Steven Mooner Usher

In technology, or moreover, computer science, canonicalisation is the operation of transfiguring data that has multiple potential representations into a single, canonical representation.

In search engine optimisation, this refers to the avoidance of having more than a single representation of your data, ie; website. Millions of websites have two options to their website, firstly, website.com, and secondly, www.website.com. This may seem like a trivial point, but when it comes to the indexing of your website, the algorithm by which your pages are ranked may or may not choose the best option, and that is something out of your control, except for removing the options in the first place.

Avoiding canonicalisation is extremely simple to achieve, but many websites fall in to the trap of believing that having two sites indexed, two likely identical sites its worth mentioning, will improve their rankings, or at the very least increase brand/site exposure.

The fact is this just isn’t the case. If you’re a webmaster, or business owner with a website through which you wish to receive traffic and potential custom, it’s important that you correctly and clearly define the channels through which a search engines spider should travel.

This is unlikely to lead to any ‘duplicate content’ penalisation, but its good practice, and is ultimately one of the fundamental actions that should be taken upon the launch of any website, particularly one of significant depth.

If you are unsure whether your domain has correctly taken the steps to avoid canonicalisation, simply type website.com in to your browser (replacing website.com with your own URL of course). If this redirects you to www.website.com, then you are fine, but do not fear if it doesn’t, there is a simple procedure to ensure you communicate your site correctly.

Firstly, open your text editor of choice, and copy the following code in:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Then, replace website.com and www.website.com with your own domains equivalents, and save this with the filename .htaccess, with which you can perform other techniques to improve your chances of ranking your site correctly, including rewriting your URL’s, but this is generally for smaller sites as you will need to include the code for each URL individually. For larger sites this is usually done through a combination of database category allocation and PHP (or similar) code.

Once you have saved this file, place it in your local root directory, save, then upload it to the root directory of your remote (hosting) server. Now, give it a try and you will find that if you type in website.com it will automatically redirect to www.website.com,thus avoiding canonicalisation and incorrect indexing of your sites information/services.

Try some examples. Follow the first link:
http://harrisfowler.co.uk - good personal injury site, you will find yourself at www.harrisfowler.co.uk.

Now, try the following link:
http://youclaim.co.uk - bad personal injury site, you will find you are at the URL originally shown.

Remember, if you have a website, let it serve it purpose.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t say anything as he flanked President-elect Barack Obama during his first post-election press conference. He didn’t have to.

The image alone of Schmidt standing elbow-to-elbow with Obama’s top economic thinkers was enough to send shivers up the spine of Google’s competitors.

“This terrifies Microsoft,” said a Democratic lobbyist familiar with the industry. “There’s a reason why people are scared to death of Google.”

Last Friday’s press conference Friday came just two days after Google threw in the towel on an attempted Internet advertising partnership with Yahoo, the older, but struggling Web company. Google said that the prospect of an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department was the key deal breaker. Yahoo, which needed the deal more than Google, had said it was willing to fight the government, but Google didn’t have the stomach for a protracted legal battle.

So an open question for Google is whether the search-engine giant’s newfound closeness with the Democratic president-elect will give the company the muscle it needs to win disputes with the government over deals such as the Yahoo partnership.

Google says that Schmidt was acting on his own, and his politics don’t reflect the company’s official stance.

“Eric’s endorsement of Senator Obama was a personal matter, and as a company Google was neutral in the campaign,” said Adam Kovacevich, Google’s senior manager of global communications and public affairs. “We look forward to working with the new administration and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to keep the Internet open and to promote economic growth.”

Obama’s transition team declined comment.

Some insiders, though, say Schmidt is inevitably identified with the company he leads. And they say that could benefit Google, not on the big decisions in Washington, but on the accumulation of smaller, less-visible matters. “A lot of decisions are made in the gray areas and at the low levels,’ explained the Democratic lobbyist.

“From the staff attorney all the way up the line, everybody now knows that Google is close to Obama,” the lobbyist said. And that could subtly affect the policy playing field in Google’s favor.

Beyond the perennial antitrust battles, Google has a host of other issues pending in Washington, from broadband access and net neutrality to privacy rights to patent reform and copyright policy.
And it hasn’t gone unnoticed in the lobbying community that Google has been quietly upping its participation in the Washington scene for nearly a year.

Not only was Google’s Schmidt on the campaign trail and on Obama’s economic advisory committee, but he also assumed the role of chairman of the influential New America Foundation early this year. Google didn’t donate money as a company, but Schmidt wrote a personal check of $1 million, single handedly financing a healthy portion of the foundation’s $12.9 million annual budget.

The New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy think tank, will clearly be at the center of the new administration’s thinking on economic issues: Schmidt and two other of its board members were among the 17 influential economic thinkers who stood behind Obama Friday.

“We’re looking forward to having more friends in the next administration,” said New America Foundation Vice President Rachel White. “But as an independent foundation, the chances are good that we’ll swim against the stream of some of the policies that the Obama administration puts forward.”

Anticipating the problems that can come from having prominent people with multiple agendas serving on the foundation’s board of directors, New America drew up a conflict of interest policy in June, saying, in part: “New America’s conflict of interest policy is not designed to eliminate or exclude relationships and activities that might create a duality of interest, but rather to encourage transparency and careful deliberation in those cases where conflicts or perceived conflicts may arise.” Source Unknown.

iTunes, the proprietary digital media media player from Apple, was first released in 2001, performing mainly as an organiser and player of music. Now, I resisted the temptation to get involved with the Apple love-in that had started perhaps 5 or 6 years ago, that was, until, this year.

I have never owned a iPod, and don’t suspect I ever will, but I have reverted to an iMac for work, and no doubt I’ll be buying my iHouse soon with my iMortgage, and relaxing with an iPint at my iLocal. I digress, my point is this: I have no allegiance to Apple or any of their products, so it was with entirely equitable eyes that I came to love iTunes.

As a side-note for those that are interested, the ‘i’ in their branding originated with the iMac, which was released at just about the time the internet started to truly spread its appeal, and thus stood for ‘internet’, as it was an ‘out-of-the-box’ ready-to-go machine for web-surfing (among other purposes of course). Now it holds no meaning, but does tie their products together nicely, and has proven to be a hugely successful branding.

Having used iTunes now for 6 months, I can safely say I am a fan. Over the past month or so I have started exploring its features, and much to my delight I now get the Adam and Joe podcasts updated automatically for my listening pleasure, I can tune in to an eclectic choice of radio stations, from rock and metal, classical and jazz, to sports and comedy. Even when I add my own music to the library, it manipulates the files in to m4a’s, which require less memory, and can be transported to any portable media playing device of any worth.

The navigation is superb, and even the most laymen of….men, will always understand what action their iTunes is performing, and how to get to their desired area should they not be there. A simple, clean design, very much in keeping with Apple’s virtues of design.

It’s to my detriment that I was too lazy to try the various functions available, and as a comparison to its main rival, WMP (Windows Media Player), it simply blows it away. I’m sure there are areas of performance that WMP out-wits iTunes, but I won’t be the one to find that out, as I am now married to iTunes, and have no intention of changing my election in the foreseeable future.

WMP serves it purpose as a music player, but iTunes has endeavored to unite your media playing needs in to one extremely simple interface, and boy did they succeed. Available to download for free from the Apple website, with versions for all major operating systems, there’s no reason not to let Apple massage your ears.

So, I haven’t posted for a long time, 19 days in fact, and there is a very simple reason for that, a lack of motivation. When i first set this blog up I foresaw me making daily contributions about all kind of interesting and crazy subjects, but frankly that just hasn’t transpired.

Without having a designated field about which to write, a designated field that was also a passion of mine, then anything I put up here would hold no merit, no interest, and no relevance, so its become apparent that I need to center the blog in on a subject close to my heart, music.

The basic plan at this early stage is to focus it on reviews of local bands or artists in the Somerset area, post details/reviews of their shows, do my own band bio’s, provide contact information etc, and just try and give the little guy a little lift. I will back this up with some reviews of other great bands, from any place or time, most likely restricted to bands that I personally love, and hopefully you do/will too.

For an idea of what to expect, see my post regarding Ryan Inglis, a local musician who’s working towards a record deal, and keep your ears posted if you already haven’t for bands similar to Far, New End Original, The Kinks, Dry Kill Logic, The Dismemberment Plan, Reuben, Rainer Maria, At The Drive-In, De Facto, Arms Bend Back, Sebadoh, and many many others, which I may list at a later date so you know better what to expect from the site, and to decide if it’s something you care to join in with.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the site will still see posts relevant to my work and other passion, technology. A popular post from my archive, the Google Chrome Review is probably a good snap-shot of the flavour of the technology orientated material you will see here. Coming soon will be a full browser review, pitting the new boys against  each other in some of the key criteria, following the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 and Google Chrome in quick succession.

I think that’s pretty much it, I’m off to enjoy some more music (and technology!).

There are many controversial practices within certain industries, cosmetics have animal testing, sports events have ticket touts, cinema has DVD piracy, and farming has seal-clubbing…don’t worry, I’m joking. No, possibly the worst of these (excluding seal-clubbing) is that arm of marketing and advertising that leaves us so infuriated that we often resort to abuse, Tele-sales.

As with everything maddening, there are degrees of annoyance. I would much rather receive a sales call than, say, see my house burgled, by a Big Brother winner, on a Monday, in Hemel Hempstead, whilst the salient realisation dawns on me that I am in fact naked. Thankfully that can never happen, as it almost technically illegal to move to Hemel Hempstead, but nevertheless, there are degrees. So where does telemarketing stand on the great scale of vexation? Do we really hate these calls as much as we claim? Or are they just an excuse to vent our daily angers at a faceless innocent?

We have within our power the ability to hang up the call at any moment, so why do we make such a drama of how these calls are the plague of our existence, steaming like a pot of mussels after each and every call we receive? The main reason I can attribute this to is the interruption, the glacial nonchalance of the sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.

Having had first hand experience of working in a call centre, for which I apologise and feel remorseful to my very core, I can unequivocally declare that there is a beating heart of unalloyed malevolence pumping nothing but a disgustingly nefarious ethic in to the minds of their staff, many of whom are still relatively impressionable. On a day to day basis we would be taught how to deal with the anger and retaliatory nature of a large percentage of our unsuspecting victims. We would be trained to react with politeness but determination, and to keep selling until the potential customer had hung up. That for me was the hardest element of the job, I have no objection to speaking to strangers, and to some extent I have no objection to a hard sell, but I could not bring myself to bludgeon my way in to these peoples lives, pretend to be their best friend, and worst of all act as though I was working for someone I wasn’t.

Without naming names, I was told that my introductory speech should read something akin to “Good morning sir/madam, my names Steve and I’m calling on behalf of xxxx”. Like i said, naming no names, but for the xxxx you can replace with Google, O2, Microsoft, and many more.

‘On behalf of’, what a ridiculously ambiguous statement, and I completely understood the callers need for clarification, which happened a large number of times. The largest chunk of my time was spent appointment setting, and seminar booking, which is the easier end of the scale in terms of the product you are trying to sell. These seminars were aimed largely at the technology sector, so I was calling IT Technicians and Directors, who frankly will have known of my ‘products’ beforehand through alternate media if they were in the slightest interested, and the bookings I made I can only accredit to luck.

So where is the defence for telemarketing? I don’t believe this case is quite finished just yet, although I know I can not metamorphose the truth in to something truly acceptable.

If we remove all inimical thoughts and take a look at the calls through set of clean eyes, or should that be ears? We see that in most cases there are offers here that would be beneficial to us, they would enhance our life should we accept them and give these calls a fair chance. One of the most common calls I receive is from Vodafone trying to extend/modify my contract, and recently I came to the end of my contract and predictably got that call to renew. I took this as an opportunity to see if I could work this to my favour, having heard many stories of people bartering a good deal. I was originally paying £40/month on a fairly comprehensive package, and had just a couple of months previously received a new phone from them, the model of which I forget, but suffice to say it was nothing remarkable. Having nothing to lose, I said I would renew so long as they sent me a Nokia N95 8Gb, and dropped my monthly rate for the same package, and to my joy this is exactly what they did. I am now on exactly the same package, with a rather brilliant phone, and paying precisely half of my original monthly fee.

This is just one example, but I’m sure if we were all truthful with ourselves, we could admit to other examples of this nature of experience, an experience that would never have happened were it not for some sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.

My view is that rather than instantly becoming irritated at hearing that overly polite introduction, is to disregard the voice, and listen to the words, to take away from the call the information to make an informed decision as to whether their offer will benefit you or not. This is not an easy achievement of that I am acutely aware, but the person on the other end of the phone may be someone just like me, who needs an injection of cash after a relocation and actually doesn’t want to ruin your day at all.