People are searching for things all the time on the web. If you’re a blogger looking to write good content, it is a good idea to get out there on the net to find what people are searching for. There are a few tools for doing this, but I wanted to isolate one of them and play with it for a minute.

@marknunney posted a link on Twitter about a “new tool from Wordtracker for content ideas”, so I clicked over to the site and read the following:

“People often type complete questions into search engines: if you find these questions and answer them, you could get some great search traffic”.

Below it was a box for entering in a word, so I tried a few words out. The results were amusing enough for me to want to share them. Further analysis follows.

Results for Life

I found the results for the word ‘life’ to be what one might expect. Right now, people are wondering about life insurance. However, the ‘color of life in ancient egypt’ is something that is phrased in such as strange way that it could warrant further research — especially since it was looked up 156 times. At #6, ‘what is the meaning of life’ is asked. I guess life insurance and ‘how time of my life was chosen for american idol’ were more important.

My personal favorite is #13 — ‘how to summon a real life dragon’. I bet if someone were to write a post on that, they’d get lots of hits. Maybe lots of Diggs too. I’m not sure how I’d go about researching that one. It’s probably better than trying to write a post on #8 — ‘how to ruin someone’s life’.

Results for E-mail

How does E-mail work? Apparently people are asking this question. But there is an important trend happening elsewhere in these question results. That would be the address of one (or rather two) ‘cole sprouse’. They happen to be identical twins, and are, according to the Cole Sprouse Wikipedia article, “known for their roles in the film Big Daddy…and for portraying the title characters on Disney Channel sitcoms”. Good luck finding their E-mail address, as well as the address of Prince Harry, Zac Efron and Jamie Spears.

But you can write about how to E-mail pictures, or #9’s ‘who invented E-mail’. That one actually seems particulary interesting. The narrative histories of everyday things are always a joy to read about.

Results for Business

‘How to write a business plan?’ Can’t one just download a template from Microsoft Word or something? That question is really a broad one. It depends on what kind of business one wishes to start. #3’s ‘how to start a cell phone business’ is pretty good. #10’s ‘what is the best business opportunity’ is a really intense question that cannot totally be answered. #11’s ‘how to start a web design business’ is actually very answerable by a variety of sources such as Design Float and Smashing Magazine.

#8’s ‘how to start a business with no money’ is interesting. I think it’s never been easier — and more difficult. It’s probably time that’s the big issue. Taking a lot of time really works. A cell phone business might manifest as an online reseller of cell phone accessories.

Results for Google

I was confused by these search results. I didn’t think they’d be this broad, or this ill-informed. Are Google founders Larry and Sergey that obscure? I wonder what sources Wordtracker is using for its search queries.

It might also be interesting to create a post on the founders of Google just to see what happened to it. I’m sure Wikipedia and Google have this question answered already.

Results for Yahoo

I queried Yahoo! just to see what would happen. Very similar to Google’s results, except there was a question of what Yahoo stood for. I’m actually wondering that myself right now (goes off to find the answer).

The answer as to what Yahoo! stands for comes from About.com’s ‘Internet for Beginners’. The answer is that “Yahoo! (spelled with an exclamation mark) is short for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Apparently, “The original name: “David’s and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, was appropriate, but not exactly catchy“. You can read the rest of Paul Gil’s Yahoo! article for the whole story.

Results for Money

The search results for money really surprised me. I had no idea that so many people wanted to know about ‘what presidents are on money’. I wonder what demographic asks this question the most. Is it youth? Is it due to a bet? Is it a homework assignment? Perhaps it is to clarify the use of slang words.

#2 and #3’s ‘how much money does it cost to open a bar’, and ‘how can kids make money’ are interesting. I’m wondering if more kids than parents searched for that phrase and if there a way to tell. As for #2, a lot of people seem to dream of owning and running their own bars.

I thought that #7’s ‘how to make money’ would be higher up on the results than that, but apparently the presidents on money trumps that. It’s also a much easier niche to write for than the seedy ‘how to make money’ post. #8 and #9’s ‘millionaires who give money to help’, and ‘millionaires who give free money’ make a lot of sense. Those questions make me wonder how many millionaires out there actually give money out to strangers who ask for it over the Internet. Generally, processes and charities are involved. Darn! Perhaps Google or a blogger will write about another way?

Results for Puppy

Puppies. They’re somewhat irresistible. So irresistible that a lot of people question just how large they’re going to get, apparently. It would be useful to make a site that gave information on how large any breed of puppy was going to grow. It would be complete with a puppy weight calculator, to answer question #3 as well. One would simply have to enter in the breed and the age of the puppy and the Internet robots would do the rest. Hooray for calculators.

I wonder how many new pet owners typed in #7 after watching their new puppy pee on their freshly installed carpet? Is there any way to tell? Perhaps they should’ve just stuck to drawing a puppy instead of owning one, like those who searched for #4’s ‘how to draw a puppy’.

Results for Read

This was wild. I did not expect to get results on horoscopes, tarot cards or reading palms. I’m not sure what I expected originally, but it wasn’t this. I thought people liked books more than daily horoscopes. My college experience has given me some explaination for these results. Everyone in my dorm was obsessed with reading their horoscopes to each other. Some of them even printed out astrological charts. I didn’t participate.

But result #6 makes a lot of sense in this respect. Aside from horoscopes, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one of those books that’s assigned to the majority of school districts across the United States. I’m assuming a lot of kids didn’t want to purchase the book, lent it to someone else, forgot it at home or at school, or were looking for a quick way to read a chapter before an annoying quiz after lunch or homeroom period.

Results for RSS

What *is* RSS? Oh man. It is probably the greatest thing since the last iteration of really cool stuff that people enjoyed. It allows the quick and easy access of content without having to browse for it. I recommend watching RSS in Plain English instead of searching for RSS in Google. It’s an extremely short video by the Common Craft show. Totally sweetopian.

Hmm…#13’s ‘how do i find my twitter rss fed url’ is curious. Not only is fed spelled incorrectly, it is searched for 7 times. I’m sure there’s a great tutorial on this out there somewhere. …Or is there? I suppose that’ for random people to find out.

Results for SEO

These were not surprising. ‘What does seo stand for?’ Search engine optimization, of course. How does one ‘become a certified seo?’ Well gee whiz, that’s a hard one. Probably from showing it on your own site, and the sites of your clients. And by not selling links from bad sites. Also, by educating people thoughly about your techniques.

‘How to set up seo?’ Go through a standard checklist on your website, checking for alt tags, title tags, a sitemap, ect. I like the free Website Grader from HubSpot for a really quick website check and grade.

Results for Six

I wondered about numbers next, so I checked out an the number six. Purely arbitrary (by arbichance? arbitration?). I was amused to find such a long phrase at the top of the question results. ‘The six basic fears and how to eliminate them’. That is totally a book by Sharry Harris. #2’s ‘what are the six terms of geography’ totally sounds like a query taken directly from a homework assignment.

#3’s ‘what are the six parts in a business letter’ has reminded me to re-examine my business letters for the correct number of parts. Perhaps I can do that while developing a six pack while using Six Sigma techniques.

Results for Twitter

‘What is Twitter?’ Ahh…if only there were an easy way to explain that. ‘How to use twitter’ is even more complicated. See, it is the emptiness of a vessel that gives it use-value, and Twitter is an empty vessel. The question of ‘What are you doing’ is never fully answered. Thus, how to use Twitter is like telling someone how to use a vase. The emptiness gives it many uses, whereas a tutorial can only give a finite amount of use-cases.

Finding the Twitter RSS feed URL is another matter. Simply scroll down to the bottom left corner of your Twitter page and click on RSS. Or you can right click to ‘copy the address’ to place it elsewhere with ease.

Results for Unicorn

So Unicorns are very important to the state of the world. They give us a fantastic antithesis with which to view things. I assumed that I would get different results because of this mindset, but I did not. The number one search for unicorn relates to finding free Unicorn pictures to color. That is a total let-down.

I guess people are interested in drawing Unicorns, though. Perhaps they’ll make some awesome viral Unicorn videos when they get older. Like Charlie the Unicorn.

Final Verdict

WordTracker’s new tool is pretty fun, but I’m not sure how terribly useful it really is. I think you’re the judge for that.

————-

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

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.

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 10 [29:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (374)

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Reid Beels and Chris Pitzer, wherein we talked about abandonware, search engines with unique algorithms, Cyber Surfari-adorned T-shirt, getting free meals for reading books, and a potential CyborgCamp session composed of scientifically extrapolating claims in science fiction stories of the past to predict the future.

And if you listen to the end of the podcast, Reid’s and Chris’ Twitter username is @reidab and @chrispitzer, respectively.

Note: Dates and venues are pretty much set for CyborgCamp!

You can now:

• RSVP for CyborgCamp Portland
• RSVP CyborgCamp Vancouver

I never saw it coming

CyborgCamp occured at around 10Am from a shoutout by Kris Krug and Dave Olson of RainCityStudios. I met them both at Gnomedex and we got along really well.

The only problem was that they both lived in Vancouver B.C., and I live in Portland, Oregon. Normally, it is difficult for me to travel unless there is a conference. So I told them that.

To which Dave replied “just have a Cyborg Camp!”.

And CyborgCamp was born.

Once Kris Krug retweeted the news, 30 or so people immediately jumped into high gear. Nate Angell built a Wiki with all sorts of capabilities, and more people got on board to discuss all aspects of Cyborgs.

Meanwhile, the Twitterverse was coming up with all sorts of speaker and venue suggestions, and by 6Pm that night, the first planning meeting for CyborgCamp 2008 occured as an offshoot of an Android Developers meeting at the Lucky Lab Pub SE.

…Whew.

That was only two days ago. Now we have a venue, a sponsor, and some potential speakers. Also a @cyborgcamp Twitter account, which Bram Pitoyo has been handling amazingly, as well as a preliminary poster design.

Now what?

If you think this sounds like something you might be interested in, Sign up —> CyborgCamp2008 for Wiki access. Or follow the @cyborgcamp Twitter account for updates, general inquiries, speaker suggestions and sponsor ideas. Or you can directly E-mail caseorganic if you don’t use Wikis or Twitter.

What is a cyborg?

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine. Join in our pre-conference discussion about what is a cyborg?

What is CyborgCamp?

An unconference dedicated to exploring cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

Who should come to CyborgCamp?

Cyborgs, hybrids, androids, robots, and the people who love them!

When is CyborgCamp?

Nov. 21-22 2008

Proposed Topics

• Space and Time Compression
• Cybernetic Organisms - The emergence of technological systems, control and feedback in biological life
• Online Presence and Boundary Extensions
• What is Cybernetics?
• The Future of Mobile Technology
• Artifical Intelligence
• Technology and Culture
• A Brief History of Cybernetics
• Cyborgs Around & Within - How humankind takes for granted our lives as, and among Cyborgs
• Top 10 Modifications you can make to be a better Cyborg
• Cybernetics and Morality
• Wetware Hacking
• Pimp My Avatar

Hyperorganization

This should be an interesting event. It needs a lot of film and audio coverage, as well as live casting and projection screens. As many channels as possible so we can exist in as many places at one time. Our minds can supply the rest.

You can follow along at CyborgCamp.org or on Twitter by following @cyborgcamp.

It’s been a big week in Portland Tech, and it’s still going strong tonight with the Demolicious/Portland Web Innovators event at Cubespace. What is Cubespace? Rental office space for start-ups, consultants, and freelancers. What is Demolicious? 5 project presentations, 10 minutes per project. It basically means that a bunch of innovative people in the room, watching, sharing, and presenting prodigious pre-beta/beta/live web projects. Good stuff. Gone is the era of stale doughnuts and flatlined agendas. This stuff is groundbreaking, interactive and sweetopian.

There’s also beer here, provided by MyStrands, a social/community/aggregator startup based on music sharing (currently in Beta edition, but I can send you an invite).

There’s probably about 50 people here. A lot of faces from last night’s Gary Vanerchuck event at Portland’s ad agency Weiden+Kennedy, and W+K’s Monday Lunch 2.0 Event.

If you’re curious about what’s going on in the Portland Tech scene, and want to join in on some of these events, check out the next events at Yahoo’s Upcoming! website. (The next Lunch 2.0 Event is on July 16th at Souk!)

Presentation Map:

* Kevin Chen, Metroseeq
* Don Park, Do-it-yourself Friendfeed
* Matt King, Interface Content Management Framework
* Mounir Shita, GoLife Mobile
* Lev Tsypin, Green Renter

The first presenter is Kevin Chen of Metroseeq

“Metroseeq is a location-based search engine that aggregates offline deals,” says Chen.

The ability for users to be able to find information from both offline and online sources effectively is the difference between Citysearch and Yelp.

But there’s more - the website also digitizes coupons. Chen tries to demonstrate this with a manila envelope full of paper coupons, but accidentally drops them all over the floor. It’s great, because shows his point even more. Then Chen navigates to the screen, where coupons for each listed business have coupons available for online users. It’s very nice.

Number two: Don Park, with Do-it-yourself Friendfeed

He’s working on solving the problem that everyone faces when they join social networks and have to re-enter all of their social connections. “When you’re joining a new social network,” he says, “you want to bring your friends with you.” Everyone’s data is locked up in different silos. There’s the Twitter silo, and the FriendFeed silo, and the Digg silo.

The key is to drain the silos and bring the dis-separate user data into one place. Use an RSS reader to to it to conveniently track it, and you’ve got your own personal mini-PR system at your fingertips. Brilliant.

Park’s XFN Spider project utilizes the attributes attached to a user’s friends on Twitter, Digg and Wordpress to map out other connections and links associated with those users. The spider can show the blog, Facebook profile, news sources and other pointers that contain the user’s profile/identity attributes, and consolidate them in one resource list.

“Your friendview in Twitter only allows 50 ids to display at one time,” says Park.  “A spider can index all of those ids…far past the 50 it allows in its display.” Attach an RSS reader to this process, and you’ll be able to read every RSS feed that your friends are reading.

The spill-over of extensive blogroll links on Wordpress and other Blogging sites can be put to good use by using attributes to track data.

He then uses Firebug to “inspect” one of his friends in Twitter. The whole sequence of links becomes a fractal. If someone The RSS does the updating. “You don’t have to depend on any other location to do the updating.” The speed at which you gain information is And it can go infinite levels deep. That’s a lot of Web 2.0 fractals. The downside? It’s kind of slow. But what is slowness compared to a social media site that’s often fail whaled?

Try it out at: http://donpark.org/spider/

Presenter numero tres: An Interface Content Management Framework, presented by Matt King

“I’m going to show you a content management system that builds content management systems.” he says. He then states that he’s going to build a fan site about the A-Team, because it rocks, and that he’s going to build the website in the next 10 minutes. He then brings up barebones interface. “Just to show you that I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve…” he points to the projection screen, “there’s no pages here”.

So he starts by adding a page. The audience watches.  Click. Click. This page is done.  “Lets hit save,” he says, “then we’ll add a page about the show, I guess.” He points out that you don’t have to assign a slug or a template. The site will do it for you.

The he does a pages about the A Team’s Van, because “the van warrants a page in and of itself, because it’s so cool.” Users can use templates to pull content in from the CMS.

The structure of the pages is easily modified, with the database automatically updating the url structure. Pages can also be infinitely nested.

King begins to add some dynamic content for the episodes and the characters. He does it this by adding models. “You can add as many as you want,” he states, explaining that “Models are the dynamic content of your site.”

There’s more. You can add as many fields to your content types as you like. You can upload images if you want.  Add a location and the database will automatically give you an address and will geocode it. (this system reminds me of an ultra-fast, ultra light version of Drupal).

Once the page structure has been created and set, one can instantly start adding content to it. Models can all be associated with each other. This part is kinda meta-style.

Season:

Associations: “has many”

Volia.

Like some sort of computer chef, King previews the site. “And then we’ll go to the page here,” he says, and “out pops a really nice page.” Watching King make a website is like watching a chef make something, put it in the oven, pause the camera, and take it out again, completely finished. Except there’s no baking time.

“Okay, I cheated. I did the templates beforehand”. The audience laughs.

“Go to seasons,” he says, ” and Pick a season. We’ll actually get to see what episodes are associated with it.”

Lastly, when you add content it instantly gets an API. King says that they used this for a few flash-based websites. The websites didn’t even need to use html, “just our API”. Nice.

Q+A:

“Is this internal only?”

“We’re trying to make this a base camp-type setup for it, so that you can sign up and get an instance of this development”.

“As long as we can get a website setup for it”, says King’s partner.

Matt King’s website is here, in case you feel like checking it out. He’s done a variety of other tech experiments. Perhaps you can use Don Park’s spider to find them all.

Four: Mounir Shita, from GoLife Mobile

He’s presenting a mobile application platform for mobile applications. He shows a Traffic Camera Widget.

He accesses the platform on a sort of mobile device emulator. Then he swaps out the data source object without changing the code. “You can tie these UI components to different devices,” he says, “like switching one component traffic feed (Oregon) to another (Arizona).”

Simplified overview of the platform:

A widget contains UI components. UI components are attached to sources.

Platform layercake:

XML (standard Internet), SMS Vado (cell phone), HTML (iphone)

(Gateway)

(Virtual Widget Layer)

Action Layer (Show lists) (Show traffic information) (View article) (Write article)

(Personalization layer) (Content enhancement layer)

(Data Access Layer).

Simple use case: Person x wishes to find closest Starbucks. But a mobile device should also figure out where friends are. Mobile device will go and figure out where friends are and recommend a location on the basis of nearness. The device will then tell you where location is, how to get there, inform your friends of your trajectory, and smoothly handle any details, should they arrive.

A mobile device should also show you the menu options, deals, and drink selection of the location as well.  Dynamically. You shouldn’t be telling every single application what you like and what you don’t like. “it’s very very semantic”, he points out, “you’re plugging in very very small semantic codes that plug and play together”. On the whole, these semantic codes help mobile nomads get together on the fly.

It’s as semantic as a roving a meeting maker that negotiates meetups across dynamic time and space, as if the entire geography were a mobile, roaming office.

The website meta tag states that “GoLife Mobile is erasing the barriers between the physical and electronic worlds. We let your mobile device get to know you, so it can…” Well…you know. Here’s the website, if you’re intrigued.

Finally: Green Renter, presented by Lev Tsypin

Green Renter is a database of Green buildings available in the Portland area. Tsypin states that this database is location-agnostic. It has data values for the Portland area because it was birthed here, but should expand to encapsulate every real estate area.

There’s a featured building, and a cetegory for renters and owners. A real estate site that satisfies a eco-niche. A nice feature of the site is that it provides a list of features like:

The Building’s surroundings…

Community resources (i.e. libraries nearby)

Services (i.e. grocery stores nearby)

Public transit nearby

Car share vehicle nearby

Bike lanes/paths nearby

Park/open space/wildlife areas nearby

The same type of list is available for building materials, like non-toxic concrete mix, and bike racks.

All of these categories and feature layers aggregate together to form the context of a ‘Green Score’, a scoring system similar to Google’s Quality Score or Page Rank. Over time, this will hopefully spur the community transparency and ethics which will lead to more green buildings.

Something Green Renter wants to include in the future is a glossary for their green categorization system. Including this glossary allow the side an educational/resource component for those who with to learn about how to find/develop increasingly sustainable and environmentally friendly buildings. It’s like the etiquette of a website that’s been correctly structured according to W3C standards or SEO code.

Visitors can utilize an aggregate map of all buildings in a given area and filter out which buildings have vacancies or not, or which buildings have LEED certifications for green building.

The site also has a blog that links to green events that are happening around town. In this way, Green Renter can bolster the education and awareness of its community of readers, but can also connect those readers to other individuals who are also interested in living in sustainable architectures.

The add building feature allows users to  add commercial or residential property to the site, with property details, contact info, pictures, and renting or leasing information. It’s like a social network for the buildings themselves. Each building with its own avatar and characteristics. Pretty nifty.

The founders also own greenowner.com and are looking into develop that, but feel it is more important to really nail down a niche before going on to develop other things.

When addressing the massive market share that Craigslist holds over the rental/leasing market, Tsypin says that “if you post your green building on Craigslist, you can provide a link back to the site so that your viewers can see all of the green features and details of the building.” In this way, Criagslist and Green Renter can form a symbiotic relationship with one another. A Craisglist listing for a Green Building can function as a starting point into a extended database full of information about the given property, hosted by Green Renter.

And yes, the site supports OpenID.

GreenRenter is alive and well at http://greenrenter.com.

In Essence…

There is, of course, much more to say. I’ll leave you to analyize the nitty gritty stuff and add details. I left out a lot of important things, but it is late and there are only 110 hours in my workweek to get things done.

As always, I am blown away by the things that are happening in the Portland Web Community. Something amazing is happening in Portland. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone I meet is always working on something so interesting, and has an positive and innovative mindset on their shoulders. I’m eager to see what’s next.

Special thanks to Portland Web Innovators, Cubespace, and all those who presented. Impressive awesomeness. Bram Pitoyo inspired me to do this write up, but this pales in comparison to his precise assemblages of brilliant journalistic data.

Thanks for reading, and please excuse any inaccuracies incurred based on my Strands-sponsored state.

If you’re on Twitter, I’m @caseorganic. I’d love to follow and meet more of you.

If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.

One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.

The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.

This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.

Categorizing Data:

Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.

The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.

The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.

With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.

“You want to really pay attention to the website architecture because it can really have an effect on how your website is organized.”
A streamlined website architecture helps search engines determine the relevance of each page when they are ranking things.
Your website must be capable of being read by both humans and machines. Your role as a search engine optimizer is to make search engines think less, users think less.

Tonight, my friends Heather and Max and I went to the WikiWednesday Open House event at Portland’s AboutUs.org. We met Wiki Inventor Ward Cunningham.

The event consisted of a networking session followed by a conference in critical thinking led by Ward. We discussed the current manifestation of Wikipedia, the future of the Wiki, and it’s limitations. The notes I took there will form the basis of a new series of posts and a few papers.

After the conference, Ward talked about AOL, the endless September of the Internet. Before the net was open to the masses, college students used to have to deal with the new waves of college students that were just learning to use the Internet every September. After a month or so, the Freshmen would learn how to use the Internet correctly and everyone would continue to improve the system as a whole.

Then AOL arrived on the scene. The September never ended. Not everyone ever figured out how to use the web like the generations of college students before them. Thus, AOL became termed as the “endless September”.

Collective Intellect is a Boulder based company that uses the collective ideas of bloggers to predict the rise and fall of stock values. I watched Don Springer, President & CEO of Collective Intellect, present at the 2006 DOW Jones Emerging Ventures Forum 2006.

How does one find the spring from which a river of ideas flows? Each profession, each category of interest has its own spring, or head influence. In fashion, the top design houses determine the fashions that trickle down to lower level designers. Though the Internet allows rapid communication to occur, the spread of ideas still takes time. In computer terms this is called ‘lag’.

When the CEO presented this company to venture capitalists, he described the company structure as follows:
This company uses an algorithm to determine the highest level idea-maker or blog of highest social influence. The algorithm is applied to blogs within an interest category, and each blog is assigned points based on blog visit stats, number of comments, and certain category-specific keywords. Blogs are also analyzed for lags in category-specific keywords from site to site, so that blogs who use category-specific keywords sooner than other blogs can be assessed.

Once the points are accrued, it is easy to see which blogs have access to relevant information more quickly than others. These blogs have the power to change ideas of other ‘downstream’ blogs, and have the least lag time in accessing and reporting on relevant ideas. Financial Companies pay for access to ranked blogger data.

Consider the following:

• A simple design story. One of CollectiveIntellect’s clients designs tupperware and wants to know how to design a next generation tupperware product that is superior to its competitors.
• It can purchase top blog information tracking from CollectiveIntellect in order to see the top tupperware ergonomic problems that have occurred in the past with other tupperware products? This tacit knowledge can then be used to design a product that has a relatively sufficient chance of success — one that will satisfy investors.
• Similarly, the tupperware company can check up on its design success by puchasing blogger information collected by CI about the product, post-release. Investors in the tupperware company can purchase the same information from CI to determine whether the tupperware company’s stock will go up or down.