I’m also looking forward to being able to devote more time and energy into collaborating with my partners on BuildZoom, which I’ll be talking more about on this blog in the near future.

I ended up booking a hotel for three nights at the Fairmont in San Jose for a total of $790.14 after taxes and fees.  More than a day before the reservation, I realized I wasn’t going to need the first night and so I called the Fairmont to try and shorten my reservation to two nights.

Since I had booked the reservation through Expedia, I was asked to follow-up directly with Expedia so I called Expedia and my first experience with customer support was being put on hold for about fifteen minutes.

Strike one.

I was finally transferred over to a customer service representative whose grasp of English was shockingly low, even for an offshore call center rep.  Let me add that I really have no issues with off-shoring customer support nor do I have any issues with English being spoken with an accent (being the son of two immigrants myself).  I do have an issue however when I have to repeat my story three times to the support rep I am speaking with.  This issue is further exacerbated when the support rep keeps ending every sentence with the word “dude.”

Strike two.

The support rep starts asking me a number of questions about my reservation and at one point asks me about my social security number.  I ask him why in the world he would need to know that, to which he responds, “to look up your record.”  I respond that I am not going to tell him my social security number and he says, “okay,” and then puts me on hold.  After a few moments, I’m taken off hold and all I can hear is my support rep singing a song to himself (in what sounds like Hindi) while typing away at his computer.

“Excuse me, ” I say.  “Are you looking up my record?”  The support rep responds, “Hang on, dude,” and then puts me on hold again.

Strike three.

This time, I am hold for about seven or eight minutes before my rep comes back on, at which time he lets me know that he has A. canceled the first reservation, B. re-booked me for two nights, and C. charged me a cancellation fee.  When I express surprise at being charged a cancellation fee, he simply responds that this is Expedia’s policy.  At this point I lose my temper and demand to speak with a manager.  I am put back on hold and after five minutes I hang up the phone.

Strike four.

I follow-up with a manager at the Fairmont and she is very helpful and apologizes on behalf of Expedia.  She puts in a reservation cancellation order and counsels me to use their e-mail support system, which I do.  I write-in and explain my case on September 19 and get an automated response – the first of three such automated responses I get between 9/19 and 9/23 before Expedia finally goes silent.

Strike five.

Today is October 6 and I still have yet to hear back from Expedia on the entire situation.  I see from my AmEx receipt that they have in fact charged me $790.14 for the first reservation and $606.35 for the second reservation although they have refunded me $560.87 but there has been absolutely no explanation for the last transaction.

Strike six.

At this point in time, I’ve already taken my business over to Travelocity.com and have filed a complaint with the BBB and plan to dispute the charges with American Express.  I’m simply shocked that Expedia would care so little about their customers, especially those that book at least one trip per month with the system.

If you have had a similar experience with Expedia, I strongly urge you to file a complaint against them with the BBB by going to: https://odr.bbb.org/odrweb/public/getstarted.aspx

I am a big fan…

I think Yahoo! News is a fantastics news portal and am still a loyal Yahoo! Mail user.

But you have to stop pushing the Yahoo! Mail integration with Windows Messenger every time I log-in to Yahoo! Mail.   I don’t mind it appearing the first time but every single time is just a bad user experience.

Search Engines and News Distribution – The Basics

I’ll begin by underscoring the fundamental role of search engines and news distribution services: In my perspective, it is the goal of search engines to help people find relevant content online including news content. It is the role of services like PRWeb to help people disseminate relevant news-oriented content online – search engines as a consumption facilitator, news distribution services as a production facilitator.

Now, everything else really stems from this core symbiotic relationship between search engines and news distribution services.

Tactically, search engines use different types of algorithms to determine what is relevant to a query. What distinguished Google in the late 90s was the PageRank algorithm, which placed a lot of value in the importance of back links in determining the relevance of a page.

Now, since then, the algorithm has changed quite a bit. These changes have been spurred for proactive reasons (breakthroughs made by Google’s über-talented engineers) and reactive reasons (to combat black hat SEO tactics). For instance, the practice of selling links or ‘link farming’ has compelled Google to make tweaks to their algorithm so these types of practices result in negative and not positive gains for perpetrators.

Anchor Text

Now let’s take this one level deeper and look at the concept of PRWeb’s usage of anchor text as a tool for search engine optimization. As the Google Webmaster blog states, “Writing descriptive anchor text, the clickable words in a link, is a useful signal to help search engines and users alike to better understand your content.” In other words, the anchor text helps explain to search engines affinities that may exist between keywords and a Web site.

On a simplistic level, PRWeb takes content from an originator and then moves it around the Web and gets it to people who consume that content and then often do something with it (like write about it). When they receive this content it includes the anchor text and when they discuss the content from the news release, more often than not they will include that anchor text in their hyperlink. Over time, the aggregate of all these individual bloggers, Web sites, etc. using anchor text and linking back to a destination site will have benefits for that destination site.

Keywords

Now, let’s look at another of our recommendations: to focus on a limited set of keywords or keyword phrases. Think of each news release that goes out in isolation – there is a compelling story that is behind that news release and the goal is to catch the interest of others out there on the Web – people who will consume and people who will push the story further through some means. All those behaviors (consumption and republication) have search benefits. Now, loading up on keywords on the other hands can have zero or even in some cases negative benefits. For instance, Google is pretty explicit about the practice of keyword stuffing.

Why? Because the goal of search engines is to help people find relevant content. So, if there is an indication that humans think that content is interesting because they are clicking-through or because they are blogging it, then a search engine will recognize that as good content. If it is obvious that the content is just loaded with excessive keywords and an attempt to game the system, then people will not click-through and people will not blog it – and the search engines will also most likely ignore it.

Hyperlinks

A final point about hyperlinks. Just like with keywords you should really use hyperlinks when they are appropriate. Too many hyperlinks can have a negative impact on your release. If there are too many hyperlinks, it runs the risks of not getting indexed in Google News. Furthermore, bear in mind that there is a lot of evidence out there to suggest that excessive links will dilute the PageRank conferred through individual links on a page. Just something to bear in mind.

Conclusion

Here is the best piece of advice I can give to those who want to gain search benefit through PRWeb: write a compelling story that people want to read and write about. Offer them the content needed (images, video, etc.) to make it easy to share your story with others through their Web sites, blogs, etc. Don’t focus as much on the little elements but instead focus on the underlying story. Now, you still want to follow best practices such as using anchor text, high-volume keywords, etc. but these should be a secondary focus after the primary focus of creating great content.

It is an interesting approach to collaborative debating.  One thing I like about the methodology is that it should provide some interesting insight to the types of content that is considered supportive of one side of an argument against another.  UberSpat should consider categorizing evidence ‘types’ and then offering a real-time analysis of what are the types of evidence that are normally considered more legitimate than others.