life in search dot com

Posting has been light lately, but I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce you to a sweet new site I discovered last week. Unless you’ve been on a serious bender for the last year or so, you must have heard all the buzz on the interweb about social media and the next generation internet. Web 2.0 became the 900lb gorilla of buzzwords, and VC firms broke out their chequebooks for the first time since the dot com crash of the late 90’s.

If you’re not familiar with any of these sites (honestly, where have you been?), be sure to check out the Web 2.0 Awards over at SEOMoz. More than likely, you are familiar with sites like Facebook and YouTube. While there are differing opinions on the distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0 sites, they all invariably include some form of online collaboration and sharing. Web 2.0 is the transformation of the internet from network into platform, in conjuction with the rebirth of old media as new media. My favourite element of Web 2.0 has got to be the sexy lexicon of technobabble buzzwords; long tail, mash-up, podcast, folksonomy,tagging, taxonomy, ajax, soap, clouds, bookmarks, diggs, ect, ect, ect.

Web 2.0 “tipped” when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased MySpace in July of 2005. You have to check out the Alexa stats for MySpace, and be sure to sort by three years. That spike is a beautiful thing, indeed! Even though *everyone* is fleeing MySpace for Facebook, it is still in the enviable position of being one of the highest traffiked sites online today. On the topic of Facebook, I have a few observations to post sometime soon; be sure to check it out bitches. When News Corp. moved on MySpace, a lot of people (especially in the investment community) started to pay attention.

Every other start-up in the Web 2.0/Social Media space benefitted directly from the newfound investor confidence in new media. Was this the beginning of dot com boom 2.0? Without a doubt! Then along came came a cool video site called YouTube. Has anyone out there ever heard about it? Not long ago, Google bought them for something like 1.6 Billion dollars! Anyways…I didn’t intend for this to become a brief history of Web 2.0.

The site I was meaning to write about a paragraph ago is called Virb. When I discovered it one of my favourite bands, Bloc Party, was profiiled on the homepage. I have to admit, I was sold right away. It’s like MySpace for hipsters! If you’re a music fan, you should really check it out. It’s a little bit Last.fm, a little bit MySpace, and a whole lotta Web 2.0 sexiness. They even let you rename your profile URL If any of you heed my advice and decide check it out, let me know what you think in the comments below. Virb is the Werd!

Have you guys noticed anything strange about Gmail lately? Is it just me, or am I seeing the early signs of Google Personalization? People have been speculating and ranting about this for a little while now, but I think I’m starting to see it in action. Let’s do a little test. Go over to Wikipedia, and pick ten random topics. Feed them into the search bar, then copy-and-paste each of the articles into notepad or whatever. Then log into one of your email accounts, and send each of those articles (individually) to yourself at Gmail. And be sure to use the name of the article (or a related keyword or phrase) in your subject line.

Now, when you check your gmail take note of the adverts in the right column. They will be subtly tailored to the content of the message, and I have to admit that it’s really starting to creep me out. The ad targetting is slightly off-base at times, but they are generally on point. What is really freaking me out is that when the ads are off-topic, they are still representative of my interests (ie. the general subject matter of my historical messages). This is precisely why I think that personalization has just been turned on. Is anybody else seeing this, or am I just slightly paranoid?

Not only is this sort of personalized targetting being applied to the advertisements contained in Gmail, it is also being applied to the standard search engine result pages. All signs are suggesting that Google is going to scale this out very soon. They are currently logging all of your user data with that nifty little toolbar, and now they have decided to supplement that data by implementing something called “search history“. What this means is that your search results will be tailored to your historical search profile. Over time, it will almost be like we are all using a different internet. What are the implications for the search marketing industry?

Matt Cutts, Google’s Chief Spam Hunter, claims that it will be the end of blackhat SEO. In a recent interview, he also refers to the new SEO (linkbaiting, social media optimization, etc) as a highly effective whitehat strategy for long term Google search marketing, and suggests that adopting the long tail theory will help to insulate sites from the effects of effects of personalization. I think most of us are already aware of this, but one thing that really caught my interest was the idea of optimizing for user experience. This poses an interesting dilemma for search merketers, in that a positive user experience is rooted in the intent of the user. I suppose we are all going to have to learn a lot more about remote viewing…

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of all the recent talk about Google Personalization. Essentially, Google will be tailoring their tools and services to your ultrasecret user profile housed deep in the depths of the GooglePlex. Larry Page recently claimed that they are not far off from implementing true artificial intelligence. Now, I don’t particularly believe him…but it does make me wonder. I have always believed that the highest of high technology in the public realm is roughly twenty old. I would be willing to bet the farm that certain governments (and by extension, their friends like Google) are in possession of technology that we can only imagine; literally the stuff of science fiction. Hopefully, there will still be some blackhats around when the army of GoogleBots come. Skynet, anyone?

Working as an in-house SEO has it’s pro and cons. While it is great to dream stuff up and pass it off to IT or Development for creation and implementation, I often feel that I am missing out on learning how to do things myself. Until recently, my day-to-day SEO tasks were limited to on-page optimization, organic link development, and performing site audits. While working on any specific site, I would produce recommendation reports and pass them off to another department for implementation. So when it comes to performing certain technical tasks, I have limited practical experience.

That was my primary motivation for launching this blog; to force myself to learn how to do new and exciting things outside of my comfort zone. I also have certain reservations about doing anything beyond the basic whitehat stuff while working on somebody else’s sites. Now I have the opportunity to experiment with various shades of grey, without the fear of compromising or tainting sites belonging to somebody else. This is also my first foray into technical webmastery and working on the Wordpress CMS. I must say, I absolutely love working with Wordpress!

I was experimenting with a number of plug-ins before I pushed this site live, and I came across a dirty little plug-in called WP-Autoblog. Once it has been installed, it gives the user the ability to enter a list of RSS feed addresses. It will then go out and fetch all of the posts in the feed, republish them to your blog, and trackback each post in the process. I know, I know…it’s absolutely filthy. But it’s kinda cool, too. Obviously, I would never knowingly appropriate other people’s content. I know how challenging it can be to come up with quality, unique content on a regular basis. I also know how frustrating it can be to have somebody come along and dupe it.

But, my mind works in shady ways at times and I can see this as being very useful for doing trackback spam. So here’s what I have in mind… Like I said, this plug-in actually fetches and posts automatically once the feed address has been input. I would like to use this to post to a specific category that is not accessible to users or the bots. I would then like to be able to generate 301’s on the fly, based on the postings made with this plug-in. It should work something like this - fetch feed and post to /spam/, 301 all requests for /spam/ to $ page. Anyone out there willing to hack this plug-in for me? If I use .htaccess for my redirects, how do I get it to automatically update with each new post? Can I use wildcards? Hopefully, the .htaccess pimp can help! This is probably very simple to do, but I could use some direction. Any takers?