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).

Via SEW, Google has a new customized homepage module called interesting items for you.

Based on your search history (and perhaps toolbar feedback if you have a Google Toolbar installed) Google will recommend related searches, related web pages, and related homepage gadgets. Right now here is what the interesting items for you module recommends for me:

For Google to be building technology to recommend all types of things I should be consuming you know that eventually that sort of technology is going to work to enhance what ads I see while searching and while on content sites. Thus, Google will be able to exploit for maximal profit potential whatever profitable flaws I may have in my identity (see the recent Bob Massa interview for more info on how that works).

What I find frightening about automation and creating maximally efficient ad networks is that inevitably they promote the businesses with the deepest pockets. Like corporate structures, capital is amoral, and you don't get the deepest pockets without doing some shady stuff. More often there is more money in deceiving people than in truly solving problems and helping people. Plus, as marketing continues to evolve, and it is easier to test and gain feedback, it will be easier to control people through instinctive predictable animal behaviors.

Psychology Today published an article about Why We Hate, which stated:

Researchers are discovering the extent to which xenophobia can be easily—even arbitrarily—turned on. In just hours, we can be conditioned to fear or discriminate against those who differ from ourselves by characteristics as superficial as eye color.

And, to me, that becomes frightening when I think about how I just played a video game for a few hours, and Microsoft bought a video game ad targeting company. It is even worse when you consider how much money the military spends on marketing, and that they use their own high end shoot em up video games and pizza parties as recruitment devices on 13 year old children.

What really concerns me about Google (and others) continually improving social recommending engines is that they may make it harder to realize our own prejudices.

The guilt of mistaking individuals for their group stereotype—such as falsely believing an Arab is a terrorist—can lead to the breakdown of the belief in that stereotype. Unfortunately, such stereotypes are reinforced so often that they can become ingrained. It is difficult to escape conventional wisdom and treat all people as individuals, rather than members of a group.

How long until machines know us better than other people do? Are you comfortable with a profit agenda driven machine making life suggestions for you based on your categories and flaws? How much will we let a machine's interpretation of conventional wisdom make choices for us?

How long until there is a Luddite backlash? And should I register LudditeMarketing.com so I am ahead of the curve?

Long ago I mentioned that even if I didn't usually agree with Michal Martinez, that I thought he was exceptionally citation worthy. He recently offered up a blog post explaining his view of the recent evolution of SEO and link building in an article called Who Does Google Trust Now? I don't agree with many of the statements in the article, like:

Neither age of site nor age of links pointing to the site should really matter to how much a site can be trusted.

I believe that age matters. At least to some degree. I have an old domain which had no relevant anchor text (other than internal navigation) and few (perhaps no) quality links that ranks quite well in Google for competitive commercial queries.

In spite of not agreeing with some the article (and thinking portions of it might be a bit self-aggrandizing), I think Michael did a great job with the end of the article. The last few paragraphs rocked.

Simply getting links from free directories, article submission sites, reciprocal links, and other popular link sources will probably gradually extend the length of time new sites require to earn trust if for no other reason that they will only very slowly naturally attract links from trusted neighborhoods.

Exactly. When you focus on as much as you can get for free without building any value (and valuing your time at nothing) it takes an awful lot of pricing your time at free to catch up with established sites. Perhaps more time than you have left in your life. Why race toward the bottom?

The real question comes down to this: if I am correct, or close to correct, in my analysis, how long will it take for spammers and SEOs to develop methodologies that effectively poison the "good" (trusted) neighborhoods and force Google to develop some filtration methodology?

SEO and search constantly co-evolve. What Google trusts now is only temporary, and some SEOs have been building AHEAD of Google's shifts. And the search results show what is going on, so they will continue to be forced to change their algorithms. Nothing new there.

But poison is a harsh word. I don't think we should fault people for gaming the system. Google creates the game...we are just pawns that must move with the ebb and flow. As SEO gets harder those who know how to do it will get paid more. And one can argue that by manipulating search results we are helping keep the search engines sharp, forcing them to improve their algorithms.

Google is more profitable and has a larger effect on the web than you or I. People do not link as naturally as they once did (worrying about what the all powerful Google may think), Google is training some people about how to link to benefit Google, and Google has some people so brainwashed that they consider anyone disagreeing with Google's for profit agenda as spammers poisoning the web. Who's actions are poisoning the web?

If you enjoy consuming something, but you later find out that you found or experienced it under a false pretense, does it matter how it came into your stream of consciousness? Many people who search probably do not realize search results have paid ads on them, or that some engines may bias their regular results toward informational websites to increase ad clickthrough rate.

Few people understand that the organic search results are manipulated by people like you or I. Google states that some kinds of manipulation are acceptable while others are not. But who gives Google that authority when they sometimes do not even follow their own guidelines or policies? How can they freely add links to other's websites, buy links, sell links, and state that buying or selling other types of links is somehow wrong?

Google teaches publishers to blend ads in their content, and funds the placement of ads on what many call low quality content. Yet some people land on those pages, click on the ad that describes what they want, and end up somewhere they want to be.

Many magazines blend ads to look like content, and/or have insertion fees which is basically a way to buy exposure.

People create and spin controversies to get media exposure. In some cases both parties involved in the controversy will have off the record chats to talk about how the story should be spun for maximum benefit to both sides.

I have seen people give away tens of thousands of dollars worth of their books because their book was nothing more than thinly disguised self-promotional marketing material. And I have seen some of these books become best sellers!

Some people watch Fox News even though it is blatantly and obviously biased. Many news channels show packaged video press releases as being part of their news program. And many news networks work with one another to present a highly biased view of the world that promotes the agendas of affiliated businesses.

Generally any form of content creation, publishing, aggregation, or information sorting is going to be biased toward the goal of self preservation and the beliefs of the power sources within that organization (and affiliated organizations). Goal #1 of any business or organization is self preservation.

Right now there is a diary video series on YouTube which is fake, and will likely a lead in to some sort of movie or marketing message (or maybe all content is somehow a form of marketing). Yet each of the 27 videos in the series (thusfar) has averaged around 200,000 views.

Many artists write abstract song lyrics which have entire sites devoted to what the hell did they mean?

People have got other ideas out of things I have wrote and called me a genius or brilliant for their (mis)interpretation of what I wrote. If I meant what they thought I did, then I would indeed be far smarter than I am. :)

Every human action, every thought pattern, and just about every piece of information is likely somehow flawed (during creation and during interpretation / consumption).

Does it matter if information was created via pure intentions that matched why the audience like it?

Does it matter if information is ranked, sorted, placed, or found via the force of a person who bought the exposure or gained it through gaming some authority system which claims to be relevant even though it doesn't understand why?

Outside of ignorance, is purity anything more than a myth?

Why are the Gmail spam filters so pathetic?

For example... I hate the letter I: Some asshat (who can be described using no other word), has sent me about 1,300 spam emails in the last week. Every email has the subject line of I and the from name of I. After labeling over 1,000 of these in the past week as spam how is it possible that Gmail has not picked up that footprint? How many real messages have 1 letter in both the sender name and the subject line?

Same Spam Name: Another asshat (or maybe the same one) is doing a spammer phrase dictionary attack. Surely they know the person named Buy Viagra Online Discreetly who uses the same thing as the subject line is a spammer? Yet I get about a hundred of these random spammer keyword emails in my inbox each day as well.

Many of my blog comments are not spam: Gmail is now sending many of my blog comments to the spam bin, in spite of me not labeling them as such. I even set up a custom filter for them to label it as important.

Good job starring the messages and spending them straight to the spam bin. I am sure you realized that is what I wanted when I set up a filter requesting the messages be starred as important. What is even dumber is that after I report dozens of these as not spam they still star new ones and send them to the spam bin. Why isn't there a filter to prevent something from being labeled as spam?

If Gmail doesn't improve I am probably going to have to try something new pretty soon.