Search, Photography, Wine & Design

Websites as Graphs

I came across this very cool, and very interesting site the other day as I was surfing. It’s a little Java applet that scans the site that you specify by url, and outputs an on-the-fly graph of the site using a system of colored dots. At face value, it is a really neat way to visually see what is going on behind the scenes of your site and could almost pass as art. I know it’s not just cool to web geeks like me, cause I showed it to my wife and she liked it as well. The picture shown here is a graph of my site. After familiarizing myself with what the colors mean, it was interesting from an seo perspective to look at my graph, cause I got to visually see how a bot would crawl my site and access the different parts. If nothing else, it’s at least a fun way to kill some time! -kenny

New Word - PSEO

Pseo - {see-OH}
noun
A pseudo SEO
• One who presents his/her self as an seo, but who is full of bologna.
• One who is regarded as an seo simply because of the position they hold, or the company they work for
ex. “Sheri is a pseo“

What Do You Do?

DHTML - A Bunk Term of the Past

Abbreviations and acronyms these days are multiplying by the pound. Everywhere you turn someone is making up some cute saying to shorten something. Mostly I’m all for it, if for no other reason than it just makes you sound cool when you can throw these terms around and know what you’re talking about. Actually, I can often tell if someone doesn’t know what he/she is talking about because of the way that they misuse certain terms or abbreviations. Or even if they spell or capitalize them incorrectly. A common example is the word Ajax. (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) Which is correctly spelled Ajax, not AJAX. A lot of people think it should be spelled all caps because of what it stands for, but the term is actually it’s own word, and no longer considered an acronym. This may be news to you, but any programmer that actually writes javascript will confirm this information. Another one that always makes me smirk is when people group Java and Javascript together. Like they have something in common. This is more well known among geek types, that they aren’t related, but I still come across it on occasion when hearing people trying to BS over their heads about stuff they don’t know.

There are a lot of terms that I like, and use frequently. Like ‘Social Media’ - it just feels good, it’s the embodiment of the postmodern web community. Or even ‘Web 2.0′, which originally I didn’t like.. But it grew on me as it began and continues to take on new meaning day by day. And now is commonly accessed in my library of language. And these terms are extremely helpful when explaining things to colleagues and well educated clients. For example, it’s much easier to explain Last.fm as a social media music site, than taking the time to explain all of the features of the site to a peer. You just slap the term social media on there, and your intended audience can automatically assume a number of things about the site, how it works, and how they can be a part of it. -Brilliant

But then, we have a few terms that don’t help anybody. They don’t make anything easier to understand, they often require more explanation than is necessary, and sometimes even confuse your audience more than before you opened your mouth. We call these terms bunk-terms. One such bunk-term is DHTML. Which is supposed to stand for Dynamic Html (Hyper-text Markup Language). But anyone that knows the first thing about html, knows that it is not dynamic. Hence the use of other languages as javascript, php, and databases. So the explanation then is that DHTML is the use of html in conjunction with these other languages. Well that doesn’t make any sense in a number of ways.

1. DHTML is not modified html. You use the same html or xhtml as you do on any webpage, the only difference is that you add other languages. But this does not make the html new! xhtml is a term that makes sense, because it denotes that you are using a refined and defined format of html. dhtml does not denote anything about the html!

2. Just because you use more than one language does not mean that you get to make up a new language and call it a combination of the others. I speak English and Spanish. That does not warrant me to make up a bunk-term and say that I speak Hyderish. Cause then I would get to have this conversation: “What’s Hyderish?” “Oh, it’s when you speak English AND Spanish” “THAT IS NOT A LANGUAGE YOU MORON!!!” And I would be a moron if I called it that.

3. Dynamic is not descriptive at all. It’s counter productive in the realm of explanatory acronyms. Any time I have someone use the term, they have to stop and explain what they mean by using this bunk-term. Its not like a normal acronym where you can just type out each individual term in parenthesis, such as SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). And move on, but you have to explain that this bunk-term actually isn’t intuitive at all.

So why do we continue to beat ourselves over the head with these terms that don’t help us? I would hazard a guess that anyone who is familiar with this term has been frustrated with it once or more times. Are we waiting for it to catch on? If that’s the case, who is it going to catch on to? Anyone that understands the term without a lengthy explanation, most likely is better communicated to by using more relevant terms. Let’s all do each other a favor and stop using such bunk-terms. -kenny

Girl Jumping

Here’s a little shoot from the exciting sport of girl jumping. If you’ve never heard of girl jumping, as most people haven’t, it’s pretty self explanatory. There are only 2 rules in this fantastic sport:

1. The girl(s) that you jump have to be complete strangers to all parties involved. (Jumper, Photographer, or bystanders in the involved party)
2. The girl(s) can not have any prior warning before being jumped. This includes loud noises and/or laughing prior to the jump.
It is also best if, after the jump takes place, you continue walking on down the beach. Do not look back, kinda like in rock climbing, you never look down. The same principle applies in girl jumping.

This particular jump took place on Cinco de Mayo, in sunny Isla Vista, CA. Brought to you by Patron Tequila. -kenny

Calacanis Flatters Himself And Then Doesn’t Follow Up On His Word

So I found out about an article Jason Calacanis wrote over on Graywolf’s SEO Blog today. Apparently Calacanis wrote a piece that explained how one would go about getting a link from him by talking him up a bunch and first linking to him. I read his article, and I was actually surprised how pretentious one man could presume to be! Not that he has nothing going for himself, but he really thinks that he is hot stuff! AND he thinks that you ought to as well, AND write about it! So anyway, Michael Gray wrote in response in order to bait a link from Jason; which by the way way absolutely hilarious and over the top, cause he went out of his way to do every single thing Jason mentioned to get a link.. And NEVER GOT ONE! Reportedly, people that posted after Graywolf got links from Jay-Cal but not Graywolf. And that is how I found out about all of this, because of Gray’s double reply where he reported on the whole deal, and how jay-cal didn’t follow through on his promises. Personally, I like Graywolf, I get more excited to read his posts, than any other seo blog I subscribe to. So it kinda pisses me off that jay-cal treats him unfairly, especially considering his past of ignorant claims that SEO is BS. And furthermore, it’s just bad business to not follow through on something that you give your word to. I already half disliked jay-cal because of his remarks on SEO, and because of an interview he did on my partner but never posted, when he said he was going to. This just worsens it for me. And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t need and/or want a link from Jason Calacanis, especially if the way he recommends I get one is a bunch of politics that make negative progress on the whole revolution of social media that we all love so much! -kenny