Posts in the Speaking Category

Just a quick link to my slide deck (when did that term gain currency, and why didn’t I get a memo?) for “Emergent Semantics“.  I was honestly surprised by the number of attendees, and there were some great questions and ideas from audience members.  Throughout the rest of the day, I had some great conversations with people about their own microformat ideas.  Another measure of the level of interest in microformats and the semantic web was attendance at Tantek’s “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML“, which was so heavy that after the seats and floor space in his room filled up, a knot of people stood outside the door, turning their heads slightly and standing on tiptoe in an attempt to hear what he was saying.

On a very related note, I’ve updated my blogroll with some new met values.  I’ve met a ton of people I’d never met before, and hope to meet still more—so if I do assemble a metroll, it’ll have to wait until I get home.

• Emergent Semantics was published on Monday, March 14th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the semantic web, Speaking, and XFN categories.
• There have been seven replies.

Okay, everyone else is doing it, so here’s my “headed to SXSW” post.  Baaaa!

I’m getting in Saturday afternoon, just in time to miss Jeffrey’s opening remarks, and will be around through Tuesday.  Early Saturday evening, I’ll be at the WaSP/WD-L/CSS-D/WSM/AIR meetup at Buffalo Billiards; the festivities kick off at 6:00pm, and no RSVP is needed, so drop on by!  It promises to be a madhouse (a MADHOUSE!) of standards and billiards.

On Sunday, I’ll be speaking from 10:00am until 11:00am on the topic of “Emergent Semantics“.  I’ve been scheduled to do a half-hour book signing at 12:45pm that same day; if it’s anything like last year, there will be a few authors sitting at a signing table at the same time.  I’m told there will be copies of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition, the CSS Pocket Reference, Second Edition, and More Eric Meyer on CSS in stock, but you don’t have to buy a copy at the show to get one signed—if you already have a book of mine, bring it and I’ll gladly sign it.  Heck, bring me anyone’s book and I’ll sign it.  I’m easy.

After the signing, I’m planning to sit in on Tantek’s presentation, “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML“.  His talk and mine make a good one-two combination, so if you’ve any interest in either, you might consider checking out both.

Come Monday, I’ll be getting a late start with an appearance on the panel “Where Are The Women of Web Design“.  Before I get raked over the coals again, I’d like to point you to Molly’s post about the panel and its genesis, as well as the comments that followed (particularly this one).  Just after that panel, assuming I haven’t been burnt to a tiny crisp, the SXSW folks have me doing another book signing.  That’ll be from 4:45pm until 5:15pm.

As soon as I’m done there, I have to skedaddle over to the Red Eyed Fly for Vox Nox, an early evening of New Riders authors showing their “B” sides.  Vox Nox, which starts around 6:00pm and is scheduled to end around 8:00pm, is in many ways a sort of mini-Fray Cafe, which is appropriate… because Fray Cafe 5 is going to be held at the Red Eyed Fly on Sunday, the night before Vox Nox.  I have to admit to being a touch nervous about my part in Vox Nox, because the piece I’ve created is deeply personal and I’m not totally certain how the audience will react.  But that’s one of the interesting things about public performance, right?

Tuesday I got nothin’.  No scheduled events at all.  I can just kick back, check out sessions, hang out in the halls, and generally act like I don’t have a care in the world.  Trust me, it’s just an act, but I’ve gotten kind of good at it.  That evening I’m doing whatever, and by the next morning I’ll be gone.

So if you’re going to be in or around SXSW, come over and say “hi”.  Even if you don’t have that much interest in me personally, you should still come by, because the concentration of Web design stars, standards gurus, and forward thinkers assembling at this year’s SXSWi is frankly a wonder to behold.

• Part of the SXSW Herd was published on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

Talking with attendees and hanging out with the speakers at Search Engine Strategies was quite fascinating. 

In the first place, they’re all pretty fascinating people, from where they’ve been to what they’re like now.  In the second place, they’re all working in a field that doesn’t really interest me, except in indirect ways.  A lot of the “white hat” search engine friendliness has to do with strong text copy, building traffic, and all that good stuff.  But to spend my days picking apart search engine behavior?  Not interested.

Of course, a lot of people would find what I do eye-wateringly boring, so I’m not casting stones here.  Just saying that it’s interesting to spend time with people who are smart, funny, motivated, and gladly doing something very different from what I’m used to doing.

That said, I observed some interesting differences between the search engine crowd and the Web design/standards crowd.

• There’s a dark side to the search engine business that just doesn’t exist in the standards crowd.  The “black hat” SEOs, the ones who are comment spamming and keyword stuffing and link farming, don’t just lurk in the shadows.  They’re right up front, sitting on panels and buying booths in the exhibit hall (not to mention doing a little in-person spamming).  They don’t pretend to be anything but what they are.  The honesty is refreshing, but it’s something that doesn’t have a direct analogue in Web design.  The closest we get is coding to a specific browser, and that isn’t evil so much as it is amateurish and short-sighted.  I don’t think there’s really any comparison.

  The existence of that dark side creates an entirely different dynamic in the search engine field.  People are always watching to see if someone’s white hat is covering up a black hat, to see who’s shifted from one camp to another.  From what I heard, people have gone both directions; some black hats have gone to white over time.  And vice versa.

  This fact also seems to have created a gossip stream that completely dwarfs anything I’ve ever encountered in the standards design field.

• In a similar vein, there’s an incentive to keep one’s knowledge to oneself in the search engine business.  Suppose you’ve uncovered something about search engines that nobody else has figured out.  That’s a competitive advantage, and there’s a financial incentive to keep it to yourself.

  In the standards design field, it’s almost the other way around.  If you come up with a new technique, you’re better off publishing it and adding to your reputation.  You could keep it to yourself, of course, and that would stay secret until the first time you used it on a public site.  At that point, the secret will be there for anyone who views source to figure out and use for themselves.  Writing it up instead and sharing it with the world adds to your reputational capital, which might lead to more work—so there’s a financial incentive to share.

  That’s not to say that everything search engine experts uncover is kept secret: they do plenty of publishing and sharing, and consultants in the field are constantly referring clients to each other as needs change.  That’s sort of a flip side to what I’ve observed in the standards design field, where referrals seem to be (comparatively) infrequent.  I’m not complaining, mind you.  Just observing.  But when someone creates a unique approach, it’s more likely to benefit them by being held close to the chest.

• The field is dominated by the search engines.  Whatever they do, the experts have to adjust to keep up.  If Google alters its algorithm, a top-ranked site can drop to 100th place in an instant, and a ninth-page site can vault to the first results page.  The playing field is always shifting, always in flux.  Slow flux, but flux nonetheless.  It’s actually a lot like Web design was back in the late 1990s, when browsers were updating their rendering engines on a regular basis, instead of in cycles that can be reasonably measured in fractions of decades.

  So there’s the threat that today’s winning strategy is tomorrow’s loser.  In the standards design space, not really the case; or if it is the case, it’s only on much longer time scales.  Sure, CSS will likely be a discarded relic some day, but it’ll probably be quite a while—several years at the very least.  Comment spamming could become obsolete next week, were the engines to figure out a way to programmatically detect and penalize it.  (nofollow doesn’t quite count, but it’s a start.)

• On a related note, there’s a lot more mobility in the search engine space.  People work as independent SEOs, then go to work for a search engine, then shift to an SEO firm, leave that to work for a large corporation… and so on.  Not everyone, of course, but enough to add lots more grist for the gossip mill.  In the standards design space, most of the leading names are working for themselves, and show few signs of changing.

• The last observation is perhaps the one that drives everything that I’ve mentioned: the money.  There’s a lot of money on the table in SEO, way more than in standards design.  Sure, a big design job can be worth many thousands of dollars.  An effective SEO can make many more thousands, possibly millions if he or she gets the right job.  They can increase a company’s traffic, and potentially their revenue, by large percentages.

  Certainly, standards design can save companies money, and it can increase revenue by making a site more responsive due to smaller page weights.  That’s useful, and it’s important.  But the money being thrown around on SEO is… well, it’s a lot.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, none of this is meant to be a condemnation.  Sure, the spammers are loathsome parasites, but there are a lot of SEOs who aren’t spammers.  They get companies better rankings through the basics I mentioned before.  In a lot of ways, they seem to be content, usability, and community-building consultants all rolled up into one.  Those are all useful, needed services, and it’s kind of interesting to me that all those things are hiding behind the term “search engine optimization”.  Well, not hiding, exactly.  You see what I mean, though, right?

The last observation is more personal: it was quite an experience attending a conference where I was largely unrecognized.  There were developers there who knew my name, and who were on the standards bandwagon, but the majority of attendees were not developers and had never heard of me, or Zeldman, or Shea, or Bowman, or any of the other names known in our field.  Which is only to be expected: I had never heard of most of the big names in their field.  So I was largely an outsider, and that was a refreshing change of pace.  It served as a (possibly necessary) ego check, and let me look at the Web from an entirely new angle.

So my thanks to Danny, Chris, Grant, Shari, Amanda, Tim, Matt, and the other folks who helped orient me to this new arena, discussed points of common interest and divergent aims, and made sure I didn’t feel too terribly out of place.

• Search Engine Strategies New York was published on Saturday, March 5th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.

Since Dave recently shared his upcoming conference schedule, I feel strangely motivated to do the same with my schedule.  Memetic infection or just a case of “me too, me too!”?  You decide.

• Search Engine Strategies New York — I’ll be appearing on the panel “CSS Myths, Mistakes, & Reality” with Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey, as well as representatives of Yahoo! and Google.  My role is to quickly explain the benefits of standards to an audience that may have ltitle to no knowledge of said benefits.  The session will be 90 minutes, to provide plenty of Q&A time.

• SXSW Interactive — I have three scheduled appearances in Austin, none of which have anything to do with CSS.  The first is Emergent Semantics, a look at how to add semantic information to the Web today using already-available features of XHTML.  The second is the panel Where Are the Women of Web Design?, an exploration of why there are so few female “leaders” in the Web design space, and how we might encourage more.  Last, I’ll be one of the performers at Vox Nox, a New Riders event that features several authors performing pieces that aren’t technology-related.  It will unfortuantely overlap a bit with 20×2, but not too badly.

  The SXSW folks have also scheduled me to do two book signings, one on Sunday and the other Monday.  If you’re going to be at the conference, bring a book to sign, or buy one there and get it signed.  Just think—the signature alone will add at least a dime to the book’s worth, although the personalized inscription will knock it back off.  That’s how it goes.

• NOTACON 2 — held right here in fabulous Cleveland, Ohio, I’ll be giving two talks.  One will be The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM, about the evolution of S5, looking at various design decisions and the joy of DOM scripting.  The other talk is Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List, an overview of what I’ve learned as List Chaperone for css-discuss, and what I think makes a good community manager.

• WWW 2005 — and away I go to Chiba, Japan!  For the conference, I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial on standards-oriented design trends and techniques.  I may also be presenting a poster, if it’s accepted by the poster committee, but I won’t know for a few weeks.  I’m also planning to speak at the Tokyo PC Users Group, and am still scouting for consulting opportunities while in Japan.  If you’re interested, please let me know!

Looking further into the future, I’m currently scheduled to speak at conferences in September and October.  I’ll have details on those as the time draws closer.  You can stay up to date with my public speaking schedule over at Complex Spiral Consulting, and yes, I really should turn it into an RSS feed.  Some day…

• Upcoming Events was published on Saturday, February 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Tech categories.
• There has been one reply.

Just a quick note for people in the Cleveland area: I’ll be giving a talk this Saturday, 22 January, at the meeting of the North East Ohio Apple Corps in Strongsville.  The topic will be turning your Macintosh into a powerful Web development environment using resources, scripts, tricks, and tools available for free.  If you’re interested, drop by, and if you need directions, check out the NEOAC Web site.  I’m told that there will be donuts.  Mmm…. donuts.

• NEOAC Talk was published on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Due to some weather-related travel upheavals, I didn’t get to spend as much time at SES Chicago as I would have liked—I ended up flying in Tuesday afternoon, speaking before lunch Wednesday, and leaving Wednesday evening.  Still, the panel went very well, the speakers were quite gracious, and I didn’t even need a fire extinguisher.

Based on what was said in the panel and the fleeting conversations I was able to have (sometimes from the podium) with Matt Bailey and Shari Thurow, here’s what I took away from the conference:

• Semantic markup does not hurt your search engine rankings.  It may even provide a small lift.  However, the lift will be tiny, and it isn’t always a semantic consideration.  Search engines seem to use markup the same way humans do: headings and elements that cause increased presentational weight, such as <strong> and <i>, will raise slightly the weight of the content within said elements.  So even the presentational-effect elements can have an effect.  They also stated that if you’re using elements solely to increase ranking, you’re playing a loser’s game.
• The earlier content sits in the document, the more weight it has… but again, this is a very minor effect.
• Hyperlink title attribute and longdesc text has no effect, positive or negative, on search engine ranking.  The advice given was to have a link’s title text be the same as its content, and that anything you’d put into a longdesc should just go into the page itself.  (Remember: this advice is ruthlessly practical and specific to search-engine ranking, not based on any notions of purity.)
• Having a valid document neither helps nor hurts ranking; validation is completely ignored.  The (paraphrased) statement from a Yahoo! representative was that validation doesn’t help find better information for the user, because good information can (and usually does) appear on non-valid pages.
• Search engine indexers don’t care about smaller pages, although the people who run them do care about reducing bandwidth consumption, so they like smaller pages for that reason.  But not enough to make it affect rankings.
• A lot of things that we take for granted as being good, like image-replacement techniques and Flash replacement techniques, are technologically indistinguishable from search-engine spamming techniques.  (Mostly because these things are often used for the purpose of spamming search engines.)  Things like throwing the text offscreen in order to show a background image, hiding layers of text for dynamic display, and so forth are all grouped together under the SEO-industry term “cloaking”.  As the Yahoo! guy put it, 95% of cloaking is done for the specific purpose of spamming or otherwise rigging search engine results.  So the 5% of it that isn’t… is us.  And we’re taking a tiny risk of search-engine banishment because our “make this look pretty” tools are so often used for evil.

Reading that last point, you might be wondering: how much of a risk are you taking?  Very little, as it turns out.  Search engine indexers do not try to detect cloaking and then slam you into a blacklist—at least, they don’t do that right now.  To get booted from a search engine, someone needs to have reported your site as trying to scam search engines.  If that happens, then extra detection and evaluation measures kick in.  That’s when you’re at risk of being blacklisted.  Note that it takes, in effect, a tattletale to make this even a possibility.  It’s also the case that if you find you’ve been booted and you think the booting unfair, you can appeal for a human review of your site.

So using standards will not, of itself, increase your risk of banishment from Google.  If someone claims to Google that you’re a dirty search spammer, there’s a small but nonzero chance that you’ll get booted, especially if you’re using things like hidden text.  If you do get booted and tell Google you aren’t a spammer, and they check and agree with you, you’ll be back in the index immediately.

So there’s no real reason to panic.  But it’s still a bit dismaying to realize that the very same tools we use to make the Web better are much more often used to pollute it.  I don’t suppose it’s surprising, though.

Due to my radically compressed schedule, I was unfortunately not able to ask most of the questions people suggested, and for that I’m very sorry.  There was some talk of having me present at future SES conferences, however, so hopefully I’ll have more chances in the future.  I’ll also work the e-mail contacts I developed to see what I can divine.

• SES Chicago Report was published on Saturday, December 18th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Hey, Japan, I’m headed your way and looking for gigs!

I’ve received official confirmation that I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial at the Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference, otherwise known as WWW2005, and also delivering a keynote and participating in a panel at the W4A Workshop at the same conference.  WWW2005 will be held in Chiba, Japan, running from 10 – 14 May 2005.  There will be more details on the Complex Spiral Events page in the next week or so.

So here’s the deal: I’m already committed to travel to Japan,  so this is a rare opportunity for any companies, organizations, or other groups that would like to hire me for training, speaking, or other consulting.  My usual fees include reasonable travel expenses such as hotel room and airfare, and as you might imagine, a plane flight from the eastern United States to Japan is just a tad expensive.  (Try somewhere around $1,250 for economy class and $7,500 for business class.)  However, since I’m going to be there anyway, I’ll waive the airfare expense for any consulting engagements.  That’s a pretty notable savings no matter what airfare class I’ll be flying.

Here’s the flip side: I will need to book my flights before the end of January, in order to make sure I can get good flight arrangements.  That means I’ll need to have settled any agreements to consult (in whatever capacity) by that time.  So if you’re in Japan or know people who are there and interested in standards, spread the word!  This is the first time I’ll ever have been to Japan, and I may not be back again for quite some time.  Any assistance in making the trip more productive will be greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion on where I could search for leads, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.  If you have a business proposal or wish to seriously discuss how we might work together, please contact me via the inquiry address at Complex Spiral.  Domo arigato!

• Into The East was published on Monday, November 29th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Consulting, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been four replies.

Some of you may recall that a while back, I let my mouth run sarcastic in the direction of some SEO experts, a topic conference, and by implication an entire industry… and ended up publicly apologizing for same, when it turned out I’d been, if not libelous, then at the very least grossly unfair.  In the process, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, the guy who organized the conference I was maligning, floated the idea that I might come speak at one of their conferences.  I indicated that I’d be interested.

As a result, I’ll be appearing on a panel at SES Chicago.  The other two panel members are, as it happens, the very same people I bad-mouthed back in August.  So that ought to be interesting.  More information, and links, are available on the Events page at Complex Spiral Consulting.

So what standards-centric question(s) do you think I should ask of these SEO experts?  The one that’s top of my list is: “Exactly what effect, if any, does semantic markup have on search engine rankings?”  A related question: “How does content ordering affect search engine indexing?”  I’m sure there are others, and I’m happy to be a conduit for asking them of people who should know, and getting the answers back to you.  So ask away—and be polite, please.  I’m not going to be talking to comment spammers, but people who learn the ins and outs of search engine behaviors to help clients get wider exposure of their content.  They’re not too dissimilar from those of us who learn the ins and outs of browser behavior to help clients get their content online in the first place.  I failed to respect that before, and won’t make the same mistake again.

• Preparing For SES Chicago was published on Monday, November 22nd, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been twenty-one replies.