Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.
As ever, comments welcome.
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Sources Used:
“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]
“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]
“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]
“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]
Digital publishing has come a long way. Six years ago (or so) all websites and blogs could only be updated from computers that were connected, with long lengths of cable, to the nearest telephone socket.
But then along came Wi-Fi. Suddenly the Internet was in the air all around us. You could hook up your laptop or, more recently, Smartphone, whenever you got a sniff of it and suddenly all the old boundaries of digital publishing tumbled down.
The mobile Internet meant that people to could publish on the fly from almost anywhere. And when I signed up to the Africa Rally – sometime early on last year – I wanted to do just that.
The Africa Rally
The Africa Rally is best described as a charity touring event, which is organised by a company called the Adventurists. The aim of the rally is to successfully drive from England to Cameroon in Africa in an old, unsuitable or amusing vehicle. I signed up with two old friends and we decided to have a go in an old VW Beetle. Our team name was to be Camervroom.
Blogging it – (problems)
Such a long and peculiar journey immediately struck me as excellent material for a blog. A blog would help us to stay in touch with family and friends at home, it would remain as a record of the trip after we had finished and it would serve as a new publishing challenge – just enough to satisfy my ongoing Internet addiction.
But there were lots of problems. The journey was (at best) going to take a month and to stop each evening and compose a reasoned blog was going to be too time consuming. Even if we did find the time and my two friends did have the patience (which they wouldn’t have had), the likelihood of finding an Internet cafe whenever I wanted one in various corners of Africa was low.
The obvious solution was to cut out Internet cafes and blog via telephone. There are lots of powerful telephones available at the moment and, in particular, the iPhone has about as much publishing clout as an entire newsroom would have had just about a decade ago. You can take photos, shoot video, record audio and send email on the iPhone, all in a few jabs of the finger. In addition it records useful meta-data as you go, including geographic location, local times and date – all of which comes in useful if you want to do some data mashing later on.
Still, taking an iPhone along to Africa is certainly about as stupid as it is clever. On the rally we were passing through 12 different countries, each of which had perhaps two or three different mobile service providers. Any concoction of these may or may not work, depending – or so it seemed – upon a million different capricious factors.
On top of this you have the problem of cost. Everyone has heard horror stories of enthusiastic holiday makers generating enormous telephone bills in just a few short days in Mallorca. Add on to this the fact that an iPhone is just the sort of expensive, desirable object that you shouldn’t carry out of the country, and all things considered it could end up a dysfunctional waste of space.
Blogging it – (solutions)
Enter Posterous
Posterous hasn’t been around that long. In fact, it was only launched in May last year but it has quickly grown in popularity as one of the best platforms for mobile blogging or, more fashionably put, lifestreaming.
The idea is simple. All you have to do is send emails to Posterous and thereafter it is the software’s job to make sense of the message’s content and cobble it together into a post.
For example if you take a picture on your telephone and then email it to Posterous, within a minute that photo will have been blogged alongside any accompanying text that you include in the body of the email.
All in all, a blog can be prepared, posted and published within about two or three minutes and you can post to Posterous from wherever you phone allows you to connect to the Internet. A decade ago people wouldn’t have believed it.
Connectivity
So Posterous worked for the blogging software, but what about connectivity? Well, I called O2 who are my mobile service provider and told them that I was going abroad and that I wanted to use my iPhone to connect to the Internet. For £50 a month they set me up with a bolt-on package called Date Abroad 50, which allowed me 50 Mb of data, downloads every month while I was out of the country.
(For a full-scale blog for a month, this isn’t quite enough. But if you are careful (you can monitor how much data you are downloading by studying your telephone settings) and just use the phone to send emails then it should be a good amount to start off with).
Connectivity Again
So. I had a phone with the potential to write emails, record videos and sound and take photos. I had Posterous which had the ability to take all of this information and process the code into a meaningful post and I had a bolt on package from O2 that allowed me to send data while abroad at an affordable price. All done.
Or not.
The iPhone worked perfectly in France and Spain and fitfully in Morocco. After that the cellular network quite predictably fritted in and out continuously. It didn’t work in Senegal, worked a little bit in Mali, failed totally in Burkina Faso and Benin, reappeared dramatically in Nigeria before vanishing again in Cameroon.
In countries without sufficient network coverage I was forced to resort to WiFi. This was a more tricky task, but luckily West Africa has an enormous number of unsecured wireless networks that usually pop up at opportune moments, most of them in hotels, banks or on the streets outside governmental buildings. Three minutes stood outside one of these buildings in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin or Cameroon was long enough to post a brief update. And usually that was all that was needed.
Real time rally – some observations
I posted 84 times on the Camervroom blog – most of these coming on the road and in the last month it has been read by around 4,000 unique visitors.
I’ve always thought that a good definition of a successful blog is one that has more total comments than total posts – and Camervroom, with more than 100 different comments, passed this test easily.
There were many benefits of using Posterous – its ease of use and reliability were the main ones, but another little quirk that worked particularly well was its ability to detail the geographic location of a post, making it easy for people to see exactly – to the very spot on a street – where we were.
Lesson learnt
For me, working in digital media, there are a couple of lessons to be learnt here. Firstly, people want to know what is happening in real time: writers, content producers, journalists and whoever else should be willing to occasionally substitute the overall quality of a piece for the amount of time that it takes them to get it out.
This change can be reflected by the frequency of posts, but also in the style and mindset of the writer. An author can write in the present tense instead of the past tense to give a sense of an ongoing journey, they can end a piece without reaching a conclusion or post a picture without an explanation.
All of this flies, of course, in the face of creating a fully coherent journalistic piece, but lifestreaming is something quite different to that. Simply put, you don’t always have to finish with a conclusion because your reader will know that you are going to be back soon.
Secondly, if you are going to have a go at lifestreaming then it is a good idea to experiment with different types of media. By this I mean audio (podcasting), visual (photographs) and video, and the very best applications to use for anyone with an iPhone are Audioboo and You Tube to help you do this.
Thirdly, think about your readership. Posterous is very good at sending out automated updates across a host of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and so on. But does everyone in all of these communities want to know about what you are doing three times a day?
The best bet, until you know otherwise is to manage this yourself manually otherwise over-publishing will be seen as spam and any effort that you are putting into doing something may well have negative consequences.
Micro journalism
I attended Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired event on Thursday and was interested to hear Greg Hadfield, someone that I hadn’t ever heard of before, say something that I agreed with completely.
He said, journalism is now much more about individual journalists doing little projects than large organisations and enormous projects. And I think that using Posterous for little projects like this is a perfect example of that.
Ok. This was a rally and a holiday, but the same methods that I used on the Africa Rally could easily be used by journalists on projects abroad, by aid workers at the height of a crisis, by managers at a business conference, or by a music journalist on the road with a rock and roll band. You could imagine each of these resulting in excellent pieces of journalism – micro journalism if you like.
Ingredients for a lifecasting blog
Download Posterous, set up your email to post directly and Google Analytics (optional)
Get a Smartphone with the ability to connect to the Internet
If you are going abroad you need to agree a roaming bolt-on with your mobile service provider
You need a USB cable to connect your telephone to fixed computers when you get the chance (in Africa I took my USB cable everywhere and it acted like a wonderful umbilical cord between this world and the virtual one)
Make sure you have some good telephone insurance
Cost
All told, in one month Camervroom cost about £150 in additional telephone bills. Just about everything else was free and as it is going to be staying around for as long as the Posterous servers exist (fingers crossed), then I don’t think it is a bad investment at all.
Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.
For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.
1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)
“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –
2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.
Here are the first two verses of one:
The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.
A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…
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3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking(the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)
Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.
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Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.
When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.
This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.
Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.
4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest(the news arrived in London one day later)
There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:
5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy(there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)
It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.
6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana(no delay)
By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.
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7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings(reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)
July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.
To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.
I’ve little to add that hasn’t already been mentioned elsewhere, but here’s a thought.
Today we saw old and new media working together. Newspaper editors and journalists were interacting with bloggers and twitterers. There were articles, blogs and tweets – all repeating the same message over and over and over again.
There was an unfamiliar sense of unity. The idea that if the media worked as one it could defend a principle that it felt strongly enough about.
And after years of new and old media growling at each other from different corners of the same room, this was something new.
An important principle has been defended – and that is the most important point of all. But perhaps it is worth noting that some bridges might just have been built in doing so.
William Lyon Phelps delivered the following speech in a radio broadcast on 6 April, 1933, just one month before the NAZIs burnt around 25,000 books in a single disquieting night in Berlin.
The speech documents his reverence for books and the fundamental place that they had in his life. Phelps spoke of his strong emotional attachment to books as live objects: they could be held in the hand, filed away or arranged on a shelf for aesthetic pleasure.
For Phelps, referring to an old, pencil-marked book in later life was like ‘visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail.’ ‘You have the pleasure of going over old ground… recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.’
It’s a strong argument for the important place that books, as tangible objects, have played in society over the past five centuries.
Good as Delicious is as a virtual bookshelf and as liberating as a blog or a website may be, they can’t replace what Phelps describes here. And as the publishing industry totters on the edge, you can’t help thinking that if it falls we’ve got quite a bit to lose.
William Lyon Phelps – The Pleasure of Books
“The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.
But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that affectionate intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have one’s own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as to the eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all. Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing six thousand books; and I have a stock answer to the invariable question that comes from strangers. “Have you read all of these books?” “Some of them twice.” This reply is both true and unexpected.
There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage over living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for our personal friends and acquaintances, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They “laid themselves out,” they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.”
