BRADY FORREST: Hi, I'm Brady Forrest with O'Reilly Media.
I'm here today with Matt Cutts.
Matt is the head of the Webspam Team at Google and is
a very long-time employee there.
And I've known Matt from the search
world for quite a while.
Hey, Matt.
MATT CUTTS: How's it going?
BRADY FORREST: Pretty good.
Pretty good.
MATT CUTTS: Right on.
BRADY FORREST: So you do a lot of things with Google.
You're kind of the voice for Google in a
lot of search matters.
And you wanted to talk about rel="author" today?
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, absolutely.
It's a pretty cool thing.
Basically, we just announced it recently.
And if you think about it, the web is sort of this anonymous
place where anyone can show up, leave a comment.
You don't really know who wrote a blog post. And that's
not the way the web should be.
So what rel="author" is, is a really nice, clean, completely
standard HTML5 way to mark up a page and say, here's a blog
post I do on mattcutts.com or whatever, and I can make my By
Matt Cutts byline point to an author page.
And I give it the rel="author" attribute.
And then Google can sort of start to tie
together all this content.
Now, the first version is only for on the same site.
So newyorktimes.com, cnet.com is using this to point to
their reporter or journalist pages.
But over time, you can imagine making this richer and linking
it with other sites or linking it across different domains.
And what's really great about it is, if this starts to take
off, then imagine you've done a guest blog post, right?
And we already know Brady's got great author rank.
He's a reputable guy.
But even if that new guest blog post doesn't have any
links yet, maybe down the road we could say,
ah, but this is Brady.
We already know he's a good guy.
So maybe give you a few links or a little bit of page rank
in that author rank.
BRADY FORREST: So how does this feed into the overall
people rank?
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Google has been working a lot more on social search.
Trying to make things more transparent.
So we sort of annotate in the search results.
This particular change lets people start to do the markup
so they can start to annotate the web a little bit.
Then we'll be working on ranking changes to see, OK,
given the signal, what traction is it getting and how
can we use it in our ranking?
And then over time, we'd like to make it where you can
actually see a picture of the person's name, their photo or
avatar, and who did this.
And then, if you want to, maybe click and get more
information, what else has this person written.
BRADY FORREST: And will we ever see this extending across
to YouTube videos and other types of content so it's not
just words on a page?
MATT CUTTS: I definitely think that would be great.
And, in fact, one of the very first things that happened as
soon as people introduced it is, hey can I make this with
HTTP headers or what are the different ways to do it?
And that way, you could say I'm the
author of this picture.
Even though there's no way to put metadata in a picture.
Now, that's a little bit down the road, so we'll have to see
what sort of uptake we get.
But it's pretty exciting.
The guys that worked on rel="author" are three or four
doors down.
So they're really happy to get this out.
And now they can start to figure out, how do we improve
the search rankings actually knowing who's writing things
on the web?
BRADY FORREST: Are you guys working with
anybody else on us?
Is Bing going to support this?
Yahoo?
MATT CUTTS: There was also schema.org, which has also
come out around the same time.
And that's got Bing and Yahoo behind it as well.
This particular thing, it's using preexisting stuff.
So rel="author" has actually been around for quite a while.
So what we're essentially saying is, if you do annotate
your pages like that, it's much more likely that Google
will start to use that information, start to
incorporate it into its rankings, try to figure out
who are the individual people.
It's going to be fun.
BRADY FORREST: Cool.
Are you using it yet on Matt Cutts?
MATT CUTTS: Yes.
I have annotated my page.
So if you go to my blog, you can click on By Matt Cutts and
you can see it goes to-- you can look at all the markup.
I'm usually the guinea pig for a lot of this stuff.
So whenever you mark someone as a spam result and you need
a screenshot of a spam result, they use my blog and
that sort of thing.
Even though I'm not spam.
BRADY FORREST: Yeah.
MATT CUTTS: Okay.
BRADY FORREST: It would be ideal if I could tie this to
my Twitter account or my Facebook account and make
those my pages of record if I chose.
Because I have bradyforrest.com, but not
everybody has their personal domain.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, you want it to be easy.
And so the challenge is at the same time, you
want it also be trusted.
You don't want to have fake Barack Obama.
And so one of the things they're doing is it requires,
down the road if you allow across different domains--
you can link to whitehouse.gov, but unless
whitehouse.gov links back to you, then it hasn't been
authenticated.
So you need those sort of bidirectional links.
So it's still early days along getting those
links across sites.
And we'll have to figure out, where can you put a link on
Twitter to prove that it's really you?
So there's some issues to be worked out.
So it might make sense to start with something trusted
where you know.
I could imagine a Google profile where you can change
the annotation of the links or something like that.
But over time, in my opinion, people want to be where they
want to be on the web.
And people should support that.
BRADY FORREST: So it'll be interesting to see how this
affects the social graph if it's able to export it out
from Twitter and Facebook and put it on the open web.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah.
BRADY FORREST: Do you picture being able to put up
relationship?
That already exists, but--
MATT CUTTS: Well, and a lot of the WordPress guys, for
example, are great because they've done XFN and all these
kinds of standards.
And what I think is pretty interesting is, if you use
rel="author" and then rel="me", then you can start
to think about tying all this stuff together.
And I'm on Twitter.
I've done 13,000 tweets.
So if there's some way to combine those over time.
And it may take a little while before we figure out what's
the right exact interface.
How do you make it easy?
So there's something called the Social Graph API where you
can type in, OK, here's a URL.
What else is linked in that social
space via various links?
So you want it to be trusted, but you also want to be
transparent so people understand why is this page
linked with that page.
So I think it's probably better to go a little bit slow
and be a little careful so that people aren't really
nervous about it.
But it definitely makes sense to me that you'd want to be
able to have people annotate as much
of the web as possible.
BRADY FORREST: So you and I are both kind of fitness
gadget people.
So what's that on your wrist?
MATT CUTTS: This guy?
This is a Nike Plus SportBand.
It's actually pretty neat.
I've got a little Nike foot pod in here.
And so as you're running, this guy is keeping track of every
step you take.
And so it knows your cadence, and it can take a rough guess
about how far you've run.
And the neat thing is, then you just take this guy and you
can plug him right in to a USB port and it'll
upload it to the web.
And you can take those guys, you can run against other
people, you can say, are you doing better and faster and
those kinds of things.
So it's getting now where you can have quantified self on
your running.
You can have Fitbit, you can have a Nike, you can have GPS.
If you run with your cell phone, you'll be able to see
what your track was.
And that's pretty cool.
BRADY FORREST: Yeah, see, I want that
pedometer on my cell--
MATT CUTTS: I know.
I know.
BRADY FORREST: Tie into the cell phone and then maybe have
specific sensors that maybe use Android@Home or ZigBee or
something like that, that actually
tie it all in together.
Because accelerometers in phones are a little--
they're not set from phone to phone.
And that's a problem researchers have.
MATT CUTTS: And you don't want to drain your
battery on your phone.
But it's getting really close.
And some Android phones with My Tracks can
talk to some devices.
And it's just like there's that thin thread.
But over time, especially at Google I/O, they we announced
the Android Developer Kit.
So you can start to do Arduino and all these
other kinds of hacking.
And if you can get all kinds of cool devices interfacing
where it's just like your pedometer can talk to your GPS
and all that stuff, or your bike computer.
BRADY FORREST: Well, and as we were talking, Google is
working with Ford, with their Predictions API to work on
fuel consumption.
I'd love to be able to stream my data up to the Predictions
API and get feedback like, oh, you're about to say something
inappropriate, it's time to take your medication or maybe
you haven't had water in a while.
Whatever.
Your body is reacting and you should really think about
doing this right now.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, you're about to run late on this meeting.
A little blip or something.
Or even the notion that you're about to say something stupid
so your phone starts vibrating with an SOS pattern.
It's like, oh, that's my ringtone that lets me silently
know I need to back out of the room because something big is
going down.
BRADY FORREST: Cool, well, thank you very much, Matt.
MATT CUTTS: Yeah, absolutely.
Always good to see you.
BRADY FORREST: Yeah.