SMX Advanced Seattle 2011

After attending an SMX East and SES San Francisco in years past, SMX Advanced 2011 has been the best networking and learning experience yet.

Since the last SEO update that formed part of the Week in Tech just over a month ago where rich snippets and the Google Panda update was mentioned. I can happily say that none of the sites MIH SWAT have been assisting with their organic search efforts have been hit by Panda It was really surprising to see how many of the SMX Advanced attendees were negatively affected by the Google Panda updates. During the You and A session with Matt Cutts he noted that yet another Panda update was in the works. Panda 2.2 if you will. How do you circumvent being hit by the Google Panda update? Easy, all you need to do is follow the new Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors embedded below.

Apart from the periodic table of SEO ranking factors that apply to each and every site out there I am not going to go into detail about every single session I attended; we have Search Engine Land, SEOmoz and AimClear for that.

My one take away from #SMX would most definitely be Google, Yahoo & Bing’s new schema.org. For a very long time I’ve been an advocate of semantic mark-up and with the release of schema.org it may just be it’s time to shine and be adopted by more sites out there. Utilizing schema.org may not be a ranking factor right now but it certainly will be in the near future. If there is one piece of advice I’d give to every company within the Naspers/MIH group that would be to start implementing schema.org on the millions of pages on the various sites.

If you’re considering attending an SMX Advanced in the future be sure to books your seats at the ‘Birds of a Feather’ lunches and do not miss out on the workshops the day after the main conference. The one-on-one conversations derived from these events will make you want to return to SMX every year.

The on-again, off-again deal by the two internet giants was signed back in July, but regulatory approval by the European Commission and the US Department of Justice only came through this week.

According to a joint statement made by the new Search Alliance, changes will start being implemented very soon. Microsoft is to power the search technology on both Bing and Yahoo but each site will continue to operate under its own identity;

“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.” From Yahoo’s official press release.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer previously described the move as a way to provide “real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company.” Unsurprisingly Google, which controls over two thirds of the search market in the US had tried to prevent a deal between its main search rivals. Back in 2008 when Microsoft bid almost $45bn to acquire all of Yahoo!, Google openly attacked the move as anti competitive and tried to sign its own deal with Yahoo Search Business. Google were eventually forced to pull out of that deal after the US Department of Justice questioned the antitrust implication of one company controlling what would have been an estimated 90% of the US search market.

Whether the new alliance will put a halt on Google’s burgeoning search market share remains to be seen. With a combined search market share less than half than that of Google, they certainly have their work cut out for them.

In one of the pieces, Clay Shirky recently gave a talk titled ‘It’s Not Information Overload. Its Filter Failure’ (Web 2.0 Expo NY September 2008) which really struck a chord with me. There are a lot of other interesting ideas in the talk which I am sure I will return to, but for now I would like to focus on what I believe to be the core premise contained in the title – that of filter failure. Filter failure postulates that it is not a dramatic increase in information that leads to the feeling of information overload, but the failure of ones filters. The necessity to retool our filters really resonated with me.  His conclusion includes the comment “we are to information overload as fish are to water its just what we swim in”.

This leads me to another piece. At a recent Commencement Address (a US institution that is similar to a graduation ceremony) the author David Foster Wallace ( Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005) told the following story:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” the point of the story “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” and correctly that “we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”"

Closer to home (for me anyway) another piece is from Arthur Goldstuck writing on News 24 where he writes:

“One unforeseen (by most) consequence of all this bandwidth is that available content will mushroom even more dramatically than it has in the past decade. The information glut will become an information slum, and it will seem impossible for individuals to find their way to the best or most useful content, or at least to find their way through the useless content that will litter the internet, and possibly even TV. ” (Arthur Goldstuck 08/10/2008 09:16  - (SA) )

And then some pieces even closer to home, right here in the SWAT Blog: I Want Sandy (and others like her) (Chester do Nascimento 10/13/08) and
The web is a knowledge repository…not! (Jacques van Niekerk 10/10/08) and the response to that written by by G-J.

All of the above discuss the idea that there is too much information, an overload or a glut, and that this overload is too unwieldy or erratic. That all this information is not necessarily relevant to the context at hand. The premise being that we need tools or filters to deal with it and here is where it gets interesting for me. I am a self-confessed media addict and I do believe it forms a natural environment for me to the extent that I am not even aware of it, unless something impinges or changes  – and this is why Clay Shirky’s talk struck the chord it did with me. Something in the media environment has indeed changed and I/we need to retool. I had stopped seeing the water but something is muddying it.  Even while remaining a media addict one does not need to be the frog on slow boil!

For years now there has been talk of autonomous agents but nobody seems yet to have developed the killer app.  Micro-formats and the Semantic Web are technologies with similar promise which also have not delivered on their potential – yet.

So lets us consider a unified theory of filters.  These filters must apply across a wide variety of activities from business to pleasure, across a wide variety of applications from email to web feeds and across a wide variety of media from text to video to music.  Filters must be usable in or on a wide variety of media from the normal web to the mobile web, to the in-car GPS system to the Wifi connected camera.

In the same way people are discussing an internet of things, are we moving to an internet of filters?

Lets us consider some variables.  On one hand we want this filtering done for us and on the other we are the only people who can do it for ourselves.  The act of filtering must not be intrusive and it must not be complex.  The filters must be scalable and adaptable to new applications.  How can we enlist the help of others as Wikipedia has done? We cannot own it all because we cannot do it all.  Room for plugins is essential, an API mandatory.

What price privacy? Do we require filters in and filters out?

There are already some very big fish in the water but they do not seem to be providing quite the thing. The biggest fish at the moment is Google and they are certainly not resting on their laurels. There are others such as Cuil, new kids on the block Twine, DeepDyve and many other variations on the basic theme. How significant the management of filters can be is highlighted by Europeana, the EU response to European concerns over Google.

As Arthur Goldstuck goes on to propose,

“The solution to this will be information mapping at a level, on a scale and with built-in intelligence such as we have never seen before. An entire industry sector will emerge around the concept of mapping information, with the likes of Google and Wikipedia eventually being seen as the forerunners, but not the owners, of that space.”

We must not blind ourselves to the fact that we are talking about more than search -what we have here is a very exciting opportunity.