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Every now and then, I read an article and think -- that needs to be on another one of my blogs. The one below is such an article. Perhaps it's because I risked a lot and went beyond the normal efforts to come up with the data necessary to post it. Maybe I'm just so pleased with the results that I wanted to share.

Either way, there it is.

It describes the differences between Google and Yahoo!, their algorithms, and the techniques that work best for each individual search engine. Any search engine optimization professional will know this information to some extent. I only wanted to take it a step further and actually run tests to make sure that what most believed is actually the way it is.

It is.

Please feel free to read the entire story at Links and Links and Content. It isn't a long read, but it should either teach or reaffirm knowledge about getting ranked well for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN

A work on citizendium has been complete and will run tomorrow on Wired!

I make an early edit to Assignment Zero's entry on Citizendium; http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Assignment_Zero

What was learned?

So far, I can say this:

Originally, it looked like the first article to be produced was going to be on Crowdsourced Law Enforcement. Work was steady, and fruitful, until a few roadblocks were hit, speedbumps and tire spikes resulted in loss of momentum, and the passengers just got out of the bus and left. Mostly.

So the first piece turned out to be based on Citizendium, which is a similarly goaled project. Perhaps it made the best sense that a crowdsourcing news project would report on a.. well... crowdsourced project. Kind of like looking into a strange mirror. We'll see what the piece is like, and what the resulting fallout is.

How did the citizendium piece develop? Was there more interest? Was it easier to produce? Did it have a larger team? Were the people working on it more steadfast and knowledgable?

In some respects I am willing to both take responsibility in applying my previous post to myself in terms of not doing legwork (I think I was susceptible to my own faults), and to say that I think there was a larger steered effort to produce a piece of citizendium. After all, one chased a relatively current event that implemented a concept that was probably originated on-line with it's predecessor and the other is just a concept, that happens all the time.

Is it fact that because something is new it gathers more attention? Is crowdsourced law enforcement boring, or taken for granted?

In some ways, the two have things in common. Citizendium's success relies on minor policing of the community in order to maintain a level of quality, consistency, and accountability. Law enforcement is about policing communities to keep them crime-free; is wiki vandalism a crime or a result of noneducation? If we educate more wiki contributors, will there be less vandalism? If we educate more people, will there be less crime? Does more community self-regulation result in a lower crime rate?

There are parellels to be drawn, for sure.

What will be the next topic for reporting? Politics, Law, Art, Religion? Does it take a catalyst to motivate people to choose a topic to report on? What will be that catalyst? Synthetic or naturally occurring? Accidental or on purpose? Can it be hype-generated?

I'd like to see the editors weigh in on this one. It seems to be a curious point. How much contribution was there when the site was new versus now? If work is produced every two months will more and more users contribute over time? Will there be an explosion of existing user contribution or new user contribution following the article?

Only time will tell.

Seriously!

Even in some of the topics I'm working on, it seems it's a link-fest. It's impossible for me to read through everything that's been posted, and it seems like people are just pulling quotes from wherever without actually interpolating and summarizing the idea from them.

Sure, it's nice to know what people say, or what industry says, but provide something conclusive!

You can't write an article or a story using just quotes. It's meaningless! Like all teachers have said at one point, "Garbage in, garbage out." If there isn't any meat or perspective being relayed here, then what's the goal?

In my idea of what Assignment Zero is; it isn't a link fest. It isn't Blog Wars(you may or may not know what this is, FYI: NSFW, 18+), it's not Engadget, it's not an advanced RSS feeder. This isn't what journalism is. In my view, it's supposed to be something that you provide a context to. If you read 30 quotes by Sanger and Wales, what collectively do they indicate about their thought or character? What can be said about Wales' opinion about CZ? What can be said about Sanger? Is he a realist? Is he over-the-top?

I fault many of my teachers for pushing the idea that you should just memorize things; especially history teachers. But that's what I think we're getting here.