Chapter 1 (How it all began)
In December 2006 I broke my left foot. It was not a pleasant event, and I decide to blog about it (check here). I titled my post "Broken Foot", and I thought I was smart & funny, etc.
Chapter 2 (Why it happened)
Six Apart (Typepad) is doing a great job in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is all over the Typepad content, and they always index it fast. As a result, the Typepad blog posts surface up to the top results on Google.
Chapter 3 (Introducing our Hero)
A year has passed, and an innocent stranger on the east coast (let's call him Dave), breaks his foot. Barely alive, he crawls to his computer, typing in Google "broken foot?" hoping for some useful health tips. Does he get helpful information? Oh no. He finds a "great" post on the subject, by a west-coast based Israeli VC.
Chapter 4 (What happens to Dave?)
Dave wanted health related information, and all he got was my stupid post regarding my broken foot. It was a big waste of time for him, but it was also a loss for me, as I got irrelevant traffic to my blog. I am sure 99% of the people that come to my "Broken Foot" post, are not interested to hear the VC point-of-view on the topic.
Chapter 5 (Conclusion)
Last week I attended the Le Web conference, and I heard a great presentation by Jason Calacanis about the "Pollution on the Internet". He talked about the number of "spam" results you get on Google, and how difficult it is to find the right information, and not the information that was "promoted" on Google. He blamed the VCs for pushing their companies to create traffic growth. Needless to say, he also promoted his own company (Mahalo), a company that focuses on manually filtered search results.
Not sure if the VCs are to blame for all of this, but I do think that although Search Engine Optimization is important, it can also be evil, and in many times non-productive. I would personally like to apologize to all of the people with broken feet that had to read my 2006 posting on the subject.
I agree that Calacanis was the only person in the conference that talked about the responsibility of the leaders of the Internet community to reduce this "pollution". On a different panel, some old fart (Dave Winer) who developed a photo aggregator for his 100 inch plasma TV arrogantly dismissed a question from the audience about the negative environmental impacts of creating applications that will keep his huge TV on for the whole day.
I expected "the elders" at Le Web to take some time-off from telling us how great they are, and address the responsibility of the Internet community to use its media for good, social responsibility, etc, but there was way too little of that. People only talk about it when they can make money out of it. Le Web=Le Ego.
Posted by: arnon | December 21, 2007 at 06:27 AM
SEO/SEM --> that's the new world dude...
Posted by: Jack | January 03, 2008 at 02:50 PM