i admit it, i'm a search junkie. i love search and how it's grown over the web. Of course, i couldn't give a damn about the algorithms though. You see, search to me is more about relationships. Take this page, for instance. Sure, there's my monkey like screeching (now with less flung poop), but for the most part, when i present a link, i present it with some sort of context. Sometimes it's an article like this, or maybe it's the list of links gathered together by a rough categorization i run down the left side of the page.
By providing context to whatever the heck grabs my attention, i'm hopefully giving you a clue as to where you're going. In effect, i'm a search result where the query is "What shiny object(s) are distracting JR?" Yeah, it'd be nice if you could specify something different, but it's my page so nyah.
Thing is, being the social search junkie that i am, i'm always interested in reading about the decisions folks make regarding their own pages. That's why i was curious about Dave's decision to pull his blog roll in favor of a separate page of links. In effect, he felt it was too hard to keep it up and that it was intrinsically unfair. i'm not going to fault his reasoning. i mean, the list i offer is a serious subset of the feeds i go through on a given day. (Ok, so it also gives me an excuse to use the long abandoned XFN "rel" tags for my own personal amusement.)
Even more bothersome are articles like one i read on the SEO blog that talks about White hat vs. Black hat SEO (and how the term SEO is being applied more to black hat outfits). Granted, the whole thing reminds me of the crap "Hackers" when through before the media slapped every two bit script kiddie with the moniker. (Yeah, i was a white hat hacker. But telling folks that is like telling them you're a terrorist now.) Eventually, white hat SEO folks will become tech support for marketing firms in the same way that white hat Hackers became software consultants.
What bothers me is that the article seems to be pointing out that it's no longer quite as "worth it" for SEOs to do the hard work if companies turn to black hat ops for the short term burst rather than the long term payout. i recently found out that this blog has a pagerank of either 4 or 5 (depending on which URL you use). i still have no idea why. Actually, that's not true. i know exactly the reasons why and it's something i worked at using mostly white hat methods and a lot of patience. Something a start up company that's not thinking more than a quarter or two would be interested in.
So as the interweb becomes more and more like real work, one wonders if it will continue to be as webby, or whether it will dissolve into a fine mist of stand alone sites indexed by search engines using older ranking methods. While i'm not going to stop keeping a blog roll, i'd note that trackbacks are still disabled here because of spammers. i also route unknown links through a whitelist and anything that doesn't match get's dead-ended. i'm just as bad as anyone else.
Nah, probably not going to happen. Unlike a lot of other things that have been ruined, the web has a bunch of folks actively working to screw the people actively working to screw with it. And it's fun to screw with people, that deserve it.
Hey, I mark them as "Geek" for a reason, you know.
By the way, I know that for 90% of humanity, you'd have to be on your tenth cup of copy and fourth demerol to understand what the hell I'm talking about.
Hmm. So should I be concerned that I understood it before finishing my first can of Mountain Dew yesterday morning?
I should know better than to read some of your more in depth, geeky, wtfihta (figure that one out) stuff before 7 am and before my first coffee. You lost me after the first paragraph.
I'll come back later. Before 7, I seem to be so blond.