by Elissa Ewald

Steven Masiclat dives into the different factors that affect whether or not your content is found on the web.

When we metatag, we are making the news we create as fit as we can for the web environment…but this isn’t just about metatagging. This is about all the factors that make your media web accessible.

Contextualized

Means that your content situated within a series of web structures

-html

-served by databases

-has a presence that is calculated

Components of your online context (what makes it a network object): head and title tags, meta tags (keywords and descriptors), intra-site ranking(page rank algorithm), structured text, inbound references, intuitive interface

…All of these things work together to determine whether or not your news item is seen or not.

The issue with the text that we use is that there is polysemy. One word can have many different meetings and have hundreds of different associated images. On the web, there is a gap between the images and videos and the words used to describe them.

The map or graph of possible contexts for a word (for example the word green is associated with words like color, apples, environment, policy, etc.) is too large to be accurate. Therefore, we layer on additional data layers like external page links. The associated meanings of a word are turned into a mathematical representation so that it can be used to determine importance or relevance in a web search.

Common sense approach: When thinking about words to describe your work on the web, map them out. Are the words commonly used together to describe your topic? Will the words you use to describe cloud the meaning of your topic or piece? If the words on your mind map are closely connected, it is safe to use them together, but if the words are on opposite sides of the map and are not connected, using them may make it less likely for your content to be found.

What does this mean? Be careful what you write.

The algorithm used to determine the importance of your media will measure the semantic differences between the terms used. High correlation with low semantic difference in taken to mean useful, high-quality data, whereas a large number of terms, repetition, low-correlation are a sign of low-quality data.

Context for SEO

No jargon. No excessive technical detail. Use words that your audience will use. Titles should be directional and clear, tell your audience where they are on the web, and how to navigate the page. Your keyword text should be clear and simple as well. It should use words that your audience will be looking for on your topic.

Connected

…through links. When people link to your video in a contextual way, it improves your PageRank score.

…through contextualized links. If many people link to the page, add comments and link-backs, the page becomes large validated referant. (ex. Google Bomb) People could, in effect, change the semantic meaning of a phrase by thousands of people linking that phrase to a particular image.

Connected multimedia is…

-video people react to and comment on

-content people can freely use to help make a point

-available for a long period of time from a stable source (a permalink)—it stays connected. The longer something is online, the more links it can collect. The more links it collects, the more fixed the meaning of you media becomes.

-a subset of your total online portfolio or YouTube channel, photoblog or flickr-type page

Customer-centric

People need to be able to get to the media in a sensible way

People want to get media from sources they trust (they look at things their friends like, recommend or email to them), through this people experience the content not the ownership.

In other words…

-Video travels best over social networks or through trusted sources

-People generally don’t look for video news, they assume it will come to them. (Lee Rainie study)

This means you let people share, post links, and re-tweet your content. You let them distribute the content.

Cheap

How do you make money doing this?

-the problem of realizing value for work is systemic.

-the mass audience is gone.

-the audience that’s left is a large collection of very small niche-interest groups that are likely geographically disparate.

News is not amenable to long-tailed cost-recovery. News is the most valuable when it is timely.

What do we need? Masiclat suggests a content distribution network that can easily and cheaply syndicate your content on Social media sites, as well as online news organizations to syndicate to their sites.