Today's webmasters face many challenges when it comes to launching and maintaining a successful website. While design and content are key, its also true that driving new visitors to your site is often dependant upon outside sources. Take for example the extremely important role Google plays in promoting your site. A quick scan of your web server logs probably reveals that much of the search based traffic you receive comes from Google. Furthermore, having Google index your pages also effects how accurate revenue generators like Ad Words function on your site.

So how do you know if your getting the most out of Google? By in large, you want your site to be fully searchable by Google and you want your page rank to be as high as possible. Ultimately you want your page to be the first result when someone types in a particular search. Unfortunately deciphering features like Google's Page Rank system is largely like trying to reverse engineer a black box. But one web design guru recently conducted a test to isolate the importance of well formed HTML and semantics on how high web pages rank in Google searches. The findings were somewhat surprising, especially when it comes to the use of valid HTML code.

Think you're overworked and underpaid? You're not alone, 57% of respondents to a recent survey by Salary.Com said that they planned to leave their job because they weren't paid enough. But according to the company's research, only about 17% of workers are truly paid less than their peers. One of the major reasons for the gap in perception is the meager rate at which wages have increased in the past few years. On average the annual raise has been consumed by inflation, leaving little real gain in spending power.

The phrase coined by Tim O'Riley has come to represent many things to different people. For some it's the birth of a new round of innovation on the web, and for others it's something almost spiritual. An excellent blog entry by Nicholas Carr explores why the transcended promise of Web 2.0 isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I found this article interesting for several reasons, most notably because it attempts to rebut some of the arguments made about Web 2.0 without thoroughly trashing it. I also liked the way the author drew similarities between the early Internet movement and the "expand your mind" experience of the sixties, even if he does blame capitalism for their eventual corruption.

I'd say this is a necessary read for anyone concerned with where the Internet is going and how it will get there.

Rough Type: The amorality of Web 2.0

Seems like everyone is working hard these days. Over the past few years the squeeze has really been put on employees as co-workers have either left their job, or transitioned to a new one. Those left behind often inherit the departed person's workload, and even if a replacement is hired they may have different work responsibilities. This lack of hiring has caused many to feel overworked, underappreciated and generally contributes to low worker moral.

But are things really that bad? Sometime last year I read a story about programmers working at Activision. The story was horrible, with mandatory overtime starting nearly at the same time as the project. This kind of environment is never sustainable in the long run and often leads to mistakes. What I find interesting is that this practice is nothing new. A month or so ago I stumbled upon Jamie Zawinski's web site where he recalls working on the Netscape project back in the mid nineties.

Surprisingly, during this time of a "dot-com bubble", when hiring was rampant, the developers of the Netscape browser found themselves overworked and underappreciated. Worst of all their browser would eventually fall to the mighty goliath called Internet Explorer. But for a time, Zawinksi and his co-workers thought they were changing the world.. or the World Wide Web at least.

So give his site a look if you're interested. It's not well organized and the narratives can be a bit long, but it's worth the read if your interested in the so-called "dream workplace" of information technology.

the netscape dorm