Occurred to me recently that Google can be, under certain conditions, an excellent tool to categorize sites and media properties with, though I realize it will not work in every case.   I’ll talk alot more about this in my book on Social Media Analytics (a new book site is being worked on where I will talk about the book as I’m writing it and ask for feedback).

But here’s one example, if I were to take a list of sites – any list  – could be Comscore‘s 50,000 or so sites, or just any list all of blogs, message boards, photo sharing sites, main stream media outlets, whatever, and run a set of pre canned queries on them while counting the results, I could tell you how relevant they were on the subject of that query.   Sure, there would be some issues with dynamic urls and sites that are serving up a lot of duplicate content (which Google tries to suppress with the duplicate content filter) but over all, if I have a good set of queries and enough time, I could categorize a bunch of sites with relevancy for a particular subject (what the query is about).

If I had enough different queries, and enough time, I could categorize the web (but right now, without a bit of programming, this would be impossible to scale); in fact much of Comscore is manually deciding, via a dictionary team, what categories a site is in.   And Google collects information via Google Analytics Benchmarking where sites that share data can compare themselves to other sites who also share anonymous data in a category (say, magazines) and see how they preform on 6 preset metrics.

Much of this got stimulated by looking at CisionPoint and Recorded Future, two platforms I’m playing with right now and will have more to write about them in, lets say, the near future.  I’m also giving a webinar with Jay Krall of Cision in mid November on all the neat things CisionPoint can do and it will be an interactive webinar where I’ll be asking Jay some cool questions and he’ll show people what CisionPoint actually does.

For example, CisionPoint now reads in Radian6 data and merges it with their Media Outlet database and Industry Segmentation – I bet a lot of people didn’t know that or what to do with such information.

More about this shortly.

And then there’s Monitoring Social Media NYC 2010 taking place next Thursday and Friday – I’ll be speaking both days and hope to see some of my readers there.

Did you know that among married couples, it takes at least five positive comments to offset one negative one according to researcher John Gottman.   A post on Harvard Review cites that many times we react to situations based on how “at risk” we feel our value is, while in the workplace.    I liked the idea about the 5 positive comments to counter 1 negative one because it can almost, with some modifications, be used for social media monitoring.

But last week my eyebrows were raised when I read a curious factoid from Comscore claiming that Russia has the most engaged social networking audience worldwide.  All I can say is … “Whoa“! According to the Comscore press release:

… The study revealed that Russians are the heaviest social networkers worldwide in terms of time spent per user and that Yandex is the leading property in the Russian Federation.

Top 10 Countries for Social Networking Ranked by Time Spent per Visitor August 2010Total Worldwide Audience, Age 15+ – Home and Work Locations* Source: comScore Media Metrix
	Social Networking
	Average Hours per Visitor	Total Unique Visitors (000)
Worldwide	4.5	964,305
Russian Federation	9.8	34,545
Israel	9.2	4,032
Turkey	7.6	20,911
United Kingdom	7.3	35,792
Philippines	6.2	5,176
Canada	5.8	22,087
Indonesia	5.3	7,183
Finland	5.0	2,983
Spain	5.0	18,569
Puerto Rico	4.9	1,078

*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

But even more surprising than the Russians spending all that time on their Russian search engines is the news that Fast Food weddings are taking place more and more in Hong Kong.  Here’s more from TreeHugger:

If soaring wedding costs have you wondering how you can afford it all (and yet, you couldn’t be bothered with the effort to put on a more eco-conscious wedding) then McDonald’s may have the answer for you.

In Hong Kong, where weddings are biiiig business (my own cousin’s glitzy matrimonial affair there last winter — hosted in a fancy hotel and complete with ice sculptures, shooting lasers and yes, shark’s fin soup — comes to mind), the fast food chain is now offering “McWeddings” at select locations for young, cash-strapped couples.

The South China Morning Post quotes McDonald’s Hong Kong director of corporate communications and relations Helen Cheung as saying:

Traditional weddings use cherries for the newlyweds to eat together and kiss. We will have French fries for them to kiss.

Also, yesterday Eric T. Peterson pointed us to a blog post about how is Engagement formula was being used at Philly.com Getting beyond just pageviews: Philly.com’s seven-part equation for measuring online engagement

-

They ultimately decided on seven categories, each with a particular cutoff:

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

I suppose this method will work and most of it can be gotten out of site analytics.

I tend to find interesting angles for things that I read and more and more, things I’m going to write about in my book (I’ll have a website/blog up for the social media analytics book shortly where readers can give me feedback on ideas I’m developing to write about).

With that in mind I read a post yesterday on How To: Allow Google to Crawl your AJAX Content in JaTin’s blog that perked my interest because Google had actually solved the problem for content developers but most people probably aren’t even aware of it.   Not only that, what Google can’t pick up (aka Ajax and Flash) isn’t available to Social Media Monitoring either.

Not that most of the Flash movies would be anything that Radian6, Brandwatch, Synthesio, etc, etc, etc, could do anything with, but then again, many movies, many Ajax sites actually do have a lot of content, but it’s invisible or Ultraviolet and fits nicely into my Spectral Analytics approach – clearly there’s a way to enable Ajax tracking of a website and Google wants you to know about it and implement it if you really care about getting that content ranked in Google.    Once Google can get at it, I’m pretty sure that will also be the case with Radian6, etc.

But there’s another issue that comes up which I need to ask vendors about – how much does Radian6 or Sysomos actually pull data from Google?    I mean, Facebook and Twitter are selling their data to Google, but do monitoring platforms actually look at Google to get data because I haven’t seen any evidence they do?   If they don’t why don’t they?

I don’t love Google but I noticed no monitoring platform even attempts do deal with site ranking – why not?   The same thing goes for Google Webmaster Tools – fantastic collection of information about a subscribed site, much of it may not apply to monitoring but some of it could – why isn’t anyone pulling data from it?

Anyway, getting back to Ajax enablement for SEO, it’s not that different than Flash Enablement in that you have to make 2 versions of the content, one for your users and the other for the search engine (sounds like Cloaking, eh!?).  Well, who says all Cloaking is bad, maybe there are approved reasons for it and this appears to be one of them.

Essentially, sites following this proposal are required to make two versions of their content available:

1. Content for JS-enabled users, at an ‘AJAX style’ URL
2. Content for the search engines, at a static ‘traditional’ URL – Google refers to this as an ‘HTML snapshot’

Historically, developers had made use of the ‘named anchor‘ part of URLs on AJAX-powered websites (this is the ‘hash’ symbol, #, and the text following it). For example, take a look at this demo – clicking menu items changes named anchor and loads the content into the page on the fly. It’s great for users, but search engine spiders can’t deal with it.

As soon as you use the hashbang in a URL, Google will spot that you’re following their protocol, and interpret your URLs in a special way – they’ll take everything after the hashbang, and pass it to the site as a URL parameter instead. The name they use for the parameter is: _escaped_fragment_

Google will then rewrite the URL, and request content from that static page. To show what the rewritten URLs look like, here are some examples:

• www.demo.com/#!seattle/hotels becomes www.demo.com/?_escaped_fragment=seattle/hotels
• www.demo.com/users#!name=rob becomes www.demo.com/users?_escaped_fragment_=name=rob

As long as you can get the static page (the URL on the right in these examples) to display the same content that a user would see (at the left-hand URL), then it works just as planned.

Turns out this is exactly what Twitter just did (which also uses Google Analytics to track everything they are doing, bet you didn’t know what).  Here’s an example from the post that was actually written by Rob Ousbey.

Now we know why the ugly pound-dash URL rewrite that Twitter had do to – they are tracking Ajax and following Google’s guidelines.  Question is – will  we?  I think the answer is yes, if you want to get your content ranked and… picked up by Radian6 and monitoring platforms because they can’t read Flash and Ajax, either.

Fortunately for us, there’s a great demonstration of this proposal already in place on a pretty big website: the new version of Twitter.

If you’re a Twitter user, logged-in, and have Javascript, you’ll be able to see my profile here:

• http://twitter.com/#!/RobOusbey

However, Googlebot will recognize that as a URL in the new format, and will instead request this URL:

• http://twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/RobOusbey

Sensibly, Twitter want to maintain backward compatibility (and not have their indexed URLs look like junk) so they 301 redirect that URL to:

• http://twitter.com/RobOusbey