Articles

Most people working in the online marketing world have known the truth about Google‘s infamous PageRank scoring for several years:  it didn’t work, it wasn’t terribly accurate and attempting to classify the billions of pages on the web into 10 clusters was just plain silly.

PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the two Google co-founders.  The company included the score on its web toolbar so that someone surfing from one site to another could see that they had moved from a PageRank (PR) 4 location to a PR 3 location. That meant nothing to anyone, of course, and PageRank grew more meaningless over time.  It grew so meaningless that Google removed the metric from its Webmaster Tools section this week. Googler Susan Moskwa posted about PageRank in an official Google forum Wednesday:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

What Susan didn’t unfortunately comment on was that Google’s toolbar that many non-marketing users have access to still includes PageRank.   Those numbers haven’t matched up with “real” PageRank in years, and the marketing community has differentiated between the two for years by referring to the latter as “toolbar PR”.

PageRank is not a meaningful metric, and you should immediately stop using it in any context.  If your marketing agency refers to PageRank as a metric, you should fire them just for being dunderheads who are out of touch with the marketplace.

This underscores a big issue.   Just because you know a piece of data doesn’t mean that you have the context, training or skills to interpret that data.  My doctor sent me an electronic medical record on CD with all my tests from my last physical.  Not having gone to medical school (sorry, Mom), I have no idea what the numbers mean, but I’m sure that some web site somewhere will convince me I can read the chart.  For my sanity, I think I’ll let the medical folks worry about that data while I explain to them that they can stop worrying about PageRank. Now if only Amazon would admit that Alexa’s data is easily manipulated garbage, we would could really start cleaning up.

Articles

Image representing RescueTime as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase

Ready to learn more about how you spend your time than you may really want to know? Welcome to RescueTime. This program is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to monitor productivity.

Installing a simple program keeps track of the websites I visit and the programs I run.  Simple configuration allows me to train the system to know that some sites are work related. Google, in my case, is more often “Business:Operations” rather than “Research”.    And when Rescue Time doesn’t recognize a site or program, you get to categorize the time.

The result is a series of regularly updated reports that show how much productive time I’m spending.  I knew, for example, that the sites I visit each morning took some time.   I was surprised to learn the time some mornings was more than double.  I also set the system to alert me when I spent an hour each day on “very distracting” applications or sites. Those site visits mount up fast.   (cough) Eventually I found myself with dozens of hours in the database.

Like many businesspeople, I spent far too much time in email.  There was also a lot of time in Excel.  The real findings were the 5 and 10 minute visits to other sites.  During a week, that time added up too. I remember reading a Bill Gates quote that he and Steve Ballmer would exchange calendars and critique each others time.  Since Ballmer is apparently busy, I used Rescue Time.    The program runs quietly in the background, doesn’t seem to use too many resources and is a good bargain at $64/year or only $8/month. Try it for a month or two and see what time you can rescue.

Note: Joe & the RescueTime team just wrote and suggested we share with everyone there is a referral program.  I had seen that and promptly forgot all about it.  So the link was here changed to a referral link.  If you decide to install RescueTime, you get 2 weeks free for others you refer and 4 weeks if they get a paid account.

Articles

I love magazine subscriptions. I especially love free magazine subscriptions, but I love all sorts of print.   Magazines, newspapers, catalogs.   How many marketers do you know who still keep a copy of Famous Catalogs on their bookshelf between a PHP book and Robert Spector’s book about Amazon‘s business model called Get Big Fast?

In a world of Kindles, on demand cable television and smartphones, print may be dying as a media, but the print layout is something many still seek.  Google Reader add-on Feedly is maybe the best RSS platform I’ve ever used.   And now Google itself enters the fray with Google Fast Flip, currently in development in Google Labs, but available to all. Fast Flip is just about the coolest news platform ever.

Enter the microsite to be greeted by your choice of periodical, subject or popular stories (with links to the most popular in each category).  The periodicals are simply A-list: The Washington Post, BBC and The New York Times are just a handful of the news periodicals available.  Subject-specific periodicals like Billboard, Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechanics are also here. Fast Flip gives a thumbnail view of a periodical page.  Text links float around the top or bottom (Google is always testing, after all) although simply clicking the thumbnail itself brings forward a copy of that publication’s online article.    Subjects are on target for world events.  Today’s topics include Nigeria, Facebook, Pakistan, Tsunami — actual news.  A recommended link will undoubtedly make smart use of Google’s algorithms and create a newsstand populated by your previous choices, biases and likes. In its quest for increasingly granular micro-targeting, Google started with big brands and refines their content to the reader’s biases.

What’s not to like about a fast Google rendering with a familiar New York Times logo showing that someone was at least paid to edit and fact check the article? Fastflip isn’t the end of print.  Print already ended.  We’re simply watching its slow death now.   But the thin-slicing of Google information about its users and search patterns are fast resulting in something that could easily converge with YouTube and challenge CNN or the BBC with enough video content.  That’s a future phase.  Right now, FastFlip seems content to be an electronic newsstand.

Executive Summary:  Google’s Labs features enhancements and new services you should stay on top of to see where the search giant is headed as it morphs into an information services company.  The latest foray, Fast Flip, reproduces the online pages of traditional print media in an appealing filmstrip layout.

Related articles by Zemanta