What is a 404?

Lets start with the Wikipedia definition;

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. A 404 error should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future. – sourced from Wikipedia here.

In simple English, if you try to go to a web page and the website can’t find that particular page then it responds with an error saying “that page can’t be found” which is called a 404 error.

Great examples of 404′s

It has almost become a right of passage for a new Internet start-up to have a bit of fun with its 404 page. It’s a nice way to express that the company isn’t all about just making money, they’re there to enjoy themselves while they’re doing it.

Here are some examples of funny 404 pages that can be found around with the best saved to last:

Blippy 404

Digg 404

Techcrunch 404

Twitter Fail Whale

TradeMe 404

Nosh 404

The last one, is the Nosh.me 404. You can view the Nosh.me 404 here. It’s worth watching the video as a great example of what you can do with a 404 page as well as quite likely a real measure of how to build a compelling viral media campaign about your brand!

If you know of any other great 404 error pages, share them in the comments…

If you haven’t heard about IDNs and are interested in the history, NZS.com has covered the development of them over the last few years starting with initial consultation via working group in 2007, the resulting decisions of that working group to hold a sunrise registration period and then the final implementation by the New Zealand DNC of a first-come, first-served publicly available IDN registration on Wednesday 26 July 2010.

With the public registration of IDN’s being available for almost a year now, it seems like a good point to assess the usage of them across the wider NZ Internet.

The most recent domain registration data is from the June 2011 DNC newsletter showing that 440,576 .nz domains were active as at the end of May 2011.

The equivalent newsletter in 2010 shows the end of May 2010 with 399,151 active domains, a total of 41,425 additions over the calendar year. In comparison the calendar year prior to 1 April 2009 – 31 May 2010 shows an increase of 40,592.

So, as a whole the active domains show only a 2% growth in registrations over the calendar year that IDNs have been publicly available.

Active domains that are registered are however not even half of the story. The next things to consider are what % of the registered domains are IDN’s and further to that, what % of the domains are actively used as websites on the New Zealand Internet.

These numbers are significantly harder to find without direct access to the DNC records.

NZS.com completes regular spidering of the New Zealand Internet (well beyond just the .nz sphere) and currently profiles over 160,000 domains that are included in this set as active websites on the New Zealand Internet. It’s another entire blog post and discuss on the details of what we consider is a website on the New Zealand Internet, suffice to say that we’ve been working on the criteria in an iterative way for the last few years.

With this in place, NZS.com is in a reasonably unique position to ascertain how many active websites are using IDN’s on the NZ Internet particularly if we can come to a final figure on how many active domains there are that are IDNs and can calculate our % of active websites against that number.

Being in the same month as Māori language week, it’s of specific interest to also understand how many active websites are using the Māori macrons in the domain, that is one of ā, ē, ī, ō, or ū.

So, at the end of part one in this, we have the basic premise that domain registrations have not increased significantly however we still need to assess if real websites are using these characters or not…

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You can also find useful tips on the the basics like how to type a macron on your own system on this blog as well.

Remember that potential employers are likely to throw your name into a search engine before making any contact to do a background check. You’ll often find your name and details coming up on University alumni websites, articles about conferences you may have been to and so on, but these are normally harmless and give away little personal information.

However, it is most important to be careful with the information on your social networking websites, such as Facebook and Bebo, as these can also been seen by potential employers. Embarassing photos, posts, even quiz results can be incriminating and can affect a potential employers impression of you – and could even cause them to leave you out of their candidates.

Make sure all of your pages are private and only viewable to friends. Remember that you never can be too careful online – your friends could potentially link to a photo of you on a wild night out from your page onto their page, which may not be private, and open to search engines. When job hunting and reviewing the content on your social network pages, if in doubt, take it out!

Image from Flickr.

You can see from the screenshot that the idea of just counting words within a document has come a long way.

Seeing these readability statistics really sets you off thinking about how readable your piece of content is, whether it’s a blog post, online article or column for a magazine.

That said, it’s one thing to suddenly consider it, it’s another to digest the wealth of information that Google are throwing at you with these statistics. What do they all mean? In what situations would you prefer an average longer sentence structure compared to when it might be better to have a shorter average word length?

After a short amount of research it appears that the formulas at the bottom of the screenshot are the ones that are most helpful to give you a quick assessment of how readable your content is. These include scores for the Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index.

Having a read of Wikipedia’s definition of Readbility gives us a starting point to understand these scores:

“Readability is commonly defined as reading ease. The Literacy Dictionary defines it as “the ease of comprehension because of the style of writing”

The Flesch Reading Ease score gives an indication of textual difficulty (i.e. how easy the text is to read) and is measured from 0 (very hard, average sentence too long, average words more than two syllables) through to 100 (very easy to read, average sentence is 12 words or fewer, no words of more than two syllables). 67 is considered plain english.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index are both devised from the same measures, however the weights are different. They are generally used in educational situations to help grade the level of readability of books and texts for students and are related to the US grade level needed to comprehend the text.

After reading through these options, I imagine I will be looking at the Flesch Reading Ease score once in a while to start to understand the score on different pieces of content. Most of the discussions I’ve seen that mention the score suggest looking at it regularly to help familiarise yourself with the score for your own style of writing in differing circumstances.

Search trends, like many things, are seasonal in nature. The longer you follow search trends the more predictable they become and the earlier you begin to think about them each year in order to consider what people are going to be searching for before they actually need it.

Seasons, anniversaries and almost anything that occurs at a regular annual time fit into this cycle.

You can see from the summer search trend graph below over the 2009 – 2010 year that searching for summer keywords has begun to increase in May, steadily rises through June to October and then steeply diving again in November:

This trend is a common one in search where people are researching an event well in advance to it occurring, especially so when there is large scale planning involved (like summer holidays and seasonal work). The norm is for searching to peak at the edge of an event actually happening and then tail off very quickly following the start of the event. For a season like summer, there is less of a defined start for the event however with other non-seasonal events such as concerts, the peak and tail-off is abrupt.

A good analogy in the seasonal trend of searching is the retail market. If you’re someone who has ever thought about buying a Valentine’s Day gift, turned a corner and seen the first displays in the shop windows then you can guarantee whoever produced those displays was thinking about it long and hard before you and timed their set up ready to catch your eye just as you’re turning your mind towards it.

The online search industry is a lot like this. Those who live and breath search (like the team here at NZS.com) often spend our time researching, evaluating and getting ready for search trends that cycle up well in advance of an event.

Major summer keywords in order of number of searches:

1. summer jobs
2. summer work
3. summer fashion
4. summer recipes
5. summer holiday
6. summer dresses
7. summer camps
8. summer music
9. summer festivals
10. summer events

Source – NZS.com’s Google Analytics report for top 10 “summer” searches from 01 Oct 2009 to 30 Sep 2010. Duplicates (e.g. plurals) removed.

Analysing search trends in New Zealand is a core focus for NZS.com’s team to help bring the right content to local searchers at the right time.

Defining Social Media Monitoring and the tools used

If we take a step back to define what social media monitoring tools are then we’re talking about automated online applications that update you about any discussions happening online surrounding a specific topic that you’re interested in.

An example would be if you’re interested in knowing every time someone discusses (or even mentions) your brand name on Twitter. For NZS.com this involves setting up an automated tool specific for Twitter like Twilert where a daily email is sent through to staff listing all of the conversations on Twitter for the past 24 hours that have mentioned the keyword “NZS.com”. Twitter is only one of the social networks that this is important for, however it is one of the easiest to use as an example case as almost everything discussed is in the public arena.

These tools help businesses discover, monitor and sometimes interact with the people that are discussing their brand or products online in social networks.

In New Zealand there has been a tipping point recently where social networks have become mainstream and the monitoring of the discussions that take place on the networks, particularly when they’re in the public domain, has become something businesses can’t ignore if they’re planning on staying on top of their own public image.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here’s a list of tools that are available for monitoring social conversations online. Note that none of these have been reviewed specifically, this is only a compiled list of tools that have come to our attention and are worth checking out, if you have any feedback on them specifically please let us know in the comments:

• Google Alerts (Search style through email updates, free) – probably the most commonly used
• Twitter Advanced Search (Twitter only, free)
• Chatterbox Search (Built in New Zealand, free and paid options)
• Twilert (Twitter only through email updates, free)
• Tweetdeck (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, generally used for updates but good for monitoring)
• Social Mention (Comprehensive search style, free)
• Raidan6 (Paid service, expensive, used by some well known brands)
• HootSuite (generally used for updates but includes monitoring)
• Lithium (formerly called Scoutlabs, paid service)

The New Zealand Government Web Standards site has a useful guide that has been put together to help government agencies and State servants monitor existing social media entitled Implementing social media monitoring with reference to a few of the tools above as well as links to other studies that back up the need for monitoring. From this guide:

Social media is a new medium that New Zealanders are using to communicate with each other, sometimes regarding government policies and services. The use of social media is part of the transformation of bureaucracy from one built for the industrial age to one meeting the needs of the information age.

The guide also asks some excellent questions relating to interacting with discussions like checking who is maintaining accurate Wikipedia entries and finding ways to talk or discussion with communities online rather than “storming their territory primarily for your purposes”.

For more of an overview on social media monitoring and why it is important for your business, view our Monitoring Social Media article in the NZS.com Website Resources.

Influence and Sentiment

Further to purely seeing where the discussions of your brand are happening within social media online is what impact the discussions are having. Monitoring tools are quickly evolving and the holy grail of these tools is working to define the influence and sentiment these discussions are generating. When we discuss sentiment we are talking about whether or not the discussion is positive or negative, passionate or indifferent. It may be that while a post reads particularly strong, the sentiment behind it and the reading of all of a discussion’s posts in context show an indifferent sentiment towards your brand.

Understanding the influence of the specific person or group that has tweeted or posted about your brand is also as important as the sentiment. This helps you understand the impact the discussion has and is key to making the decision on when and how to respond, or even whether to respond at all.

Flickr image credit: timothymorgan, wwworks

This week, NZS.com has officially launched a new way of bringing your businesses’ social content together into a single place. You can read about it here in our media release: Local search company connects businesses’ social media efforts with searchers.

We’ve been working in the background, talking to our advertisers on what they’d most like to see on their own Site Profile pages and are quite happy with the reception it’s received around the industry already.

• Grant Osborne from First Rate said: “Brilliant! I was looking forward to a NZ directory launching this.  In my opinion, the new features on NZS.com offers visitors far greater value and increased interaction with businesses.”

• Duncan Shand from Young & Shand said: “It’s a nice addition to the profiles!”

• Kalena Jordon from ask-kalena.com said: “Now there’s a smart idea.”

Over the last year or so, many in the online industry and beyond have been inundated with statistics on how many consumers in New Zealand are now involved in social activities online. 2010 has surely been the year when New Zealand businesses’ have sat up and taken notice of where their customers are spending their time online and how new publishing technology allows a business to start interacting socially with them.

As businesses step off into their own social content generation, it can be too easy to spend time on each social avenue as a silo, without considering how they all fit together and without using the power of each social stream to its fullest advantage as a whole.

That’s where the re-launched NZS.com Site Profile page comes in.

A business can have their Business Info, Twitter discussions, Facebook friends, YouTube videos and blog posts all together on a single page creating an exciting marketing opportunity for the business to present all of its social content in one place.

You can see some great examples of companies already using these pages to promote their social streams: Vodafone, Domains4Less, EuroAsia, Natcoll and many more.

If you don’t already have a directory and business listing with NZS.com you can do so through the Promote Your Business page or if you already have a listing with us just login and Edit Your Website / Business.

I had the opportunity to chat with Adam Hutchinson, the Event Manager of SEO Challenge, following the launch to chat about his ideas behind building the challenge.

From Adam:

“The reason for creating SEO Challenge was to raise the awareness of search engine optimisation amongst both businesses and the general public. There is a global trend of people turning to Google nowadays for answers rather than offline media such as the Yellow Pages. For this reason it’s important that businesses understand the search environment they operate in, and also understand that there is a valid practice for ranking high within it.”

After asking where the word Quadracentifiable came from he had this to say:

“The keyword phrase came to me like a flash at 5am one morning. I really liked it as it would allow people to make up their own interpretation of it. I had to wake up and do a search to which I surprisingly discovered there were no results..Bingo! Luckily it didn’t rule out any domains that had been already registered by participants, given the ‘only 3 subsequent’ characters rule.”

It’s great to see people like Adam working, in their own way, to build the awareness of the industry and while there are varying opinions on the value of a competition like this, the one thing it does do is stimulate discussion about the SEO industry in New Zealand.

The competition is definitely open to a wide variety of SEO tactics including where people might spend their time generating low-value links to their website thereby gaining initial results without generating true value that a quality SEO and link-building campaign brings.

It has never been clear in the industry what is “black hat”, “white hat” or in between, however it’s definitely true that no two SEO campaigns are equal and in the race to bring a site up the rankings on a term like Quadracentifiable there will be many who employ SEO tactics that aren’t applicable to a quality campaign.

The team at Avatar (their entry in the challenge is the www.avatarchallenge.co.nz website targeting Quadracentifiable) have this to say on their challenge website:

“Unfortunately, this type of quick-fire SEO challenge targeting the single word quadracentifiable is likely to be won by a link-begging competitor with a lot of time on their hands to peddle a plethora of low-grade content. In the real SEO world, ongoing success is assured by a compelling raison d’etre, quality content and a plethora of incoming links from authoritive sites.”

Whether you’re planning on watching from the sidelines by following the Google Search itself or are deep in there giving it a go, we’re looking forward to seeing the final result and good luck from the NZS.com Team!

After a successful and enjoyable time meeting with all of the attendees and gaining some great feedback about the new Enhanced Listings, anyone who entered our draw will no doubt be curious to hear who won the $1,000 worth of online advertising with NZS.com!

Just as an aside, if you have’t yet seen the details on how to make sure your business is getting the most from NZS.com, you can check out what enhancing your listing can give you here: http://www.nzs.com/enhance/

As for the prize winner, from hundreds of entries across the expo’s, ecoPortal® (www.ecoportal.co.nz) was the lucky winner drawn today. ecoPortal® is an easy to use online management system that delivers cost reduction, certification and awards on the way to environmental sustainability.

Logan Wait from ecoPortal® was thrilled with the win and the promotional push for his business.

“What a great start to the day! I wont have a free lunch but I did get some free advertising! I really appreciate the integrity of NZS.com actually delivering on the free stuff!“

Congratulations to Logan and ecoPortal®!

Let’s start at the beginning and answer what a Māori macron actually is.

Here’s an excerpt from the New Zealand DNC (Domain Name Commission), the body that is entrusted with running the .nz domain names, describing what a macron is:

What is a Macron?

The written form of the Māori language, te reo, uses macrons over vowels to denote an extension of the sound of the vowel. Up until Māori Language week 2010, domain names within the .nz space are not able to include these characters. From then on, it will be possible to have a domain name which accurately reflects one of New Zealand’s official languages, Māori.

Source: New Zealand DNC

Now that we’ve established what a Māori macron is, we turn to how to type the Māori macrons through your standard keyboard on a PC or Mac.

How to Type a Māori Macron

There are no keyboard buttons that are by default able to be used to type Māori macrons so initially you will need to configure your PC or Mac through the selection of the Māori language on your system and then through a short-cut system via clicking another button along with the corresponding vowel on your keyboard.

The best resource I have found for this that has a good explanation for each operating system is the Typing Māori easily / Te māmā hoki o te patopato page written by Stephen Copy.

Waikato University also have a training document that shows specifically how to type Māori macrons in Microsoft Word.

Māori Macrons in ASCII

If you’re really interested in the technical aspect of the Māori macrons, you can see an Ascii Reference for them as well.

The characters are ā, ē, ī, , ō, and ū.

ā  is   ā ,    Ā  is   Ā

ē  is   ē ,    Ē  is   Ē

ī  is   ī ,    Ī  is   Ī

ō  is   ō ,    Ō  is   Ō

ū  is   ū ,    Ū  is   Ū

If you have any other resources for Māori macrons that you’d like to share please add them to the comments below.