EPiServer Adds an SEO Manager Tool to Product Suite
November 27, 2012
In “EPiServer Gets SEO Manager Add-On for Web CMS,” Anthony Myers discusses the recent release from EPiServer to add to its Web content management suite of offerings. SEO Manager as a commercial add-on for EPiServer CMS is now available. The new tool is explained:
URL management in particular can be tricky because it has to be done on the server side for things like changing page names, changing section names and moving pages around a website.
SEO Manager is the tool that optimizes a site’s URL’s, one of the things many Web properties lose sight of while focusing on keywords, headings and content (see: Content Strategy: The Perils of Search Engine Optimization). Those are obviously key to improving on search results, but more is needed to bump that all important Google ranking.
New features include renaming pages without rank loss, URL history memory, and optimized results in Google Analytics. The new tool may be worth looking at for SEO. But it doesn’t take away the need for good content and a user friendly Web site. InSite illuminates all of your information from documents to Web pages to social media networks with the power of semantic search for your Web site visitors.
Philip West, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Big Year for Search, Expect More in the Future
November 27, 2012
The year 2012 has been one of the biggest for search and data. Big Data has been and will be the list term when it comes to analyzing data and finding new business insights. Search has made many big leaps as well and the BDaily Business News Network ran down the achievements and what we can expect in 2013 in the article, “Search, the Future, and the Big Data World.”
About 80% of the data generated in the workplace is unstructured—meaning humans have created it. Before unstructured data can be searched it needs to be preprocessed, which leads to Big Data. Enterprise search developers are well aware of the need to normalize unstructured data and have created technology this past year that makes the process quicker and reliable. It helps put back the human element, the “why” the data was came into existence in the first place.
Fat piles continue to grow and even with Big Data software, one key component remains the same: search.
The article puts it this way:
“Despite these acquisitions, enterprise search continues to be of growing importance in its own right. The process of finding information becomes more difficult as data sizes scale. At the same time, in the information economy, finding information – whether it is to check a fact, retrieve a known document, or conduct new research into a subject – remains a critical part of the process of doing business…In conclusion, a well-implemented enterprise search system remains a key component for driving business productivity.”
Search is and will always remain one of the core essential functions of the Big Data game. Search pares down the irrelevant data to pull out the key facts a user is looking for. Data is only as useful as long as it can be found. It still remains a quick fact that software designed specifically for search proves to be a good investment on the part of Big Data. LucidWorks, the search experts, have been ingrained in the Big Bata boom since the start and have developed a search application useful for developers and end users alike.
Whitney Grace, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Importance of Wireframe Expertise
November 27, 2012
Employing a home-building metaphor, mobile software firm Zeus River laments about clients who insist, “‘I Already Have Wireframes, I Just Need You to Code It’.” Making that demand of a software engineer, writer Milan Gokhale says, is akin to a non-architect drawing up their own blueprints and telling the contractor, “I just need someone to lay the bricks.” The article explains:
“A house isn’t constructed until it has gone through a lengthy, rigorous architecture process. High-quality software operates the same way. If you want to maximize the value of your investment, you need an engineer to think through many long-term considerations. . . .
“Wireframes are sort of like interior design; they describe what the colour of the couch is, and where the couch should be located. These are not the concerns of your architect when you’re building a home, and they are not the concerns of your software developer when he/she is trying to build your app. If you didn’t involve a developer in your wire-framing process, you’re setting yourself up for a situation in which the couch looks gorgeous in a house that will crumble at any minute.”
Oh, you say, but picking colors is much more fun! That may be, but at least fork up the dough to bring your developer in on the party. Doing so is sure to save time, money, and frustration in the long run. The frustration, by the way, is also felt by developers; Gokhale says he and his partner now decline any projects with pre-drawn wireframes. It just isn’t worth the hassle.
Launched in September of 2011, Zeus River is located in Toronto, Ontario. The founding partners, both experienced enterprise software engineers, formed their own company in order to work in the more exciting, innovative arena of mobile technology. Good luck, guys.
Cynthia Murrell, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Integrate OpenCalais with Adobe CQ5
November 27, 2012
After Thomson Reuters bought ClearForest in 2007, some of its technology became the nifty open source project OpenCalais. The Cognifide blog offers some integration advice in “Adobe CQ5—OpenCalais Integration.”
The OpenCalais Web Service automatically incorporates semantic metadata into content. The best way to see what it does is to past a chunk of text, any text, into their Document Viewer. The tool will tease out and insert links for topics, social tags, entities (like organizations or industry terms), and events & facts. After you’ve played with that, check out the examples of ways the technology has been implemented on the Showcase page. It is acceptable to use the free OpenCalais for commercial purposes (the API key is obtainable here), but a Calais Professional version is available for power users.
Blogger and software engineer Mateusz Kula suggests a way to integrate OpenCalais with the Adobe CQ5 marketing cloud that makes automatic tagging a breeze. He writes:
“A fairly good way to integrate OpenCalais with CQ5 was to create a workflow step for content tagging that could be embedded into any workflow fired on some CQ event or by hand. The mentioned step pulls data internally from a page and calls the OpenCalais integration OSGi service.
Text data is collected from the fields of components lying on a page, then the integration service sends concatenated text to a web service and pulls tags back. Finally the workflow step adds nonexistent tags into the CQ tag manager ‘Calais’ namespace and applies tagging to a page.”
A helpful workflow diagram and configuration tips follow this explanation. Cognifide has created an integration package, which includes an example workflow to get you started. The final paragraph of the article includes a link you can use to download the package’s zipped folder.
Before they were snapped up by Thomson Reuters, ClearForest began in 1998 as an independent software start-up based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Marketing tech consulting firm Cognifide is located in London, UK. They are proud of the partnerships they have formed with Adobe and Sitecore.
Cynthia Murrell, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Search Needs More than Plug and Play
November 26, 2012
Today’s businesses are consistently looking for ways to improve enterprise management and overall operations, so it comes as no surprise that software marketing is targeting those needs. The unfortunate side effect of a good marketing plan can often be a product that does not live up to user expectations. FCW’s article “Does Your Enterprise Search Engine Stink? Here’s Why” reiterates how often times if new software seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Content processing, productivity tools and sorting options are just a few elements of enterprise software that should be evaluated before considering a change:
“Given the predisposition to think of search as pre-formatted to meet our needs, many IT managers and executives believe they can simply purchase, install and operate enterprise search software right out of the box. To a large extent, the leading search software vendors promote this plug-and-play mentality because it is a message customers want to hear. If you are familiar only with Web search as a personal tool, it makes sense to assume that a search engine for your business would operate the same way.”
When relevant results and increased efficiency are the primary concerns a friendly user interface is just an added bonus. Despite marketing hype, quality search requires more than plug and play attention. Full service solutions, expert tagging and feature rich search, such as that provided by Intrafind are a great start for enterprise search solutions.
Jennifer Shockley, November 26 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Productivity Can Only Climb With Information At Work
November 26, 2012
A recent article from Slashdot mentions the increasing convoluted nature of the big data industry and the likelihood that it will only increase from here on out. The article, “How To Be Successful with Big Data Integration,” offers up a few pieces of advice for organizations primed and ready to begin their exploration of big data tools and processes related to extracting insights and opportunities from the bytes and bytes of information out there.
Hadoop and Hadoop variations make up a fairly large chunk of the resources available. Many organizations also turn to other NoSQL databases and high-performance relational analytic databases. Still others seek a fully comprehensive big data solution that reaches the entire enterprise.
We learned from the article that in order to find success with this method an organization should:
Facilitates integration with enterprise data—even big data cannot thrive on its own. Ultimately, enterprises need to integrate their big data platform with the rest of their data stores. To make this happen, they need effective tools to connect their Hadoop and NoSQL databases with traditional relational databases, data exchange formats, and enterprise applications.
Tools like PolySpot’s Information At Work have a library of over one hundred connectors, and thus little chance that information will not be delivered quickly, securely and with integrity. Productivity was never this easy.
Megan Feil, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Nextag Troubleshoots Declining Google Web Traffic
November 26, 2012
Relying on Google alone for Web site traffic is tricky business. In the New York Times article, “Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites,” Steve Lohr and Claire Cain Miller look at the comparison shopping Web site Nextag.com’s bout with declining Google traffic. After Nextag engineers tested their side of the matter and found no issues, they doubled their spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months. The move was seen as a necessity considering the amount of Web traffic Nextag received from both free and paid search ads. The issue has also gotten the attention of the US government because of possible antitrust violations. The author’s add this about Nextag’s next move:
His Google traffic now costs more. Two years ago, 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic from Google was from free search and 40 percent paid — people clicking on ads Nextag bought. Today, it is 30 percent free and 70 percent paid.
But his company has also shifted its strategy to become less vulnerable to Google’s charge into commerce. It has invested heavily in its underlying technology to help Web sites attract visitors, especially ones most likely to buy their goods.
The article is a good overview of the pitfalls when relying on Google advertising and what direction the issue is headed. One way to shift strategy from advertising is by enriching your Web site experience for visitors with a powerful search feature. InSite from Mindbreeze is one cost-effective and no-install required option worth looking at. InSite gives a custom searching experience unique to the user with the added benefit of mobile capabilities.
Philip West, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Open Source Cloud Company Expands
November 26, 2012
Clouds expand and contract based on heating and cooling. Cloud computing companies expand based on how many partners and funding they receive. Network World tracked down a company that is following this economic trend: “RightScale Joins OpenStack, Supports Rackspace’s Open Cloud.” RightScale’s software is used to manage private and public clouds, and it will join with Rackspace to support its open source project. Rackspace has an OpenStack-powered Cloud. OpenStack is gaining more traction and this also that RightScale is dedicated to include open source choices for its customers.
“ ‘Enterprise interest in OpenStack continues to increase,’ says RightScale CEO Michael Crandell. Rackspace’s open source cloud aligns closely to the OpenStack trunk code, which minimizes proprietary extensions, he says. RightScale already works as an integrator with a variety of other public and private cloud platforms…on the private cloud side, RightScale can be used to manage workloads on the OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus platforms, all of which are open source.”
This partnership does not come as a surprise, as more companies are understanding the benefits of Cloud computing and storage, not to mention the cost-effectiveness of open source. They need to remember, however, that Cloud enterprises need to be searched as much as site-based storage. They may want to give LucidWorks’ search applications a look, a trusted industry leader.
Whitney Grace, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Troubling Filter Bubbles in Google Search
November 26, 2012
It is another reason to love my favorite search engine, DuckDuckGo. The folks at that search site, which collects no user information and does not personalize results, ran a Google experiment and found some disturbing effects of the search giant’s results tailoring. DuckDuckGo’s Gabriel Weinberg discusses the results in his blog post, “Magic Keywords on Google and the Consequences of Tailoring Results.” I recommend skipping to the bottom of the page and watching the one-minute video, either on its own or before delving into the thought-provoking article.
The upshot: many users searched Google for the same terms simultaneously and got very different personalized results, even when logged out of their Google profiles. Weinberg reports:
“No ordering received a majority across the whole study, and several orderings were only seen by one or two people. In fact, the data only includes the top five links — if you open it up to the whole first page (usually 7-11 links) it fragments a lot more.
“We saw a lot of different links (not just orderings). And we also saw a lot of different news results within the news blocks.
“The news varied a lot. In the ‘obama’ search, news was the first link. Some people were getting Fox News while others got the LA Times and a few people got other stuff.
“Individual people often saw the same things on the off and on versions, but there was of course more variation person to person. That this tailoring exists even when making an attempt to de-personalize (signing out or going incognito) makes it impossible for an individual to pop their own Google filter bubble.”
Some folks have long been leery of Google’s personalization efforts, largely for privacy reasons. This article highlights another reason to dislike results tailoring—it takes confirmation bias to a new, insidious level. Rather than actively rejecting perspectives with which you don’t already agree, you don’t get to see them at all. So, if one is using Google to objectively research all viewpoints and develop an informed opinion. . . well, good luck with that. I’ll stick with the Duck, myself.
Cynthia Murrell, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Facebook Mounts Technical PR Push
November 26, 2012
Info World recently reported on Facebook’s appetite for crunching data reaching new highs in the article, “Facebook Pushes the Limits of Hadoop.”
According to the article, since the social media giant has a billion users and a requirement to analyze more than 105 terabytes every 30 minutes, it has reached the upper limits of raw Hadoop capacity. The desperate need for more data crunching has lead to the company’s launch of the Prism Project, which supports geographically distributed Hadoop data stores.
In order to compensate for Hadoop’s capacity deficiency, the article states:
“Facebook’s business analysts push the business in a variety of ways. They rely heavily on Hive, which enables them to use Hadoop with standard business intelligence tools, as well as Facebook’s homegrown, closed source, end-user tool, HiPal. Hive, an open source project Facebook created, is the most widely used access layer within the company to query Hadoop using a subset of SQL. To make it even easier for business people, the company created HiPal, a graphical tool that talks to Hive and enables data discovery, query authoring, charting, and dashboard creation.”
Facebook plans to open-source prism soon but it is pretty urgent to start generating revenue from mobile in order to supplement the money it has lost in advertising. Will it succeed? We will see.
Jasmine Ashton, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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