I was privileged to spend an evening at Google Haifa with:

• Yossi Matias, Head of Google’s Israel R&D center
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience
• Noam Nisan, Google research scientist
• Some Googlers demonstrating some of their products (Sadly I didn’t catch their names — anybody who knows them, feel free to chime in)

The understated descriptions for Yossi, Marissa, and Noam are from Google’s page for this event, and remind me of Danny Sullivan joking that “Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.” Dr. Matias is a former air force pilot who published over 100 research papers and holds 20 patents. Dr. Nisan is an expert in algorithmic game theory. Marissa Mayer has led product management efforts on Google search products since 1999 and was the youngest woman to ever make Forbes’ list of most powerful women.

What most stood out to me was Google’s approach to product management.

• A Googler mentioned that Google has never been good at starting with a business plan and building the technology to address those needs.
• The same Googler mentioned that meetings are usually short at Google because Google’s product managers were all very smart & technical and understood the issues right away. He contrasted that to the other companies in which he worked where he said most product managers were idiots.
• There were 4 rooms where Google engineers were holding court, describing the products they were working on and answering questions. The passion and pride were impressive.
• Dr. Matias discussed how Google doesn’t have traditional product management. In addition to Google’s famed policy of letting engineers spend 20% of their time on pet projects, they have a large role in defining the features on which they spend the other 80% of their time.
• They don’t have any project managers. He said they don’t use Gantt charts, by which I think he meant they don’t use any scheduling tools. They do have deadlines, but the deadlines don’t seem to be driving the pace of development.
• Within engineering, the team leadership positions are fairly fluid. One person will lead one project, and then a different member will lead the next project.
• It’s largely geeks working together to design and develop products and features that they want to develop and use. Their passions, skills, and professionalism drive the pace.

They were trying to recruit developers, so they may have been playing up the sides that sound like developer heaven, and perhaps showing off their happiest and most passionate developers. It did all sound great, but it’s important to understand some of the harder things that make this work:

• Test-driven development. They had papers put up in the bathroom educating about test-driven development’s importance and best practices.
• Multivariate testing environment exporting boatloads of data.
• Data-driven decision making.

In this sense Google is the ultimate engineering organization. Their product development process seems built on the metaphor of the compiler. Developers are given more say to develop what they think will work because ultimately their creations have to pass this super-compiler, which checks not just for syntax errors but also whether or not the code breaks some other functionality or harms some business metric.

As a product manager, I’ve been repeatedly humbled by our own data-driven systems. It’s our nature to assume we’re usually right. Maybe you are. Testing has proven to me that I’m not.

Google’s Udi Manber told Business Week that they ran 5,000 experiments last year, and probably have 10 experiments for every successful launch.

On a perhaps related note, at SMX Advanced Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi pointed out that Bing’s mission was to help people accomplish their tasks, while Google’s mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Bing focused on people, Google focused on data. One quick data point: Googling “Google’s mission” got me directly to what I was looking for. Binging “Bing’s mission” got me nothing, so I’m quoting Mehdi from memory. Focusing on people sounds like a great idea, but focusing on the information may actually be a better way to give people what they want.

Peter Drucker spoke of “management by objectives and self control.” Google takes this a step further by giving testing and data a central role in management. I wonder if most engineers would rather be managed by a compiler or by a person. It’s nice that Google has icons like Marissa Mayer to put a human face to it all. Google’s system is admirable, IMO, and probably quite efficient. Still, it may be best that Google’s product managers are generally engineers by training. This approach may be best suited for us tin men.

More about Google and its competitive environment:

• Google & The Facebook Fantasy
• Microsoft, Mehdi, and Matt Cutts
• The Google Definition Link and Answers.com

[Reminder / Disclosure: I work at Answers.com, which is in some ways a competitor]

Congrats to Joel Spolsky on getting funding from an all star team of investment bankers. Having this combination of great entrepreneurs and great VCs certainly increases this companies’ chances. But the company’s current plan seems to based on two (long shot?) assumptions both coming in:

Stack Exchange

1. Stack Overflow’s success in building great content and community will be replicated to many other areas, even though so far their efforts here have failed.
2. The expert content and community will one day bring significant revenue, even though so far their efforts here have failed.

Stack Exchange Sites

“Over the course of the 6 months we have found a lot of successful sites have gotten created, my favorite is mathoverflow.net for PhD level mathematicians. …  It’s a really awesome site, get’s a lot of traffic … It’s an incredible resource for mathematicians that basically erupted on the StackExchange platform in about 2 months, that it went from 0 to pretty much all the mathematicians on the internet are on there right now.”

– Joel Spolsky, Mixergy: Why Didn’t Stack Exchange Work?

OK, getting all the mathematicians on the internet is pretty cool. Here are the numbers from Alexa:

Stack Exchange Sites

MathOveflow.net is that blue line there at the bottom, sometimes peaking above the level of 100,000th top site in the world.

Assuming Alexa’s numbers are roughly accurate here (I’d use Quantcast, but MathOverflow.net doesn’t rank high enough to get a listing there right now) then at least one (and possibly both) of the following are true:

1. Spolsky’s a little off in his estimate that they have all the mathematicians on the internet.
2. “All the mathematicians on the internet” is a very, very small market.

Not very encouraging that this is the one site he points to as their biggest success in all the interviews and posts I saw from him on this subject.

ServerFault and SuperUser have had more success, but they’re almost spinoff sites to Stack Overflow, going after neighboring markets that overflowed from SO’s natural user base.

Key Factors Behind StackOverflow’s Success with Programmers

“The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience (#15 on Bloglines) and Jeff’s (#89) would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day one. So Jeff and I decided to go in together on this.” — Joel Spolsky, Stack Overflow Launches

A number of key factors helped Stack succeed with programmers:

1. Spolsky and Jeff Atwood had very large tribes of programmers who followed them here. Generally speaking, these community members:
   1. Were committed enough to the art of programming that they read the industry’s top blogs
   2. Had been reading Spolsky and Atwood’s great posts, and were now getting a chance to both give back and show off their knowledge to their mentors and their community
   3. Already felt like a community, and already acknowledged these two site owners as their leaders.
2. Programmers generally:
   1. Do their job by typing on their computers, usually while on the internet.
   2. Are comfortable learning new sites and programs, and using the Web to share information. Many programmers I know prefer to get their information from virtual friends on the internet than from the guy in the next office.
3. Programming questions are generally of little interest to anybody who isn’t a professional programmer. Therefore programmers generally:
   1. Don’t make a living by charging for their advice (like most lawyers, for example)
   2. Don’t get hounded for professional advice while out with friends (doctor, I’ve been having this pain …)
   3. Can run a Q&A site where a very high percentage of the people are their peers, asking and answering each others’ questions. By contrast, Spolsky discussed building a site for professional gardeners. It would be very hard to stop that site from being filled with people like me asking stupid questions about my plants.

Take another example Spolsky suggested, Home Improvement:

• Instead of Spolsky and Atwood you could start with Bob Villa and Tim the Tool Man Taylor (the Buzz Light Year of Home Improvement). Or whoever the equivalent bloggers are in that industry (if such people exist). You may need to give them significant equity in this new site so that they’d bring their large online communities in, and you’d need them to hang around and mingle for a while .
• Most home improvement professionals aren’t typing on the computer while doing their job. They’d generally need to answer these questions at night from home.
• Most questions would come from non-professionals. And eventually, probably most answers as well. Experts would more often visit the site looking for clients than expecting to spend quality time with their professional peers.

If you tried to do an SEO Q&A site (as has been suggested) you’d at least be starting with people who are online. Then you could try to get people like Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan, and Michael Gray to bring their communities on to your Q&A site. Right, because that’s why they built these communities, so they could give them to you. And then they’d have to hang around and help lead your community. And even if you could pull that off, the SEO industry is filled with consultants who get paid to share their information, and who build web sites for a living. Good luck getting their readers to volunteer their time to building your enterprise.

Last example I’ll give is VCs. Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon and the other Stack Overflow angels already have an interest in the company. Maybe they’ll commit themselves to making AngelOverflow work. But I’m guessing that VCs’ audiences fit the pattern of most audiences on the web. Most of Fred Wilson’s readers are probably NOT fellow Angels, but rather entrepreneurs who find Angels and their information fascinating and potentially useful. The programming world is a fairly rare exception, because only programmers care about most programming questions. On AngelOverflow, I’d be asking the questions, and I’d love to see how long Chris Dixon sticks around to answer my questions. It’s not a symmetric community. It’s an expert / celebrity and his audience / fans.

Happy to hear what subject areas you think are going to work. I haven’t heard any that I think have a good shot, other than the awesome MathOverflow site that “gets lot of traffic” and has “pretty much all the mathematicians on the internet.”

Stack Exchange Revenue

Well, it’s 1999 again. Stack is going to accumulate eyeballs and assume there’s going to be a way to monetize them.

Within a few days of Stack’s announcement that the paid Stack Exchange 1.0 failed and they were going to pivot to a free model:

• Community site Ning announced that it was abandoning its free model, going to a pay model, and firing 40% of its staff.

• Ask.com’s parent IAC announced that they were shutting down FiLife, the free Financial Q&A site they had been running with Dow Jones.

It was interesting that at the same time top angels took the leap of faith that Stack Exchange would be able to turn eyeballs into money.

Thanks to Jeff and Joel for documenting their monetization attempts, and to William Shields for gathering these in his excellent post about Stack’s failed efforts at monetization:

• Responsible Advertising: Feed a Programmer
• Our Amazon Advertising Experiment
• Summary of Amazon Remnant Ad Experiment.

My favorite is Jeff’s comment “well, we have earned $1.16 so far. I think I will go buy a twix, and we can share it.”

But, we’re going to party like it’s 1999. I hope this one ends better.

What Comes First, Quality or Quantity?

Six months ago Joel had a soul searching moment when he asked if slow growth = slow death, discussing Ingres’ battle with Oracle.

“Executives at Ingres meant well. According to [Geoffrey] Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.” Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?” — Joel Spolsky, Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

This story may be part of what drove Spolsky to raise venture capital to grow Stack Overflow more quickly. And it may have changed some policies regarding his other company, Fog Creek. But he remains smugly confident that he’ll conquer the Q&A market one niche at a time, while focusing on high quality at moderate quantity. He mocks sites that are taking the Oracle approach of trying to grow very quickly and then scampering to get the quality to catch up to the quantity.

Other Issues

Stack is also betting that verticals will be more successful than horizontals in the Q&A market. That’s what most of the smart people thought about search too. But building these individual communities almost from scratch is going to be a tremendous challenge.

Stack is betting that their model of democratically choosing which sites to build next will result in the creation of the sites that will succeed in terms of community and revenue.

Closing Thought

Joel is leading a great team of entrepreneurs, angels, and software developers. If anybody can make this model work, it’s them. But IMO that’s a very big if.

Am I missing the boat here? Please let me know your thoughts.

I just found an interesting reason why some people want to believe that Facebook will replace Google. With Google you have to decide what you’re looking for, and with Facebook interesting things come to you. There’s a fantasy that technology will free us from having to think, and decide, to be disciplined.

“Most of the technologies and platforms we use these days require our action. In order to achieve anything, we have to acknowledge the need, make a decision, and then follow through.

Example: You need a new swimsuit for the summer and you decide to find one that best matches your search criteria: Color, style, size, etc. …   This simple task requires a bit of thought and effort on your part.

What if you could skip this process and let technology offer you the perfect swimsuit once the summer season arrives, without asking you to take any action?”

– Yuli Ziv, 5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate the Next Decade in Mashable

A nice thing about reading penetrating writers like Yuli Ziv is that they put their key premises right out there to accept or critique. I’ll choose the latter on this one.

The key part of the Facebook Fantasy here isn’t social; it’s serendipity. Disciplined goal-oriented determined activity will be a thing of the past. We can just do what comes naturally and everything we want will come to us. We can be our ADD selves, and the good things will come to us, while we just flow.

Then I realized that this was hitting a nerve because I was still reacting badly to Lisa Barone’s How to Write a Blog Post. I like just writing. Lisa actually has a 7-step process, which includes things like “decide on your goal,” “find your hook,” and read it out loud a few times and keep improving it.

But while commenting on her post that her system would make this take so much longer, I wondered if that kind of discipline would actually shorten the process, in addition to improving the end result.

By nature, I’m way on Yuli’s side on this one. I’m an extreme ADD, who loves jumping around to different topics and finding complementary and contradictory ideas from different voices and subject areas. This post is the result of just such an example, seeing from Yuli’s post why I was bothered by Lisa’s.

So yes, serendipity is great.

But part of the reason we value it so much is that it justifies things like watching TV while writing this post. I can just invite more stimulations and go with the flow. And when I get stuck trying to figure out the next sentence, I can just switch over to Twitter and see if anything interesting is happening there. My ADD brain hurts and freezes up when I try to force it to focus on the goals I set out for myself. So yeah, I like serendipity.

But the serendipity that we get from sites like Facebook really doesn’t liberate us from our needs for impulse control and self-discipline. In fact, it increases our need for those traits, and for finding the discipline to plan and execute complex activities in a goal-oriented fashion.

Yuli opened with “In order to achieve anything, we have to acknowledge the need, make a decision, and then follow through.” She writes that as though the need to make conscious decisions is a bad thing from which we will be liberated by cool technology. Sorry. We’ll always need to make hard choices, follow through, and do grunt work. Facebook is cool, but it doesn’t free us from the need for self-discipline.

And now that I’ve shared that thought, I’ll move on to the most annoying steps of quality blogging: editing and re-editing. And then maybe I’ll do what I was supposed to do this morning. Often I’d prefer if we lived in a world where serendipity and flow replace proactive thought and determined action. But we don’t. Get used to it.

“I want to believe that we will finally admit — to ourselves and to the public at large — that allowing people to hide behind anonymity has not been good for our industry, our culture or our country.” — Anonymous (just kidding. Connie Schultz)

Back to privacy? Won't happen.

For thousands of years most people lived in small communities, and knew most of what there was to know about one another.

Then we saw the rise of cities, and increase in mobility, and city-dwellers could suddenly live in relative anonymity. This had many liberating benefits, but also quite a few costs. I’m guessing the average small town has neither strip clubs nor homeless people.

When the internet began, the first movements were towards increased anonymity. You could go online and be whoever you wanted and nobody would ever know.

And then a funny thing happened. After years of creating fake online identities the norm became to use your real identity online. The rise of Facebook really marks this shift in internet usage, and the increased use of Facebook Connect means that people are using their real identity as they travel throughout the internet. Facebook’s latest social releases will further accelerate this shift.

Of course technology has been creating large databases of information about our habits for a few decades now, through identifiers such as credit cards and loyalty numbers. Linking these to the information now available about us on the Web is creating enormous databases that know enough to qualify as deities.

At SMX Toronto, Gillian Muessig expressed strong concerns about these Big Brother all-knowing corporations with all this data, and she tried to rally up the troops to get active in encouraging politicians to craft intelligent privacy regulations.

But almost nobody at the conference seemed to care. As far as I can tell, most kids today (and by kids I mean anybody younger than me, which is a fast-growing demographic) have long-ago accepted this trade-off. They don’t value anonymity nearly as much my generation did. They don’t expect it, and they don’t particularly care about not having it. They’d rather get targeted ads and content from a technology that knows them than random junk from the era of mass-marketing and mass-broadcasting.

As we close the door on the age of anonymity, we should recognize the fortunate gains we made during that time in terms of tolerance. In a less tolerant age, it was far more common to keep secrets, to hide skeletons in the closet. I now routinely see younger generations talking comfortably about things their parents and grandparents would have hidden.

People are sometimes too open today, and they’ll learn to cut back. Hint: Don’t call in sick and then Tweet about what a great time you’re having at a party. When you give up your anonymity you have to be a lot more careful if you want to lie to some while telling the truth to others. We’ll learn, and I’d like to think we’ll live more honestly and openly.

Regarding legislation, perhaps there are some good laws that should be passed, but some quick concerns:

• Many of us, myself certainly included, fear governments more than we fear corporations.
• Government should not hinder individuals and corporations implicitly agreeing that we’ll let them know about us if in exchange they use this knowledge to personalize and improve our experiences.

The Age of Anonymity was a historical blip, between the time technology spread us apart physically to the time technology brought us together digitally. On the internet, everybody knows you’re a dog. Some will scream about 1984 and Brave New World, but in my opinion, the End of Anonymity is a good thing.

Excellent recent articles in the New York Times, TechCrunch, and All Things D have brought some clarity and insight to the issues surrounding large-scale content-creation sites. Here’s an industry overview:

Assembly Lines for Content

Who?

Demand Media’s eHow, Associated Content, New York Times’ About.com, Aol’s Seed.com, Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com’s WikiAnswers (where I work).

What?

These sites create thousands of articles every day.

The articles generally meet the following criteria:

• Users are searching for it
• Advertisers are bidding on it
• Long potential lifespan, aka “Evergreen” or “durable.” It won’t be “yesterday’s news” tomorrow.

How?

Demand Media has algorithms which sort through search logs and advertiser bids to find which articles will attract both users and advertisers. They then offer these writing jobs to their network of freelance writers and editors. Seed.com and Associated Content follow similar models. Wired magazine provided an excellent description of the process in The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Model (though “disposable” is inaccurate, and his estimates on Demand Media’s profitability through this model seemed to be off by an order of magnitude).

Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers let users post questions to volunteer communities. These sites do not filter based on advertiser value.

About.com is closer to Demand’s model, with a freelance staff of “experts.”

Market Size:

If Yahoo! Answers, eHow, WikiAnswers, and About.com were stand-alone sites, they would probably each rank among the 25 most visited sites in the US.

Many journalists have written that Demand Media is taking in over $200 million a year in this business, but that number is apparently highly misleading. Most of Demand Media’s revenue apparently comes from other, unrelated sources, such as their domain registrar.

The concerns:

Some of these sites are now considered content factories, that are using a freelance global workforce to create specific content according to specific standards.

Some online journalists have expressed concern that this will:

• Decrease journalists’ pay, as they compete with content factories using a freelance global labor force
• Push journalism towards boring and monetizable content
• Fill search rankings with low quality content
• Cause content to be too standardized, like fast food
• Provide low quality content

The journalists’ fears are real. One prominent journalist first wrote positively about Demand Media:

“As long as search engines like Google continue to rank niche, topical content highly – and we see absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t – then Demand Media will continue to pump out thousands of articles a day …”

and then changed track and started throwing around imagery of demonic content farms infiltrating Google, powered by journalists who swallow their pride to work under sweatshop conditions.

Naturally, the first article received little notice, but the later tirades attracted quite an audience. Globalization and efficiency experts sounded like much better ideas when they were threatening other people’s professions.

Still, these sites are generally not playing a large role in the problems facing writers. Eric Schonfeld writes in Seed’s Goal Is To “Redefine Journalism For The Internet Age,” Its Reality Is Untangling Cat Hair.

“Seed is supposed to help by assigning the stories that “satisfy the world’s curiosity” (the Seed Creed) …

The closest assignments I could find that might require some actual reporting are “What it’s like working at Target” ($25) and “How to Untangle Matted Hair on a Cat” ($80), which asks for an interview with a pet groomer.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that none of these are going to win a Pulitzer.  But maybe that’s not what Aol means by redefining journalism.”

These sites are not competing with most journalism. These sites will rarely appear in your search results when you’re looking for hard news. They will show up when you ask Google about untangling cat hair, and they’ll be competing with each other, not with most journalists.

Regarding standardized content, often quality standards are good. I’m glad that eHow articles will generally share a template and meet certain guidelines of how a How To article should be written. Perhaps eHow isn’t the place I go when I want to hear a fresh voice.

The biggest issue may be the last one. These sites produce both high and low quality content, and their long term success will be dependent on how much high quality content they can produce. Wikipedia did a great job creating quality content from a diverse group of volunteers, by focusing on standards. YouTube is a more diverse site, with plenty of great content and plenty of awful content. The search engines will continue to get better at highlighting the quality content. The large content sites will keep getting better at creating quality content. Meanwhile, the best journalists like Kara Swisher, Eric Schonfeld, and David Carr will continue covering these subjects and receiving traffic from their loyal readers and from search engines.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

Wikimedia’s strategy memo is interesting for what it has and for what it’s missing.

Wikimedia Strategic Planning

Key Concerns:

• Editing community has flattened out.
• Have been very successful in the “Global North” but it will be much harder to grow in the “Global South.”
• Technological and financial infrastructure have not kept pace with growth in readership.

They will:

• Invest in their infrastructure: technological, organizational, and financial
• Reduce friction for new contributors
• Remain “free of commercialism”

They won’t:

• Go to China.
• Invest in developing content partnerships
• Invest in direct editorial interventions to increase quality, e.g. paying people for developing content or policies.

Most of their strategy sounds good. They need to build the infrastructure that can handle their site’s activity. They need to make changes to their culture and to their site to encourage new contributors. They should stay out of China. And their mission and vision requires that they expand to parts of the world that need them more, but where progress will be much harder to achieve.

The biggest problem IMO is their plan to increase spending without developing a viable revenue model. The only parts of the strategy document that discuss finances discuss the money that they’ll spend and the income possibilities that they reject.

They discuss their revenue possibilities in a separate document and you can read the notes from their financing task meeting. Ideas include seeking government funding, selling user data, premium subscriptions, more aggressive fundraising, pursuing an endowment, and displaying advertising. The only mention their strategy memo makes of these ideas is to reject some of them. The ones that aren’t rejected may be either unrealistic or worse than the ones that were rejected.

I think Wikipedia does a lot of good. But I think the same of Microsoft and Google. And those companies’ revenues have been (or will be, I expect) used to contribute billions of dollars in taxes and charity. I wish Wikimedia luck in figuring out how to cover their expenses, and I hope their moral compass doesn’t lead them to try to finance through taxpayer money in order to live up to their values of “free of commercialism.”

In 1993, the New Yorker famously published a cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The internet was where you lived your anonymous second life. How times have changed.

The excellent Doc Searls mocked the way sites treat your privacy by imagining it in the real world:

“The [privacy] policy tells you that, if you fill out this guy’s form, he will plant on your person a tracking device that will report your movements back to him. Collected data might include the type of car you drive, the routes you take, the names and addresses of the places you visit, and the times and dates for all this activity …At the bottom of the form, under a heading titled “Your Consent”, it says “In dealing with me, you consent to the terms of my Privacy Policy, my Terms and Conditions, and my processing of Personal Information for the purposes given above. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please stop talking to me. If you continue talking to me, I reserve the right, at my discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions from this Privacy Policy at any time. Your continued conversation with me, after I put a new form like this in my back pocket, means means you accept these changes”.

“This is your ‘Privacy Policy’”? you say.

“Yes”.

“And your ‘Terms and Conditions’ are something else? ” …

– from Where Markets are Not Conversations, Doc Searls

And then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they were changing their privacy policies since privacy was “no longer a social norm.”

Naturally, there’s a lot of discomfort here. I keep flashing back to blockbuster movies with Will Smith and Shia Labeouf where the big bad military types get control of all of our information and use it to tyrannize the innocent. I understand the fear. But ultimately I think Zuckerberg’s point is very relevant and mostly good.

I’m reminded of the scene in Dharma & Greg where Larry is horrified that Dharma got a Social Security card. “Now you’re on the grid!” he says ominously.

I think this is progress. A generation ago people chose untraceable usernames and lived a second life online. Today we use our real names as Twitter handles and Facebook Connect into social applications. Our online presence is part of our total presence. Online man is born anonymous but surrenders his anonymity to society so that we can interact responsibly and with accountability as our true selves. We shed some of the lies and barriers and interact with greater openness than in the past.

This isn’t just an online thing. My parents and grandparents had many family secrets. Intimacies, squabbles, diseases, and struggles were covered up lest family members be shunned from future work or social relationships. People changed their names to hide their religious and ethnic identities.

People today are generally far more open and less prejudiced than they were years ago. As a result there are far fewer people living in their various closets. Billy Joel’s The Stranger keeps declining in relevance. We come closer to interacting publicly as our true selves.

This is not to argue the important details of privacy policies. But the general social shift that Zuckerberg notes is IMO a generally wonderful thing. May we continue to increase society’s openness online & off, and may it be a reflection of increased appreciation and respect for authenticity, individuality, and responsibility.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/ / CC BY 2.0

Counting down the top SEO smackdown of 2009 …

#1: Danny Sullivan v Derek Powazek: SEO = Spammers, Evildoers and Opportunists?

The provocation:

Derek Powazek

“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.

… The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.

… SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam.

… SEO bastards are behind worms that attack blog services

… every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients.

… Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side …”

– Derek Powazek, Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

It gets worse in his comments section, from which he blocked most comments that disagreed with him:

“… I didn’t call SEO people “fucktards” because that wouldn’t be fair to actual retarded people.

… There is no such thing as honest SEO …”

The response:

There were many excellent replies. Danny Sullivan’s calm and powerful replies proved again why he’s earned so much respect:

Danny Sullivan

“… my response come from my own 14 years of covering search engines. Of having answered feedback from hundreds of people. Of having talked with hundreds of people personally. Of understanding that the “you just build it; you just put it out there” approach to search engines, sadly, doesn’t always cut it.

… the stuff that you think isn’t rocket science — that anyone knows — is indeed a mystery to others. They want help, and sometimes they can’t find that web developer who also understands SEO issues. In the same way, you sometimes don’t find web developers who are also designers. Or designers who understand conversion issues. Or conversion experts who understand web development.

… There are bad SEOs out there, who give the entire industry a bad name — just as there are bad bloggers, bad designers, bad cops, you name it. There are also excellent SEOs who work inside of companies as well as through agencies for hire. Don’t tarnish an entire industry that actually helps many, many people in ways I’m sure you would agree with.”

– Danny Sullivan, An Open Letter to Derek Powazek on the Value of SEO

Danny proceeds to tell stories of people who care deeply about their websites but that really needed good SEO advice to reach their customers. He ended his post with links to the excellent posts he wrote replying to other rants on the same issue over the years.

Derek came back the next day with a nasty FAQ blasting SEOs. Danny came back with a stronger response.

“SEO is a profession. Companies from MTV to the New York Times to the Wall St. Journal to Yahoo, to name only a few, employ full-time people who are responsible for SEO (and they aren’t scumbags, either). These companies have some of the best content in the world. And yet, they can still have major issues in how their sites are built or written or constructed that prevent them from doing well in Google or other search engines.

These SEOs, by the way, struggle with web developers who “think” they know SEO but don’t. Web developers who think that despite what an SEO tells them, a 302 redirect is the way to go. And thus the International Herald Tribune loses thousands of links because who wants to trust the scummy in-house SEO, right? I’ve got story after story of web developers and designers who think they know SEO but don’t, who cause major problems for web sites, and yet NO ONE ever writes a blog post blasting them.”

– Danny Sullivan, SEO FAQ That’s Not from the Land of Unicorns

Derek came back a third time, a week later, with an apology so fake it made Lisa Barone’s apologies to Robert Scoble seem sincere. (It actually did. I reread Lisa’s apology and thought she really was trying to de-escalate, she just couldn’t resist the extra jab. But I digress). Derek said that the reaction to his posts were “the least fun thing ever” for him. But his “apology” is centered on the theme “the only reason to get defensive is if it’s true.” So what does his defensiveness against the people that called him an evil ignorant jerk prove?

Danny came back one more time with a post summarizing his years defending the SEO industry’s reputation. Every year, it’s somebody else, coming from the point of view that the natural order of the world is for readers and high quality and relevant content to naturally find each other, and that this would all work perfectly were it not for those evil SEOs. Here’s Danny’s final paragraph:

“I’m often asked why I don’t give up. The reason is that people do listen. You can have conversations and attitudes can change. Make more good SEO visible, and maybe the spam won’t be the main thing that seems to speak for the industry.”

I applaud Danny’s efforts. I have little doubt that we’ll be right back here in 2010 with SEO being scapegoated for all spam, incompetence, and other imperfections in of the web. And maybe next year’s argument will be more civil and more productive.

On a personal note, I started this smackdown series by letting my darkside loose and playing on our bloodlust for verbal venom. Then I realized I was bringing back all the anger that surrounded these smackdowns. I went back and edited the whole series, playing down the ugliness, and focusing more on the core issues they discussed. I appreciate Danny’s leadership on this smackdown. Danny’s immediate tweets captured his initial anger, but he toned it down and wrote posts that were calm, intelligent, and on point. I hope I can follow his lead. I’m wishing myself and all of us a 2010 where we can summon the better angels of our nature in fun, compelling, and meaningful ways.

Have a great year — and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The full countdown:

#5: Barone v Godin: Brandjacking?

#4: Arrington v Demand Media: End of Hand Crafted Content?

#3: Rand v Whalen: Is ‘Focus on Users, Not Engines’ Terrible Advice?

#2: Barone v Scoble: Is 2010 the Year SEO Becomes Less Important?

#1: Sullivan v Powazek: Is SEO Evil?

Powazek image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorriti/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Sullivan image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/ / CC BY 2.0

… top SEO Smackdowns of 2009 … the countdown continues …

#2. Barone v Scoble: The year SEO isn’t important anymore?

The provocation:

Robert Scoble

“SEO is getting dramatically less important and that SEM should be renamed to “OM” for “Online Marketing” since small businesses need to take a much more holistic approach to marketing than just worrying about search results.” — Robert Scoble, 2010: The year SEO isn’t important anymore?

The counterattack:

Lisa Barone led the counterattack:

Lisa Barone

“As a small business owner, search engine optimization will remain important to your site until the days that people stop searching. And if Google has anything to say about it (and I think they own the world at this point, so, they get a say), the importance of search and optimizing that search will always take center stage.

Yeah, SEO now means incorporating a lot of marketing aspects. It’s about building a brand. It’s about building a community. It’s about showing up in blogs and articles and video (all stuff that can be, what’s the word, “optimized”, BTW). But that doesn’t cancel the rest of it out.”

– Lisa Barone, Ignore the Silly Man, SEO Still Matters for Small Businesses

Regarding the suggested name change to Online Marketing, Lisa writes “I guess the term ‘Internet marketing’ we’ve all been using for a gazillion years wasn’t encompassing enough.”

Getting Ugly:

IMO she went way overboard leading with a picture of an ugly half-naked man in a dunce cap along with the “Ignore the silly man” headline. And when Robert cried foul Lisa smacked him with

“I did not attack you. Let’s not make the post more about you than it really was.”

Then it got colder. Scoble lost his cool, and appeared to call one of her commenters an idiot (upon further review, that’s not what he was saying).

Lisa fanned the flames with some fake apologies like:

Apologies to Robert is he felt “attacked”, I really don’t feel as though it was that hard in the post, but, we all have different levels.

and

Again, apologies if you felt “attacked”

Ouch. If you want to calm things down Lisa, don’t use the words “if” or “felt” and don’t put the word “attacked” in quotes. And the “but we all have different levels.” Wow. Cold.

Several times Robert defended himself with

“my headline was a question, not a statement”

Sorry, but this is disingenuous since:

1. He repeats the central point that “SEO is getting dramatically less important” several times in the article
2. Wording a provocative charge as a headline doesn’t dilute the charge, as the headline authors presumably know. It just gives them a fig-leaf of deniability. If I posted headlines like “Heart attacks: a government conspiracy?” or “”Is [XYZ] a charlatan and a fraud?” and wrote articles mostly justifying those points, could I then turn around and say that I was just asking a question? Would anybody respect me or my writing afterwards? I had to use [XYZ] instead of a person’s name in that second question, since even in this context putting anybody’s name there would be inflammatory. How much more so if it’s a headline on a well read site, backed up by a long article?

A bit of background:

In a previous post Lisa Barone used “scoble” as a verb (I’ll let her define it, but it didn’t seem to be positive) and her blog has a tag scoble mocking which doesn’t even include this last post.

Robert Scoble for his part has been blasting SEOs for a while, for example in this video where he projects that Mahalo will defeat Google because Calacanis will keep those evil SEOs out.

This is part of a larger battle. For the most part, the social media and SEO camps overlap. In fact, Lisa’s profession and expertise is probably more social than search. Search conferences generally include tracks on social media, which SEOs recognize as important. But for various reasons, some members of the social community, most prominently Scoble and Jason Calacanis, sometimes lash out at the SEOs. In Calacanis’ case, it appears to be part of a calculated pattern of picking fights to gain publicity and links. I don’t know about the others. From the SEOs, I’ve only seen the anger directed at the individuals who attack their profession. Please correct me if I’m missing things. But there’s a lot of anger the other way. Social gets all the love and attention, but the SEOs may deliver more traffic and revenue. As Lawrence Coburn says, Sharing is Caring but Google is King.

The calm reply:

A lot less fun, but short and to the point was Danny Sullivan, whose comment on Scoble’s blog was essentially:

1. SEO is not likely to get less important anytime soon
2. For the past decade SEO focus has been far broader than Scoble implies
3. “There’s always been online marketing, which is the umbrella term of marketing — well — online. It includes thing like social media marketing, link building, email marketing, virtual worlds marketing and yes, search marketing. Some online marketers can do all these thing. Many specialize, just as in the real world …”

The final blow:

Scoble’s post started with a video of 2 SEO’s, George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson. The post implies that the conclusions reflect their views. But Revutsky cries foul on Scoble and sides with Lisa, Danny and the other critics:

“Hi Danny – we take no responsibility for that headline. I think Robert is (successfully) practicing linkbait here.

I want to be clear that in no part of this interview did we say that SEO is not going to be important, or is any less important than before.

Thank you (as always) for speaking up for the industry. Most of us would not be here without you.”

and

“Let me say this for the 27th time: our interview itself does not agree with Robert’s post – and neither do we.

The whole idea was to have a general talk about search and SMBs, and let folks know MyNextCustomer is coming soon. That’s it. Robert decided to be provocative all on his own.”

One last point: kudos to both Robert Scoble and Lisa Barone for leaving their comments section open for the whole thing, for engaging their users. Scoble really stands out in this area. There’s a reason Dave Winer has Scoble on his shortlist of Natural Born Bloggers. The man does his thinking out loud, in public, and with tremendous energy and enthusiasm.

Postscript: I don’t know if these posts are connected, but the same day there was a post 2010: The year marketing dies …. First I expected this to be a spoof of Scoble’s post, similar to Ari Ozick’s excellent spoof of Derek Powazek’s anti-SEO rant a few months ago. But no, it was an unrelated piece, with the same title as Scoble’s except the word “SEO” replaced with “marketing.” But the marketing post was subtitled “or at least marketing as we know it.” And its last line was “Marketing is dead. Long live marketing!” It was written by a marketer who was calling on his colleagues to understand how their field was changing. Scoble’s piece was about how his rivals’ industry was collapsing and getting subsumed into Scoble’s industry.

Previous: #3: Rand v Whalen

Next: #1: Sullivan v Powazek

Some Kings Live Forever

Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does well in search engines? Content that generates incoming links, and that addresses the questions that users want answered.

The importance of becoming an authority site was my top conclusion from PubCon. Google values sites that other trusted sites link to. Google’s moves into personalized and social search are going to increase the social cues Google uses in determining what content users value.

The quality eulogies were kicked off by Michael Arrington, whose The End of Hand Crafted Content provocatively claimed that “Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content.”

Great linkbait, made all the greater by how far off it is. Here are some points:

High Quality = High User Value

The best of the recent articles is Martin Bryant’s Audiences aren’t stupid, Quality’s not dead, which ends with this point:

“There’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. Sometimes content farms with their hyper-targeted approach provide exactly what an audience needs. Even if it’s cheap and rushed, an article telling you “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew” (for example) answers a specific question – one that people most quality outlets wouldn’t bother to answer in isolation.

Sometimes it’s the ‘low-quality’ content that fulfills an audience’s need. In that case, is it really low quality?”

Bryant’s point also answers the Forbes editor who warned students about Demand Media:

“They’re paying seasoned journalists five cents a word for their stories. They’re paying very skilled video photographers $2 per video. You’re not going to learn anything about a secret drone attack in Afghanistan on this site. You’re going to find stories like: What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?

Forbes is a business & financial magazine. Are most of their stories about “a secret drone attack in Afghanistan?” And if readers are more interested in “What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?” then which story provides more value to the user? It seems like Demand Media is doing exactly what Forbes is trying to do, provide quality content of interest to a commercial audience. But Demand Media may be doing it better.

At PubCon Google’s Matt Cutts encouraged web publishers to do keyword research to see what users are looking for, so that the publishers  can meet the demand. This is a good thing.

Quality: The Wikipedia Model

User generated content sites’ long term success is dependent on becoming a trusted authority. Back in 2004 I was asked to add Wikipedia’s content into Answers.com (then GuruNet). I resisted because Wikipedia was lower quality than the professionally published sources we were licensing. Studies now show Wikipedia quality to be on par with Britannica. When Chris Whitten approached us to purchase WikiAnswers I had a similar hesitation, because it was often lower quality than our licensed content. But like Wikipedia (though a few years behind), WikiAnswers quality improves every year. I’ll put a stake in the ground and say that within 12 months it will be considered the authority site for answers.

Quality Unique Voices Will Find Audiences

Ross Dawson and Doc Searls have also provided clarity in this debate.

Searls writes:

“I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think Fast Food Content is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs.”

Searls later writes “what matters most is what each of us does better than anybody or anything else.”

Dawson expects “the rise of effective content reputation systems, that allow you to assess the likely quality of articles before you read them or even find them.” One way or another, I’m sure Google will figure something out here.

Quality and LinkBait

The Arrington post was classic linkbait, content that’s hand-crafted to maximize reaction and incoming links. While writing that post Arrington couldn’t possibly have believed the article’s premise, that hand crafted content is dead. The piece was a masterstroke of hand crafted content. BTW, it currently ranks 3rd (of 21 million) in Google for “hand crafted,” showing what good hand crafted content can do for you.

Linkbait has similar problems as TV news shows that interview extremists from both sides because that makes better television than interviewing moderates as they explain nuanced views.

A second theme ran through Arrington’s piece, that writers need to figure out a new disruptive way to win. Arrington wrote that daring innovators will thrive, and that we need to learn to deal with the changing models. But a thorough and intelligent exposition of that idea wouldn’t have generated much passion in the blogosphere. So Arrington went with the linkbait theme of “The End of Hand Crafted Content.”

If one were really worried about ways that people try to game the system to get poor quality content to rank, he’d focus more on this kind of Linkbait and less on Demand Media.

Conclusion: Quality Remains King

Quality content is more critical than ever to a content web site’s long term success, and the sites that want to be here for the long run are going to be paying more and more attention to it. They’ll become high quality, or die trying.