Social Media Club Buffalo: #TacoVino

Last night the local Social Media Club chapter here in Buffalo put on the event TacoVino, a wine tasting paired with a local taco truck who has social media to thank for some of its success. City Wine Merchant opened its doors, and bottles of wine, while Lloyd Taco Truck made a special menu of duck tacos along with its regular fare.

As you look at the photos below, please keep in mind I got there a little early to take photos before the crowd arrived, that's why they may seem a little empty. I wanted to spend my time there being social, not playing photographer. After all, that was kind of the point of the event.

The event had to be capped at 50 people owing to the size of the venue, making for a smaller crowd than previous events, but it also set the tone for conversations to flow more easily and people to connect with familiar faces from previous events. Unlike those previous events where the Tweet wall garnered a fair amount of attention, probably owing to the novelty, the two tweet walls set up for this event were largely ignored by the crowd in favor of human-to-human interaction. Given the social nature of the medium, I think that's a good sign as opposed to a silent room of 50 people with only the sound of thumbs on phone displays. Regardles, the #TacoVino hash tag saw a fair amount of activity throughout the night.

I am always a little surprised when people comment to me that they not only see my food tweets, but often look at the photos of that food. Moreso when those people represent some of the larger local companies who have established a social media presence. Of course, I was obligated to post some photos of the food. Mostly to make those who didn't register in time a little jealous for what they were missing.

Credit to pulling off the event goes to the SMCBuffalo president and vice president, Nicole Schuman (@Buffalogal) and Frank Gullo (@frankgullo); Kate Wolcott (@k8creative) for the creative; Susan Cope (@susanlynncope) and Terri Swiatek (@TerriSwiatek) for event planning help; and City Wine Merchant (@ericbuffalo) and Lloyd Taco Truck (@whereslloyd) for venue, wine and food.

Given the great press the Buffalo chapter of Social Media Club recently garnered (Social Media Club Puts Buffalo on Whole New Map), I hope we can pull together more of these events and help show the other chapters, and social media types, just how strong that community is here in Buffalo.

Previous Events

• Buffalo Launches Social Media Club Chapter, September 23, 2010.


• Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0, August 12, 2010 (posted at City Love Cloting).


• Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF, July 1, 2010.

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Browsers to Add Tracking Blockers

This may be somewhat old news by now, but given the hubbub last night that Apple and some makers of apps for the iPhone are getting sued over tracking users without consent, it seems that the struggle between privacy and features will never be old news.

Back at the dawn of the web, the notion of surfing anonymously was pretty compelling. Users in the early days had enough technical know-how to understand that privacy could not be guaranteed and at the very least a combination of IP logging and old-fashioned real-world tracking could often get an interested party the identity of someone engaging in nefarious activity. The key benefit to that process (for users) is that for most organizations it wasn't worth the bother (either time or money). Privacy was maintained simply for lack of effort.

Fast forward to today's world where online ads can track your habits and preferences, where Facebook is regularly lambasted for sharing too much information, where mobile devices can track where you are at any time, where people use social media with the curious expectation that they are guaranteed some privacy, and so on...

Microsoft sees this as an opportunity to push its coming web browser, Internet Explorer 9, to the fore by offering a new feature called Tracking Protection. Microsoft will be rolling this feature out in the next beta release due early in 2011. In Microsoft's words, the feature will do the following:

1. IE9 will offer consumers a new opt-in mechanism ("Tracking Protection") to identify and block many forms of undesired tracking.


2. "Tracking Protection Lists" will enable consumers to control what third-party site content can track them when they're online.

This is a little different from the Federal Trade Commission's request that browser makers implement a "do not track" feature. In the FTC's world, this feature sets a flag for all sites you visit asking the web site and/or ad service not to track you. The FTC cannot force anyone to honor that, however, so it's a mostly empty request. This is where the IE9 feature is so compelling — it's intended to just block the tracking outright.

Mozilla isn't missing the boat on this. Even though a similar feature was in development in June, it was pulled (for conflicting reasons) but made its reappearance just a few days ago. Mozilla's chief executive stated in an interview that [t]echnology that supports something like a 'Do Not Track' button is needed and we will deliver in the first part of next year. He was speaking about Firefox 4, which is still in beta. This puts Firefox's offering out there around the same time as IE9's.

Now that two major browsers will be developing a feature in parallel with a similar name and set of functionality, it will be interesting to see how it is implemented. While the features both Microsoft and Mozilla are discussing have mostly been in both browsers in some form since the last full release, activating those features isn't exactly intuitive for the novice user. Now comes the struggle of creating a user interface that is simple, still provides enough detail and control, and isn't so far removed from the other browser's interface that users who use both aren't horribly confused.

Whether these features are enough to satisfy the FTC, consumers, or even the ad networks is still up in the air. Whether these features will be easy to use, however, seems unlikely given browser configuration options over the years. If that happens, it may end up protecting ad networks for now.

Related

• Apple, App Makers Sued Over User-Tracking at Wired, December 27, 2010.



• 'Do Not Track' Coming to Firefox 4 at PCWorld, December 21, 2010.



• Firefox backs "Do Not Track" with online stealth at Google News, December 18, 2010.



• Privacy and the Web's 'signal-to-noise ratio' at CNN, December 15, 2010.



• Microsoft Builds Online Tracking Blocking Feature Into IE9 at Wired, December 7, 2010



• IE9 and Privacy: Introducing Tracking Protection at Microsoft's IE9 blog, December 7, 2010.



• IE9 "Do Not Track" Feature Prone to User Error at PCWorld, December 7, 2010.



• FTC Staff Issues Privacy Report Offers Framework for Consumers, Businesses, and Policymakers at FTC.gov, December 1, 2010.



• Hiding Online Footprints at Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2010.



• Question of the Day: Would you use an Internet “do-not-track” tool if it were included in your Web browser? at Wall Street Journal.

Related on this blog

• Google Analytics Opt-Out Add-On Is Out, May 26, 2010.



• Google to Let Users Opt Out of Analytics Tracking, March 19, 2010.



• Google Dashboard: What Google Knows about You, November 5, 2009.

Updated: January 24, 2011

• Firefox and Chrome Add "Do Not Track" Tools To Their Browsers

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You Get What You Pay For

First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, "You get that for which you pay" just doesn't roll off the tongue.

In the last week I have watched two free web services I use announce (in some fashion) that they are going away. This has caused a good deal of frustration and anger on behalf of users. And it's all just a repeat of things I have seen on the web for 15 years now.

I have watched the Brightkite blog, Facebook page and Brightkite/Twitter accounts get hammered with angry and abusive comments from users (Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.).

I have watched on Twitter as people have derided Yahoo's decision to shut down del.icio.us, the place where they have shared and stored bookmarks for years (Leaked Slide Shows Yahoo Is Killing Delicious & Other Web Apps at Mashable).

I felt vindicated when Google decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, partly owing to the fact that nobody could quite figure out how to wield something that was a floor wax and a dessert topping all in one (Google Wave is Dead at ReadWriteWeb).

I have watched as some of the URL shorteners on which we have come to rely for services like Twitter have announced that they are going away, or have just disappeared (List of URL Shorteners Grows Shortener).

I, and perhaps the entire web, breathed a sigh of relief when Geocities announced it was going to take a dirt nap — and finally did (Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?).

I remember when both Hotmail and Yahoo decided it was time to start charging for access to some of the more enhanced features of the free email they offered users (Say Goodbye to Free Email).

I saw people panic when they might lose access to all sorts of free video, photos, and even text content from CNN, Salon, and others (End of the Free Content Ride?).

We Get It; You've Been There, What's Your Point?

These services all have a couple key things in common:

1. Users have put a lot of time, energy, and apparently emotion into these services.


2. They are free.

The second point, in my opinion, should mitigate the first point. If you as a user are not paying to use a service, then is it a wise decision to build your social life or your business around it? Do you as a user not realize that these organizations owe you nothing?

As Brightkite announced the shuttering of its core service with only a week heads-up, they were kind enough to allow users to grab their data via RSS feeds. Yahoo hasn't even formalized the future of del.icio.us, but already fans have found a way to grab the data. But in both of these cases, if you as a user aren't backing up your data, keeping an archive, or storing it elsewhere, whose fault is it really that you might lose it all?

Is it wise to build a social media marketing campaign on Facebook, a platform notorious for changing the rules (features, privacy controls, layout, etc.) on a whim? Is relying on a free URL shortener service a good idea as the only method to present links to your highly developed web marketing campaigns? Should you really run your entire business on the features offered by Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc? If you have to alert staff/friends/partners to something important in a timely fashion, can you really trust Twitter to do what you need?

The culture of the web (nee Internet) has always been one of an open and sharing environment, where people and organizations post information that they understand will be shared/borrowed/stolen/derided. Somehow users of the web have come to expect that everything is, or should be, free. Look at the proliferation of sites to steal movies and music as an example on one end of the spectrum. On the other end is the reliance on Wikipedia by every school kid across the country instead of a purchased encyclopedia.

Let's all take some time to evaluate our plans and what we are doing. When that vendor who builds Facebook campaigns comes back to tell you that what he/she built last year won't work this year due to a Facebook change, there is your cost. When you have to take time from your real work to download all your bookmarks just so you can try to find a way to share them again or even get them into your browser, there is your cost. When you build a business on the back of a Twitter API and have to retool your entire platform due to an arbitrary change in how you call the service, there is your cost. When your Google Doc is sitting in "the cloud" and you're sitting in a meeting without wifi just before you have to present it, there is your cost.

This cost, however, ignores something that can't be measured on your end with dollars. The cost of sharing your personal information, your activities, your habits, are all your daily cost for using many of these services.

You may be under the impression that I have something against these free services. The use of this very blog should tell you otherwise. Instead I have something against users who have an expectation of free, top-notch service from organizations who are really only around as far as their cash flow can sustain them.

I keep my bookmarks on my local machine and just share the files between computers. I have been archiving my Brightkite photos since I started using the service, and archiving the posts to Twitter and Facebook, all the while backing up my Twitter stream. I use locally-installed software (MS Word, OpenOffice) writing to generic formats (RTF, etc.) and keep the files I need where I can access them (file vault on my site). I pay for a personal email service in addition to maintaining a free one. Other than Twitter, with its character limits, I avoid URL shorteners (and have no interest in rolling my own). I signed up for Diaspora in the hopes that I can funnel all my social media chaos to the one place I can take it with me. I keep a landline in my house so when the power goes out I can still make a phone call to 911.

I don't tweet my disgust when Facebook changes its layout. I don't post angry comments on Brightkite's wall when they kill a service. I don't try to organize people to take their time to rebuild Google Wave when I cannot. I don't punch my co-worker when he buys me a sandwich and the deli failed to exclude the mayo.

Let's all take some personal responsibility and stop relying solely on something simply because it's free. Your favorite free thing is different or gone (or will be). Suck it up and move on.

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W3C to Explore a Federated Social Web

You might recognize the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) from such specifications as HTML, CSS, XHTML, ARIA, MWABP and other acronyms that are hardly pronounceable. Today the W3C has added yet another item to its list, in the form of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group (the announcement).

You may wonder what the W3C has to do with social media, other than the fact that it's all built using W3C technologies (HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, etc.). The answer is pretty simple — social media lives on the web, uses web technologies, and is sorely lacking in any standardization. This does not mean, however, that the W3C is trying to create a standard. The Federated Social Web Incubator Group is not in the standards track, so don't expect specifications to be forthcoming. Instead, W3C Incubator Groups are intended to quickly turn around ideas related to new concepts that aren't (yet) candidates for specifications developed through the W3C Recommendation Track (which is how we got HTML).

The mission of the Federated Social Web Incubator Group is to provide a set of community-driven specifications and a test-case suite for a federated social web. As with anything as nebulous as this, I am curious about deliverables, which they are kind enough to provide in the working group charter:

1. An interoperable number of user stories and associated test-cases for a
   federated social web, with a focus on a compelling user experience. A
   strawman input href="http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/SWAT0_-_strawman_protocol_flow">document
   is available.


2. The requirements and design of a meta-model - on the semantic level - and
   design patterns - on the protocol level - in order to share status updates
   on the Web. These may be implemented by a number of different
   architectures, and these architectures will be compared.


3. OStatus is one design
   pattern for the Federated Social Web. OStatus lets people on different
   social networks follow each other. It applies a group of related protocols
   (PubSubHubbub, ActivityStreams, Salmon, Portable Contacts, and Webfinger),
   and so is a minimal specification for distributed status updates, and many
   social applications can be modelled as status updates.

If you find yourself wondering just what the heck is a federated social web, you may not be alone. The casual user probably won't have a clue, but someone developing for social media has already been plagued with the lack of interoperability, data portability, Balkanization, and general technical hurdles. Ideally, the W3C might have some novel ideas on how to address this, although industry will probably move more quickly than the W3C. Regardless, I recommend reading up on the concept in this post, which explains it almost in a federal/states'-rights model versus a sprawling open source model.

• What is the federated social web? by Evan Prodromou, July 13, 2010

If you are a little too lazy to read through the entire thing, he had a follow-up post titled Features of a federated social web where he outlines some of the key features of current social networks and frames them as the possible basis for a federated social web, should one ever happen. Since I can tell you haven't clicked that link, here's the list, but you'll have to go to the article for more detail on each.

• Identity: your unique details that make you, you.


• Profile: how you present your identity to the network.


• Relationships: the whole point of being social are your connections.


• Media: terrible photos, loud video, tasteless haiku, etc.


• Activities: think of the news feed or tweet roll.


• Messages: an analogue to email or SMS.


• Groups: methods to organize your connections.


• Search: you gotta find stuff, after all.


• Client API: allowing third-parties to develop add-on features.


• Data portability: sadly not implemented very often, if at all.

When you break it down, the idea of somebody stepping in to help standardize all of this to make the social web easier to use can be pretty compelling. Whether the W3C decides it can even make an effort to try will be in the hands of this new incubator group. I, for one, wish them luck.

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W3C Releases Mobile Web App Best Practices

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that has brought us such fun specs as HTML, XHTML (or what's left of it), CSS and other exciting yet dry specs, has today announced that it has created a standard for mobile web applications best practices. From the Mobile Web Application Best Practices announcement:

W3C today issues standard best practices to create smarter mobile Web applications. The Mobile Web Application Best Practices offers practical advice from many mobile Web stakeholders for the easy development and the deployment of mobile Web applications that work across many platforms. The guidelines also indicate how to design Web applications that are efficient, well-suited to different contexts, and which boost the overall mobile user experience.

You can get to the full release here: W3C Issues Best Practices to Create Smarter Mobile Web Applications. The document has support from some players in the mobile industry: AT&T, The Boeing Company, China Unicom, China Electronics Standardization Institute, Deutsche Telekom, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Fundación ONCE, France Telecom, Google, HP, MobileAware, Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, Nokia, Novarra, Openwave Systems, Opera Software, Rochester Institute of Technology, SK Telecom, Telefónica de España, University of Manchester, Vishwak Solutions, Vodafone, Volantis, and what the W3C calls "invited experts." Given a key statement from W3C (emphasized by me in bold in the quote below), it makes sense that these organizations are interested in keeping their costs down by pushing developers to minimize network abuse.

Mobile Web Application Best Practices offers guidance on which Web technologies are particularly relevant on mobile devices. The guidelines also indicate how to design Web applications that are responsive to their usage context, while sparing the network and optimizing response time to significantly boost the overall mobile user experience.

In conjunction with this announcement, the W3C has also released its Mobile Web Application Best Practices (MWABP) Cards.
The 32 best practices defined in the specification are divided into 6 categories, or cards, covering the categories "Spare the network," "Set users free," "Remember Web principles," "Design for flexibility," "Exploit mobile-specific features," and "Optimize response time." Given the recent slew of "card sets" as quick reference guides for everything from usability to accessibility, this approach isn't too much of a surprise.

What is a surprise is that the cards are just a web page that happens to display well on mobile, but that's about it (there is a PDF version, too). Given that just a few months ago the W3C updated its Cheat Sheet (W3C Cheat Sheet Now Includes HTML5), an app for mobile devices that also includes a section on mobile web best practices, it would have been nice to see this rolled up into that tool well. In a quick check at the Android Marketplace, I do not see an update available for the Cheat Sheet.

If you were paying attention in October, you might have seen when the MWABP Cards were released for review, or when the MWABP became a proposed recommendation. That they have wrapped this process up relatively quickly to come up with a final release is nice to see, considering the comment period ended just under a month ago.

Because I am always interested in recommendations for technical implementation, I pulled this one item out of the list:

• Make telephone numbers "click-to-call."

There is no direct link to th relevant part in the MWABP document, but you can find it in section 3.5.6 Make Telephone Numbers "Click-to-Call." The document says to use the tel: URI scheme (protocol if that's how you know it, even though that's incorrect) in an href along with the full international phone number, as outlined in RFC3966. The document then goes on to say:

Note that at the time of writing support for this RFC is limited and device compatibility should be verified before deployment.

Sadly, the document gives no indication what to do to support desktop browsers that cannot process that link. The lesson here is that sometimes best practices in a vacuum can butt up against other best practices (like making sure all your links work for all users).

Regardless, there are some good standards in here, and with a little technical and implementation know-how, developers should be able to put it to good use.

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Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.

Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams.

Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it took the Twitter idea further and integrated built-in photo sharing and geolocation for each post. It was a while before Twitter even opted to offer location in tweets, and it still relies on third-party services to link photos. Brightkite also allowed for comments on posts and more robust friend (and fan) management. But being better or first didn't quite count (which reminds me, does anyone have a Betamax VCR I can borrow?). From Brightkite regarding place check-ins, photos, and user/place streams:

These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them.

Brightkite itself is not going away. It will focus on its group text feature, something for which I do not have any need. I did practically eulogize the loss of these features three months ago when Brightkite announced its first change in direction (Brightkite Changes Direction). I'll spare you the recap.

Others Starting to Offer Similar Features

This isn't the only change in the location-based social media space, however. The idea of attaching photos to places and not just tweets has been gaining traction. Last March, Gowalla offered the ability to attach photos to a place (The Location-Based Wars Rage On: Gowalla Adds Comments, Photos & More). Users checking in to a place can see images from other users or contribute their own. The interface for the mobile application is a bit clunky, and it's not a major feature of the service, but it re-creates some of what we saw in Brighkite.

Gowalla announced just a few days ago that it is going to integrate with Foursquare and Facebook places, allowing users to see their friends in one stream of activity. This is a converse of the single-point check-in service offered by Check.in, offered by Brighkite, that allows users to check in to Brighkite, Foursquare and Gowalla at once using some place matching tricks.

Just yesterday Mashable posted a theory that Foursquare is going to add photo sharing, based on a screen shot from a user and comments made by the Foursquare CEO about new features in the works. If Foursquare is really offering this feature, it essentially re-creates a core feature of Brigktkite. Whether it will offer a stream of photos with comments is anyone's guess. If it does pan out, it keeps Foursquare ahead of Gowalla, owing partly to Foursquare's Tips feature (Brightkite Photo Tips, anyone?).

Gowalla and Foursquare aren't the only players in the location-based world of photos. For those who know me, Foodspotting is right up my alley, allowing users to post food photos that are associated with food venues. SCVNGR also allows people to post photos with places as part of its overall game model, awarding points for the activity. There just isn't a good way to access those photos for users who are just checking in to a place to play the game. Facebook Places tries to offer some of these features, but it gets lost in the mountain of other things users can do on Facebook and certainly has its own batch of privacy issues beyond just giving up your location.

While users can now associate a tweet with a place and post a photo readily from their mobile phones, the existing photo sharing services don't provide a way to see all images associated with a place. That is why place-centric services are starting to see the value of relying on user-generated imagery to bolster their core offering — checking in to places. In the end, being able to see photos of food, the venue, the crowd, the lighting, specials, and the local drunk may be far more compelling reasons to use a check-in service than earning badges or pins.

That Brighkite is stepping away from this saddens me, but there are clearly going to be others offering at least some of those core features in the near future.

Related Articles:

• Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux


• Brightkite Changes Direction


• Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks (my Brightkite use is referenced in the article)


• Securing Facebook Places (from Your Friends)


• Twitter Pushes into Places


• Travelogues, Places and Meetups


• Brightkite Tries Another Angle


• The Future of Check-ins at evolt.org


• Mapping Location-Based Social Media at evolt.org


• Real World Hyperlinks at evolt.org


• Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked)


• Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media


• We are thankful for... at the Brightkite blog

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Negative Reviews Can Now Affect Site Rank Downward

One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using "link farms," sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This "spamdexing" technique is based on having many of these sites (hundreds, thousands) with nothing but links. Quite some time ago Google, Yahoo, and other search engines from the mists of history all recognized this bad practice and started penalizing sites listed on those indices.

When you get SEO spam email claiming that the spammer will list your site in 300 (or some other large number) search engines, this is often what they mean. If you can name more than three search engines, you are already ahead of most Internet users and you recognize that 50, 100, 300, etc are all untenable numbers. If you get an email from someone saying he or she likes your site, has linked to it, and wants you to link back, it's probably just another link farm.

Sadly, with the proliferation of community and social media sites that allow users to post comments and rate organizations, we see a repeat of the comment-spamming model that has caused blogs (among others) to implement CAPTCHA and other Draconian measures to try and hold back the tide of comment spam. As the adage "all press is good press" has led us to believe, coverage of any sort is good for business. That also means that sites that track comments about business, such as Epinions, Get Satisfaction and others like them, can end up boosting an organization's rank in the search engines even when customers complain about the organization. Let me restate — if people had anything to say about you, including bad things, they were giving you a bump in search engine results.

Cue an article in the New York Times, A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web, which tells the story of a woman who purchased a pair of glasses from a company that appeared at the top of the Google search results. Not only did she not get the product she wanted, it took a decidedly Single White Female turn and became a real life game of harassment from the vendor. The motivation for the vendor to behave this way is pretty clear from a comment on Get Satisfaction, posted by the very person harassing the customer.

Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com. I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.

When you see comments like these from "Michael" on Get Satisfaction, you can see how Michael's constant "complaints" are really doing nothing more than acting as link machines back to the offender's site. You decide if Michael is a real person or just part of the link spamming.

While this is an extreme case, it was enough for Google to take notice. On December 1 Google announced that it has made changes to its search algorithm (Being bad to your customers is bad for business):

[W]e developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue[...]

Google makes some fair points about blocking (or lowering the rank of) an organization's site outright that has negative commentary associated with the organization. In that scenario, many politician sites would fare poorly. Competing organizations can engage in a war of defamation on third party sites. And so on.

What's key about Google's statement is the phrase "extremely poor user experience." This goes beyond just poor customer service and defective products, and can now capture sites where people complain about the design or the usability. I am one of those people who has reached out to a site to complain about a technical or implementation problem (yes, I am that jerk) and, when faced with no response, have taken to the critique sites to restate my case (complaint, whining, whatever). If you get enough user experience (UX) designers to complain about a site's ability to confound, or enough disabled users to complain about a site's inaccessibility, those can now impact a site's overall Google rank.

As you read the Times article, remember that even if your organization would never behave that way, if your site is impossible to use and people say so on opinion sites, then you could fall into the same bucket.

While you're considering that, make sure your site loads quickly, too (see the last link below).

Related

• Beware The Link Farms – Avoiding Mistakes In SEO Link Building


• A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web


• Being bad to your customers is bad for business


• Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank

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Two Advent Calendars for Web Developers

One of the best parts of December, regardless of whether you believe in Christmas or that it belongs in December, is the fun of the advent calendar. As a kid I used to look forward to jamming a new piece of creche-themed chocolate (chocolate stablehand, anyone?) into my mouth every morning before breakfast. Now that I am a little older and can wait until after breakfast, I can also appreciate more evolved advent calendars.

24 Ways

Today marks the start of 24 Ways, an article-a-day site presenting web design and development posts from authors such as Dan Mall, Simon Collison, Richard Rutter, Cennydd Bowles, Sarah Parmenter, Veerle Pieters, etc. The site has been dispensing holiday nuggets ever December since 2005 and, based on past years (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009), this year will have some gems. Last year I had a write-up on 24 Ways as well (24 Ways Is Back Over 24 Days), and I can tell you that I have referred back to some of the posts often.

You can find daily updates right on the home page, or by following 24 Ways on Twitter (@24ways), Facebook and/or following the RSS feed in your favorite aggregator (full content of each article is in the feed).

This year 24 Ways is changing it up and also offering a printed annual with all the 2010 articles with all the proceeds from the sales to be given to UNICEF. The printed version of 24 Ways is only on sale during December 2010 (for £8) and will be printed at some point after that. You can read more and place an order at the 24 Ways Annual site.

Adfont Calendar

Fontdeck has created its own advent calendar, or its Adfont Calendar (see the image above). Each day a user can select the appropriate "drawer" to access another free web font special. Here's the cool part about it — these are web fonts.

Before you get too excited, it's clearly a sales promotion, but at least you get to try out some new typefaces and enjoy a discount to buy the whole thing. According to Fontdeck, all of their web fonts are free to trial for up to 20 visitors, but the fonts in the Adfont Calendar are also free to upgrade for use on a web site with up to 1 million page views. You will need to sign up for an account and provide Fontdeck with the URL of the site on which you will use the typeface. Once you do that, Fontdeck provides you with code to link to the CSS file and the appropriate CSS to use in your site.

I signed up for today's free font, Museo 900. All I had to do was create my account and then click the big red "Purchase font licenses" option. Since it's a $0 annual license, I wasn't too concerned about clicking the button (but I shouldn't count on it lasting past December 1 of next year). I was presented with a block of text that, comfortingly, read:

Thank you! We've upgraded this account to unlimited use – now all your site visitors will see the fonts.

And that's it. It looks like it's good to go. Now, today's offering isn't exactly the typeface I would choose for my site, so I will be visiting daily to see what other typefaces open up this month.

If you are really itching to play around with web fonts and want more options, check out the article I wrote in July, Trying Google Font Previewer.

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Google's Web Book May Not Help Those Who Need It Most

In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online "book" called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children's book that allows readers to flip through the pages, it is designed to provide a general overview of the internet and how it works (DNS is fun with cartoons!), all the way down to the browser on your computer. Read about it in the Google Chrome blog post, A curious guide to browsers and the web, from November 18.

While having a conversation with a friend/client, I sent her a link to the part of the book that explains web browsers and why a modern browser is probably a good idea to use instead of an outdated browser. This user is on Internet Explorer 6 and is not allowed to upgrade per corporate policy. What I did not expect was the page to break so forcefully for a user on Internet Explorer 6. She was immediately prompted to download and install some fonts, and declining to do so resulted in a page that could not be read (owing to the text flowing off the left side of the screen) and a curious illustration of a dog and fire hydrants (which she took to be some sort of mean joke from Google):

On a whim, I suggested she reload the page to get the fonts it was pushing down to her, and I can say that the experience improved — albeit slightly. The main copy of the page was visible, but the content was cut off on the first "page" with no way to get to the remaining "pages" in the section. Take a look for yourself:

You may note that there is a caption at the top of the page telling users to download a modern browser (Chrome) or at least install Google Chrome Frame. It says flat-out that the page was designed for HTML5-compliant browsers (which is a small list, and ever-changing given that the spec is not done).

Owing to the growing collection of HTML5-sites-that-aren't-really-HTML5, I was suspect about this one, so I looked under the hood. Lo and behold, among an assault of divs and spans I actually found some HTML5 elements — header, nav and footer. Unfortunately, I think many of the divs and spans could have been better served with the oft-maligned and misunderstood aside, section or article elements, assuming this site really wants to tout HTML5.

If you are going to exclude older browsers because you want to play with the newest whiz-bang, why not just go for the gusto and pepper the site with as many HTML5 elements as you can muster? And while you're at it, why not take out the whole section explaining why you should upgrade your browser? Clearly if you can read and use the book, you are already modern enough.

In case you are curious, that same page above as rendered in Google Chrome:

Related

Some examples of what I've written about people not quite getting HTML5.

• Google Doodle: Bouncy Balls Aren't HTML5


• Google, Arcade Fire Confused on HTML5


• Methods to Select an HTML5 Element


• Does Your Browser Really Support HTML5 and CSS3?


• HTML5 and CSS3 Confusion


• Too Soon to Advocate HTML5?

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Current Internet Use, from Assorted Sources

Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don't know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general. Opera is certainly motivated to capture as much of the mobile market as it can given its low appearance numbers on desktops. Regardless, the title of the report really distills down Opera's findings: Generation Y chooses the mobile Web. You can get all the details from this and prior surveys at Opera's State of the Mobile Web site. Some of the highlights:

• Almost 90% of respondents in the United States aged 18-27 have used their phones to share pictures. Of the profiled countries, Vietnam &8212; at 67% &7212; had the lowest use of mobile phones to share pictures.


• Respondents in the United States are least likely to have asked someone out on a date via SMS (44%). Respondents in China (84%), Germany (84%) and Vietnam (83%) are most likely to have used SMS texts to ask someone out on a date.


• Generation Y in both China and the United States share a disdain for printed newspapers. 53% of respondents in the United States and 57% of respondents in China rarely or never read physical newspapers.


• Watch your privacy policies. Respondents in South Africa (49%) and the United States (44%) were somewhat to very uncomfortable sharing their personal information online.

Last week ReadWriteWeb reported that YouTube use on mobile devices has been on the rise — 75% of surveyed mobile YouTube users saying that their mobile device is the primary way of accessing YouTube (YouTube Mobile Use Exploding: 75% Report Mobile is Primary Way of Watching YouTube
). This number, however, should be considered in context. Only users of the mobile version of YouTube (typically the YouTube app installed on a phone) were surveyed, so you can expect a far larger percentage of respondents relying on the mobile version as opposed to the general public. This doesn't, for example, track the users who might come across a page on your site with your corporate YouTube video. Since YouTube is often used for casual surfing, not so much business use, it makes sense that a meme discussed over beers with friends might result in a smartphone popping out to track down the video everyone is referencing.

Brian Solis was kind enough to take the data from the Ad-ology report, Twitter Users in the United States, and distill it down to some manageable chunks of data in his post Who are All of These Tweeple? In short, Twitter users tend to range between 18 and 34 (which is a big range) are white and have at least some college education. Again, cross-referencing with the data we've gathered from other surveys, we see a continuation of some trends toward younger more savvy users. There aren't lots of surprises in the report, but there are some numbers that can at least provide a little more detail to what we already expect. For example:

57.7% of Twitter users use the Internet more than three hours per day for personal use (outside of school or work) and are considered "heavy Internet users."

Back in June Nielsen released a report with a telling title: Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online. Four of the most popular destinations on the web are Google, Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia. All of these enjoy a lot of use from users on mobile devices (well, perhaps not so much Wikipedia, but people are still looking things up in bars after tracking down the YouTube video). While the article is silent on mobile use, a skilled reader can apply mobile trends to the overall traffic and begin to see part of the reason mobile has been climbing.

If you believe this article from June, Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web, then you can expect to see the numbers of social media sites to continue to climb and ages of users continue to stay young, even as older users get on board. As part of that, mobile use will continue to climb as people want to stay socially connected wherever they are.

The trick among reports and studies is to figure out how the data was gathered, who performed the gathering, why they did it and who participated. If you can validate that a study has any merit, then you can start to cross-reference it with other reports and piles of data to tease out some meaning.

Related Links

• Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web, June 15, 2010 at Social Fresh.


• Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online, June 15, 2010 at Nielsen Wire.


• Who are All of These Tweeple? November 10, 2010 from Brian Solis


• YouTube Mobile Use Exploding: 75% Report Mobile is Primary Way of Watching YouTube, November 12, 2010 at ReadWriteWeb.


• Generation Y chooses the mobile Web, November 24, 2010 from Opera.

UPDATE

It seems the day after Thanksgiving is a good day for people to post more details about Internet use. I won't distill them here (I haven't had a chance to read them in detail), but here are a couple more chunks of stats and data to review while you digest.

• Preview of Mobile Stats to End of Year 2010: 5.2 Billion subscribers, 350M people got their first phone this year, November 26, 2010 at Communities Dominate Brands.


• The Great Wealth Divide in Internet Usage [STATS], November 25, 2010 at Mashable (who still refuse to properly date stamp their posts).

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Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux

I finally get to eat.

Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite.

In addition to a free meal, my family also got to experience some of the potential of social media in the form of the Brightkite wall, which was a constant stream of posts and photos from Thanksgiving meals across the country. Amazingly, they sat transfixed as it scrolled across my TV and they got a kick out of seeing a slice of everyone else's holiday.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

Last year I wrote up a blog post, Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media, that detailed my previous year's experience and it was picked up by Brightkite on their blog: We are thankful for.... They were even kind enough to provide a link to a Brightkite wall with some search terms already selected (Brightkite only). That was back when Brightkite was still enjoying a fair amount of photo postings and had not been thoroughly overrun with spammers.

Mashable, the site for all things social media related, posted an article titled HOW TO: Plan the Perfect Thanksgiving With the Help of Social Media (although the title tag says "social web"). The article, however, has little to do with social media and instead talks about web sites focused on helping you prepare meals, travel, and generally survive the holiday chaos.

If you prefer the idea of a wall showing all the latest Thanksgiving tweets, many Twitter tools allow you to follow specific terms and hashtags, meaning you can build your own if you already have one of those tools. If you want something a little more interesting, the Brighkite wall still works and allows you to aggregate tweets in addition to posts from Brightkite. TwitterFall is another projection-friendly (or TV-screen-friendly) option for viewing tweets in a cascade down your screen. There will be more noise (spam) on it than two years ago, but it's at least a way to see live posts come through. Sadly, there is no way to aggregate all the photos that make it to Gowalla, the various Twitter image services, Facebook, and so on. But then, it's probably better to spend time with the family anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to turn this into a post about the TSA pat-down policies and the opt-out day that many are calling for on the web that coincides with the start of holiday travel, but if you want to cash in on the chaos via a new Foursquare badge, then you may just need to check in to an airport some time over the next couple days. We'll see if I get it when I do an airport run shortly...

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Social Media Policy Lawsuits, Part 2 of 2

Yesterday I covered an example of lawsuits sparked by teachers unions and school boards over social media policies. Today I'll carry it a little further with another case involving unions as well as a professional association.

Complaining about Your Job

An employee at an ambulance company, faced with complaints on her behavior, was denied the ability to have the Teamsters respond on her behalf. Using Facebook, the employee lashed out at her supervisor, using vulgarities and a company term to imply the supervisor is mentally unstable. She was ultimately fired from the company and her Facebook comments were cited in her dismissal. The National Labor Relations Board, formed to protect employees who form unions or discuss working conditions, has stepped in to file suit claiming that the social media policy is too broad and that her Facebook comments cannot be used to fire her. The policy states that employees are not to discuss the company in any way on social media sites.

Since the NLRB is involved and weighing in on this, it's a federal issue that applies across the country. Organizations don't have to have unions to be affected by this, either. The NLRB ultimately felt the social media policy was too broad and infringing the employee's rights to discuss her working conditions, which can have serious effects for companies who have already written policies with an eye toward restricting employees from discussing anything regarding their employers. Any disparaging comments about the supervisor's mental capacity were dismissed by the NLRB as secondary to the issue.

Employment law firms across the country sent out alerts in the wake of this case, urging companies to re-examine their social media policies.

American Medical Association

Perhaps owing to the many private practices across the country that might not be in a position to draft a social media policy, or even care, the American Medical Association has released its own policy: AMA Policy: Professionalism in the Use of Social Media. While it isn't a set of strict rules, according to the AMA release it is designed to help[...] physicians to maintain a positive online presence and preserve the integrity of the patient-physician relationship. An overview from the AMA (not that the policy itself is much longer):

• Use privacy settings to safeguard personal information and content to the fullest extent possible on social networking sites.


• Routinely monitor their own Internet presence to ensure that the personal and professional information on their own sites and content posted about them by others, is accurate and appropriate.


• Maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship when interacting with patients online and ensure patient privacy and confidentiality is maintained.


• Consider separating personal and professional content online.


• Recognize that actions online and content posted can negatively affect their reputations among patients and colleagues, and may even have consequences for their medical careers.

The policy, however, is silent on HIPAA on how it fits into social media. The short and simple answer is that it does not. HIPAA naturally precludes the use of social media for so much patient interaction that any physician following the rules of HIPAA should understand that casually sharing any information with or about patients is a bad idea.

The problem is that without this being explicitly spelled out, physicians who are not technically savvy may not understand that something like a tweet sent to a person (by preceding it with the recipient's handle) or maintaining a venue on Foursquare would be a violation (not everyone should be given the opportunity to check in to an oncologist office).

There are still safe ways to use social media, and examples could be added as an appendix. For example, making a Facebook fan page for your dentistry practice or medical supply store is probably safe, as long as you police it to make sure people aren't posing medical questions or seeking medical advice (and worse, getting it from other patients). This might be too much effort for a small practice to commit, and may not be tenable for many.

Conclusions

Crafting a social media policy is necessary, even if everything covered in it is already addressed in other policies. Providing specifics helps those without technical savvy to understand what they can and cannot do. The trick is be sure a policy isn't too restrictive or otherwise unenforceable. As lawsuits roll back and forth across the country, in time, as with most other policies, a standard set of best practices will shake out. Until that happens, flexibility is important.

Related Links

• Corporate Social Media Policies, September 21, 2009 on this blog.



• Protecting Yourself From Social Media Lawsuits, July 21, 2010 from Social Media Today.



• The Ethics of Social Media – Part I: Adjusting to a 24/7 World, November 11, 2010 from Business Ethics magazine.



• Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post, November 8, 2010 from New York Times.



• Groundbreaking Lawsuit: Company Accused of Illegally Firing Employee over Facebook Post, November 11, 2010 from a California employment attorney blog.



• The Perfect Storm-Facebook, Email, NLRB, November 15, 2010 from Social Media Today.



• Company Social Media Policies Challenged, November 12th, 2010 from 1 Good Reason social marketing blog.





• AMA Policy: Professionalism in the Use of Social Media, November 8, 2010 at American Medical Association site.



• New AMA Policy Helps Guide Physicians' Use of Social Media, November 8, 2010 at American Medical Association site.



• The Realities of HIPAA in Social Media, April 6, 2010 from the Lovell Communications blog.



• Sorting Out the Confusion of Social Media and HIPAA Regulations, October 9, 2009 from (e)Merge, a medical marketing company.

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Social Media Policy Lawsuits, Part 1 of 2

Back when I first started pitching the idea of developing a social media policy for an organization, it was really two-fold. The first part was the key part to me — outline a process and rules for your organization to communicate using social media. Having a process for responding to questions, complaints, trolls, etc. from customers directly engaging an organization or from comments found out in the wild of the web is just good business practice.

The second part was, in my opinion, a little less important. Creating a policy for how employees use social media at work and how they discuss work seemed pretty straightforward and already covered by existing confidentiality and defamation policies. Sadly, in a litigious society such as ours, it's never that simple and legal counsel is motivated to create iron-clad legalize tomes of rules.

The end result is that some employees may feel that their rights are being infringed. Today I'll cover a case with a school board in Florida.

Teachers vs. the School Board

In August, the Santa Rosa County School Board posted its revised E-Mail, Internet, and Social Media Acceptable Use and Risk Policy. Parts of the policy make perfect sense, such as protecting non-public student information by requiring parents to sign-off before any of that information will be transmitted via the notoriously insecure method of email.

The social media portion of the document, titled Risks Associated with the Use of Social Media literally discusses the risks of social media and has a sign-off at the end stating that the reader acknowledges those risks. There are cases where specific and non-specific statements are made, such as this one about befriending students and posting information about students:

The Santa Rosa County School Board does not support or recommend any staff member “Friend”-ing a student or parent on a social network. Do not post student pictures, names, or work on school or personal sites unless specific permission to do so has been obtained from parents and site administration. ADDITIONALLY, ANY INFORMATION RELAYED TO STUDENTS VIA ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS MUST BE ETHICALLY APPROPRIATE AND PREFERABLY SCHOOL-RELATED (I.E., HAVE LIMITED ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION WITH STUDENTS)

The teachers union, however, takes issue with the policy overall. A third grade teacher at the school worked with the union to threaten a lawsuit, providing the following statements:

My main concern is an employer has asked an employee to sign a document that is so lengthy, it required a table of contents. [...] It stated by signing the nine-page document, you agreed to everything in there and were not allowed to edit it, in part or in total. [...] When you sign the form, it says the district has the right to put your name, picture and employment on the Internet, and you have no discretion on how it is used.

While I think she has it completely wrong (the policy is geared toward protecting student data), I am not a lawyer (IANAL™) and not every employee is going to read this kind of document carefully, with its extensive legal references (for self education), and not feel as if a signature is somehow terminally binding on something that may not be understood.

Teachers in Manatee County and Bradenton County, both also in Florida, have also filed lawsuits with similar claims. The flip side, however, is that teachers without a social media policy giving them direction on appropriate behavior may not know where to draw the line. While a policy doesn't prevent poor behavior, it sets parameters and expectations, and protects schools when teachers get out of line.

Just last month New York Post reported on three teachers that were fired for inappropriate interaction with students on Facebook. In the article, the Post reported that the Department of Education has no social media policy in place. The absence of a policy governing behavior with students can lead to lawsuits from parents just as easily as lawsuits from unions for having a policy.

Tomorrow I'll cover another example lawsuit and a new policy from a professional organization.

Related Links

• Corporate Social Media Policies, September 21, 2009 on this blog.



• Could your social media policy spark a lawsuit?, November 15, 2010 from Andrew Careaga's blog on marketing and PR in higher ed.



• Company Accused of Firing Over Facebook Post, November 8, 2010 from New York Times.



• Free speech: Teachers sue Florida school district for social media policy, November 13, 2010 at First Amendment Coalition site.



• Santa Rosa teachers union files lawsuit over social media policy, August 28, 2010 from Northwest Florida Daily News.



• Restrictive Nine-Page Social Media Policy Leads to Lawsuit, August 30, 2010 at Employment Law in the Digital Age blog.



• Teachers union sues district over proposed social media policy, November 17, 2010 from WTSP.



• Teachers fired for flirting on Facebook with students, October 18, 2010 from New York Post.

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Google Instant Preview Overview

It's like I'm running out of novel titles or something.

With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant and SEO/SEM). Anyone who thought that Google would still for a while from there was wrong. Just last week Google introduced Instant Previews, which now shows search users the preview of a page before visiting it (see the announcement at Beyond Instant results: Instant Previews). The embedded video from Google below provides an overview of the feature.

To be fair to others, Google didn't exactly pioneer this, but as the biggest player in the market, Google's implementation can have an effect. As a result, expect to see people react to it in different ways. Many users, however, may never know the images are available since they will have to click the magnifying glass icon (or use the right arrow key) to activate the feature.

One key feature of Google's implementation is that it highlights the keywords in the screen shot, showing users just what the search term hit within the page. This is particularly handy to see if your search term is hitting some main content, or just some ancillary content on the page, potentially saving users extra clicks and time spent reading through a site. In looking at my own site, I can see that it highlighted the introductory text instead of the giant h1 with my name in the banner.

Since showing the preview to the end user doesn't get reported in a site's Google Analytics data, it will be very hard to measure how effective the preview is at getting users to visit your site.

Before you get excited that as a user that you can now spot SEO spam sites before clicking a link, don't get your hopes up. Google offers support for a meta tag that allows you to exclude a site from the preview (read the Instant Previews entry on the Google Webmaster Central blog for the scoop on other bits for web developers):

Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.

SEO spammers will likely use this, including domain name squatters and people who squat on misspellings of common web addresses. In time, users may even come to recognize that a lack of a preview is akin to hiding something.

If your site relies heavily on Flash or third-party plug-ins, you may also need to spend some time testing how it looks in Google Instant Preview. There is a reasonable chance that the preview will have broken puzzle piece icons in place of the Flash element. In the words of Google:

Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

This screen capture of the preview from Lifehacker with an embedded video, which almost ironically show how to use Google Instant Preview with your keyboard, shows what happens when you have plug-ins embedded in the page.

You may also want to skip splash pages or interstitials (the modern splash page for within a site). A splash page may become the preview, and that could end up keeping users from following the link to your site. I've been railing against splash pages for well over ten years (see my article showing developers how to allow users to skip them from over 11 years ago: Let the User Skip the Splash Page), but perhaps this new feature of Google can help push more developers to abandon them.

Time will tell how well this feature is received by end users, and more importantly, how developers consider making changes to their sites as a result. I predict it's just a matter of time (probably backward in time, since I suspect this has already happened) that someone implements a user agent sniffer to detect the Google crawler and serve up different styles to optimize the layout of the page for the preview size and format. If I wasn't writing this post I'd probably be working on that instead.

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How Many Users Support JavaScript?

This is one of those posts I started back in mid-October and sat on, suspecting that there would be more follow-up, backlash, challenges, and general bickering. There has been some, but then it died down a bit. And then I remembered I should post this.

The Yahoo Developer Network posted an article (by Nicholas Zakas) in mid-October asking the same question I have been asking for 15+ years (and so have many of you, even if not for that long): How many users have JavaScript disabled?

The post goes into some detail outlining the methodology for capturing the data, which is worth reading for the follow-up posts, but here is the breakdown:

After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic, with the highest rate being roughly 2 percent in the United States and the lowest being roughly 0.25 percent in Brazil. All of the other countries tested showed numbers very close to 1.3 percent.

If you've followed me long enough, you know that I have always (15+ years) argued that sites should and need to function without JavaScript, that JavaScript can then be added on to enhance and improve the experience.

The Yahoo article echoes that sentiment and provides some simple math to prove that point: with 300 million users hitting the Yahoo home page every month, 6 million of them don't have JavaScript. Think about that. Are you willing to turn away that many users with short-sighted development practices?

Mike Davies, a former Yahoo Europe worker, took issue with the message and methodology from the Yahoo post and wrote about it on his blog (Disabling JavaScript: Asking the wrong question). In particular he focused in on this snippet from the original post:

First, the overwhelming majority of users has JavaScript-enabled browsers and can therefore take advantage of all of the enhanced functionality and dynamic interfaces developers and designers love to create.

He doesn't address the second point, that 6 million users hit Yahoo each month without JavaScript. Instead he takes people to task for jumping on the first point as justification to continue their own ill-advised development practices that leave non-JS users in the cold. After all, people tend to find data to support their own opinions and discard the rest (we just had elections in the US that bolster that point). This motivates him to suggest other ways that users might not have JavaScript support in their browsers — a browser cannot execute JavaScript it has not received.

Citing network outages, corporate firewalls, band browser extensions, he notes that some users sometimes never receive the code. He goes on to point out poor coding can prevent script from even executing, ranging from browser detection, object detection, poor error handling, and so on. These users wouldn't show up in the Yahoo test as JavaScript-incapable, even though they functionally are.

The author of the original Yahoo post had an addendum to help address the comments received on the first post along with all the other chatter around the web and wrote Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?. In it he reviews his methodology for arriving at the numbers in the original post. While I don't agree with some of the assumptions he makes, it doesn't diminish the percentages from the original post and only leaves room for them to be higher.

The rest of the post goes on to expand on one of his points from the first post, that a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. He goes on to outline and defend the Yahoo development approach and outline Yahoo's use of progressive enhancement. Yahoo's own research validated the assumption many of us make, that users do surf without JavaScript.

The takeaway from this entire back-and-forth is that there are still users without JavaScript support, for a variety of reasons, and they are a significant number of users. Neglecting them as you build web sites and applications is short-sighted and just bad practice. This has been true for over 15 years, so it's reasonable to expect it will be true for years to come.

Update: February 11, 2011

I discuss how assuming everyone has JavaScript is probably a bad idea, especially when your JavaScript breaks: Beyond Hash-Bangs: Reliance on JavaScript Is a Bad Idea.

Updated: October 22, 2013

The UK Government Digitial Service outlines how it tracked users who aren't able to use JavaScript (regardless of reason), which turns out to be tricky: How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement? Note the numbers 3 years on aren't much different from Yahoo's own numbers suggesting perhaps there will always be a 1%.

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