Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Powerset, the natural language search engine that’s been under wraps for a while, has just launched a test version of their product that searches Wikipedia articles. Danny Sullivan describes how Powerset’s search differs from a standard search over at Search Engine Land.

Key to the difference is Powerset’s ability to glean meaning from the sentences. While other search engines primarily look for instances of words on pages, Powerset understands those words. Or something like that. The Search Engine Land article illustrates the concept with a search for Henry VIII. The Powerset results include “factz” based on verbs, such as he “granted” land and “married” a bunch of times.

I was suspicious of the “z”.

But, I figured I’d try it out myself using the tried and true ego search method. If I there’s one search result for which we should be able to judge accuracy, it should be the one about ourself. (Keeping in mind that the current version of my Wikipedia entry is woefully out of date and has been flagged for depressing grammar issues.) So what does Powerset think that Wikipedia has said about me?

That I have declared bankruptcy and received email.

Sigh.

Email marketers know that people tend not to open marketing mail that gets sent on the weekend. We spend Saturdays and Sundays maximizing our time in the sun and the breeze by watching TV and bad movies on cable, erm, I mean rollerblading and picnicking in the park. People also don’t open mail on Monday because they are trying to catch up from that weekend of TNT marathons and they don’t open anything on Fridays because they are too busy trying to decide whether the coming weekend should feature disaster movies or quality films starring California’s governor.

That leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for any serious email marketing effort. Some say Tuesday early afternoon is the best time for optimal open rates. People are ready to tackle the drudgery that is the inbox, and your mail is the first thing they see. Others say Wednesday, as perhaps people have conquered the worst of it and feel they deserve a reward such as idle email shopping. Choose either day, but make sure you send early afternoon.

Finally, testing and research have given us definitive answers for something and we never have to worry about it again. We now know not only the ideal days but the ideal time. Hooray!

Except I’ve found a potentially fatal flaw in this plan.

And that is that everyone is now sending marketing mail on Tuesday and Wednesday, early afternoon.

I don’t get much email marketing because I unsubscribe to just about everything as soon as the first piece of mail hits my inbox. Someone who declares email bankruptcy must become ruthless with incoming mail.

And yet there I was last Wednesday at around 1pm, and on came the mail. REI wanted me to know about their May events calendar. Alaska Airlines wanted to make sure I knew I could buy people flowers and earn miles at the same time. Microsoft Office Live Small Business thought I might want to know how to get my business online for free! Choice Hotels has my room ready! The mail just kept coming.

And I realized, all that research was going to have to start over with the addition of a new variable. Not only do marketers have to avoid sending mail when people are off for the weekend, they have to avoid sending mail at the same moment everyone else is sending mail. And so Thursday at 10am will become the new Tuesday at 1pm. At least until everyone adjusts their email schedule. And then it all will start over again.

Of course, rather than look at averages for “the” customer, you could look at the particulars of your customer. I was thinking about this last Wednesday at 1pm when my mail started filling up, but apparently I’m not the only one.

Last night on the plane, I was reading Fast Company and happened upon this article about how Barneys is personalizing mail based on individual behavior on the web site. Targeting mail seems like a much better approach than the old fashioned blast, although I’m not sure about their assertion this rosy new relationship with the customer means that people embrace getting up to five emails a week. They do say they’ve had a ten-fold rise in response rates, which totally makes sense. If you send a promo for hip new purses to your entire email list, you’re percentage of conversion is going to be lower than if you send the purse promo to teenage girls and the power tie promo to older men.

Although Barneys is getting better at segmentation, they seem to be hesitant to go the next step: stop sending mail to people who don’t respond. I have never shopped online at Barneys and haven’t been in a store in at least eight months. But that doesn’t stop them from sending me mail day in and day out. Mail, by the way, that I never open. (I finally opened one last week solely to click the unsubscribe button.) The incessant mail (10 messages during a 12 day period last month) actually made me less likely to shop at Barneys because I was so irritated that they continued to clog up my inbox.

Ryan Warren of Exact Target brought this up today at the eMetrics Industry Insights Day. He said that sometimes the best thing you can do is stop sending mail to people who don’t open it. Spend you energy on those who like getting your mail and take action on it.

His data supported Barneys’ direction. He said that only 11% of companies send targeted mail and only 7% leverage click stream data, but doing so can raise conversion rates from 1.1% to 3.9% (and can raise click through rates from 9.5% to 14%).

He talked about sending mail not on Tuesday afternoon at 1pm but based on when the customer was interacting with the site. For instance, if you have a travel site and someone puts a trip on hold, send them an email to remind them the hold is about to expire. Or if they were checking out a vacation package, let them know when the price drops. Or better yet, if you know they’re in Seattle and they were browsing trips to Mexico, email them when you see that the Seattle weather forecast calls for rain. (Although now that I think about it, you might need to tweak that last one, or you may end up with the Barneys mail sent every day dilemma.)

Last week, I decided to try the new survey feature of Google Docs. It has some slick features, particularly in that it compiles the results to a spreadsheet automatically, but it also has a few, er, idiosyncrasies.

Open in a New Tab?
The most irritating thing, which is surely a bug, is this. You click on the spreadsheet from the docs list. It opens in another tab. Then from that tab, you go to another page. Perhaps you start to compose a blog post. Then you switch back over to the docs list and click the spreadsheet again to open it. It opens in the tab where it was previous open, rather than a new tab. Perhaps this is the tab that contains your newly composed blog post. Or did contain before that content was replaced with the spreadsheet, wiping out all of your writing. Ahem.

Anonymous Results
Another thing that I suppose makes senses but isn’t clear up front is that you can send the survey to a list of email addresses, but the survey results are anonymous. So my question asking if the respondent is willing to do a follow up survey? Not all that useful to me. I’ve since added a new field asking for that email address.

Limited Question Types
Two things I really needed in my survey but that Google Docs didn’t have were:

• An ordered list (rank a list in order of importance)
• An “other” choice with a text field (so respondents could write in additional answers)

No Custom Email Messages
You can send the form out via email, but any text you write ends up as part of the form. You can’t send a separate email message as you can with other types of Google docs.

Overall all though, the survey was easy to put together and it’s easy to see the responses. I can’t seem to manipulate things much in Google Docs, so I’ll likely have to export to Excel. It would be nice, for instance, if my single-choice answers had graphs or pie charts displayed by default that showed distribution. Instead, I just have a non-compiled laundry list of answers. You can now add Gadgets to spreadsheets, and likely one of these does what I want, but I’d like to have some of that functionality built in. Not that I’m saying I’m lazy.

If you’d like to take my survey about how you approach and measure your online marketing activities, you can check it out here. All results are anonymous. Unless you fill out the newly added email question. Which, like the rest of the survey questions, is entirely optional.

In August of 2005, Google Sitemaps was a fledging new product (it launched in June with little more than an XML definition, a Python script, and a submission UI) and we were looking for a way to let our users know when we added features. Google has lots of blogs now, but it had very few back then. The main Google blog was going strong, of course, and AdSense and AdWords had popular blogs as well, but most other products didn’t. (Now there are more than 70!)

Matt Cutts had been out talking to webmasters for years and had recently started a blog of his own. I worked with Karen Wickre, who leads the Google corporate blogging efforts, and our product marketing manager on the best way to launch this crazy new blog idea. As those of you who blog know so well, launching a new blog is a huge undertaking. You need a plan for updating it with fresh and interesting content and when blogging isn’t your full-time (or even part-time) job, that plan becomes not only more difficult, but more vital.

At first, the blog mostly fulfilled its original purpose. We posted when we added features to let our users know to go check them out.

The first few posts were about Sitemap index files, Sitemap file naming, and the launch of mobile Sitemaps.

And Then, A Shift
However, a curious thing happened. Looking back now, it doesn’t seem quite so curious, but at the time, it was a substantial shift that was amazingly positive for our team (and in my view, for the industry). Our team started thinking of ourselves — our product, our blog, our related Sitemaps Google Group — as serving all the search engine-related needs of the webmaster community, not just their Sitemaps protocol-related needs. (The first non-Sitemaps specific post seems to be from October 2005 about using advanced operators to learn more about what Google knows about your site.)

We started working even more closely with Matt, who after all, has more experience than anyone at Google in knowing what webmasters want and need. The blog began changing focus as part of an entire team shift, which was reflected in the product as well. In April of 2006, we took our Sitemaps documentation and merged that with the existing webmaster guidelines and other documentation, worked with the support team who tirelessly answered webmaster email questions, and created an entirely new webmaster help center. By August 2006, this shift from Sitemaps support to webmaster support was complete. It was clear through our now fairly robust support suite (tools, blog, discussion forum, and help center) that what we offered went well beyond “Sitemaps” and a name change was in order.

The Launch Of Webmaster Central
We launched Webmaster Central, which incorporated all of these components into one comprehensive offering. As part of that, we changed the name of the Google Sitemaps product to Google Webmaster Tools, the name of the Inside Google Sitemaps blog to the Google Webmaster Central blog, and we created a multi-category Google Group, with major sections to reflect the types of issues webmasters were discussing in our previous, less-accurately named “Google Sitemaps” group.

This was an exciting change. It paved the way for a number of positive initiatives: we could more easily expand the scope of the product since it was positioned as a comprehensive webmaster resource, so both internally and externally, things like Sitelink information and geographic location control made more sense; creating the new “webmaster trends analyst” position was a logical extension of the team, as the value of understanding the issues of the webmaster community easily complimented a comprehensive webmaster support system; and specific to the blog, it made even more sense to get various search-related teams to write blog posts and share what they were doing with the webmaster community.

Out of Beta! Comments!
In February 2007, we took Webmaster Tools out of beta and we enabled comments on the blog. Not long after we launched in the initial blog in 2005, other teams began adding blogs about their products, but as with launching a blog, enabling comments is not a small undertaking. You have to understand the time involved to read the comments, research information when need be, and reply when appropriate. When we enabled comments, Jonathan Simon, our first webmaster trends analyst, did a great job in managing that. We were the first existing blog to enable comments (although the Librarian Central blog launched with comments enabled from the start, so they were technically the first to have comments.)

The Intricacies of Corporate Blogging
While I was at Google, I managed the blog: I wrote posts, worked with those on my team and on other teams to write posts, kept track of stats, and stayed in close contact with Karen Wickre about what Google was doing generally with blogging. Corporate blogging is different than personal blogging. You have to remember that you’re not only representing yourself — you’re representing your team, your product, and the entire company.

When you’re blogging for yourself, you may have a sense of your audience, but with corporate blogging, this is even more critical. You want to deliver the information your audience is looking for in a timely, accurate way. We got ideas for blog posts a number of ways: from issues people raised in the forums and elsewhere on the web, from questions people asked or presentations we gave at conferences, and from internal Googlers who had things they wanted to talk about.

It’s Only Gotten Better Since I Left! (Heh, what does that say about me…?)
Maile Ohye has taken over a lot of the blog management responsibility, and the blog is ROCKING. The variety of topics and writers have continued to increase and the quality of the information they publish is fantastic. So, as you might imagine, I was ecstatic to see that the blog had won the Search Engine Journal Best Search Engine Corporate Blog of 2007. I know how hard everyone worked to get the blog to the place it is now, and how passionate Googlers are about providing useful and timely information via the blog. I cannot tell you how happy I am that webmasters find it to be a valuable resource. I never imagined, back when we first had discussions about launching a blog in mid 2005, that it would grow to what you see today, and its success is definitely the result of people you see (like Matt and Maile) and people you may not (like Karen Wickre).

Little known fact! Find it difficult to remember the long URL of googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com? Just type in kirklandwc.com. It redirects to the blog. What’s kirklandwc, you might ask? Well WC stands for “webmaster central” and the team is based in Kirkland!

Want another tip? All the old posts from the Sitemaps blog as still available, but they’re difficult to get to since the home page URL redirects to the new blog. Check out some of the highlights of the old blog or search through the archives.

And Google isn’t the only one dispensing webmaster-centric advice. Yahoo! often posts webmaster-specific information on the Yahoo! Search Blog, and Microsoft recently started a webmaster-specific blog as part of their Live Search Webmaster Center. Along with the engines’ discussion forums and their active presence at conferences and online discussions around the web, those involved with search marketing have access to more official information than ever.

It’s like that Coke commercial on the hill with the flowers and the singing. Maybe we should make the engine reps re-enact that commercial at SMX West….

If you’re around in about an hour (1pm pacific), check out me and Rand on Webmaster Radio. You never know what we might talk about. Head on into the chat room and mock us ask us questions. Or just send a twitter to @vanessafox and hear my phone buzz throughout the show. I’ll edit the post later with the downloadable podcast if you don’t happen to be checking your RSS feeds every two seconds and don’t see this post in time. But who doesn’t check their RSS feeds every two seconds so I probably didn’t even need that last sentence.

Update! Thanks everyone for listening, hanging out with us in the chatroom, and sending your twitters. If you didn’t get a chance to listen, you can download the mp3 or listen below.

Webmaster Radio
SEOmoz Headquarters Vanessa Fox joins Rand Fishkin from the headquarters of SEOmoz to discuss startups and bloggers, & Vanessa’s mention in a Search Marketing Gurus interview and take listener questions Show Host: Vanessa Fox Show: GoodKarma Channel: Internet Marketing

I have this love/hate relationship with social sites. Clearly. No question. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. The love part is easy: they bring together people from all over the world, you have brilliant, witty discussion, you laugh, you cry, you meet up and drink vodka. What’s not to like? But social networks are also these little islands of isolation, surrounded by those tall chain link fences with the barbed wire on top, and you spend your days running from place to place, seeing who’s where (searching for people alone is tiring) and trying not to get your pant leg caught on one of those barbs. (The throw-the-blanket-over trick you see in the movies doesn’t always work quite as well as you might think.)

Finally, a site has launched that has heard my pleas for joy and harmony and singing on a windswept beach. Or it may have been a grassy hill. I’ve completely gone on a tangent with that chain-linked fence thing, so I’m sure I’ve lost you with the metaphors already in any case.

Sphinn, the new discussion forum/social networking/post submission site from Search Engine Land, warms my cold and cynical social networking-pained soul. As you might imagine, the first flicker of hope and joy comes with the slashes in that description. I understand that social networks can’t be all things to everyone (they are, in that regard, the Abe Lincolns of the web), but it’s nice to see one that makes an effort to bring things together.

The obvious coolness is that brilliant and witty discussion. You can talk about Search Engine Land articles, articles that you’ve submitted from other sites, or just random topics that you want to chat about all in one place. I know that Digg technically lets you discuss submissions, but mostly on Digg, people just vote. This site feels much more like a place for discussion, rather than a quick hit and Digg (or in the case of posts from this site, a quick hit and bury).

And then there’s the profile system. I have often ranted about just how problematic it is to stalk people online. In a previous post, I said I wanted a site that would let me do lots of things including add all my social networking profiles in one place, add all the communities I post on, see my latest blog posts, see my latest comments, have cheesecake anytime I wanted, and walk only on flower petals everywhere I go. Sphinn still has to work on scattering flower petals in my path, but they’ve made a good start on the rest.

Check this out:

You can also see someone’s latest comments, submissions, and Sphinns and can get an RSS feed to keep up with it all. Sphinn even calls this stalking because in addition to reading my blog and making my wishes come true, the folks over there are just that damn funny.

And they’ve got a private messaging system and an events calendar where you can see where everyone’s going to be and lots of happiness like that and it looks like they’re planning to keep evolving it. So I’m just going to continue to complain about my social networking woes here and see if maybe they can get that cheesecake order going for me. It could happen!

I would keep writing about it, but I really have to go now. I need to write another post about my cat so I can submit it to Sphinn and see if I can get the post sphunn up to make my cats famous! Feel free to write your own post about my cats. Here they are.

The other day, someone asked me a question that has haunted me ever since. It mocks me in dreams. It whispers in my head when I’m sitting at traffic lights, minding my own business and thinking surely it would be fine to just pop into the McDonald’s drive-through for a cheeseburger, right? Cheeseburgers are so little. It follows me when I’m taking the laundry over to the washing machine and wondering if I really need to go through my pockets for change, because really, do I ever put change in my pocket because I don’t remember ever doing that and why are you following me, question, when I really am just going over here and I’ll be right back I promise.

What is your favorite song?

My favorite song? The one I like best out of all songs that have ever been sung? The one song I would bring with me if I were stranded forever on a remote island and had to listen to just that one song for the rest of my life, which likely wouldn’t be all that long, since I would soon starve or get bitten by a creepy endangered spider that only lived on that one island and there are only two of them left, but somehow I managed to step right on one and since I had lost my shoes and was barefoot, I didn’t squash it but only made it mad and it chased me down (because that’s the one special trait of this uniquely skilled endangered spider) and bit me right on my toe, which swelled right up and sent poison into my stranded, starving heart. What song would I want to hear as I lay dying is really the question.

How am I supposed to answer something like that?

I had a long drive soon after, and so I fired up the iPod, intent on discovering my favorite song. Surely it would be somewhere on my 2500 song playlist. What I discovered is that my iPod holds a lot of crap. And apparently I have no taste in music. No wonder I don’t have a favorite song. I don’t own any good ones to choose from.

Sure, I’ve got Britney and NSync, but I apologize for none of that because it keeps me on the elliptical. And I’ve got AC/DC and Def Leppard and Guns ‘N Roses and ABBA, which is great old stuff, but not necessarily favorite song ever material. And I have some U2 and Madonna and Carpenters, which may be timeless, but is it worthy of agonizing spider bite death accompaniment? I’m not sure sure.

I have some Lemonheads, which is totally worth having if only for the “Outdoor Type” song with the line, “I can’t go away with you on a rock climbing weekend; what if something’s on TV and it’s never shown again”. Although these days dude, get a tivo.

I also have songs from Jennifer Love Hewitt’s first album, and honestly, there’s a reason she did better in her acting career than her musical one. I have Creed. Lord knows why. I even have something by Luckydog, which I’m sad to say I know is that band that that guy who won Survivor that one time was in. Fortunately, I don’t remember his name.

Clearly, there is no best song ever in the universe in this bunch.

So, I need some help. I have accumulated several iTunes gift cards and need to buy some decent music. What should I get? No matter what you suggest, it can’t be worse than Nick Carter singing “Rhythm of my Heart” before he was in the Backstreet Boys.

And I’m curious, what is your favorite song? And how many times could you hear it on endangered spider island before throwing it over a cliff and getting the resident chipmunks to hum?

The problem: lots and lots of cardboard boxes. Clearly, one can’t simply stack them up in a corner of the room and turn them into furniture. I mean, one could, but spiders could hide in there and so every time you’d walk by or sit in the room or somewhere else in the house or even walk up towards the front door you would think, are big scary spiders hiding in that tower of cardboard boxes? And that’s just no way to live.

The solution? One truck (borrowed from someone who’s currently out the country and surely won’t notice his truck is gone as long as I return it before he gets back mind), one rather large tarp, lots of rope, two MacGyver-type women, and a cutting implement of some kind.

It was all going so well until we needed the sharp implement. You might instantly think knife, because you’re a smart person and it wouldn’t cross your mind that this house would contain exactly zero knives of any variety. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story about the lack of knives. You would be bored. It’s not that interesting of a story.) So, then your clever mind might jump to scissors, and yes, this house contains two of those. Sadly, both are too dull to cut through the tape on boxes.

When I ran into the dull scissors dilemma, my mind instantly went (of course) to the foil cutter on the corkscrew. And if you are wondering why a corkscrew was handy and a knife was not, well, then you and I live in completely different worlds. I live in the land of corkscrews. (And a world without shrimp, but that’s entirely unrelated.)

It worked great on the boxes, but not quite so great when I was stripping speaker wire. So, I picked up some wire strippers on my next trip to Home Depot. Oddly, it didn’t cross my mind to pick up some kind of a knife.

Mystery Guest was up for the challenge of of the truck and the tarp. We eyed the truck bed, overflowing with cardboard and styrofoam. We looked at the tarp. And the ropes.

“Do you know how to tie a knot?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. This rope came with instructions. Or maybe just a glossary of knots. You know, like fishermen use. I’ll bring it out with us.”

It was all fine until we had to thread the rope through the tarp as only one side of the tarp had holes. This was entirely our fault since we folded the tarp over. (Did I mention it was a really big tarp?) But now we needed to make our own holes. Mystery Guest went in to get some kind of cutting utensil. I had already clued her in to the wonder of the corkscrew. She brought out…

…a plastic knife!

Haha. Well, that was a funny joke. She then pulled out the corkscrew and the wire cutters. Which meant our tool arsenal consisted of:

Both of the non-plastic items barely made a dent. So, what the hell, let’s try the plastic knife! And the serrated edge sliced right on through that tarp like butter. Let this be a lesson to us all.

I would describe our knot-tying, but I feel I should end on a triumphant note. The contents of the truck didn’t fly out as I was driving to the recycling center, so I count the knots as a success. Mystery Guest was potentially feeling a bit overconfident and was ready to take to the high seas to try out the hard knocks sea-faring life just to see how far our knots would take us, but we were armed only with that plastic knife, so perhaps it’s best we rethought that plan.

She was really proud of those knots though. And her plastic knife foresight.

Next time you are stranded on an island or in a lifeboat and you have only string, a toothpick, and a pack of gum to survive the winter, I totally recommend bringing Mystery Guest along. She’s very resourceful. And can totally almost tie knots.

I am stunned and speechless and grateful. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of your kind words and that you’ve gone out of your way to blog and post and email me. It makes me amazingly happy that the work we’ve done at webmaster central has helped your businesses and your sites. And I’m so glad that I’ve been able to help some of you with stuff I’ve written or spoken about or when I’ve talked to you. It’s been so wonderful to meet and talk with so many of you and I hope that continues! The next round will be on me. Seriously, you all rock.

Next up: more writing about Buffy and traveling and social networking and blogging and my damn phones and how it just can’t be easy anymore to hook up a TV. Also, I need to do more ranting about ordering stuff over the phone. I’ve now been trying to return that wall mount for the TV I didn’t buy for over a week.

For the last two years, I have had a fantastic time helping to build Google Webmaster Central. I have loved working with the (ever-expanding!) team, writing about search on the blog and for the help center, and designing features for the webmaster community. And speaking of the webmaster community, I have been lucky enough to have been able to meet them, get to know their challenges, and well, then there’s the drinking. There may have been a little of that too. Search is a fascinating industry and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to create such exciting things in the space.

Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. I’m moving on from webmaster central knowing that there’s a great team who care as much about this audience as I do and they’ve got exciting plans in store for the coming year. I’ll really miss working with my team, but I’m happy they’ve been getting out and meeting more of you and I know they’ve had a great time drinking with you too. I mean talking. Did I say drinking?

I’ll still be around in search. My company name may change, but I still plan to see you all online and at the bar, talking search and Buffy and mobile devices.

So, why the change? Well, it was one thing for Dave to go on about me being nude all the time, but then he started paging me in the middle of the night, and I said enough of this. (Not really, Dave. I still love you! ) And honestly, working with webmasters has been absolutely one of the best parts of working on webmaster central. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished and happy that will keep moving forward to even better things.

Making the move was a very difficult decision, but the challenge of creating something new in a space that’s so young and evolving was too great to pass up. And I have great confidence in the webmaster central team and know this project that feels so much like my baby is in very capable hands and will continue to grow and thrive.