Do you believe something more or less because you found it while doing backlink research.

When someone gives you an unsolicited link does it make your more or less likely to trust them? How does it change your perception of the content you read or the person who wrote it?

Seth Godin recently asked why it was so hard to find tweakers.

The first problem is that name. It is not descriptive and it sounds belittling in nature. But there are other problems as well. I have found that people generally have to pay or overpay to take you seriously. You can give away general advice all day long, but to take the time to do specific in depth analysis and get them to test implementing the actions you are going to have to make them pay. And pay big! Go with a low price and get no respect. It reminds me of a friend who was giving me shit recently when I asked him if he thought it would be worth it for me to go to school. He said "not trying to be a prick here, but objectively looking at it, how can you respect a business professor who is twice your age and works for 1/3 your wage? What can they teach you about business that you can't learn on your own if you are already ahead of them?"

I might classify, in some ways, as a tweaker, but since there is no domain expertise associated with that general word then why should I brand myself as that? Most times when people do an SEO consultation with me I talk SEO and information architecture. I also tell many clients about how their design does not inspire credibility, they are not effectively using their content to guide the user to the desired action, they are selecting the wrong defaults, their copy could be better, etc etc etc.

If one works on such a wide array of topics it is hard to build up the topical support you would if you worked primarily in one community, and discussed other topics in a framework of how they relate to your domain using the language of your community (Jakob Nielsen is great at that). You have to be known and branded as an expert at something to be trusted enough for your opinion to count on other things.

Why don't I call myself a tweaker? There is no money in it.

The true tweakers (who should be trusted) realize their value and just tweak their own sites or work as affiliates such that they can get paid for the value they create. It is nice to have a few friends like that on your IM list, but I certainly wouldn't hire a tweaker that marketed themselves as such, at least not to work on a successful business.

I am still busy busy busy redrafting SEO Book and other content, but a couple recent comments made me want to make a quick post. On my post about why I thought it was alright to mention politics in work blogs Andrew Goodman came buy and left a gem of a comment

Been thinking this over. I don't often post on politics in spite of having an extensive background in political studies. Maybe that's because I learned you need to have eight chapters of literature review, history, and facts, and three chapters of case study, before you get to write the two chapters with the conclusions. It's easy to dump on obvious miserable failures -- much harder to imagine and/or implement a better or perfect world, at any level.

And given that the web encourages lousy content, having to throw away or leave unused a large amount of research is brutal if you are looking at content production on a ROI basis. To do so, you almost have to be certain that your research is going to be so outstanding that others notice it, or you have to be creating it out of passion without much regard to finance.

One of the reasons you see so many lists of items on popular blogs and social news sites is that they allow you to collect these random scraps, slap them together, format it, and GIVE THE IMPRESSION that the work is well researched and comprehensive, even if it was not. Little to no waste in the formatting, and rather than doing a lot of work that doesn't show you look like you did far more work than you did.

And the reason factiod posts do so well is not only that impression that they are a lot of hard work, but also:

• they are at a low enough level that most people can understand them

• people are attention starved, and the ideas are usually broken into small bits easy to digest
• at least one of the ideas in the list will be easy to identify with (as an example, I once told a story of how I was an idiot and accidentally dialed 911...most people had no comment or interest. the only person who expressed interest later revealed that the did the same thing)

Right now I have roughly 50 or so draft posts saved, and whenever I want to I can finish one up or use chunks of it to help create content for another related post.

These scraps of knowledge (or factoids, if you will) are not only big on blogs and meta news sites, but also are largely what most any user generated content sites and what the Wikipedia consist of. I used to be (and maybe still am) so anti authoritarian that I view most everything that starts from bottoms up as being better than things that are top down, but in many spheres it probably does make sense to have human editors, human aggregators, and trusted topical authorities that exist somewhere in the middle.

Search isn't successful because the technology is so great, it works well because they do have human editors, and they use your and my links as signs of trust.

When you look at the Wikipedia page on SEO and read through the talk archives you will see that they ran off both Bill Slawski and Danny Sullivan. Is there another topical expert that could possibly be more qualified to talk about search than Danny Sullivan? Not that I know of.

Some of the best topical experts have no distribution because people can not understand them or identify with them. Other topical experts may be good at communicating their ideas, but still can only reach certain audiences due to the errors of authority structures. For example, imagine if everyone followed the law, would we still need police officers, or would the laws change to create the need for the job and creat some criminal class to control the remainder of the populous?

People who just reach a bit of authority often like to feel a self-aggrandizing level of importance, and use a mob mentality to express it. Self preservation and a sense of purpose are probably the two key goals to any social structure or any person heavily committed to one. The more you try to convince them they are wrong the more you get flamed to bits, even if all they are protecting are their rights to remain ignorant and feel important.
And wherever there is conflict and/or brainwashing the all knowing experts of all topical domains are not going to be able to see past their own biases and brainwashing, and I doubt people can create rule sets or software which does a good job of avoiding that. Thus anything with significant reach and a bottoms up approach is typically going to be biased toward conventional wisdom, perhaps offset with a few outside fanatical voices.

Marketing works (and will never go away) because humans have inherent flaws, limited attention spans, and the market for something to believe in is infinite. But any structure that becomes authoritative is going to need to fire some of its top users if it is to stay relevant.

Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, recently announced Citizendium, which is sorta going to be like Wikipedia, but it will also have content verified by topical experts. I think I was the first donor to the project, and I would love to see it take off.

But I wonder if authority is the enemy of any social project. You want the authority because you get the distribution, but after you start to gain it you get gamed to bits and people start letting your content and software represent a large part of their identities or worldviews and it all goes to crap fast.

One of the more important reasons to try to grow out slowly and not force it too much is that you get to react many times before you get big. People who get rich fast often get poor fast. Sites that have their authority grow beyond their programming skills will have their flaws exposed so heavily that it presents a great marketing opportunity for others aiming to enter the same market.

So my brother came out to live with me for a couple months to hopefully straighten out a bit, but tomorrow he is flying back to California. At dinner today he stated that the odds of him doing well out there were not high. I proceeded to tell him statistics are bullshit, and that you don't do well by figuring that you are going to do whatever statistics say (I think relying too heavily on statistics is a way to push blame and/or plan for failure). You have the potential to do far better if you can defy statistics. If you can create new markets, or invest in ideas, markets, and opportunities the market doesn't see you can create value that statistics don't predict. You can't create many types of value by only following statistics.

What moves the price of a stock: when the company does what is predicted, or when they do not?

Statistics do not matter if you really want to do something. If you are an entrepreneur and view what you are doing as being average and your math is reliant on average then you are probably going to fail. Why? Because stats lag the market, and any market worth being in probably is not stagnant.

Less than four years ago I got kicked out of the military, the economy was in the hurt locker, I was suicidally depressed, I knew nobody in business, all my friends were on deployment, and I knew nothing about the web. The odds of me doing well at anything were quite low, but I think I am doing above what the statistics would predict for me.

Social and business hierarchies are designed such that many people work for few and few have the ability to rise through social or economic classes. If you want to be average or just assume statistics are all you need, it makes sense to work for someone else, or just give into becoming a statistic ahead of time (there is no point pretending you will escape them if you trust them well enough to predict your own life). If you work for yourself and/or are trying to change the way you behave throw stats in the garbage or use them as motivation to defy them.

Jim recently asked if he should post about politics on his blog. Rand recently posted why he thinks politics should stay out of your content. I strongly disagree with Rand's position. Why?

• Almost anything that I have been told was stupid to write, I also had others tell me that they thought it was cool. To me, I would much rather ensure I was memorable over avoiding risk.

• When you go outside of the conventional framework of what you are expected to do you are probably going to be more memorable than when you subscribe to a framework that everyone else subscribes to.
• People who have a strong emotional appeal to what you write are going to be far more likely to remember you and/or want to talk to you. Most others will just let it go.
• People subscribe to their own biases. We are constantly seeking things which reinforce our worldviews and identities. As long as you are fairly rational with what you write, those who disagree with it will usually tune it out. Those who agree with it will be more likely to remember it.
• People use language (and thus search) using queries that will likely indicate their biased worldviews. Thus they are not as likely to find your opinion if your political views differ from their own.
• People are more likely to link at things they can identify with. Just look at the most popular political blogs. Most of them are extremely biased.
• Many political bloggers are link rich. If you can create something that they will link at you soon will be too.
• People are more likely to link at thinks they think are totally screwed up. Even if people think your position is full of crap they may cite it because they want to say just how wrong you are.
• Politics generally is nothing but marketing and a game of double speak. The very fact that people react to it emotionally shows how strong the marketing is and how strongly people identify with it. It is important to understand how that language relates to marketing.
• If you let fears control your actions then you are guaranteed to produce watered down stuff.
• If you are full of crap in your worldview and have intelligent readers who care about you then audience feedback will help you quickly see other ways of viewing the world.

The four potential downsides with occasionally posting on politics and religion I have encountered thusfar are

• It may cost you some top down support, but I think it will get you more bottoms up support from people who find it easy to identify with who you are and where you come from. The bottoms up support will more than make up for the lack of top down support if you are small and passionate.

• If you post about politics too frequently it could alter the perception of your brand to be more about politics than your core value.
• You get death threats, etc. Some idiot has already offered me a dual. hehehe
• The death threats and ideological asshats may start to eat up some of your time and attention, and try their best to undermine your views of humanity and evolution.

But in the end, do I really want to help this person spread their belief system and control my life? Nope.

On Rand's blog he mentioned

The current political environment has exacerbated sterotypes and tensions in the political spectrum such that overarching assumptions about a person's qualities are built around even the smallest admission of idealogical leanings. For example, in the US specifically, those who put themselves far to the right of the political spectrum may create stereotypes of amorality, anti-family attitudes and military appeasement for those on the left. In the reverse, the accusations might be homophobia, racism, close-mindedness & lack of education. When you claim political affiliations of any kind, some of your readers/clients/colleagues are prone to jump to these type of conclusions.

There is an endless stream of amoral profit driven sources that will try to use fear to control your activities so that they may gain further wealth and influence. Why subscribe to thought control? Why let the close-mindedness and ignorance of others limit how you express yourself? I took to the web precisely because I didn't want to let others control my actions, how I express myself, or what I could say.

Only a couple hundred years ago slavery was an accepted practice here in the land of the free. Things are able to become much worse and take a much longer time to get better if people are afraid to talk about them. When you need to be a comedian to be honest doesn't it mean there is something wrong with our perspective of the world?

I probably post political stuff a bit more often than I should if I were focused on optimal conversion. I think if you do something rarely, but do it really well then you really get to drive home your desired message. Like take Danny Sullivan when he roasts Google or another engine. He is typically so mild mannered that when he roasts them you are pretty certain they deserve it. Or take Keith Olberman's recent take on the president. It really doesn't get much better than that.

We are all human, and thus are all biased and hypocritical, so of course we are going to look stupid to some of the people some of the time, but at least they looked. Feel free to throw stones and/or flames below ;)

Update: Paul Graham has a cool article called What You Can't Say, from which I will quote:

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

....

obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

Thinking outside the framework others set up, predict, and control is what allows you to create your own for profit framework (and by profit I do not mean only money).