Loci 2010 – David Mihm

David Mihm is the President & CEO of GetListed.org, in addition to running his own Portland-based search engine consulting business. He’s a Search Engine Land columnist and a frequent speaker at the SMX, SES, and Kelsey Group conference. He has created a number of tools to assist the SMB in navigating the rough waters of local more easily and publishes the annual survey of Local Ranking factors. More importantly he cares about the state of local search and how it impacts SMBs. He brings that sensibility and an astute mind to his list of articles that  stood out for him in 2010.

He thinks through the issues top to bottom and whenever I have a question, he is the one that I call.

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The Local conversation this year was once again dominated by Google, and in particular, its decision to completely reinvent its Local interface, moving away from the 10/7-pack and into a blended organic/local SERP.  (Btw, it bothers me that we still do not have a conventional term for this type of result two months after it launched!).  So a couple

Looking ahead to 2011, I think it’s going to be all about reviews, reviews, reviews this year as the differentiating factor for most Local SMB rankings.  Google’s extensive–though not quite exhaustive–push of Hotpot here in Portland these last couple months only goes to show how much stock they’re putting in reviews.  So I want to bring people’s attention to a couple of your posts in this arena.

Then, a couple of conceptual / theoretical posts–one by Chris Silver Smith that highlights an often-overlooked fundamental principle of Google’s Location Prominence patent, and one by Carolyn Johnston of Microsoft addressing one of business owners’ and marketers’ biggest frustration: why is my business data wrong, and what’s with all of the duplicate listings?

And, one tactical post–in my opinion the most actionable post in our industry over the course of the entire year–hats off to Garrett French.

Localization, Unique Data Sets & the Future of Search –
Few people follow the economic side of Google’s UI decisions as closely as Aaron Wall.  In this article he lays out some of Google’s less altruistic motives behind Place Search.

Dead Fingers Walking –
Andrew Shotland’s darkly satirical commentary on the same Places UI upgrade (pre-dating Aaron’s article by several months thanks to your own publication of the beta Place Search interface, Mike).

What Are the Implications of the New Integrated Local Search Results? –
Your own commentary on this seismic (or catclysmic, if you ask Andrew) shift in the way Google returns results for Local Intent searches.

Review Services – Do Positive Only Reviews Have a Place? –
Perhaps not one of your greatest literary epics, Mike, but I see this debate raging for many years, particularly as Google begins to incorporate self-generated testimonials and hReviews into its Place Pages.  It’s an extremely important question to ask both the search engines and the marketing community.

Principles for a Review Plan: Considerations in encouraging customer reviews –
You pretty much nail the matrix of important considerations in this easily-digestible column.

A New Behemoth Emerges in Google Maps: Wikipedia –
Chris Silver Smith highlights the importance of the highest-rated referring Place-related document as part of Google’s Location Prominence patent, here pointing to Wikipedia as a very highly-rated source.  Perhaps not actionable for most businesses but I think the concept behind this discussion is incredibly valuable.

Why Local Listings Data Is Tough –
A great “Q&A” posed from the perspective of the marketer/SMB to the search engine that is very illustrative of the difficulties in getting accurate data to flow all the way through the Local Search Ecosystem.

Phone Number Co-Citation Analysis for Local Link Builders –
Garrett French’s terrifically efficient strategy for making sure you’ve got your competitive bases covered when it comes to Local listings.

2011 — The Year Python Takes Over GIS

Funny how we think back to the past and say things like “the world was a simpler place back then”. I was sitting having some beers with a couple long time GIS friends and one of them started going off on how much better his life was back with ArcInfo and AML[1]. We went though the workflows back then; ArcEdit, ArcPlot[2] and the rest. Removing the specific programs from the work flow, we are left with one clear point of GIS analysis in 1997, scripting.

Back then, if you needed to convert a file, re-project it, buffer it and then clip it, build it or clean it; you did it all within one text file (usually ending with .aml). There wasn’t any one off GUI wizard that you ran, you planned out what you wanted to do, authored a AML script, ran it and then took some time out for a cup of coffee. That seems to have been lost and probably because AML was essentially deprecated the minute ArcGIS 8 arrived.

But in 2011 we have a great scripting language that no only can replicate those AML workflows of the past, but bring in new tools that can help get our work done faster. That would be Python. There is no reason why, right now, you shouldn’t close out your ArcGIS Toolbox window and start using ArcPy.

import arcpy

from arcpy import env

env.workspace = "c:/workspace"

# variables
in_features = "soils.shp"

clip_features = "study_boundary.shp"

out_feature_class = "c:/workspace/output/study_area_soils.shp"

xy_tolerance = ""

# Execute Clip

arcpy.Clip_analysis(in_features, clip_features,
out_feature_class, xy_tolerance)

Shoot that is easy, isn’t it? It all works that way and the ArcGIS help includes all you need to copy and paste to start using python for your analysis at the bottom of each help article. Plus if you are “that guy” who remembers ArcPlot fondly, there is a whole ArcPy Mapping Module that gives you all that power to manipulate MXD and LYR files using Python.

Remember AML fondly if you must, but today with Python you have tools that run circles around what AML gave you. I find myself opening up a command window and running python commands to manipulate data over starting up ArcCatalog these days and I love it.

No more excuses to not use Python.


[1]: Don’t we all have one of these friends, the one who thinks that AML and Avenue were the high point of their GIS existence.
[2]: Actually there is no reason to fondly recall ArcPlot. I hope it does a slow painful death on some HP-UX server in a hot room in the sky.