Scott , over at Matt’s blog, writes:

…I am disgusted by some of the comments above. How can anyone who values freedom and privacy not give their full support to Google for doing what amounts to be a courageous thing? …

I’m struck by how myopic most onliners are about this debate and I replied:

Scott – a thoughtful post but one sided – very odd that you seem to think most of the comments support DOJ’s request – onliners all over the web are very much in favor of Google, though I’d guess that most mainsteam folks and the court will wind up supporting DOJ’s position and will say “what specific privacy right is violated here?”.

The world is complex. You seem to fear Govt abuses more than commercial abuses. My view is that we have far more commercial abuses of info than our (inefficient) Govt could ever dream about. The community has created a very open and virtually uncensored online environment and we better get used to Govt and society at large being threatened by this openness.
———— end Joe comment——-

ABC’s coverage at Googleplex was weak tonight and Sergey Brin probably did not sway skeptics with his suggestion that we should support Google’s refusal to comply with DOJ info request because we would not like the Govt sending agents to come and snoop around our house for playboy magazines. “This is Roberto Gonzales – DROP THAT CENTERFOLD and Welcome to Gauntanamo you helper of the Axis of EvilDoers!”

ABC did briefly interview the insightful John Battelle who is also hosting some of the best breaking news and info about this story at his blog. John’s the best Google watcher out there and he really is the guy that seems to know….everybody!

Many are arguing, speciously, that onliners should enjoy total privacy protection.

Does Google have an obligation to turn over info they uncover that clearly indicates a plot to destroy New York? Of course they do – probably even without getting a subpoena.

The USS No-Privacy sailed years ago and we have at best only a modest level of protection. ISPs, Google, NSA, and many related entities are watching.

I’m more concerned with how this is used and establishing legal protections from unreasonable USE of my data rather than worrying about impossible restrictions on COLLECTION of my data.

Lots of superficial reporting of the Google vs DOJ subpoena to turn over search information. I think the Gov’t is less interested in the info, which they could obtain elsewhere, than in setting the precedent of making search snooping legal for them to do on a routine basis.

Unlike many onliners, I think the type of online privacy held dear by many is 1) not all that sacred in the first place and 2) an unrealistic expectation in the modern online world. Many don’t realize the extent to which your financial, health, education, political, and other information are already available for review by anyone with enough money or cleverness to dig up the stuff.

For me the concern is less about collecting info than how that information is used. For that reason I’m as concerned about commercial abuses of the info (e.g. a search engine could notice my “digital camera” search and direct me to sponsor camera sites without telling me they’ve manipulated the results)

I think developments at Google and elsewhere have quickly eclipsed the ability of mainstream media to shed much light on the issues at hand.

A design idea I’ve always liked is sometimes used at universites and other large campuses.

Rather than build sidewalks where they think the people will walk, they simply wait until people walking around creates many paths from place to place, and build the sidewalks there.

I think this principle has much broader application than sidewalks. With my new office I’m trying to wait on setting up some things until I can tell from experience the best spot (wait..maybe that’s just PROcrastination in my case, but not a bad idea.

For internet marketing clearly an experimental approach is called for. Try things out, do more of what works and less of what fails. For organic search rankings his approach is challenged by the fact that Google, Yahoo, and MSN take some time to incorporate changes into the results, but generally experimentalism is a good concept in marketing, and vastly underutilized. Google Blogger Matt Cutts has often noted this in his excellent observations about search strategy.

I’ve always been amazed how often marketing managers use intuition and even whimsy rather than math to determine advertising buys. With salespeople pressure this leads to a lot of wasted ad dollars.

Online pay per click advertising offers instant feedback which is one of the reason’s it’s becoming so popular and effective for those who “do the math”.

What? You haven’t heard of v7ndotcom elursrebmem?

You soon will if you have anything to do with the internet.
It’s an SEO contest to see who can get the highest Google rank for this nonsense term.

Initially in what appeared to be part contest, part publicity grab a company called V7N.com offered a modest reward for winning. Hearing about this uberSEOmeister Greg Boser, one of the web’s top SEO guys, launched an even larger counter offer that did NOT involve links to his sites. To V7N’s credit they removed the requirement of linking to them, which means the winner can now….take it all…. I think there is now 7,000 at stake.

I initially thought I’d jump into the fray, but I think the time is better spent working on *real* terms and getting better ranks for real sites. The level of competition here is about as high as it gets with people like Greg and Dave Naylor from the UK playing the game.

A clever current ploy is a charity site which currently is near the lead in the ranks – the guy is asking for links and promising to donate all the winnings to charity.

With all the hype surrounding DIGG.com these days I decided to post my critical notions of the service at DIGG.com and see what response it got. Not a lot of Diggs but it got a lot of comments – about 8 within hours. Some thoughtful, some flames, but what interested me was the one that said “he can’t get it, he’s too old”.

My first reaction was “hey, maybe he’s RIGHT!” I’m as immersed as most of the young crowd yet I obviously don’t have the same feelings about many of the new “cool” things coming online.

My second and correct reaction was that the comment was actually a microcosm for both the problem with Digg and the problem with many in the new crop of young American tech folks.

I think for many in the tech rank and file, wisdom has been replaced by unhealthy skepticism and social concern by hedonism. Their attention span is getting dangerously short, is often hostile to thoughful discourse and analysis, and most importantly most young people have fallen out of touch with many of the realities of modern productive life and global turmoil.

I searched Digg for Darfur and got 2 articles, while “xbox” returns over 270….PAGES…. of articles.

Hopefully maturity will prevail, as it seems to for those few who make it to the big leagues, because I certainly make an exception to this criticism for most of the folks I’ve met from Google, Yahoo, MSN. They tend to be very globally sophisticated, very sharp, and many have a great sense of world priorities. I’m actually optimistic as the highest levels of the tech corporations – for example the Omidyars of Ebay, Bill Gates of MSN or Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google – express strong ideas about “changing the world” in very positive ways. But in important ways these folks represent the OLD timers rather than the new folks.

So, are we resigning our future to experts in gaming rather than globalization? Well, sort of. The globalization experts are out there, but they are not watching Digg or MTV very much. They are in China and India, studying their asses off in demanding school environments, and getting ready to take over the world.

Based on the lifestyles and superficial drivel coming out of the mouths of many of our young whippersnappers here in America maybe those guys and gals DESERVE to take over the world.

For a few months I’ve been playing with some of the new”social” search tools where user input rather than algorithms determine the rankings and some of the content. Most notable of these are Digg.com and Del.ico.us but also rising are reddit.com, wink.com, and others.

I’m NOT a frequent user of these so I’m really in NO great position to comment on them …. but I will anyway….

Overall I’m underwhelmed with the actual tools. Theoretically I see this added user input as great, but using them seems to yield superficial (spend a few minutes watching “DIGG SPY” articles scroll along your screen to see what I mean) and inadequate results.

CAVEAT – I have not put in a lot of time researching with these vs Google. Frankly, my early results just didn’t show enough promise to continue.

Using Digg.com and delicio.us I’m just not getting a “much better” list of things than with a faster and easier Google or Yahoo or MSN search. I certainly think the concept of democratic user selection and getting out from under the restraints of the Google algorithm are really profound, so I wonder if it’ll be a hybridized search, perhaps one that Yahoo invents now that they bought del.icio.us, that sets new standards.

As blogs begin to replace websites, spread like fire, and pump millions of pages of new content online daily we need systems that can sort and rank this content almost in real time. Google, as well as the other big search engines, fail this test although Google does seem to index blogger (and other blog?) content much, much faster than new website content. But Digg is sorting these articles at the speed of rumor and innuendo, which as we all know is *pretty damn fast*. This brushfire style of ranking leads to excitement but also problems when the rumors or story are false or questionable as OReilly writer Steve Mallett learned the hard way last week.

So, my jury is still out, but I’m not convinced regular folks will find will find del.icio.us all that tasty or dig digg as much as needed to keep all the big buzz going.

Most travel sites, especially official ones, are already in existence and therefore don’t face the challenges that a new site has simply getting into the Google index. It’s currently easier to get into MSN and Yahoo, but in general if you’ve come to the game this late with a travel site you may want to reconsider your options, associate with existing sites, or take over an old travel site.

* Official information, in my opinion, is valued more highly by search. Most SEOs think that pages from .edu domains are given preference, and I think there are algorithmic benefits to being an “official” travel site for a state, region, or country. This may be primarily due to more links and references out in the web.

* If you are an official travel site you should seek to have all members or other sites affiliated with you link to your site. One good approach, for example, is to create or use an existing “request for travel guide” page and send out linking code to your members or associates for their sites. They can thus offer a printed guide via your site and you obtain more leads and more links.

* Stop wasting so much on print, TV, and other offline advertising! The return on pay per click advertising is likely five to ten times what you consider acceptable ROI for your print campaigns. Most (all?) destinations would benefit from completely reversing their online and print advertising budgets. The caveat is that you should bid on a VERY high number of terms – as many as tens or even hundreds of thousands – to optimize the ROI of your PPC (pay per click) campaigns. More about this in future posts.

* An excellent ranking roundup from Randfish’s blog SEOMOZ

In some ways SEO is a lot simpler than most people think. As search engines have improved, SEO has become more intuitive, simply making sure you write information well suited to the topic. Despite this positive trend, search for travel remains of questionable value, increasingly leading to booking sites when you want information sites and (less frequently) the opposite.

Here are some very basic but fundamental ideas on how to optimize a site so it can gain it’s appropriate rank in the search engines.

Overall this is a good guiding principle (write for the users), but it’s also important to make sure your pages conform to the broadly accepted “search friendly” structures below plus what you’ll read at the Google webmaster guidelines.

* Create real, original, and helpful content.

* Make sure the important words that represent the content of the page, the “keywords”, are used fairly often on the page, appropriately, and in context. You can actually ruin a page’s rank by “keyword stuffing” which is using important text too often. I suggest as a good very general rule to use the keywords slightly more (I’d suggest two times more) than you would in your normal writing.

* When naming pages use URLs that correspond to the subject of the page. e.g. a page about “Google in China” could be named “google-in-china.htm” or china-google.htm. Most SEOs recommend separation of words with hyphens over underscores but it’s likely they are equivalent to most algorithms.

* Work to obtain as many “in bound links” to your site as you can. Buying links is no longer a good technique and even trading with other sites appears to be of questionable value. Ideally your site or article will be SO GOOD others will link to you. Yes, this is a VERY tough part of the game.

* Work to have the “anchor text”, that is the linking text, from those inbound links match the keyword of the page it’s linking to. e.g. the hyperlink to this article should look something like the following link: Travel SEO

* The TITLE TAG of the page should also reflect the important keywords. e.g. The title of a page about travelling to Nanjing China should be something like “Nanjing China Travel”

There are few “magic bullets” in SEO unless you’ve screwed up a technical item or do a really bad thing, get a penalty, and then don’t understand the reinclusion process. More on those later.

In fact search engines have become so concerned about manipulations of their algorithms (search routines) that in my opinion the best SEO is now done internally by subject experts and NOT by hiring fancy self annointed “experts”.

In fact I have a GREAT case study from my own company showing how expert SEOs are not of much (any!) help even with fairly substantial time and money, but more on my very interesting KeywordRanking.com experiment and experiences soon.

There are many ways to address the deficiencies with search engines, all of which are struggling with the onslaught of spam and manipulations of their algorithms (search routines).

One approach to “new search” that is catching on….like wildfire…. is letting the community of internet users rank, write, submit, and comment on content.

The best example in the technology sector is http://www.DIGG.com which has gone from obscurity to a site with over 500,000 daily visits. Recent capital from the Omidyar’s of EBAY fame will make Digg a household name very soon.

A similar (copycat?) idea is http://www.WINK.com which is actually taking input from Digg and other “user review” sites to create a sort of metaDIGG. I’m wondering if Wink’s bit off a bit too much here, thinking that niche searches and communities are where the web is heading rather than global search tools.

If true than what are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves going to do when people stop using them?

Poor guys. I urge you to send donations to their CEOs so they can feed their kids next year.

http://del.icio.us
http://www.digg.com
http://www.wink.com

Jeremy Zawodny said…

And http://reddit.com/ too.