Fun dog photos on the homepage aside, it seems the site is plagued by timeout errors, vanishing wedding/baby registries and unresponsive customer-service centers. (I haven’t seen this myself, but then I’m not a big target.com customer in the first place: For the types of things I buy online, I usually just go straight to their ex-e-commerce partner.) This is sort of like the fresh coat of paint on a dilapidated house, only in this instance the house is brand-new construction where the owner hired 20 contractors and expected them to coordinate. That number might, just might, be the source of these issues.

If anything, this is an important reminder that the underlying technology has always got to be solid and the first consideration — great design is everything, but you need Atlas holding everything up. It’s therefore important to pick a firm that can coordinate both technology and design. I’m searching around for ideas on this one.

The Goldman Sachs thing — at least the parts I could read, since the whole thing isn’t available online (very Time Inc. circa 2003 move by Rolling Stone) — so then I started reading some of the criticism. One of the articles I read mentioned that Megan McArdle (who I haven’t read before) from the Atlantic wrote a big response to the article, so I decided to go try and find that. I typed this into Google:

atlantic goldman sachs taibbi

But I ended up with this order of results:

Snap, it looks like this Huffington Post piece is eating this Atlantic piece‘s lunch, even when I’m looking specifically to go to the Atlantic page.

We all know search-engine listings are important, so how did HuffPost pull this one off? When I look at the source code, it seems like The Atlantic is missing some simple SEO best-practice stuff that could have helped them out here. HuffPost isn’t kicking ass at SEO coding, exactly, but they’re doing enough of the small stuff right that it’s likely that was enough to get Google to list them over The Atlantic. Running down the basic-level SEO checklist:

• Friendly URLs: Sort of a wash; both URLs contain the keyword strings “taibbi” and “atlantic” at some point.
• Header tags: Running into some trouble here — HuffPost has the page title “The Atlantic: Taibbi Is ‘Becoming The Sarah Palin Of Journalism’” in an h1 tag, while “Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On” is an h3 tag on The Atlantic. That’s a weird one, particularly because there’s no other competing h1 tag on the Atlantic page and we’re looking at an individual post here, not the main page of the blog where you might use the h1 for the blog title.
• Meta keywords: Keywords are one of the few meta tags that actually count for search engines, and while they’re downplayed a lot in best-practice techniques compared to the days when people would put 200 keywords into the source code, they still serve a contextual purpose. The Atlantic didn’t even use any — not good, not even as good as the cursory list on the HuffPost page.

Plenty of SEO-consultant advice is voodoo, as Google’s algorithm is a mystery to most, but low-level code tactics like URL structure, meta and header tags make a difference.

HuffPost gets some flak now and then for not doing enough original stuff (or sometimes going beyond that), but in cases like this, they’re grabbing the traffic in a perfectly legal way. Even if they do link through in the end, this is a tangible example to pay attention to best-practice coding when you’re building a site, because otherwise, web dudes will come and G up even those readers specifically looking for your stuff.

Webdev word is bond.

Suffice it to say that I fall squarely within the Obama camp on the question of net neutrality: the Internet can no longer be considered a product, but instead a network similar to the airwaves. Like the airwaves are licensed by the government, there’s room for licensing of the Internet’s physical network by bandwidth costs, but you can’t package “the web” and sell it to consumers in a realistic fashion. That’s a really old-fashioned way of thinking about it. Instead, the web is the marketplace wherein websites sell their goods and duke it out for audience and revenue share. To change the web into a cable-television model is just imposing an old-fashioned dynamic on a system that’s already created its own rules.

As for fair share of political views within the media, the lefty side of me thinks it’s necessary, but the MBA/realist side of me thinks differently: people are going to listen to or watch the crap no matter what you do, so somebody might as well make some money off of it. Do you then require those moneymakers to put on informed, objective (if that’s even possible), educated content as a result? I don’t think it’s even relevant: the media marketplace is so segmented these days anyway that the consumer is going to seek out whatever they want and likely find it, whether that’s on-the-scene reporting from Zimbabwe’s reconstituted parliament or the skateboarding dog.

It’s a dog on a skateboard!

Brand or Channel — May ’08 Unique Audience (000) — May ’07 Unique Audience (000)

Yahoo! News — 35,846 — 30,451
MSNBC Digital Network — 35,184 — 28,347
CNN Digital Network — 33,101 — 29,094
AOL News — 22,524 — 17,444
NYTimes.com — 21,340 — 12,775

Tribune Newspapers — 16,238 — 13,300
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 14,629 — 12,645
Google News — 11,356 — 9,359
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 11,124 — 10,211
USATODAY.com — 10,785 — 9,528

Fox News Digital Network — 10,132 — 7,594
CBS News Digital Network — 9,225 — 8,620
washingtonpost.com — 9,204 — 8,613
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 9,131 — 9,885
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 7,955 — 8,380

WorldNow — 7,523 — 6,232
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 6,965 — 6,189
Slate — 6,456 — 3,856
Advance Internet — 6,202 — 6,006
IB Websites — 5,943 — 5,203

BBC News — 5,933 — 6,554
Cox Newspapers — 5,826 — 3,949
Belo Television — 5,354 — 3,301
Topix — 5,133 — 4,411
Boston.com — 4,962 — 4,038

Gannett Broadcasting — 4,735 — 3,030
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 4,715 — 1,327
Associated Press — 4,527 — 8,191
Belo Newspapers — 4,462 — 2,417
Fox Television Stations — 4,386 — 3,451

I’m happy to see so many newspaper companies are cracking the list. The audience is there; we just need to use that more effectively to make money and keep things going. It’s also good that the big news sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN beat out Google News by so much: the first three still have a human element at play in editing, proving that context really does matter.

So good news to all you editors: for now, you still can’t be replaced by robots.