Getting email responses

“Sim­ple name-slug per­son­al­iza­tion can lift the click-through rate by up to 30%. We’ve seen true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion lift response rates by 300%.”

– Rachael Heapps (Rap­pDig­i­tal) in an inter­view with Direct

Obvi­ously this is talk­ing about email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns (though it’s prob­a­bly not a bad idea stick­ing the name of the per­son you’re writ­ing to on per­sonal emails, either!) and is prob­a­bly quite unsur­pris­ing. With a lit­tle bit of intel­li­gent mail­ing (time-of-day sched­ul­ing, etc.) it’s quite triv­ial to make mass emails appear to orig­i­nate from a real per­son. In my last job we sent out over 110,000 “name-slug” cus­tomised emails each week in a lit­tle over 8 hours (~15,000 an hour) and then a lit­tle faster after some opti­mi­sa­tions (I think it was cut down to six), so if you start it not too late in the morn­ing it’s quite pos­si­ble to get out mes­sages over the course of the day that appear as though they have a gen­uine, per­sonal, author. (The pur­pose, of course, being the pro­mo­tion of Australia’s num­ber one cult-of-celebrity morn­ing show!)

Of course that was newslet­ter con­tent, not the “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” [sic] that Heapps speaks of, but for the most part it’s dif­fi­cult to see the appeal of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” more broadly — busi­nesses will gen­er­ally have a core focus and if their cus­tomers are receiv­ing emails from them it’s prob­a­bly in rela­tion to that core area. Excep­tions are obvi­ously out there… two that spring to mind are wholesalers/distributors and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary cre­ative agen­cies (web/print, event/web, print/vision, etc.) that have fairly dis­tinct groups of clientele.

For churches, “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” could take a vari­ety of forms but prob­a­bly won’t in the kind of auto­mated capac­ity Heapps sug­gests. For exam­ple, you could poten­tially have dif­fer­ent email mes­sages for youth/adults, par­ents (kids ministry)/unmarried/childless adults, men/women. How­ever, I do think these would be dif­fer­ent email mes­sages and not merely “per­son­al­i­sa­tions” of the same core email. Then again, if your church sent out a weekly newslet­ter this might be some­what different.

The way St Matthias does things is sim­ply to send out emails as required to rel­e­vant peo­ple. This isn’t man­aged ter­ri­bly well at present and I’m hop­ing we’ll be able to change that over to a proper email cam­paign sys­tem some­time in the near future (when, you know, spare time rears its ugly head!) — BUT, tech­ni­cal aspects aside — it does mean that there is a cer­tain free­ness in the way things are run.

We can send out emails any time, not just when it’s time for a newslet­ter to drop around — and we don’t need to send out emails at all unless there is some rea­son to. That last point is pretty impor­tant, because it means that peo­ple aren’t stress­ing about cre­at­ing a newslet­ter each week/fortnight/month unnec­es­sar­ily. It also means that email from Matthias, in the eyes of our mem­bers and part­ners receiv­ing mes­sages, remains a vehi­cle emi­nently for the pur­poses of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In a way, this is our ver­sion of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion”: irrel­e­vance is not expected, and, pre­sum­ably, we get a bet­ter response for it (though email and web cam­paigns are still quite sep­a­rate… by which I mean to say web cam­paigns are non-existent, and we can’t track email responses accordingly!)

There is, of course, a fac­tor of size. A youth­group with even 40 kids and six or seven lead­ers is prob­a­bly going to strug­gle to write enough con­tent for a newslet­ter each week — or, even if they’re not strug­gling, there are per­haps bet­ter ways they could have spent that time. A larger group might find it immensely help­ful to keep in touch this way.

“Newslet­ter” is a fairly abstract term, how­ever, and don’t hear me say­ing there’s no role for emails that don’t com­mu­ni­cate any­thing new. They’re great for send­ing reminders (auto­matic or man­u­ally crafted) about events even where peo­ple have known about the events for ages. They’re also great for con­sol­i­dat­ing things that have already been said or done (though I per­son­ally see much less of this hap­pen­ing — reflec­tion is more the realm of blogs these days than email, per­haps). Most of all, they’re great when they’re per­sonal and rela­tional. A cold form-mail doesn’t have the same impact as a warm or slightly jovial form-mail, and even the slightly jovial form-mail pales in com­par­i­son with a tru­ely per­sonal mes­sage (in com­po­si­tion and content).

Which raises the ques­tion as to whether this whole thing seems strangely verisimil­i­tudi­nous for a rea­son. We strive to emu­late this per­sonal essence in mechan­i­cal utter­ances (oh, gosh, it’s AH all over again) and find that we can lift our response rates with “true” (there’s the verisimil­i­tude, I guess) con­tent personalisation.

But this is just shout­ing in the mar­ket­place. If we will blame email and elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the decay of inter­ac­tion in soci­ety, we must remem­ber that it is cer­tainly not the first one-to-many medium. The only dif­fer­ence I can see is that, in this mar­ket­place, there are some­times walls of one-way glass that pre­vent reply. That metaphor is inter­est­ing, because it sug­gests that the speaker (the observed one, speak­ing to the mar­ket­place) is the one most dis­ad­van­taged by this cir­cum­stance. We have no right to reply, but they can­not even see us. They know noth­ing about their audi­ence; their audi­ence can­not steer them in the right direction.

This isn’t some Clue­train bea­tup, but an obser­va­tion of what is, upon a lit­tle reflec­tion, self-evident. Essen­tially, if you have a mes­sage to get across to peo­ple, don’t make their job in receiv­ing it any more dif­fi­cult than it needs to be. If you have ambi­gu­i­ties in your mes­sage, let them ask. The ten­dency of organ­i­sa­tions to use no-reply@example.org email addresses is com­pletely con­trary to rea­son with regards to this issue of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The one excep­tion is mass media, which is, it must be said, def­i­nitely not most of us.

# by Josh on September 22nd, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Intoxication

I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, use­less IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of con­fig­ging it worked but couldn’t sub­mit because of that depen­dency… it saved a data file I could sub­mit with Win­dows, though) and am astounded.

After zero-config, installers work mag­i­cally, 3d engines func­tion, and every­thing is gen­er­ally incred­i­ble. I read this on someone’s blog ear­lier today: “with that I was able to install the lat­est Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writ­ing). This comes with bet­ter sup­port for HL2 and WoW.” and con­se­quently was afraid the ver­sion in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and gen­er­ally useless.

No, the author is cor­rect in say­ing “bet­ter support” — there is intrin­si­cally fan­tas­tic sup­port for pretty much every­thing. It’s incred­i­ble. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play var­i­ous games. Linux, appar­ently, is no longer a bar­rier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing chal­lenge as com­pata­bil­ity lay­ers keep grow­ing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, but am con­tent with hav­ing ten­ta­tively embraced the gamer side of geek for one week­end. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough devel­op­ment work to jus­tify it for the next cou­ple of months. MS Office would be a pleas­ant addi­tion to the reper­toire, though OpenOf­fice is excel­lent for most appli­ca­tions. I’d never go back to using Word for prepar­ing real doc­u­ments, but per­haps for things requir­ing collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d prob­a­bly get MS Office for cre­at­ing Pow­er­point templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnec­es­sary. It’s just fan­tas­tic to think that it is, all of a sud­den, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m wax­ing lyri­cal about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the bril­liance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue oth­er­wise… but they’re wrong :-)

# by Josh on September 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Speech: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

No pretty PDFs of this one. I wrote it in a nor­mal word-processor (because jaggy, unjus­ti­fied lines are eas­ier to read) so there were no LaTeX sources to make doc­u­ments from. OpenOf­fice does PDF export but there’s not much point. Shrug. Speech fol­lows, ~5mins (prob­a­bly over, closer to 6). ~950 words.

Scene 4 in Act 2 of Shakespeare’s Cym­be­line affords us a great deal that is of inter­est when exam­in­ing the devel­op­ment of romance nar­ra­tive through­out time.

This por­tion of the play is a scene — just in case, you know, every­one doesn’t, ah, remem­ber what the read­ing was — a scene in which Posthu­mus is in the house of Phi­lario, dis­cussing the present polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion that exists between Rome and Eng­land. As Penny Gay men­tioned in her sec­ond lec­ture on Cym­be­line, there’s a cer­tain depar­ture from his­tory at this point. We are made aware that there is trou­ble brew­ing over the ces­sa­tion of the pay­ment of trib­utes to Rome, and, in Posthu­mus’ words, “this will prove a war”.

It’s unabashed nation­al­ism, com­pletely shame­less, and writ­ten in such a way that a con­tem­po­rary audi­ence would thor­oughly approve: “You shall hear/ The legions now in Gal­lia sooner landed/In our not-fearing Britain than have tidings/Of any penny trib­ute paid.” O’Neill would, how­ever, have us call this some­thing other than the re-writing of History.

It is the con­struc­tion of a fic­tional world — a fic­tional world that, it should be said, bears some mark of real­ity… but a fic­tional one nonethe­less. In fic­tion, as O’Neill explains, every­thing is con­tin­gent upon noth­ing aside from the whim of the author; that term, of course, extend­ing to include “play­wright”, “poet”, and all other man­ner of narrative-creator.

So in this fic­tional world, against this back­drop of polit­i­cal tur­moil, Iachimo enters. He enters amidst Posthu­mus’ nation­al­is­tic out­bursts, and it almost appears as though Posthu­mus doesn’t realise the issue at hand has altered, so unfal­ter­ing is his courage in his spouse, as with his nation.

“I hope the brief­ness of your answer made/The speed­i­ness of your return.” — he could well be speak­ing of an emissary’s rebut­tal at the hands of a for­eign power demand­ing trib­ute. There is some­thing diaphanous about the edges of these themes, as though Shake­speare has feath­ered them together inten­tion­ally. Our con­cep­tion of “state” is quite dif­fer­ent from that of mar­riage, but per­haps there is some­thing to be made of the way in which they are together, here. I think it pos­si­ble that we are being invited to exam­ine Posthu­mus against expec­ta­tions of what befits a “good” hus­band, specif­i­cally with regards to his lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. As a poten­tial states­man, Posthu­mus has not yet been thor­oughly dis­qual­i­fied. That comes in the scene fol­low­ing this, wherein he throws a hys­ter­i­cal, misog­y­nis­tic, tempter tantrum.

I con­sider this jux­ta­po­si­tion of polit­i­cal and rela­tional dis­cus­sion some­thing that is meant to con­nect the two in our minds: Posthu­mus is, after­all, being eval­u­ated not only as the con­demn­ing hus­band of Imo­gen, but also as a poten­tial ruler of the state. His apti­tude for both roles is seri­ously brought into ques­tion through­out this play: and often through the same events.

In an envi­ron­ment of ironic cru­dity, the sup­posed elite of Renais­sance Europe gather in Philario’s house, jest­ing about the con­stancy of, in par­tic­u­lar, Posthu­mus’ wife Imo­gen. Posthu­mus is agree­ably con­fi­dent in his wife’s fidelity, but, some­what less agree­ably, will­ing to sub­ject her to the approaches of one Iachimo. In con­clud­ing their wager, Posthu­mus declares:

Only, thus far you shall answer: if you make your voy­age upon her, and give me directly to under­stand you have prevail’d, I am no fur­ther your enemy; she is not worth our debate : if she remain unseduc’d, you not mak­ing it appear oth­er­wise, for your ill opin­ion, and the assault you have made to her chastity, you shall answer me with your sword.

This doesn’t take too much unpack­ing. In the case that Iachimo suc­ceeds, Posthu­mus explic­itly says “I am no fur­ther your enemy”. Back in Act II Scene IV, Iachimo is speak­ing of the par­tic­u­lars of Imogen’s cham­ber, and says he must speak in greater detail to jus­tify his knowl­edge. Posthu­mus agrees, stat­ing: “So they must,/Or do your hon­our injury”. There is a con­cern here for Iachimo’s hon­our even amidst his defama­tion of Posthu­mus’ wife. Again, on line 124, Posthu­mus responds to Philario’s ratio­nal sug­ges­tion that a cor­rupt ser­vant may have taken a token on Iachimo’s behalf, say­ing “I am sure/ She would not lose it : her atten­dants are/ All sworn and honourable”.

Sworn and hon­ourable, in fact, beyond the hon­our of his wife? Appar­ently, in Posthu­mus’ mind, this is true.

All this has a fan­tas­tic irony about it, as it serves both to cri­tique Posthu­mus as leader, and as hus­band. The two are insep­a­ra­ble; Posthu­mus has failed in ways a Renais­sance man is not per­mit­ted to fail, demon­strat­ing his cru­dity, his lack of faith, his inabil­ity to lead respon­si­bly even his wife — in the eyes of the audi­ence, he has failed.

This is realised through a nar­ra­tive that is cal­cu­lat­ing in its grad­ual rev­e­la­tion and con­struc­tion of the char­ac­ter Posthu­mus: we see this in the estab­lish­ment of the wager, Act 1 Scene 4; its con­tin­u­a­tion as Iachimo slowly unveils his deceit in Act 2 Scene 4, and Posthu­mus’ propen­sity to doubt his wife jeal­ously; his tantrum in Act 2 Scene 5; and, later, his order­ing her mur­der; and, later still, his grov­el­ing repen­tance rather unlike Iachimo’s stoic admis­sion of guilt. Iachimo is, in some respects, an anti-Posthumus. He is cal­cu­lat­ing, not impul­sive; cun­ning, not deceived; and orches­tra­tor of much action with regards to Posthu­mus’ rela­tion­ship with Imo­gen: he leads their rela­tion­ship, whilst Posthu­mus is (falsely) led.

This should not be taken to mean that Iachimo is a paragon of great lead­er­ship — this is, after­all, a com­edy in a world sus­pended between his­tor­i­cal fact and Renais­sance dis­course. There is scope for some degree of reflex­iv­ity within this play, as Shake­speare pokes fun at his own char­ac­ters, using oth­ers to delin­eate their foibles and pro­pel the nar­ra­tive towards its inevitable, genre-defined, close: poetic justice.

# by Josh on May 16th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Perplexingly Pithy

I’ve never really got­ten away with one-liners on this blog. It’s weird. A large part of that is because I’m an old wind­bag that doesn’t know how to write a sen­tence with­out a ridicu­lous num­ber of clauses, but… the proof is in the pud­ding; they should all lead some­where and make more sense more clearly than shorter sen­tences would. It’s about me not trust­ing you, dear reader, to have half a brain for your­self and under­stand what I am say­ing. I imag­ine that, by speak­ing (that is what char­ac­terises this medium of blog­ging more than any­thing else — as with instant mes­sen­g­ing, it is more about an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion than a pro­tracted series of epis­tles) more, I leave less to chance, less chance of mis­un­der­stand­ing, misinterpretation.

And I find this to be true of most other blogs I have perused in the past, with the obvi­ous excep­tion of com­pletely sim­ple statements/one-line com­men­taries to be found on posts that con­sist solely of a link to another site, and a sum­mary comment/quip. Those aren’t blogs, though, they’re link-logs. Or what­ever you’re going to call them.

Finally, I’m engag­ing with LJ peo­ple and am increas­ing per­plexed as to how one is expected to inter­act in such an envi­ron­ment. All is nor­mal, mun­dane, draw­ing a-heck-of-a-lot-of-comments; then there is a peb­ble (it is only a peb­ble) dropped onto the placid sur­face of a tightly strung mem­brane, pulled taut by dozens of inter­ac­tors (com­menters) who play a role in the blog con­text. It bounces.

Crack.

I pic­ture it like ice, because that’s a dra­matic image that appeals to me… shards, stress-fractures, mov­ing across its sur­face at incred­i­ble speed. It’s not really like that, how­ever. The sur­face is sim­ply released from the edges. It’s like those para­chute games you’d play as a kid… imag­ine peo­ple let­ting go of the edges — the peb­ble, or author (actu­ally in my orig­i­nal metaphor it was the author’s pithy-one-liner post: either ana­log will suf­fice), is left in the mid­dle beneath sheets of canvas.

Per­haps I mis­con­strue the response. Even beneath that can­vas there is, per­haps (again), a sub­ter­ranean response that goes unseen — that is, email, phone calls, SMS, IM con­ver­sa­tions… I speak of an elec­tronic com­mun­ci­a­tions ecosys­tem only, for it per­plexes me to think that any­one could or would use a let­ter to deal with such things: this, how­ever, betrays my per­sonal con­text: I am male and no longer at an age where I encounter my clos­est friends at school everyday.

But, it appears, this peb­ble bounces and causes those who were active to fall silent. Respectful.

That’s how I feel about it. That’s how I excuse it in myself.

As an alien, it is not my duty to respond… it would be inap­pro­pri­ate, engag­ing too much, likely to attract dis­dain, scorn. So afraid we are of being seen to reach out.

And I can’t help but won­der what would hap­pen if I were to start post­ing the same kinds of one-liners I see all over those kinds of very-age-specific social net­works, here. Would some­thing explode, scar­ing all com­menters away? I like to think I mix it up enough here that I scare every­one away equally… or rather, there are occa­sion­ally things that will inter­est all, but I have some­how man­aged to free myself from the con­straints of writ­ing for an audi­ence. This is post 966, by the way. That’s devel­oped writ­ing… not good writ­ing, just devel­oped. Hope­fully as I do so more I’ll under­stand the medium bet­ter… for me, yeah, there is a medium. Blog­ging is not use­less (anymore).

Even Live­Jour­nal is use­ful in its own (dif­fer­ent to this) way… it’s chiefly social. That’s the thing about hosted ser­vices over DIY jobs. DIY jobs are the best. Yeah, Word­Press counts as DIY. The point is, there’s no social facil­i­ta­tor in place. This isn’t Face­book or MySpace or Live­Jour­nal. It doesn’t have any hooks into them (excep­tion: LJ’s awe­some OpenID is del­e­gated to from this page), there’s no way to build links. I’m still an out­sider tech­ni­cally, if not oth­er­wise… LJ blow-in that I am and have been. But they’re out­siders, too. They’re out­side every other social net­work on the planet. It’s that which I find most strik­ing about social net­works… they con­tinue to facil­i­tate frag­men­ta­tion! Each cries out, “join our clique!” … and they often do.

Some are using Blog­ger, or even (MSN) Spaces. There are no social net­work­ing hooks between ser­vices. None of that group of friends uses RSS: they’re still man­u­ally check­ing (if, indeed, they do) these blogs. No con­ve­nient index-login-screen to say friends have posted new things. No attention-drawn to pithy one-liners to be ignored (or responded to in some hid­den way?) The whole sit­u­a­tion is utterly per­plex­ing. And now I feel how I imag­ine a soci­ol­ogy stu­dent must.

# by Josh on May 15th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

The Penelopiad, Chapter 26: Trial of Odysseus as Videotaped by the Maids

Essay, ENGL1002.

Screenshot of PDF front page

Full­text fol­lows, incor­rect for­mat­ting. PDF ver­sion also avail­able (proper for­mat­ting, foot­notes, etc.).

Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on April 28th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| No Comments »

Brilliant anti-AJAX comment

Pinched in full­text from a com­ment on a post regard­ing Web 2.0 (orig­i­nally writ­ten for FT, so it’s not par­tic­u­larly geeked out).

Such pages, how­ever, tended toward dull­ness and infre­quent updating.

Or, to put it another way: Such pages tended to ful­fill the orig­i­nal vision of the Web, which was to allow absolutely any­one to pub­lish infor­ma­tion that might oth­er­wise be lost to the pub­lic, in a way that allows it to be searched, indexed, book­marked, and linked to related infor­ma­tion. And accessed by absolutely any­body who’s look­ing for it.

As opposed to today’s “dynamic” Web, where you need a broad­band con­nec­tion, an industrial-grade graph­ics work­sta­tion, and more plug-ins than a Roman orgy just to look up the atomic weight of molyb­de­num. Which you can’t book­mark because the URL is a dynamically-generated con­glom­er­a­tion of the host­name, your ses­sion ID, the phase of the moon, and the bra size of the webmaster’s cur­rent girl­friend, that doesn’t point to a page that’s actu­ally stored on disk somewhere.

As nifty as it is that peo­ple have found new ways to make use of HTTP and HTML, we seem to be slowly los­ing the very con­cept of “pub­lish­ing” as “pre­serv­ing a record of today for future recall”. Instead of being the equiv­a­lent of an “address” where one can “go” to retrieve infor­ma­tion, the URL has become a “magic incan­ta­tion” that instructs a dis­tant server to per­form some action that may or may not pro­duce the same results as the last time it was used.

In some ways, that’s good: it’s nice to be able to use the same mech­a­nism to say “Bring up the lat­est edi­tion of Dan’s blog”, “Show me the cur­rent pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture read­ings of Injec­tion Molder #7″, and “Dis­play page 7 from our company’s 2003 annual report”.

But there’s some very scary Orwellian poten­tial here, as well as the risk of exac­er­bat­ing the Dig­i­tal Divide by con­stantly ramp­ing up the min­i­mal plat­form needed to access much of the web. Those librar­i­ans Dan men­tioned lately shouldn’t be the only ones wor­ried about mak­ing sure that a large per­cent­age of online con­tent remains “dull” and “static”.

I think the “Orwellian poten­tial” bit is a load of scare-mongering crap (in rela­tion to the other con­cerns posed in the arti­cle, at any rate), but every­thing else rings true.

I am, at present, work­ing on the first large-scale project I’ve been involved in where <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX/ title=“Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”>AJAX is being utilised. In this instance, yes, it was my call: yes, I do feel it’s jus­ti­fied (rea­sons include traf­fic, and the advan­tage of not hav­ing to reload an entire page — yes, it’s large scale enough for that to be sig­nif­i­cant — and sim­ple usabil­ity, because the archi­tec­ture is such that users will desire to move quickly between ele­ments of con­tent, and AJAX facil­i­tates that. More details post-release). We’ve been very care­ful to pre­serve func­tion­al­ity in non-XMLHttpRequest enabled UA envi­ron­ments, but it’s still not per­fect — book­mark­ing is one (minor, given the nature of the con­tent) prob­lem that still requires rec­ti­fi­ca­tion: that’s one thing I’m hop­ing to resolve tomor­row (along with gen­eral CSS com­pata­bil­ity back to IE 5, pos­si­bly 4 — but that’s not par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant). The Javascript is not par­tic­u­larly “unob­tru­sive” (still using inline onclick), which I’m hop­ing to sim­i­larly resolve prior to launch, but it’s not of any par­tic­u­larly great consequence.

This is not a site to be archived, as the author of the com­ment above laments. But he shouldn’t. That wasn’t ever this site’s pur­pose, so I’m not par­tic­u­larly con­cerned if the markup isn’t pres­tine. Yes, there will be RSS/Atom syn­di­ca­tion. It’s a fairly Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant site, though (I hope) not par­tic­u­larly unnec­ces­sar­ily adop­tive of such tech­nolo­gies. We’ll see.

# by Josh on January 17th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| 6 Comments »

Ansearch answers

All had been quiet on the Ansearch front as I awaited a response from Ansearch CEO Dean Jones, promised a hair under two weeks ago when I alluded to an ear­lier analysis/criticism I’d writ­ten when talk­ing about the state of play with Aus­tralian search engines, specif­i­cally refer­ring to the then-newcomer Ansearch.

Dean picked up my post via Tech­no­rati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update ser­vices to track what peo­ple are talk­ing about in real-time. I was suit­ably impressed by this dili­gence and appar­ent desire to hear what the mar­ket has to say about their prod­uct: could this be the same com­pany whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youth­ful exu­ber­ance”?

Appar­ently so. Ansearch’s begin­nings, though marred by dubi­ous prac­tices1, received praise from var­i­ous quar­ters of the main­stream press — or, at least, those quar­ters not con­trolled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. How­ever, the Inter­net com­mu­nity responded qui­etly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of dis­dain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my orig­i­nal post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an arti­cle on them in the SMH — an arti­cle which reads a lit­tle too much like a rehashed press release for my lik­ing: the tell­tale sign is in the clos­ing sen­tence “Ansearch is the search engine divi­sion of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Busi­ness sec­tion of their paper, I’d under­stand, but it wasn’t.

I wan­dered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offer­ing was mediocre. In hind­sight, it prob­a­bly didn’t help that I wasn’t shop­ping for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar — accord­ing to a ZDNet arti­cle, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focus­ing very heav­ily on the com­mer­cial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their list­ings par­tic­u­larly well, as a search for Dash­Lite turned up my Word­Press hack over com­mer­cial list­ings for the actual Dash­lite brand I inad­ver­tantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have sub­stan­tially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first arti­cle on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on sev­eral fronts. Their core offer­ing has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my ini­tial com­plaints regard­ing acces­si­bil­ity have been met. Their ancil­lary prod­uct offer­ings seem to have devel­oped nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our prop­er­ties] goes through up to 7 stages rang­ing from an ini­tial, sim­ple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved ser­vice, mini por­tal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancil­lary prop­er­ties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst sev­eral oth­ers) are cur­rently being actively sep­a­rated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quar­an­ti­ning”), and the exact direc­tion of a num­ber of these projects would become clear over the com­ing months, with the appoint­ment of a full time man­ager of these online properties.

I’m a tad con­cerned about his descrip­tion of their strat­egy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hang­ing off two words here: dis­trib­uted por­tal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (espe­cially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubi­ous domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I per­ceive it: as a com­mer­cial por­tal, and not as another Google. “We are not aim­ing to be another Google… we don’t have their bud­get and, to be frank, there are enough peo­ple try­ing to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones sug­gested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiq­ui­tous search behe­moth, and that its index is “some­thing unique… some­thing faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a rea­son for them not to try and be a por­tal. Aus­tralia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domes­tic por­tals, and I’m strug­gling to see what Ansearch will do to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch appar­ently holds an index of only 500,000 web­sites con­sid­ered by its met­rics to be “most pop­u­lar”. I argued that this was poten­tially a bad thing as rel­e­vant con­tent might lie out­side this realm: for exam­ple, this web­site per­forms well when peo­ple search for reviews of the HP 2610 or infor­ma­tion about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 play­ers that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is per­fectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be miss­ing out a lit­tle bit. They can lever­age on my con­tent for their adver­tis­ing impres­sions and poten­tial click­throughs, because they have more valu­able con­tent show­ing up in their list­ing along­side adver­tised prod­ucts. If some­one reads my HP 2610 review after hav­ing found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remem­bers hav­ing seen a “Buy HP print­ers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behav­ioural stuff, but valu­able nonetheless.

Whether it’s valu­able enough for them to bother is another mat­ter. “We spi­der our own con­tent… some­thing that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Hav­ing only 500,000 web­sites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, pro­vide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth pre­serv­ing. If that’s all resources per­mit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of pop­u­lar­ity “has a com­mer­cial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gen­der and age demo­graphic based search fea­ture, this makes sense.

Their index of pop­u­lar­ity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the low­est 20,000 that gets shuf­fled, and this seems to make sense. One has to won­der whether all the higher-ranking pages can have sub­stan­tially fresh con­tent month after month, but pre­sum­ably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was inter­est­ing to hear Jones speak­ing about these peo­ple, too: amus­ing, even! Web devel­op­ers the world over often join in spec­u­la­tion as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employ­ers) website’s per­for­mance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world sim­i­larly spec­u­late as to what those hor­ri­ble devel­op­ers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to com­plain: “The larger SE’s are hav­ing a very tough time com­ing up with clever ways to index con­tent to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that rel­e­vant con­tent should hope­fully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as inter­est­ing is Ansearch’s strat­egy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only index­ing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trick­ery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, peo­ple rarely put spam on their home page — that is, door­way pages, link farms, etc. usu­ally reside away from the main index… and, sec­ondly, it deletes mul­ti­ple results from the same web­site. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from say­ing they are rel­e­vant to 100 or 1000 key­words or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argu­ment against clients who love their splash pages!

Con­tent rich front pages aren’t, how­ever, an absolute solu­tion (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). Accord­ing to Jones, Ansearch’s pol­icy of “rank­ing sites in true usage pop­u­lar­ity, both on and off­site” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resis­tant.” I’d agree it’s a pow­er­ful met­ric, but my reser­va­tions above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algo­rithm that appears poten­tially exploitable is its fail­ure to exclude con­tent in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

A screenshot highlighting the inclusion of information between style tags in Ansearch's index

As high­lighted in the screen­shot above (click for orig­i­nal page, link may expire), Ansearch’s list­ing is includ­ing con­tent between <style> tags. This presents poten­tial for SEO abuse2, as most browsers hap­pily over­look errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a doc­u­ment: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increas­ing their rel­e­vance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely pos­si­ble the con­tent bears no weight at all — but the ques­tion of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another rea­son to reward web­sites that use seman­tic markup prop­erly, though at this stage that would exclude dis­pro­por­tion­ate amounts of the web, so I under­stand engines’ hes­i­tance to embark on any­thing like this. It’s not some­thing a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before con­tin­u­ing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web com­mu­nity hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not hav­ing embraced seman­tic markup from the out­set. Accord­ing to Jones, it’s built on a tech­nol­ogy devel­oped for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that par­tially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first com­ment on their fail­ure to use seman­tic markup was sim­ply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dis­pute the valid­ity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been estab­lished, is chas­ing a fairly dif­fer­ent mar­ket sec­tor. Their core busi­ness is search, but it’s a dif­fer­ent breed of search con­ducted in a dif­fer­ent way: and seman­tic markup and acces­si­bil­ity is a dif­fer­ent way. Encour­ag­ingly, Jones sees the poten­tial for embrac­ing seman­tic markup in the future on both tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audi­ence with var­i­ous devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced band­width expen­di­ture as a result of light­weight code” rea­son, pre­sum­ably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for trans­fers over this, on their ded­i­cated server range.

Irre­spec­tive of their rea­sons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch web­site designed with­out any tables and heav­ily styled using the CSS, which even­tu­ally will gives us more con­trol on how we present our site to dif­fer­ent media types.

Ansearch has gone through sev­eral minor enhance­ments over the past 6 months with the releases of ver­sions 1 to 1.3. We are cur­rently plan­ning a major update for ver­sion 2.0 and the issues [of seman­tic markup and sep­a­ra­tion of pre­sen­ta­tion and con­tent] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t every­thing: con­tent is what ranks well in search engines erm… con­tent is what draws an audi­ence. Ansearch’s explo­ration into the devel­op­ment of por­tal envi­ron­ments is some­thing to be watched with inter­est over the com­ing months, as well as its other busi­ness aspects, includ­ing an adver­tis­ing net­work known as Soush that remains slightly enig­matic, and the mys­te­ri­ously named “Fac­tory” division.

An announce­ment is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week out­lin­ing some­thing of Ansearch’s future direc­tion: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a pos­i­tive one, as Ansearch dis­tances itself from its much-criticised prac­tices at launch, to a diverse range of prod­uct offer­ings that uniquely ful­fil the needs of Aus­tralian Inter­net users.

Update: A fol­lowup to this has been posted, in response to a crit­i­cism that this review was overly tech­ni­cal in nature. Read on!

Notes

1 Jus­ti­fied with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sen­si­ble reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Inter­net Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
2 I noti­fied Ansearch of this shortly prior to pub­li­ca­tion in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this poten­tial prob­lem dis­ap­pears quickly.

# by Josh on September 13th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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