life in search dot com

There have been a number of high profile news items this week, each of which touched upon the politics of the web and internet marketing in a unique and interesting way. A handful of prominent bloggers have been discussing the implications of a new law, currently under review in the US Congress, that would force internet opinion makers to “register” with the government in the same manner as a lobbyist is required. WebGuerrilla breaks it down for the masses in a sweet post entitled “Why Most Bloggers are Complete Idiots“. In this case, I have to wonder if those considering the support of this bill are complete idiots? The post was inspired by an insightful thread over at Threadwatch, which referenced an article at CNET and a site called Grassroots Freedom.

While this news in and of itself caused a flurry of keyboard activity, some other seemingly related developments transpired. Allow me to preface this by stating that, as a Canadian, I have very little interest in American politics. Having said this, I will admit that I am both amused and dismayed by the political process and the state of public affairs in the West and beyond. Oh, yes! I am more than just a little bit cynical about the role of the public interest in the current political climate. There is no public interest, my friends. There are only special interests…and this is especially apparent in modern American politics. As the beatnik author William Burroughs once said, “Once the law starts asking questions, there’s no stopping them.”

By now, you must be wondering what politics has to do with social media. Be patient, faithful readers. Aside from the introduction of this incredulous bit of legislation, two other (albeit less) significant incidents occurred during the past couple weeks. First off, Barack Obama announced his intention to run for the democratic nomination…on YouTube.com! Welcome to America 2.0! This is the first time as far as I know, that a politician has, through the use of an interactive, online community announced his/her wish to become the next President of the United States. God Bless America!

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton announced (about a week later) that she, too, would really like to be President one day. Make no doubt, I think she could be a serious contender. I suspect that she has a lot of resources and talent behind her. I would like to congratulate her, in fact, for having some hip, cool, web savvy folks giving her campaign advice. Just yesterday, Hillary made her first foray into the world of online campaigning. It appears that she is attempting to engage the community over at Yahoo! Answers. She is appealing to the folks over at Yahoo! Answers for their opinion on possible improvements to the American health care system. Smart. Very smart.

It is very interesting to me to note that two of the main contenders for the democratic nomination have embraced social media as a platform for political campaigning. It is absolutely brilliant, in fact! It makes a world of sense, doesn’t it? It gives them immediate reach to millions of potential voters. It gives them greater mindshare with a smart, passionate, educated demographic. It gives them an opportunity to truly connect with people the way many people today connect with others; using this wonderfully liberating communications tool we call the internet. Now if one of them could somehow convince Oprah to get in the game and become their potential vice-president, I think they would pwn the White House! You heard it here first, kids!

This week, I have been delving into widgets and widget marketing (for lack of a better phrase). You have all seen widgets before; they are the cool little mini-apps that you might find on your favourite websites or blogs. If you have a Mac, you can find them on your own desktop. If you have a PC, you can download Yahoo’s Widget Engine to give them a test drive. You know…Widgets! Everyone seems to be talking about widgets lately, so I thought I would chime in with my .02.

Once upon a time, there was little internet startup called MyBlogLog. They built this neat little widget that you could plug into your blog, which showed photos of all of your friends and acquaintances (who also happen to use the “service”). Now, everyone that comes to your site can see just how popular you are. **sigh**

The story goes a little something like this. MyBlogLog went live in June of 2006. A bunch of people tried it, because it was all, like, new and cool and shit. Bloggers, and most notably SEO bloggers, adopted it. Yahoo saw the SEO community and the internet opinion makers embrace this groovy little app and bought them for 10 million just a couple weeks ago.

This is a relatively trivial tool developed for egomanics by a unknown company that somehow…miracuously…saw their product or service or whatever it is, go viral. They tipped! I was stupified when I heard about the sale. What made this product stand out among the others? Perhaps it is the user data that Yahoo! has placed such a high value on? People have been building cool little web-apps forever. We built one a couple years ago for a fundraising site, but it was intended as a link development tool. We got a few thousand links out of it…mission accomplished…but surely not worth 10 million dollars. One could certainly buy a lot of links for 10 million dollars!

The following is a collection of posts and articles on widgets and widget marketing:

Yahoo Desktop Widgets

Opera Browser Widgets

Firefox Browser Widgets

Widget Box

Widgets Lab

Wid Sets

Wikipedia on Widgets

Widget Toko

Read. Write. Web.

Sexy Widget

Valleywag on Widgets

Todd Malicoat on Widgets

Stephan Juhl on Widgets

Michael Gray on Widgets

Abhilash on Widgets

Micropersuasion

A VC Blog

I don’t know about you, but I am dreaming about the potential of widgets…

I just came across an interesting, new Canadian social media site that you should all check out. Strangely, I discovered this site via Adwords. Now I consider myself an extremely savvy web user, and I am rarely enticed to click on an ad…unless it is a competitor, in which case I am happy to make them pay for my clicks while I learn about their campaigns and landing pages. For the record, I do not endorse clickfraud in any way, shape or form. Use a proxy, kids. The neato thing about this particular click, the one that brought me to their site, was that it was contained in my gmail. Would I be going out on a limb to suggest that Google considers me an “Influencer”? LMAO!

Now, back to the new social media site. It’s called “The Influencers” and it was started up this past summer by a fellow named Sean Moffitt. His company is based out of Toronto, Ontario. He has been working in WOMM (word-of-mouth-marketing) for a few years for some large, Canadian brands and appears to have had some success in this space. According the story in the National Post, he and his business partner took on a number of clients together. Eventually, they parted ways and Sean launched his new site, and from what I can tell, it is a really cool idea.

According to their site:
The Influencers is the first and only Canadian community dedicated to helping start, seed and spread these conversations among the “high priests” of word of mouth - Canada’s opinion leaders. Unlike mass marketing, we focus on starting the “person to person” word of mouth grapevine by:

• Attracting, recruiting and working with a gifted network of Canadians - The Influencers. They are at the epicentre of word of mouth conversations: people who attack life, like to get involved (and early), explore, connect, lead opinions, are curious about new things and act as a potential army of word of mouth evangelists waiting to be inspired by stuff that comes across their radar screens
• We put The Influencers, in touch with new, cool and conversation worthy stuff occupying places within Canada’s most talked about subjects. People forget boring and average stuff - instead, we find the stuff that gets people excited, stuff that solves problems, stuff that’s new (or newsworthy) and stuff that’s relevant to Canadians
• Finally, we provide our Influencers access to exclusive opportunities to experience and collaborate with exciting products, ideas, services, retailers and businesses from the very start; encouraging feedback, helping fan their enthusiasm for spreading honest and positive word of mouth and by doing so, providing chances for reward, fame, influence and charity support.

So I signed up. You should check it out, too. Surely, we are all about gaming social media when the opportunity presents itself. I haven’t a clue how the social element of their service works, but I’ll report back on it in the near future. Honest. As a marketer, I am always looking for new and interesting ways to push ideas and products. Have you noticed any cool, new sites or online services lately? And, Sean, if you happen to read this…I would be happy to assist you with your SEO efforts. You need some links, dude!

Yeah! Yeah Yeah!

I miss you, sweetheart. Let’s talk…

When I was hired at Geosign two years ago, I spent a lot of time studying the work of the masters. If it was not for people like Todd spreading the good word about effective search marketing tactics, we would all still be building reciprocal links. While Todd and I have spoken only briefly, I feel I have heard his voice time and time again. That’s one of the strangest aspects of the blogosphere, in my humble opinion; how you can feel you know somebody without ever having developed a proper friendship.

When I first started in search marketing, I had some difficulty cutting through the noise in the world of SEO. If you have ever spent any time at Webmaster World or any of the other webmaster forums, you would agree that there is a lot of opinion and conjecture floating about the search industry. Finding the “signals of quality” within the internet marketing community can be a challenge, to say the least. I was fortunate, in that I was surrounded and supported in my education by some of the industry’s leading SEO rockstars. One of my first assignments under Sugarrae was to commit myself to reading the blogs that she considered authoritative on a daily basis. Todd’s was one of them. I couldn’t have hope for a better education.

Anyways, that’s enough about me for the time being. Recently, Stuntdubl was featured in an interview with that dude from WebProNews. They’ve been producing some quality videos lately, and I highly recommend that you check them out. It’s a pretty sweet interview, and contains some sound advice for getting the highest ROI out of your anti-social media activities. Neil Patel is in it, too. Listen and learn, kids!

In my previous post, I made mention of a particular set of search results that I found rather disturbing. One of the sites I work with is called the Renewable Planet. It’s a supercool Google mash-up of renewable energy projects that is trying to raise awareness about the critical environmental issues facing the citizens of the world. The editor of site, Katy McEwan, approached me a few months ago with a strange discovery; the site ranking #1 in Google for the query “global warming” appeared to be heavily engaged in a disinformation campaign against global warming activists on behalf of the multi-billion dollar energy industry. The site was called globalwarming dot org (*no links for bad guys*). Check it out for yourself. As of today, the site is no longer ranking; not even in the top 30. And rightfully so!

On some level, I am somewhat disappointed. This was going to be a HUGE story! This was going to be my coming-out story; my first big break as an investigative journalist/blogger! Prior to my discovery, Google announced that it was their intent to make a significant investment in green energy production at their Mountain View “campus”. It was a perfect story! Here, I thought I was in a position to call out Google for discrepancies between their corporate beliefs and their search results! This would have been a Digg-worthy post, make no doubt! But sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s nice to know that certain search engines actually put some effort into providing relevant search results. Which brings me to our friends at MSN…

While I was somewhat let down that this juicy story turned out to be a non-event, there is a positive side to the story. After finding that the site in question was no longer ranking in Google, I decided to check the other engines. Yahoo! was okay; the site was nowhere to be found. MSN, on the other hand, was still ranking this site at #1. My story was still alive! Thank you, Microsoft, for giving me the opportunity to point out your irrelevance in search. For anyone who spends any time studying the serps, this should come as no surprise. MSN has, since it’s inception as a search engine, provided the worst results of the big 3. Whether they are ranking Blogspot splogs using javascript redirects, or simply showing 404 pages in the top 10, MSN seems light years behind the other engines with regards to quality search results. The moral of the story? Don’t always trust the #1 search result to be the most relevant to your query…especially at MSN.

2007 is officially upon us, and I am feeling super stoked! 2006 was a great year for too many reasons to note here and now, but I am confident that this year is going to be even better. So to commemorate this wondrous occasion, I have launched my new blog. Welcome to LifeInSearch.com, faithful readers.

To be honest, I am not exactly sure what I intend to accomplish by publishing my often-convoluted thoughts and ideas. Hence the name of this, my humble blog. I am living a life in search…of meaning…of purpose…of a future that has not yet happened. So to begin, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the people that have inspired me to dive headlong into this wacky adventure.

First and foremost, I want to thank Rae Hoffman for introducing me to the search marketing industry. At the time she was the Director of Search Strategies for Geosign Corporation, and she played an instrumental role in training and mentoring me in SEO. Had she not taken a chance on me, at a time in my life when I needed something truly great to happen, I would not be writing this. She has since moved on to bigger and better things, but she continues to be a massive inspiration to me. Thanks, Sugarrae! I am eternally indebted to you.

I would also like to thank George Kepnick for advising me to “grow some balls and take the plunge”. I had the good fortune of attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC back in March of 2006 with George, and I have had immense respect for him ever since. I spoke with the good doctor just prior to Christmas, and he gave me some amazing advice regarding my professional future. You’re one of my heroes, George. Thanks M8!

I want to thank my wonderful girlfriend, too. Natalie, you are an absolute sweetheart! You have already taught me so much about life and love, and I look forward to spending an eternity with you. You are one of the warmest, kindest people I have met in my short time on this planet. You’re also stunningly gorgeous! I don’t know where I would be without you, baby.

Last but not least, I want give a big shout out to my wonderful son, Liam. You are the centre of my universe, son. Every day, you inspire me to strive for the things that are truly meaningful in life. You make me appreciate the little things in life…the typical day-to-day things that too many people overlook. You bring out the best in me, wee man. As a father, I often see my role as similar to that of a teacher. So far, you have taught me more than I could have ever taught you. You’re a shooting star, Liam!

Most of the time, I will be blogging about issues surrounding the search marketing industry. I will do my best not to regurgitate the stuff written on other SEO blogs. The last thing this industry needs is another SEO blog. Hopefully, I will be able to contribute something useful and insightful to the common discourse of ideas in search. Other times, I will simply be writing about the things that interest or excite me. I am currently in the midst of writing an article on environmental issues and search relevance at Google. So stay tuned kids…more coming soon