The idea that the level of self interest among people varies widely is less compelling to me than the idea that self awareness (of one’s own self interest) varies widely. I want to write more about this but here’s an example:

Yesterday I had a somewhat heated exchange with a real estate agent when I simply wanted to view a listing. She was pressing me for details on who would represent me and suggested if I didn’t have anybody her brokerage could do it and her son would be my agent.

Right…. son is going to act in a totally unbiased way to help me lower the price on a house for which they’d be pulling in a 30k commission – and a LOWER commission if he gets the price down for me. I’m NOT suggesting he’d be dishonest or that this type of thing is not a normal part of the real estate game. It is, and I’ve yet to meet anybody in it that I think is *consciously* dishonest. But salespeople are almost NEVER introspective enough to see how their self interest colors their perception, thus they can honestly…act in a way that is broadly best considered somewhat dishonest.

What was incredible with her is that she didn’t even seem all that interested in getting a serious offer out of me – rather in making sure I understood the commission should NOT be a negotiating point and that if I represented myself I would talk ONLY to her and NOT to the owners, MY OWN FUTURE NEIGHBORS! “I wasnt’ aware of that law”, I said, wondering how far she’d go with self serving suggestions. She admitted I could legally talk to them but said something like “it just isn’t done”.

Unfortunately I felt forced to get into details better left until later, I explained I wanted to represent myself and although she was not obligated to lower her commission (which the seller “pays” rather than me – though obviously as part of the total proceeds it’s really NOT just the seller who is effectively involved in the commission) , I thought it would be a reasonable negotiating point. (yes, keeping total costs low is is in MY interest and I’m happy to admit it)

Whoops…. you would have thought I’d suggested she drown herself in the cute little pond on this property.

The irony is that she seemed more fiercely protective of the commision than interested in making the sale. I’m tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt though and assume she gets a lot of frivolous inquiries and therefore uses “does not like to use brokers” as an indicator of inexperience or insincerity (neither of which even remotely applies to me – I’ve bought several houses and I’m fairly savvy and serious about this property).

Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin abuse was a big topic some time ago. My feeling is that Limbaugh’s drug abuse demonstrated both what a hypocrite he is for suggesting harsher treatment for others than for himself and more importantly how his hapless listeners were not outraged by the whole episode (though I suppose it’s a bit silly to think people who swallow his BS are suddenly going to adopt great critical thinking skills). Loyalty in the face of a friend’s challenges is a virtue, but loyalty in the face of deceit and hypocrisy is just…pitiful.

I should caveat this by saying I didn’t follow the whole thing carefully – maybe, just maybe, he was repentant enough to fall into the category of Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky apologies… of course Limbaugh never accepted Clinton’s transgressions as anything but close to treason so …

I’m bringing it up now mainly to test an experiment with blog postings. However, I will say his rantings are always fun and sometimes even educational, though I fear that people like Rush, Sean Hannity, and Mike Moore downgrade the national dialog to such an extent that there is a type of damage to the national psyche that is hard to define. One only needs to listen to GW and Tony Blair talk about the same exact thing to know that even at the pinnacle of global politics the American intellectual experience….leaves much to be desired.

OK, so now I have a post called “Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin”. I shall follow with another post referencing this one using the phrase “Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin” and see if I show up for that in a few days. I also want to see if this post affects the listings for “Oxycontin“, a valuable search term. I’m skeptical of that possibility for reasons I’ll discuss later.

Excuse me but I had to throw in two quick posts about Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin because I’m really curious about how blog posts are indexed by the search engines for “valuable” terms like those relating to drugs and also for fairly unique phrases such as Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin

I’ve been amazed at how fast the content of this blog makes it into Google – usually within a few days. I was assuming that Google applied “nofollow” to the blog links – ie does not give them value in the web at large, but then I remembered that Matt Cutts changed his link to Jeremy Zawodny when JZ started showing paid links, and this indicates that links out from a blog really do matter.

So, if you follow this link you’ll hear how I feel about Rush Limbaugh’s Oxycontin

I’m also providing this link to real info from the Federal Drug Administration about Oxycontin in case you need to know!

For a society what is the optimal distribution of “smart people” vs “creative people” vs “Lerts” vs “action people” etc?

I’d suggest in terms of innovation the number may actually be evolutionarily designed to be something like 1%. ie out of a hundred people only one of them is going to be really , really innovative.

If you have TOO FEW innovators in a society systems will stagnate, growth is hard, and perhaps most importantly the response to big changes in environment may be uninspired and thus lead to the extinction or decline of the society.

HOWEVER I think you can also have TOO MUCH innovation, leading to a glut of good but experimental ideas without enough regular steady folks to implement them.

That said, I’m not sure there are many examples of the “too much innovation” problem because we are a stupid primate and this problem of too much innovation is NOT a pressing one, especially with all the recent concerns over creationism and cartoons that sound more like those of the 12th rather than the 21st century.

The usually spot-on Greg Boser (without a doubt one of the top SEOs in the biz) poses an odd directive to the big brands – spam the search engines!

I don’t follow Greg’s logic because the “perfect storm” for Google is spam from a big brand that allows them to kick them out and force them to use aggressive PPC “while we sort out your problems”.

I’m sure this type of “extortion” is NOT practiced directly (though I saw evidence of something like this by Inktomi before Yahoo cleaned up the practice) However there is considerable monetary incentive to leave SOME of the big sites OUT (though not all or relevancy is too compromised).

Over time I think Search engines will actually crack down MORE, not less, on spammy practices because they compromise the index AND cracking down creates the most revenue positive environment for them which is me ONLY finding BMW at the TOP of the PAID listings.

Where’s the down side for Google in being punative?

However, SUPPORTING Greg’s thinking is the recent BMW spam incident he’s referencing where BMW was back in the index before you could say “whoops, we didn’t meant to do that Matt!”

all we’ll get is a tiny slap on the wrist to show the world that the particular search engine is serious about web spam. And once our public scolding is completed, we will instantly be allowed to cut to the front of the confessional line.

Still, you must balance risks and rewards and I see little reason to think that agressive WHITE hat SEO is less likely to work than black hat which is *almost certainly* going to create eventual problems, so I say “just say no!”

Last year when Godaddy.com ran superbowl ads and owner Bob Parson’s blogged about it I was hoping it would at least shed a big light on the ongoing debate about whether Superbowl spots are worth the enormous cost. I think it was about 70k per second for a 30 sec spot last year. This year it was 80k.

But since that Godaddy commercial was so controversial, featuring scantily clad model Candace Michelle as the “Godaddy Girl” it generated huge buzz before and after the game, and Parsons’ insisted it was a spectacular investment, which is hard to dispute when the 2? 30 sec spots were run probably thousands of times in other TV venues and the commercial became “the ad” for that game.

Not so this year with a very tame follow up commercial Parsonts (cleverly) submitted many other far sexier versions which were shot down. These are running at places like Google video and probably are getting a LOT of play time.

Still, I doubt he’s going to see an increase of 4.8 million in biz for this investment, which (based on last year’s percentage that he shared) represents about 20% of his entire marketing budget for the year.

The conventional wisdom in advertising is that “brand awareness” plays a very key role and justifies a huge investment in superbowl-type advertising that raises that awareness. I’ve always been skeptical and favored marketing alternatives such as online pay per click advertising and website expansions, which I am almost certain would impact bottom lines to a much greater extent than offline ads in all but a handful of exceptions that really prove the rule – offline advertising is usually a waste of money. That emperor has no clothes.

OK, I’m starting to feel naive about trusting the new age corporations to actually give a sh** about users. AOL and Yahoo are now going to charge companies to bypass their filter in order to solicit users with mail they are unlikely to want. AOL and YAHOO that would be the USERS that have made you successful rich companies!

There appears to be a lot of rationalization going on, and I certainly agree you need to make compromises in business, but I’m no longer convinced that the dialog about “corporate responsibility” is trumping the marketing and revenue and SNEAKY BASTARD considerations, even at places like Google which claim to make that a key operating principle and I think really DID make it a key principle….in the past.

As many have pointed out there’s nothing *necessarily* wrong with the ruthless biz first, biz last approach – some would say it’s the approach that has made America number ONE. I’d agree that a combination of ruthess capitalism and caring at the corporate level have created our thriving entrepreneur-friendly fast and frenzied business climate, and that on balance this is good for most people in the USA and even most people OUTSIDE of the USA by powering up a thriving global economy which feeds more people than a crappy (or socialistic) global economy ever could.

But why be so hypocritical about this and pretend you care about the users more than the cash? I actually would be a lot more respectful of these money plays if you said “screw the users, we want the money!”. But I’m asked too often to give you the benefit of the doubt when you sacrifice my needs for yours. That’s over now.

First Google buys a stake in AOL and gives them and other big advertisers preferential treatment in a variety of venues, then it’s Yahoo, MSN, and Google helping China censor politics, and now Yahoo and AOL are going to charge businesses to spam people with offers. For a penny you can dodge the filters and get to the users.

The problem is not so much the charging or even the increase in the amount of marginally relevant crap mail we’ll see from this. Rather it’s that as USUAL the big guys are sacrificing user satisfaction for money WITHOUT enough respect or recognition of the rold of the user in the big picture.

I can only hope this is at the great peril of the big companies.

I’m looking forward to a sort of user/publisher revolution where people start to recognize that commercial considerations are driving the web in irrelevant ways and we need to take back the web which should remain by the people and for the people, with the people reaping the benefits of the new medium more than the company best poised to exploit us.

Yesterday I saw “End of the Spear” which is a simply brilliant film about the complexity of life, the clash of cultures, the heroic passion of missionaries, and more. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that dealt as honestly with the portrayal of a very violent native culture, the Waodani of Ecuador.

This is no “Dances with Wolves” and is inappropriate for a sensitive child – there are several disturbing (though not all that graphically violent) scenes of brutal spearings and machete killings as the Waodani and another tribe engage in the cycle of violence that brings them to the brink of extinction.

Like “Black Robe”, another brilliant culture conflict masterpiece, this film chooses to honestly portray the disturbing brutal violence that characterized some aspects of native American life rather than censoring those things offensive to our modern sets of sensibilities.

I’m not a religious person but I find the courage of missionaries inspiring as they brave many hardships and dangers to bring their vision to others. In one of this film’s many great moments the son and narrator of the film asks his father if he’ll defend himself if attacked after first contact with the tribe. “We can’t shoot the Waodani” says the father, because they are not yet ready for heaven and we are. Later this choice must be made and the missionaries stay true to their faith.

The film is based on a true story about the Waodani people of Ecuador and their intersection with two generations of missionaries.

There’s also documentary about the real people in the film called “Beyond the Gates” I have yet to see.

Ultimately the internet is about people or it’s about nothing at all.

At first glance I think many offline folks would think it odd to see a post of the passing of Jeremy Z’s Grandmother on his blog – one of the web’s most prominent. But as the posting itself and the heartfelt comments indicate this is a fine statement of respect and affection for a dear member of the family.

Our ability to blend and connect people, emotion, respect and affection with the online tools will define not only our business success, it has begun to define us as successful human beings.

THIS is pretty neat.

It’s a chart that shows the number of times “Google” is mentioned in blogs at Technorati and you can use any word to see how the blogging world is addressing the issue.

Try Miers, then Alito.

Battelle talks about Google’s database of intentions that is big, growing, and could have monstrous implications for humanity. It’s not just Google – it’s … everywhere!