I usually keep my blog posts limited to things that I feel very strongly about, things like Scientology, the truth about Drugs, L. Ron Hubbard’s books, SEO, and soccer.  (?)  But now that I’m a Blackberry user again I take a bigger interest in their new releases.

I think this new little guy rocks.  My only issue with it is (once again) there’s no NexTel Direct Connect feature.

I think it’s terrible that NexTel phones always seem to have full-generation lag behind any of the new, cool items from RIM, Apple, Palm, etc. 

My BlackBerry 7100i is sort of neat, but man - no camera, crap keyboard, and I really, really don’t have a screen that looks like that.

But, the Direct Connect is a feature I can’t live without, meaning that I can’t REALLY have a convergence device that’s got the nifty new cutting edge features.

Please if RIM would make a version of this that would work on Nextel’s iDen network!

Ref:  RIM BlackBerry Bold/BlackBerry 9000 makes official debut | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Tags: nextel, blackberry, iden, rim, iphone

I’ve come to a conclusion, based on the number of responses (0) to various posts I’ve put up on the subject of International SEO, that Americans don’t know jack about the subject, and probably don’t have much of a reason (usually) to care.

I did get some enlightened help on one particular SEO message board I was on, but it didn’t look like these people were Americans.  Most of my fellow countrymen, by survey, can’t find the city of Budapest on a map, and have never heard of places like Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.  It’s unfortunate, since I’d be willing to wager that just about anyone in Dubai or Kuala Lumpur could point to New York or Los Angeles on a map. 

And they probably speak English, too.  Hmph.  Figures.  Apparently 90% of the Internet is written in English.

But here’s what I’m trying to accomplish with foreign SEO, and perhaps some other enlightened individual can assist. 

(and this is example text only, but is what I’m trying to put together)

Best Practices:
Encoding:  Set to UTF-8 and language set to local iso language code
HTML Titles:  Use foreign chars, UTF-8 encoding, title case
Meta Keywords: Don’t worry about translating these, not used by search engines
Meta Description: Custom-written SERP-friendly text written and translated
Page Filename:  For Japanese, Chinese, use UTF-8 local chars in links, and decoded ASCII filenames.  For Russian, Greek and Hebrew, use whatever is easiest to program.  For en_US and western european languages, use ASCII filenames in links and filenames, with transliterated “oe”, etc equivalents for accented characters

…or something like this.  Some stable guidelines like that.

Anyone with any bright ideas?

Tags: SEO, search engine, multilingual, international

I just came across this one when trolling through Google News, thought it was cute.  Original article is here on the Philippine Information Agency website:

Cebu, Philippines (20 April) — Scientology International donated an 18-volume limited edition of The BASICS, authored by L. Ron Hubbard to the City Library of Cebu.

The Scientology Volunteer Ministers‘ International Goodwill Tour donates books to selected libraries all over the world, and the latest addition to the roster of recipients is the Cebu City library located at Osmena Boulevard, Cebu City.

Cebu City Librarian Rosario C. Chua welcomed the goodwill gesture of the Volunteer Ministers to house under her keep the brand new volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s literary works for the benefit of the students and the reading populace of the Cebu City.

Another set was earlier donated to the University of Cebu LapuLapu & Mandaue Campus Library through the assistance of Mandaue City Vice Mayor Carlo Pontico Fortuna.

The aim of the Scientology Volunteer Minister Goodwill Tour is to share the knowledge developed by their founder to improve the people’s conditions in life.

The books contain comprehensive and substantial information on the way to happiness, and the development of human ability and how to handle life at all times.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health which was a bestseller for more than half a century today is written by the founder of Scientology. It is the first book about human mind that has been translated in more than fifty languages.

Anent to this, a daily Disaster Response Specialist training and Life Improvement course is being offered for free by the Volunteer Minister International Goodwill Tour soon in the Queen City of the South.

A visit to the Volunteer Minister Yellow Tent will provide the one-on-one assistance that the Scientology Volunteer Ministers Goodwill Tour in Philippines offers to anyone who wants to learn the technology of Knowing How to Know.

Tags: philippines, dianetics, scientology, library

Now that our great guys at WordPress have release a search tool for WordPress, I’m finally able to see how many great Dianetics-related blogs there are on WordPress. It’s actually a pretty buzzing community! 

The search results are great, though:

You get the link, author, tags, etc, in the search engine result pages, so it’s real straightforward to see what you’re getting, or better, to cross-search for other similar posts that have your desired tags on them.

Of course, I’m a bit enamoured with the Dianetics book-a-thon that’s happening right now, so I was pleased that this showed as number one, but a lot of other neat ones showed too:

Like Luana’s post on reading the new edition of Dianetics:

Tags: wordpress, search, dianetics, technology

As a follow-up to the last post I did on foreign-language SEO, here’s an interesting comparison on foreign SEO.

Take one phrase, such as Googling for “common cold” in various languages:

Japanese:

Googling for “感冒” in google.jp gives you 2 results in the top 10 that directly link to Japanese characters in the URL itself (which will of course be rewritten in the browser), and 3 of the top 4 had the phrase in Japanese chars in the title, all of them in the snippet.

Interestingly, the #1 result has a decoded UTF-8 version of the characters as the URL:

d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/%B4%B6%CB%C1

Russian:

Googling for “простудой” in google.ru gives you zero results that have Russian characters in the first 3 pages of results. Most are CMS-driven sites that have letters & numbers in the URLs themselves.

All of the top 10 results, though, have the keyword in Russian chars in the subject and most have it in the snippet as well.

Greek:

Similar to Russian, most of the top 10 results for “κοινο κρυολογημα” are CMS-type sites with the keyword in the title and description, but no keyword or transliteration of the keyword apparent in the URL itself.

German:

The word I have for common cold in German is “Erkältung”. May not be right, but it serves me well as it has an a(umlaut) in the spelling.

Googling for this in Google.de gives a very interesting result. The number 1 result, a Wikipedia entry, is for de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erkältung — with the a(umlaut) in the display URL. The #4 result has this as well — www.gesundheitpro.de/Erkältung.

However, the #3, #5, and #10 results utilize the transliterated “ae” spelling in the title - www.erkaeltung-online.de and www.netdoktor.de/krankheiten/fakta/erkaeltung.htm and www.aspirin.de/erkaeltung/index.html — which leads one to believe that it’s just as effective, in the European languages, to use the transliterated version of these characters in SEO-sensitive elements like the filename, title and description.

I’m not sure which conclusions this draws me to, but it’s data. Anyone have insight or suggestions?

This is something I’ve wanted to nail down for some time:  How do you do Search Engine Optimization for foreign character sets? 

SEO is getting to be more and more a normal thing to do, and less and less of a hidden black art.  Google has made it plain enough times that what they want is good, fresh, updated, relevant content,  and not a bunch of garbage. 

Pursuant to that, you’ve got a ton of fairly-well-documented best-practices for SEO’ing your site.  And, if you don’t know the first thing about SEO at all — well — read a good book on the subect.  My favourites are:

• Search Engine Marketing, Inc. - Bill Hunt / Mike Moran
• Search Engine Optimization an Hour a Day

Or you can just hit SEOMoz or SEOBook for some hot tips.

But one unfortunate thing is that most of the best SEO data is coming people who are ignorant Americans like me.  Despite my love of geography and far-off places, I can speak no foreign languages fluently, except for some Korean bad words I learned from fellow soccer players. 

What does that have to do with anything?

Take the preceding picture I just linked to where I’m doing a soccer throw-in.

Assuming you could edit that page, if you ask any search engine novice to optimize that page to show up well for its subject matter, they’d probably tell you to hit the easy things first.  They’d tell you to optimize:

- HTML <title> tag
- <meta description=> tag
- <meta keywords=> tag
- <H1> text
- Body text
- text of inbound links
- filename of the page

Ideally your page would have “Soccer Throw-In” or a more unique title and <h1> text, and would have a description and set of meta keywords that followed along.  Ideally, as well, you’d have a filename like “/soccer-throw-in.html” or similar. 

Easy, right?  Of course it is — in English.

But, let’s say you have similar items in German, or worse, Japanese, Greek and Russian!

As an example, the Japanese word for “soccer” is “サッカー“.  What do you make as the page title for that?  The filename? 

If you do a google.jp search for “サッカー“, one of the first results you get is a Wikipedia article for “サッカー” which has a displayed URL of:

Now, of course, anyone with any technical sense will tell you that you can’t put non 7-bit ASCII URLs into an HTTP request, as that violates the spec. 

But of course, pasting such a URL into your browser automatically decodes it to:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%83%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC

So, it has the benefit of (a) showing up with the proper Japanese term in the search engine result page, improving the apparent relevence of the result, and (b) well showing up at all in the top 10 listings at all — so you’d think it has SOME positive impact in ranking.

European terms are much easier, as there are common transliterations for many of the non-7-bit-ASCII characters that one would use in normal usage. 

For example, Google for the beautiful German city of Düsseldorf.  Clearly, one wouldn’t want to have to title all one’s pages as “Dusseldorf” as that would mean “village of idiots” as opposed to Düsseldorf which refers to the small tributary of the River Rhine.   The u umlaut is easily transliterated to “ue” generally, so by Googling for “Duesseldorf” you get an acceptable result - as Google knows what you’re talking about.

Not so easy with these other languages like Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, etc.

I’m very interested for any input or feedback on this, as it’s a massive gray area right now — and I don’t know if ANYONE has this one covered well.

Will It Blend? - iPod

I’ve got an old web server that I think I’m going to give them for this show.

I’ve grown completely bored of all of the “NEWSFLASH” news that’s been plastered all over the net this past week concerning this compilation of 3rd-hand opinions and concoctions about Mr. Cruise, Mr. David Miscavige and Scientology that has been humorously referred to as a “biography”. 

However, the MSN home page today took the cake for me once again, with the witty little sub-head of, “Slate highlights the juicy parts.“ 

This is like taking note of a 20-day old container of half-eaten Chinese take-out found in a dumpster, and wanting to “highlight the juicy parts”.  It seems like the most undesirable and foul-smelling thing I can think of, never mind being a completely worthless waste of time.  

The only interesting thing I could find in the MSN article was a link to the official statement by the Church of Scientology International, which actually gives the facts related to this explosion of archetypal media hyperventilation.

In any case, after reading this, I side with EW.com reviewer Mark Harris, in that I feel “…two seconds older if two IQ points dumber” reading my great source of “daily news”.   I’m going back to reading my good book, Science of Survival, so I can better spot such rot before I end up investing 10 minutes of my precious morning and 65 watt-hours of my computer’s precious CPU time.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: TomCruise, biography, David Miscavige, Scientology, entertainment, media

Entertainment weekly writer Mark Harris certainly got it right this time, on this article I found on CNN.

The recently-release Tom Cruise “bio” by Andrew Morton is an unqualified disaster, actually worse — an unqualified piece of nothingness.

I guess that’s what you get when you’re doing an “unauthorized biography” — tons of meaningless trivia and false information, because the author himself couldn’t verify his facts with the person he’s doing a bio on. 

Honestly, it’s the same as any other attempt to generate “controversy” when speaking of a genuinely, honest-to-god, good person.   It’s the history of L. Ron Hubbard, who has had just about every vested-interest, hatchet-job writer from the last 50 years attempt to sully his reputation, utterly failing each time because the hatchet jobs are based on lies.  It’s the same with Mr. David Miscavige, or Tom Cruise. 

I was blogging the same thing a few months ago when another “viral” round of hatchet-job posts were going around concerning the school in Oregon that Tom Cruise send his kids to. It’s trying to make a story out of nothing, so as to either (a) make a lame attempt at a swipe at Scientology, or (b) just gain a few more hits to spike your AdSense revenue.

Pretty lame in my book, which is the slot this bio falls into as well.

Reference: Review: New Cruise biography comes up empty - CNN.com

Blogged with Flock

Tags: tomcruise, bio, unauthorized, scientology, david miscavige

Just posted to the Scientology Basics website was a CGI video done for the launch of the Basics in July. 

Now, I don’t know if anyone else has seen anything as impressive as this for the release of books, but I certainly haven’t.  Personally, I think that the 3DS Max text effects are the slickest I’ve ever seen.  I’ve got to figure out how to do some things like that myself.

And if you watch it, definitely turn up your speakers.  The sound rocks too.

 
This is some of the animation from the opening of the Basics CGI — the Basics are the foundation of any study of Scientology and Dianetics, and as such the graphics depict this as a rock-solid basis of further study in the subject.

 
Each book is presented with its accompanying lecture series, and each has its own sequence, with text effects that suggest at the actual content of the book and lecture series.  This one is for Advanced Procedure & Axioms and the Thought, Emotion & Effort Lectures, which go over the restoration of self-determinism to the individual so that he can create his life and move out of fixed conditions.

 
I can’t really show it well without the animation — the text effects in the video are pretty slick.  This one is for the book Creation of Human Ability, where Mr. Hubbard discusses a number of processes that assist the individual to be more in present time and able to control his surroundings, but also address the thetan exterior — meaning the spirit as separate from the body.