Gee - TechCrunch had a post today on When Everyone Is A Blogger, Nothing You Say Is Off The Record.

In a way, isn’t that what we’re moving to?  With Google Search Wiki - I could pretty much comment on any url from any search result, and anyone else who wants to see my comments can.

Look, this story about a Belgian Diplomat and a New York Based blogger is pretty interesting in the level of “over reaction” that happened - here’s the story, according to TechCrunch:

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage.

Ha, ha, guess he was drunk, or something … anyway - here’s the rest of it….

Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisers admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels).

Clearly, one of the Diplomat’s advisers was out of line - and talked about a sensitive issue in a bar - which unfamiliar people.

He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

A couple of days later, someone from De Crem’s office had a telephone call with Nathalie’s boss, after which she was promptly fired. This was initially denied by the politician, and it remains unclear if her termination was a direct result of the call or the blog post in question.

Somehow, the story was picked up and got a lot of attention from local bloggers and the mainstream media, which ultimately lead to the Minister having to defend himself about the NY trip in Parliament.

That’s how it is with Social Media happens - it’s the democratization of information - everyone can share - there is total transparency - and it can’t be controlled easily, if at all - but if people relax about it - it’s much easier to influence.

Yesterday, he made a statement to the Parliament admitting that a call was made but that there was never any insinuation about the girl getting fired from her job (which makes me wonder why the call was made at all then).

But then, the story unfolds some more and it ends us being blamed on the Blogger -according to what I just read in TechCrunch:

He also stated:

I want to take this opportunity and use this non-event to signal a dangerous phenomenon in our society. We live in a time where everybody is free to publish whatever he or she wants on blogs at will without taking any responsibility. This exceeds mud-slinging. Together with you, other Parliament members and the government I find that it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself against this. Everyone of you is a potential victim. I would like to ask you to take a moment and think about this.

De Crem added that he’s asked his legal counsel to see which measures could be taken to ‘defend his integrity’.

Needless to say, his statements indicating that ‘blogging is a dangerous phenomenon’ spurred a lot of angry (and funny) reactions in the local blogosphere, making the situation for him much worse than it already was (much like that German politician who blocked the local wikipedia.de website).

Let me just say this - is a blogger now sopposed to go out and get training on what he or she can or can’t say?

The TechCrunch Blogger Robin Wauters takes the point of view that it’s not Blogging that is a problem for the Belgian Diplomat, but that he comes from a culture and time that doesn’t know what to do with this kind of media - and treats it like a news story or news leak, when it’s sharing a personal experience in a blog.

People, and especially politicians representing them, need to wake up and smell the coffee. The world is changing, and blogging is now a big part of it, with all of its good sides as well as its bad ones. Live and learn. The sooner you get the hang of social media, the more you’ll see the opportunities in there rather than the threats.

To be totally honest, I would not be offended if there was some sort of Guidelines no so much what we can say, and what we can’t, but what information needs to be included.  For example, would it have helped if Nathalie Lubbe Bakker pulled at a Flip Digital Camera and filmed the statements?  Or would that be more damaging.

And if the Dimplomat’s party really felt pissed - maybe they should have been more open about it at home, instead of a Belgian bar in NYC - but that’s another story.

Now that I’ve had a chance to look at Google Search Wiki, I think it’s a lot of fun and really, the right direction for search to move in, but I noticed some who liked Google better without the personalization such as Andrew Goodman and Michael Arrington.

The main sentiment expressed by both is that Google is not broken, so why fix it?  In Michael Arrington’s own words:

Google says they’ve created a way to customize search results, and share (via the comments). They say they are striving to improve the search experience, and giving people tools to make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

” … But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.”

Now, I’ve looked at TechCrunch’s results in the Google Search Wiki - with all the results shownand right now - there’s not that much interesting - but imagine what you’ll be looking at in a month or two.  Imagine looking at Google to get information and see what other people are saying - and actually learning what people think - stuff you could never get, not like this, ever before.

Goodman, who I’ve met at SES San Jose recently thinks Google ought to turn the whole thing off and turn the clock back:

” …. It may be just a visceral reaction, but I’m with Arrington, who just pleads with Google to just turn this thing off and stop this cult of the amateur world from spilling over from YouTube into the one workable, reliable techno-thing that is for many of us truly sacred.”

On the other hand, John Jantsch seems to have a more open mind while Seth Godin thinks what Google has just done is the most signficant change in Search …. since Search Engine were launched!

“… If you’re a signed in user of Google, you’ll notice the most significant change in search since their launch.

You can now interact with search results, wiki style.

You can vote them up or down and leave comments. And they will be seen by others.

1. This is going to lead to an incredible rush by small businesses and social networkers. They’re going to go crazy trying to game the system.

2. Google is going to find that millions of people pay a lot more attention to their search results (for now).

Interesting to consider what happens after that. How do they handle the deluge? Does democracy matter when it comes to search? How do you filter out the gamed votes?

Also interesting to think about how a tiny change in a beloved interface changes the way you think about and use it.

Ha, ha, ha … Seth worries about Google’s new interface being “gamed” - but isn’t that what we had all along - thousands of people were gaming Google’s results every day -and as time has gone one - it’s gotten harder to plug the holes in Search Engines.   Spam?   Why… Google is trying to filter it out … but much of it is generated because of Google and the way it is - or has been.

Google Search has been broken for quite some time, and many people, including me, complained about the unfairness of Pagerank algorithm and that links are not the endorsement Google has claimed they are.

Besides, the Search Optimization Industry is, more or less, dead, anyway - Google killed it by improving semantic analysis, plugging spam holes, mixing in other types of content and harnessing all the information they’re collecting from Google Analytics, Google ToolBar, and now, the Google Search Wiki.   We can get rid of those things in a site that prevent Google from processing the information, we can increase the usability and we can learn to focus our content to better match what we really want to put forward, but the rest is really being figured out by Google and no deliberate attempt at SEO is needed, most of the time - and that has been Google’s message, all along.

Yep, all along, Google was sending their people to search conferences while they were also telling people to just focus on content and stop trying to deliberately optimize your sites - Google was had become smart enough to figure out your site content for you - and all you had to do was follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and Google would take care of the rest.

In fact, if you tried to hard to optimize your site, and Google saw that, they’d penalize it - which happened to a lot of sites, often unfairly.

Meanwhile, Google’s emphasis on automation ended up becoming a double edged sword - on one hand, automation allows for many of the routine tasks to be done well enough - but when there’s a problem or issue with the search results, it was difficult or almost impossible to talk to anyone at Google - you can submit a request - but you get back no direct response, since you had no idea who, if anyone, was listening, or cared, since most services Google provides are set up to run on automatic pilot (at least, they make is seem that way, even if it isn’t neccesary true).

And the other reason, the main reason why Arrington and Goodman complained about Google Search Wiki is they benefit much more by keeping Google Search as it was - since they know how to benefit and manipulate Google up till now - but would have a much, much harder time manipulating the Search Wiki (though Arrington is far better positioned than most to take advantage of Google’s new “Digg like” interface, and I bet TechCrunch, will.

Still, the new Digg like Search Wiki interface is far more “democratic”, believe it or not - much “fairer” way to rank results than what Google has been running for the last 10 or 11 years.

True, while Google Search worked OK for general types of queries, it’s not too good at specialized and niche types of  information, mainly because the index is too big.  One solution, gave rise to verticals with more qualified pages (i.e: I’m thinking of specific verticals for Medical, Auto, Pharma, Finance, etc).

But something else has been happening - the same thing that brought Barack Obama to the White House as been slowly corroding the quality of Google’s search results - and everyone else’s, more or less - and that was … the Searcher.    The Searcher is growing up. The Bar has been “raised” and search needed to evolve to become more “social” - because there is wisdom in the crowds.

Here’s some obvious observations - searchers are becoming more sophisticated in phasing Search Queries (the average search query  used to be 2 words 10 years ago, now it’s 4 or 5 words), the average searcher is much more sophisticated in knowing what they want and finding a much harder time going through Google’s massive search results index - the problem - now that more and more people are being creators and commentators on content, the original pagerank algorithm, no matter how much Google “improves” it - is not able to deliver helpful search results in the majority of cases, there is simply too much content and it’s too complex for them to know the meaning of it quickly enough or well enough - primarily because what we say and what we write, we often don’t mean - but the Search Engines are not smart enough yet to tell the difference - and it’s simply beyond the ability of any algorythm to figure out what we mean and what we really want.

Google Search Wiki is what I’ve been asking for all along, for Google to experiment with giving the community of searchers the means to decide what they see or don’t see, and in what order - and let others share in that decision.

I like that idea, I think Google ought to go all the way with it and let’s get to a point where the metadata around a search result is far more interesting than the actual search result.

But some have also noted the abuse that can happen, just as Digg was abused by “Digg Gangs”, including Marketing Pilgrim -Google Gets Personal.

However, just because abuse can happen, doesn’t mean it has to happen - Google, as Digg, knows who is voting and what IP Address they’re using - it also drops persistent first party cookies in your browser cache - Google can find ways to detect certain types of undesirable search behaviors and discourage them, as, in a way, they do now, with the various spam filters they’ve set up.

So… I’m not as worried as many seem to be about Google’s new Search Wiki - I say … bring it on - let’s go all the way with this - and look - maybe to help those who can’t handle this change - to have the old version of Google back - but for those, like me, who want it - let’s go full steam ahead.

Yeah, let’s bring it on and do the same thing to Google News and Google Hot Trends - especially Google News - that could be a great way to share information as it’s happening.  Yes, Google - this is an innovation of yours I’ve been asking for a long time  - and now you’ve introduced it - let’s quickly move forward and add it into Google News.

By the way, one more interesting observation, Google has now moved the “Seat” of commenting - away from the Website (the actual sites in Search Results) and onto Google, itself!

There’s a whole new industry that can be “farmed” by harvesting the information that people are putting onto Google - a new class of ranking tools and comment extraction tools could and should be developed, once this new change in Google has been more fully “absorbed”.

You must realize, that up till now, most comments you got about a site - were either on the site in question, or in some message board or blog - but now ….. now …… it’s in the Search Results.  Wow!

Enough for one post - now, I’ll go back and play with my search results - maybe I’ll learn something from them, finally!

I see Facebook as the AIG of Web 2.0 - too big to fail - yet Facebook is running out of money, just like AIG did and Marketing Piligrim asks is Facebook Headed for Financial Ruin? According to TechCrunch:

“… Facebook’s growth, thanks to all these user-created translated versions of the site, has probably exceeded even their own internal projections. And running this engine isn’t cheap.

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.”

But that’s my point - Facebook is too much a part of what is happening today to be left to fail - so I’m not worried about Facebook falling on it’s face - I’m more worried about the rest of the world falling into a financial depression, and what that is going to look like and be like, to live though.

I do think Facebook will need to become more profitable, though - and that means developing stuff people will buy more of - and at that, in an environment when people are spending less and less.

Probably nothing - it’s not about the money - but some people do get paid according to a post on Read/Write Web - How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!

A friend sent me the RWW link today and I was thinking … so all that great stuff I read in TechCrunch and Gizmodo, etc .. the top Blogger is lucky to make what, say, a Teacher makes after a year or two - with a lot of uncertainty thrown in.

I mean, didn’t Gawker just close down a few more blogs recently and lay off some “Top Bloggers” - Yep… The Gawker Layoff Tipline.

If your into security - blogging is not for you.   But I find Blogging is great if your inclination is to blog, anyway.

It’s opened up a lot of doors for me, a lot.

On this Sunday, was kinda thinking, again of absurbity, but more about how people, growing up on Web 2.0 have now taken control of the message.   I think, what we’ll see the in the future, is more and more, co-creation along with the audience, rather than talking at it - hopefully, even Politically.   The next 4 years will be telling - and it’ll be interesting to have the same conversation in 2012.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrignton has a good post on this - Wassup Obama, first look at this famous Budweiser “Wassup” commercial from circa 1999-2002(btw, ValleyWag thinks TechCrunch is on it’s way out -TechCrunch heads for the deadpool -don’t believe it for a second - but it would be “ironic” if it did).

And then, look at what someone did with that message.

Ok, this is much better than Lively, it’s a new platform allowing you to create 3D Movies.  I found out at XtraNormal from TechCrunch - Build Your Own 3D Movie Clips In A Flash With Xtranormal.

Here’s the URL http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20081016182908570  though the program is very slow and the background didn’t render - I think there’s a lot of promise here for all kinds of things you can do with it - though the program is a bit sluggish.

Imagine when a 100 times more traffic hits XtraNormal’s servers - I don’t think it will take long for that to happen!

I was taking with a friend, Sebastian, who runs Blogspeedway.com along with me, today who mentioned I should do a post on LeWeb03, Seesmic’s layoffs, the economic situation (which I covered in End of an Era and … The Man Who Won as Others Lost - Plus Social Media doing Good in the Recession?).

One thing that struck me last year, when I attended LeWeb03, was the point of it was to create the environment for a Silicon Valley in Paris - (see Paris is No Silicon Valley: Neither is Europe, plus Paris Is No Silicon Valley—Yet and Le Web 3.0: Silicon Valley comes to Europe).

But..with the recent changes in the World Economy and Seesmic’s layoffs (Loic’s company) (see Seesmic layoffs and a new reality? plus Seesmic’s newest feature: layoffs plus Seesmic steps up layoffs, look out below and Getting The UnParty Started: Seesmic Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff; does the idea of what LeWeb stands for make as much sense?

True, the Seesmic layoffs, Loic was quick to point out to Robert Scoble, were from Marketing people, those viewed as non-essential and outsourceable.  However, by that same reasoning, Marketing positions, viewed as non-essential, should have been outsourced from day 1 - and they were not.

Sebastian and I agreed, the real story here is that firms want to be strong enough to make more money for their founders, and now that it’s clear they won’t, even well funded Web 2.0 Start ups, such as Seesmic.com, are laying off everything they can.

But, again, the logic suggests, if essentials was all they cared about - they could have done that much earlier.  So the real story is profit.    But the other side of it, if LeWeb03 is losing it’s value proposition (which it might well be - I’d have to go and take a look, to know for sure) wouldn’t that hold true for the Web 2.0 Conferences?

I was just at the Web 2.0 conference in NYC, and there was an overall sense that Web 2.0 companies need to grow up and make money - and most of them, don’t.   And with the global economic downturn, it’s hard to see which one’s will - but one thing is for sure - they have to collect money, to make money - and that money has to come from somewhere - if not from Advertisers, then from Subscribers - or else you just sell the company to someone else who thinks they can make money off of it - but then, where’s the buyers (Investors) going to come from now?  You have to wonder.

Which gets me back to LeWeb03 08.  Any point in going?  Even if they give me a Press Pass?

I don’t know, but being that Loic Le Meur is so closely associated with Seesmic - it’s hard to dissociate changes in his company (which TechCrunch is partly investing in) with the overall situation for European Silicon Valley. After all, if Silicon Valley, here, is hunkering down, what can be said about it’s European version?

Again, I don’t know the answers to this - of if I’ll even be there, this time; that remains to be seen.

I know this, I’m sure the World Economy will be a subject discussed at LeWeb03 08, that is obvious.

I’ll be at SMX East on Tuesday Morning, October 7th, and I’ll try to make it for the morning Keynote on with Google’s Tim Armstrong, who is President of Advertising and Commerce for Google, Inc.

I also plan to attend Search & The US Presidential Campaign, Personalized & Customized Search and the Paid Search Analytics sessions.

I’m also attending the NYC Tech Meetup on Tuesday evening and a SMX East party bash later on Tuesday evening.

Meanwhile, there are some good posts by others I wanted to mention, including one by Shawn Collins who did an Affiliate Summit Social Media Recap for the conference I missed last Sunday; I also wanted to go and had a ticket, I just had the problem of not being able to be in two places at once - I opted to attend WordCamp instead of Affiliate Summit.  Fortunately, Shawn’s post gives me much of the information I missed.

Also, Michael Arrington is plugging LeWeb3 in Paris this year - Get Yourself A Ticket To LeWeb and writes about it in TechCrunch- I attended LeWeb3 last year but am on the fence this time, awaiting a Press Pass though I really wanted to speak, instead.  However, SES Chicago is happening at the same time, and I have a shot of speaking at it, redoing my San Jose panel, so if I had to choose I’d probably pick the Conference I can speak at over one I can’t.

On the other hand, at the rate the global economy is collapsing, I am wondering if going to Europe now is such a good idea.

I also briefly saw SEOmoz show me his new SEOToolKit - SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset.

Honestly, I’m not all that impressed, and many SEO tools are hard to use and don’t add much value; we’ll see.

That’s enough for tonight, going to sleep now.

TechCrunch has a post on State of The Blogosphere: The More You Post, The Higher You Rank that stubles upon a truth I found out, by accident, a few years ago.  What I started posting to Webmetricsguru.com, I usually did 4 or 5 posts a day - and it’s really hard to do that many posts on Web Analytics.

I don’t think anyone posted as much as I did, but my subject matter often strayed into adjancent areas, along with some posts that didn’t relate at all - but I felt, belonged anyway.

And now, according to 2008 State of the Blogosphere along with Erick Schonfeld’s analysis - it’s revealed that bloggers who post more, rank higher.

“…Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.”

In a  way, hearing that GigaOm Buys A Mobile Blog - One Less Independent Blog In The World highlights a trend of larger blogs buying smaller ones to roll them up, according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:

"…the rollup of the better blogs (subjectively defined) as the space gets hyper-competitive (you gotta love zero barriers to entry)."

".. I predict that this is just the beginning of the process that will accelerate over the next 12-18 months. Larger blogs lacking the stomach for competition will sell to large media corporations. The more competitive large blogs who want to see this thing through will start to acquire the smaller ones and group by topic areas. Whoever builds the network of the most interesting and prodigious voices will eventually “win.” Or perhaps everyone will win, but to different degrees."

Was Arrington talking about himself selling TechCrunch to AOL?  My understanding is that there's a deal being discussed which I wrote about in

AOL TechCrunch - ugh, but if so, Arrington is cashing in

The only problem I have with this information - that TechCrunch isn't aquiring other blogs and is itself, shopping aroud to be aquired.

================================================

On another note, I just want to remind readers that "other news" today - 200 dollar Web Tablet and ……. some other news that I'm more confident  Webmetrisguru.com will continue - though it will have to be moved to another location - more of that information as details flow in.