Well known SEO Ian Turner recently attended the WMW conference in New Orleans, and failed to return home. ThreadWatch has a post about him being missing.

If you attended the New Orleans WebmasterWorld conference, and stayed around through the weekend, please take a look at the thread to see if you can offer any details.

Ian is a great guy. I wish him a safe return to his family soon.

2005 Stanford Commencement address by Steve Jobs - well worth a read

Majority of states want to tax Internet sales
ShopZilla (what a bad name) bought for 525 million in cash
year over year web sales up 35% for the week
first quarter web advertisement sales increases 26%, to 2.8 billion dollars. yet, gasp,
the Keyword Price Index just dropped 15%.
the web is doing rather well compared to airline ads

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox celebrates 10 years. An interesting excerpt:

In 1997, I wrote the "Do Websites Have Increasing Returns?" column, discussing the relative value of big and small websites. I predicted that small sites would generate 75% of the Web's total value because they can be more targeted than big sites. ...

Most current discussions of the long tail underestimate the non-hits and assume that each point on the curve has the same value. But on the Web, being small means that you can better target your content and thus provide higher value per unit than more generic services.

Jakob also mentions a few of his hits and misses and points out some of his Alertbox articles which he feels deserve far more traffic than they get.

I have a bit of a hard time balancing self worth and ego, but it is interesting to think that hundreds of thousands of people could read your not well received work and still view it as deserving of more attention.

It seems to me that whether a person calls something usability, long tail, conversion marketing, SEO, story telling, brand building, or whatever, the end goal is to create enough value to extract profits while serving customers needs.

Usually most of the tips and information can be generic in nature (ex: track results or increase usability) - or deeply specific using some random vocabulary set (ex: Use location based keyword modifiers and bid for third position on Overture for expensive terms. Daypart your bid prices or ad display times to match the optimal point on the profit elasticity curve.) - because most of these terms and ideas are geared toward creating websites or systems which specifically target the needs of a small group of people. It is easy to fill the needs and desires of a small group of people.

It also makes me wonder if I should broaden or shift some of my interests (and more importantly, the way I market them) to a label other than SEO.

When in the UK I asked a ton of questions about demographics, law enforcement, power generation, social services, transportation, and the like. I find it fascinating to watch how some systems scale. It will be amazing if / when people figure out something that can beat out AdWords. MSN's new product may offer more data, but it may be confusing and just a bit ahead of its time.

Left, Right, Or Center? Can A Search Engine Be Biased?

Biased Search Ads:
Ads are going to be inherently biased, as paying for them means that the person buying them aims to use that money to manipulate others to perform a desired task.

From time to time someone will go too far and search engines will say the ad is out of bounds. The process will repeat.

Are Search Results Biased? Working with a Limited Information Pool:
Lets presume that the search engines aimed to be completely unbiased. Search engines can only display information they know about. They can not serve up information that does not exist.

Creating Information:
Information creation is either a labor of love, or must pay for itself.

Ideally it does not happen, but if a site creates profit the business model is going to bias the content.

If information is a labor of love then it is probably going to be highly opinionated - showing the world from a biased perspective.

If you pour yourself into something at a financial loss hopefully you are gaining in other areas, or else why would you create it?

While the best answers are usually somewhere in the middle, it is much more exciting to propose something that is cutting edge or deeply rooted in some ideology.

Linking to Information:
People are more inclined to link into overtly biased information. Whether they like the person:

Some might think ABC is a bit out there, but this is just a briliant idea (link)...

or hate them:

XYZ is a real tool. This moron said "blah blah blah" (link)...

Political and religious related topics are going to come out with a higher ratio of biased to unbiased information. Stories where religion and politics overlap will build heavy linkage data.

In being somewhat biased people get more feedback (potentiall more content), more readers (can make more money from ads and thus can further the content creation, brand, and distribution), and more links (furthering their authority score). Using the results of this type of social network how could search engines be anything but biased?

Credible Sources:
The Wall Street Journal is branded as honest information about business and finance in a capitalistic society, and yet they are reporting bad quarters and shrinking some of their edition sizes to cut costs.

Do the people reporting about money not know how to make any?

Part of the bad quarters may be due to

• the slugish stock market

• rapid consolidation of wealth
• uncertainty
• trade and federal deficits
• lack of trust in the market
• and energy shortages.

They are also losing out due to the web being a faster moving and cheaper distributed advertising network. Another thing that really hurts them - and all unbiased trusted sources - is that I can read exactly what I want to from whatever channels I like. News biased the way I like it.

While news search algorithms can use systems like TrustRank to unbias their news results, you can't fully remove bias from search results.

Most people are not cited or remembered as social significant for being unbiased and centered. The channels (websites) which do not have to ask for citation (links) will usually beat out those that do.