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The Problem With TweetMeme

TweetMeme has become the de facto standard of retweet buttons, it’s hard to find a blog without it.  Little do we know just how slow it is – to be exact, how much it slows down site access.  This might not appear a big deal, until you we realize that Google now considers site speed as a factor in determining Page Rank.

I quickly ran my personal blog through the Web Page Test, and here’s what I got: TweetMeme is about the only killer, slower than anything by a long mile.


load time first

The above chart is the result of initial access – below are the results of repeat access, when a lot of data is already cached:


load time repeat

Not a pretty picture – but for now, I am leaving TweetMeme anyway… hoping for a solution soon.

Update: The animated image of the never-loading button is from a blog post that recommends a solution. I vaguely remember reading about the logic years ago – not just for TweetMeme, but all widgets – but the actual details go beyond my technical grade:   Install the TweetMeme Retweet Button… WITHOUT the Slow Page Loads!

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Earthquakes, Google Juice and How Content Beats AdWords

I often find out what’s happening in the world just be looking at the keyword activity in my blog referral log.  Like today, when I received readers looking for news on the earthquake in Japan.  This is actually sad, I feel bad for people looking for real info and getting “hijacked” – I am clearly not an earthquake expert, not even an authority on the subject.  All I did was point out how Twitter had been the first to report on several quakes in China and Japan, long before the major news-wires, and miraculously (and unfortunately) my post became the #1 hit for the Japan earthquake search on Google for a while, even preceding Japan’s Meteorogical Agency, which should be the ultimate source for such information.

This isn’t anything new, I’ve seen some of my posts get into top Google positions before – but it’s more understandable when I write about a more obscure subject, or a startup nobody else covers… like Brainkeeper,  where my post was #1 for months, preceding the company’s own site.   Being #2 for the fairly generic search on saas very small business is a bit more surprising, and #1 for Microsoft Outlook Sluggish is certainly rather unexpected.   Yahoo, for a change, lists my fairly old post as #1 for the very generic search term Startup Executives, and how on Earth did I get to dominate the igoogle for google apps search? smile_embaressed

Recently I’ve noticed it almost doesn’t matter what I write about, I can get a premium position for certain relevant keywords. As much as I am enjoying it (hey, who doesn’t like Google Juice), there’s something fundamentally wrong with this system.  I think blogs are somewhat overrated, and perhaps individual posts should be weighted on their own merits, not the Google Juice of the main blog itself.

But there’s another conclusion we should draw here. Content is really king, to the extent that it can compete with advertising. Businesses should take notice: you can pay for AdWords, or get to the top by developing your own content – and organic hits are worth more than paid ads. smile_shades

There’s another side of the coin here: if you don’t develop your own content, someone else will – and you may not be happy with the results.   I’m not sure UPS enjoys seeing my post immediately under their site for the google search  UPS Tracking

So once again: the old adage “Content is King” has got a new meaning.  I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and am getting ready to announce a new initiative in the next few weeks.