(Sphinn this)
Search engines react to behavior of its users and site owners. Search engines measures these behaviors to deliver value to each, but ultimately to serve the search engines’ best interests. At first, search engine sused what they could by implying relevance and rank by link behavior. But as the web evolves to the social web, social media connections are going to have an increasing weight on search result relevance. Let’s face it: social media strategy is going to canalize black hat and some current white hat SEO strategy. Social media strategy is the new way to do SEO (figure out how to give value to your client’s web strategy). It is Matt Cutt’s job to figure out how to measure this relevance, and he is seeing that it is social media.

Right now, there are a bunch of SEOs listening to what Danny Sullivan has to say about social media strategy because they trust him. But some SEOs refuse to re-evaluate what brings value to their clients, (note: this Sphinn user was not in attendance) even saying that Jason should not be allowed at conferences. These sentiments just prove to him that what he is doing is right. It is innovators dilemma. SEOs got where they are today by being great at SEO strategies. Asking them to adopt social media as a new strategy is new and foreign. As Danny tries to lead his followers to new territory, some think he is betraying them and the strategies that made them the stars they are today. Some might be too afraid to go back to their clients to tell them they are going to try some new strategies to help their clients succeeded. They should remember that this does not mean the work they did in the past did not allow for successes or was a bad idea. SEO definitely has been one of the main ways to help clients succeed on the web for the past 10 years. But, there is no need to defend past actions with future ignorance. They need to redefine their metrics. The longer they wait, the more likely they will get their lunch eaten.

Thus, the knee-jerk reaction to Jason Calicanis’s rhetoric that SEO is a dying or bad strategy. Yes, let’s admit that Jason loves to agitate people by rubbing strategy decay into SEO’s faces, bad Jason ;). No one is going to tell an SEO that they are not giving value to their clients using SEO techniques. It just that the tactics they are using need to evolve.

Less attention is going to be paid to traditional SEO because (especially in the creation of static pages) now it is so much easier and valuable to create site with an open source blog, CMS, wiki or other application platform that may or may not rely on search engine traffic. Sure, even with these there are some ways to tweak them from an SEO perspective, but not as much as you might have needed to do 10 years ago. This is disruptive technology, bad news for the traditional SEOs that build sites from scratch, sprinkling in their elusive, magical SEO code. But, the developers of these open source CMS apps have figured out how to do the complicated SEO work for you (why else would Matt Cutts speak, attend, and endorse Wordcamp?). Here (along with social media application designers) is where good SEO needs to happen, and smart web strategists will realize that this is where it should continue to happen, because it scales and eliminates redundant work. You just need to wait for the search engines to spider your site. Now, traditional SEOs (which should now be called web strategists) should have more time available to add additional types of value for their clients by either engaging in social media on their behalf, or teaching them how to engaging with their prospects in a way that will help them efficiently meet their goals over the web. This is done by creating “meaningful relationships” (for lack of a better term) with people. At this point, SEO is just one of many tactics used by a web strategist. So calling a person an SEOs or SEM will soon be a way to show how outdated or limited that person’s strategy toolbox is. SEO competes with other value-adding strategies if all you do is SEO. Thus, SEO people see social media strategy as a threat. Being a web strategist is where it’s at.

Update 4/25/08: Oh yeah, add semantic web to the list in the title.

You can spend engineering resources on fighting spam like Matt Cutts and team, or you could spend talent resources on writing and curtaining content like Jason Calacanis, Jimmy Wales, and passionate bloggers.

Likewise, you can spend engineering resources to make sure you rank well in search engines with SEO, or you can create value for your users/customers by allowing them to poll you presence with a social media strategy like blogging, Twitter, curated bookmarks, teaching them like Brian Clark at Copyblogger, or helping them kick ass like Kathy Sierra, until they are compelled to become a paying customer.

Is one better than the other? Those that made their name with one may downplay the other, but that is human nature. It is better to be a good sales person than a strategy picker.

The odd thing is that SEOs see SMO as an SEO strategy, and SMOs see SEO as a dying strategy. Let’s just call it all evolving web strategy.

If you are in town for SMX Social Media, we can discuss this further. Look for me at the bar at the Westin. Add me on Twitter if you can’t find me.

There is a really dumb press release (and I say dumb because of its FUDy tone) at Marketwire suggesting that open source is a threat to the software business. This is may be true, but I think my post title says it all. Plus, the Standish Group wants to charge you $1,000 to prove this to you. Smart companies are succeeding with open source, such as MySQL and RedHat. From their inceptions, their business models were designed to give away or use free software, an infinite good that can be copied at zero cost, to sell services such as time and expertises, a finite good. Incumbent market leaders are not willing to pay what Dave Winer calls The Strategy Tax. It seems like the same idea as Clayton Christensen’s The Innovators Dilemma. Companies are not willing to change so drastically that they cannibalize their current value proposition, turn off their currently paying customers, and find new ones, so they whine when someone comes to eat their lunch. These companies must die off or they will create poisonous incongruencies inside of an industry, just like in the recording industry.

Today, Blockbuster Inc. announced its offer to acquire Circuit City. This is not good for consumers.

Big box electronic retailers control the consumer electronics industry more that you might think. In the US (and maybe elsewhere), Circuit City and Best Buy can pretty much tell consumer electronics manufacturers what to make buy telling them what they will buy in their buyers meetings.

Blockbuster can be influenced very easily by their primary vendors, the big Hollywood studios. If and when the acquisition occurs, Blockbuster could be a proxy from which big content content owners can exert control over consumer’s fair use and free speech rights. Hollywood studios could possibly push further anti-consumer efforts such as HDCP (high definition copyright protection), which is designed to stop piracy at a higher priority of satisfying paying customers. The false positives of anti-piracy mechanisms have a chilling effect, whether the content was fair use or if it was used to censor dissent at just the right time.

For this reason, this deal should not take place. Anti-trust watchdogs should take note. This is not “synergy.” It could be more infringements of free speech using consumer electronics. If the anti-consumer moves TiVo has recently made concern you, it is possible you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Update: Some think the merger is a joke because both companies are such weak players in their own marketplaces. I must admit that current with each companies financial positions until I read this post on CNet.

What you are looking at is an ambushing of Mike Arrnington at his own party with the intention of pissing him off and creating news for Valleywag, and the real reason behind all of the drama. (Update: In the comments for this photo, Bonny says it was innocent enough, but the depiction here is probably how Arrington saw it). And here, Owen Thomas does a piece to suggest humorously Arrington’s over reaction. Whether this tactic was suggested from above by Denton or Thomas, or if Bonny and Jackson cooked it up themselves, I do not know. But now I feel we were all (or at least I was) an unintended, unwitting pawn in creating news for Valleywag.

Jackson West approached Arrnington, saying “Hi, I am with Valleywag” as Bonny shot the reaction: Arrnington storming off to find bouncers, kicking them both out moments later. In case you are not aware, Valleywag does about one disparaging pieces a week on Arrnington, and I can understand why he would not want them at his private party. But Jackson and Bonny are new to the team. They could have remained at the party without stirring anything up, but that would not be in true Valleywag form. Stirring the pot and making the news happen, it seems, was there intention, and they accomplished their mission.

Do I mind the exposure for the part I took? Not really, but now it appears it was at the expense of Arrington’s nerves, and I am not completely comfortable with that. But perhaps it is just the tax Arrington has to pay for fame and success. It would have helped if Arrnington had explained all of this to me at the time, but emotions were running high with everyone, the club was loud and dark, and it was not possible. As for Bonny, she is a sweet girl, and I guess if she wants to work for Valleywag, that is her choice. I suppose neither Bonny nor Jackson were surprised that they were personally escorted out by Arrnington and the bouncers after what they did. By the time I became involved, Valleywag already made the news, I just helped to unknowingly sweeten it a bit. I don’t wish to downplay my “heroics,” but just to say that they were uninformed. So, I really was Vallywaged, not in a good way.

Photo by Bonny Pierzina.

My girlfriend and I attended the TechCrunch/PopSugar meetup last night. Well, Mike Arrington had to give Valleywag something to talk about. He, along with 6 bouncers escorted Bonny Pierzina, (a vlogger who was hired to photographer the event by Valleywag) out of the venue. This took place soon after after Jackson West, a new Valleywag writer, introduced himself to Arrington. Right when Bonny happened to be talking with Hayden Black and I, we were appoached. As we stood there with Arrington for a moment, who was looking smugly at us as the bouncers surrounded her, I asked them not to spare sweet little Bonny, but they would not have it.

I later learned that the ever-charming Pete Cashmore of Mashable was kicked out as well, presumably becuase his blog competes with TechCrunch? I just don’t get it. I guess the idea of friendly competition/”co-opitition” are dead. More details here along with the photos Arrington does not want you to see! Even more pwnage ensued after the event. Well, hopefully everyone can be friends afterwards. Loren Feldman, who made a name for himself by calling out Arrington, is now friends with him.

Update:
LA Times reporter David Sarno reports Pete may have fabricated the story of his ouster at the party just for fun (via Valleywag).

Update 2: The Truth Emerges: Valleywag at the TechCrunch/PopSugar Party

We now have two great examples to point at in the music industry on adapting to change.

On one end, we have Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who ditches his label, does his own production, marketing and sales, and takes a complete hands-on approach into creating his own artistic and financial destiny.

On the other end we have Billy Bragg who simply expects to make music without him or his company taking any initiative to do anything innovative, and then sit back and wait for others to pay him, and to blame others (companies who provide an opt-in service to help artists deliver content to fans and potential fans) for taking advantage of him. Music is not worth as much as it used to be. The days of being paid a premium for your music when it is not remarkable are long gone, as is automatic payment for any use of your music.

Bragg, here is a list of other distribution service companies (some of which have had less business year over year since 2000) that have “taken advantage” of you that should be giving you money even though you have done nothing to deserve it:

Trucking Companies
Every Monday, thousands of trucks across the country would deliver new CDs, records, and tapes to independent records stores, Tower Records, SamGoody, The Wherehouse, and Virgin Mega Stores (these are all old US record store chains). These trucking companies had a business model because at the other end of supply chain was you, the artist. The funny thing is that labels (or maybe the stores themselves) where the ones paying the trucking companies for the service, not the other way around. No profit sharing with artist here.

Pressing Plants
CD and vinyl pressing plants perform a service of putting artist music on a physical media so these trucks could deliver it to the stores. A labels artists would submit the artwork, a mastering studio would deliver the glass masters, acetate, or master tapes to these facilities. Of course, these are still around. They are serving artists and labels that have figures out how to make fans buy things they can’t get for free. No, pressing plants are not responsible for paying out royalties either.

Music Stores
Label’s marketing organizations sometimes had a hand in promoting music at the stores themselves, by sending posters and promo CDs to play, and then having a rep come and visit the store to make sure the store was using the material. Also, they may have allocated shelf space to specific releases. But is this something they can rely on today to help your sales? Of course not. Amazon and iTunes might have similar equivalent, paid sponsorship of artists. But it is in their bests interest to promote artists that sell, not the ones paying the most for “virtual shelf space” (as some physical music stores were relying on for most of their income at one point).

But are any of these companies in the distribution chain charged with promotion and payment of artists? No. This was the label’s responsibility. And today, it is increasingly the artist’s responsibility to either take charge by creating his or her own destiny, or make sure they keep a management team that is not pretending that things are the same as they were 10 years ago. Back then, certain services were bundled together. Today, they are all separated. The distribution channel is not responsible for paying you unless you make this explicit, which fewer are not in the business of doing (remember Caroline? I think they are/were in this business).

Check out Bragg’s site, he links to his iLike profile. Watch out, iLike, you will be the next free service to owe him money for promoting him, and then not taking proper responsibility for making him rich.

Social networking sites with music were originally for unsigned, independents artists. Since these became some of the only places to legally listen to music online (since the major labels were to timid to participate), these sites became destination sites for music. Then came the established artists with their old-school expectations and mentalities who subtly wanted to hijack the attention established by the independents. Then the established artists cries foul for expecting the world to put the genie back in the bottle. I don’t think so.

Update 3/25/08:
Joe Weisenthal’s blog had a great thread going on that Billy Bragg himself was participating in. Well, it was great in that Joe, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Blaise Alleyne, Thomas Hawk, Matt Mason, and some others had the opportunity to debate the issue of the moral obligation Bebo did or did not have to pay artists. Comment were turned off. Temporary problem with the blog I guess, thanks for letting me know, Blaise.

Some argue that artists should be paid for their work, but offer no solution. Others say that the royalty organizations and/or the US Congress or the labels should have created compulsory licenses for such sites so they can pay artists. Speaking of pay for plays, I participated in the old mp3.com 10 years ago and it was a joke. I say take the bull by the horns like Trent, and just make it happen for yourself.

I am taking issue with the way Stilgherrian has characterized the working style of Jason Calacanis by comparing Mahalo to 37 Signals. Yes, they are both startups, and they are both in the “web 2.0″ space, but are very different companies with very different goals.

Mahalo is venture funded. His VCs are expecting multiple returns their investment. Jason probably has a limited time and space to show investors that this project has legs. Mahalo is about cranking content on recent events, and making them rank high in search engines to generate ad revenue. Working in this type of environment is not for everyone. But for a lot of people, working at Mahalo is a great opportunity. Just think of the people who worked for him in the past who have all gone on to do great things like Om Malik, Rafat Ali, and Peter Rojas. I know Sean personally and he is happy there. There are a lot of options in the future for some of the people working there, and their time with Mahalo is worth the investment to them. It probably is not to most of the people criticizing Jason’s advice in his post, but they don’t matter, they just want page views themselves.

37 Signals on the other hand is not as young, and there is no pressure on them to grow exponentially as there is with Mahalo (Jeff Bezos has invested in 37 Signals, but if he started making any demands, Fried and Hansson would definitely hand him his money back). They have designed the company around their own happiness, and not much else. They designed Ruby on Rails to make developers happy to code. They have designed Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise to satisfy the right customers, the ones whos’ needs are being met with good enough features. They are able to say “f*** you” to their critics’ faces (you know you have “made it” when you can do this, seriously, am I right?).  37 Signals puts all design, features, and business strategy decisions through this filter: will it make me less happy or less free? If the answer is no, they don’t do it. This means saying no to new features, no to customizations, no to monster growth. They piss off investors by saying no to their money. They can afford to loose customers with demands that are too high. They are, in Tim Ferriss’s words “the new rich.” They have options and freedom. And not just anyone can work for them. They can afford luxuries. Great programmers are not commodities.

Could Calacanis design a company this way? I don’t know about that. That is not what got him where he is today. He is a content guy by choice, becuase that is what he loves. Content always needs to be written and updated, and this is a commodity today, especially with so many newspapers laying people off today. Adhering to a business design philosophy around happiness, and not chasing after competitors or stories is the choice 37 Signals has made becuase they love great apps and great code.

The point: when you have to please investors in the short term, you probably cannot design your business life around total happiness, but happiness (and experience) can still happen despite the imperfect lifestyle design.

Update: Sean Percival, the happy employee at Mahalo weighs in.

PS,
Jason, please hire me.

For moblogging, you need to camera phone with e-mail capability. So, I just upgraded to a Motorola W490 specifically for the photo and video features. I was eager to connect it to my Flickr account. Flickr itself does not have this capability built-in, but since it has an open API, they did not have to build it themselves. Here are a couple sites that connect to Flickr and another that could/should.

Twitxr
The brand new player in this space is Twitxr.com. What interested me is the ability to send my mobile phone pics to both my Twitter and Flickr accounts (it will send them to Facebook as well, but I was not as excited about that). I singed up, and found it pretty easy to connect it each of these other profiles. Due to the nature of each of these connecting sites, the registration process was slightly different for each one. I took some pics, and sent it to a special e-mail address generated by Twitxr, and had it appear on my Flickr, with a geo tag (you set your location on Twitxr ahead of time), as well as my Twitxr profile which appears to have its own obligatory social network along with a user landing page and commenting, and RSS feed with a simple URL. Twitxr’s social network seems kind of pointless at first, since I am using it as a utility to send pics to my other social networks. However, the value is that you don’t need to have a profile on these other sites to make use of Twitxr. I don’t feel much like looking for friends on it, especially since FriendFeed has raised the standard for ease of friend-finding. According to TechCrunch, Twitxr is a product of Fon Labs, part of Fon Wireless, a WiFi provider with offices worldwide.

ShoZu
Next, I checked out ShoZu. I found ShoZu on Flickr’s mobile tools page. BarCampLA5 is this weekend, and I wanted to make use of my camera phone there. While twitxr does geotags tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not regular meta tags, ShoZu does meta tags (set it on the site ahead of time) but not geotags. So, I set the tags ShoZu to BarCampLA5 and some variations on that. ShoZu, being the oldest out of the three sites, supports connections to the widest variety of social networking and blogging platforms that have open APIs: 28 sites including YouTube and Facebook, plus e-mail and ftp. It does not have a social networking feature, or a landing page for your profile like twitxr, but it does provide an RSS feed for my photos like twitxr. ShoZu has a blog and a support forum, and their team looks pretty solid. They are venture funded and their target user demographic is worldwide, and are based in London. I am not sure what their business model is, but they appear to have some corporate partnerships with big media companies.

JuiceCaster
The first site I checked out was actually JuiceCaster since a friend of mine was just hired there. By far, this was the most difficult site to use, and I could not even get it to work. I had to send it from my phone with the text “Profile” to [my phone number] @juicecaster.com. It cleverly sends the pic right back to my phone (I don’t think it is supposed to do this, and I do not see any value in it), but nothing changes on the site. I could not even get a picture to appear. I don’t care if there is some step I skipped or something, it should just work and be idiot-proof.

JuiceCaster lets you host both pictures and videos, lets you embed a Flash widgets on your blog or MySpace, or Facebook, but it does not seem very useful I can get the pictures to appear. The widget takes the TV metaphor a little too far by showing snow, color bars (when there is no content yet), and letting you change the channel to another users. The widget is the only way to view the content, which creates a bit of a usability problem. This means that you don’t have access to the raw jpg files. As a destination for photos and videos, there are no open APIs to allow the connection of something Flickr or YouTube, which in some ways are compititors. There are no RSS feeds so there is no real platform for others to build on. As a user, if you want your videos to get seen by a lot of people, you are far better off using the ShoZu to YouTube application than embedding the JuiceCaster widget. But, it is pretty clear that the main purpose of this platform is for mobile phones themselves (not the web), sharing with specific friends, and immediacy. However, a little web usability can go a long way in helping to build this brand via some mild SEO. They do have a Facebook application, with instructions on installing it here, but strangely, no link to the actual Facebook application on that page, which is here, listing 19 active daily users. There are four different fan groups on Facebook, the most having 26 members. All of this calls their current strategy into question.

One feature that JuiceCaster has that other services do not have is the ability to send photos and videos to your friends’ phones. However, it seems most phones today have this feature built in, and you do not need a 3rd party application. I am not sure what the core competency or business model is for JuiceCaster. In some ways they compete with Slide.com and RockYou.com’s MySpace widgets and Facebook applications. The target user seems to be the MySpace demographic. I suggest they focus more on allowing the content to be spread around the net with more than just Flash widgets, but also with RSS and an open API, and perhaps a blog. According to their about page, they were able to make their mark years ago as a white label solution, back when there was less competition and innovation in the space.

It seems they definitely want to be a platform, but the other two competitors mentioned in this post, which are simply tools to enable the use of larger platforms, seem to be ahead of them in functionality, flexibility, and momentum. I would love to see them get it together. JuiceCaster is based out of Los Angeles, Ca. They appear to have investors but do not list any of them, but they are listed here at the TechCrunch CrunchBase

I tried to embed the Flash widget, but it messed up the layout of this page to much, so here is a screen shot instead.

Mashable took a less in-depth look at around 30 of the competitors in this space last year.

Update:
If my friend is able to help me fix the problems with JuiceCaster, I’ll update it here.

Mike at Techdirt points to some half-hearted efforts at free e-books. The books will only be available for a limited time, and they cannot be printed. It is all posturing by the book publishers who still believe that completely free pdfs will cannibalize physical book sales when authors like Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have proved otherwise.

The new definition of “free” is DRM-free as well as free-as-in-beer. The restrictions on printing and the books’ availability for a limited time are just other forms of DRM.

It is true that it is cheaper to buy books than it is to print them. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine is a free to download/print/read book I was looking into printing at Kinkos, but it is going to cost $43 when the book will probably cost $25 in stores and $20 from Amazon when it comes out (thanks to someone who linked to it in the comments on Techdirt.com from a post a couple of months ago).

Also newly available to to freely download/print/read is The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson.

And finally, Neil Gaiman is deciding which of his books he should release as a free download.