Great Scott

I was talking with Julian Chadwick of PDXPipeline this Monday about the tools he uses for search engine optimization. We recorded a podcast that will be posted Monday night on Hazelnut Tech Talk. However I wanted to pass on some of the information he gave me regarding the SEO plugins he uses for Firefox. I’d like to review the SEO Quake, as it has been very useful to me.

Basic Information

There are a few baseline pieces of baseline information that any SEO beginner. One of these is Page Rank, or Google’s consideration of what a given page is worth. Page rank varies from site to site, and there are a number of factors that contribute to pagerank. One of them is the amount of websites linking to a given website. This is called ‘inlinks’. One can find out this information by going to Google and entering the string “link:http://www.yoursite.com”.

The amount of links from a site to you website show up differently in Yahoo! Search vs. Google search vs. MSN. Obtaining this data takes a while without a good tool to help you find it. There are additional metrics one can find about a site, such as the page rank, sitemap, alexa rank, and whether the site has been indexed in search engines or not. Site indexing is different from checking inlinks.

If the pages of your site are not indexed by search engines, it is difficult for searchers to find them. Making sure your website has a sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster tools is an essential baseline step in the SEO process. You can generate an .xml sitemap for free by using the free tool provided at XML-Sitemaps.com.

SEO Quake for Firefox

SEO Quake is a plugin that adds another layer of information on top of your brower’s basic information. Instead of having to search for inlinks, the inlinks are displayed right on top of the site for you. You can also choose what information you want displayed about the site. There are plenty of options (accessible from preferences) that allow you to view any information you want about the page you’re on. There are Yahoo! inlinks, links to domain, Alexa rank, Page Rank, inlinks from MSN, compete rank, sitemap, and the robots.txt file, just to name a few.

Using SEO Quake rocks. It’s super-customizable and generates a ton of rich information without the need to click. Plus, you can click on the information and download into a spreadsheet or text document for later use or data analysis. Highly recommended.

Download

This is a link to the download site for SEO Quake. Again, it is only available for Firefox browsers, so if you aren’t using Firefox (which you most undoubtedly should), then you’ll be missing out.

Resources

Thanks to Julian Chadwick for mentioning this plugin. You can check out Julian’s site at PDXPipeline or follow him on Twitter @pdxpipeline.

For more information on SEO, Julian and I both recommend SEOMoz.org, a Seattle-based company providing an extremely comprehensive database of resources and tools for beginner, intermediate, and advanced SEO specialists. Try the free Trifecta tool on your site for starters.

——–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

I explained this in the concept of a video game. In order to optimize load time, the content of a video game loads relative to the user. Data streams load from nearby places into the user’s dashboard and notification bar, or ‘feed reader’. There are two types of feeds — the global, overarching data streams of the game, and the feeds that deal with timely events. James Whitley of GoLifeMobile described

While I don’t have the time to transcribe the entirety of the session right now, I will say that we talked about a number of things. We discussed some of the apps that currently exist for Geolocal RSS, namely:

1. Geourl
2. Everyblock
3. Fireeagle
4. Icecondor
6. Britekite
7. Twitter
8. Palatial
9. Shizzow
10. Meta Carta
11. Carrot 2

People, Places, Things

Paige Saez pointed out some of the philosophical ramifications of place, and how the concept of place is constructed. I pointed out that a person can be a place, or an event can be a place. This moved into a discussion of the shift from responding to place (as traditional place is often immobile and very contextual) — to making a place (due to the light modernity and the ease with which place can be arranged) — to people as place (people as an experience, place as an experience, people making place).

We all discussed various use cases of why/where/when/how Geolocal AutoSubscribing RSS Feeds might come in handy. I noticed that the use cases presented by the group members were strongly tied to cultural, beliefs and experience. I think a point was made concerning the structure of systems. I pointed out that a Go board is empty when starting a game, and as the game is played, the Go board allows some structure while allowing many permutations of forms and ecosystems.

Twitter functions in a similar manner. The system allows short turns, similar to Go, and each of these turns contributes to the overall shape of the game. Twitter allows people to be treated as place, and allows people to visit segments of a place, or turn off that place from entering into the environment of experience.

Use Cases

“I’m new to this city/here on business, and I have three hours to do something cool — what is around me that is useful/interesting? What people share my interests?”

“I don’t know this area and need good food.”

People become a location when they’re tied to experience.

Whether you don’t know the area or you do, it can be useful to be able to quickly understand the social/placial cartography of the area.

I forgot who it was, but the system was joking labeled, “a gateway drug that gets you to engage with your neighborhood. That gets you to the people who can make the best recommendations”.

Theses are Geographical conversations. They’re also technosocial conversations, because it’s not the website that has the data, it is the people in the area. But to get to those people easily in a short period of time can often be helped along by technology, RSS, geolocal decides. So, in a way, content is people and people are content.

Community Custodians

Then the discussion went back to video games such as ‘Ultima Online’. We discussed the roles of ‘Gatekeepers’, or ‘Custodians’ that help people into a foreign online territory. Custodians continue to preform these orientation tasks is because it gives them a tremendous sense of use value.

Robots have been programmed to act as gatekeepers to new techniques and experiences, but many have failed (See Microsoft’s “Looks like you’re writing an E-mail - can I help you?” Wizard). It can be noted that humans are matchmakers, not machines. However, a machine can help one human reach another by breaking the boundaries of the distance and time that it takes for those two humans to travel to see each other in the real world. For instance, there is Yahoo! Answers that uses real people to connect Answers to Questions, and Wikipedia for collaborative knowledge creation. Places facilitate conversation, but they must be inhabited by meaning first.

We talked about the semantic web next, and ubiquitous technologies that ID markers and tags might bring. We talked about subscribing to tags instead of feeds (some blogs do this already as a more dynamic/fluid replacement for categories).

Planned Serendipity

We talked about a new kind of serendipity, in which fortuitious and existing social connections and meetup in locations that were predefined as as “excellent” could happen, without all of the hassle of being introduced to a new location. But some objected to this new kind of social relationship. Paige pointed out that it this new kind of serendipity would reduce the organic excitement that unplanned serendipity provides.

To which I pointed out that the modern person is disassociated from a peer group or community, and generally cannot talk to one another on the street. In this way, technology could recolonize the public space with actual social connections instead of shells. Paige, of course, had an excellent point. It is very exciting to come into serendipitous contact with others, but how can one tell if that serendipitous contact will be enjoyable? It is often difficult for a person to walk up to another and ask to hang out. It is sometimes easier with the computer as an icebreaker. When personal music devices isolate people from each other on the street, and laptops isolate one from another at coffee shops, and people cannot look in each other’s eyes on the street, or give another a high five, perhaps it is a clue that we have become afraid of the company of one another, or shy, or disassociated.

Every day we walk down the street or ride bikes or drive cars, and though we are doing the same thing, we cannot speak to each other while doing this. Twitter has allowed a certain type of backchannel to traditional modes of communication that allows for many to communicate with each other on a backchannel while doing the same thing at the same time.

Four Dimensional Search Methods

We talked about fourth dimensional search as a form of data on top of the traditional data flow of real life. Technically, geolocal autosubscribing RSS feeds could be considered forth dimensional data.

Geolocal feeds would allow one to gain information, getting an accumulation of information. doesn’t eclipse the actual experience of getting that information.

Someone blurted out the title of a “New Tech, New Ties”. How cell phone information is affecting us.
The landscape has scaled but we haven’t. Suburbia is so decompressed that huge amount of non-space connect it. These non-spaces take the form of highways and airports and airplanes and bus stops. The inner city — the walking spaces — have many landscapes to them. Stores have microlandscapes everywhere. Food courts compress low-resolution versions of the experiences of other countries into their culinary offerings. Already we have a surplus of landscapes - we have so many that we can’t pay attention to them.

So these landscapes must be filtered. Anselm pointed out a term he invented: “Hygradeing — we filter for the best of the best and leave the rest.” He gave the example of a bag of trail mix being passed around a campfire. All of the good things get taken by the first few people that have access to the bag, so that the rest of the campers have less access to variety. Naturally humans are able to weed out what is good or not good and unsubscribe from the rest. Geolocal feeds can only work if they have high enough quality. Twitter allows one to block feeds that are not interesting or relevant by simply ‘unfollowing’.

We’re Urban Nomads on limited time scales. We have a limited time to access and filter relevant information. Like actions must be compressed together. We’re changing — growing our own gardens and becoming different people, and

Technosocial synchronicity by topic, location, and person can result in synergy. I’m using the Masuda’s 1979 definition of the word synergy, which is used to describe individuals with similar interests pooling towards a common goal.

Silo Sites

It was O’Reilly that said that Internet is becoming one large database.

The hub sites have been created now. Data has been submitted and receptacles have been created for most data types. One does not have to build a silo but a thing that collects and reechoes. Let people subscribe to a geography and re-echo it back to them.

We’re all living here — there is just too much data in the way to be able to hear each other. This is the period of trilobites. Filter feeders. API’s. Mashups. Yahoo! Pipes. Combined RSS feeds. Dynamic content. Relevancy and efficiency means integrating people instantly into a community of relevant data.

One of the more accessible practical applications of these ideologies could be a simple wake-up device. If you’re on a train and you fall asleep, your phone knows where you are and rings right before your stop to wake you up.

WhereCamp Portland was an excellent and invigorating event. Perhaps some of these discussions will

WhereCamp Resources:

From Hazelnut Tech Talk:
WhereCamp PDX Resources | A Combined Yahoo! Pipe for Pictures, Tweets, and Session Notes.
Wherecamp PDX | Paul Bissett on Illuminating the Dark Geoweb.

From the Portland Tech Community:
WhereCamp PDX Roundup
WhereCamp PDX Takes on PacManhattan (Includes an excellent video by Adam Duvander.
NowWhatPDX. A community about social change developed almost entirely at WhereCamp Portland.
Rules for PacManhatten.
Drop.io WhereCamp Portland Resource Drop.

Relating to Geolocation Studies:
DorkBotPDX.
MakerLab.
CyborgCamp (Dec. 6th, 2008).

Blogs about Online Communities:
Dawn Foster writes high-quality posts about the care and feeding of Online Communities on a regular basis.

————–
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

Other, less radical images were much closer to the reality we have today. One showcased a man sitting in a comfortable chair looking up at a projection of some dancers on his living room wall. The caption went something like, “with the help of phono-vision, you can finally enjoy the pleasures of the can-can from the comfort of your own home”. This was a prediction made in 1888, or something like that, so I’ll call it impressive. Others had moon villages, and dystopic robots lacerating poor human victims.
I was eight years old when the book was shelved out of my memory, when the year 2000 arrived, I was older. Fourteen! To celebrate, I dusted off The History of the Future again and was able to read it this time instead of merely looking at the pictures. It inspired me to take all sorts of other books from different time periods and compare their contents to today’s technological results. If The History of the Future compared the 19th century to the 20th, then I wanted to compare the ’60s to the ’00s, or even the ’80s. What patterns might I find? What forgotten utopic visions, or dyspeptic nihilisms might I run into?

Searching for the right books wasn’t difficult. I’d watched the data of the public library move more and more to the computer, and thus as time went on, the bookstacks began to collect dust. I began to recognize a ’60s book from a ’70s or ’80s and so on.

Books from the 60’s were the best. They were so optimistic and projectionary. They were always set Arial font with bolded Arial for titles, as if the world were simple, and so was solving problems. Pictures were generally black and while, but every once in a while, you’d run across a book with a greyscale streaked with a monotone yellow or pink or shocking blue. Books with more somber subjects resembled green computer screens.

Comments and Excerpts from Urban Structure, 1968. Paul Elek. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The Interfaces (Page 76-77).

“An interface may be described as a common boundary between two systems. The interface between transportation systems is the most neglected element that the passenger is force to tolerate. The attitude of transportation system operators seems to be, ‘leave the driving to us but how you get aboard and where you go when you get off is your problem’. Improvement in the attraction and holding of riders is needed more than anything else except frequent service.”

“The one ability that ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race has that makes mass transit possible is that ability to walk. Why do we attempt to eliminate it as if it were unnatural? We seen to accept the walking required to use vertical transportation in buildings. We walk from our car or bus into the building, walk to the escalator, something even walk on it as it moves up, walk to the elevator, walk in, walk out, and walk to our desk. Why do we accept this? Because we are always moving towards our destination. The only wait is for the elevator and this is very short, and the interfaces are convenient, comfortable and pleasant, as much so as the building itself. Similar qualities of environment can be had in horizontal transportation.”

“Let us assume you live in suburbia, 25 miles from the centre of the town. You own two cars. Five minutes in one direction is the entrance to the freeway. Five minutes in another direction is the station for the suburban rapid transit. The freeway is belted around the town centre, requiring you to use the streets to reach the parking garage a block from your office building. The suburban rapid transit station is 12 minutes’ walk from your office building but connects directly with the CBD distributor which has a station in your parking garage. Let us compare the trip:

By Automobile

-Drive to freeway
-5 minutes
-25 miles on freeway
-15 miles at 60 mph 15
-6 miles at 45 mph
-4 miles at 15 mph 16 (on good morning - no bad weather -no accidents or breakdowns -no Christmas season rush, ect.)
-0.5 miles downtown at 9 mph 3.5
-Parking, elevator trip and walk to office building 3.5

Total Travel Time: 51 minutes

By auto and mass transit:

-Drive to station 5 minutes
-Park and walk to platform 1
-Average wait time (5 minute headway) 2.5
-25 miles on train at average speed of 50 mph 30
(all weather - all seasons)
-Transfer to distributor 1.5
(1 minute headway and change level)
-Distributor trip time at average 3
-Speed of 12 mph
-Change level and walk to office building

Total Travel Time: 45 minutes

If you use the building described above your drive-in trip requires the following interface changes and walking:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to parking garage elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off of escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change on to elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 5 walks and 8 interface changes

If you take the transit:

-Walk to garage
-Change into car
-Change out of car
-Walk to train platform
-Change into train
-Change out of train
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to distributor system
-Change into distributor
-Change out of distributor
-Walk to escalator
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to office building
-Change on to escalator
-Change off escalator
-Walk to elevator
-Change into elevator
-Change out of elevator
-Walk to office

Total 8 walks and 14 interface changes

The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them

.

-Several things must be done. Transit service must be improved to eliminate waiting times for all practical purposes at all hours.

-Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.

The interface between two systems is a meter of performance to the passenger. And its performance depends on the expertness of the plan and its execution as well as the performance of the two systems which share it.

Other pages:

“The car as an extension of the foot instead of the car as a satellite part of the home: or the tendency for appliances to impose their presence as against the psychological need for ‘cosy’ or ‘friendly’ objects” (127).

(A Note here: that I’ve seen online in development of objects, and that is the tendency for objects in the lower class to be not be benign companions, and those for creative culturals to be designed to be companions; to be benign. The same is with vehicles. As a vehicle ages, it becomes less of a friend to it’s driver, and more of a liability. It needs to be replaced, because it turns against its owner.

In this way, technology is not man’s best friend, but man’s worst double-edged pet. It is a beautiful toy one minute, and next year is a shameful disgrace that no longer works. How easily this happens to the machine and the product! How more and more quickly these things turn on us!

We could make maps of ‘the psychology of space’ onto a shaped, gridded blob:

-”Social Zone”
-”Interchange Zone”
-”Quiet Zone”
-”Bed Capsule”

“A whole entirety of architectural plans that include electric vehicle tracks and future projections for robot implementation within the household. Text in overlays on the grid-work and planning of the new buildings” (131).

“Car expands to become place”, “floor can be re-formed instantly”, “private enclosures by now are also tunable” (1988).

Likelihoods….1990+ “Enclosures free-up”, “environment can be simulated - seen but not really there”, “demarcation between one persons domain and another becomes more pliable”.

So I feel like modular living is a very interesting concept to imagine.

Page 133 hosts an essay called ‘Drive-In Housing’, “A Proposition by David Greene and Michael Webb. In the first paragraph, the house is described in such a way, that “it can also be a mobile room which can plug itself into a drive-in bank and become extra floor area of that bank” (133).

This is back in 1968, before the widespread adoption of the Internet, of course, but that was my immediate thought when I read the above sentence. just this morning I accessed my bank account from the comfort of my room. The interface I used was the computer, and my transaction went as such:

Digitally:

-Walk to desk
-Remove chair
-Sit down
-Pull out laptop from drawer
-Turn on laptop
-Wait for laptop to load
-Click on ‘firefox’ internet client
-Enter username and password for college student network
-Enter bank address online
-Type in username and password for banking website
-Check account balances
-Click on transfer balances
-Enter in the account to transfer money from
-Enter the amount
-Transfer the amount
-Confirmation screen
-Log out of the website
-Close internet browser window
-Close laptop
-Remove self from chair

Non-digitally:

-Walk to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk one block to bank
-Open bank door
-Wait in line for teller
-Greet teller
-Slide bank card to verify identity
-Ask teller to transfer money
-Wait
-Take receipt
-Walk one block to bus stop
-Enter bus
-Leave bus
-Walk back to dorm

In the first one, my computer did act as a modular interface that allowed my location to meld with the bank’s location. The act of drive-in housing that Greene and Webb talk about has been achieved by the Internet, and whose actual mechanical rumblings probably would look very similar to a mechanized real-life version of drive-in housing, were they to be mapped out.

Greene and Webb then go on to point out two intrinsic parts of architectural space. The inner space would be that of the “service unit, where space is at a premium, stuffed to the lid with the mechanics of the kitchen, the chancel, office or cinema serving Hamburgers, God, money or films to a lavishly planned and styled up consumer space; a restaurant, name, banking hall or auditorium. But this consumer space is, of course, made up of a series of mobile human containers - cars” (Elek, 133).

“In a drive-in home, the volume at any moment is directly proportional to the number of people in it; when the family is away at the seaside the house consists only of folded-up storage units; during a party as many as 30 mobile containers might gather around a unit to form a big space.”

Now, coming from the side of the intellectual, this is a very innovative and surprising view. But coming from the side of the common man, this is a very Arkansas model - the mobile home and mobile lifestyle. I am not suggesting that the entire state functions in this way, but I was told by a friend who lived there for a while that the lowest strata of Arkansas residents would move their mobile homes around in this way; not for parties, but for marriage. The trailer of the son or daughter’s partner would join the housing collective and form one big unit.

Besides, this model is used in order to gain entertainment from the Internet or the television. The resident does not have to move at all, and the hidden 4th dimensional magic does the shifting. Life could get confusing with all of that Tetris, like having to wait in line for the bank. If you brought part of your house with you, and all of the mobile bank ports were already filled, you’d block the street with your vehicle. If not, you’d wait in the mobile unit parking lot and take up space, just like regular cars do, but if your living space was lavish you’d probably take up more space than a car would.

And, if you were away at the seaside, what would prevent some lunatic from running away with your folded up house? Could you fold up your house and put it inside the rest of your house?

What if you had a dinner party and one of your guests had a terribly messy house, or a terrible cat that snuck into your section One could write a tragically amusing story about a mobile dinner party gone wrong, especially if one of the guests decided too long, like a month, and the host house had no way of detaching them. An if a mother-in-law showed up for a weekend, not only she would arrive, but her house too! Although if you met someone at a bar you wouldn’t have to invite them over to your place, because they’d already be there.

Of course the article is somewhat of a joke, because the authors go on to dissect their opening paragraph and go on to things or a more wild character.

Architecture is fun. This was my experiment with it.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

Event Summary:

What is the state of the Geoweb? One of the major problems is that relevant informaton is locked away from being indexed by search engines. We call this dark content because it is unlit and unsearchable.

How much dark content it out there?

~800 Terabytes of data is currently unsearchable online.

~91,000 Terabytes is inaccessible. It’s non-searched, non-indexed digital content.

What does that mean? It means that less than a percent of the digital knowledge we’ve collected and stored online is not availabile for our use.

That means there’s no indexing, no searching, and no synergistic use of that content because it’s not being indexed.

This makes it an enormous productivity sink to everyone involved to access, verify and collect data from the limited sources that are available. Only relatively ill-equipped, uninformed decisions can be made.

What can we do?

Things need to be indexed.

Say we want to buy a house, but we want to make sure we are purchasing a house in a safe area. You can look at a map that has earthquake zones, and one with tsunami zone, and you can even overlay all these maps to see intersections of data. Those are information layers.

But imagine doing that for every decision you make. Having layer maps for everything you do, and ever choice you make.
Now, this probably doesn’t matter as much if you’re making a decision about going to Starbucks, but when you’re deciding where to put a water purification plant, or a park or recreation system, it becomes very important.

How do we do this?

The good thing is that ever since Google Earth launched, geography has become cool.
But it’s one thing to use the data, and another to contribute to it to make it more rich and usable.

The other problem is that most of these data sets are not text based. They require a series of information unwrapping protocols to dissect them into usable content.

You need the tools to be able to do this. You can find a file, but then you must also be able to get into it.

There are also decision processes surrounding that data. Each file is different, that’s why a lot of it stays in the dark. The processing systems become as important as the data when data is so seperate and stuck in silos.

There is no metadata standard/standards that would at least allow for cross indexing of different data and content. This is essential for the sharing of processing of data.

Existing metadata standards are cumbersome and there is limited motivation to use/decipher them.
There’s also the scalability of data sets. Large data sets are difficult to break down into usable chunks.

The openness of data is based on different cultures. Government data has a different culture around it than Myspace. One company has the right to create something, and it is very expensive to get access to it.

All data should be sharable — so that people can build upon each other’s work.

Resources:

You can find out more about WhereCamp Portland here.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.

The date’s been set. Due to scheduling conflicts (including the event being really close to Thanksgiving) CyborgCamp Portland will be held on December 6th, 2008, at Portland’s CubeSpace, which is at 622 SE Grand Ave Portland, Oregon 97214

You can RSVP for CyborgCamp on Upcoming if you’d like to attend, but note that the formal registration will begin in a few weeks. If you follow @cyborgcamp or @caseorganic on Twitter, you’ll know when you can officially register for the event. If you don’t use Twitter, you can E-mail caseorganic at gmail.com and I’ll personally let you know when official registration is open. There will also be a link from the Upcoming page, so check back in a few weeks.

CyborgCamp is a conversation about the future of technology, and how humans fit in.

Want to help out? You can do it in 4 different ways!

1. Sponsor. E-mail Nate Angell at ixmati at gmail.com or Twitter @xolotl. See the sponsors page.
2. Blog, Tweet, write and broadcast the event (before, during and after.) See the Marketing Page Email Amber Case at caseorganic at gmail.com or Twitter @caseorganic
   

3. Volunteer before, during and after the event. Email Bram Pitoyo at brampitoyo at gmail.com or Twitter @brampitoyo We need 3 more volunteers for the morning set-up (7 Am) and take down (6-7Pm).

4. Attend. RSVP on Upcoming.org (Note that RSVP does not guarantee you a space if you’re not paid for register).

What to Expect at the Conference:

One room will be devoted to keynote sessions on various aspects of the cyborg (technological, health, spiritual, communication, humanity, etc.), and the other three rooms of the conference will be unconferences, done BarCamp-style

Who should come?

This is an educational mindsharing and networking event that encourages high-level interdisciplinary interaction.

Classrooms, individuals and businesses are encouraged to attend the event remotely. It will be livestreamed through multiple channels and will be archived and tagged for future viewing. Details on remote conference access will be available a week before the conference begins.

Tags

Flickr Tag: cyborgcamp

Twitter: @cyborgcamp or #cyborgcamp

All other social media: cyborgcamp

See you there!