Observations – Page 3

Gun control stupidity

December 1, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

You may have heard of the case of Brian Aitken, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in New Jersey for transporting guns he had legally acquired as a Colorado resident while relocating to the Garden State. (Yes, you read that right – he’s doing seven years for moving his own guns to his own residence.) As you might imagine, this has sparked more than a bit of outrage in many corners, and there is a Facebook group devoted to his release. The Philadelphia Daily News has picked up the story, and while there’s nothing really new there, this howler caught my attention:

“What little I can glean about the transportation issue leaves me puzzled, but a person with common sense would not be moving illegal products from one place to another by car,” said Bryan Miller, executive director of CeaseFire NJ, an organization devoted to reducing gun violence.

Mr. Miller. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that he really hadn’t been moving, as testified by his mother, his friend and the arresting officer. He still needs to move said firearms and related items to his home. So how precisely would you suggest he transport them? A U-Haul truck, I’m guessing? Armored vehicle, perhaps? Gee, how about a caravan of law enforcement to accompany him, lest he be consumed by his primal urges and prompted to go on a homicide spree? I mean, really – do you have any idea how profoundly stupid you sound?

“If Mr. Aitken did the research he said he did, he would not have hollow-point bullets and large-capacity magazines in the vehicle,” Miller said. “They are illegal, period.”

If anybody has failed to do his research, it would be Miller. As indicated in Radley Balko’s excellent article (the first link above):

In December 2008 Aitken made a final trip back to Colorado to collect the last of his possessions, including the three handguns he had legally purchased in Colorado—transactions that required him to pass a federal background check. Aitken and his friend Michael Torries had found an apartment in Hoboken, and Torries accompanied Aitken to Colorado to help with the last leg of the move. According to testimony Torries later gave at Aitken’s trial, before leaving Colorado Aitken researched and printed out New Jersey and federal gun laws to be sure he moved his firearms legally. Richard Gilbert, Aitken’s trial attorney, says Aitken also called the New Jersey State Police to get advice on how to legally transport his guns, although Burlington County Superior Court Judge James Morley didn’t allow testimony about that phone call at Aitken’s trial.

This guy did everything he could to make sure he was legally within the bounds of the law. He took great pains to transport his legally acquired firearms as required by state and federal law. Yet he still ends up sentenced to prison. And Miller suggests that, in spite of all his efforts to follow the letter and spirit of the law, he had it coming?

Given recent SCOTUS rulings, I’m actually quite optimistic on the long-term odds of the survival of the Second Amendment, at least at the federal level. The real battleground moving forward is at the state and local level. And if this case is any indication, the next target should be New Jersey. Any state with such insane gun laws should be easy pickings in court. Here’s hoping this case has gotten the attention of somebody at IJ.

Google’s true threat

November 24, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

Many observers of the ongoing search wars keep looking for the so-called Google slayer. Who, they wonder, will finally be able to pose a real threat to Google’s monopoly on the search industry?

This SEO’s two cents? Google’s greatest threat just this moment certainly isn’t Bing, or really any other search engine per se, but a confluence of two factors: the changing nature of how people relate to and communicate online, and the speedy rise of the mobile Internet. But before I get too far ahead of myself, I should explain a bit about the history of search and how Google changed the game.

The first automated search engines (Excite, Infoseek, HotBot) relied heavily on looking at the on-page content of a website to determine its relevance to a given search. Obviously this approach is more than a bit problematic because it’s fairly easy to manipulate. However, Stanford doctoral students Sergey Brin and Larry Page had a question in the mid-1990s. It’s very easy to look at the content and links on a given webpage – but is it possible to find the links to that page from elsewhere on the Internet, and use those links to determine the authenticity and relevance of that page to a given search query? That is a much more difficult question to answer, because ultimately what you need is a picture of the entire Internet. But the answer to that question eventually evolved into what we know today as Google.

Due to Google’s changing of the game, one of the factors that has become enormously important in search engine optimization is backlinks – in other words, getting sites to link to you. And we SEOs go to great lengths to find valuable links, because building out a quality link structure is absolutely critical to success in organic search. The analogy I like best is that when a site links to you, that site is in effect voting for you. But in the Googleverse, not all votes are weighed equally. So earning quality, relevant links is the name of the game in SEO today.

With that in mind, here is where social media throws a wrench in Google’s gears. This is a screenshot of my Twitter account:

Screenshot of Twitter feed, with nofollowed links highlighted

See all the links highlighted in red? Those links are “nofollowed” – they are blocked from being visited and indexed by the searchbot. That nofollow attribute is applied by default to all links posted on any Twitter account, and there’s no way to remove it. Same goes for Facebook, even if your profile is 100% public.

Herein is Google’s big problem where its search algorithm is concerned: people are increasingly taking the linking activities they used to engage in on widely accessible websites (blogs, forums and the like) to the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. I know in my case, while much of my blog content was composed of giving backlinks, today I’m far more likely to share links I find interesting or worthwhile on my Facebook wall or Twitter feed, rather than on my blog as I would have in the past. As this trend accelerates, the Internet community is stripping out the sorts of backlinks that are integral to Google’s ranking system, meaning Google’s picture of the Internet is developing blind spots.

This isn’t to say Google can’t or won’t figure out how to adjust to this new reality. They’re now crawling Twitter to offer real-time search results, and as an experiment by a colleague illustrates, in some cases Google may count tweeted links in its algorithm. But that’s Twitter; Facebook profiles, which can be blocked to all but friends, is a different matter entirely. It’s clear that Google will have to stay nimble enough to alter its search strategy to conform to ongoing changes in user behavior, which will likely be a challenge as the company grows ever larger.

But what if the way people use the Internet, and especially the way they relate to one another online, is fundamentally changing? Again, a personal example. Some months ago, I bought a Bluetooth earpiece based on favorable reviews I had discovered via Google. But after messing with it for a few weeks, I discovered that it just wasn’t doing it for me. So I tried a different tack: I tweeted and Facebooked a request for Bluetooth earpiece recommendations. Based on suggestions from a Facebook acquaintance, I may have my Christmas present clearly targeted.

There’s nothing original about asking somebody we know and trust for suggestions or ideas on a given matter, especially on something important to us. But Facebook both facilitates and amplifies this behavior substantially. Asking a friend here and there is one thing; instantly polling your entire trusted circle of friends on a whim is another matter altogether. Even amid the rise of the Internet and search engines, word-of-mouth referrals remain the best sales leads around, and if word of mouth spreads that much more easily and rapidly, then on that basis alone Facebook poses a radical threat to Google’s continued success.

And this trend is only accelerated by the arrival of the smartphone. The increasing ability – likelihood, really – of people to have the Internet always at their disposal, with the ability to seek information and poll their trusted circle, marks a radical shift in the information people can access and, especially, the way they access it. To its credit, Google saw this coming way off (hence, Android). But add to this the clear technical challenges in presenting the same level of search engine results on the mobile platform, and suddenly it’s obvious that Google needs to remain remarkably flexible to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

One last point: don’t take these observations too far in any direction. More specifically, I’m hardly saying that Facebook means the end of Google. I recently heard a self-appointed social media expert assert with some confidence that the time was not far off when companies would shut down their websites in favor of Facebook pages, which seems to me premature at best. But in just a few years people now connect socially and integrate the Internet in their lives in radically different ways. Google will have to adjust rapidly to this and continuing changes. It should be fun to watch.

Center-right groups need to catch a clue on SEO

October 19, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

For the purposes of this post, I will reemphasize my professional credentials. I have been working for nearly three years now in the private sector in web marketing, specifically in the field of search engine optimization. In my day job* my official title is SEO Content Strategist, where I do a substantial amount of copywriting and strategic content development with the end goal of getting my clients appropriate organic rankings, traffic and conversions. In January of this year I earned my Google Analytics Individual Qualification; last month I earned my Google Adwords Individual Qualification.

With that as a backdrop, I have been reading of this story with increasing concern:

How many clicks does it take to soil a candidate’s online reputation? A prominent liberal activist would like to find out.

Chris Bowers, campaign director for the Daily Kos, is launching a behind-the-scenes campaign against 98 House Republican candidates that attempts to capitalize on voters’ Google search habits in the hopes of influencing midterm races.

Bowers wants the Daily Kos’ thousands of participants to dig up little-noted or controversial news stories about the candidates that could hurt their chances with undecided voters. Users would click on the links and blog about the stories with the goal of boosting their rankings on search engines, so that undecided voters will discover them more easily.

I took some time to go through Bowers’s introductory post** and later posts related to his campaign, and in my professional opinion, Bowers’s approach incorporates widely accepted SEO best practice, and based on what we know of Google’s algorithm is very likely to have an effect on long-tail searches for certain candidates. Put bluntly: if I were trying to orchestrate an on-page optimization and off-page strategic linking campaign among multiple web properties to manipulate search results for queries related to certain candidates, what Bowers is doing is pretty much the route I would take.

Regardless of what Bowers may say, it’s impossible to call this anything other than an orchestrated Google bomb. Dirty pool? Unethical? I’d certainly say so. But likely pretty effective in terms of impacting organic rankings.

Whether it will have any actual impact on the election is a different question, and at this point the momentum is already so heavily at the Republicans’ backs that I have a hard time seeing it do much to sway the midterms overall. But very tight elections are a different matter; concentrate efforts on a few close races and you might just tilt enough votes to swing the contests in your direction. As the Internet continues to become the battleground for electoral politics, the GOP grassroots needs to wake up and understand the impact this could have on future political campaigns.

*As spelled out on my bio page: any opinions shared within this site are mine and do not reflect the views of my employer.
**Take a good look and you’ll noticed I nofollowed the DK link. Whatever link juice I have, I ain’t sharing a drop with the likes of Kos.

The Internet keeps changing, and the PR world can’t keep up

July 28, 2010 by Ryan Leave a Comment

Been meaning to post this, but now is as good a time as any. Dan Riehl at Riehl World View is less than impressed with the response of mainstream organizations generally, and the PR community in particular, to new media:

Not long ago, PR in politics, and a host of other areas, dealt mostly with responding to queries filtered through a somewhat conglomerated mainstream media. Today, news and political junkies, as well as experts and keenly interested parties in a range of fields, have direct access to media they never had before. Given these three examples, it seems reasonable to ask if the public relations industry across the board is truly keeping up with the growth in size and significance of new media.

Given my own experiences in j-school and in online media over the last four or so years, I don’t blame him for the skepticism.

While in journalism school at Arizona State University around 2003, I had the opportunity to talk with the then-VP of one of the bigger PR shops in Phoenix (which, by extension, means the state of Arizona). His take on my school was something like this:

“I have never hired graduates straight out of the Cronkite School. I’ve interviewed several, but I’ve never hired them. Why not? Because they know everything, you can’t tell them anything, and they have this idea that it’s all about circulating press releases and pitching stories, when in point of fact that’s such a minuscule part of the business anymore.”

“We’ve talked to the professors at the school,” he continued, “tried to explain, ‘Look, you’re not giving us the graduates we need.’ And they just won’t listen. They are hopelessly behind, but they refuse to change. They have this notion of PR that’s at least 15 years behind the times.”

When I heard that indictment of my school of choice, it became clear that I was receiving an obsolete education. So I went out of my way to augment that education to the extent possible. At the advice of that VP, I got in as many internships as possible (I ended up doing six in total), but by far the very best decision I made was to start a blog. As I say on my bio page, I really did it just for fun and experience – I didn’t anticipate it would actually translate to anything worthwhile as far as career options.

I was very mistaken. That experiment in blogging as a student led to my blogging stint with the Alliance for School Choice, then going corporate, and now in my present role in web marketing. But back then, I’m fairly confident the blogosphere didn’t register a blip among my professors.

However, I rather suspect I’m an outlier as far as my time in school.

Understand, I graduated in ’04, back when blogging was really coming into vogue. In Internet terms, that was a generation or two ago – before the rise of the iPhone, at a time when Facebook was but a twinkle in Zuckerberg’s eye, back when Twitter only had vaguely to do with small birds or old ladies. This radical change in how we use the Internet, how it has altered the power structure, how it has changed the way we relate to and communicate with one another, has just happened way too fast for many big organizations to keep up.

The more obvious victims have, of course, been the legacy media. While most people (well, the navel-gazers within the MSM particularly) have focused largely on how new media has upended their traditional business model, not enough have focused on how the nature of communications has also changed. As Trent Reznor pointed out in connection with the destruction of the recording business:

“Anyone who’s an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact — no idea,” he declares. “I’m surprised they know how to use e-mail. They have built a business around selling plastic discs, and nobody wants plastic discs any more.”

Meanwhile, the entire system that for a lucky few turned those discs into hits — rock radio, MTV, music mags, CD megastores — has crumbled, and label execs have no idea where to turn. “They’re in such a state of denial it’s impossible for them to understand what’s happening,” Reznor says. “As an artist, you are now the marketer.”

Simply put, these are pretty radical changes that have taken place in just a few years. Bigger organizations with more insular thinking are getting caught flatfooted. As Glenn Reynolds likes to point out, smaller, more nimble organizations have a real edge.

In my professional work in search engine optimization, the thing that has really come to the forefront is how effective SEO – namely, backlink building – and effective PR are heavily connected. The line between the two has gotten so blurred that I really believe it’s increasingly hard to see where one ends and the other begins. But all this has happened outside the ivory towers that are churning out new batches of PR professionals. And with the rise of social networking, you can expect the dinosaurs at j-schools to become that much more befuddled at what is happening in the world beyond.

I’ve actually seriously considered doing some sort of graduate work related to PR and online marketing. But what journalism school out there really understands the intersection between the two?