Materials science and the future of publishing
Posts tagged Google
Traffic estimators don’t work (well)
Jul 20th
The social news website Reddit has a post “Experts” misunderestimate our traffic, and we dont know why that documents how traffic estimator sites like Compete.com, Quantcast, and Alexa don’t work very well. They compared their own server log data and Google Analytics data to the estimates provided by these other sites.
These traffic estimating tools use their own voodoo to generate numbers so advertisers can compare sites without having access to the actual traffic numbers. The problem is, they’re skewed (and as the Reddit post documents, inaccurate).
For example, Alexa samples users who installed the Alexa toolbar, considered by Symantec and McAfee to be spyware. Do you want to rely on data generated by the kinds of users who would install BonziBuddy?
If you want real usage, you need the server logs. If you can sacrifice some accuracy (resulting from Javascript and privacy blockers), use Google Analytics. If you want a guess, take your pick.
Second thoughts on H.264
Jun 29th
Looking to send video to an iPad? It’s more complicated than I first thought.
- MPEG-LA Considering Patent Pool for VP8/WebM and X264 developer says Google’s new VP8 WebM codec is a mess – VP8 may have patent issues in addition to being a bit of a messy spec.
- Why Flash Isn’t Going Anywhere, iPad Be Damned – Moving from the Flash plug-in to the H.264 codec is like moving backward — from Flash to a more expensive Flash.
- HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web – “Much like MP3, H.264 is currently liberally licensed and also has a license that changes from year to year, depending on market conditions. This means that something that’s free today might not be free tomorrow. Like sending an H.264 file over the Internet.”
- No, you can’t do that with H.264 – Confusing licenses may limit what can be done commercially with increasingly popular video codecs like that used to deliver video to the iPad, H.264.
Update: After publishing this, John Harding of YouTube posted a defense of Flash as the primary means of YouTube’s video delivery on his company’s API Blog: Flash and the HTML5 <video> tag. This debate isn’t going away.
Matt Cutts’ SEO site review session from Google I/O 2010
Jun 3rd
Google engineer and SEO expert Matt Cutts reviews web sites and tells us what the Google search algorithms, and your users, are looking for.
If you’re an SEO nerd, there’s lots of great insights in here on how to make it easier for Google to find your content. Some are obvious, like don’t use pictures of text — use text! Other points are a bit more inside baseball, but still valuable.
1099-0488/asset/cover.gif?v=1&s=8d2ea1baa63a6897c48d0101eba1465dd14e8017 "The Journal of Polymer Science: Polymer Physics will be the main forum for the international polymer physics community.")