Reflecting on events this week that I attended; a dinner in Chinatown Monday night where I met Jeremy Wright of B5 Media and Missy Ward of Affiliate Summit fame.

And then, I met the same people, and more, last night, at Mashable’s Motivational Meetup (Gary Vaynerchuk Videos from Motivational Meetup - 11-5-05) - Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s event footage is now up on this site and CenterNetworks (Allen Stern).

Spoke to Jeremy Wright last night about the penalty Google imposed on most Know More Media blogs, including Webmetricsguru.com, before I bought it off the defunct KMM Network.

The traffic today isn’t terrible, between 200 to 300 visits a day, about the same as when I bought the domain with Sebastian Wenzel for our BlogSpeedWay.com network.

But I haven’t been able to get back to the 1000-20,000 visits a day I used to get, before last January, when the penalty was applied.

Jeremy mentioned he had success with a few KMM blogs he bought, using Google Webmaster Console, which turns out to be another name for Google Webmaster tools.

3 inclusion requests after cleaning up the blog, and no real response from Google, via the tool.

But here’s the thing … A conversation is usually 2 ways, and fully Duplex, meaning you make a request, you get a direct reply.

That’s also Web 2.0 and how this last Presidential Election was won by Barack Obama with a brilliant Social Media Strategy that acknowledged his followers and made them (us) feel heard and acknowledged.

Why doesn’t Google not hear and acknowledge me, not by sending me more automated bots via Webmaster Central, but answering my reconsideration requests with a human voice and face, so that I know I was heard.

Lately I’ve been on rants with companies that sell you on ideas they enable, but don’t actually embody, themselves.

Last month I mentioned ComScore, who sells expensive intelligence to corporations who want to spy on each other (competitive intelligence) running metering software that none of those same corporations will allow to run on their own networks due to privacy policies - pathetic, but true. No wonder the numbers are so far off from the same webstats, when available.

Then last week, Radian6, did, more or less, the same thing, and I wrote about it. It was cleared up when Radian6 talked back, had a conversation with me.

And now, Google,the most successful Web 2.0 Company if them all.

Wha!

Google doesn’t want 2 way conversations, they just tell the rules, something happens and your in the Gulog, they throw the key away.

Here’s my point, and I haven’t even gotten to gotten to Gary’s rant with Howard Stern, today - why can’t Google start having 2 way conversations?

Why won’t Google acknowledge me or my reconsideration request, so that I know my concerns were addressed?

Just a thought, but you’d think, by now, Google would be acting Web 2.0 by just talking to me.

And it’s not like Matt Cutts is easy to reach, these days.

I don’t know, the wholething is frustrating, and, as usual, people who talk the talk, often don’t walk the walk.

Note: I wrote this post on the subway while heading towards DUMBO, Brooklyn, for an Art Opening.  I am finding, I can compose and post my work while commuting, and even, while walking, and my last post was done entirely while walking to work this morning.

Of course, I don’t recommend doing that kind of writing all the time, but feel good that it’s there for me, when I want it.

Avinash Kaushik announced new enhancements to Google Analytics including customized segmentation and customized reporting - a blow to counter Yahoo Analytics.

I saw some pretty interesting scatter graphs and advanced reporting that Avanish feels will result in the death of standard reporting.

We wanted to bring something very complex and make it simple.

And finally, Google Analytics now has a custom API. In fact, adSense is also part of Google Analytics reports.

I noticed some changes in Google Analytics late last night, but had not explored any if the enhancements Avinash mentioned.

Btw, as a subnote to this post, I just found out that I won’t be attending LeWeb3 08 in Paris this December. I guess they have become ultra exclusive, of late. Too bad.

Was not really sure I would attend, but LeWeb has decided to cast themselves as a “premium” conference even though, essentially, it’s more if a networking event, that just happens to be in Paris.

I walked into Justin Cultroni teaching Google Conversion University and he’s fantastic as an instructor and extremely knowledgeable on analytics and Google Analytics, in particular.

I walked in to the Goals, Funnels, Ecommerence and Site Search and I got a few points cleared up I didn’t know about, including how to set up goals properly, using head matching, issues with session ids, how to set up site search and the way funnels work (a clearly defined process).

My sense is that much of the work of web analytics is to match up the way a business works with the way a particular data analytics platform needs to have the data structured. In a way, web analysts are the “glue” that ties together Marketing, IT, and the analytics collection platforms.

True, analysts provide insight into the data collected, and that is mainly the way I look at Web Analytics, but the other side of the house is that Web Analytics is the glue for matching up the different parts of your organization, in a way that is often overlooked.

I also sat in on Justin as he covered Website Optimzer, Webmaster Tools, Ad Planner, which was pretty farm good.

Google Ad Planner can be used as competitive intelligence tool much as AdCenter is.

The data comes from the behavior of the top 3000 sites, according to someone in the room that works for Google and in Google Ad Planner.

You have to sign up for the beta,you don’t have to even run a campaign with it, or you can figure out what ads to run and for whom.

Again, forgive my spelling and grammer, I am typing this on the IPhone.

Don’t think Danny Sullivan is saying anything that different than what I’ve been saying for some time about Google - The Google Hive Mind - does that mean Google sees the world in a multifacted matrix, like a bug?

Certainly it’s a new term and Danny Sullivan has come up with a summary of Google’s Hive Mind activities over the last 10 years.

‘…. when Google views products in isolation, it seems to justify to itself that it makes sense to do them. “Look at this new bed of flowers — we should go here, it makes complete sense!” But it fails to understand that the move into that new flower bed makes the hive even more threatening to others. That more and more flower beds now have Google going into them, making others wonder if they’re next.”

I almost feel, that in reading this detailed product evolution and acquisition strategy, I’m reading more about Empire Building (like Napoleon’s First French Empire e and the justifications that go along with it); but, maybe the story of Google could be put in terms more like  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which just happened to end up producing the world’s smartest company, via The Google Hive Mind.

“…Search is where Google started, and even though the mission was back then was (and officially still is) to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” no one at Google was really putting many of today’s non-search services into a blueprint for success. Many of these products emerged from Google’s own internal needs, opportunistic purchases, ideas that curious Googlers with “20% time” suggested and sudden departures into areas not envisioned at first but which made sense as Google evolved.”

According to Sullivan, Blogger and Gmail fit in with Google, as a search engine, even less than AdSense did:

“….If it was a stretch to say AdSense was part of search, Blogger was even a bigger stretch. Google acquired Blogger a month before AdSense was rolled out, in February 2003. At best, Google could argue that Blogger allowed it to provide tools for publishers to use — which in turn meant information it could help organize.”

“…With Gmail, the hive grew into yet another new area, without that move really having been mapped out in advance. It was a natural evolution of letting people develop things that made sense.

Then Google got involved with offline ads, radio ads, in game advertising, satelight ads, newspaper ads, cable TV ads, etc:

“…Suddenly, Google’s dabbling in offline ads. It also offers radio ads and TV ads through other deals and acquisitions that have been made. This fits with the “Ad” mission of the tagline. But it also has caused print, radio and TV publishers — along with agencies that serve them — to worry if this is part of Google’s plan to take over key offline areas and dominate as it has online.”

“…Or when dMarc approached them, was it yet another case of Google looking in isolation at the purchase and thinking “ads, make sense — we’ll figure out the exact details on how it fits later.” I suspect the latter.”

Google Checkout, Knol and Chrome are further expansions, based on the Hive Mind, according to Sulllivan”.

But here’s what I think, on Google’s 10th Birthday, that Government intervention is unlikely anytime soon, even though Google has repeatedly invited it.   Why?

The Government has it’s hands full with an economy that is contracting rapidly, where we are moving, perhaps the world is moving, into a deep, deep recession.

The last thing any Government wants to do, now, is attack Google, believe it or not.   That’s not to say that Google and other search engines, but mainly Google, ought to be regulated - it should be, at least, aspects of what Google does ought to be regulated - but as far as having Government crackdown on Google for being monopolistic which it’s Hive Mind Strategy, it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.

On thing that Google does provide - and I wrote about it yesterday, is Leverage (see Search Engine Leverage); Google, if you want to view it that way, could be like “AIG” the firm that was bailed out on Wall Street last week.

Actually, I figured out what Google’s real mission was earlier this year - their mission has nothing to do with search, not any longer; Google’s real mission - to re-organize, retool and dominate any business process, any market, that Google feels it can make a valuable contribution.

Google has become so interlinked with Web 2.0 and the Internet Economy, the Economy of the 21st Century,  that it is the Wall Street of the Internet, if I might term it that way - all the information of the world, and much of it’s money, runs though it.

Google can’t be allowed to slow down much, or suffer too mcy, because it’s one of the main engines of internet growth and economy for all of us - Google is the single most powerful engine of prosperity that now exists - countless businesses have built, for better or worse, businesses around Google Search, around Google Advertising.

And let’s not forget that Google has, in a few short years, accomplished what no government could, to create an almost complete record of what everyone is doing online - Google is far closer than anyone else in archiving a 360 view of most of it’s users with Search History, Web History and it’s DoubleClick acquisition.

Sure, if Google were reigned in than something else would take it’s place, but the disruption would be as  devastating as the events leading up to the $700 Billion Bailout is proving to be, and Google’s role has been as an enabler that made it much easier for many SMB’s to succeed - which also enabled a lot more taxes to be generated - and more money that got leveraged around in the world economy.

Now, it can be argued, and Danny Sullivan has masterfully made the case in The Google Hive Mind that Google didn’t really plan all the acquisitions and moves it made over the last 10 years, many of the moves Google made came out of a strategy that let product groups within Google determine what made sense for the company, as a whole.

And while Google’s “Hive” sorta stumbled to the top of the Internet food chain, almost without a plan, almost by accident, in a “fuzzy” way - that is so typical of “Web 2.0″ is is also the most paradoxical of all Web 2.0 companies.  Why?

Here’s why …. the “transparency” that is the hallmark of Web 2.0, of Social Media, of the way companies are being to operate, in a way, doesn’t apply to Google.   While they promote “transparency” for others, Google, itself, is often opaque in it’s intentions and actions - that is it’s paradox.

I know Google did pick up on one of my earlier objections about Search Engines, and, via Google Webmaster Tools, allow webmasters to download detailed search and impression stats for their Google Verified Websites - in this they followed the letter of the law, but not it’s spirit, for they did nothing much to make any sense of the data for the individual site owners - you could download Gigabytes of detailed query logs for your site - but the data is raw - you’d need a large database and programming effort to effectively use the data - and who’s got that?  (hint: Google).

So…, while fragmenting the landscape for services might be in the consumers immediate interest … I don’t think Google really has to worry that much about a Government crackdown, anytime soon - our Government is too occupied now trying to avoid a Depression to  worry much about how and if to police Google - and the next administration, hopefully run by Barack Obama, will, most likely be Google  Friendly.

As much as I and others criticize and even fear Google (I’m still pissed at them for the Google Penalty they have  yet to lift), Google is neccessary and vital as an engine of growth for us all, and must be allowed to continue, for better or worse, on it’s course (until something better comes along).

Yeah, Google is a habit, alright, and one we can’t really do with out, or shake.

I briefly met Nicolas Carr earlier this year at a Search Conference, I think, back in March, and have a copy of The Big Switch somewhere at home, but never read actually read it - who has time - I get a lot of books and find I can’t really get into that many of them - I just don’t have the bandwidth anymore - I guess I’m skimming - just like a lot of us do now - and according to Nicolas Carr, we’re starting to think like the tools we use - namely Google.

I don’t think thinking like Google is necessary a bad thing - but as this clip from the Colbert Report shows, many typically are processing information so quickly that we can only know a little about a lot of things or a lot about a few things.

It’s kind of one way, or the other - there is not that much middle ground here - because there’s so much information hitting us at any one moment - that we have had to learn to “skim” through it do decide what we want to focus on.

Does it get us to the point where we can’t focus on anything meaningful?  Is that what Google is doing to us, for example?

Or is Google and other search engines just creating for us that which we want, anyway - sorta like a cat chasing it’s tail (or is it a dog chasing it’s tail - forgotten).

I bet we can chart, and this is where the analysis comes in, the amount of information (”messages”) bombarding us over time, say in the last 30 years, against attention span, and come up with a downward slope - that’s my premise - what I’d expect to find if I did take a closer look.  Using the same “skimming” that Google now makes possible, by the way - here’s an interesting chart I came up with, or should I say, mashed up with my post here.   In other words, I gave up something, and I got something in return - the question is how you use that information, not if the trend, itself, is good or bad:

” ..By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages. It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages. Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

This chart doesn’t really address the time span, but it does address attention span - we can’t take in too much information at once - and that fact has been  used, quite successfully, to blinsight us, particularly in Electoral Politics (ie: for example, John McCain’s campaign invites medical doctors in for 3 hours to examine 1000’s of papers about his medical history - that are almost impossible to process - without the ability for doctors to take any notes, or just massive barriages of information that are meant to mislead and confuse us - so we can’t actually get the nuggets of real information from the noise that bombards us).

We’ve put up filters to tune out noise, and often, good information is in with the noise, and we tune that out too, and as I’ve maintained, some campaigns exist just on that - flood us with information that gets us to the point of being stupid - so we can’t process anything new - even though we should and new to.

From the same Measurement Matters blog post - I came up with another chart that ties in the number of information, stories that media can track well:

We brought together data from more than 200 organizations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media. While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was. Organizations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more. For those organizations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

Put it another way, the reason Republican’s have won more consistently is that their messages have tended to be fewer, more primal, more focused then Democrats (it has nothing to do with weather the messaging is correct or fair, it’s often not), that had much larger constituencies - communicating what you stand for is harder when there are a lot of voices talking -especially when there there is so much “noise” to filter out.

Even in the debate last night, McCain sought to emotionally connect and stay on just a few themes - it just so happens he’s on the wrong side of most of them - but that has not prevented candidates   from winning - especially if they can exploit the overloads of information.

However, the same trend that decreases our attention span also enables us to have a lot more information to think about, to write about, too.

I think, having so much information at our disposals, provided you have a point of view, should make it fairly easy mash up information, come up with new insights, that could not have happened, otherwise.

What I have noticed, however, is that there’s been a proliferation of information that is essentially duplicated, with little added value.

For example, if I look at information on a prescription I’m taking - or even a herbal medicine, you can often find the same thing repeated, but with almost no added information.

The News is often that way too - last night I watched the first Presidential Debate and got a headache - The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won and I feel that i could have passed on it - I already know who I’m voting for but for all the talk - little information from either candidate that was new, even on the eve of the largest financial bailout in history, the largest back failure in history, the beginning of a long recession, perhaps a depression, little information from either candidate.

And when you look online, the situation is not much better - what’s in the New York Times and Washington Post, about the same stuff, and cable / tv news is just repeating every couple minutes, the same things.

And even with all the 1000’s of cable channels which I can now choose from, on Time Warner - or for that matter, almost any cable provider - there’s often nothing to watch.

Why is that?

I think I know why; relative to consumers of information (all of us)  there are not that many people that produce it, and many of those who are, are looking at each other for information, there’s actually little original.

And here’s where Google could help, but doesn’t - this would be the positive side.  Yes, Google did try to suppress duplicate information for some time, but ….. due to the nature of using textual data and links (and some metadata) they can’t really distinguish the quality of information independant of the backlinks/reputation and text in a page/site.

In order to make Google and other search engines better, they’d need to be more “Social” and process the information from your friend and community - to resurface the information - and they’ve been working on it, Google has, I know they’re experimenting with a “Friendfeed” type of interface - that will allow for commenting on search results, will rerank search results, etc.

So I think, it’s possible that what we’re coming to is not a bad thing - we’re losing individual concentration and knowing a little about a lot of things, but not that much about much of anything - but … our “group” can, our “friends” can - and that’s what I think we’re moving into - that, to me, is the Big Switch, and technology can now enable that to happen, globally, where it could not have, in the past.

Well, you know, it’s kinda nice to see something like Google Chrome come out; I’ve always felt the Browsers we’ve had are kind of sucky - even FireFox - doesn’t work all that well a lot of the time (esp with playing Online Videos, it often runs out of memory).

Tonight, Steve Rubel wrote about Google Chrome in a post titled How Globalization Handed One Blogger a Big Scoop in his blog, Micro Persuasion; see what Steve has to say, below:

Philipp Lenssen has long been one of my favorite bloggers. He co-authors one of the best blogs on Google, which is also one of my obsessions. Today he scored a big scoop.

Google’s long awaited web browser is launching tomorrow. If you’re reading this Tuesday or later, the browser is here.

So how did this happen? This is just my analysis. I haven’t confirmed with Philipp (who I have known for years). But I suspect globalization is totally to blame.

You see, Philipp blogs out of Germany, where there was mail service today. So a comic book tease from Google that probably every big US tech blogger is going to receive tomorrow once the US Post Office re-opens, was in Philipp’s mailbox today. Oops.

Steve makes his post about Globalization, while I don’t really think that’s particularly important here - I guess he got his comic book in the mail one day early from the rest of us (I don’t know if Google is sending me a comic book or not -  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow).

I read part of the Comic book online (up to page 8); the rest would not load - I guess everyone is trying to read the same file at the same time and even Google has limits to what it can handle.

While reading the official Google Post on  A fresh take on the browser I was tempted to also read in my own idea of what Google’s mission really is - it’s not about Search anymore, and hasn’t been, for some time.  What Google’s real mission is … as far as I can tell … is to re-engineer all web based business processes into superior versions Google can run.  Read what they said in their blog:

“.. Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.”

In a way, they’re kinda right - they can do it better, in most cases - but … aren’t they beginning to swallow up more and more opportunities for others to innovate and provide services?

And let’s be clear about it - TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington thinks this is another “War” between Google and Microsoft to dominate the Web’s operating systems - see Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer

Make no mistake. The cute comic book and the touchy-feely talk

about user experience is little more than a coat of paint on top of a monumental hatred of Microsoft.

Ha, Ha, it reminds me of the Twilight Zone’s episode of To Serve Man - it’s a Cookbook!

After all - suppose Google Chrome becomes the dominant Browser in a year or two - and Firefox and IE8 are eclipsed - more and more, Google will not only control Search, but also control the content and the delivery mechanism of the content (the browser).

As Google becomes bigger and bigger - it becomes one gigantic services company - basically, a more intelligent version of IBM, that makes it easier for the end user to do stuff - but Google will own everything in between it - and you.

Where does that leave everyone else?

By the way, here’s a chart of major influencers for the Google Chrome Story from Radian6

The most engaging blog post, by the way, on Google Chrome, is  the one that broke the story - Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

It's Google, and there's trouble again, this time with "virtual tresspassing" - take a look

To be perfectly honest, I've been pretty critical of Google in the majority of posts I've written here over the last two years - but this one post I'm going to write about today is 180 degrees different.

First of all, Google's new, "experimental" "Digg like" Search Interface is not only the future of Search, it's also a lot of fun and a 100 times more interesting, in my opinion, than anything else they've come up with in the last 4 years.  The new search interface is also a "logical" evolution of Social Media, Social Networks and Search Technology and what I've seen in the movie below is almost exactly the vision I have for the Future of Search - and it can't come fast enough because the search of today, on Google, or any other Search Engine, sucks compared to what it could and someday, will be.

TechCrunch's post by Michael Arrington Is This The Future Of Search? has the most detail, yet, of this fairly new development in Search - that has just hit the blogosphere over the last day or so.

What excites me is not, so much, the "Digg" part, which is probably going to end up being "gamed" by "Google gangs" just like "Digg Gangs" did/do now - though it's still an improvement over what we have now, and this new "Digg like voting" is much more "democratic" than Google's current Search Engine which gives all the power of ranking and determining what gets into the search results to the computer engineers and scientists who program the search engine.

What excites me is the "FriendFeed/Twitter" part of this new Search Interface and ranking system, which allows the wisdom of Searchers to mix in, rate, and comment on the Search Results - this is truly the future of search - and it allows the users the control and transparency that Google and the other Search Engines have deliberately withheld. 

But now, all the Search Results, in all the Search Engines, are so lousy, overall, that even Google, spending all it's time now patching up it's failed Pagerank system, it's failed back link, it's failed spam filtering, and everything else that has evolved, finally, is ready, to share control of the search results with the users of it's search engine.

We're not talking about some dials - the stuff they gave us a few years ago (both Google and Yahoo had versions of this feature), we're talking about Personalized and Social Search merged in one interface that will allow anyone to see comments on the Search Results (and I guess, Google will study those comments and re-rank the results - using their "semantic" technology - perhaps the right place for automation, at this point - since there's going to be so much commentary on the search results, no army of humans could possibly  read it all in time to act on it - before a ton more comments are made.

In my follow up post on The Analytics Guru -

Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface

I'll envision the future of Search Engine Optimization once the new Search Interface is fully rolled out, probably anytime between the 18 months from now, and five years (it'll depend on how "aggressive" Google wants to be here - setting this new interface as a Google Experiment is OK for now, but to get the full interaction, at some point, they will need to take the plunge and make this new innovation, the default interface for Google Search - the sooner the better, in my book).

Read an interesting post on Smackdown about Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers :

'"..if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time. At worst I will be seriously wasting my time. By analyzing the referrers on the clicks generated during this test we can easily see why this is so."

Recently, I wrote the current crop of Keyword Tools are almost useless for Social Network, user conversations, viral marketing - because they don't really target conversations, or what's really hot.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Roundtable is of the opinion The Google Keyword Tool is Useless for SEO, and Here's Why

Michael VanDeMar wrote an interesting post on his blog about the uselessness of the Google Keyword tool for SEO. He explains that while we reported that the tool is showing keyword numbers, it still isn't helpful. His rationale is that the numbers refer to PPC search behavior only, not overall Google.com search behavior, and then he explains how past research has given him this perception. He writes:

For instance, for [birthday poems] the tool gave a number of 27,100 (which would be an average of 903 searches per day) and bidding on that keyword for 3 days gave me 2,411 impressions (or 803 impressions per day). This is fine and dandy if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time.

I've noticed that a keyword's demand and/or position in Search Results, esp on Google, rarely generated anywhere near the traffic I expected.   On the other hand, when I happened to write about something interesting and provocative, and it was a subject in the news anyway - I recently got several hundred visits to my Webmetricsguru.com blog an hour.

That doesn't happen any more though - Google took care of that …. they don't like anyone getting too much traffic - in this case, they penalized the entire Know More Media network - but it was never explained, officially, why (there were "unofficial explanations, though).

But at any rate, the idea of publishing actual keyword search numbers in the External AdWords Keyword tool is not about accuracy - it's about convincing people to run advertising.

I've been thinking about a presentation I'd like to do at Search Engine Strategies someday - not this time, in San Jose, but maybe the next time I get to speak, about all the things in "border-color: initial; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: transparent; font-family: serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 100%; line-height: normal; position: static; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-transform: none; color: green; text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; background-position: 0% 0%; border-width: 0pt; border-style: none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt" id="gtbmisp_83">algorytms Search that don't work - stuff the search engines do try to get better results often backfire.

I wrote a post about that last week - Reputation and what we associate with it where I examined how Google's way of evaluating TrustRank, based partially on who a site links to, was wrong.

But… I didn't explain my point as fully as I'd have liked to.  What I meant to add, was - much of the way we deal with bits of data is based on the way we deal with objects in a 3D World - based on direction (closeness/distance/proximity), direction, size, and so on - yet data that is used to evaluate ranking is really of entirely different dimensions and qualities - using algorithms based on our physical reality often give results that are garbage (I guess I do have a can of garbage next to food - see the photo below)

To me, the computer scientists who work at Search Engines, I believe, are using methods to sort and qualify data based on concepts honed in the physical world we all live in- but the analogies don't work that well - putting my food next to a garbage can surely makes me not want to eat it anymore - but it doesn't make the food bad - but according to Google, linking out to sites it thinks are "bad" makes yours more likely to also be "bad" and you may find your ranking much lower in Search results because of this.

The point of this post is that tools Google gives us and tools they use to decide the quality of your content - are based on what they believe, what easiest for Google to handle - it's not necessary created to make your life easier - even if it appeared to be done for that reason - like the AdWords External Keyword Tool - which gives you data that isn't really useful for Search Optimization - not the way you think it would be.

And maybe, that's the way Google wants it.

I wrote about the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube (Google) last year when it first was filed last March (see Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for $1 Billion); at that time, Mark Cuban was openly musing that Google's aquisition of YouTube was a mistake.

Now, I think we've moved past that issue (aquisition a mistake or not) so there's no point musing about that - but it appears Google LOST to Viacom (B.L. Ochman has a post on this topic that I like - Worried About the YouTube Order? You Didn't Have Any Privacy Anyway):

A federal judge in New York, presiding over Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit against Google, has ordered Google to give Viacom a three terabyte database showing every clip users have watched on Google-owned YouTube, the Internet's largest video site. Here's a YouTube video that explains it all to you, with musical accompaniment.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, an 81 year old Reagan appointee, issued the order, renewing concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or be obtained by third parties.

Judge Stanton ordered Google to provide Viacom with records revealing the users' log-in identities and the Internet addresses for their computers. Both companies say discussions are underway to anonymize the logs.

Here's a YouTube video that explains the debade, made last year, at that, when the lawsuit from Viacom was first brought against YouTube/Google.

I decided to use Radian6 to probe the Viacom - Youtube story and see what else I could find - setting up a profile with the following keywords

I typically set the default measurements to give more emphesis to on topic posts and on topic inbound links, as I always do - this makes sense to me and it one of the unique features of Radian6 that many of the other platforms I've looked at recently don't have - see Social Web Analytics EBook - print it out and read it.

Here's where it gets interesting - as what I find out via Radian6 is a much more "balanced" view of the news - all coming into one dashboard - something that RSS Aggreators should do - but don't actually do. 

Here's a list of the Influentials on the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit from Radian6's New Influencer Widget:

Also, you can hover over the graphs in the Media Viewer (for each post) and get a count of the number of comments at any point in time (on the chart) - an intersting feature for those who need to follow the development of a story and it cascades in the news.

For example, the TechCrunch post was viewed as the most "engaging" and influential of the latest news on the Viacom -YouTube lawsuit -with Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves with the Judge allowing Google to protect itself at "our" expense - something that doesn't quite show up in the news the way it's typically read:

"…If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle."

That was a pretty serious thing AOL did …. and TechCrunch says this could be much worse - meanwhile - Google gets off scot free:

"…Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”"

So what's the deal here … "user beware" of Social Media?  You use it, you buy it?  I don't know, but I find an interesting thread here - and Radian6 pointed out the "User Engagement" by noting the extreme number of user comments that were from unique IP Address - which is an Engagement Metric.

But what the TechCrunch post is really saying is that the Judician System may not be equiped to pass Judgement on Technical Issues of Privacy - in this case, the Judge, Judge Stanton, might be too old and out of it ….. just might not be up to date on what is really involved here:

"…I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.

YouTube&
rsquo;s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.

The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law."

 

The idea of "justice" is that people who understand the issues being brought before them, make an impartial judgement - but what if those making the judgement calls are incapible of understanding the issue in the first place - is that what we've ended up having - a goverment run by incompent and out of touch polictial and legal appointees?  Is appears so.

We've seen what that does in the Executive Branch - I don't have to elucidate - the evidence is all around us - in our world, which appears to be "falling apart".  According to TechCrunch:

 "…Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube."

I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions."

Engagement, as I've defined it, using Radian6, also picked out the top news sources from the River of News, as it's termed in Radian6.

From a Search Persecptive, I could see writing a post that picks up on the Keywords that are being "talked about" the most around the topic of a profile, in this case being the "Viacom - YouTube" issue that I'm focusing on, today.   

For that, the New Topic Cloud Widget is most helpful, and I'll adapt the keywords and title of this post to be in allignment with that teh Topic Clould finds are the main keywords:

The phrases I'd use here are "Youtube Infringment", "Viacom copyrighted video information ruling" with "Viacom", "Video", "videos", "information" "watched clips", "youtube infringement, etc - but this is not so much for a keyword volume standpoint, as "contextual" targeting - because this is what people are "talking about" in Social Media - and therefore - we're focusing on who the influentials are who are talking about relevent issues surrounding at topic.

Also, when we're looking at a target topic, like Viacom - Youtube, once we've isolated the keywords that stand out, via conversations, we can look at the frequency they appear over a specific time period (like the last two days) and this may be useful to figure out how to respond to the developing story (depending on who you are, in this case) by using the New Comparitive Topic Monitor: