Pitos Blog

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We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on.

What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searching with Google or one of the other search engines.

As I tell the story to many people, I summarize what I’ve learned by noting that it’s all more or less common sense, once you hear it. But for some reason common sense isn’t always so common. The source that I have learned the most from (and where I’ve learned to really appreciate educational podcasts is the “Beginning SEO podcast” from Neo1Seo.com.

To illustrate common sense, here is how you can put a subtler and deeper interpretation to the above sentence.

LEVELS of SEO ENLIGHTENMENT.

SEO is the science and art of…

1. …getting your site to come up when people are searching…
2. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching…
3. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching and getting them to look at it…
4. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching, not any time but specifically when they are in a mindset to act, and getting them to look…
5. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching and in a mindset to act, and getting them to look, and then actually place an order, sign up, or whatever it is you want them to do…

If you bother to actually read those repetitive sentences, each one is a logical and common sense step beyond the preceding one, but many people - including me, pre-enlightenment, never get beyond level one. There’s a whole lot more to it than that of course but even that little bit may be a profound insight for someone who never gave it any thought.

So what about that email signature? Well one of the episodes of my favorite podcast talks about the other things you can do to help people to actually come to your site, in a mindset to act, and then doing whatever you want them to do.

And this one is so common sense and yet for years now I have not done it.

Starting today, everyone who I correspond to in email will have this friendly little signature line at the end of it:

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Check this out: http://www.blogbridge.com/look

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What are high reactives?

“Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.” (from Understanding the Anxious Mind)

This is quite a long article which I won’t attempt to summarize here. It argues for an interesting explanation and clarification about why certain people tend to react certain ways, differently to different kinds of stimulus. This is from the conclusion:

“An anxious temperament might serve a more exalted function too. “Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.” (from Understanding the Anxious Mind)

If this kind of stuff interest you, you might try tackling the whole article

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“Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it,, don’t wait for it, just … let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee…”(Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks)

Don’t ask me why, the quote just strikes me as funny!

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Check out this post Chefs and Editors from Dilbert.com Blog:

And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future. (from: Chefs and Editors)

And in general, read Dilbert.com Blog!

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You may not have followed the discussion that ensued when Ray Kurzweil was reported to ‘not understand the brain‘, but it’s pretty fascinating. Here’s what PZ Meyers said:

“There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.” (from PZ eyers)

Ouch!

Here’s a typically articulate and persuasive rebuttal from Ray Kurzweil:

“Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.” (from Ray Kurzweil)

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I bet many of you didn’t realize that Roger Ebert is still writing a fantastic column, with movie reviews yes, but also some excellent written commentary. For example, check this fine post Ten things I know about the mosque from Roger Ebert’s Journal:

1. America missed a golden opportunity to showcase its Constitutional freedoms. The instinctive response of Americans should have been the same as President Obama’s: Muslims have every right to build there. Where one religion can build a church, so can all religions. (from: Ten things I know about the mosque)

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Ok, that’s my own curious headline for this interesting article in the New York Times:

“What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.” (from The New York Times)

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The other day I wrote a post where I mentioned Google’s App Inventor, and I mentioned it with some skepticism.

Today, a column in the New York Times that covers Google’s App Inventor in more detail, and comes to more or less the same conclusion:

“I’m happy for App Inventor. I wish it a long and exciting life. Surely it will have one in schools and computer classes, among other niches.

But for nonprogrammers on their own? Forget it. Android Hype Inventor is more like it.” (from the New York Times)

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Check this link out, there are lots of really fun drawings. The artists take a little kid’s drawing and turns it into something amazing. Here’s a taste:

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