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.

Mike Grehan goes through the Stages Search has gone through till today.

First stage - more you have keywords in your doc, higher you rank (pre 1998). This is what we say about ourself.

Second stage - Hubs and Authority - it’s more what others say (links). Google perfected this, it’s the quality of links (from inside your community).

Up to now, main signols were on page and links.

Third Stage - informational, navigational, transational searches (Andre Broder, who I met in 2005 at IBM Research).

Around 2005 Google realized Link data ranking was not such a good idea and new signals need to be looked for.

Mike Grehan now says if you not now the first result, you may not be found. Universal Search is hugely popular but as it turns out most are below the fold.

Look at the top 10 results for Bed and Breakfast in New York.

Cognitive Search - query chains where you refining the query in the same session. After a while people Google does predictive analysis.

Universal Search has changed the psychology of search.

Digital Asset Optimization - what media assets can I optimize for?

What signols does Google has?

Trditionial SEO will dissipear and in it’s place are new signols

1. Social Media, but more importantly the Google Toolbar ( your navigational habits and dwell time are being looked at from Google).

Search engines can only ever have fraction of the web). But it’s the conversation going on between individuals that is now of interest.

Crawling the web will be less important.

2. Search Engines doing content deals with social networks and message boards, etc.

3. Replacing the HTTP protocol; as content becomes more fragmented, complex and rich media, browser based protocols are no longer sufficent.

New Book by Mike Grehan - new signols for Search Engines out next spring and a new paper out next week.

I got here, at the Jarvis Center on the west side of mid Manhattan, around 5 PM tonight, just in time to take a quick look at the exhibition hall and the early evening keynote with Bill Tancer.

Bill Tancer’s new book, CLICK, is worth checking out.

Bill Tancer is using Hitwise search query data, almost as a lens, to turn it back on ourselves, to find out insights that don’t normally show up in market research studies. Examples might be Gas Prices orvour real fears, segmentation.

Cognitive dissonance - are we really catching what goes on online?

I guess the full Hitwise database allows you to test out ideas on what motivated an audience in a different way then ComScore or anything you can now get from Google.

I have wanted to have the HitWise data to play with for some time, but I have never worked in a place where HitWise was purchased (and HitWise is pretty expensive).

There is an Art behind the Arbitrage and it can be used for financial predictions, like unemployment percent before the department of Labor announced it.

Can we predict the outcome of the US Presidential Election beforehand?

Diffusion of Innovation and how products diffuse in our society. How fast does a bussiness innovate? Which segments are the early adopters?

Early Adopters visit Tattoo sites, video directory web sites, there is so much video out there that semantic search might not be capturing all the information out there.

Ilovedata.com and the Science of Data in Time Magazine.

I will buy a copy of CLICK today, get it signed by Bill Tancer now, more to get ideas on how to use data I can get my hands on.

The problem is the data you can get out of Google Trends, Compete.com, and other sources that are available to me are “noisy” and lack resolution.

I was thinking about how Google penalizes websites when they link out to other sites that have a poor reputation (what I think of as Google TrustRank), and according to SeoBook's Aaron Wall (in his TrustRank Algorithm Post)

• Good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.
• The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page.
• Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.

But that's still an abstract idea, not that hard to visualize, but still, not real.  This is more like it (see my photo, below):

This photo is more real - and explains what TrustRank really is - though I doubt Google would agree with me.

I was half thinking about having a sandwich at work, there's often food around - but when you put it next to a garbage can, the food becomes garbage, at least, in my mind, it does.

Besides my own mood and needs, it's the context that objects are in that make them attractive, or not.

I think, and this is where Google goes into error - that you can apply physical ideas like association and reputation (ie: one color next to another, changes both - simultaneous contrast) or hang out with criminals, you become one - to links coming from a website (especially if they're "paid links").

But what I think is wrong - that we're using links as a way of evaluating a site - I think that's wrong - but that's still a big part of Google's Pagerank algorithm.

Getting back to my photo, the food in the table didn't change - it's my conception of the food that changed - because it's next to a Garbage Can.

You may argue that people should not put food next to a garbage can if you want it to be eaten, or you should not link to offending sites if you want Google to rank your site - but that's all based on the idea of CONSUMPTION.

I think the reason why search results aren't that good anymore is the that links are used to determine much of the value of a site and it's reputation - when it no longer makes any sense to do so - it did, 10 years ago, but it doesn't, any longer and I think it's time for the Pagerank algo to be retired and replaced with something else.

Sure, I don't want to eat that sandwich - but I don't think Google should be my alter ego and decide, what is appealing and deserves to be shown, vs, what is not, based on it's own self serving idea of consumption.   I don't think we can evaluate the true value of anything just by what it is next to - what it links to - that's why the Search Results, in my opinion, are getting worse, not better.

I think Social Networks do offer a solution - and that appear to be the relationship of how information is used, not just what you link to, but how you interact - the whole Social Graph thing - that is much more meaningful than just looking at a bunch of links.

In fact, I'm reminded of ideas I've had about works in Museums, and how art is shown, or in fact, how a meal is prepared.  When you put a Van Gogh next to a Rembrandt, one of the paintings is going to suffer, probably the Rembrandt, it will look darker and older - and yet, if you put two similar paintings next to each other, they will probably enhance one another. Same thing with a meal - certain dishes don't work so well with each other - it's hard to appreciate everything when it's all mixed in on one plate.

And I think, it's the same thing with websites and search engines - that we need to look beyond what links to what - and more at what does one entity does with something else - not just what kind of links are on a page - but what do visitors do when they transverse that link.

But here's a problem - Google might have the technology to track all of this - but in order to do so, that data could easily invade our privacy, and it's a can of worms to track to track and evaluate sites based on behavior of visitors clicking on links - yet we have to move away from an "link economy" - a term that Jeff Jarvis likes to use a lot - to an action based economy - not what we link to, or who links to us, but we do with the information.

I wrote two posts over the last day or so that describe interesting problems with search engines - in the first place I noted that People Search Less for what they’re not interested in.  That's right - no matter how optimized you make your site and how well  you do in search results - if people aren't that interested, and they aren't as interested in buying houses right now, then all the optimization in the world is not going to sell you more houses, or house plans, etc.

In fact, Hitwise was able to show something I was privately telling my clients for quite some time - getting the search results is just the first 25% of making a sale, or even less  - it's what happens after a visitor arrives on the site that really matter - but in the case of things like "house plans" or "houses" there really is lower demand and there fore, traffic will go down on searches related to "houses" because it must go down - people don't want to eat a lot more food after they've just eaten - or, you can't sell house plans to people who are losing their homes, when there's over a years worth of new homes that can't be sold right now and are depreciationg in value.

Look, if you don't belive me, look at this chart (below)

Not sure if less searches led to lower prices on houses or the other way around - but you can see the two are co-related.  I'll leave it at that.

Also, I wrote another post about Keyword Search sucks according to TechCrunch - and it does.  So, people aren't looking because they can't afford to - and then, when they do look, the termonology doesn't match up well with teh content up there, on the web.

This was very much on my mind (esp the first post I mentioned); but I took a break from it and dropped off a painting of mine to a gallery in Brooklyn - here's a movie I made of my analytic impressions of the day:

Actually, I took a look at SearchMe this afternoon and quite like it; it's not the greatest Search Engine out there, but the interface, or at least, the part you deal with, is pretty nice.

Too bad Google Search isn't like that - but then again, not sure I want Google to get any better - I'd like to see something else, someone new, come up with a stealth application that throws a monkey wrench into Google's Search and Information domination scheme. 

I was able to get a look at My Mahalo before it's preview on Wednesday during Jason Calacanis's keynote at SES NY and I liked what I saw but I had many questions for Jason (while he conducted the interview) not all which he answered.

There was so much going on this week, I'm probably not going to be able to really sit down and digest, summarize many of the interviews I did - including the one with Jason Calacanis.   Fortunately, being first is not necessarily the best thing - and much of the work of describing what Jason said and what My Mahalo is has been done by others - so I don't have to do that - I can spend some time over the weekend going over what I liked or didn't, and why.

However, I did want to put something out there, at least as a marker for which I'll later take a position about - and to sum up what's been said so far - Calacanis has done that with his post on My Mahalo preview at SES New York which he published earlier today.

I think there's an open question about how much of the Social Graph people really care to see; I have some thoughts about that.    

One of the issues, questions that came up over and over is the scalability issue - can something like a human edited web really keep up with all the content that's constantly mushrooming up - it can't.  

I think the approach taken in My Mahalo works, but not for everything - it works for niche subjects, and areas like medicine and natural remedies - areas of knowledge and expertise - but beyond that, I'm not sure.  

I need to think about it and I'll have more to say later on this week. 

Well, it looks like Ask.com is going to mothball Teoma and start using Google as their search engine.  I'm thinking that Search Engine Strategies, later this month in New York City, is going to be more interesting this year due to all the changes going on in the Search Industry - there will be a lot to talk about.

TechCrunch reported Ask.com May Dump Teoma For Google, Layoff 100 People and I created a post about what that means (to me) - Ask.com getting rid of Teoma and moving to Google?

Here's the problem - if everyone except Google and Yahoo give up on Search we'll end up with Google being even more of what it already is -  a monopoly.

History has shown us Monopoly is not conducive to growth - we need competition in order to grow - but if everyone throws in the towel and lets Google run everything -it'll mirror very much what's happened in the world stage where United States was/is the only remaining Superpower.  

And you know how that worked out so far.  That's why Ask.com should not get rid of Teoma and be moving to Google and why it'll be interesting to see who ends up owning Yahoo, Microsoft or someone else. 

Can any of the search engines really improve all that much - and have they improved all that much lately?   Yeah, Google has Universal Search (but I don't get all excited over that) and Yahoo has improved the appearance of it's pages and search results (but the results aren't all that much better than they ever were).  Microsoft has spent the last two years rolling at Live, but for a while, no one could figure out why they called it "Live" and why they bothered at all (and now that Microsofts seeks to buy Yahoo - that's even more true).

However, Ask.com continues to improve in very tangible ways - and even if it doesn't really matter much in the bottom line - because improving Search is not really all that important anymore - people have moved on - I still appreciate all the changes Ask.com has been making - changes you can really see when you use their Search Engine.

I got the news about the latest change from Jay Mettle who mentioned how Compete.com data was being worked into some of Ask.com's search results - the story is on the Ask.com blog.

Also, I wrote in detail about the improvements on Ask.com in a post Ask.com + Compete.com = better Ask Search at The Analytics Guru. 

Read about SpaceTime today in Read/WriteWeb and downloaded the tool - Visual Web Browsing with SpaceTime.  

"…SpaceTime is one of the start ups at CES. They’re launching a new version of their 3-D web browsing tool - version 1.0. The free download is a lot like Mac users are used to using. You can interact with windows and your browser, along with perform visual web searching. The interface lets you more interact more intimately with content - like separating out images or videos from your browser.

The tool automatically launches top pages in your search result, but you must click on the image to launch the page. If you search for images it will display them as a stack of individual images matching the keywords, not the actual web site."

It looks interesting but I didn't really find SpaceTime that useful yet - maybe I need to play with it more.