Category Archives: Projekte

Meine Projekte oder Dinge, die ich gelernt habe und die ich euch gerne weitergeben möchte.

Google supports RDFa – SEOs work changes forever

Google and Yahoo just announced that they’re going to support RDFa (and Microformats). Be sure that you understand what that means: This is the dawn of the Semantic Web (or you may also call it Web 3.0) and the beginning of the end of old ways of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In this post you’ll find some more info explaining what RDFa is, why I state that the Semantic Web will now emerge and why it soon will not be important to put the buzzwords into Headline-Tags (<h1>Buzzwords here!</h1>) but to link the word your content is about to the rdf-Source of what that word really means.

Talking about Google. Google is THE defining webtechnology company. The google page rank is the most important factor that a SEO cares about, and he would be doing anything to get a high page rank, as this would rank his site higher in the google search. And google search is the main entry point of the average surfer to get to content he cares about. Being highly ranked in google’s search is like being well-known and this holds a lot of marketing power. Google (and the other search engines) are doing their best for about 20 years to understand a given HTML-site and its contents, to know what to show their users when they search for a keyword. But they can never know what you mean when you talk in your blogpost about Big Ben. Do you mean the Volcanic Massif on Heard Island labeled Big Ben? Do you mean the world champion jumping horse that held this name? In this article, I marked up these three words with their meaning … you can’t see it, but google can (well in fact that might be a stupid idea, because Google will think that this post might be about these items … but anyways, if you find it in the sourcecode, you’ll see what I mean, just in case this wordpress blog won’t have shreddered what I just typed in).Diagram for the LOD datasets

Most people that want to “invent” the semantic web like Qimaya think they can derive semantic meaning from webpages by emulating a human brain which just understands the words. They sell this idea to investors who don’t like technical terms like RDF or Ontologies, because those investors hope that the Web will become “semantic” by magic instead of hard-to-understand science. If that would be possible … don’t you think Google would have already implemented it? Nevermind … we all need some fantasy.

RDFa is a way of embedding RDF into HTML. RDF is the Resource Description Framework, and with that its possible to define semantic meaning. In RDF, you have a Subject, a Predicate and an Object as in real-world speech. You could say “This article (subject with the unique URI http://www.ithoughts.de/google-supports-rdfa-seos-work-changes-forever) is about (standard-RDF-predicate) the semantic web “and Google would rank your article way higher when someone wants to know something about the Semantic Web and uses this keyword in Google Search. You could also model these triple-sentences to make a connection between defined resources. “I’m interested in the semantic web” could be a triple you can put directly into HTML. Google could derive a logical connection here.

Google will first use some use-cases, like that of the ratings. Say you define your blogpost as a rating about a product like some special laptop, and you define it unambigously by using a unique id (in fact a unique URI, perhaps that will be the product page at the laptops vendor), Google has a lot of info that it can directly parse from your website: Its about a certain laptop, you have rated it, and maybe you also give information about yourself. This is all machine-extractable structured data, that can be used by webspiders like Google Search. With these definitions about products, ratings, companies and people, a lot of the central data that a lot of people search about in Google can be automatically extracted from average users like you and me – if we know how to embed that data. This might become a central interest of all SEOs out there – understanding RDF and implementing RDFa into webpages might be the next thing in terms of “Semantic Page Rank“.

Its some kinda funny, that I’m working on an RDFa-Editor for a semantic blog in my thesis. Seems like I have to include Googles usecases in it, or it might be “outdated”. If you have any questions, just add a comment. By the way: Welcome to the Semantic Web!

Related articles by Zemanta

Don’t use too many pictures on your site – Zemanta warning

Whoa! I just took a look on my blog-mainpage and needed to wait VERY long. Okay, I think my blog is pretty much cluttered with wordpress-plugins and some JS and flash-stuff, but I never waited THAT long. After all, I must realize that the pictures that I link through zemanta have this slowdown effect … its not even zemanta’s fault, but loding so many different pictures from different sources just cuts the speed. So I need some posts without too many outbound pictures within, and this one is the first.

Don’t get me wrong: Zemanta is a wonderful firefox-plugin that helps writing blogposts in many ways, and you wouldn’t see this problem when you only look at one post, but the mainpage is dragged down a lot. Perhaps Zemanta should warn its users, that it may be easy to get fitting pics for their posts, but that they shouldn’t use that too extensively.

Related articles by Zemanta

Friend of a Friend

Just tried out the FOAF-File-Maker and put the resulting FOAF-File it on my blog. So if someones out there using that stuff and knowing me, set a link to http://www.ithoughts.de/foaf.rdf … thanks :-)

Just for those who don’t know: FOAF means Friend-of-aFriend and is a technical way to express your friendship and personal info on the semantic web. As more and more services spider the web for such info, I just put it up … perhaps you’ll be able to register to websites with just pointing to your FOAF-File.

Advertisement as recommendations in blogs

I just wondered how much money I gained from the clicks on the one google-ad that I put up in the sidebar for over half a year now. Its not even 10$. Well I deacivated AdBlock PLUS for one moment and took a look at the ad, and wondered why anyone ever would click on such an ad – its not nice and the content is not even close to what I’m writing about. Well its main purpose was counting the visitors, but meanwhile I discovered other methods that I use for counting visitors now.

So I took it out. And thought about what could take its place. When I thought about that, I remembered seeing recommendations for books and music in other blogs and thought – why not make advertisements for books and stuff I really would recommend to my readers? So I googled to the amazon-website to take part in the affiliate program. This is the english website and this is the german one. First I saw that the english one give much more benefit to the user than the german one – but as most of my readers are from germany, I took the german program after all.

I entered german and english books that I can truely recommend, some of which are also available in the other language (like some of the HeadFirst books). I wrote a short comment about each item, chose an ad outfit and color – and copy-pasted the code to a wordpress-text-widget. I plan on writing reviews of the ad-items later on (I reviewed Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii on german here), but you can watch them now in the sidebar, if your adblocker is off and if you have flash installed.

This way I can recommend interesting things to you, have a nice flash-application and gain more rewards if someone buys on of those books on amazon. Hope you like it! I’d like to see your recommendations too, if its liked to amazon doesn’t matter much to me. Any comments?

New Plugins: TweetSuite + MathAntiSpam

Just want to inform you about the new plugins I’m using. The TweetSuite gives you the opportutiy to tweet the post you’re just reading via twitter and show which tweetbacks (tweets about this post) exist. I replaced the Twitter Tools, as tweet suite does the same and more … while they’re not as configurable. You’ll have to dive in the code of the plugin to change the CSS-appearance of the button at the right for example, as it comes without ID or class.

The MathAntiSpamPlugin is something you surely have seen before – I need to put this in place now as I getting more and more spam everyday. You’ll need to answer a simple addition of two small numbers to be able to post a comment.