Marissa Mayer Leaving Google? Don't Laugh

There are reports that Marissa Mayer is leaving Google. Barry Schwartz commented briefly about it today on SearchEngineLand and he points to a report coming from Valleywag yesterday. I've heard Mayer speak at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose in August of 2007 where I took a few photographs of her conversation with Danny Sullivan, below. (Click the image for more photos)

SES-8-22-07

She seemed personable and intelligent there as she discussed Google search and displayed the iPhone interface on her phone. I've briefly mentioned her comments in a post on "previous Query Refinement" but don't recall hearing much from her elsewhere.

To get a better idea of what google is losing if she does indeed depart, I took a look at a video of her presentations at Google I/O Developer conference 2008. Here's that hour long presentation if you have time for it:

It's often odd to see executives leave successful companies, knowing that they have made major, substantial contributions to the shape of that success. The video above is a great way to become familiar with what Google is losing.

Gawker apparently wants to poke with the sharpest stick and they focus on her personal fortune as the 19th employee of the startup, fresh out of Stanford and her laugh! The laugh does surface a time or two in her I/O conference presentation above, but seems endearing and humanizing there.

Google is apparently about to lose a big talent. I've often wondered why people leave startups after they go public - those who help to build the vision over time. Sergei and Larry are clearly not serial entrepreneurs. They are staying. Is Mayer on the way out?

eHow Wins Mashable's "How To" Open Web Award Category

eHow.com won the Bloggers Choice for the "How To" category of the Mashable Open Web Awards! Rich Noguchi, community manager for eHow, announced the win this morning on the eHow Blog.

This comes on the heels of getting a bit of Television love from New York Fox Affiliate WNYW where eHow GM Greg Boudewijn along with eHow Food expert Bethany Frankel were both featured in a "How to Make Money from Home in a Tough Economy" news spot. How-To is an expanding category of content and to dominate for what are normally "Stop Words" is quite an achievement.

YouTube offers Search From ALL Embedded Videos

Today I was reviewing my blog after adding a TwitPic widget to the shoulder (left side) and coincidently moved the cursor over an embedded YouTube video on the Google iPhone App when I noticed a search box appear under my cursor!

Wow, that is pretty incredible and according to the YouTube blog, they just recently added the functionality - I love it when I hear about new stuff when it's still new. Searching YouTube from all embedded YouTube videos, wherever they are in blogs and web sites all over the webIs pretty impressive!

I've often been watching an embedded video on a blog here or there, wanted to see a related video that wasn't shown in the "Related" videos they incorporate into the scrolling strip at the bottom of each video after completion of the clip you just finished watching. I always think, "Nah, I'm busy right now - I'll go later" (I never do that) but now I'm in danger of actually getting distracted immediately - NOW - because I can search YouTube from the video I've just watched, on the site I'm already on.

This is a great offering from YouTube and may result in many of us who formerly resisted wasting our time watching too much YouTube stuff to start wasting too much time watching more YouTube stuff. Because we can now search for it from every existing YouTube player across the web.

Below is an example from the YouTube blog explaining the search feature. Take a look at other new features while you are at it, like the ability to see closed captioning, translations of those closed caption subtitles, and all included video annotations from the author. Those features are basically available from the button in the lower right corner of the video player.

Impressive stuff guys! I hope I can resist the temptation to use the search feature and stop myself from looking at foreign language closed captions

SEO Accessibility for Visually Impaired Visitors: OdioGo

For years I've been interested in SEO as it related to web accessibility issues. After doing some initial research into how SEO was tied to accessibility, I wrote an article (linked above) suggesting that they are so closely linked they should be married. So far I've found little interest among clients in making their sites fully W3C Compliant for Accessibility, due to the low volume of blind visitors to their web sites.

Visually impaired web visitors often use special screen readers to allow them auditory access to web page text content. But today I stumbled across a tool that makes text content accessible, not only to visually impaired, but to anyone who'd rather listen than read. So there is actually little to no SEO benefit to the audio option discussed here.

This makes "Accessible" have another meaning - as in accessible to those who prefer auditory to visual content. As a matter of fact, you can subscribe via iTunes if you like, among others.There is a great audio subscription page hosted by OdioGo, which gives visitors the option of listening to a stream of all posts or downloading individual MP3's.

As you may have noted, there is a "Listen Now" link right below the post title above, which plays an automated "Text to Speech" version of this blog post. I doubt there is any SEO benefit to that and since it is displayed using javascript, it won't work for those who surf with javascript turned off. That's a bit ironic, since accessibility is often opposed to content displayed using AJAX or javascript.

I've been interested not just in accessibility though - I'm interested in availability to all who might be interested, including those who don't happen to speak my language. I've recently installed the Google Translate widget on several of my websites for the benefit of those who seek my content in other languages (in the left shoulder on this blog).

Again, no value to SEO there, and there are no cached versions of those pages to get indexed in foreign search engines, but it does make the content available and useful for more people - who may use the AddThis "Share" button to bookmark - which leads to more external inbound links and higher rankings.

I guess it's a great illustration of the concept "Just create great content" and your audience will find you. In this case, those who speak other languages, and those who would rather listen than read your blog.

Demand Media @ Web 2.0 Conference 2008

The video below is Richard Rosenblatt at the Web 2.0 conference presenting on Demand Media Social Media tools. Pluck on Demand discussed and explained.

Demand Media

View SlideShare Demand Media Web 2.0 presentation or (tags: web2summit)

Full disclosure: I work for Demand Media.

Google Mobile Voice App Live: iTunes App Store

Just saw that the google Mobile App is live on the iTunes store. Even though it isn't apparently available as an update through the Application itself. Problem is that the link here doesn't work through the iPhone itself. Grrrrr. Have to wait until I get home to download and test it.

AddThis Social Bookmark Widget for Open Web Award

I have been a strong advocate of the AddThis widget to ease social bookmarking since I first spotted it in September of 2006 and did an emailed interview of co-founder Dom Vonarburg here at RealitySEO.

Since then, it has spread like wildfire to major media sites like Time.com, CBS, ABC and a long list of web publishers that needed a scalable way to do link building. As you can see from this blog, I use it here at the foot of every post.

For me, the single AddThis dropdown widget has always been preferable to what I've heard called "Iconistan" - where sites show a collection of up to a dozen social bookmarking site icons on every article page.

This single tiny social bookmarking widget allows visitors to any site where it is used to bookmark the landing page easily at up to 39 social bookmarking services.

Here is an example inline so you can view details by hovering as you read.



Since the beginning, AddThis has offered publishers new tools, like branding the popup window which results if users choose the "more" option on the dropdown, customization of the sites shown in that dropdown, and tracking for publishers of how many times the widget is used by visitors and for which bookmarking services.

AddThis has constantly added new services to the pop-up as they have become popular and this makes it easier on publishers to keep up with the ever-evolving world of social media. The single tool gives you access to 39 social media sites in a single widget and adds trackability.

AddThis is the perfect win-win - ease of access to social bookmarking sites for users and trackability and link building scalability for publishers. Recently AddThis was acquired by ClearSpring and those added resources and reach will no doubt allow improvement of the tool.

I was happy to see that AddThis has been nominated for the Mashable Open Web Awards and, as a big fan of widgets, I want to make it possible for readers to vote using the widget below. Simply enter your email address and you'll receive a follow-up email from Mashable to confirm your vote.