally got around to writing up the talk I gave at Bathcamp a few weeks ago, Classic Geeky Objects of the 20th Century, though I actually decided to remove two of the original objects I mentioned, including the Atari CX40 joystick (pictured above).

Before you ask, I purposefully chose not to include any Apple products, otherwise the blog post would have turned into a list of Apple objects.

Penolo - Updates

try { penoloShowSketch("rrGM"); } catch(err) {}

It's been about a week since Penolo launched. This evening, I'm uploading some changes that I've made over the weekend:

You can now login without tweeting/saving a sketch.

You can save a sketch without tweeting (still requires you to login via Twitter though, so that the system can save a sketch against a name/username).

Added social bookmark/sharing buttons when viewing a sketch.

Added 'embed code' (Javascript) for a sketch when viewing, so that you can embed a sketch easily on your blog (see above!).

Added JSON output to the API.

The most important part, as far as I'm concerned, is the 'embed code'. I'd like to eventually make Penolo so that it's the 'youtube' or 'scribd' of sketching: whenever you need to quickly get an idea across in a blog, Penolo should be the first place you turn to sketch it out and embed it.

We'll see how that vision goes, but in the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

The Advocate / Enemy Conundrum: What a Smart Company Would Do

My last couple of blog posts have been complaints about a certain company. I don't make a habit of complaining in my blog and on Twitter. I believe that people should add value, and this rarely involves trivial complaints: my usual approach is to try to provide useful and interesting links. But when a complaint applies to a wider group of people, and could potentially save others' time and money, then I think complaints are valid. A responsibility, even.

Anyway, let's try to add some value with this post.

The way I see it - and this has no scientific or statistical evidence to support it - people typically display a certain level of... let's call it 'passion'. Some rarely get riled or excited; these people would be represented by horizontal lines near the bottom of the graph above.

Then there are others, at other end of the scale, who are 'passionate' - represented by horizontal lines towards the top of the graph, like the red one. That's me. That's probably you too.

We can be extremely positive about the things we like, and similarly negative about the things we don't. Most importantly, this intense passion also comes with a voice. You want to shout about the things you love, and bitch about the things you don't.

People who complain loudly and frequently can be easy to dismiss. The Internet seems to sometimes consist solely of this group. "Oh, ignore them, people will complain about anything. People love to complain. Especially geeks."

But the people who complain loudly could as easily become advocates. It has been said, and I agree, that the best customers are sometimes those who have had a problem which has been brilliantly resolved. These customers can even be better than those who have never had a problem.

Businesses shouldn't be ignoring the crowds of moaners. They should be actively courting and converting them.

A true advocate can be worth tens of thousands of dollars of equivalent sales and marketing activities. A true advocate is your best salesperson, but without the salary.

What would a smart company do about this?

A smart company would use their support channels to recruit advocates. The support team becomes the most important part of the business (and, on a side note, should therefore not be outsourced to a faceless cost-saving operation in a different country).

A smart company would develop an 'influence estimator' that, next to each customer name in their support ticketing system, displayed a best-guess as to how vocal and influential a customer might be. Any simple application scanning social media for my name will be able to easily guess that I write a number of blogs, have X-thousand followers, and have my tweets re-tweeted Y times.

A smart company would then ensure that those most likely to be influential receive an outstanding support response. Even if it costs the company some money (*cough* maybe my £11 refund, company from a previous blog post?).

This doesn't just resolve a support ticket. This creates a salesperson. How much is that worth?

I'm not saying that this is what an ethical company would do. Everyone deserves amazing customer support. I'd hate to think that my mum - without a twitter account and RSS subscribers - would be put to the back of the queue by her ISP because they'd focussed all their resources on dealing with the twitterati. But in these economically-challenged times, it's what smart companies should be considering.

Of course, a great company would offer outstanding support to every customer just because they know that it makes sense, it's ethical, and at the end of the day, it makes money.

Dear PayPal: You May Be Unknowingly Laundering Money for 123-Reg

"To run illegally acquired money through a legitimate business to make it more difficult to track" - Launder definition.

I'm going to quote other people who have experienced a similar issue to mine with 123-reg ('auto renewing' without consent), to prove that it was not a one-off, and that the company has practiced this - at best, deceptive - racket for some time. These quotes are not mine: they are re-printed from Twitter and Review Centre. If they included mine, it would be twice as long.

it's so annoying. The autorenew that @123reg are doing is basically theft and something I never knowingly signed up to.

@123reg autorenew, more like auto steal.

Reg123 [sic] renewed number of domains on me when I didn't want to renew them. They just charged my PayPal. Seems to be what they do.

@123reg For 2 days you restarted old domains & invoiced me for these. i have tried to call the office number and twice the call terminates.

can't believe @123reg won't refund the auto domain name renewal i didn't want. is that even legal? i don't even know how it got switched on!

123Reg is forcing me to enter card details so that it can autorenew all my domains unless I specifically tell it otherwise. Time to move on.

I'm proper mad at @123reg for putting my domains on auto-renew. Let's hope they reply to mail before end of today,or there'll be chargebacks

Yep, i had the same. Do you want to renew, ehh NO. Then they take money out of your account and then say that even though you clicked on the "let it expire" button, you didn't cancel the hosting

I signed up with 123 reg only to have my hosting auto-renew at well over double the original price. I can find no record of them notifying me of this, and it's just terrible that the onus is on the customer to stop them putting their greedy little hands into our bank accounts for as much money as they like!

Today i received three paid invoices from 123-reg for domains that i did not order.

I went on to my control panel and set the package to expire and set up my new site. This morning I have an received a receipt and 123-reg had taken the money from my card.

I'm not sure how many of these payments were taken through PayPal, but mine was, so I can only assume that at least some of these were.

PayPal, please take note. I KNOW that this isn't your fault. You're not doing anything illegal here.

But you should not be involved with a company like this. Your brand relies on security, trust, and convenience. Given my recent experience - where my dispute with you for this charge wasn't accepted (and you told me to physically write to an address in the US to find out more details - I'm in the UK), I can't honestly say that you feel more secure and convenient right now.

Please, don't let this company tarnish your image. Don't let them use your services.

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Dan Zambonini