Peter Morville is a well known information architect, who co-wrote Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. He recently wrote Ambient Findability, which is an O'Reilly book related to search, so I had to read it.

I was a bit uncertain exactly what the book would be about when I bought it. Ambient Findability is primarily about how people interact with the web & information, and I was well pleased to find that the book looked at search from a some perspectives I have not read before.

Most the time I look at search I am thinking rank rank rank. I find how people interact with information to be a fairly interesting topic, and Peter went in great detail about a number of things I don't usually think about.

Peter talks about:

• tying the web & real world together

• the history of wayfinding
• how we interact with information
• the limits of language
• push vs pull
• sharing & tagging information & the semantic web
• some of the reasons for bad information consumption habbits
• and one of my favorite subjects: how our views on authority change as we are able to solve more of our own problems

In the push vs pull chapter he talked about striking the balance with marketing, and I think this quote is useful to marketers:

Markets are conversations. People exchange goods, services, ideas, and values in an intricate dance of push and pull. And as technology disrupts and transforms the marketplace, only those who listen carefully will profit from this persistent disequilibrium between supply and demand. - p. 117

In SEO it is common for people to want to rank #1 at any cost and then have a site that wastes the traffic it gets. Peter does not talk about marketing as a stand alone product, but mentions how it should be integrated holistically into the site.

This User Experience Design article on his website has a picture of what he calls The User Experience Honeycomb, which shows how he believes value is strung together through the combination of assets.

Ambient Findability is a cool read.

Not good, Google:

Google Inc. has quietly patched a potentially dangerous security flaw in two of its business-facing services after a private security research outfit warned that malicious hackers could exploit the bug to hijack sensitive user information.

The vulnerability was 'flagged and fixed' in the Google AdWords and Google Services subdomains.

Because both sites use data from the Google Accounts username/password system, security experts said the flaw presented a major identity theft risk.

As if click fraud wasn't a bad enough issue. As they continue to collect and cross reference information they need to be careful with that user privacy issue.

Blog Goodies...a blog about blogging.

I was posting too much blog stuff here and started to felt like it was drowning out the other stuff, so it now has it's own channel.

My first semi original useful post on my blog about blogging is about socially conscious automated blog content generation

The man, the myth, the Mick Jagger of search, well I guess he doesn't really go by that name ;) but...

Matt Cutts was nice enough to answer a bunch of questions I asked him via email.

For the gray hat in the crowd, I asked Matt what fields SEOs should look at as search advances. He said:

If you're creative, I'd look at the marketing/buzz aspect of things. A person who is savvy about marketing will often have a good leg up on interactions with people. If you are a talented backend person, there's a ton of neat start-ups right now. 2-3 people in different places can collaborate on some nice stuff. If you're a button-pusher, I'd try to diversify that skillset. ;)

for tips on building a search engine & doing SEO read more of the Matt Cutts interview

Now, don't get me wrong here, I like WordPress, but I don't understand how a website that was recently in sore enough shape to need to do large scale search spam can want $10,000 for a one day home page text link sponsorship.

Certainly there has to be some middle ground in between needing to upload 100,000 AdSense pages and needing $10,000 for a single text link?

1-Day Text Link $10,000.00 average clicks 4 cost per click $2,239.64

Who would look at those numbers and eat that up? Maybe an online casino looking to spread a viral story?

I do not do much in the lines of ad sales, but sometimes the key is to charge lower rates to help boost demand, and then raise them after advertisers see the value. Some of my friends give ad space away off the start.

Even if the traffic is not well targeted people will pay money if they believe the value is there, but I think it may help to place a blank ad for a friends site on the home page just to get a test sample of CTR data. You need to prove the value or have a ton of buzz before people will want to rent uncertain pixels.

What is the most you ever paid for a click? Was it worth it? How did you know before and after you bought it?