Being from Colorado, I like to go skiing in the mountains at least a couple of times a year with the family. It feels like a responsibility and justification for living in a climate that can be cold for many months out of the year. It’s strange how, at the same time, I always notice that the skis and associated hardware have changed slightly. You know, the color and design of the skis or maybe the way the boots and bindings work. I’m usually intrigued enough to see if the change could improve my ability to ski or to enjoy the experience.

Skiing in Colorado typically starts at about the same time as Webmaster World’s annual conference in Las Vegas, which kicked off on November 11th at the convention center and ended with the traditional pubcon gathering at the Hofbrauhaus 4 days later. I always enjoy catching up with friends and getting the latest information on the search engines and web development trends. If you have a web site and you want to promote it, this is the one conference no one should miss.

This year I noticed that every session had rows of tables for participants to place their laptops on, unlike past years, when we only had chairs and took session notes manually. I observed people multi-tasking from the rear of the conference rooms. IMs, eMails and tweets were flying back and forth on a variety of devices. I even noticed someone answering customer support messages from their web site using Live Person right in the middle of a session.

It made me wonder if I was missing something. I remembered my old skis and how they had lasted for so many years. Could there be similarities with web development? It seems like a bizarre correlation, but underlying web technologies are moving ahead at a relatively slow pace. We’re just bombarded with a lot of extraneous items that make it feel like things are moving faster than they truly are. The number of options and tasks that we have to monitor has surely increased, but underlying changes in technology happen slowly.

I guess what I’m trying to do is draw a correlation from my latest ski adventure to my latest web conference; after all, it is that time of year and I recently purchased a new pair of parabolic shape skis. Besides the significant difference in my ability to carve up the mountain slopes, I noticed that nearly everyone is now using the relatively new technology.

So what do parabolic skis have to do with this years Webmaster World conference sessions? During the widget (aka gadget) session, one of the presenters showed a slide that overlayed web usage and web traffic to corporate sites and social networks. It showed how valuable it can be to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and provide your content on these networks (and devices) in the future.

It seems like only a few years ago that we were introduced to web widgets, even though they have been around for more than a decade. I believe that is about the same time that Elan introduced parabolic skis. After attending the gadget session at Webmaster World this year we built and served-up several custom gadgets. Somehow, it reminded me of carving up the back bowl at Copper on my new skis…piece of cake!

One effect of rich media becoming more conventional on the web is increased bandwidth usage. In many cases, the cause comes from the size associated to video files being delivered directly from your web site. We’ve seen bandwidth rise hundreds of times for some of our client’s web sites over the last several years.

The good news is that customers enjoy the rich media experience. The bad news is that it can cost thousands of dollars in overage charges from ISPs. In some cases, it may make sense to use YouTube to offset overage expenses by letting Google do the “heavy lifting” of streaming video content. Here is a simple example:

Embedding YouTube videos on your web page can really save a lot of money on any bandwidth overage charges. Everyone knows digital video files can be enormous and utilizing Google’s network for delivery can be very advantageous since it is fast and it is free. The downside is that YouTube controls the viewer application window and can provide additional videos and advertising that may not align with the messaging of your video.

One inherent problem with most blog applications is the duplicate content issues associated with categorizing and displaying a single blog post in several different ways. Search engines have always tried to eliminate links pointing to the same content from their indices. Most blogging software allows you to display content by author, archival date and category, but informing the search engines that the listings are actually the same has always been a problem.

Another dynamic with blogging and SEO is that the individuals that typically write the posts are usually unfamiliar with the underlying principles of SEO and don’t really pay a lot of attention to things like: page title nomenclature or creating unique metadata for descriptions and keywords. The end result can be missed opportunities for web site traffic from organic search because of low page rank for your blog postings and links in the search engine result pages (SERP).

Along comes “All in One SEO Pack” from uberdose. This WordPress SEO plugin is a must-have for anyone using WordPress. It is designed to give you several basic SEO best practices as soon as you install and activate it. Our favorite feature is the automatic creation of noindex tags for the duplicate content on your web site blog. The installation is moderately painless, however, uberdose does seem to update the software more than most WordPress plugin developers, so it can be challenging to keep a consistent version for all your customers if you maintain a lot of blogs on multiple servers.

Recently, we were asked to look into the best ways of displaying mathematical symbols and formulas in a WordPress blog posting. The author was having trouble generating all the necessary elements for their post using the available functionality in WordPress so they ask us to look into the options and provided us with an article formatted as a Microsoft Word document.

At first, we tried to use the Microsoft Word document. We started with a simple cut and paste from Word to WordPress. This has always been unpredictable and this time around was certainly no exception. Converting the file to a standard text file worked better, but we lost the special characters and formatting in the process.

Next, we tried saving the Word file as HTML, but then we were presented with the challenge of sifting through an enormous amount of extraneous code and files for input into WordPress. This was frustrating because our formulas were converted to a series of files and images that didn’t display as they did in Word.

A simple search on the phrase “displaying mathematical formulas using HTML” will give you all the links needed to get the background on this topic. At some point, you’ll find that TeX is semantically superior to HTML and that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community for blog postings similar to ours.

Installing LaTeX in WordPress was not easy. There are a lot of steps, the files are big and it takes time. It’s also important to have the latest version of WordPress running since we ran into issues moving our installation from our development environment to our client’s production server without synchronizing our WordPress versions.

In our WordPress post there were various symbols that could be addressed with character entity reference (i.e. the Greek small letter mu (μ) has a character reference of (ampersand-mu-semicolon) in HTML 4.0). Several parameters were subscript and superscript, but it was simple to nest the character entity references in the HTML tags as needed, but for the more complex equations we needed to enhance basic HTML functionality with LaTeX.

Here’s one of the equations from the blog post:

Here’s the TeX code for the equation in the post:
$latex \displaystyle S_q = \sqrt{\frac{1}{MN} \sum_{k=0}^{M-1} \sum_{l=0}^{N-1} [z(x_k,y_l)-\mu]^2} $

Here’s a link to the final post:
http://nano.tm.agilent.com/blog/2008/02/04/rms-roughness-the-measurement-that-may-sometimes-be-skewed/

For us, LaTeX worked great. It is ideal for WordPress authors that deal with mathematical formulas and don’t want to be bothered with the tedious tasks associated with generating HTML and images to support their postings.

One tip we picked up from the Google Analytics (GA) folks at Webmaster World (12/07) was to update our GA clients’ page tags as soon as possible. It’s really not a big deal, the updated tag just points to the new (ga.js) file and the change doesn’t affect any past data. We made the change for all our customers before 2008 and have not seen any anomalies.

It turns out that Google has been using the (urchin.js) file since they acquired the San Diego based firm in March 2005, but don’t think this update is just cosmetic. There are several new features that are only supported if you update your code including analyzing form posts from search products like HTDIG. It also eliminates the redundancy of managing two sets of tags (http and https).

We have several sites using HTDIG for web site search. In the past, we have used customized code to breakdown unstructured searches for our customers. With the new (ga.js) file in place you can add the search parameters you use in your form posts to the Site Search settings. The searches are collected and the results are displayed under GA’s Site Search menus. It’s really as simple as that.

The easiest way we’ve found to include a video in a WordPress blog post is to use the Anarchy Media Player plugin. Adding videos is straight-forward once you get the plugin installed since it’s integrated right inside the “Write Post” functionality and covers most video formats. We recommend that you use Flash though, it’s pretty easy to encode your footage as FLV these days and Flash seems to be the best format for video delivery on the web, just ask YouTube. Here’s a sample:

denver.flv

Once you’ve uploaded your Flash Video (video.flv) it’s really simple to add it to a blog post because the Anarchy plugin handles the controls and the display. Keep in mind that if you use Flash FLV the size of your videos will remain the same throughout the blog since the resolution is adjusted as a parameter in the plugin’s options. You could use the Flash SWF format to adjust the size, but this adds several levels of complexity to the whole process. Most other formats are available too, but for consistency and easy deployment, Flash FLV is the way to go.

Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.

The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.

At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.

I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96.  He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously.”  It was immediately credited to Confucius.

This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.

There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.

This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.

So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but to a search engine - video subtitles are worth a thousand pictures”.

Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?

On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.

The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was still single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.

We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.

Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.

What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.

This year I turn 50! Quite a milestone when you think about it. I can tell you a number of things go through your mind when this event occurs and I’m guessing everyone goes through some sort of “right of passage“. Having been a tennis player most of my life, I decided that 50 was my opportunity to join the 50-and-over tennis tournament circuit. I imagined filling my trophy case with hardware from my triumphs.

In my first tournament, the draw had me play a first round match late in the evening, followed with a meeting with the number 2 seed early the next morning. This didn’t seem fair, but as a newcomer I didn’t feel it was my place to complain. Well, the good news was that I won my first match, but the bad news was that I resembled a pretzel the next morning. Needless to say, I went down in defeat, but on my drive home I had a bit of an epiphany on tournament draws and search linking algorithms.

What I realized was that search algorithms actually use a similar process. You see, as an unknown, the tennis tournament directors could not credibly seed me; similarly, search engines don’t rank newly found URLs very high in their listings. Now, if I would have won my match against the number 2 seed, I’m sure the Colorado Tennis Association would gladly seed me in the next tournament. Likewise, search engines start recognizing URLs when other prominent (seeded) sites point to you.

The lesson here is that “talk is cheap” in both sports and web search. I plan to continue my quest for Colorado tennis stardom, but in the meantime we’ll plan to get as many valuable links (from seeded websites) to Viewmark as possible.

This is the first official post on Viewmark’s NEW blog. We actually started looking and using blogs back in 2004 when blogging was just getting started. Several of us participated in a session at a Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose with the creator of Blogger. I vaguely remember him announcing the Google acquisition.

We were intriqued enough to secure several blogs for Viewmark back then. Recently, we’ve added several new client blogs and are integrating the technology with our tools. Blogs are just one of the many marketing tools our customers are using to communicate with their customers.

As President of Viewmark, I am in charge of the overall vision and direction of the company. I think my first entry on our NEW blog will be to officially announce our commitment to use this channel to discuss, share, and explore relevant news, topics, technology and methods related to using the internet to enhance business.

I find blog integration with RSS feeds particularly interesting. We are now living in an “on-demand” world. Consuming content based on our personal preferences is becoming more and more the norm. News readers and the the many personalized myPages that support XML feeds through RSS and Atom are an eyeopener for sure.

In the late 90s, I was lucky enough to attend an awards ceromony in which Tim Bernes-Lee was discussing his book “Weaving the Web”. In the later chapters of the book, he describes the Semantic Web. Are we now starting to embrace and support his vision? Stay tuned!

I hope you you will sign up to our blog and join in on the discussion.