Daguerre’s creation changed the way mankind saw the planet… not just through the introduction of the photograph, but also by changing the scope of the visual arts.

Introduced in 1839, the Daguerreotype photo process started a 20 year sequence of events that resulted in more and more simple photographic processes, and ultimately in the art of Picasso. Not bad for a chemical process that yields a fragile image that can only be viewed at an angle.

For hundreds of years, artists had been judged largely on draughtsmanship…, the ability to draw accurately, and then render a “correct” image of the subject was the mark of talent. Perspective was conquered, control of shadow introduced a three dimensional quality to painting, and by the beginning of the 1800′s most portrait artists could create a fair likeness of their subject. The best artists received the best portrait commissions, and we can be certain that the original client for the Mona Lisa was pleased by Da Vinci’s accurate and lifelike rendition of his subject.

Photography changed painting. No painter could match the accuracy and detail of a fine photograph. By the 1860′s photography was becoming cheaper and commonplace, to the point that the enlisted men of the Civil War armies would obtain portraits to be sent home to their families. The fear was that photography would “kill” painting as an art form. Instead it liberated the form and created a new means of expression in paint. It’s not an accident that the dominance of photography as a portrait medium coincided with the explosion of ideas represented by Monet, Renoir, Sisley and others.

From 1860 on, photography’s progress was a steady march of faster film, shorter shutter speeds, better lenses that arguably culminated in the work of Cartier-Bresson. Karsh might capture the decisive moment in his portrait of Churchill. Adams would show us the f64 beauty of the American West.

During the same period, painting as a plastic art re-invented itself. The impressionists made us feel the elements of a time and place…, Picasso broke our world into fragments that we’d never noticed before, Einstein explained general relativity, and Dali disturbed the time-space continuum.

A new technology (photography), changed an old technology forever and allowed it to morph into something new. If there was no Daguerre, there could be no Dali.

Today, photography is challenged by Photoshop, CGI rendering, and all the tools that digital technology puts at our disposal, in the same way that painting was challenged by photography.

I won’t kid you…, photographs have ALWAYS lied. I spent a good number of years and made a good living by making photos that represented people, products, and ideas in a positive light…, the light I chose. The difference is that today’s population understands that a photo can not be trusted. If Cameron Diaz appears on the cover of People magazine, we simply do not know if that’s what she looks like. Is she taller, shorter, older, younger? There’s no way to tell…, instead, she has become an avatar. She is what the photo editors tell us she is.

Watch now as photography reinvents itself.

Sept 4, 1998

Alta Vista reigns supreme as a search engine. Yahoo dominates the directory world. AOL appears impregnable, and is still two years away from a valuation of $166 Billion dollars at the Time-Warner merger date. IBM releases a laptop with a 300 Mhz processor and a 4GB hard drive. A fast Internet connection runs at 56kbps, and 2 math geeks from Stanford file papers to incorporate Google Inc.

Google hit the ground with one key breakthrough… the concept of PageRank. (a pre-cursor of PageRank was patented by Baidu founder Robin Li in 1996). Where existing search engines had ranked pages by the in-page content, PageRank used what Google called the “democracy” of the web to rank pages based on the number of inbound links to those pages. Suddenly a search for newspapers would yield the New York Times as a result. The New York Times website did not identify itself as a “newspaper”, hence an Alta Vista search was more likely to yield a website that ranked the circulation of newspapers.

The concept was a near instant success, and Google grew rapidly as a search engine, although without any clear strategy for profitability. In 2003, the company launched Google Adwords… one of the most remarkable money machines ever created. To this day, 97% of Google’s revenue comes from Advertising.

The advertising revenue gusher has resulted in Google’s emergence as a dominant web force. From Gmail to Google Maps to the Android phones, it seems difficult to imagine an Internet sans Google.

Happy Birthday Google. We suspect the teen years will be challenging.

Google’s 10K filing with the SEC contains 12 pages of Risk Factors affecting their business. Yet it’s the unknown unknowns that may be most threatening.

PageRank as initially described is obsolete. It didn’t take long for website operators to understand that they could artificially inflate the number of inbound links to their sites through automated blog comments, creation of link farms, and any number of other methods of varying degrees of ethical merit. Google has responded with improved algorithms that attempt to measure the value and relevance of how sites link to each other. Most recently, in a response to the perceived threat of Facebook and MSN joining together to use crowd-sourcing as a ranking factor, Google has increasingly relied on a new “special sauce”…  user behavior. The major search engines are all moving towards popularity as a key ranking component. It’s akin to an “Ask the Audience” lifeline. They may be right… but not always.

Google’s revenue model is a tripod. It won’t stand up if it’s missing one of the legs… Search, Adwords, or Doubleclick. Google would undoubtedly like to deliver the “best” search results, but more importantly Google must deliver the “most” search results to continue to thrive.

Disruptive technologies like Wajam, Friendfinder, or Rockmelt may do a more pleasing job of basing search results on user activity, peer groups, and/or popularity. Facebook at the moment has captured a generation, and Facebook is actively pursuing search technology. It remains possible that a massive privacy failure could destroy Google’s reputation.

It’s possible that the real Web 2.0 might come down to a new method of delivering search results in some fashion that is qualitatively ranked. How might that work?

• Self-assessed IQ compared to reading levels on destination sites.
• Fee based search engines (user fees for human review. Not advertiser fees)
• The web could evolve into two parallel ecosystems (a populist broadband info-foraging, infotainment channel, along with a payment based information system)
• Accreditation – (submission to professional review panels resulting in endorsement of a website’s content and corresponding rank benefits)
• A new portal model that is based around member review
• The Holy Grail. An AI breakthrough that grades websites on literacy, accuracy, and importance.

We live in accelerated times. It would be a massive mistake to believe that Google’s current dominance equates to assured dominance, or even existence 10 years hence.

The most certain advice we can offer for your own website, is to build something exceptional. Be guided by the needs and demographics of your users, and by your own singular vision of what you would like to accomplish. Most importantly… assess the past, but imagine the future.

McLuhan was a Canadian Professor of English Literature and communications theorist whose ideas about media and communication were innovative and controversial. A core premise was that our technology was both means and molder of communication, and accordingly shaped our culture. The content of a medium is less important that the medium itself. It is the medium that shapes us. Geronimo may have “heard” his world…, but literate man “saw” the world because typography shaped his world perception and cognition. Henry Ford could only exist because of Gutenberg.

In 1962, McLuhan wrote that “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind”. Sounds a little bit like the world web doesn’t it?

The web is indeed a new medium…, non-linear…, and hugely disruptive to a generation that has been taught to think within an obsolescent Gutenberg Factory School, but learned to perceive within an MTV world. (Remember when they played music?)

Twitter and Facebook are the first faltering steps in the creation of a global theater, and the natural cousins to reality television. We’re now inside the viewscreen of Fahrenheit 451 and everyone would like a lead role. Our brains are being shaped by the use of digital media. As our brains are shaped, so too is our culture. With each new baby Chang we move inexorably towards a world that will be unintelligible to our grandparents. The global theater runs 24×7, and it molds the participant. We are hyper-stimulated from birth, and our culture requires that stimulation as the norm. The written word organized us by index, table of contents, and annotation. The digital experience repatterns humanity as a download device.

We’re running through a crossroads. Web designers design the way they learned…  for linear print and linear culture. Corporations are determined to put a Keynesian smokestack on their websites.  Search experts tout the advantages of the newest flavor of “you need more of X”… and the users blissfully respond by ignoring the road and following the spider web.

I suspect that the new search engine is incomprehensible to most “professionals” working on the web today. Google never promised to deliver the most accurate or authoritative information, and they certainly never promised to value your originality. All they have ever done, and what they are becoming better at doing, is delivering links that will likely satisfy and result in your return to Google. If the village takes to painting their faces blue, then we expect your face is blue also.  The tribe has spoken.

Marshal McLuhan was born 100 years ago today. In later life, he fell out of favour, but it seems his relevance is being re-understood as our digital world expands. I remain in his debt for sending me down a lifelong path of questioning…, always conscious that “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

Thank you Dr. McLuhan

Recommended Reading

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
From Cliché to Archetype

An Exhibit of McLuhan Media

The First War of the Information Age

Strangely, the phrase “information age” entered the vernacular with very little assessment of what was meant or implied by the term. We understand clearly that the “Iron Age” and the “Bronze Age” have a meaning beyond being colourful names for historic periods.
Bronze was an early metal alloy that could be worked and shaped after heating to 2000’ F. The ability to work bronze meant that a civilization possessed the ability to create knives, swords, utensils of more usefulness than could be produced by a society without the ability to work the metal.

Bronze was power. A bronze weapon was sharper and more deadly than stone, and could be forged or pounded into more useful shapes. No one could make a stone sword, and a three meter long stick with a bronze cutting edge at the tip was a far more useful weapon of war than a similar length of wood with a thrusting stone point.

Bronze tools allowed for greater precision in the creation of desirable products whether made of bronze, or alternatively wood which had been shaped by bronze tools.

In fact, the desirability of bronze created the earliest trading networks. Bronze required copper and tin, materials which were not usually found in close proximity.

At the moment iron was introduced, the weaponry of a Bronze Age civilization became obsolete. Iron was harder to work and required higher temperatures, but an iron sword could easily hack through the bronze helmet of a Greek mercenary. Bronze swords broke when blocked by an iron sword. Bronze remained useful for decoration, but successful nation states adapted iron weaponry rapidly.

What then is an Information Age and how does it differ from the Bronze Age, or the Industrial Age that we are exiting? The Industrial Age used specialist machines that were controlled by humans to manufacture goods. In the late 1800’s, the power of a nation could be largely measured by its ability to produce steel and turn that product into a specialist weapon of war or an implement of peace.

Fundamentally, Germany lost World War 2 because its ability to produce and utilize specialist weaponry was inferior to the Allied Powers’ ability to do the same. German specialist designs were equivalent to, or in many cases superior to the weapons of the allies, however the combination of manufacturing capability and Germany’s difficulty in providing fuel for their machines doomed the 3^rd Reich.

In 1989, the wall dividing East and West Berlin fell. It was symbolic of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Many western observers attributed the collapse of Russia to the demonstration of military might and resolve which had characterized the Reagan administration. Oddly, this military might has proved insufficient to induce Cuba to change its ways, yet success was claimed in the Cold War.

What actually occurred was indeed a victory, but it was victory in the 1^st war of the Information Age. The opponents were unaware they were fighting the war, and remain blissfully unaware of its outcome. The Soviet Union collapsed not because of ICBM’s, rather it was destroyed by the photo copier and the personal computer.

In the year 2000, the economic systems of most western countries could be brought to their knees by another power’s ability to erase the information that records our relationship to each other. Imagine an attack that resulted in the complete erasure of the bank records of a single major U.S. bank. Naturally this would be exceptionally difficult to accomplish. There are multiple redundancies and multiple backups stored in many places. Yet there is in fact no paper record of the bank’s transactions. If it were possible to erase the information, the result would be chaos. What then is the agent of power? The money is not…, as we have already established that money is simply a convenient agreement between men. The industrial power of the businesses whose records are erased is not. The single item whose absence would result in chaos is information.

Hackers attack the Net routinely with viruses designed to make life inconvenient to users, yet no hacker has as yet accomplished anything remotely close to the scenario just mentioned. What however, could a nation state accomplish if it proposed to conduct a war in this manner?

On February 24th, Google rolled out the Panda update. Amidst great howls of pain and gnashing of teeth, a significant number of websites learned the hard way that having a good website mattered. The Panda update was designed to identify “thin” content…, content that may be “unique”, but really doesn’t add very much to the human experience. I like to call this content the “plastic water bottles” of the Internet. It takes up space, it’s useless, and it won’t go away.

The other thing Panda did was to incorporate an algorithm based on human factors. The algorithm attempted to quantify the results of questioning Internet users about such things as:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

It can not be emphasized enough that the simple fact that your content is “unique” does not make it worthwhile. “nsdnf sdfn iisdf isdifu sudifu” is unique. It’s also useless.

The update impacted on 12% of U.S. search results.

Google has a number of powerful tools at their disposal. Their access to Google Analytics provides detailed comparisons of successful and unsuccessful page views and visitor experiences on a website. We’re not suggesting that Google is currently adjusting your search results based on your Google Analytics results. We are stating that the data available tells Google how often an unsatisfactory search result will put a user back on Google after visiting a bad website. It also tells Google what behavior it should note from Google Toolbar users. The rapid adoption of Google Chrome and Google Toolbars has given them statistically significant data on user behavior. And finally, the introduction of a user’s ability to block a website from their search results allows for direct feedback from users as to the value of a site.

Google went to great pains to explain that the February 24th update did not incorporate data on sites blocked by Google users. However, they did announce that they were pleased to see that the correlation between blocked sites and the sites which fared poorly in the Feb. 24 update was extremely high, and “validated” their approach.

On April 11th a second shoe dropped. This update was a refinement of the original update, and also (read it carefully!):

“In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.”

If your website was one of the 2% of queries that suffered in the April 11th update, you can consider it to be a high probability that your site has been measured by viewers and found wanting.

Why is April 11th such an important date? It marks the proof of a conceptual move from using the web to measure a site’s relevance (inbound links and on-page content), to measuring a site’s relevance based on human perception factors. It’s 1996 all over again, except this time it isn’t the quality reviewer at Yahoo looking at your site, it’s the algorithmic intelligence of many humans combined.

In the first 48 hours after this blog entry launches, a series of robots will try to post comment links to a variety of pharmaceutical sites, and free download sites. None of these comment links will be posted here, but you can be assured that the only reason comment spam exists is because large numbers of links get generated that way. The inbound link model only makes sense if one measures the credibility of where the link comes from. Google knows this.

The Panda update at Google focused on quality. In simple terms, Google used focus groups to try to establish the characteristics of websites that appealed to humans, and then converted that information into mathematical formulas that could be used in their algorithm. Google has been remarkably open about what kinds of questions they asked.

Here’s some staggeringly bad advice. Some presumed SEO experts are suggesting that you should “focus on creating the footprint that sites that focus on users have”. Duh!!!  So their advice is to “fake sincerity”???

Here’s an idea. Make your life simpler and focus on your target users and building a great site.

Let’s look at what happens if you build a great website.

	Positive	Negative
Increased Page Views and Time on Site
Increased social recommendations and diverse quality inbound links
Topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, rather than generating content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines
You might expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book
Pages provide significant value when compared to other websites
Website is FAST with no errors
Website is designed to provide value to the user first> Monetization comes afterwards.
Viewers believe they received complete and accurate information

And if you do it well enough, you will have built a brand that consumers search for. (and that’s a positive ranking factor too)

Consider what the Internet is hiding from you.

Almost any major website worth its salt is tracking your activities and apparent interests. Amazon is built on the premise of offering you books similar to books you appear to be interested in. Based on previous behavior, Google tries to predict whether your search for “discs” is related to your spine or your car’s brakes. In fact, the ads you see as you roam the web are based on advertisers’ assessment of your interests based on your web browsing history. All of this technology, is touted as helping to insure that you see information that is of interest to you…, but here’s the problem…, you’re not going to be surprised. For an Internet marketer, your search results will be biased by your previous searches and apparent interests. It’s extremely unlikely that a chemical engineer will read an intriguing article about electronics and recognize a parallel with his/her field.

The primary method used to track behavior and interests is a cookie. This is basically a small file placed on your computer by almost every website you visit. I’m not suggesting paranoia here…, a cookie created by an advertiser when you visit a CNN does not tell them who you are. However, if the same advertiser provides the ads to your local city directory, it will tell them about the type of page you have previously visited. Try this test…  pick a topic you have no interest in and have never searched for on the Internet. Spend a couple of hours, searching and visiting related sites. You will see the advertisements that come into your web browser begin to reflect your apparent new found interest in animal husbandry.

Belly button gazing and cookie lint? The result of this technology is that you do not learn new things! Most of the Internet is trying to establish your interests and deliver you information that is specifically tailored to the record of what you appear to be interested in.

My advice to anyone building websites for the population at large, or who should be aware of social trends is simple. Set up at least one web browser on your computer and block all cookies from every website. Never sign in to one of your accounts using this web browser. Preserve it as a “factory-fresh” browser that contains no information about your possible interests. You might be surprised by what you discover.

How to turn off cookies.

Today’s typical designer sits in front of a 27 inch or large screen, and is connected to the Internet with a 15 to 30 MBps download connection. Worse still…, in most cases designers get in the habit of previewing pages on their local machine without ever visiting the Internet. At a minimum, they may preview in Dreamweaver, or you may run a beta platform that has a high speed connection. It’s fast, it looks efficient, and the result is often a lousy user experience.

After years of progressive increase in average screen size, the introduction of mobile connectivity (IPads, Playbooks, Netbooks, and smart phones) has resulted in a decrease in the average screen size in use. Where the user’s connection is wireless, the real speed delivered to their device may be much lower than the stated speed offered by their provider.

So here’s a crazy idea. In the 90′s we made our designers review their web pages with a real (and slow) internet connection. What would happen if you took away your designers’ bright and shiny monitors and forced them to do all their work on a 19 inch monitor with a resolution of 1280×1024 pixels? Designers would be forced to look at your web pages as they appear to more than 50% of web users. Is there an IPad in your design department? Is it used to check your website, or is it just for cool factor? What would happen if you equipped your sales staff with low end laptops or even netbooks? If your answer is that the sales department wouldn’t be able to properly demonstrate the capability of your website, I would suggest that your sales department is confronted with the limitations of your existing website.

OK… perhaps you’re not prepared to take away the high-end monitors. (I’m working at a huge monitor right now). Your page review and design approvals should all take place using a broad mix of screens and screen resolutions.  Most Internet users use a screen resolution of less than 1280×1024. The most common size is still 1024×768. You absolutely must understand what your website looks like to the typical user. You absolutely must understand what your website looks like to a mobile device user.

Equally important…, you must get a sense of how quickly your site loads for your average user. In 2010, the average download speed in the United States was 3 Mbps per second. You can calculate your download speeds or alternatively you can throttle a computer to see the results. Google Pagespeed and Yahoo’s YSlow also offer useful information.

A site’s design must reflect the user experience…, and this is something far more subtle than what colors you use, or choosing a font size or type.

Google tells us that there are billions of web pages added each day, and presumably trillions of unique URLs on the web. One of the largest challenges facing search engines is how to suppress this noise. The mantra early in the 2000′s was that a website needed unique content in order to survive, and now in 2011 this has become a mini-industry.

There are hundreds of companies that offer to generate articles of any length that are “optimized for profitability and keywords”. Pick a keyword, and the company will generate an article for you. It’s usually a restatement of a news story or other information that’s been published elsewhere. Heck, you can even subscribe to free automatic article generators. Click a button, and an article will magically be generated. It’s in English and it contains real words. (dripping sarcasm?) It’s the web version of plastic water bottles. They’re everywhere and they are taking up space.

Google, Bing and other search engines live or die based on providing good search results to their users. There is an immense amount of research dedicated to identifying the web’s “plastic water bottles” and insuring that they do not show up in search results. Google’s most recent algorithm update was specifically targeted at this problem. Search engines look for relevant, good content and they will get better at it. The search engine that can figure out how to deliver those results consistently will rule the space.

Put simply, if you have an agreement that produces 1000 “unique” words per day on “x” keyword, it’s time to cancel the contract. It’s a year 2008 tactic that the search engines are well aware of. Time and budget would be better spent on looking at your current content, making it relevant, complete, and easy to navigate. Spend the content budget on new articles that improve a section of the site and make it better, or alternatively on a set of new articles that create a new section. Build a great website. That’s what Google is trying to identify. Google wants to send visitors to great websites.

If I randomly type 300 characters, the odds are good that it is unique content, but obviously it is meaningless dreck. Is your “unique content” the product of a 1000 monkeys typing, or is it good content that will educate, illuminate, or otherwise contribute to answering a user’s question?

Google handles more than a billion queries per day and they are slowly building a better understanding of the relationship between how a search is constructed and what the user is actually trying to find out. By analyzing vast streams of data, it’s possible to build a search algorithm that better understands user intent and purpose. You can safely assume that there are a large number of very smart people at Google and Bing trying to figure out how to convert this to a mathematical equation.

The funny thing is that humans are blessed with the ability to intuit meaning and intent. You can look at your own website, and build an understanding of not just the terms that result in a visit, but the intent of the user. What did they click on after landing on your page? If the page has a high bounce rate…, think very carefully about what the user wanted to learn vs. the information you provided. If you believe that your page answers the basic question, then ask yourself what is the next question the user will have. Do you provide an easy to find link that will answer the user’s next question?

You can use statistics to help you, but you must use your mind. Statistics will tell you what has happened and what is happening. Statistics can tell you if your changes are successful. With that said, you must do the hard work of understanding who your user is, and what motivates them.

The bottom line is that your search “strategy” should have its foundation in building a great website that answers a need. Google is trying very hard to build the algorithm that will find that website.

Someday, a user will type in a search for Love Poem. The #1 result will be a haiku. The haiku won’t include the word “love”, nor will the domain name and/or URL contain the word “love”. The user will be moved to tears by the beauty of the poem. (A haiku is a form of poem consisting of 3 lines and 17 sylables.)