Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

It’s time to take the internet seriously say’s Edge.org.  I’ll pose the idea on why you should take the internet seriously, the block of text lead by #., and you preface it with questions it might answer – Go!

(Links in this section of the post are dedicated to my previous post)

What’s the next step in the evolution of search engines?  Google personalized search?

What hangs on the technology tree…?

5. Consider Web search, for example. Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree.

Why should my company blog?

How do you change stained glass…?

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure

How does social and search dance?

How does the future flow…?

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time

Why social media?

Wouldn’t a stream melt snow…?

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

Just finished eating a delicious scallop and cabbage and capers dinner topped off with a little bit of reading – Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I’m about 1/3 through the book and it’s turned out to be the book I wanted The Management Myth to be, philosophy infused proceedings on the nature of our work (knowledge work, specifically).  I came across a passage that made me think of SEO.  It reminds me of the conversations floating around the industry from  season to season about whether or not SEO is a science.  I’ll quote it at length:

But there is another class of arts that Aristotle calls “stochastic.”  An example is medicine.  Mastery of a stochastic art is compatible with failure to achieve its end (health).  As Aristotle writes, “It does not belong to medicine to produce health, but only to promote it as much as is possible…”  Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch.  The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way.

…

Like building houses, mathematics is constructive, every element is fully within one’s view, and subject to deliberate placement.  In a sense, then, a mathematical representation of the world renders the world as something of our own making.  Substituting mathematical strings for shoelaces entails a bit of self-absorption, and skepticism, too: the world is interesting and intelligible insofar as we can reproduce it in ideal form, as a projection from our selves.  By contrast, in diagnosing and fixing things made by others (this other may be Volkswagen, God, or Natural Selection), one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves.  This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments.  This is easier said than done.

Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex, and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing your are trying to fix.  This disposition is at once cognitive and moral.  Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration.  I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for out time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness.  Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.

So why did this make me think of SEO?  Because it’s stochastic.

SEOs often fail to achieve their ends, the ideal – ranking in the first position for all major keywords.  SEOs do not produce rankings in the strictest sense; they perform their form of the art to promote first page rankings.

We cannot and never will know the search algorithms in a comprehensive or absolute way (I don’t even think those that have unleashed this ever evolving beast know!).

There is a certain disposition required in what you do as an SEO, particularly when you first start out.  Any bit of tumultuousness is accompanied by internal moral panic.  I remember when I first received my clients; it went from reading lots of blogs and knowing it theoretically to “Oh crap,  I have to put these thoughts into practice…and make them money!”  This is one of the effects of being a knowledge worker, I think.  There is a peculiar kind of detachment that is at once alienating and exhilarating.

SEO epitomizes the scientific disposition – A happened; why did A happen?; test out variables X, Y and Z to find out if they caused A.  That doesn’t make it a science.  Science requires falsifiability and an ability to provides steps to the next person who comes along that will provide the same result, consistently.  Put another, if SEO was a science there would be no SEO; it would be a commodity.

You can demand that oil act as it should and it will turn into gasoline with the right pushing, prodding and pulling.  You cannot demand that all websites react exactly the same to your methodology.  You certainly have your best practices, but the differentiation, and proof of your skill, comes in emphasis – on-site, off-site, consistency, patience, education.

Fortunately for the SEO, attentiveness to the consistently changing search landscape necessitates creativity in uncovering solutions.

Image by boopsie.daisy

Written on March 30, 2009

I recently bought Seth Godin’s latest book called Tribes. I’ve decided to read and take notes along the way and hopefully turn those notes into a somewhat cohesive blog post. So, in an effort to get that cohesive ball rolling – imagine a softball sized ball of tape, rolling along the floor, nabbing hairs and dirt along the trip – here ya go!

Primary thought after reading first quarter or so of book: Social media allows businesses, organizations, associations, anyone to lead a tribe. SM is certainly derided as frustratingly difficult to track (and I agree to an extent), but it provides a potentially explosive opportunity to businesses. Standing on the sidelines because you personally do not like social media is short-sighted, egotistical and, in the end, it’s really not about you. People are already talking about you whether you like it or not. It’s about the user. Your constituents. That’s the beauty of the internet.

Joel Spolsky is Changing the World

• Joel’s passion is talking about how to run a small software company
• By its nature, search is about the how – people are looking for information
• Tribe = group of people, a leader and a connecting idea
• Tribes need a leader and an idea
• To be a tribe, a group needs a shared interest and a way to communicate
• As a business with a website, you have commons, a meeting place
• Obviously, have a way to communicate

Grateful Dead

• Did not necessarily succeed economically – at least it was not their primary goal, but they created a blue print for a tribe
• Humans want to belong to a group
• Tribes make our lives better
• “…being in a tribe is a big part of how we see ourselves.” Page 3

Tribes Used to be Local

• Internet eliminates geography
• Explosion of tools that allows us to connect with people, other tribes, to connect interests
• Becomes more about our interests as opposed to who we know as a first move (Facebook, Myspace)
• More on interest networks

In Search of a Movement

• Many groups stuck – they drown out dissenters and those with views different from the status quo
• These people are aching to be a part of a movement
• Similar to The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

Tribes Aren’t So Squishy Anymore

• Prior to internet, tribes hard to connect
• Instant communication makes things taut
• Barack Obama can raise $50 million in 28 days
• Important point: the internet is a tool, it’s about us, about the people. You don’t need a keyboard to lead, but the desire
• We are hardwired to be social, internet – Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Yelp – allows us to be social
• Okay, if you don’t the desire, let someone else who does have the desire lead the tribe
• If you are the CEO, the director of marketing, it’s important to recognize those individuals in your company that are impassioned by blogging, tweeting, facebooking. If they can sell you on their efficacy, then give them the power to use their authenticity to garner recruits to your tribe. Nothing worse than disingenuous online interactions – people pick it up and revolt (see uproar about Guy Kawasaki and his use of twitter)
• “generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the self-efforts of someone doing it just because she can.” Page 7
• Googlers view on authenticity, et cetera
• It does not cost much (just buy Red Bull for the knowledgeable 23 yr old in your company). It can yield long term ROI.
• http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2009/03/top-web-analytics-questions-twitter-edition.html

More to follow as I read along and write.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few months about the recession, trying to figure out exactly what happened in order to understand various why answers that have been thrown out there. Something I’ve noticed about the recession, and that generally bothers me, is the use of science, math, numbers, equations (whatever) to create models of prediction – models that attempt to predict human behavior. I’m sure certain models do quite well, but to fall in love with an equation? Crazy. How do you turn happy, sad, greedy, desire, depression, irrationality into an equation? The numbers in these equations are not all rational actors. That’s a strategic point of view.

Certainly, on a tactical level it seems the crisis is very much about how our banking/economic system functions (housing is only a part of the problem!), but, again, on a strategic level it’s about how we regulate ourselves – through politics, government. If we concede our irrationality and desire to do what’s best for me, then I don’t understand the view that we do not need to regulate our markets.

The equation is enticing. It’s final. It’s complete. It gives you hope and security. But what happens when people start to act all too human? Makes me think of this passage from Notes from Underground:

…Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science … and pulled myself up. And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices; that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula; then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the chances; can such a thing happen or not?