Review of SES NYC by Khalid Saleh

Conferences are especially interesting especially in a tough economy. Truth be told, I had low expectations for SES NY when all I was reading was companies scaling back and downsizing.

But the first tweets about SES painted a brighter picture. And with close to 5,000 marketers registered for the conference it was shaping up to be an excellent conference. As I walked through the exhibit hall vendors had a very good show and were very pleased with the large numbers of crowds that showed up. Of all the different SES shows I have attended over the last few years, this particular SES NY had to top the list in both the quality of the lectures, the speaker list and even the small details such as quality of the food J.

Here is a quick wrap up of some of the highlights

I thought that Guy Kawasaki’s choice of topic on using “Twitter As A Tool For Social Media” was an interesting one. And although I am a fan of Guy, my assumption was that most everyone in attendance must have used twitter for some time. I was really wondering if I am going to learn many new things from session. The room was over flowing with people and the few who showed up late had to spend the hour or so standing.

Guy made 9 main points:

  1. Forget the A list (sort of funny coming from A lister ;) )
  2. Defocus
  3. Increase your followers
  4. Monitor the conversation
  5. Copy best practices
  6. Use search
  7. Use the right tools
  8. Squeeze the triggers
  9. Make it easy to share

Guy’s favorite tools to use in conjunction with Twitter

My favorite portion in the presentation was the section on search and utilizing advance search parameters to look for terms people are using. That can be a valuable tool to increase business. Let say you are a web designer who is looking for work. You can setup a search for a term such as web design referrals. That is an excellent time to jump in and introduce yourself.

Twitter hawk is a tool that can be used to send automatic “paid” messages when people search for a term. I am not familiar with the tool but I see the potential to use it for business development. I am sure there are many who will debate the tactics Guy suggested in the session. If you are a believer in pure social media, I think there are many things that will turn your stomach.

The session on Meaningful SEO Metrics focused on measurements that help generate better ROI. Traditional metrics focus on number of visitors, pages per visit, time on site, etc. Ray "Catfish" Comstock discussed how bounce rates for keywords is critical in the process of conversion optimization. Ray suggested examining:

  • High Bounce Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keyword phrases that are generating traffic but users are not finding what they want.
  • High Conversion Rate keyword phrases: which indicate keywords that are working and therefore which phrases you should focus more resources on.

I did not really appreciate the importance of mobile SEO until I chatted with an SEO for a large auto site. He mentioned that their site traffic usually peaks on Mondays and Tuesdays. That is the time where people are searching for cars. The traffic usually dies off on weekends when people are out shopping. If you think about it, people actually shopping in real life is perfect time for Mobile SEO. That discussion was enough to convince me to attend Mobile seo best practices. Cindy Krum who specializes in mobile marketing consulting did a great job covering Mobile Marketing Strategies. While visitors of traditional marketing can arrive at a site at different stages of the buying process, mobile search usually indicate immediate intent. Cindy pointed out that real mobile web browsing, flat-rate data pricing, and faster download speed are all factors help that make mobile web more relevant. Cindy’s advice for basic mobile seo includes:

  • Follow all Traditional & Local SEO Best Practices
  • Submit your Site to Mobile Search Engines & Directories
  • Avoid using flash, scripts, popup windows.
  • Follow XHTML standards
  • Use external CSS

The panel discussion on the most common search marketing mistakes CMOs make promised to deliver an interesting topic. My favorite of the mistakes was failing to assign $ value to every conversion on a website. There are too many times when we focus on a generating sales or leads via a website and forget about the other conversions that can take place. These other conversions might not have the same dollar value as a sale but they are the still conversions. A visitor might subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or subscribe to a blog. Assign a dollar value for each of these activities.

The extreme makeover session with a focus on conversion made for an entertaining afternoon. Jeffry Eisenberg of Future Now, Tim Ash of SiteTuners and Ethan Griffin of Groove Commerce took on a discussion of one of the sites Groove Commerce worked on. You can tell right away the different approach to optimization each of these guys takes. Jeffry is evaluating different customers, looking at what might work for them. Tim is focused on the testing aspect. Ethan is considering optimization as well as implementation details. Jeffry and Tim seemed to disagree even when they were making the same point. As a listed to the panelist go back and forth on what to test and what to remove, some sitting next to me asked, so who should we listen to here? I smiled and said, listen to your visitors!

Night time at conferences is as valuable as day time and SES New York was no exception. So, on the first night of SES NY I stayed up until 4 AM with Frank Watson (AussieWebmaster AKA crocodile man in some Hollywood circles) and Patrick Sexton (who you know from SEOish or his latest venture GetListed.org), every muscle in my body was aching. I am just not sure how Frank was planning to stay up for few more hours.

B2B complex sales involve longer cycles, many stages and different people in each stage. The session on B2B marketing focused on search marketing tactics that can help deal with some of these complexities. Segmenting data becomes more critical in complex sales. This can be done through allowing customers to identify what segment they belong to (enterprise, small business, etc). Another important factor when it comes to complex sales is going beyond the cost per lead to cost per action which is a good indicator of the quality of leads.

Another panel discussion I attended at SES was Slash Your Search Budget. As you can imagine the title hit home with what many companies have to deal with nowadays. Unfortunately, this session was perhaps the most disappointing discussion in the conference. The speakers did not offer real ways to slash marketing budgets. The talk of mobile SEO as an alternative to traditional SEO threw me off completely. How would that relate to slashing a marketing budget? Talk of utilizing social media as a way to generate hits did not resonate with me either. Social media takes a lot of nurturing and a lot of budget. So, at that point, I could not help but raise my hand and ask how is using social media help in cutting SEM budgets? There was a bit of silence there.

The only exception was Aaron Kahlow of the online marketing summit. He offered candid suggestions: It is better to take charge of the budget discussion. Approach your manager/boss and tell him you want to slash the budget. Evaluate which parts SEM activities are not producing results. By doing so, you will be guaranteed a seat at the table.

The 2 nd night at SES included attending live web master radio show hosted by David Szetela, learning more about the SEO community from Jim Hedger and enjoying a lengthy discussion on online marketing with @webanalytic J .

On the third day of SES, I attended News search and SEO. Most notable on that panel was John Shehata of who specializes in news search seo . John provided many valuable tips that ranged from the basic to more advance level. Some of the tips included:

  • Use trends/buzz keyword tools when writing news for online audience (Google hot trends, Yahoo Buzz, Google Zeitgeist, seomoz popular)
  • Print headlines sell the story, optimized web headlines tell the story

Well, before I sign off, I have to congratulate Matt McGowan and his team for an excellent show and raised the bar for upcoming search events. I think Matt is on his way to Australia at this point. If you enjoyed this post and would like to connect, then follow me on twitter.

How Many Trillions Does it Take to Put a Banker in Jail?

About to go to jury duty here in about 15 minutes...which got me thinking about the concept of justice.

I don't mind paying a lot of taxes if it goes toward creating a better society, but in California when you get toward the upper end of the tax bracket you can pay ~ 60% (federal + state + local + self employment/social security) of your income in taxes. And those tax payments probably do not even offset the handouts we are giving to bankers that gambled with trillions of dollars and lost.

News of additional bailouts via a public private partnership (that makes almost all the reward private and almost all the risk taxpayer funded) have spurred Bank of America and Citibank into buying more of the toxic assets that they allegedly need help clearing off the books.

A guy writes $7,000 in bad checks and gets a 24 year prison sentence. These bankers cost tax payers trillions of dollars. So much money stolen that they debased the currency, and they are awarded with free money for being incompetent.

I am not sure what will come of today, but if this country actually had any sense of justice then there would be at least a half dozen bankers serving a few decades in jail. The fact that none of them have been locked up yet shows how perverse our justice system is and how little you should trust the U.S. government. Politicians work for the bankers.

Obama has a poll allowing voters to ask questions about the economy. Most of the questions are about "what about me I am broke and don't know what to do" and "I need some relief" etc. And that is how they will remain until our financial system is fixed. And by fixed I mean these bankers serve the jail-time they earned and pay back their "earnings." Billions of hours of labor have been wasted propping up a ponzi scheme that promotes insider/bank traders winning on both sides of the trade, while handing you the losses.

Is there any wonder why so many people feel overextended?

These bankers put teeth in the consumer bankruptcy law (lying using bogus statistics to pass it) then they wanted a decade long ride on the free money train for their company.

What's worse is that children who have yet to be born have interest working against them starting from the day they are born. They are in the hole from their first breath, having done nothing wrong other than being born into corruption. The politicians take care of their own children, just not our children.

We are so afraid of terrorism...and financial terrorists that cost us trillions of dollars are somehow just part of how the system works. No big deal.

Sorry, but I don't need to pay for someone else's second yacht or fourth home. If anything these career criminals should be scrubbing my floors and taking out my trash. You and I are the people who are actually paying their salaries (and bonuses) through a collective billions of hours of OUR LABOR that was confiscated and handed over to the banks. This makes me angry enough to want to go unemployed and stop working and/or move to another country. I hope I get to be a juror over a banker some day. And I hope you do too!

Update: here are a couple relevant articles in Rolling Stone & The Atlantic, and a nice video.

Google Expands Snippets & Related Searches Word Relationships

Google announced that they are rolling out a new technology to better understand word relationships and extend their snippets on longer search queries.

Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Note that they claimed that this is "one of its first applications." If they can improve relevancy with integrating this technology directly into the core search algorithms then it will lower the importance of on page optimization (since you only need to be close rather than use the specific words that were searched for). Such a change would likely decrease the traffic to low authority sites held up largely by strong site structure and on page SEO, while increasing the amount of traffic going to high authority sites and well branded sites that are poorly structured from an SEO perspective.

I am not sure if this sort of algorithm change would favor shorter or longer content pages. In most cases I would guess longer pages if they were kept on theme, and broken up to relevant chunks. The expanded snippets on longer search queries show a lot more information directly in Google's search results, which helps thicker pages show off their offering more than thinner pages, but cedes more control of the information over to Google as they can show close to 250 characters in the search results.

If the technology was applied to anchor text it might also limit the value of anchor text manipulation by boosting up the value of related phrases (if Google knows that the word Salesforce is relevant to CRM then they might count that anchor text more).

Greg Sterling noted that this change came from the Orion technology that was purchased by Google from Ori Allon in 2006. He also interviewed them:

I spoke yesterday to Google and Ori Allon. To the extent that I understood his discussion of the way Orion’s technology had been applied to refinements here’s what’s going on at a high level: pages are being scanned in “real-time” by Google after a query is entered. Conceptually and contextually related sites/pages are then identified and expressed in the form of the improved refinements. This is not solely keyword based but derived from an “understanding” of content and context.

It is hard to speculate if/when this technology will move from sideshow to becoming a big deal. The current usage is fairly trivial, but it could get much more well ingrained into many parts of the relevancy algorithms.

As search engines get more sophisticated with how they show word relationships (on branded and non-branded search queries) that is one more thing that can be optimized, though likely one that will require a holistic marketing strategy to optimize, because you will need to create a lot of co-citation (or some other signal of relevancy) across many pages on the web.

A couple years ago Lord Maurice Saatchi described their brand strategy as being built off of One Word Equity.

In this new business model, companies seek to build one word equity - to define the one characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.

It is the modern equivalent of the best location in the high street, except the location is in the mind.

SEO & Marketing Links of Interest

I have been saving these links up since January 21st. Time to share about 50 of them. :)

Niche SEO Guides

The Rising Commoditization of Everything But Experience

Graywolf shared this great video about the ongoing process of commoditization.

  • materials get commoditized
  • due to competition products become materials
  • customized service and personalization help create sustained value

The Fear of Success in Creative Arts

This Elizabeth Gilbert TED video talks about how to live with knowing your best work is likely behind you, which is true for many popular artists and authors.

More Search News

Yahoo! Search makes it easy to embed videos & docs with SearchMonkey.

Amazon is trying to use DMCA to block other ebooks from getting onto Kindles. Sony and Google partnered up to make 500,000 ebooks freely available on the Sony ebook reader.

Yelp was accused of extortion. Pay us or that negative review stays at the top. Lovely mafia-styled business model :)

Bryan Todd shares a powerful story about how words are powerful:

There is no such thing as right language or wrong language, good grammar or bad grammar, correct English or incorrect English. There is only language that got you want you wanted, or didn't.

Perry Marshall highlights how Google considers some businesses to be illegitimate businesses. If only they would get to the government grant stimulus ad scams.

Gab Goldenberg offers tips on online branding. Lance Loveday wrote a great article about the overlap between search and branding. In our member forums I started a thread called branding in the search channel.

George Michie explains why budgeting search is a bad idea and offered some SEM RFP questions worth asking. Generally I have avoided clients that needed an RFP because I felt they were still in the shopping phase.

Searchers have been using longer search queries.

John Andrews explained how he thought Sphinn moved on from its roots.

CJ shares some ideas for how search engines can hunt for paid links.

Joel Spolsky highlighted why you should not use Google apps for anything important. I am really hoping they never screw up my email account!

Michael Gray took a look at the influence of article directories on organic rankings.

Debra Mastaler offers a link building stimulus plan.

Rob explains how some sales techniques, particularly in social settings, work well by hiding the upsells in the price. Online if you sell a non-commodity you can make the core price higher (to increase perceived value) and then let people de-select the pieces they do not want or need.

Back in January Robert Scoble highlighted that Facebook is studying sentiment behavior.

Andrew Goodman highlighted how dumb some clever nanotargeted marketing is. Funny :)

Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt were on the Charlie Rose show. A couple interesting quotes...

  • from Eric - Technology has brought us closer together, but makes us more stressed.
  • from Marissa - speech to text technology on Youtube that is searchable should be around in 5 to 10 years
  • from Marissa - credit card companies know if you are going to get divoriced with 98% certainty something like 2 years ahead of time.

Eric Schmidt also suggested that as netbooks get cheaper they may subsidize them to buy marketshare.

The Economist published a story about Brewster Kahle and the idea of an open library.

Tons of great free research from FutureLab.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin riffs on the purpose of schooling, including ideas like...Teach future citizens how to conform & Teach future consumers how to desire

Here he talks about the concept behind his new book Tribes.

Danny Sullivan Highlights Google's 2 Tier Justice System

Danny highlighted how many aggregators of aggregators and content cesspools are bogusly clogging up Google's search results with sites that would be viewed as spam if the owner was not socially well connected:

You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe. Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

Alltop, Mahalo, Squidoo -- none of them dominate Google. But seriously, Squidoo has a PR8 home page? Alltop has a PR7? Search Engine Land, which actually produces original content, sits with a PR6 -- but these guys that simply compile content from others get a big fat PR kiss on the lips?

Hey, I don't fret about PR scores. I know how meaningless they can be. But Joe Schmoe who tried to launch one of these types of sites wouldn't get any PR at all. Google would have shut them down long ago. Lesson here? To be a really successful SEO, get successful at something else, then jump into your SEO play.

Danny Sullivan is probably the only neutral reporter in the search space with a decade + of experience AND a background in traditional journalism. He is usually quite neutral, so for him to say that, you know Google is screwing up pretty bad.

If you are good at public relations you can have all the PageRank you want. Can't afford a proper public relations campaign? Have no brand equity other than being branded as an SEO? You are the scum that makes the internet a cesspool. Better luck next life!

If you can't be found you don't exist. As Google's "spam team" grows more subjective with the definition of spam (hey I know him it's not spam, never heard of him it's spam, etc.) the web loses out on its diversity. Meanwhile how about you view some great fraudulent government grant ads through AdWords.

Google's public relations team publicly lied about cleaning those fraudulent ads up.

"Our AdWords Content Policy does not permit ads for sites that make false claims, and we investigate and remove any ads that violate our policies," said Google in a statement e-mailed to ClickZ News. "We have discussed these issues with the Federal Trade Commission and reaffirmed our commitment to protecting users from scam ads."

The above LIE was quoted from an article published 3 weeks ago, but Google is still making over $10,000 a day carpet-bombing searchers with that reverse billing fraud (and probably $10,000's more on the content network).

Spam is only spam *if* the spammer is not paying Google and they are too small to fight back against the often arbitrary and injust decisions of the irrational Google engineers that "fight spam" while turning a blind eye to grant scam ads.

Pretty worthless hypocrisy, Google. Who is trying to turn the web into a cesspool full of fraudulent ads and corporate misinformation? This company:

SEM Rush Uncovered : Interview of Michael Goldfinch

I have been a big fan of the SEM Rush project since it launched, and recently interviewed their CEO, Michael Goldfinch. We discussed their software projects, and how they got into the field of SEO.

You guys have had a strong string of hits in the SEO space with SEO Digger, Ads Spy, SEO Quake, and SEM Rush. How did you guys get involved in the SEO space? What do you attribute your string of successes to?

SeoQuake Team became active in the Internet at the end of 90s, when Spedia were alive. Since then we have developed a lot of web projects. In 2000 we started doing SEO. We did SEO for Altavista and NorthernLight. Happy times they were! I remember that we made pages with enough keywords and after entering captcha got top1 immediately. After that we worked for different companies (SEO and web-developing).

SeoQuake and SeoDigger are public products and they make a small share of our work. SeoQuake Team made them public to demonstrate its ability to develop such products. SeoQuake and SeoDigger are extremely popular for a reason: they are helpful, user-friendly, and affordable. They are innovative and developed with users’ needs in mind.

So you guys have created a pretty cool tool in SEM Rush. What made you guys decide to create it?

In summer of 2008, after the shy start of AdsSpy.com, we were playing with different ideas of AdWords keywords research, AdWords arbitrage and competitors’ keywords. And when we found out that Velocityscape plan to launch their new version of Spyfu we launched SEMRush. This was a nice joke, I suppose. When we saw PPC web spy – we just integrate SEMRush AdWords data into SeoQuake =)

When you guys created SEM Rush you closed down SEO Digger. Is there any reason you didn't do a 301 redirect during the transition? What made you feel that a new brand was needed after SEO Digger was already so well known amongst the SEO community?

SeoDigger has not been closed yet. API access for all registered users is still active :) We plan to close it after the integration with Market Samurai is finished. We gave a new name to the project to emphasize its novelty. Besides, the product value is more important for us, then its name.

How hard is it to crawl and update that much data from Google? Do you guys need a lot of beefy servers to grab all that data and serve it up?

It can be really difficult for anyone except Google, but we like this problem. With some relevant experience it becomes not so hard. Without going into details of the technology I have to say that a lot of developers do not bother with their codes and databases optimization, and therefore, they need large server farms. Instead of this we use a lot of C++. Also we use new technologies – SSD (solid-state drives) on servers and so on. Of course we have a number of servers in different data-centers to monitor Google and other search engines geo-targeted SERPs.

Recently Google tested showing AJAX search results to some searchers. If they roll out such a program will you guys still be able to gather all that great data?

We have not tested it yet. But I believe that SEMRush will be still working. Google can block all their analyzers, but why would they do that? Such tools help advertisers, SEOs, and other people working in the web. They make Google AdWords more popular. In addition, I suppose that Ajax-SERP is interesting for geeks, not for mass users.

One of the most interesting SEM Rush features (that I have not seen in any other competitive research tools) is the ability to cross compare the organic rankings for one site and the AdWords ads for another site. What gave you guys the idea to do that?

Our programmer far away in Siberia did this on his own without being asked. The team decided to leave it “as is” :) We like this feature and we plan to improve it.

SEM Rush does a break down of the value of each ranking. What statistics do you use to determine the difference between say a #3 and a #5 ranking?

SEMRush use open statistics about CTR dependence of URL’s position in SERP. in addition it uses statistics from our own sites.

You guys created a list of some of the most valuable and high traffic domains with great organic Google rankings. Have you guys thought about putting together a list of the most valuable keywords as well?

Now everybody sells “expensive” keywords, “huge” keywords databases, “profitable” keywords lists etc. SeoQuake Team is going to sell more valuable information – domains related to top adwords spenders! Full version of SEMRush rank will be available soon. You will be able to download lists of high organic traffic domains (with stats) and lists with high adwords traffic domains (with traffic and costs details). I think this info is really important to SEO firms and adwords professionals.

There is a version of SEM Rush for the German market and one for the Russian market. Are these both primarily based on Google rankings? Are there any other similar tools that serve these markets, or are you guys first to market in these markets? Have you guys considered making a French version and/or a UK version?

Yes. We made them to simplify google.de and google.ru analysis. As you know Keywordspy try to do this for German, and nobody do this for Russian version of Google. SEMRUsh.de (German version of SEMRush ) is still beta for today. There are some problems with keywords traffic estimation for local markets, because there are no accurate stats for German, Uk of French keywords. As you can see there is no enough geo-stats about these keywords at even Google Keyword Tool. And there is a problem in sorting keywords database: you can easily detect specific keywords, but what should you do with universal keywords like cnn? We try to make accurate keywords packs for local markets and we are open to cooperation with anyone who can give us this information.

What are some of the most interesting ways people have used SEM Rush to boost their business?

SEMrush users don’t report us about their success, because the silence is golden. I can only say that for last month our users performed 1.5 million different queries for Google AdWords and organic keywords reports for different sites.

Do you guys have any other new analytics tools or other SEO related tools in the works?

Our users keep giving us tons of great ideas and we generate a lot of them too. So we constantly develop different tools – quite simple ones and I’d rather not discuss them now, because they are not ready yet. When we launch them – you will notice it, my promise! One of them will be for brands analysis. This is not only SEO, but we believe this is interesting too.

Do you guys plan on adding support for subdomains (like seeing the subdomains as their own site)?

We recognize top-level domains using this list https://wiki.mozilla.org/TLD_List. SEMRush already supports reports for URLs and for domains. Correct recognition of subdomains is a problem. There are no rules about what is the subdomain – different site or just a site’s directory. Some other day we will solve this problem, not today.

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Thanks Michael. Check out SEM Rush if you would like to learn more about their new competitive research tool. You may also want to check out our review from when SEM Rush launched.

'Professional' Content vs Content Actually Worth Reading

Some media executives are bitching about Google ranking blogs and sites not controlled by the mainstream media. Of course Google has been tilting their algorithms in the direction of brands, and even includes trusted news partners directly in the search results for recent news items. But that is not enough to make bloated media companies profitable.

"The original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results."

Google subsidizes these media companies with additional exposure by

  • weighting domain authority
  • giving them first mover advantage in the search rankings (through direct inclusion of recent news results in the organic search results)
  • featuring their content (yet again) in their news search product
  • favoring informational content over commercial content

If a big business has "real access" and yet loses out to people rewriting the story, it means the original source did one (or more) of the following

  • did a pretty crummy job of reporting
  • did a pretty crummy job of SEO
  • erected barriers that made them not linkworthy
  • fought off niche brands with a generic brand that does not resonate as well with the market

Google could give these media companies almost 100% of the search traffic and many would still go bankrupt because their business models simply do not fit the web. Online ad rates are lower, most of the media infrastructure is unneeded bloat, and individuals and brands are starting to create their own media.

When I click the publish button, 10's of thousands of people will read this post. Its not your fault or my fault that big media was too lazy to create niche brands offering relevant regularly updated content.

Ironically, the quote from AdAge, begging for coverage of the original source, did not have a name on it. You can quote it, but there is no source. These clowns whine about something and are not willing to put their names behind their own words. Maybe that has something to do with why people would rather read elsewhere.

This is the same media that pushed the bogus Iraq war, laughed and joked about those errors (while people were still dying), and missed the financial terrorism occurring back home. Why again is the original source more important than those who dig a bit deeper and add further context?

If the relevancy algorithms are your enemy, then maybe your work is no longer relevant.

Maybe they can work on stuff that matters.

New SEO Tools

Get Listed is a cool tool for seeing how your website looks in local search, and to aid you in submitting your site to local search engines.

Wordtracker announced they will be launching a new version of their keyword tool soon.

FairShare helps you track scrapers publishing your content.

WebReader makes it easy for people to click a button that makes your blog speech enabled.

Wiep highlighted a new link building and public relations tool called BuzzStream.

SEOmoz announced they retooled their backlink anchor text analysis tool using their Linkscape data, which they also released an API for.

Majestic SEO created a neighboring sites search.

Wolfram Alpha is to launch in May as an answer engine. I predict that launch strategy will create branding issues (like not being able to outsource the blame for their poor algorithms onto spammers - like Google does) but if the tool is decent it might be a great tool to use when researching content generation ideas. The new CashKeywords toolbar also looks quite useful for researching content ideas.

In January Google started offering a new, more-advanced sitemap generator, and made Jaiku (a Twitter-like tool) open source.

Mozilla is testing collecting usage data to create open research, hopefully they don't pull an AOL with the data though.

Some developers are creating new tools to analyze Wikipedia.

Links & Relationships vs the 'Social' Media Monster

John Andrews highlighted how the narcissistic "social" media platforms are in many ways replacing links

The players producing platforms are manipulating the currency that they see those platforms aggregate — which is mostly links. As you type type type your content into Twitter or Wordpress.com or Wikipedia you are fueling the coffers of an elite group of benefactors, and if they continue to manipulate the open web, we lose the “free” benefits of our world wide web. They used to encourage you to sign onto their systems, but now they need you. We’re not linking because our tools don’t make it easy enough to express our linking selves. Those who make the flexible tools today do so for personal gains, not the betterment of the web, and so they manage the linking. Greed is the new black.

If enough such platforms keep growing then Google will have to evolve their algorithms to look beyond links, placing significant weight on other factors and/or some nofollowed links.

A while ago I mentioned how Twitter was pulling blog links away from bloggers (lowering the ROI of blogging from super explosive to only explosive). This trend is not only spoke about in the SEO industry, but is starting to receive coverage in broader channels. Brian Solis recently mentioned this trend, noting that many of the top blogs are seeing lower link counts in Technorati. People would rather write about their status than spend the effort needed to digest and compile something deeper.

Since more links are occurring on networks like Twitter that will lead to a rise of tools like BackTweets. Until the search relevancy algorithms evolve more, we need to look for ways to encourage as much conversation as possible to happen on independent websites. How do we do that? I have a few ideas, but would love to read some of yours first. :)

Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy

One of the first books I read about the web which really helped me understand the culture of the web and the concept of the web as a social network was the Cluetrain Manifesto. In it, David Weinberger stated "hyperlinks subvert hierarchies," a concept that helps explain a lot of the chaos in the current world.

The staggering rate of change and seeing cracks in imperfect structures makes us more likely to question authority. Fear slows down economic activity but it also creates the conditions to help speed up change through creative destruction, as insolvent structures crumble and are replaced by thousands and millions of online experiments ran in parallel due to forced entrepreneurship. As Clay Shriky puts it:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

Each link creates a new opportunity, which in turn creates new opportunities, giving our social nervous system many senses. And the web is just getting started. Watch this Tim Berners-Lee video and try to predict the future of the web. You can't do it.

As the web grows (and grows smarter) two of the biggest risks are machines learning too much about us (through spying on our browsing habits) and proprietary databases that lock away pieces of our culture while surfacing other favorable pieces (the divisions could be nationalistic, idealistic, or commercially driven - like "brands" that we are apparently "hard wired" to). For both of those reasons, Google's market dominance scares me.

On the above video by Tim Berners-Lee, Ralph Tegtmeier wrote the following

As long as we don't seriously do something about protecting people from the very abuse of their personal data (more often than not linked without their express acquiescence), we're merrily lighting the fuse to a humungous collective powder keg. (And it's really not helpful at all shrugging such concerns off with pejorative epitheta such as "tin foil hat", "conspiracy theories" etc. as is so common across the board.

Let's never forget that all the major atrocities committed in "civilized" countries ever since the 19th century, ranging from genocide to mass destruction, ethnic cleansings, wars, the holocaust etc. were only as scalable as they eventually proved to be because of just that: "linked data" ruthlessly leveraged and deployed by those who could get their hands on it.

Think about how distributed (and targeted) ad based business models work in a republic / quasi-democracy. Buy ads that change the opinion of couple percent of people and you change the course of a country, and perhaps the course of civilization. Think about how well Google intends to know your flaws, and sell them off to the highest bidder in any medium they can:

users that spend a long time bartering instead of stealing in a game may suggests that they are interested in the best deals rather than the flashiest items so the system may show ads reflecting value. As another example, users that spend a lot of time exploring suggest that they maybe interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations. As another example, users that spend a lot of time chatting instead of fighting or performing other activities in online games suggest that they like to chat, so the system may show ads for cell phones, ads for long distance plans, chat messengers, etc.
...
The dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.

And while we are being profiled, pieces of our culture are being locked up via anti-competitive agreements. Richard Sarnoff, the chairman of the Association of American Publishers, noted how they were hoodwinked in a deal with the devil:

Sarnoff also speculated that … [l]egal hurdles may make it infeasible for any other firms to build a search engine comparable to Google Book Search.

Many power structures that are being killed off by the web are the walking wounded, making deals that are rational only when paired against death. And we are stuck living with the consequences of those decisions.

With Google being so profit driven they are leaving room for a pure search play, if only someone that got branding, marketing, and the web would step up. I hope Rich Skrenta (or anyone) provides real competition to Google soon, before spying is seen as respectable and too much of our culture gets locked up in exclusive deals.

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