I am making this my first New Year’s Resolution and I will stick to it. I will. I will.

The resolution is to be an advocate for structured data on the web. I will sing it from the mountain tops and whisper it from the valleys. Well, I might yodel it in both places but I certainly will be vocal.

In the great quest for efficiency online it is time we move beyond the 19% of websites that have XML feeds that structure the sites data to a full onslaught of education for web publishers. The semantic web is depending on it.

The semantic web is in a gestational state and no where near reaching its potential to revolutionize the way that we interact with information. The tech certainly isn’t there yet in the capacity of computing and the redundancy and review that needs to be applied to content for fully actualized linking.

What is apparent however, is that about 81% percent of the web is missing its opportunity to hop on this dog pile of ever growing linked data with information from the publisher and not just the bots that are crawling it. There is much information that can be gleaned from microformats within certain publishing platforms but there is still a mass of information that goes without inclusion into the structured whole.

As part of this resolution I will continue to push for RSS feeds since they are the simplest technology to get up and running when it comes to websites. There are tons of tools available to the put feeds on any site and every blogging platform today offers something in the way of feeds either with Atom, RSS or custom XML.

The time has come to bring data together and prepare for the long tail that awaits in a decade from now. Consider adding structured data to your site now like adding it to a time capsule. And instead of it being an 8-track requiring a special player it is more like a stone tablet with the language of the people – or the machine.

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• Technology Trends #3 – The Data Explosion (realtea.net)

My First New Year’s Resolution is a post from: TechStartups.com

I was asked to review a scenario for a friend this morning that deals with competition for mind share in an ongoing row between disparate entities. Ahem, feuding like Hatfields and McCoys as Waylon Jennings would say, and they’re doing it primarily online.

Most of us choose to go about our business online without causing confrontation. You might not choose to be involved in a situation like this.

However, if you are put in this position tactics for a remedy are below:

1. Make sure all of your sites where dynamic content is being created on have RSS feeds
2. Make sure the sites are being indexed by Google . . . and recently cached by going to Google and typing in “site:blogdomain.com” blogdomain.com being the site URL
3. Most of the sites below (I was furnished with list including Topix and Blog Catalog to mention a couple) require registration and some code editing to “claim” the sites. Register with them and follow their protocol for submission into their directories for partner programs and additional synidcation
4. Create a press release(s) that contains links, not just copy, but links to the RSS feeds from clients site(s). Example, “For more information on this ongoing issue subscribe to: http://www.blogdomain.com/rssfeed”. The popular outlets have wide syndication
5. Use this tool from Google – http://www.google.com/sktool/# and enter your sites and the sites of the competitor into it. Disregard the pricing listed on the page for AdWords and focus on the keywords. Compare the the keywords of your competitor with those of your sites and adjust accordingly in all digital communications. Organic search is king.
6. Next use this too from Google – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal once your keywords are set to see how you are doing
7. Depending on the blog or site platform you should have the ability to create keyword RSS feeds. Do this. Robots like structured data and favor feeds. Most, if not all, Google real-time alerts come from RSS feed links back to the source site.
8. Commenting on local (this is a regional battle for mind share) blogs with links to client site(s) and feeds is another way to increase chances of indexing and more favorable search results

If I were fighting this battle or one like it these are exact steps that I would take. So dear reader, if we ever lock horns, we may duel to a draw since you have my playbook.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

How to Win Mind Share in Online Battles is a post from: TechStartups.com

The good people over at CNN.com have made a significant improvement with their new redesign and it’s not what you think. Sure it is prettier, peppier and full of new web goodness, including beta a beta section.

All of this is great but what about CNN showing link love after all of these years? I believe this is the greatest improvement.

For years, CNN did not link directly to sites that it referenced in any of its reporting. Their policy dictated that a site be referenced by typed out URL and not a link. So if you were lucky enough to be written by CNN on one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web you would have not one referral that you could track.

In the redesign posts it seems as though since this restriction has been lifted authors are punch-drunk and link loving like mad. You know the kind of party I am talking about.

You can get a view of this content on their newly redesigned pages. The older pages of the site, evidenced by their two column layout and darker grey background still adhere to the old policy.

The reasoning may be that different versions of the site are controlled by a newer CMS that isn’t fully integrated with legacy content. Which, isn’t that uncommon when you are dealing with an organization as large as this Time-Warner property.

To see an example of this linking in action read Pete Cashmore’s, “Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun.” Pete is the CEO of the popular technology blog Mashable.com. Should I be as excited that CNN is partnering with Mashable . . . you bet! That however, is a post for another day.

What should also be of interest to other publishers is why CNN has opened up this linking policy. It isn’t simply because linking makes it easier for you to get to the referenced content, that is part of it, but not fully. Real links create machine readable code that can be used more readily in semantic applications for creating connections for content.

This is a big step is creating a smarter web of content that allows computer filtering, vertical syndication, structured data relationships and more of the all important SEO juice.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

CNN Linking Some Love is a post from: TechStartups.com

The semantic web is well on its way and one of the startups that has taken an early lead is Zemanta. They have taken a unique approach to linked data and the science that powers their ability to create structured content from it. They aimed their service at publishers, not the IT crowd.

Typically, semantic technology companies rely heavily on their colleagues with computer science degrees not the actual publisher. They will deliver products as API’s or server side solutions with a hefty price tag. Zemanta has created the right relationships with CMS and blogging platform owners to integrate their tools within administration sections.

They offer AJAX’ed out components in these platforms that reads from the main content box as a publisher types a post and updates linked content like photos, links and tags that are appropriate for the post. By doing this it allows the publisher to focus on their post and actual release content faster.

The core of their service is to intelligently eliminate the need for the publisher to start research from ground zero. They offer points of direction inside the administration interface to guide the publisher to resources quickly. I am most impressed with the way that Zemanta handles tags and the relationships between them.

Zemanta does offer an API, I have used it in the past. The API returns data quickly and an even more robust set than the plugin style for CMS’s. A sample request returns maps, categories, links, excerpts and more. The only problem that I encountered was one that all semantic companies have right now, context and sentiment for breaking news.

Semantic services rely on hefty algorithms that need sample data to create the links between data and develop sentiment. As a result of this issue, it makes it very hard to implement solutions that work with real-time data and syndication of that content. Most times, once something has hit a feed or been released to a partner site it cannot be updated with linked data. I’ve been told it is something that the Zemanta team is working on.

Zemanta makes it easy to Zemify your content in WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type among others and possibly Blogger in the future.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Zemify Your Content With Zemanta is a post from: TechStartups.com

Let’s start by saying that we all have been reading and participating in the most recent meme that ’seo is evil’, but this isn’t the time to get in the gutter.

Now that this is out of the way I wanted to point you in the direction of a new tool in Google Labs called Fetch as Googlebot. It allows you to run any URL from sites in your Google Webmaster account as the Googlebot. This can be of huge value when you are trying to discern just what the bot sees when it is sent out to fetch content from your sites.

To use it – login to your Webmaster Tools account, click on the site you would like to fetch, choose Labs from the top left menu, click Fetch as Googlebot, enter the URL you want to review and wait a few seconds for it to load. That’s it. The analysis is up to you.

Real value

It becomes particularly handy when you are using AJAX, hidden div layers or image based linking. You can ensure that when your content is fetched by the Googlebot that your content is making its way into the index as you intended. Whether it is a static page, dynamic one or an RSS feed you will be able to view fetched content as Google sees it. And it sees them very differently.

Below is an example of what the Googlebot sees:

Highly structured data (RSS feed)

Unstructured data (dynamic HTML)

If you were a developer on the Google team, which one would you rather index and run algorithms against?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Fetch as Googlebot – Today’s SEO tip is a post from: TechStartups.com