Multiple players, video formats, and text-file types bring about incompatibilities. Your chosen video format may limit what you can do with captions, and in any case your viewers will need a player that can run your video and the captions. This is particularly cumbersome with many divx caption formats. However, of all the captioning techniques, the divx is among the best.

The form of captions – typography, placement, chunking, speed, identification of non-speech information, and other factors – varies widely according to player type. Yet captioners are, at the same time, surprisingly limited in their options for captioning form; authors have much less control than in other captioned media. Of particular interest is the complete absence of fonts that are designed for online captioning and proven to be legible, readable, and usable by viewers.

Authoring tools are hard to use, sometimes unreliable or expensive, and inaccessible to people with disabilities other than hearing impairment. (No captioning software is known to adhere to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, for example.) The Youtube captioning service provides a pretty good interface, but still involves much manual labour that needs to be resolved.

Web authors who wish to provide captioned video in order to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines may find that certain other browser incompatibilities cause them to violate the Guidelines in some other way. Also, the Guidelines permit Web developers to provide simple transcripts rather than actual captions.
Online captioning is almost exclusively an English-language phenomenon. Which is why, when sites like www.ted.com have multilingual captions, you must stand back in awe! Captions in other languages are hard to find; character encoding can be unreliable.

There is no easy way to convert captions into transcripts or Web pages with semantic, valid XHTML or similar markup. This has implications for the reuse of captioning in a learning repository.
Most online captioning is closed, using video players’ own formats and functions to hide captioning inside or alongside the video stream. Closed captioning replicates the model used nearly all the time on TV, on video and DVD, and at the movies, but may be unnecessarily complex and expensive much of the time in online captioning.

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Let’s start with the better of the two: The Labor Party

The Pros:

1. Loads very quickly: you do not want to keep potential voters waiting to load content. The ALP website loads in 2.96 seconds according to official web loading speed testers. Though I have found that it is much faster than that. The fact that the Labor party has only 12 other websites on the dedicated server also contributes to this good loading time.
2. Modern Look at feel: Labor certainly has a modern site by most standards. Adhering to a generic “WordPress Inspired” like Web2.0 theme. It uses good colour combinations, icons and sliders to create a familiar and “expected website” look and feel.
3. Basic optimisation is there: good title and description tags, good use of social media etc etc. Small SEO elements missing, but over all, not a bad effort.

Cons:

1. What I really hate about the labour website is that it is difficult to navigate to crucial pages that a potential voter may want to visit. Say a “policy” page. That would be nice! Julia Gillard has been widely criticised in the media for having “no economic plan”, so it would have been good to see “Economic Plan” somewhere in the main navigation under say a “Policy” heading and similarly a link somewhere from the homepage. Instead what you get (as shown in the image below), is an “Agenda” menu item with “more policies” submenu item with heaps of drop down pages. Not to mention the fact that the menu overlaps with the slider item. This site could definitely use a usability review!

Labor "Agenda" navigation with many submenu items!

2. The site is way too long and busy. The use becomes lost and looks to the top menu to try and gain some sort of navigational clarity. But to no avail! Whilst the “Connect With Labour” second half of the site may be an important tool in the election, it would not do much good to swinging voters who have not yet made up their minds!

3. Internal pages such as the Agenda Page abuse images. Searchability is important. Not just from the search engine perspective, but also from the users’ perspective. Bombarding visitors with an array of stupid images with smiling people and text laden images is definitely a poor decision. When I visited that page, all I wanted was a clear hierarchy of relevant pages, and what you see below is what you get! Smiling gits that do not fool anyone.

Image bombardment by labor

4. No image use?? Make up your mind labor website administrators, either you are going with the theme of cute icons and images or your are not! The Health Reform page was a horrendous usability fail! Which could have definitely used some nice sliders such as the one on the home page, icons, and videos to break up the monotonous text!

Overview: Very disappointed at the poor structure of the site. Navigationally, the Labor site really failed. Also, some of the design elements of the site were a bit dated, given that you can generate text on top of images with a neat CSS trick, that could have definitely helped the above Agenda page to say the least! But, page speed and relative modernity (to the Liberal site) means that I would grade this site 6.5/10.

Now let us turn our attention to the Liberals!

Pros

1. Dedicated server to a dedicated site. But keep reading because this still did not help the page speed!
2. Generally good SEO basics such as meta title and description etc. are pretty good!

Cons:

1. The most annoying thing about this site, which made me very angry and actually forced me to leave the site was the terrible loading speed! According to most website speed tools, the site loads in over 3 seconds. However, on several machines that I have tested, the site takes 7-10 seconds to load!! Now the site is not that heave at just over 40kb, but something is slowing it down majorly. Maybe the server is old, and is unable to cope with web traffic or modern code! Maybe there are plugins and database issues that need to be sorted out. Yes, Tony Abbot is an economic conservative, but come on Tony, invest in a better server and website!! Not only is the page speed slow, the site keeps trying to load something continuously even after the page has loaded! On this point alone, the site fails.
2. Design: What also really annoyed me about site is the stupid, and I must say, patronising background graphic of the heavens opening up. To me, this image exacerbated the anger that the slow loading time of the site has ignited. This allusion to religion, only diminished the modernity of the site and further helped to support Abbotts’ poor reputation as being out of touch with modern values! The colour scheme was pale, and the home page banner image should have been a slider or an interactive widget of some sort, but definitely NOT an image of Abbott with his mouth in a semi open state! Smile!

3. I became really excited to see “Policies” in the main navigation menu. This quickly faded when I had to wait 10 seconds for the page to load, and faded even quicker when I realised that all of the internal links were in PDF format!!! Was it that difficult to hire an admin person to simply transfer all of the PDF data from the cumbersome PDF files into simple text and add some images??! Another fail! Also, Tony, considering that the elderly are likely to vote for you, try and make your website easier for them to navigate and don’t confuse them with downloads of PDFs!

Overall: The Abbott website is most definitely a fail due to the extremely poor usability due to slow loading speed and prolific use of PDFs. Overall score: 3/10.

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March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.

May 19-20, 2010: Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I’m doing a site review session.

June 8-9, 2010: SMX Advanced in Seattle

November 8-11, 2010: PubCon in Vegas

I was gone last week (February 9-13) for the TED conference, but that was attending, not speaking.

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Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.

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- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) — even when I excluded comments.

- Blurb.com will try to create a book from a blog, but it only supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not other WordPress blogs. That will help some people who want to print their blog into a book, but not everyone.

- I had the best luck with FastPencil. In order to reduce the size of your exported blog, you’ll first want to go to your comments section, click on the “spam” link and clear out any spam comments by selecting all the spam comments and clicking “Empty Spam”. Then you can export your WordPress blog (from the Dashboard, click Tools, then Export) as an XML file that you can download to your computer. From there, FastPencil lets you upload the .xml file and then select which blog posts to include in the book. You can also filter by time, which I had to do. Even my blog posts (no comments) from the last year and a half still made a 350+ page book, and FastPencil choked on turning my entire blog into a book.

FastPencil did a few things well. Included images were imported, and some formatting such as bold made it into the PDF. But other formatting, such as code formatting and newlines/spacing between paragraphs didn’t make it. Embedded content such as videos or polls were likewise empty. Trying to import my entire blog also didn’t work. But all in all, I was impressed with FastPencil. They also have nice collaboration tools (e.g. you can designate editors, reviewers, co-authors, and project managers to help in writing/polishing the content). The site also works through your web browser instead of as a downloadable program, which appealed to me. If you’re used to WordPress, FastPencil won’t be too much of a change.

It’s still not a point-and-click affair to make a nice looking coffee table book out of a blog, but it’s getting closer. Right now, the “make a book” niche feels like the early days of recordable CDs. Back then, CD-R discs were expensive enough that I would spend time to make sure that I used all the free space on the CD. Eventually prices dropped so much that you didn’t feel bad about burning a half-empty or not-perfectly-polished CD.

If you’ve tried other blog-to-book services or websites, let me know your experiences in the comments.

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Styling Regular websites

Speaking SEO wise an HTML website is the best for bots and readability. However, many dynamic, CMS based websites are almost as search engine friendly as static sites, and the usability and functionality they offer is unsurpassed. A nice flash header, background animation and javascript often prove to be more viable options in aesthetic quality than FLASH built websites. Of course, if money is no issue whiz computer experts can integrate FLASH and dynamic code.

The advantage of conventional websites

Flash websites are often read as a single page by the search engines. Whilst you may have laboured tirelessly to provide quality content, you will not reap the search engine benefits of this toil as bots are not able to read into .swf files and only view your site as a single graphic. As a result, a 50 page website is turned into 1 page. This means less internal linkage and any changes made to content are not indexed. Whilst dynamic and HTML websites clearly show each page as a separate entity within your URL, and any changes made to content attract the Google bot and others to return more frequently to your site, thereby contributing to higher rankings.

Optimizing Flash

All is not lost with FLASH however, if you insist on travelling ‘the road less travelled’, however, be prepared to spend extra money on optimization. For an SEO, it is definitely no easy task to optimize FLASH. It involves aggressive meta data entry, clever CSS tricks and some semi white hat div tag tricks. But a proficient SEO will tell you that you need to build a dynamic website around your existing FLASH one and place all of your written content there. Effectively this provides an access point for bots and spiders to crawl the content and increases the size of your site generally (which is always a positive).

Optimizing FLASH takes a significant investment into SEO services as it involves virtually generating a whole new website to complement your existing one. You can save yourself the expense and trouble by simply going with a hybrid model.

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The Google ballyhoo, as I would like to call it, has created a somewhat deceptive illusion that Google is the most relevant search engine. It is true, that at one point in time, Google was the best search engine, providing quality, fast and honest results. However, several changes in algorithm, the realization of the power of search, and the ‘Google Currency’ (see my previous  blog) have, in my honest opinion, changed Google for the worst. This however, is not to discount the efforts of Yahoo and Live (MSN), I believe that these search engines, particularly Live, have been quietly, yet quickly learning from their competitor, and, as such have caught up, and arguably overtaken Google in search result relevancy.

The early 2000’s witnessed a vast vacuum of search engine competition with Google searing ahead on its patented search engine algorithm, leaving Yahoo and MSN scratching their heads over what went wrong. However, as I pointed out in my previous  blog, the virtual ‘Google Currency’ that has become particularly powerful and expensive today has served as the largest incentive to vary search algorithms and prevent quality websites from reaching respectable results.

Let me elaborate by considering an analogy. You bake cookies to help the homeless, your cookies are so good that the homeless love your cookies and recommend them highly. All of a sudden, your cookies are a great hit, and the line to get your cookies is enormous (no, this is not a lifted plot from ‘Small Time Crooks’, bear with me). In fact, the line to get cookies from you for free is so large, that you are not coping with the demand, so, in order to manage the demand, you start charging 50c for your cookies. Sure this is a reasonable price to pay for quality. Great thinking! The implementation of a fundamental law of economics has helped you mange your demand. But wait….the amount of people wanting your cookies is still increasing, so what do you do? Raise the price again and expand, open shops, go public, create a brand. You now manage a large factory producing cookies, and you no longer make the cookies yourself, instead, the cookies are made by machines and people you hired to oversee the project.

Now folks, the point of this rather extended comparison of Google to a cookie factory is to illustrate that the Google industry has become a crumbling cookie. The vast demand for search relevancy has meant that Google introduced Adwords to help advertisers achieve results quickly, but an even higher demand for the Adwords Google Currency, meant that the key-word auction system was invented. The outcome of these steps resulted in an exponential growth of the company. The creation of a virtual ‘factory’ leads to inflated prices for search terms, loss of quality control, sacrifice of morals, and the deprivation of the poor (search engine users) from delicious, free search engine results. This phenomenon has caused many to revert back to their old search engines, and this, may not be a bad thing…

Lets compare the natural search engine outcomes for a keyword phrase like ‘sydney seo’. To make life easier, I will look at the first result on Google for each of the three top search engines: Google comes up with pilkster.com/ a general portal website, with no relevant data in the title or description, but a page rank of 5. In fact, the term ‘sydney seo’ does not even show on the landing page of the search! Yahoo, comes up with a slightly better result by showing www.seosydney.com.au/contact_seo_sydney.html as its first result. This is also a rather bad outcome, as it is the contact page, and does not have much content that would deem it worthy of a top search engine result. Live, on the other hand, seems to be the only one which provided a good and justifiable first search engine result of www.sydneyseo.com.au . The respective URL outcomes for 21st May 2007 for each search engine are give here, they may change by the time you view them the seo&btnG=Search&meta=," target="_blank">Google result, the  seo&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&fp_ip=AU&x=wrt&meta=0" target="_blank">Yahoo result , the  seo&go.x=0&go.y=0&form=QBRE" target="_blank">Live result .

As I have suggested in my previous  blog, I believe that Live is the best and most relevant search engine for images. I find the rollovers to be very useful and aesthetically pleasing. I am now of the opinion that Live is producing more relevant search engine results than Google or Yahoo. Perhaps, this will change, perhaps when the tide of searchers return their loyalties to Live, Yahoo and others, Google will be forced to re consider its search policy. Until then, I encourage everyone to give Live a chance.

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Broadly speaking, Web 2.0 represents the movement away from individual websites and web pages, and a progressive movement towards a unified web community, where information is gathered from a myriad of sources and presented to the end user in a singular manner. This also means that the internet will become an even bigger part of everyday life. Ultimately though, you will probably not notice the effect and change that has and will be brought about by Web 2.0, and this is perhaps the reason for its undoubted success so far and in the future.

So how do you keep up with the evolving nature of the internet?

At first, this may strike you as a near impossible feat, however, you may find that you have already incorporated elements of Web 2.0 in your website. For instance, a major hallmark of Web 2.0 is interactivity and the immersion of the internet in everyday routine. If your website has a forum or a place for your customers or viewers to comment or express their opinion, you have already incorporated Web 2.0 in your website. Essentially, anything that makes the internet visitor act instead of passively absorbing information is a positive step in assuring your business’ success within the Web 2.0 environment.

Whilst interactivity may seem like a rather simple and perhaps obvious step for the internet, in actual fact, what is taking place, is a complex psychological and scientific process. Technically speaking, the user is encouraged to shift the way they intake and process information from the rear hemisphere of the brain (responsible for absorption of information) to the frontal lobes, where cognitive planning and critical thought take place. This is a much more effective learning technique that is commonly encouraged. By facilitating interaction, the changing nature of the internet allows for more effective learning and browsing experiences without the user necessarily realizing it.

The other process that is taking place, is the movement away from the conventions of voyeurism that plagued Web 1.0. Specifically, the web’s initial cornerstones were based on presenting large amounts information in an simple, easily accessible manner, this made pornography propagators and initiators immensely successful. However, this also instigated a period of social voyeurism, where the internet viewer was engaged, even hypnotized by the monitor without a secondary thought in mind. Now, Web 2.0 is encouraging people to be more active online by expressing their opinions, taking actions and interacting with each other. Progressive e-business workers have already taken advantage of these trends by creating online ads that ask the user to play a game or participate in a survey first, before trying to sell products to them.

Lastly, a crucial aspect of Web 2.0 is dynamically generated web content. If you or your web designer are still using simple HTML to generate content, you are wasting time, money and are not using your online space effectively. Dynamic websites made using languages such as PHP and ASP allow the website administrator to simply edit websites by accessing a back end, user friendly system to update content instead of having to deal with HTML code directly. Furthermore, these dynamic languages allow the incorporation of interactive and useful modules on your website that can improve the usability, functionality and quality of your website environment. It is by taking these actions that you and your business can actively participate in the Web 2.0 environment.

Web 2.0 is a rather insidious phenomenon which should result in a largely positive outcome for users and business owners in general. Making your website user-friendly and interactive are important steps to take to ensure that you are keeping up with latest internet trends.

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The answer to this question lies at the heart of search engine competition, and is the main reason for Google remaining the leading search engine. A search engine uses a number of different factors to provide search results to your browser within split seconds after the query has been entered. One of the factors taken into account is the number of links.
Links work in a similar way to word of mouth promotion. For instance, if you like your local website design company, you may recommend them to you friends and acquaintances. Linking to a website, is ‘virtually’ the same thing.

Exchanging Links
Whilst finding links may seem like a relatively uncomplicated process, it is important to remember that the people working at Google, Yahoo and Live are savvy, and they have caught on….
This means that if your site is linked to a ‘link farm’, a site dedicated to creating outbound links, without any substantial content, your ranking will suffer as well. Similarly, if you are linked with a poor website, that is not updated regularly, is out of date, does not meet international web standards and has a poor ranking of its own (amongst other problems), your site will suffer too.

So how to build up link popularity without sacrificing the integrity of your site?

The most important issue to consider in finding linking partners, is to make sure that their site is a high quality site. This can be done in a number of ways. The most easy way to do this is to simply, look at the site’s Google ranking, which can be gained via the Google toolbar. However, a site may still be of high quality even if it does not have a Google ranking. For instance, if the site has recently started up, but is regularly maintained and updated with fresh content and functionality, it is a definite asset in link building. This sort of site, will gain popularity quickly, and as its ranking grows, your site’s ranking will grow accordingly. In judging whether a site is worthy of a link exchange, it is also important to look how many people link to that site and how relevant the content of the site is to your website. Make sure that if your selling apples, that the sites linking to you are about fruit, and not the arguments for and against evolution.

Directories
A sure way to build up incoming links is by submitting your site to quality directories. DMOZ, is the first obvious choice. It is frequently browsed by Google and other search engines, and receives much user traffic. However, getting into DMOZ can be a pain, as it is still controlled and maintained by people. So getting listed can take up to several months. In the mean time, try to find directories for your business type, such as landscaping directories, or wine directories, and directories within your locality, such as Melbourne or Sydney directories. Often, these are free, and are a sound investment.

Paid Link Exchanges

Often, many sites and directories will offer you an express listing or a special, sponsored listing for a fee. These are sometimes worth considering if you think that the website is of a high standard. Browse through the pages, and look at the site’s page rank, and if you find that this site is fit, then paying for the link could be a positive step. As a guideline, the most you should be paying for link exchanges is up to $35 for a years listing on a website or directory, and the median price should not exceed $8.00, unless it is something like the Yahoo directory which charges $300 USD to be listed. These are often not worth the money, you can find other cheaper, quality links which will probably do your site more good than the Yahoo listing.
Getting links is a gradual process. Do not be intimidated by sites which have links in the hundreds or even thousands. It took them time to accumulate those links too! Set yourself a benchmark for the year and try reach that goal in link exchanges, and remember quality outweighs quantity.

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Premature launching may have a nasal spray solution in real life, but a premature website launch may cost you more than the odd grand it would cost to get your site properly checked before hand.

In starting up an effective internet marketing campaign you definitely need to know what to do. But more importantly, you must know what NOT TO DO.
Many start up website administrators fall in to some cleverly laid out traps by search engine gurus.
So in this blog I will point two initial foolproof strategies and identify some foolish traps to avoid.
“Premature launching may have a nasal spray solution in real life, but a premature website launch may cost you more than the odd grand it would cost to get your site properly checked before hand.”

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