Monday 14 February 2011

influential web articles that have never been been seen on the web

Something which may surprise you is that many of the articles I've written about the SSD and storage markets for my main publication StorageSearch.com have never made it to the web - even though I edit that publication (which means they would easily meet my  standards).

It's not that they weren't good enough to publish  - but if they  took too long to write  then short term daily pressures for fresh content  bumped them off my to-do list - and maybe a few days or weeks later they just got abandoned.

The strange thing is  that the  analysis and thought processes that went into constructing those unseen  articles  has had an  impact on rewiring the synapses and assumptions  in my brain. And very often when I'm writing about about a related subject I start the process of linking to an article which no one else has read but me.

I can still find them on my notebook - and because they're in the same directory as live www  files  (they just never got completed and uploaded)  there's  a  strange feeling of loss and panic  when I can't find them online.

Oh yeah - I remember now - it never got that far.

Many of these articles are 95% complete - and even years later seem to fill  much needed gaps  in the analysis of the market.

The curious thing for me is that I do have the benefit of having written them - even if no one else has yet seen them.

In the thousands of years of writing - before the online world - this must have been a much more common experience. And even though my educational background was electronics, physics and maths (and not literature and all that stuff) even as an ignorant  technocrat barbarian  I am aware that during the course of history there have been many writers who are popular today - but who never got published in their lifetimes.

I'm not saying that a blog about some ephemeral aspect of a transient market like solid state storage  (which no one will care too much  about in 50 years time) can be compared to a novel or collection of poetry. (Which reminds me -  I do have  some novels I've finished which aren't online too. And I reread them when I'm in the right mood and have run out of anything else to read. My wife and I have over 4,000 books in our house - and  I've read  most of them - except  I confees I have skipped several hundred marketing books - because  I'm not the one in our household who runs product management master classes.)

 I'm just saying that going through the process of writing  articles which analyze some aspect of a high tech market helps to improve the quality of thought in later  articles  even if the original articles were never published. I guess it's like winning a track event. No one sees you training. But you are more likely to do better in public  if you have trained.

Shame about the links though.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

what's the life of a web page?

Does a web page have a life?

What about after it's deleted?

What about return on investment?

Why would anyone even ask these questions?

Does Google calculate ROI on the cost of indexing different web pages?

Most people who create web pages don't think about any of the issues I've listed above - but if you're in the business or making money from publishing on the web then they are questions you should ask - even if you can't find any good answers.

When I started publishing on the web in 1996 - it wasn't my first job. I had previously worked in R&D  in the  electronics  market - so I was familiar with the concepts of  "life cycles" for software   development. I did think about the life cycle of a web page in simple terms which went something like this.

How much is it going to cost me to create a web version of my print publicatuion? Is what I get back going to pay me and make my efforts worthwile? Back then in 1996 the commercial web was little more than a year old. It would have been impossible for me to find any good answers to my questions - because web advertising itself was still a new concept - and we just made the rules up as we went along.

If we guessed wrong - we tried another approach with another customer. It was hard not to make money in those days on the web.

15 years later - I still make my living entirely from selling web ads in my own publications. So the few  things I did  right must have outweighed the many things I did wrong. And luck plays its part too.

Let's go back to the questions I asked at the start.

Does a web page have a life?

Yes. But the concept of an "average life" for a web page isn't very helpful.

Some web pages - which are created by software- may only last for a fraction of a second. Those Google searches for example which flash up just before you click on something.

Other web pages - which are  created by humans - may last for days, weeks, months or years.

What about after it's deleted?

It's comforting to think that after you've deleted a web page - that it's gone. Especially if you said something in that web page which is embarrassing now - or which expresses a business view which is the exact opposite of the view you now hold. For example in 1995 I couldn't understand how anyone could create a business model which made money from web content (rather than selling something via the web). As it happens - because of my strong belief (in 1995) that a print publisher like me  couldn't make money out of the web by putting my content online - you can't find a web page  designed by me at that time which makes that statement.  In retrospect - it was a prejudiced view based on fear of the unknown and the risk of getting things wrong. Within a few months I was kicking myself and wishing that I'd started sooner.

Anyway - your old deleted web pages can often be found in 3 different places for various lengths of time.

1 - on the internet archive - http://www.archive.org/  - upto 15 years later (and still counting)

2 - in cached versions of Google search - for a week or month or so (depending how often Google scans that page)

3 - on 3rd party blogger sites which comment on your content (or steal all of it)

So deletion is not a permanent cure. A better solution is to put a note on the old page saying something like "this was a subject which I used to be interested in - but now my interests have moved elsewhere - plesae click here to see what I'm doing now." I say that - knowing I've still got thousands of web pages which are showing exactly the same as they did 10 years ago. It doesn't really matter if your web stats say that no one is seeing those older obsolete pages.

When it does matter though - is when something you wrote  a long time ago  becomes a search spike. If you really care about your reputation as an industry guru or blogger you can monitor those random spikes and decide if it's worth redirecting  readers to your current projects. There are no hard and fast rules about this.

What about return on investment?

If you look at this from the philosophic point of view you could say - I don't care about the value of my web postings in  monetary  amounts. If I care about an issue I'm going to create web pages because they satisfy some other needs I have - such as communicating better with my friends and family, educating others to help them learn from my experience, lobbying for a special interest group which I want to support etc etc.

But back to the readers who wondered why I didn't just write ROI....

Here's something to think about. Which of these  is worth more?

A single human created web page?

10 software assisted social networking web pages? or

1,000 software created pages?

The numbers I used above are arbitrary - but you probably get my drift. The value of a web page in economic terms is not directly related to the cost of its creation - but rather to the difference between what money you can make from each page (on average) versus the cost.

For example:- if you can create 100 million web pages (using software)  for 1 cent each - but can earn 2 cents from each of those pages in a year - even if those pages only live for less than 1 second  (average) - you might earn more money than the guy who can earn maybe $3,000 a year from a single  hand crafted article - but only has the time to write a limited number of such articles in a year.

The first model - is the one the venture capitalists like - because it's scalable, got big  numbers in it and looks like a real business.

The second model is more difficult to assess. It's more like the book or  movie business. Everyone knows it's hard to make money as a living  author - and the Harry Potter books are the  business exceptions rather than the rules.

My answer to the web ROI question is that the founders of  Google  did think about the cost of a web page -  when they made the special effort to make their  search software scalable. (Because they were well aware of the costs and performance pitfalls of not doing so - which they could see in the examples of other search companies operating at the time.)

But you don't have to be on the scale of Google or Facebook to have an ROI which makes sense for you.

Maybe your website is  collecting money so your local library can buy new books or pay a contractor to mend the fence in your local church cemetary. The ROI is different for everyone.

If your web pages are your CEO's blog then it's probably a bad return on the investment of their time compared to the value of their time spent instead  on web advertising. But it could be a good investment if the blog is the main way that people in your company get to hear about the direction your organization is heading.

Why would anyone even ask these questions?

I think about questions related to the value of web pages a lot - because the answers dictate how I prioritize my time. I allocate scores to web pages on my site which have built into them value indicators - like who's going to see this web page today? this week? this year? or in 3 years time?

Getting the right answers to those questions is important for me - because the web pages do have a life - and often a web page I created several years ago earns  more money  now than a new web page I created yesterday. That's  because the old page has more links going to it - and because the topic in the old article has now moved into the mainstream instead of just being of interest to a advanced niche.

 Does Google calculate ROI on the cost of indexing different web pages?

I don't know this for a fact - but I would be surprised if they didn't - because the decison of whether it's worth indexing any particular new web page - and how often to go back to it - is at the heart of their cost models.

When making the decision to index a page - the search engine is making an investment in that page. How many times will knowing the contents of that page benefit the advertising model?

What are the risks of skipping a page this time - and maybe redeciding whether to have a look next week or next month instead?

Prebuilt into those value judgements (done by algorithms at the core of web search) are assumptions about the lifetime of a web page.

If it's a new page - a lot of people might be interested in it today. Maybe less tomorrow - maybe nobody at all in 6 months. When the historians   come to have a look 10 years later  - will the web versions of those news pages still be there?

What if  the page is   a blog about the life of a web page?

Why would anybody -  even a robot be interested in that?

If you are. Or if you were. Thanks for reading.

Monday 17 January 2011

why would you be interested in past data storage news?

As the editor of StorageSearch.com there are many times in the day when I hop backwards and forwards in time like a speeded up and demented pilot of HG Wells's time machine.

You may not be surprised that articles which predict the future of the market are popular. Even though we all know that such predictions are educated guesses rather than reliable facts - it can be useful to get a view of someone else's vison of the future and compare it with your own. Maybe it will mention a factor which you have overlooked completely. No problem. As it's talking about the future - there's still plenty of time to research that subject if you think it might intersect with your own interests.

Why would anyone be interested in past data storage news?

That's a question which I asked myself in the 2nd week of January 2000 - as I was deciding whether I should simply delete old news stories when they rolled to a particular point past the bottom of the viewer's screen - or archive it for future reference. Deletion would have been much easier. And deletion had been what I did before with my vendor product listings. Archiving news stories implied adding to the collection of assets which had to be managed in my web page life-cycle.

Starting a news page in January 2000 was a big decision for me. Before then my news page was simply a list of suggested links to other news pages which were springing up all over the web. I mean - what value could I add? And would enough people be interested - when there were so many other news pages, aggregators, newsfeeds and email updates available? Although I'd been publishing online since 1996 - my thinking had been that news was always going to have a short life and that the effort expended in offering news wouldn't be a good use of time compared to compiling directories. And what did I know about managing a news page anyway? Nothing. But once it started - it seemed like a waste to throw the content way. That's how my news archives were born.

Looking back now - more than a decade later - I'm glad I did it.

News gives readers another reason to come to a web site. In the case of StorageSearch.com it's not the main reason - because my readers are more interested in articles which explain what's going on in the market - and lists of who does what and why. But having news content helps to calibrate the content in the time dimension.

News gives vendors and other stakeholders in the market more reasons to contact me. Although that did happen anyway before - because vendors are always interested in being listed in buyers guides - being featured on our news page is particularly good for new vendors. For startups emerging from stealth mode maybe the first time their new website becomes widely visible on the web is in the hours after Google picks up the links from my news page. That's also benefits me too. When I publish a new article - the first thing I do is mention it on my news page.Of course - when my ftp upload died for a handful of days in 2010 I couldn't do that. So the only way I could let readers know about my new blog - which chronicled those problems - was to use an external newswire. I also informed some vendors via email. But as I hate getting spam myself I've never compiled a bulk email list. And in fact most of my outgoing emails are replies to incoming queries.

Archived news gives me a powerful tool for analyzing and commenting on "new" news stories. That may sound incestuous but here's how it works. Let's say someone sends me a news story claiming they're the first company to offer a product which has a specific size, speed or some other feature. I can quickly look through my news archives and get a feeling for whether the claim is plausible. I can often make an otherwise clone-like story (which you'll see on 100 other sites) more interesting by adding a comment which says something like - another company did this 2 years before. Or if someone is launching a new company - I can use my archives to answer questions like... What did they do before? And does what they did before make it more or less likely that the new venture will succeed too?

For newcomers to the storage market and storage veterans people who are looking at a newsubject for the first time - the archived news pages can quickly give them a flavor for... Who are the main players in the market? What is the state of the art from the technical point of view? and How quickly is the market changing?

At some point in time archived news does become history. In the data storage market which I write about I sometimes find it useful to go back a long way to supply information in market growth articles which answer questions like... How much has the capacity of an SSD grown in the past 10 years? and Were the market predictions made by such and such market analyst wildly out of line with what happened - or about right? Answers to the latter type of question helps me filter new prononuncements from the same sources.

Remember, the web has no memory! is an article I wrote in November 2001 on my Marketing Views web site. Although the Internet Archive had been doing a good job of picking up and saving content from many of the sites I was interested in at the time the situation today in 2011 is that many gaps have started to appear in the data storage market narrative accessible via that route. I've noticed that when the domains of gone-away storage market companies are acquired - many of the new owners kill the old content in the external archive. That makes it hard to rediscover details which might be interesting to people like me who want to check particular facts about the market from years gone by. (I still have a readable email archive which has most of my relevant emails going back to about 1996 sitting on my pc - but the emails don't always contain the full text of press releases - and sometimes just tell me about a product link which was once on the web - but which has since disappeared.)


I think that delving daily into archived news has helped me become a better judge of what is newsworthy today. I ask myself the question - is anyone going to be interested in any of this stuff as a tracket to what happened in the market - next month? next year? or in 5 years time? If not then why mention it? Just as back in January 2000 - there are plenty of news aggregators operating in January 2011. Part of my added value to readers is to ignore what isn't really new and comment more on what is.

That's why I've stopped writing stories which start with "EMC has just spent N hundred million, or N billion dollars acquiring XYZ company" for example. Going back through history EMC has always acquired other storage companies. So that's not news. Unless you are a stakeholder in the acquired company or one of its competitors. But my reader stats show our readers don't expect EMC to do anything new or innovative in the storage market - so the acquisition story gets a low news score with this editor and rarely hits the news pages. Instead - what would rate a high news score would be if EMC announced it had decided to never again acquire another company and instead would be focusing its resources on organic growth and internally developed technologies. But I don't expect to see such a press release until April 1st.

I've never had any illusions about the transient and ephemeral nature of most of the things that have preoccupied my professional thoughts in the 34 years I've worked in the digital electronics market. The burning issues and hot products of one day are shunted into the mental trash pile to make way for the next new thing. Despite all that history sites can now be found all over the web - preserving the nostalgic appetites of generations of people - like me - for whom these past digital crazes were once a big part of their daily lives. Maybe there is a future in past news after all.