The Kobo has a lot going for it. Because the company behind it isn’t an Amazon.com, and so they can’t do it alone, it scores big points by using common technologies and supporting standard formats.

For the Kobo being a 1st edition, and for wearing a much more affordable price tag at $150, than the Amazon Kindle at $260, it can be forgiven for falling short of the Amazon Kindle in a lot of ways.

But the Kobo has only itself to blame for where it falls hardest.

Their (boring) slogan is “eReading: anytime. anyplace.”

It should be “eReading: anytime… eventually. anyplace… eventually.”

It takes over half a minute to power on.

That’s just too long.

Reading is a sacred ritual. Those that read are going to be frustrated, and those dead tree books will also be calling them with their sirens song.

Charlie Sorrel of Wired is correct, the Kobo is a killer, suicidal that is.

I do expect it to do decent in the Canadian market, but this first edition is no Kindle killer.

I’ll be returning it this week.

Note: Chapters Help Lies, Thankfully It Should Be Easy To Return

Contrary to Chapters online help stating “Kobo eReaders must be returned in its original unopened packaging.” I confirmed first online with Kobo customer support, and then in store, that I have 2 weeks to return it open with the original package.

“If the unit is not defective and you simply don’t want it you can return it to your local Chapters/Indigo store within 14 days of purchase as long as you have a receipt”

And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.

Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?

Anil, do you have any data to support the wild claim that TypePad has better SEO than WordPress.com? Of course you don’t. Further, I don’t understand what the 2nd sentence means (link with additional info?) or how it even relates to SEO.

WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.

Here are a couple of the most obvious issues TypePad could fix to get on the path to WordPress levels of SEO:

1. For years TypePad’s URLs of posts (permalinks) had underscores between_words, which still are not well supported by search engines. In the last couple of years thankfully they now default to using-hyphens for new posts which allows search engines to recognize the individual words.

Unfortunately, TypePad still only includes fifteen characters from the title in the URL. Anil’s example http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html didn’t show this, but it often results in words being cut off in the mid.

Lets look at the articles of one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Seth Godin. What would you or a search engine think is going to be the title of the post with the URL of http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-marketing-o.html . No, it isn’t “The Marketing O’”, it’s “The Marketing of Fear”. If you look at his other articles must suffer from this same problem.

If you want TypePad URL SEO you have to limit your titles to a couple of words?!

2. TypePad sets an article’s URL when a draft is first made and doesn’t update it when the title is updated. This one is the far more annoying and potentially embarrassing if the original title was inappropriate.

Lets look at the posts of another one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Steve Rubel. Just looking at his posts on the front page, I only have to look to the 2nd post from the top to see an example of this problem. The title is “Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing”, but the URL is http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/06/how-friendfeed.html. How? That must have been how the beginning of his original draft read.

Where I see this issue the most is blogs with editors. Look for it the next time you are reading a Wired blog. I’m sorry now that I’ve pointed it out, you likely won’t be able to help but notice, and it will start to bug you too as much as it bothers me

Six Apart is well aware of both issues, and knows the SEO implications. For the second issue, I emailed Anil about this over six months ago, because it bugs me that much.

On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.

I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.

These type of issues are in the most basic examples of SEO. Worse, it’s just a lousy experience — I like to think the first rule of SEO is that the optimization is also a good user experience, or at the very least doesn’t detract from the experience. Come on Six Apart fix these issues. It’s better for everyone.