All About Content

In a post last month, Michael Martinez of SEO Theory debunked his favorite myths about SEO myths, including the oft-repeated bromide that there’s no such thing as proprietary SEO knowledge:

“There ARE SEO secrets and if you think there aren’t that just means you don’t have any.”

Heh heh. Bravo! (But for the naive, please don’t mistake any cloudy snake oil for SEO secret sauce.)

Go check out the post for more myths that aren’t myths.

This week Nicholas Carr (author of Is Google Making Us Stupid, a piece from The Atlantic I pointed out previously) waxes philosophic about the centripetal forces of the Web, how Google offers the course of least resistance, and how the rich get richer when it comes to the attention economy on the Internet:

…the “long tail” remains an elegant and instructive theory, but it already feels dated, a description of the web as we once imagined it to be rather than as it is. The long tail is still there, of course, but far from wagging the web-dog, it’s taken on the look of a vestigial organ. Chop it off, and most people would hardly notice the difference. On the web as off it, things gravitate toward large objects. The center holds.

The whole paragraph about how Wikipedia “first sucks in content from other sites, then it sucks in links, then it sucks in search results, then it sucks in readers” is worth quoting extensively as well, but rather than cutting and pasting all that is quote-worthy from that article into this post, I’m going to encourage you to spin off in a different direction and read the piece in its entirety.

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.”

According to the current issue of The Atlantic, the Web

…injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Jumping Brain image by Emilio Garcia

The author laments that he’s finding it increasingly difficult to read books or anything of substantive length — it’s just too hard to concentrate. As someone who used to read voraciously but now loses patience with anything longer than a thousand words, I sympathize.

The more time we spend on the web, the more it changes the way we process information… the Internet is remaking our brains in its image. Resistance appears to be futile.

Read the article (yep, the whole thing… as in all 4173 words, with only a few hyperlinks and a couple of dropcaps to distract you from all that endless type.)

In lieu of actually writing original content, I’ll continue just posting clever things other people write and hope it’ll be enough to make you believe I’m still “maintaining” this blog

This week’s quote of the week:

If you are a Web 2.0 company in today’s Web you really need to ask yourselves, “Are we solving a problem that everybody has or are we building a product for Robert Scoble?”

Words of wisdom from a Microsoft Program Manager and, according to Wikipedia, son of Nigeria’s former president. Related to the issue whether Web 2.0 apps have practical application and what Robert Scoble thinks, check out this post by Bob Bly called What’s Wrong with Social Networking Junkies.

I’ll try to come up with some words of wisdom of my own at some point soon. In the meantime, please discuss amongst yourselves.

“Just ‘cos you work on the internet, and Twitter happens to be on the internet, does not mean Twitter is work.” - Matt Davies

From 21 Reasons Twitter is Bullshit. And I think I just killed a kitten.

Quote of the Week from Eric Ward’s article on so-called “best practices” in link building:

Hannibal Lecter followed a set of “best practices” when he ate a census taker’s liver, and those best practices included Fava beans and a nice Chianti, but having best practices didn’t make him any less insane.

This week’s quote of the week comes courtesy of the SEOmoz blog. Jane Copeland complains about the lack of originality and general suckiness of most start-up sites trying to cash in on Web 2.0… still:

We made jokes about rounded corners over a year ago, but it seems that people still believe that if their site looks like an iPod, it will be an unbridled success.

This week’s quote of the week comes from Confucius, by way of a New York Times article (about agricultural sustainability, of all things):

The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names.

The phrase jumped right off the page at me - probably because I’m so finicky about language (or “pedantic” as I’ve also been called).

Since I was wearing my SEO hat (of indeterminate color) at the time I read the article, it made me think about the whole Google/paid links/rel=nofollow debate. I’ll leave it to all y’all to parse what I exactly I mean by that.

This week’s quote of the week comes to us courtesy of Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Watch:

We know that search sites trade query induced traffic like swingers swapping wives. Each one offers the same basic operation but sometimes it’s that little variance in style or positioning that makes all the difference.

Sorry for the political incorrectness in that title, but the guys over at Copyblogger sure know how to get your attention with powerful copywriting. I practically snorted coffee through my nose when I got to that line in the post titled Does Telling Someone to “Click Here” Actually Matter?.

“Google is truly making people retarded” is my quote of the week, both for making me laugh and for reminding us that everything is not always all about keyword optimization.

Click here to read the article.