• Inbound Links?
  This has been gamed for years.
• Length of H1 Title?
  Really?
• Content Quality?
  A culturally astute reader may be able to appreciate the brilliance of Hemingway, but the reading level of Farewell to Arms is about Grade 6.
• Accuracy?
  Well, how many definitions of a particular disease do you think there are?
• Keyword Density?
  Did I mention there are 5 trillion pages on the web, and half a billion matches for a search for “surgery”. Heck, do a search for 8 random characters.

To understand why HTML5 matters, you have to think about it from a search engine perspective. As stated, no search engine can deliver the “best” or “most accurate” content on the web. In fact that might be a poor decision for a search engine. What a search engine must deliver is results that “satisfy” the user, and cause the user to continue to use the search engine in question. That is what motivates the search engine, and I urge you to spend a lot of your time thinking as if you were the CEO of Google.

As mobile traffic exceeds 15% of Internet activity, the search engines are looking for clues.

What a page written in HTML5 “suggests” to Google, is that mobile compatibility was a factor in design. If the page parses correctly, it “suggests” to Google that it will display correctly on most devices, and accordingly might be a satisfactory search result for the user. This has nothing to do with using HTML5 for interactivity, elegant forms, or geolocation. It has everything to do with giving Google a signal that your page will work correctly on an Ipad. If the page size seems appropriate, and the language is definitively tagged as English, you just improved your search result immensely. Google can’t decide whether you have the “best” search result. They can conclude that you have a search result that will satisfy the Google user, and that the user will return to Google for similar quality search results, and that is what Google cares about.

It’s even easy to visualize Google choosing to deliver HTML5 websites as results for searches conducted on a mobile device, and there is some evidence to suggest that’s happening already.

For most websites, it is time to transition to HTML5.

The article reports on a woman at an “upscale” country club who asked the concierge for a phone charger, and was told that they didn’t have one for the Blackberry. Really? This “upscale” country club doesn’t have USB chargers? You know…, the chargers used on Blackberry, Samsung, Motorola, and most Android phones?

Another interview tells the tale of a Blackberry “user” who apparently can’t figure out how to use the built in mapping software OR Google maps. A third user complained that the battery died while using the web browser. (Word to the wise. The symbol in the upper left corner will tell you whether your battery has a charge!)

Allow me to introduce myself…, a 60 year old geek who wrote his first software in the early 80′s. My first mobile phone was carried on the back of a burro, and the airtime was more than a dollar a minute. I’ve owned PC’s, Macs, and Linux machines…, and I currently make my living as an Internet consultant.

My Blackberry has been dropped, kicked, submerged, frozen, and otherwise brutalized. I’ve used it to fix a broken website from a hockey arena in Copenhagen, and picked up sports scores in the basement at my brother’s place where other mobile phones can’t find a signal. Nothing fazes it.

I can respond quickly to multiple emails using a real keyboard rather than a self “collecting” touchscreen. (Yeah I don’t like autocorrect.) I like getting off a plane in a new country and having my phone say “Welcome, here’s what happened in the last 6 hours”. I like all my email showing up in a single accessable area. I like using my phone to run presentation software. I like it that my phone can successfully communicate with websites using cookie passwords without requiring a reboot and reconfiguration. I like that a Blackberry will connect with a hidden Wifi network. I like that my Playbook connects through my phone account.

I suppose it would be fun to have a recipe app on my phone, but it’s not something that I’ve missed. They’ve built an Internet that is full of apps and information, and if I need a recipe I’ll connect to the Net. If your recipe app is really cool, perhaps you’ll let me borow your iPhone to see it. You can borrow my Blackberry to get your email in Belarus.

I will agree that RIM has messed up something really important…, marketing. It astonishes me that Apple is introducing an Ipad Mini that mimics part of the functionality of my 2 year old Playbook, and that gets called “cool”. Now if Apple would only add HDMI, a higher res camera, 1080p video front/rear, a speaker, Flash capable browser, and seamless integration with their mobile phone, that would be a product. Oh wait…, it is a product, a Blackberry Playbook.

Blackberry simply has to do a better job of explaining their product as a workhorse and tool.

For many years, almost all commercial photographers used the venerable Hasselblad 500CM as the “go to” camera for commercial work. It wasn’t the fastest or coolest camera on the block. It simply did its job flawlessly, and repeatably, and that’s the reason professionals used them. Years ago, Apple ran a series of “Think Different” commercials as they tried to claw back from the brink. It’s time for RIM to “Think Different” and get aggressive about explaining the advantages of their products.

Are you listening Thorsten?

The crew and technology was American, but for a few days in 1969, the peoples of the world cheered for one team…, “our” team. It was indeed a “giant leap for mankind”. Armstrong’s footprint in the distant dust was the footprint of every Smith, Chen, Okonjo, and Shah on the planet, and spoke to our potential to turn our “conquering instincts” to the eradication of war, poverty, and human suffering. The residents of the small blue orb that Apollo 8 had shown us, had landed on a distant Sea of Tranquility for the first time.

Make no mistake. These were brave men, who were traveling at the absolute limits of the technology of the day. The in flight guidance computer possessed only 2kb of memory, driven by 32kb of what we would call Read Only Memory. All programming was in machine language. There was simply no room for the luxury of a high-level language like C (which coincidentally began development in 1969). Neil Armstrong, who passed away earlier this week, later stated that he viewed the probability of successfully completing the mission as a 50:50 proposition. No less than early mariners who sailed over the horizon to Terra Incognita, the voyagers of Apollo 11 journeyed to expand our knowledge and understanding. The benefits of curiosity accrued to all. Curiosity and exploration put a tomato in your Greek Salad, and curiosity and exploration brought you GPS, MRI machines, and the Iphone.

Later in 1969, the first message would be sent over ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet which is so fundamental to today’s society, and the medium through which a woman in Moscow can read these musings moments after they are committed to the digiverse. 1969 was a time to believe in possibilities.

2012 seems a period of little vision and less courage.

We live in a world that reduces expenditures on research. The U.S. Congress has cancelled G.W. Bush’s proposed return to the Moon by the year 2020. President Obama has suggested we might orbit Mars by the mid 2030′s. “Yes, we can?”…  sounds more like “That’s really hard dude.” The government of Canada has reduced scientific spending and hollowed out its environmental legislation out of fear that these expenditures would impact on short term economic indicators in the resource based economy.

We live in a world where nations become an obstacle to advancement because government fears the economic outcome in the 1st quarter of 2013.

Clearly we live in times of economic challenge, but these economic challenges were brought about by market manipulations and the blatant pursuit of profit by individuals and corporations making little contribution of value to the human mosaic. My mother was a child of the Great Depression and certainly taught me the value of thrift and careful financial planning. I expect that from my government. She also taught me the value of the long view of investment. I expect that from my government. Research, science, and exploration have yielded astonishing benefits to the day to day life of the inhabitants of this planet. Can we predict what the innovations and results of journeying to Mars would be? – No more than we could have predicted that developing imaging systems for our early Mars missions would allow us to read two millennia old Roman manuscripts. The quest for knowledge leads to unanticipated benefits.

Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we thought about the payoff in the 4th quarter of the 21st Century? In 1969, some 240,000 miles from Earth, Neil Armstrong showed we could.

Teach your children to dream and explore. Think about the legacy you will leave to your grandchildren. Demand that politicians support research and innovation…, that they act in the best interests of future generations.

RIP Neil Armstrong

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.