I dunno, I think this is this simplest, cleanest explanation about the way SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not worth paying for, much less endorsing:

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

— Derek Powazek – Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

Make sure to see his follow-up – basically a reply to the comments to the original article (as good as original article): “Seo FAQs.”

I agree with him fully: SEO is, to me, building correct sites (not images with text, AIR or Flash etc. [today!] ). Good content; good design. If you can’t get those two together (content/design), yeah, you’re in deep doo-doo.

SEO – the black magic offered by name only today – just games the system; possible short- or long-term bump. Who can say? Yep, that’s part of the problem.

I’m betting on good content/design vs. SEO “magic.”

Officially winter; the longest night of year behind us.

What bodes for this winter/spring (and so on)?

It’s been a crazy year (employment, elections, ecommerce, journalism and so on).

Bring it on…

Tomorrow, Time magazine is scheduled to announce its annual “Person of the Year.”

It’s the usual mix of personnel on the short list, some of which I don’t get (Steve Jobs? Why this year? Obama, of course etc.)

It’s not on the list, but my choice for Person/Thing of the year would be the smartphone.

Yes, the iPhone – which completely redefined this niche – is two-and-a-half years old, but – to me (yes, a techie) – today’s smartphones are so prevalent and important that they have, in many ways, stopped being phones.

They are hand-held computers.

And ever since the iPhone took it to this level, every phone that came out since has tried to one-up it (I don’t think anyone has; Droid is close).

This is the year of the outcry of the Apple App Store blocking apps, of Android really taking off and the Droid almost equaling the iPhone, of the high hopes (dashed, to a degree) for the Palm Pre etc.

This was the year when there was no going back. You don’t have a phone, you have a smartphone. If you don’t, your next phone certainly will be.

And the app store that works with your smartphone has become nearly as important as the phone itself – and the app store’s importance will only increase as all phones become somewhat equal.

That was one of the big drawbacks to the Palm Pre when it first came out – it had an app store with only a few dozen apps.

Android, with its open and familiar Java architecture, made making apps easy and appealing for many – the Android App store, one year young, now has 20,000 apps, approximately 2/3 free.

This is less than the iPhone’s 50,000 apps in its first year, but Android came second. Apple had first-mover advantage, and – to be honest – a cult-like following.

I work with many people who have only a cell phone, and virtually all of them have an iPhone. They can post to Facebook or Flickr with it, take pictures, text friends, listen to iTunes on it.

Oh – they sometimes even use it to place or take a call!

I’ve been through a lot of tech shifts (yes, I worked at a dot-com start-up during the internet boom/bubble/burst), and this smartphone shift is as significant as the migration of, well, almost everything to the web.

Location is the next frontier on these small computers, and this space is already getting cluttered.

And neat ideas/solutions are being developed.

What comes next with regard to smartphones?

Almost anything.

Which is why I consider the smartphone to be the person of the year.

Update 12/16: Time has named Fed Chief Ben Bernake as its person of the year. Yes, he was the point person (with Geithner and Obama) on keeping us out of a depression, but he has not really been seen as entirely competent (to be fair, what superman could be “competent” under these conditions?). Krugman has a funny take on Bernake’s honor.

1979 Real Snow Job. Car boxed in

Ah, now is the winter of our discontent…

Or, winter has begun: First big snow falling.

Hey, it’s Chicago – that’s what happens. The local news is treating this like Weather Porn, it’s the Apocalypse and so on.

Yep, have to shovel. Have to clean off car.

(NOTE: Pic from years ago, when there was significant snowfall)

Taylor sleeping

OK, I agree with Kevin Drum about cats’ sleeping habits. I think anyone who has (non-kitten) cats would agree with him.

He says:

What do cats do when they’re home alone? The folks at Nestle Purina PetCare’s Friskies division installed cat-cams on 50 cats in order to find out, and they’ve now announced the results:

Based on the photos, about 22 percent of the cats’ time was spent looking out of windows, 12 percent was used to interact with other family pets and 8 percent was spent climbing on chairs or kitty condos. Just 6 percent of their hours were spent sleeping.

Uh huh. Look: I work at home. So I know exactly what my critters do between the hours of nine and five: they sleep.

I’m with him. Six percent sleeping?? Maybe kittens…but older cats? At least 60%.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the internet following the not-yet-materialized threat by News. Corp.’s leader Rupert Murdoch to pull the listings of his companies’ publications from Google’s index – possibly with Microsoft’s (Bing’s) help/monetary support.

Since Murdoch’s publications include the Wall Street Journal, this shot across Google’s bow has launched a thousand blog entries (1,001 with this one…).

However, some of the mainstream articles take off in wild directions based upon this single shot.

Danny Lyons writes about this in the Dec. 7, 2009, print publication of Newsweek (available online Nov. 29). Lyons takes the argument (Murdoch vs. Google) to the next (demented) step: It’s really a battle between Microsoft and Google.

Huh?

Basically, Lyons argues MS is willing to pay Murdoch for linking to News Corp. articles so Google can’t. I don’t buy that (sure, that’s a bonus…), but whatever.

Lyons ends his article with this observation:

The sad truth is that Google and Microsoft care less about making cool products than they do about hurting each other. Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet. Microsoft wants to ruin Google’s search business. Google wants to ruin Microsoft’s OS business. At the end of the day, they both seem like overgrown nerdy schoolboys fighting over each other’s toys.
— Google This!

Oh, there is just so much wrong with this little paragraph:

“The sad truth is that Google and Microsoft care less about making cool products than they do about hurting each other.” While there is certainly some truth to this statement, which of the two companies allows engineers 20% of their work week to work on whatever the hell they want to work on? You know, to try to create cool, sexy stuff? And while it doesn’t always work out – Google Labs is like Source Forge (but on steriods) – a lot of projects that will never get to a full release version. But Google’s had great success with this: The “20% time” projects have given birth to Gmail, Google Maps and Orkut, among others. The first two have revolutionized their respective niches (browser-based email; online maps) and the latter, while a failure in the US, is huge in South America, especially in Brazil, that continent’s most populous and fastest-growing country. Pretty “cool,” hmm?

“Their fighting has little to do with helping customers and a lot to do with helping themselves to a bigger slice of the money we all spend to buy computers and surf the Internet.” The last part of the sentence is course absolutely true. The internet’s getting more and more omnipotent and a conduit for commerce every day in so many ways. The bigger piece of the internet pie, the bigger revenues. Absolutely. And both Microsoft and Google are huge players in this pie grab, fighting for every sliver of this new marketplace. But – if you’re going to try to grab more pie – you have to help the people who are surfing the web: the customers. That’s what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows Mobile (smartphone OS) and Google’s trying to do with the various products it creates and give away: Capture customers and, in turn, capture revenue. Look at the old Napster: Yep, pirated music. People said once we had it free, we’d never go back. Steve Jobs and iTunes proved that wrong. Make it drop-dead simple, and people will use it – and you’ll profit.

“Microsoft wants to ruin Google’s search business. Google wants to ruin Microsoft’s OS business.” I think the first sentence is true: Google is (currently) primarily an advertising company, and search is the tool of choice. If Google search went dark tomorrow and stayed that way, the company would collapse. No question. Yet Google has a huge hunk of online search, and Microsoft covets it. Absolutely. But “Google want to ruin Microsoft’s OS business”? Nah. To me, Google’s not looking at Microsoft: It’s looking at the future. And the future is online, not the desktop. So Google’s doing everything it can to get – and keep – people online, and to make the customer experience online as positive as possible. Hence Google Docs, for example: Enable users to put documents in the cloud, where they can work on them everywhere – no thumb drives required; no syncing. Ditto for Gmail. Keep people online; keep them in apps that’ll serve up ads. This hurts Microsoft, to be sure – undermines the cash cows Office and Windows. But – in my mind – to me this is not Google trying to “ruin Microsoft’s OS business” as it is positioning itself for the future, which is not on the desktop. If it hurts Microsoft, that’s just gravy.

RE: The final point, I’d say that Google’s ChromeOS looks like Google taking direct aim at Microsoft – in particular, the incredibly profitable Windows franchise – but, again, I think this is just Google looking to the future. This OS will boot incredibly quickly and will only access the cloud – but it’ll be optimized to take advantage of the cloud offerings better than any browser (including Google’s confusingly named Chrome browser) on any platform.

It’s a way to let people inexpensively (it’ll just be for cheap netbooks initially) access, work in, stay in the cloud. And while they’re there – checking Gmail or Google Maps or whatever – they’ll be served up ads by Google.

Ka-ching!

Update: Scoble gets it.

CIA Factbook

There’s been a lot of talk about Afghanistan recently, mainly with President Obama trying to select the next step in our war effort(s) there.

Last week on WNPR, I heard a couple of reports about the war that made me think of the Afghan war in an entirely different way. As so-called experts talked about the challenges of the war and so on, I was struck by how similar the current engagement in South Asia is to our decades-old war on drugs (be it the drug war in Columbia, Mexico or even Afghanistan).

Bear with me:

• In both cases, we’re not fighting a country; we’re actually working in countries with each government’s support in an attempt to crush the target. (I.e. enemies within.)
• In both cases, we heavily support the governments in the countries we’re fighting.
• In both cases, the governments we’re working with are suspected of internal corruption, up to and including working with those we are trying to stymie.
• In both cases, there is not a single target we’re fighting: They are fragmented (Taliban splinter groups/Al-Qaeda; drug cartels) and these parties fight against each other as much as they engage us. And neutralizing one (whatever that mean in this scenario: capturing/killing a faction’s leader? Won’t another just step up, or the faction split into multiple factions. Think of Mickey Mouse and the brooms in Fantasia) is a just one-of-many issue. Not the end of the engagement, in any way.
• In both cases, a predominately third-world population is powerless to combat these small but heavily armed (money/weapons/government influence) factions, so a citizen revolt is all but impossible, much less simple tips from citizens. If they give us tips, the factions may kill them. If they give the faction tips, the worst that can happen is we toss them in prison. But they live.

These are just a handful of the parallels.

And ask yourself this question: What is a victory, success in either of these conflicts?

Will illegal drug production ever stop? Of course not. What reduced level of production, violence, corruption is a victory?

Will religious fundamentalists ever completely stop? Of course not. What reduced level of virulent anti-West ideology/violent fundamentalism is considered a victory?

Given all that he has on his plate – including the morass that is Afghanistan – I’m sure there are nights when President Obama wonders if it’s too late to ask for an electoral recount…

Update about an hour later: Reading this over, it sounds like I’m somehow blaming someone for either the Afghan or drug war. Not the case. I’m just pointing out what are – to me – some chilling parallels. No finger pointing.

Update Tues. 12/1: President Obama officially announced that he’ll be sending roughly 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, for up to two years (2011), depending on conditions. I wish him luck; some of my reading shows this to be the only viable option (with numerous caveats). I remain skeptical, but hope I’m terribly wrong.

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, effectively uniting West and East Germany into…uh, Germany (Deutschland).

Five years ago, the little browser that could – Mozilla Firefox – released version 1.0.

Berlin Wall going down? Yeah, a little more significant than the initial release of Firefox.

But both newsworthy!

WATCHING:
Bottle Shock
Randall Miller, Director

A movie in the vein of “Sideways” – about wine, about Napa Valley.

Based on a true story, basically outlining (in a wildly strange way) how Napa accidentally got on the map for good wine (competing with the French) and setting the stage for non-French wineries everywhere to operate on a somewhat even ground.

I.e. Quality is the differentiation, not location (i.e. France).

Not a great movie, but fun. Quirky.

It’s “Sideways” meets “The Dish.”

Worth a watch – and I don’t say that a lot.

It helps to be into wine – in the very slightest way – to enjoy same. Helps. Not necessary.

All movies

I just spent about three hours trying to fix my home network.

Turned out to be a bad port on my router (second time this has happened).

Put the Ethernet cord to another port on my switch.

Yes!

Ah, must back in my “backup” router and make it primary. Yeah, lot’s of time to do so…but may have to shortly.

Wow, how boring am I?!?

WATCHING:
Proposal, The
Anne Fletcher, Director

Another one in a long list of “hey, I have to marry someone – anyone – to get my Green Card” movies.

This one is about as unpredictable as a glacier, and about as fast-moving.

I like both Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock (the stars), but come on.

Scenery was beautiful – allegedly in Sitka, AK. Turns out it was all filmed in New England, so it’s all matte paintings. Super.

Has its moments, but I’ll never rent again.

All movies

When Google Web Elements came out a few months ago, I was on board from Day 1.

There were a few bumps in the road with the Google Maps element (I had to change DocTypes on all my blogs pages so it’d work in IE 7, I believe); however, I like the Google Maps and especially the Google Custom Search widget.

I have the latter embedded on the index page (only, currently) of my blog, and it works brilliantly.

It seems to index my blog entries much more quickly now – my last post was about four hours ago, and it’s already showing up in my site search. And I’m no big deal – it’s the Custom Search that appears to be driving the quick indexing. Interesting.

Update: This post was indexed in less than an hour.