"wordtracker" in Weblog

After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field and the product we’ve been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it’s a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I’ve been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I’ve been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I’ve become less interested in web standards per se (it’s just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I’m really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I’ll be permanent within the next couple of months. It’s going to be a busy period for me… I really want to get the work I’ve been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I’m speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I’ve also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there’s a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

I’ve not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn’t feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The ‘China writer’ has been sentenced to 10 years because ‘he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message’. Christ almighty! That must sit very uneasily with the conciences of those in the Yahoo boardroom.

And they’re not alone. If I remember correctly, Google allows the Chinese government to limit their search results and Microsoft also censor their MSN Spaces blogging service.

I suppose everyone has to decide where to draw the line and for Yahoo it was at the $1 billion mark. I don’t know how much the others cost.

Now, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, beyond the moral issue.

Firstly, I don’t understand how the Chinese government can do all this, technically. The resources they’re pouring in must be enormous.

Secondly, censorship destroys the single greatest (and worst) thing about the internet - there is information for everyone out there, no matter what they’re into. Working at Wordtracker has given me an insight into what people are looking for on the internet, and while most of it is legit, some of it really, deeply disturbing… And I’m quite laissez faire. Still, the internet, at its heart, is about putting folk in touch with other like-minded people. Without that, how much benefit do the Chinese people really get from the digital revolution that has changed the lives of so many?

Anyway, over at Wordtracker we call it ‘online behaviour’ and it’s a facinating step into cyber-sociology. The internet takes up so much of so many peoples’ lives but we know so little about what’s actually going on. I guess the Chinese have realised that and have developed the world’s first cyber-dictatorship.

SEO has earned itself a very bad name in recent years for so called ‘black-hat’ techniques: cramming, cloaking, etc. There are a lot of people out there doing it properly though, and even more taking it in completely new directions under the monica ‘keyword research’. Keyword research has spread from the narrow field of SEO to the broader marketing industry, encompassing advertising, copywriting, link building, traffic building, SEO and pay-per-click marketing.

I knew very little about any of this before coming to contract for Wordtracker so my introduction to the industry has been a real eye-opener. The best illustration I’ve seen of how keyword research works is the new ebook from Wordtracker: Vegetarian Dog Food. It’s well worth a read…

I’m contracting at Wordtracker at the moment. Their product is facinating but just as interesing is their working philosophy.

Management is based on Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Tim Lister, and Slack by Tom Demarco. What this amounts to is a massive, light office where overtime is discouraged and everyone works on flexitime for above-average pay. The thinking is that if your workers are happy and moral is high, they will be more productive, flexible and likely to stay with you, saving you training and orientation costs. It’s about effectiveness over efficiency. This is hardly rocket science but I’ve worked for a number of people who could have done with this advice, and the number of companies who neglect their primary resource is terrifying.

To complement this new age management style, they also practice Agile Development, Extreme Programming and Regression Testing. Agile means that the company’s direction is reassessed every few weeks, allowing for flexible but co-ordinated responses to obstacles as they appear. It also empowers the employees - giving them a clear sense and say in where they’re going. Now, I’ve never had any interest at all in management so the fact that I’m using words like ‘empower’ is scary in itself.

The XP and regression testing seem to go very well together. One of the Wordtracker developers is the chap who wrote SimpleTest, one of the biggest testing frameworks out there for PHP. I’ve had a few pairing sessions and I’m starting to get both the XP philosophy and unit testing. The amount of time I would have spent wading through documentation, let alone writing any code, is reduced to nothing by having an experienced developer looking over my shoulder. I was a proper developer once upon a time and the reason I left it was the intangible nature of back-end programming. I got very frustrated with days spent staring at code and nothing to show for it. Having your tests written before you start not only keeps you on track, it also gives you a real sense of motion. There’s no risk of me going back to programming but it’s been nice to find that I can still enjoy it.

I was trying to explain this stuff to some people over the weekend and I could hear that to an outsider I’m sounding like a proper crazy. Have I joined a cult without realising?

SEO’s back in the blogs with Keith Robinson’s 7 Simple Techniques (pdf) article for Marketing News, and while it’s hot I thought I’d share another link. I’m working at Wordtracker at the moment and to get myself oriented I set about reading every SEO article I could get my hands on. Of all of them, this one explained what modern search engine optimisation actually is: An Ingenious Way to Use Wordtracker. None of that invisible keywords stuff; it’s all about good content. But more that that, it’s about good RELEVANT content. If you can find a niche in your market you can target it but gathering together useful material on the subject. This will benefit the people who visit your site searching for that topic and as a result they are more likely to trust you and increasingly likely to buy from you. That’s marketing, not black magic.