h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There have been some interesting ideas here, but I'm going to stick to a couple of technical suggestions, and I'm afraid they're mostly going to be Aviator-related

First of all, there has been a great response to the whole Aviator idea, and rightly so, I think. We are primarily a site for writers, but I think we should embrace AV and try to use it to its full capacity. Any site you can think of as being a 'top' site has audio-visual content, and if we aren't to be left behind for good we really need to take a long-term view and begin to incorporate AV properly. At the moment, we see AV (and I include photography in this) as something we do *after* we are writers, but I think we should have more of an open mind - we should be more implicitly open to photographers, film-makers, animators and audio producers. There is no doubt whatsoever that writing will always be the key focus of the site, and that is our lifeblood, but we also need to see AV as a way of keeping up with the rapidly-changing medium we are in.

My first suggestion - and this is really important - is that we get AV attached to h2g2 entries *properly*. I don't mean that it needs to be held onsite, but simply that we find a way of showing the AV on the Entry itself. We take a still of the clip, add it to the Entry as we would a photograph, and let people click and play. h2g2 already uses Javascript, so there's no reason I can see why we can't use it to show a clip or play some audio held on h2g2aviators.com. Javascript isn't Curatable, but I'm sure the technical team can come up with something so that the Eds can add it swiftly. TRiG has written pages that allow me to add episodes to RSS feeds, so I'm sure the BBC technical chaps can do something that lets you pull a clip from another source. I would be concerned about allowing users to upload content themselves (for example by creating an embedding tag) for obvious reasons, but you're not sacrificing any editorial control over what is shown onsite by using Javascript, because only you guys can add it. Restricting viewable content to material we've produced would also be very much in keeping with the spirit of the site.

That brings me on to what we can use h2g2aviators.com for. I see it as being as much a place for innovation as I do for simple hosting of AV. I can illustrate this best with an example.

It's been suggested that h2g2 could be improved by allowing Researchers to collaborate on Entries in a kind of Wiki-style. That would involve some serious thinking and major changes. Now we could quite easily come up with a part of h2g2aviators that would let us test that; we already have password protection and dynamic pages. So we could create part of the site that we'd set up for collaborations, test it out by giving a few trusted Researchers access to see how it works, get feedback from them and get back to you. If it worked and you could do it, you'd do something similar onsite. If not, we'd develop it a little further, run and monitor it ourselves and have somewhere, albeit offsite, where we could work on collaborations. You don't have to spend time developing things that might not work or get abused or whatever - we'd be testing these things for you - and we get to have some fun.

So when you say '...interact with kindly BBC geeks to swap ideas, software, coding etc' - either onsite or on the Aviators group, that would be brilliant. Whether it comes to coding Javascript for you to use to show videos or for new ideas, it would be helpful because we can understand how you do things and see if we can come up with own ideas.

Finally, do something about the metatags:



At the moment, all h2g2 pages have nofollow. This means that we're missing a really easy opportunity to improve the site's visibility. I reckon we have 60,000 links between EG Entries alone, and at the moment search engines don't follow those links. The tag tells them not to. Remove that tag and the search engines can follow all those links we spend hours adding, and boost us up the results pages a lot. You'll get a lot more casual traffic, and a few visitors might stay around. You have the noindex tag for some pages and not others at the moment, so nofollow could easily be relaxed for Edited Entries and probably for UnderGuide and Post entries as well. Even our oldest pages have zero PageRank, and that can't be right - less robot restrictions would boost it. The downside would be more crawler traffic, but I doubt that would burn us out.

Just to cover one thing - the 'nofollow' was added after crawler spiders kept crashing the site.

Things may have improved now, but the fact that we can't even search our own conversations anymore makes me think not.

I keep putting forward better meta tags so we get higher up on google, but nobody listens.

Article on SEO from the Times that we've been circulated this week says this:

"The top result [on Google] gets more than half of all clicks. Anything on the second page stands only a 1% chance of being clicked on."

So I saw how we measured up.

I put Battle of Waterloo into Google:
#1 - Wikipedia (so that'll get over 50% of clicks from people looking for info on Waterloo.

The Beeb's own Battle of Waterloo "game" on BBC History is third, my h2g2 entry on the battle doesn't make the first 2 pages.

And that's just on search engine listings. It doesn't matter what we do, until we're given a level playing field we can't be useful because we can't be found!

The only entries we have that get anywhere near the top of google lists are the ones on really obscure, specific topics. Anything general hasn't got a hope, and that applies to the BBC search pages too, sometimes.

I suggested improving the tags to Jim Lynn a while ago, and he said they were considering relaxing the rules. No news since.

I don't think losing the tag from EG Entries would have that much impact, Mina - it's a few thousand entries out of how many? You wouldn't want to remove the tags from every entry and conversation, but we're missing a really simple trick to improve the visibility of the site.

Can someone explain how it is that when I type in Shire Horse in a google search it doesn't show the article I've written here, yet when I type in Friesian Heavy Horse, which is not yet written other than the title, it shows as the first item in a google search?
If I put the date for the Shire horse article, that is, the day AFTER the article was created, it shows in a google search as number 7 in the results list!
They don't show up at all in Yahoo's search.

I *think* it's because most of the other sources describe it as a 'Friesian horse', and miss out the 'heavy'. Your title fits the search better than all the others. Search for 'Friesian horse' and it will disappear.

I'd expect Google to behave the way you describe for the shire horse entry. As your searches get more specific to your article, you'll find it shooting up the results.

I think the embedding of AV content in Edited Entries is a must, and I've emailed the Sub-Eds yahoo group about this conversation.

Improving search ratings for the site would also be extremely helpful, but remember that sites like wikipedia have more servers than h2g2, and those servers are dedicated ones. Ours aren't.

I think the biggest problem is the one of chickens and eggs. We need big changes: code to embed AV content, better search ratings, features like those on social networking sites, and most of all more people writing Entries for the Edited Guide. Until we have those things, though, the site has less appeal than it should have, and the things I've listed are less likely to gain attention.

Alex

Rich, you're right, it does disappear.

Thanks, Alex

The code for AV isn't a 'big change', though. Look at the html view of the feed:

http://www.h2g2aviators.com/?feed=guidecast&view=html

Hover over the 'View/listen to episode' link and you'll see the Javascript for a popup window. I don't know the script for embedding it in a page, but I know TRiG has done it and that it's one line of code.

I know it's not a big change actually doing it, but it could take a real push to get it done.

"I don't think losing the tag from EG Entries would have that much impact, Mina - it's a few thousand entries out of how many?"

As far as I remember it was something to do with the amount of links on each entry. Try finding an entry and checking how many links there are on that one webpage.

Obviously I'm not a techie, and don't understand what it's all about, but that's what I remember. Perhaps the thing was done as an 'emergency' to keep the site up and running and the BBC never gave h2g2 time to get it sorted out properly. I dunno, just wanted to mention why it was done.

I would love entries to get higher up in the listings - and to match that I'd like people to be able to post comments without registering, added to a list of recent postings to Edited Entries and I think we'd be more sucessful.

IIRC, the problem with crawlers was sparked by the sudden un-moderation of the legacy conversation postings, which meant there were suddenly thousands of new items for the spiders to go through. I can't see that there's enough conversations hanging off edited entries to bollocks things up again.