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Forrester M&S Blogs

December 20, 2006

Blog tag and five things you didn't know about me

Thanks to my colleague Peter Kim, I've been tagged so I have to respond with this post. What's going on? There's this viral thing going on called "Blog-Tag" where the blogger writes five things about themselves not widely known, and then "tags" five other people to continue the chain. This online tagging game was recently re-started by Jeff Pulver on December 10th. He charts how quickly it spread just after 24 hours as well. I especially liked Eric Kintz at HP's approach, where he tagged corporate bloggers from Dell and Lenovo.

What I love about this game is that it shows that very human side of blogs -- that we all have quirky things about us that make us people. And especially when it comes to corporate bloggers, this is all that more important as one of the key reasons to have a corporate blog is to show that human face.

So here are my five things:

1) I'm in love with logic puzzles. Be it Sudoku (I'm now workin 16x 16 grids), or those annoying metal puzzles where you have to extract a one piece I have yet to meet a logic puzzle I didn't want to dive into. One of my favorite companies to visit is Google -- not because of their fancy bathrooms or cool decor, but because they put logic puzzles in the lobby waiting areas. Unfortunately, they are all too prompt to retrieve me for scheduled interviews so I never get a chance to indulge in this passion. It's also the only thing I asked my husband for this Christmas!

2) I made the Harvard College varsity sailing team my freshman and sophomore year and competed in the NCAA championships the spring of my senior year. All of my dorm mates were jocks while I was a pre-med geek. So I decided to try something different and went out for the sailing team, thinking that at least it would be a sport that I could enjoy the rest of my life. I ended up getting addicted and even sailed one winter in the Marblehead Frostbite league (it's exactly as it sounds - sailing in the middle of a Boston winter in Marblehead harbor). The irony is I can sail only small craft now because I get incredibly sea sick on large boats, especially in San Francisco Bay!

3) I was once mistaken for the nanny of my own child. I'm Asian and married to a Caucasian French Canadian, so our children look, well, unique. I was on maternity leave with my first child in Boston and was pushing him down the sidewalk near my house. A woman came out and was admiring my son. She then asked me if I enjoyed being the baby's nanny.  I politely informed her that I was the mother. Horribly embarrassed, she apologized and ran back into her house. One of the major motivations we moved our family from Boston to the Bay Area five years ago was so that we could hopefully raise our kids in a community where their values -- not their education, wealth, or race -- defines who they are.

4) I love, love, love reality TV shows. Give me Survivor and The Amazing Race any day over the West Wing. Why? I have limited time to watch TV so if I'm going to relax, I want to watch something that's total escapism. West Wing and Studio 60 are great shows, but I have to think and concentrate too hard! [Updated warning: Survivor spoiler ahead if you've TiVo'd the finale or are watching it overseas.] The recent series on Survivor featured teams divided by race, which raised a huge din of protest. I loved it from the very beginning because 1) it gave us a reason to discuss race and stereo types; and 2) stacked the deck to have a non-white winner. I watched the series with my kids this time, and from the beginning we cheered for Yul Kwon because he's from San Mateo, our home town. We couldn't exactly choose an ethnic team because we're a mix of Asian and Caucasian. In the end, it was thrilling to watch Yul win -- I had kids bouncing all over the living room walls.

5) Ok, this is a little embarrassing -- I play Toontown, Disney's MMORPG. I started a few years ago when I was covering gaming for Forrester and got my kids hooked on it. I then got other family members on it as well. So while the kids have lost interest, my brother and I will go online together after the kids are in bed, and take over a few Mints or battle the VP before signing off and heading off to bed. It's not nearly as cool as World of Warcraft, but hey, I get to play it with my kids! (I'm also not that keen on violent games). For those of you who know Toontown, my toon's name is Cool Duchhes, my current LP meter is at 98, and I'm still working on maxing out on toon-up and drop. You can usually find me jumping for beans in Nutty River's Dreamland. Toons of the world unite!

Ok, enough about me. Now the tough part -- finding five other bloggers to tag who haven't already been tagged. In the spirit of diversifying the blogosphere, all of my tags are women that I admire and would love to learn more about.

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Posted by Charlene Li at 03:04 PM in Serendipity, Social networking, Tagging | | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

November 09, 2005

Search engine cooking and the "third page" of search

By Charlene Li

I wanted to pass along this article from the Washington Post, "My Dinner With Google" by Andrea Sachs, where she searches for recipes that use a set of ingredients -- such as tofu, oranges, and cauliflower on Google. As an avid cook, I've had my share of adventures with search engine cooking", usually as I try out new ingredients that I pick up at Bay Area farmer's markets. Most recently, I've had some cooking adventures with with corn smut (or cuitlacoche) and romanesco.

But what I find so interesting about this is that when I do "search engine cooking" (usually at the end of the week when I have odds and ends left in the fridge), recipes from my favorite site recipe site, AllRecipes.com, frequently turn up. I took a closer look at this, and found that AllRecipes.com uses  static index pages around different topics versus Epicurious' dynamically generated pages. No doubt, this helps popular recipes show up well in the results.

The reason I bring this up is that I've been noodling around the idea of the "Third Page" of search (credit goes to Perry Evans from LocalMatters for prompting this train of thought). The first page of search is the query page (like www.google.com), the second page is the search results, and the third is a destination page on yet another search engine or aggregator that's been optimized for that query.

Here are some examples: seafood recipe, chinese restaurants in dallas, where the top results are a list from another site or search engine with better functionality to help with a structured search. And this makes sense -- my hypothesis is that while a particular Chinese restaurant will try to climb to the top of the search results for such a query, it's actually better for the user experience to see a list/aggregation of the restaurants.

Carrying that thought further, as vertical search engines develop, they will actively try to source much of their traffic from the general search engines, training consumers to actually seek out these brand names in the general interface and then drilling down into parametric, structured search on the vertical search site that's better suited for their original intention.

Hence the evolution of the "third page" of search, which extends the search experience outside of the original general search engine. I think we're seeing a subtle but fundamental shift in consumer search usage away from trying to find perfect destination page and instead, turning instead to aggregators and vertical search engines that understand (and can optimize for) the query better than the destination pages.

This has significant implications for the search marketer and site optimization firms -- it's one thing to try to improve your search engine rankings vis a vis your competition, but it's another when you're trying to beat out aggregated pages optimized for these more general queries. It points to the need for a multi-level SEO strategy -- focusing not only on optimizing pages on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but also looking at your placement on sites like Citysearch and SuperPages.com.

Posted by Forrester Admin at 02:53 PM in Search, Serendipity | | Comments (7) | TrackBack (7)

July 20, 2005

Google shoots for the moon

By Charlene Li

Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” just took a flying leap from cyberspace to real space -- check out their use of Google Maps technology on Google Moon, which plots the Apollo landings on yes, the moon. Why do this? To commemorate the first lunar landing on July 20th, 1969.

And they have a sense of humor – check out their job posting for their lunar location called Google Copernicus Center.

Hat tip to Jimmy Guterman for the lead.

Update: BTW, that sense of humor is pretty cheesy -- zoom in all the way on the moon image to find out more.

Posted by Forrester Admin at 01:38 PM in Serendipity | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)

June 13, 2005

Apologies for the lack of posts

By Charlene Li

One of the hazards of being an analyst in my particular space is that I tend to trash my computer. I have about 20 or so RSS aggregators, every desktop search program has been downloaded, tested, removed, and countless other beta programs as well.

I was just asking for it.

So for the past two weeks I've been in PC hell, barely able to get email, do my job, let alone write any posts. So many apologies. Even my most recent post was written last week and posted only today (long story of it getting eaten several times by my PC/browser/Typepad -- not sure who/what was the culprit).

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my new laptop as well as a loaner from Apple (I finally get to play with Safari and Spotlight -- I've been hauling myself down to the local Apple store to get the full experience -- and I have to say, Safari RSS rocks!)

So look out for a slew of pent up posts!

Posted by Forrester Admin at 11:21 PM in Serendipity | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (5)