As usual there is just so much to say about the AfrikaBurn festival in the Karoo, that starting is daunting. So I thought I’d just relate a little experience I had on day 5 (sunday). This year I rode up to Afrikaburn on my motorbike and registered it with the Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV) .

When it comes to other bikers, bikers are a friendly lot, so it wasnt surprising that when 3 large offroad bikes arrived on Sunday (the night after the Burn), the one guy came up to me.  He was from Pretoria with his other two mates and they were just on their way biking through the Karoo, escaping city life, when they came past the AfrikaBurn turn-off sign. They’d never heard of Afrikaburn. However he had experienced a bad fall on his bike a few hours previously and they needed a place to stay for the night, so they followed the Afrikaburn sign.  Although there was a strict No Ticket – No Entry policy in force this year, the good folks at the gate of the camp must have made an exception given that it was day 5, and the guy had had his fall.

After pitching their 3 little one-man tents the three conservative (and unsuspecting)  bikers had wandered up to the Binnekring. Needless to say they were resoundedly accosted by the most freakish sights and sounds available in the world at that particular time, and by the time I ran into my biker friend his eyes were glazed; smile and frown involved in a heated battle with each other. He related their whole experience to me, starting with the motorbike accident and saying: ” Jislaaik, I’m not sure if this is all real or if I’ve arrived in the afterlife after my accident…. and if it is indeed the Afterlife, I’m not sure if it is heaven or it is hell.”

You can see my post from last year’s Afrikaburn here and here (this is my 4th Afrika Burn and I’m already scheming up ideas for the next one. C U there!)

Having been an avid Google-Watcher for over 10 years now (and Adwords payer for nearly as long), my biggest gripe with the big G can be explained by the 10 year evolution of the Number 1 Search Results Page. Back when Brin & Page were still genuine, outside-the-box geeks all that appeared on the page were the best results – organic. Brin & Page were even famously quoted at that point of stating that any form of paid search results would not be in the interest of the user.

OK, so they were naive, and when they had to monetize, Adwords was inevitable.  But Adwords started out as a tiny little column on the right hand side very explicitly marked as “Sponsored Results”. And Google started making millions. If they’d stopped there, and had been content just to make millions, all would have been fine, and they’d likely still be the darling of the tech world. But millions werent enough – shareholders wanted billions. And so, every single year since those early days, Google has been putting more and more “Sponsored results” onto the page. Not only that, but they have craftily camouflaged the search results too, so that its increasingly difficult to see what results are paid and what results untarnished by adword budgets.

Still, shareholders (and by implication Brin & Page) were not satiated. With the rise of big competitors such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp et al, Adwords aren’t the only things monopolising the first page results. Now its other Google Properties that are promoted – Google Places, YouTube, etc. The final nail in the coffin of Organic results is the latest Make-or-Break move of Google+. Your First Page results will now also be peppered with Google+ entries.

Internet Marketing experts have been warning  that soon Google’s first page results will consist of exclusively Paid-For links or Google properties. That day is nigh. And I would personally argue that when that day comes a weird situation may result with Google where the Page 2 search results will be better than the page 1 results.  That is where you will find the non-paid for results that got to the top PURELY on relevancy. With this in mind, I present you with the business idea of the decade:

Register a domain something like “Page2Results”, put a simple search box on it and for the Search Results just skim Google’s 2nd page results (onwards).

I reckon the site would Rock! The only reason I’m not doing it myself is that you’d need mega-bucks to set up servers and infrastructure. But you’d have a very solid business.

(whilst you’re about it, make sure you register “Page3Results”, “Page4Results” etc. That way, if Google continues with their greed, you can just switch your model whenever necessary )

I migrated everything to a new PC this week, and have used the migration to switch a lot of the services I’ve been using. One service which I couldn’t live without was  ReaditLater . Basically its a browser extension that does exactly what it says – 1 click and the current page is saved to your list for later reading. Quite honestly, I don’t know how people operate without such a service these days. The amount of interesting blog articles that cross my desk every day (courtesy of Twitter, Facebook and a zillion RSS feeds) is frightening. A lot of the links are off-topic junk, but now and then there is a “long-form” piece which is really worth reading. You can usually tell this by a quick scan of the page. But, if you actually work at your computer, as I try to, and your work doesnt take well to constant interruptions – then reading the article There-and-Then is just plain destructive. So what I do throughout my day is add about 3 to 5 articles to my Readitlater list and then when I need a break or in the evening I… you guessed it : Read it Later.

Recently I purchased an entry level Kindle – no 3G, no net connection and no touch or keyboard. Although I prefer real-paper books wherever I have the choice (and there is still a choice after you’ve purchased your kindle, something a lot of commentators, in their Either/Or thinking, completely forget), getting a kindle was inevitable. I buy a lot of books from Amazon and besides the extra cost, they take ages to get to me. I specifically chose Kindle over reading on an iPad, because I actually find it a huge advantage to read without the ability to click somewhere and disappear down a rabbit-hole. Reading books requires “Staying on the Same Page”.

Enter Instapaper (which I recently switched to): Instapaper is very similar to ReaditLater – a 1 click bookmark list for reading stuff at a later stage when you not so busy. What made me switch though is that Instapaper has awesome integration with Kindle. Here’s what I’ve done: I’ve set up Instapaper so that every day at 4pm it sends my Kindle a digest of all of the articles/blog posts I have bookmarked since last time. They are perfectly formmated for the Kindle – crisp clear text minus all the adverts and boiler plate. Then, every evening, I can escape my monitor and, in a place of my choosing, I can “curl up” and read all my long-form stuff. OK, so if there’s a juicy link in an article I can’t follow it – but, hey, that’s the whole point!  I end up actually reading the full articles right ’til the end of the page. And then, even with the keyboardless Kindle, I have an option to “Like” the article which automagically sends it to my evernote account if I want to snip some stuff from it or follow some links. (you can set the “Like” action to tweet or Facebook too)

Try it out, I’m tellin’ ya, Kindle + Instapaper has been one of the smarter enhancements to my digital lifestyle sanity.

Managing over 14 000 keywords on Google Adwords as I do, is a formidable task. So formidable that I kind of gave up on it for a while, but have recently dived back in.  All of Google’s products are becoming increasingly complicated – Adwords, Analytics and Webmaster Tools. There is just too much information and not enough time.  Here’s some lessons I’ve learnt:

ABANDON PERFECTION
You are NEVER going to a be able to monitor and analyse everything that you should be. And its just going to get more impossible as time goes on. Analytics is a bottomless pit – with all the tools Google now provides, you could spend a month analysing a single days traffic.

ACTIONABLES ONLY
As a webmaster or SEO person, Traffic stats can be quite beguiling (especially if your traffic is going in the right direction). But, given the scarcity of time and resources,  a lot of stats, at bottom, are a nice-to-have not a must-have. Nowadays before looking at any Adwords or Analytics report I ask myself what action can I take that will boost my bottom line from this information. Its surprising how much stuff fails this test.

BYPASS THE GIVENS
Be careful of the “I need to monitor my competitors rankings to see if I need to step up my game-plan” trap. A lot of useless statistics and reports can be justified with this lame reasoning. If you are in business it is a given that you will have competitors, it is a given that you must always put forward your best game-plan, it is a given that you should do effective things to rank the best you can. If these aren’t givens then you aren’t really an entreprenuer. As Matt Cutt’s once quipped: wasting time on the givens is “like telling a boxer to punch harder”.

APPLY THE 80/20 PRINCIPAL
This is particularly relevant when you’re managing 14 000 keywords. Just about every Google report has filtering options. Use them continually! Concentrate your effort on tweaking only those adwords which have had more than 20 impressions for the month.  By doing this I cut my list from 14 000 to 400.  But the cost of the adwords accounted by that top 400 was 90%.  Put the other way around: Why waste time analysing 13 500 keywords in order to tweak 10% of your costs?

DONT FORGET TO PLAY
Being maths and stats based, the nature of analytics suggests precision, process and routine. Something like, say, 10 standard reports analysed every Friday, another 10 monthly, etc. Taking this stereotype approach can lead to a very one-dimensional marketing strategy (not to mention leading to a very rote, soulless task in the process). But sometimes, when you’re in a playful mood a lot can be gained by just “surfing” your analytics and stats. Exploring new reports and views that google has come up with. Seeing things from new angles. Bucking the usual rules.

BOTTOM LINE
Ongoing monitoring of Google Adwords and Analytics is definitely about Efficieny – doing things right. But in your focus on total efficiency, don’t overlook the other big E – Effectiveness – doing the right things.

“Search Plus Your World” is Google’s latest play to promote Google+. Basically your personal search results will now be mashed up with topical references from your Google+ stream (unless you opt-out)

As usual “personalisation” for improved results is the Google mantra and rationale behind the changes. However, on the other end of the continuum Google seems to be moving away from customisation to a homogenisation when it comes to the actual service they offer. The new service will attempt to satisfy all your search, social and bookmarking needs in one grand (take-over-the-world) platform.

Whilst on paper they might be moving in the right direction with customising results, the reality of the maturing webscape is that services are also becoming customised. For social – go to Facebook, they do it best. For realtime micro-blogging go to Twitter. For bookmarking use something like Evernote. Web services that stick to their knitting and avoid the Jack-of-all-trades trap will always do it best.

The market for a good plain Vanilla search engine will never disappear. But the big G seems to be undertaking a “make or break” bet on Google+. They’re playing a dangerous game and better be careful. There are already commentators like Gizmodo who see this latest move as  a Google break, not a Google make.

The pic is of a beach looking towards Chapman’s Peak. Made on my iPhone with the apps: 100 Cameras & Camerabag. You can see some of my other iPhone pics here…

oh, and tonight is Full Moon.

Now that Cape Town’s Table Mountain officially made it into the 7 Natural Wonders of the World list, it would be a good time to take a look at the unimaginable – the whole city and it’s incredible environs being turned into a permanent ghost city.

As the world’s media juggernaut moves from frenzy to frenzy it is easy to forget about the Fukushima Nuclear disaster earlier this year, and the Chernobyl meltdown which occurred in the 1980s is all but forgotten. But in reality Nuclear disasters are for all intents and purposes “permanent” disasters.  How many people know that to this day there is a 30km radius zone around Chernobyl called the “Exclusion Zone” which is totally off limits for human habitation. And here’s the killer – it will not be inhabitable for the next 1000 years! Even the official 30 km zone is debatable – most people with any choice would surely not live within 100 km of the area where soil radiation levels are still (and will be for 1000 years) extremely high.

Neither do many people realise that the Fukushima Exclusion Zone of 30 km is not a temporary measure.  It too will last 1000s of years. Nor are the world being told the truth about Fukushima. Toxic levels of radiation are continually appearing further and further and further afield. Again: nobody in their right minds would voluntarily go and live within 100 km of the place.

Enter: Cape Town

• frequently voted as one of the most beautiful cities in the world
• population 3.5 million
• new home of one of the 7 Natural Wonders of the World
• home of one of the worlds 6 Floral Kingdoms – being the smallest and richest

A mere 28km North of the city center one finds an ageing (albeit active) Nuclear power station – relic of the Apartheid era.  Unlike the nuclear power stations in Japan, the USA and France – this facility is not based in a first world country, but within an emerging country beset with infrastructural and administrative problems.  Scenario planning for a meltdown in this instance should not be viewed as scaremongering, but absolutely critical.  So here goes:

WHAT HAPPENS IF THERE’S A MELTDOWN AT KOEBERG NUCLEAR STATION?

We can safely assume that the  minimum Exclusion Zone would be 30km

We can reasonably assume that this zone may be a lot bigger (80 km perhaps) after the official obfuscation of facts at both Fukushima and Chernobyl emerge

Either way – the whole of Cape Town would have to be evacuated. 3.5 million people would be homeless.  The South African Parliament would be evacuated. The country’s second largest financial and economic hub would be utterly destroyed within a matter of days. The world would lose 100s of species of flora and fauna permanently (they’ve got a name for this: “extinction”) The 7th Wonder of the World would be a No-Go Zone.

Basically Cape Town would be a ghost city. Not for a few months or even a few years – 500 years at least!

Quite honestly it would be the biggest environmental tragedy to ever hit the world.  People will look back for 1000s of years incredulous that such a risk could ever have been tolerated.

Is it worth it? Even if Koeberg could guarantee us that the chances of a Nuclear accident ever happening are less than  0.01% (which they most certainly can’t) what would the cost be?

Forgetting the cost of the natural habitat and human lives – the economic costs of such a disaster would surely amount to Trillions of dollars (especially when you factor in 1000 years of losses). Take into account the extinctions; value of a 7th Wonder of the World and human lives lost – there is no monetary value that to which such a loss could be reduced.

How is it that such a scenario is even a possibility?

UPDATE:

Scary pics: Fukushima 9 months later – what a nuclear exclusion zone looks like