Google desperately wants you all to create unique, original content. It needs the ad real estate, but perhaps even more it needs the continuous expansion of creative content to feed the growth of the ad business. Everything we’ve seen out of Google for over a year reflects the Goog’s serious commitment to advertising over search. About a year or so ago, from my own perspective, the sensibilities shifted to a more overt recognition that it was ad space, not accuracy, that mattered most to Google search. Trust, freshness, historical significance.. all of these things mattered most to advertising. Even as search industry TalkingHeads debated how these “signals of quality” led to better SERPs, we repeatedly saw how they directly led to increased ad revenue to Google not as much through more ad impressions as through more commitment from advertisers to the Google platform.

Cloak it any way you like, but the message was less fraudulent clicks, more lock-in of users about which we know more than ever. So even if stalwart historical journalsitic sources generated reams of spam pages deep within their domains, it was “quality” and it ranked because it was good for “economic expansion”. An advertiser branded with the idea that The Denver Post was a quality advertising avenue back in the day, would not object to a large presence of ads on the online Denver Post, even if they were mostly spam pages.

The cloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal and greedy it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us.

Now we see Google sponsoring development of unique, creative content, Hollywood style with the signing on of the Family Guy guy Seth MacFarlane. Expect to see search talking heads proclaim Google is able to be television if it wants, Google is going after Hollywood when it’s ready, Google is replacing newspapers with classified ads and now cartooning, blah blah blah. But the truth is, Google needs unique creative content and knows how to position it. This is a comic widget. Google knows that Widgets work. Facebook works. LinkedIn works. Dilbert works. Copyright is a problem, webmasters who want to fight over their nickels are too much work given the big picture of creative content driving the expansion of the web, and perhaps most seriously… anyone can build a search engine.

I wrote about this last week… you only own what you control. Google may have grown as a robber baron, but it intends to stick around as the industry matures, and apparently this is a good time to test the waters of sponsored creative content before inflation kicks in. Even the best companies suffer when their activities fuel inflationary fires, and this will fuel inflation. Watch how rich this Guy gets. If you think giving away free CDs hurts the recording industry, wait until Google decides to sponsor music videos. Let’s just hope Google has better taste than those conservative families that bought up all of the FM radio stations back in the eighties. I still can’t believe they play 4o year old “classic rock” all day long on so many FM radio stations around the country even today…with ads of course.

Yahoo has acknowledged the importance of TheCloud, and obviously Google knows TheCloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. Web publishing (separate from content creation) has gone from the profit side of the enterprise to the expense side very, very quickly. More quickly than IT, even. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us. Until then, what choice do we have?

I can’t stand to think of the future in the SEO world, where we will no doubt see a new generation of poets and copywriters proclaiming that SEO is simply “unique creative content” but at least they have one aspect of that correct. Content means a helluvalot to Google. In fact, I bet in many cases your content means more to Google than it does to you. Think about that… one man gathers what another man spills.

I’m always thinking about web and Internet from a competitive perspective, because that’s really what we are doing when we optimize, seek search traffic, buy links, and forge alliances with like-minded website network operators: competitive webmastering. But that concept is not always palatable to people. There are plenty of pie-in-the-sky web publishers (and SEOs and marketers…) out there dreaming of an open, free world where “information wants to be free” and “the Internet belongs to everyone“.

Truth is, even if most of us try and make that true, a few will take advantage of the resulting “opportunity” to cash in while we don’t. That starts the cycle… and soon it’s all me-too bandwagoning. If that sounds too cynical, well, that’s because it is cynical. So what.

If you want to know who the future abusers will be, look at who the abusers are now, and who have played the role of abusers in the past. A big secret of human behavior is
“past performance is indicative of future behavior”. That part is not cynical — it’s factual.

I don’t give way specifics in an obvious fashion on my blog, because, well, I compete with almost everyone reading this blog. We are all competing for attention. No sense handing your competition the ammunition it needs to take away your opportunity. However, I am happy to allude and hint. And here’s one for those working the web the way I am working the web. The newspapers (past and current abusers) are priming their pumps even as everyone says they are a dying concern. No, not the obvious. Newspapers are never about the obvious.

Take a look at this quote form a newspaper site producer, who pulls photos from the news wires and republishes them as the primary content, attractive to readers:

Q: Were there any issues in getting permission to publish images that large from the wire photo services? The photos on the Big Picture must be twice the size of any other news site.

A: We looked at the contracts pretty well and couldn’t identify anything that prevented this sort of thing. The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that’s only about 2 inches wide, so we’d appear to be within that limit.

Those who know me personally, or who have had time one on one to discuss things in depth, know my passion for certain visual arts, and my belief in a certain specific future related to some of those arts. It’s coming sooner than expected. Things will be a changing, and acts like these will force that change. The only safe harbor for the competitive publisher is competing, which means acting now. The abusers will continue to react to change by attempting new abuses, and continue to reveal their intentions due to their need to manage risk. Sadly, they will also continue to lobby politicos and misrepresent the truth, which means we still have to a lot more than simply good or hard work, but we have to start with the honest smart/hard work part. And remain vocal, where it has influence.

First, you scrape someone else’s content, like this:

Matt Cutts made an appearance today at the Domain Roundtable conference. Matt started things off with a few introductory comments, then spent most of the time answering questions from the audience and from questions that people sent in ahead of time. Here are the highlights of what he discussed…

Then, you run it through a translator to some other language. You used to have to pay a company to use their translation tools, but they went out of business because Google now offers it for free. As output, you end up with “new”, unique content in that other language, such as this:

Matt Cutts tehnyt ulkoasun tänään Domain pyöreän pöydän konferenssissa. Matt alkoi asioita pois muutaman johdantokappale kommentteja, sitten viettänyt suurimman osan aikaa vastaamalla kysymyksiin yleisölle ja kysymyksiä, että ihmiset lähetetään ajoin. Here are the korostaa sitä, mitä hän keskusteli

Then, translate that back into English. Publish the result as “new” content on the web. It might not be technically new content, but it’s certainly unique:

Matt Cutts prefabricated an attendance today at the Domain Roundtable conference. Matt started things soured with a whatever preceding comments, then spent most of the instance responsive questions from the word and from questions that grouping dispatched in aweigh of time. Here are the highlights of what he discussed

And once it’s indexed and draws traffic from… Google.. put Google ads on it so Google can pay you. Just like at seo-mark***ting-tips.com/2008/06/20/matt-cutts-does-domain-roundtable-3/

Google won’t give you all of the advertising revenue, because after all they do have to pay for that free translating, but they’ll give you some nickels. You really didn’t do any work so something is better than nothing, right? If you need more nickels, you can just scrape more content.

Google… all you need to succeed on the web.

I know this is outside the realm of Internet marketing, but my background is scientific research and I left that world for obvious reasons…that were not very obvious to everyone else at the time. Chalk this new research out of the SPIE and Academy of Arts and Sciences as one for the “duh” column, representing more stuff we knew but perhaps no one would care about until it was formally documented:

Programs and policies that support early-career investigators and high-risk, high-reward research are needed in order to preserve U.S. leadership in science and technology, contends a report released yesterday by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We had to wait until the symptoms had become a disease, before acknowledging that the Old Boys Club does nothing but breed more Old Boys, at the expense of innovation and competitiveness:

As an example, the report notes that the average age for first-time recipients of primary research grants from the National Institutes of Health is 42.4 and rising, and that the success rate for first-time grant applicants has declined from 86 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 2007.

That’s your NIH, the primary funding mechanism for research and innovation in medicine and the sciences related to our well being. In other words, we’re not giving research grants to researchers until they reach their forties. As someone who left that world in my thirties, I can tell you two things: 1) the ones who stayed until they were in their forties to get their first funded research are not the sharpest shovels in the shed, and 2) that’s like saying you can’t do an Internet start-up until you’re at least 30. Yes, it is.

Think about it. How much innovation would we have if we refused to allow anyone under 30 to try anything new with this Internet thing? On the flip side, for those already over 30, with kids and such… how’d you like to take a small grant now and try and turn it into a successful innovative startup? The last time I had lunch in Silicon Valley, I heard someone say about the idea of working for a startup at age 40: “you don’t skate on thin ice with babies“. What do you think our funded researchers are doing when they get funded in their forties, with babies?

Disclaimer: I have great respect for many, many NIH researchers who have never received funding, or not yet received funding. I also have great respect for many who first get funded outside the NIH system, via companies and private foundations. Quite a few are good friends of mine. I don’t understand why they stay and shine shoes in the academic system, but that is their choice and I do respect them as individuals. However, across the board, what’s left looking for funding after 15 years of suffering the system of academia is not the best and brightest this nation has to offer. Those still trying should keep trying as long as their hearts believe. But the rest of us should try and effect some change.

If you refrained from participating in the massive download fest today, you are to be rewarded for your prudence. The first FF3 vulnerability is already identified. By waiting nearly one day you may have saved yourself a little frustration (”What? But I just downloaded it and haven’t even used it yet!“).

Of course, the security hole is present in prior versions as well, so you’re not exactly safe while you wait.

You really need to watch this past the first minute, to the part where the Verizon customer service representatives quote the Verizon rates. To think that this is how we consumers are forced to “do business” in this country… while nobody in our government has any better ideas of how things might be.

Thanks to Rhea for compiling the 5 Most Hated Companies Online presentation.

TAM Airlines (TAM) is the largest airline in Brazil, and has been expanding operations. They used to compete with Varig in Brazil, which owns Varig.com as well as Varig.com.br, the Brazilian equivalent, and GOL. Airline web sites are notoriously badly configured for SEO, and these are not exceptions, but TAM airlines doesn’t even own TAM.com. For a major airlines, this is very unusual.

American Airlines naturally owns AA.com. British Airways secured BA.com. Japan Airlines, known as JAL, naturally owns JAL.com. They also own the necessary variants of their names, such as AmericanAirlines.com, and BritishAirways.com.

Looking further, Dutch airline KLM of course secured KLM.com, their natural domain. Northwest Airlines can be found at NWA.com. Even South American airline Lan Airline has secured lan.com for itself, which must have been difficult given the generic value of LAN in the computer field (local area network — the domain surely had very high value). Truth is, if you are competing in the global travel space, you simply MUST secure your brand as the customer perceives it. Most airlines know that.

The Polish airline LOT Polish Airlines owns LOT.com, another strong generic domain that had high value to others. LOT knows the value of that domain as a brand. Delta Airlines is found at Delta.com, despite hundreds of non-airline businesses operating under strong Delta trademarks. Continental Airlines owns Continental.com, even though there are very major companies in other industries also operating with the name “Continental”. Why do you think Continental Airlines owns it? If you are a serious airline, you simply must own your name, no? If you visit a page of the Airline Blog that covers Brazil, you will see numerous contextual ads from travel agents and travel companies putting the TAM brand right in front of the consumers. Do they know the value of the TAM brand more than TAM airlines?

So TAM Airlines doesn’t know this? Or maybe doesn’t care. I would find it very hard to believe that the IT systems company near “Mount Tam” in California, the current registrant of TAM.com, would hold out for a higher price than a major International Airline could afford for an exact-match, 3 letter dot com. I don’t know the owner of TAM.com so I can’t be sure, but seriously… if Pizza.com went for just over 2 million, how could a 3 letter exact match for a significant International airline be too expensive to buy out from a small IT company? The online Pizza business last year was billion$ strong, and expected to double in the near term. Anyone could launch into that revenue stream immediately with a 2+ million dollar purchase of THE generic domain in that market. That’s less than the cost of producing a SuperBowl ad, and there was no trademark at risk. For TAM Airlines, with TAM.com an exact trademark match as well as a consumer brand match across languages, it must be worth buying, no?

United Airlines owns United.com, as we would expect although honestly I would not be surprised to learn someone else owned United.com since it is so generic and such a common trade moniker. Yet, United Airlines owns it. Smart move, or simply an essential necessity? Southwest Airlines owns Southwest.com. Swiss International Airlines owns Swiss.com. Spain’s Iberia Airlines owns Iberia.com. I personally know 2 restaurants in high-tech neighborhoods with that name. There’s no way the name wasn’t an early target for many companies. The United Arab Emirates airline “Emirates” is, of course, at Emirates.com. Australia’s Qantas Airways owns Qantas.com, of course, right? They were also smart enough to get Quantas.com, which is how I know them because my language doesn’t like Q’s without associated U’s.

Like I said I don’t know the TAM Airlines people nor the TAM.com registrant, but I think this expose of TAM airline’s sloppiness is a good reminder that companies should research their brand situations today, rather than tomorrow. I’m betting a handful of domain investors will call the current owner of TAM.com now, looking to bet that it has unrealized potential.

We have a joke here in our offices about domain name valuation. When a client says “We don’t have our brand as a domain name, but we want to try to acquire it. How much is it worth?” the only answer we can give is “We can’t say for sure, but it’s worth more today than it was yesterday“.

Remember those debates about whether or not gas would reach $5 per gallon this summer? No? Well, surely you remember when they suggested it might reach $4 this summer? Well, it’s not summer yet, and where I live regular gas has reached $4.59 per gallon already. Check Google News to see all the reports of problems related to the unusual run up in gas prices… you won’t see much.

Oh sure we up here in the Upper Left Corner of the US are long drive away from refineries on the Gulf coast… transport from those refineries would add significantly to the cost of gas, especially if gas were increasingly expensive. And that’s why we have our own refineries just 5 miles away. Did you notice the picture above is a Conoco station? Yup.. they own the nearby refinery. Remember that thing called the Alaskan Pipeline? Ever wonder where that ends.. where the terminals are for all that American oil? yup.. relatively close to us, since we are the closest mainland terminus for the shipping routes. So why is gas so expensive? I bet it’s not yet $4.59 per gallon near you. I also bet it will be soon.

At $4.59 for regular, things are already starting to break.

Think Tank is happening and I am now looking forward to it. I can personally vouch for the quality of Dave Klein (DK), who has put this together. He ran a charity poker tournament last fall that was nothing short of great, and several off us encouraged him to follow his instincts after he suggested he would like to host a quality gathering of movers and shakers in this Internet industry. I have full confidence, and I just signed up without hesitation. Those who know me know that is a rare thing.

Serious domainers looking at developing their empires should consider this meeting. I expect it to be on a par with T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Miami last year in terms of the quality of the invitation-only participants, with a focus on empire building using this Internet thing, as opposed to any specific aspect of that (such as SEO or domaining). I can think of a dozen of you who would both contribute and benefit from this meeting, as it is planned. It’s in a quality location, run by a quality host, who is the real deal when it comes to no b.s. this-stuff-matters. No sessions, no speakers, and a non-disclosure requirement. Good stuff.

If you didn’t get invited just follow these steps and tell DK why you belong. Be specific and don’t hold back - if you move millions of eyeballs per day let him know. If you own or monetize premium domains let him know… something like “I’m an entrepreneur and I have a thousand domains” will not get you past the cut, so don’t be shy and tell Dave just why you expect yourself to be considered valuable to the other attendees. If you know me personally and think it will help, tell him how you know me and then continue to make your case. Rest assured that simply knowing me will not be enough!

I think I share a vision that we’re all in this to meet up, listen and share ideas to make good things happen. DK has planned this as NOT an elitist event, but one that is indeed limited to the people who will make it an effective, productive, and inspiring experience for all of us who attend. As an attendee I myself want it to be inclusive of the brightest minds, the freshest thinkers, and the people who don’t just talk the talk but have and continue to make things happen on the web. As far as I know this is a full-boat, invitation-only event which means nobody’s sponsored and nobody’s participating to hawk their wares or write gossip columns..and DK has declared no audio or video at the event (too bad it had to be said, but I’m glad it was).

Most of the smartest people I know in this Internet entrepreneuring space are not in the SEO/Internet marketing industry, which is why I wrote this post. You know who you are. This event is billed as by and for Internet entrepreneurs, not just SEOs and marketers, so please consider hitting Dave early with an email, according to his request, to get an invitation. He’s a great guy and worthy of your consideration. I hope to see you there!

There was another SEO conference last week calling itself “advanced” and once again there was controversy about whether or not it was advanced. I stayed mostly out of the debate this time (as well as the conference), but I must note that an in-house SEO from NPR.org put it well when he said this about what it means to be “advanced SEO” (emphasis added):

SEO used to be perceived as a collection of tactics — use H1 tags, make a sitemap, add meta descriptions, get rid of JS obstacles, etc. That’s a pretty one-dimensional view, and even a few years ago most companies looked at SEO as just a project engagement. In the past, I saw so many engagements fail due to lack of stakeholder buy-in. The fact that we even got hired in-house speaks to how much has changed. Advanced can mean a lot of things. I think it does mean a greater understanding of how our work touches everything from development to usability, design, ecommerce, and analytics. We’re also coming into our own as strategists and online marketing managers. There is no one-size-fits all way to handle even fundamental tactics. We can argue whether PR sculpting is advanced. From a technical standpoint, it may or may not be. What is advanced is (as Nathan suggested) following a rigorous decision process as to whether it’s the best use of your time, bang for buck, and if so, how you would measure its results. I’ve spent months analyzing engine data, the search landscape, web analytics, our customer profiles, you name it. One of the major “advanced” initiatives I’m undertaking is drilling titles and alt tags with our writers. Why is that advanced? Because I’ve looked at my resources, my opportunity, and my expected outcome and in my long-term strategy, this is the right short-term move for my specific situation, for our team, for our site. Advanced does mean staying abreast of the cutting edge of tactics. Advanced also means the set of critical thinking and soft skills to actually get things executed in organizations of all sizes.

Javaun Moradi said that well. An “advanced SEO” is considering much more than on-page and network factors, and is deeply involved with strategy as search strategy defines the opportunity pursued by the web publication under consideration.

But we need to be smart here, and not just accept what an in-house SEO practitoner says is true. As forward-thinking or strategically-involved as Javaun might be over at NPR, he is in a job, and his job has a defined role. This may be his perspective, but I’d like to hear his boss’s perspective. His boss probably has a view of Javaun’s role as SEO in the overall goals of the publishing effort. He would also know if there are SEO consultants involved (SEO consultants maintain that focus on the strategic role search startegies play in web publishing). I would not be surprised at all if Javaun and some of his greater colleagues in SEO world believe what he wrote. However, I would be surprised if he continued to stay in his role as an in-house SEO, given his insights, of if his boss would pay him enough to keep him there.

SEO broke out of the chains of procedure years ago. Task SEO shops have drawn fire from the SEO community for several years now, for their failure to accommodate the strategic needs of their customers. That SEO is not a list of tasks is not new, so the fact that “advanced SEO” is not a list of advanced tasks should not be surprising, either.

The surprise is that so many attendees of SMX Advanced are debating whether the SEO tactics presented were advanced or not. To me, that is the proof that SMX Advanced is not the sort of SEO Conference I need to attend. Concepts, yes, but tactics, no. The pro-SMX people may not like to hear it, but the Search Engine Strategies show has the right name for the topic at hand.