I understand that Internet companies don’t want to inherit the burden for policing the rights of intellectual property holders. It makes monetizing their properties more complicated and difficult through advertising and other means. They make a lot of money off of advertisers like me who are active marketers typically in a handful of sectors at a time. It also poses some significant technology challenges, not just for information security but for general efficacy.

I understand that intellectual property rights holders don’t want to be ripped off. I’m an underground musician who has spent tens of thousands of out-of-pocket dollars putting out my work as much as I’ve been able to so far, with really no ROI other than just enjoying the process and the fact that a few people have enjoyed what I've done so far. I’m happy to have it paid attention to when that happens, but I’m not happy when someone presumes themselves entitled to download it for free absent cases where I've openly offered it as such. Everyone's got a sob story and there are much sadder ones one can have in life other than "I want but 'can't afford' to pay for that record/movie/book... (that I only want part of, or want but simply not that much etc.)." I’m getting closer, but I’m not yet to a place where I can regularly record and produce, moreover effectively market, records of a quality level that I'm proud enough of to put my name on. Piracy has always bothered me deeply as a content creator but it’s never been a primary deterrent to the creative process. When piracy rarely or never befalls intellectual property it's generally either because the property either is too unknown, or simply is too lacking in value. My lack of having developed my body of work has been more about the former than the latter. I'll resolve it when I can, and in the meantime accept obscurity as the price I pay for being uncompromising. It's just another dimension of my art being mine. Next time I cut a record I'll make sure I've budget left over and a road-map through which to actually promote it. Lesson learned.

I understand that the open Internet encourages not just expression and innovation but also disruptive change. As an actor specializing in voice work (whose clients are often advertisers), the forces of crowdsourcing, commoditization and globalization have pressured me to consider concession to lower rates than I would’ve had to concede to 10 years ago, to stay competitive in what is now a much larger labor pool. It makes me very happy that I occasionally get direct booking inquiries from potential clients as far away as Brazil, India or China (I’ve not gotten any from Russia yet but whenever I do, yes, I’ll do my BRIC dance). I accept that sometimes inquirers - and not just those overseas - inevitably ask me to work for a fraction of what my fees realistically need to be given my cost of living here in the secondary market that is San Francisco. I’d rather see myself technically able to work the global marketplace than be totally reliant on work strictly sourced through the primary markets of LA, New York and Chicago. The fact is without the current state of the Internet, supply/demand warts and all, I’d have much less work to my credit than I do today. I’d be largely unable to take bookings from clients directly as I sometimes do.

I understand how people say consumers need accessibility to the content they want, and will get it one way or another if/as they want it badly enough. However, we’ve come a long way from the days where kids would trudge over to their neighborhood record store, have trouble finding some of what they’re looking for, have the store put it on special order, find the store fails to procure it a month later, and then feel forced to hit up their friends so they could pirate it (off their vinyl, cassette or CD). That’s the pirate I was when I was a kid. I pirated music when I felt I had no other choice, and at that time I also spent more on artists’ music, merch and shows than I have at any other time in my life. I doubt ‘reluctant” pirates as such are out there anymore so much. Anyone with a bit of dedication can figure out how to find just about any relatively known artists’ work largely available for pirating through a few advanced Google queries, and arm themselves with proxies and other means with which to try to play cat-and-mouse with System Administrators. I also understand how this issue is more than just about movies and music, to be sure. That all said, American consumers have First Amendment rights. I love user-generated content when it’s good, and over the years I think it’s been getting better. Censorship would stifle that trend.

I understand that piracy is a huge and complex problem, that it could be called a double-standard to laud how technology can be a force for liberation and democratization while criticizing how it can be an enabler of theft. Both are totally true, but I see technology as a tool. What people do with it, people can create jobs and they can destroy jobs. I for one think that the tech space has done plenty of innovation, and it’s on the policymakers and entertainment industries to innovate in the ways they can, not just adapt. I can think of tactics that would help address this issue, in a way that would be more effective than sweeping, vaguely-written bills which by their nature may feel have impact nonetheless imply their authors still haven’t thought everything through thoroughly.

How about create jobs by mandating that sites like YouTube staff up on content moderators, not just on behalf of intellectual property owners but also on behalf of parents who need to be able to manage what their kids get exposed to, who nonetheless aren't trying to short-cut our duty to be with our young kids when they’re online? I’m one of those too (Yes, the 90s kids who with baited breath watched Jello Biafra and Tipper Gore duke it out, we’re all grown up now). Maybe if we all got a little more targeted, tactical and creative – and that’s just one example – such sites wouldn’t end up simply writing their policies to opt out of such areas (YouTube’s policy basically says users under 18 shouldn’t visit; if that’s not an admission of being a largely non-managed platform editorial-wise I don’t know what is), because they'd become more tightly moderated in the interest of the greater and longer-term good.

It’s relatively uncommon knowledge that Google has been experimenting with concepts for what a next-gen ISP might look like; effectively making some speculate they're vying to become not just much of the world’s gatekeeper to the Web but also its pipe for access to the Internet itself. That would be a lot more disruptive than moving things increasingly into the cloud has been in terms of major infrastructure shifts. If it sounds paranoid just remember it wasn't that long ago when, beyond their search network, there was no Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics or Chrome. Maybe a few policies at the existing ISPs level for managing certain asset types or data protocols are in order, now more than ever before they get even deeper into their experiments. If I were a policymaker looking to set precedents through the infrastructure angle, I'd look to do so deal with people like Comcast now, to be better braced for the challenges of trying to deal with Google later. Comparing market caps is all one need do to figure that reasoning out.

How about the entertainment industry take some of the money they’re spending on lobbying Congress and instead invest it in Artist Development again (remember that)? Because guess what: One thing all this technological change has enabled is the increasingly entrepreneurial, business savvy Artist. We struggling artists, we may be smarter at the negotiating table and we may have fancy online tools now but the minority of us who will become the next round of big-brand stars (that sustain your business and carry your losses on acts that don't take off), brief and bright as we normally will, to burn at all we still need fucking capital. Some of us are old enough to remember how it started getting pulled away from us before Napster came along, so let’s get real: You fucked up. Continuing to fight the broadening of the pyramid will only keep fragmenting the whole structure. Be smarter with the sizable capital you still have. You might learn something from promising growth-potential acts who can likewise learn from you.

How about musicians like me stop worrying so much about seeming “uncool” in the face of piracy, and talk straight-up about how if someone doesn’t pay our overhead (and we’re not independently wealthy), our work basically dies (or we out of necessity “sell out” and reposition ourselves in largely if not exclusively commercial service provider capacities)? Artists have been way to quiet over the years about the basic fact, in my opinion.

I’m not saying I have head-smacking-good ideas or even a lot of ideas, but that’s part of the point. We need to roll up our sleeves and think this through, painful and complicated as it is.

Full-time lawmakers, like full-time entertainment industry professionals, aren’t technologists. In addition to understanding business they need to also get the nuances of execution challenges of tackling these delicate, important issues.

Not that this is really a technology issue. This is rooted in technological evolution that has simply helped highlight moral bankruptcy both sell-side and buy-side. Piracy, in the ways it happens on American soil anyway, is principally a moral issue. I've never known legislation to be a mechanism capable of imparting morality, though.

I wish there were largely singular, simple answers that didn’t have potentially if not probably drastic implications. As far as I can tell the SOPA and PIPA bills, as currently written, wouldn’t meet that criteria.

A couple links worth considering, wherein you can see what a few others of have to say, also, compare the actual texts of these bills vs. a newer one that's been alternatively proposed:

http://www.stopthewall.us/artists/
http://keepthewebopen.com/

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Brilliant people are born every day but life only lets a few of them stay that way, and of those only so many do something with it.

The town I spent much of my youth in hasn't been called Encinal in a log time. Where it is, not far from what is today called Cupertino, has not changed. People haven't much used the word "industrialist", "futurist" or "inventor" in a long time. They now favor words like "entrepreneur", "visionary" and others. Still, the intended meaning is the same.

Underneath words, fashions and other superficialities of a given day, people aren't impossible to change but change they occasionally can and do. The way they find their way to changing for the better, sometimes the paths to that are changing how they experience, work, communicate and express themselves in the world.

Thank you Sir, and to the company you built, for doing so much to that end.

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What matters is I tried multitasking (so to speak) and it didn't work so well. Eventually my friend remarked "It sounds like you're being an asshole," upon his having noticed and deciding to call me out on the fact that he hadn't my full attention. Like a professor catching a student zoning out during a lecture, in so doing he schooled me in how I'd accepted an assignment of fully listening, and I could only do so much to cheat it... OK well maybe not quite like that. He had no idea what was happening on my end of the line; he just knew something was up. Also, I've only had so many educators ever call me an asshole.

Now to reiterate a point: Again, I don't remember which came first - the call or the flirting. Even with the emotional charge of that scenario having seared much of it into my memory, I don't remember every detail. So that's a great example of a detail that doesn't matter. Maybe it mattered then but it doesn't matter now. To the best of my knowledge a normally functioning, unimpaired, typical human brain lets some things go and retains others all for natural reasons. That's a good thing.

I won't dispute that very compelling art can be made through meticulous documentation of every given detail about something. That's one way to make art, information art as opposed to information architecture, and yes it can be beautiful. Still, it's just one way and like any way it has its overhead. Documenting everything does not mean that everything has inherent meaning. Any analyst worth their salt will attest to how not all information is meaningful or relevant.

Not that I wouldn't mind perhaps being one of the very rare folks profiled here. I wonder if any of them are using Facebook much, and how they'd feel about the new Timeline feature either way.

Anyway, I learned much that afternoon and obviously that afternoon continues to teach me things today.

From a purely technologist perspective I applaud Facebook's grand vision and underlying ambitions. I think GraphRank is a very interesting approach compared to PageRank; the idea of ranking apps in a Wall and/or Ticker as measured by Likes and other social actions vs. ranking sites in an index as measured by hyperlinks and their attributes is intriguing and bold for sure. For making a given platform the center of the Web long-term, will mostly pulling it in really work better than mostly reaching out to it? I'm not so sure. Apples and oranges (as it need be one way or another of course).

What I am sure of is there are times in life when connectivity and intimacy simply don't mix, and something's got to give. Do I really want and need the world and my relationship(s) to it characterized by so much multi-leveled, multi-filtered (or not) connectedness? Or do I really just need connectedness and intimacy, well managed if not by me then for me, with a select handful of people, publishers and advertisers? Every user needs decide for themselves.

Whatever. Maybe I'm just a Gen X cynic. To me too much of social networking to date has been reality TV all over again, driven by the energies put out by the collision of self-esteem deficiencies with narcissistic tendencies. They're but different sides of the same coin nowadays, one which many seemingly flip every time they open their browser window.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

The altruism attached to the driving juggernaut that is social media, the idealistic packaging, is thinly veiled promoganda. A media platform is still a media platform; monetization is still monetization. Duh.

So, let me back up and organize what I have to say at the moment a bit more clearly and cohesively...

My current POV as a marketer and developer:

Costs of advertising on Facebook today aren't what they used to be, as I've found both directly and indirectly. Of course I understand it, but nobody on the buying likes things getting more expensive to work with. Investors looking to buy shares upon availability naturally have a different agenda. The Open Graph and Social Graph seems like a very complex problem, more of intelligent grafting than of graphing, mechanically. I can't help but think users don't want to show the world their real selves so much as they want to show themselves and their connections who they wish they were, and/or just the selective parts of themselves. As always, as to analytics as to information technology: Fundamentally the value of the information that comes out is still just proportional to the value of the information that goes in. I look forward to seeing what comes of pushing the privacy/convenience trade-off.

My current POV as an artist:

3rd-party partners like Spotify? Awesome technology at work for sure. Still, how well are musicians really being taken care of again financially as opposed to just being given more potential connectivity? What about those essentially now evaporated royalties that just push the issue of artists needing to get paid - not just by consumers but also by distributors whether online or offline - that much further into the accountability ether? Regarding the problem of making someone willing to pay for music again, apparently everyone but the end consumer now is entitled to an exemption in this bold new age. Charming.

My current POV as a user:

Serendipity is to Kindergarten as the Singularity is to Grad School. I'll try to keep an open mind, even if not such an open profile, for the next year or three. Nonetheless, now things are clearly flirting with creepy on a whole new level, so I'm starting to I think I just might have to drop out midway through High School.

"This above all: to thine own self be true."
- Polonius, Hamlet

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I actually do still drive regularly, but normally only on weekends when I'm either hauling stuff (e.g. lots of groceries) or going out of town for anywhere from a half-day to a weekend, etc.

Anyway, being asked got me thinking - not for the first time about it, but taking a bit of an inventory:

1) Better for The Body

I try to wake early enough to fit in a morning workout most days during the week, but can't always, and I've learned that getting a good night's sleep is heavily tied to my being on my game. Also, working out first thing in the morning is the only way I really can work out. When I'm fully conscious, I question the rationality of the act too much, like "Why would any sane person do this?!?" ...So if I miss my morning workout, that's it. Opportunity gone forever. There's no making it up.

There are bus and rail stops all over this town, but getting to them from any given place sometimes can involve a little bit of walking nonetheless, not so much distances as much as up and down hills. If I miss my morning workout, that's the only exercise I'll probably get that day.

2) Better for The Mind

Sitting in traffic sucks. Looking for parking sucks. Each is more tolerable when one endures them with some company, but that doesn't mean they aren't each fundamentally annoying and stressful. I did it for over a decade. I'd like to think I'm done with it and that I've more than paid my dues there.

3) Better for The Planet and Natural Connectedness

Between the rail lines and the buses and the cable cars, one can get around on zero-emissions vehicles partially if not fully. My car's a hybrid. That's something, but between the hills and the freeway it's not like when I drive it I'm not using its gas engine most of the time. It's not like a hybrid gas-electric car is clean. It can just be just less dirty compared to other options (again, it depends on variables like driving habits among others).

As for the elements, some people hate fog and wind in their face. Many people gripe about rain and getting stuck in it without an umbrella sends them running. Short of risking catching a cold, I love these things. I love smelling the ocean in the morning, and how feeling the change of seasons helps remind one of one's place. It's not like humanity owns the Earth. We're guests, and if we ultimately fuck up our time on it it would largely be to our own detriment; there are still potential scenarios wherein Earth would fundamentally get on without us.

4) Better for Productivity

On the rail, I can read. On the bus I can't read without feeling like I might honk, but I can do other things like projects and tasks management, or taking memos or perhaps even working on blog posts like this one. If/as I'm not underground I can stream the morning radio and really listen fully to and absorb the content, or do other various other quick, simple things online (ref. my previous post).

In short, I can multi-task (or do what people think of as multi-tasking; technically just altering between tasks relatively quickly), or I can do single tasks, but either way it's a better use of my time, attention span and overall engagement than having to worry about being the primary operator of whatever moving vehicle I might be on if/as I happen to be on one... Frankly, I'm not even all that skilled at driving and carrying on a conversation at the same time. I'm good at executing when I can keep focused, clear, and have my space. I like that my brain works that way, too.

5) Better for Social Life

Taking public transportation, one is more in touch with one's community. One needn't talk to anyone to feel that. I don't normally talk to anyone during my commutes, and only sometimes do happen to make direct eye contact with anybody. In fact, between my headphones, my sunglasses and the hooded jackets I sometimes wear I'm capable of looking pretty unapproachable when I want to. That has its uses. Even on those rare occasions though, the simple fact is that when one isn't rolling along in a box of metal and plastic with nobody else in it and surrounded by others doing the same stupid thing, one can more easily see others as the people they are and be seen as a person back.

You've heard of the scourge of Road Rage, but have you ever heard of people succumbing to Rail Rage or having Trolley Tantrums? Going Bus Batshit, maybe? No, up until reading this you hadn't. Because I just now made all those terms up. Not that incidents on public transport don't ever happen, obviously (you get the point).

There are other dimensions to the social aspects, too. In cities, there's nightlife. Grabbing a Happy Hour once or twice a week with friends and colleagues isn't uncommon at all, and because it's just part of being of legal drinking age in the city it's not like people plan stuff like that ahead by much if at all. It's easier to partake in the nightlife when one doesn't have the practical baggage of a motor vehicle. If one ends the night a bit buzzed or actually rather drunk, one can still make one's way home afterward without the mode of transportation being a danger to self or others (and there are always cabs if/as one's desired public lines are running infrequently or not at all for the night).

6) Better for Work Life

Some of what I get paid to do requires that I conduct myself as on-call relatively; as close to it as I'm able. I need to be able to get around within the city, but rarely have need to leave it. As mentioned before it's just easier, also sometimes faster, to do without a car if/as one just learns how it's done.

7) Better for Family Fife

The more work one can get done when one isn't home, the less one needs deal with when one is which affords more time for family. The more one has a social life outside of home life, the more one has some variety and balance in life instead of it being comparatively more Work/Family dualistic. The less stress one has outside the home, the less likely one is going to arrive home at the end of any given day with emotional baggage that needs to be unloaded on someone... It's nice when one can come home and honestly mean it upon responding to the question of how one's day was with "Fine."

* * *

Two list posts in a row... Ah, well. Whatevah.

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Anyway, in that spirit and in the wake of kicking the Crackberry habit, I figure drop props to certain mobile apps I discovered last year. Here, the criteria is how useful they were to me, in situations where it really counted. Some of these I'm using several times a day, others not even weekly. This list is in somewhat relative descending order, in that rather than trying to rank them in a hard order I've listed more by logical grouping. In the parenthetical per, I've noted what Apple-only devices they have native versions for (apologies Droid/Nexus/Evo/other users, you'll need do your own follow-up homework if/as inclined):

01. OmniFocus (iPhone / iPad)
If I had to pick a favorite app this would be the one; a tasks / personal productivity management app that I use all the time. I was honestly skeptical when a friend of mine over at UnicornLabs first brought this to my attention. When I got my first organizer in high school or so, I thought they were really lame. This is not an inexpensive app and it doesn't have a Windows client, but otherwise it seriously rules even for those who like myself aren't hardcore GTD methodology-heads. I'm frequently shuffling things around i.e. rescheduling things in here which bugged me at first, but I eventually realized it's not that I'm constantly putting things off. Rather, I'm actually optimizing how I spend my time by staying focused on what's most important at any given point of any given day (the location sensitivity helps), so it's like I'm optimizing my productivity all the time even though I'm never getting everything done as quickly as I'd prefer. Also, generally I don't ultimately forget to do anything anymore. Aside from being able to have a workflow well-suited to day-to-day task and project priorities that sometimes can be in relative flux, the ability to make it very hard for ideas or other "stuff" to eventually fall through the cracks / into the ether, that alone is worth the price.

02. Evernote (iPhone / iPad)
This works as a great companion to OmniFocus. I know I don't use all of its features having only dipped into the desktop client a bit, but basically having a place to take text/media notes that auto-syncs for easy follow-up later is all kinds of awesome. I'll admit I don't use its media features often. I don't let sensitive non-textual content sit long on my iPhone. I'm not a MobileMe user and I've found that seemingly even with units managed under strict corporate security policies, pulling all user-generated pictures, audio and video files off just about any given iPhone without ever knowing its unlock code isn't hard at all.

03. TimeWerks (iPhone)
This mobile billing application is an independent contractor's dream, and after not too long I was able to migrate all my respective invoicing to it. It's not uber-advanced but has a lot of great features for billing different clients and/or projects at different rates whether per hour or per project ("item"). One can track everything very tightly. 20-minute gig? No problem. Set the client / project up on the way to it, start / stop the timer at the beginning / end of the session, email them their bill as a PDF on your way out the door to the next thing. Easily enter payments, for those hopefully rare occasions when you need to follow-up to let Clients know of any late payments. If/as needed to support Clients' and/or your own larger accounting needs you can easily activate the app's server to export some or all of its database to CSVs you can pull down wirelessly onto your laptop, pull into an Excel pivot and then copy from. The only gripes I have are the PDF generation occasionally doesn't work, also and the projects level the description fields only fit so many characters. The latter is more a result of the interface, so I'm hoping to see an iPad version of this come out soon.

04. Expensify (iPhone / iPad)
The guys at Expensify are a smart and passionate bunch, but I should admit wasn't an early adopter here. Aside from privacy matters, spending money can be fun but I'm fiscally conservative: As a marketing guy I know how easily money potentially burns, and as a creative guy I know how easily it can get used on something that isn't aimed at profitability by definition. I didn't start using credit until early college, and felt weird about using anything but cash for commerce at the time. As much as I dislike debt and am wary of financial intangibles though, in the end I've got to say Expensify rocks. As long as you make a point of always using plastic or plastic-backed systems like PayPal, it makes life much easier whenever it's time to fully and thoroughly report, itemize or claim expenses. You can take snapshots of paper receipts with it if needed, but I tend not to. One still always needs to do a bit of work adding descriptions into things over the Web version for one's accountant at tax time.

05. MyKeePass (iPhone)
A must-have for users of the KeePass desktop app. If you're like me you have at least hundreds of logins, between contexts to sites to servers to email to terminals, and need to have them always readily available because when you need a certain one you really need it. This is a simple app into which you can wirelessly import and access your .kdb files. You can't edit and then export them from your mobile back to your desktop (or sync them externally if you want... I wouldn't), but that's a minor inconvenience.

06. LogMeIn Ignition (iPhone / iPad)
I'm also a Box.net and PogoPlug user, but when I'm mobile I tend to use LogMeIn the most as I'm not accessing files so much as I'm remotely restarting, debugging or just checking in on automations. There's nothing like kicking it on a beach for a few days, briefly jumping into this app to just make sure that back home your laptop is still running ("Ahh, technically speaking I'm still getting work done... More Tequila, please."). Just watch those roaming charges. If you don't purchase ahead they'll get you, and if you don't watch your I/O usage carefully they'll get you anyway.

07. GoodReader (iPhone / iPad)
Best PDF reader available. All the features I need and then some; easy and intuitive to use. I tried a couple others. They always got snagged on something e.g. reading password-encrypted ones or other scenarios.

08. HT Professional Recorder (iPhone)
It's overkill if one's needs aren't advanced far beyond the iPhone's default audio Memos app, and it doesn't have the dot-duh simplicity that apps like iAudition do. If all you need to do is make a recording and then email/FTP it off, less expensive apps work fine. What this one does have is the ability to make high-quality recordings for variable situations, from conferences to small meetings. I use and have tested several audio recording apps and have found this one to be best for recording meetings. Use the right setting and it's very good at capturing what people say even when they're muttering, potentially even whispering. The ability to start/stop a given session even after closing out of the app is great, also it has easy and variable export features. When accurate and full capture of any and all exact words spoken is needed, this is the way to go. Consider pairing it with Recorder for bonus points. Your lawyer will thank you... Or not. Use responsibly.

09. HopStop (iPhone)
From local to international contexts I've not found a single travel planning app for every need, so I toggle between this one, Routesy, PocketMUNI and Kayak. I tend to use HopStop the most when my needs are "I need to get from A to B by C," whereas the others sometimes work better more for other things like predicting, mapping or otherwise finding the stops of particular lines.

10. OpenTable (iPhone / iPad)
Obviously not every good place to dine is within their system, but many are. Used in concert with the reviews on Yelp, you have a wicked combination. Highly recommended for those situations where you need to line up something cool quickly. Especially in cases of Thursdays - Saturdays when things book up quickly, this helps if/as one gets a random ping a-la "Hey, I'm in town! We need to talk. Can you meet for lunch soon or dinner tonight?"

Got any cool apps along the lines of the above that you'd like to call out? I'd love to hear about them.

* * *

2011.01.14 update:

Honorable mention goes to CraigsPro+ (iPhone) ... It didn't cross my mind at first because I get almost no good leads off CL normally. If you're like me and you need to stay on top of what gets posted each day, whether as a matter of due diligence or as a critical part of your business, being able to automate queries and get text notifications of matches is a huge time saver. It's great, for example, for keeping feelers out there - for keeping keyword-based gig/job searches active - also positioning one to respond very quickly to want ads in cases when one does want to respond.

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Today, the phrase "Supplemental Hell" isn't used as much as it was a handful of years ago, when SEOs started first observing Google's sandboxing of new sites into the supplemental index sometimes for initial periods of months on end. The issues of understanding how indexation works and how and when to lend weight to it in managing one's site(s) however, is more relevant than ever. While at the end of the day links as always are the most important part of SEO, a site can have a ton of great links but if it doesn't have any content substantially relevant for a given keyword, it won't rank for it, period.

This is why for some long tail, moderate/low-competition keywords, the ones that might be left not fully tapped in a given sector or niche's demand pool anyway, one can in some situations get improved ranking on site-side optimization alone... even if ideal opportunities to make substantial headway that way only come up so often. Generally I think these days it only applies in cases where sites have been building up organic trust, links and authority passively over a period of many years, like since the late 90s or something, and have had no proactive SEO work done on them in a long time or ever. Those are probably the only cases, in my opinion, where one can do dramatic things like doubling a site's natural search traffic without having to also make conscious, direct link building effort.

In any case, as with many SEO concepts really putting the one of indexation into good practice means digging into the details per project. Just as with ideas like pages' content-to-code ratios and keyword densities, also site's inbound deep link ratios and average page load times, there's no hard and fast rule that sites in general should always be held to; no real standard. At the same time, we know calculated metrics like these can matter, even if in some cases more than in others... and even though Google's datacenters will offer up numbers that can change wildly, and literally right before our eyes upon running a given site: operator query on a given domain repeatedly in a given sitting, makes the target all the more a moving one.

So how does one put indexation metrics into perspective so as to get some actual value out of them instead of chasing one's tail gathering data and stopping at that? Examining a range of sites over time in a trend-spotting effort is it. Here's an example.

The following charts are of an indexation sampling across a number of sites. There's a huge variety here in the site types; these properties range from having thousands of pages to hundreds of millions. It's still intriguing to examine a given month's span, that caveat aside.

First, let's look at percentages of primary indexation; the percentages of each site's pages that were actually ranking-capable - for any potential queries - in the past month:

Primary Indexation

Next, let's look at total indexation. While the first chart shows the fractions, this one shows the denominators; estimates of all pages these sites had across the whole of Google's index:

Total Indexation

They're wildly different views, no? There certainly were some interesting things that happened here. Pay close attention to how differently these sites work when considering the trends against one another. For example, note how eBay's primary indexation levels held at a steady downward path up until suddenly jumping after the first week of September. One could correlate that with Sellers' activity as Labor Day approached. As their offers ramped up, a kind of "lag" became evident in the primary indexation... maybe not of trust but of Google simply taking a while to then adjust to and keep pace the pages growth. Moreover, Labor Day itself with eBay has historical precedent dating back to their very beginnings; the first auction on their platform was on Labor Day of 1995). Notice also how, compared to their oceanic volume of pages, TechCrunch's raindrop held very steady... and lastly while Omniture's primary indexation dipped mid-way through for whatever reason, that only lasted for a few days after which it recovered to essentially the same level.

Obviously this is just one casual exercise... short-term, minuscule data set... nonetheless it's worth taking a shot at some

Inferences and Interpretations

• If we define size as the number of URLs (pages in theory), the smaller a site is the more important - not the more likely - it is that a higher percentage of its pages are in the primary index. This makes perfect sense if we work off an assumption that fewer pages on a given site correlates with increased likelihood of any given one of those pages being relevant and original content.
• This rule does not apply, however, to sites that are largely made up of user-generated content which a) lives on respectively unique URLs and b) is temporal. Those two things introduce a ton of flux into a given situation. Therefore, managing indexation to benchmarks is much harder to do for a site like eBay than it is for a site like Twitter, Yelp or even Amazon for example.
• With the percentage of pages a site has in Google's primary index, the more a site is made of user-generated content, the more a range of variance over a given monitoring period can and should be expected. While their architectures differ in how they render user-generated content, over this test month for example the highest degrees of change from start to end points were with (in order) eBay and Twitter (tied at 34%), followed by Amazon (21%). Of all the other sites monitored here only Zynga got into the double digits at 17% change. All the other sites maintained degrees of change in the single digits.

(and some)

Conclusions

• The smaller (primarily) and/or less UCG-based (secondarily) your site is, the higher "bar" of primary indexation you should be holding it to. This applies not only to having higher percentages of primary indexation, but also more stable trends of primary indexation.
• Monitoring your degree of primary indexation vs. your direct competitors and peers over time can be a good idea, the prerequisite being absence of major i.e. fundamental content and URLs architecture differences in between.
• Even if not deeming it a KPI, one should always be monitoring one's primary indexation levels over time. At the very least, a sudden and unusual drop in it can potentially indicate something's gone wrong with the build.

When it comes to how a site can attract organic action and how much, size clearly matters. However, so do factors of consistency, stability and technique.

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Start your engines.

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I. Everything Marketers do is held accountable to up to (4) core measurements. They are:

1. Revenue
2. CPA
3. Profit
4. ROI

If you're not working to at least (2) of those with the first one included, that's an attribution challenge that needs solving before you deploy your next campaign.

II. There are (4) core business models on the Web. They are:

1. Lead Gen
2. eCommerce
3. Branding & Advertising
4. Customer Service & Support

Each of those has overlapping nonetheless distinct KPI sets, so the best returns come from working methodically yet without getting too cookie-cutter.

III. There are (4) stages of the customer lifecycle. Often in any given situation some need hence get more attention than others, but normally all are critical. They are:

1. Reach
2. Acquisition
3. Conversion
4. Retention

Of that list, the second one means getting Traffic. A lot of people get that confused. If you're a Director of Acquisition and your job's mainly about winning converts, ask for "Customer" to be added into your title.

IV. Online Marketers should focus on a maximum of (4) channels at any given point, typically for durations of at least a year at a time i.e. changing up the set no less infrequently.

The selections can and should vary per situation. Examples:

a. If you're working for a large enterprise it might be [Search (SEO, PPC), Email, Display, Social Media]. You've got an established brand to maintain and corporate reputation to protect, and the wherewithal to work across the gamut of channels from the tried n' true to the newer.

b. If you're rolling more SMB it might look more like [Search (SEO), Search (PPC), Email, Mobile]. You can do some advertising and list buys but not gobs, yet you still need to reach a sizable market. You can do it, just not without staying very targeted with every channel.

c. If you're a Sole Proprietor or Small Business, chances are your mix will lean more [Search (SEO), Affiliates, Email, Social Media]. Advertising is largely cost-prohibitive so you need to work only the normally most financially efficient and/or inexpensive. Even if one of those is somewhat immature, everything has trade-offs (and besides, if your doors are just freshly opened your business isn't exactly matured yet either, so that's all good).

In any case though, the rule about keeping most if not all one's time and effort on a limited number of channels applies. Doing a few things but well always trumps trying to do it all but generally sucking.

* * *

Whatever your chosen online marketing route is, driving with this 4x4 is a great way to help ensure you get to where you're trying to go.

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I've been putting off taking a stab at deploying some tools: Not ones that are laborious or take a long time to use or produce, also not ones that are just another take on some item everyone's seen a million different expressions of already. The best tools address the interesting questions, those concentrating on the realm of how clear and effective ownership paves the way for clear and effective execution.

Though it's one of the tougher ones, the budgeting issue is an important part of addressing the ROI equation. One can't frame how to set goals around desired Return if one doesn't have sufficient confidence in the Investment methodology. For Marketers, having a hand in both sides of the equation is a critical component of determining intelligently how to best deliver business impact, setting and committing to aggressive nonetheless realistically attainable goals, and managing expectations accordingly. Regardless of whether one is working client-side or services-side, the difference between asking "What's my/your budget?" vs. "How is budgeting being approached given the business model and goals?" can set much of the stage for how to pick strategies for success.

As a Marketer, knowing mainly just however much money you do(n't) have on-hand doesn't cut it. Also, often the size of a given budget isn't nearly as important as the budget definition criteria, when entering into the online space and/or a given channel within. When allocations aren't made properly it can place success out of reach, and lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of budgets never becoming sizable absent foundations of success being found. Everything starts somewhere so it's about starting smart to avoid over-allocations here yet under-allocations there, not just of cash but of time and effort.

In principle, the thinking is just like how the best Analysts know the difference between analysis and reporting, so they take lead on guiding what metrics are relevant to report on in the first place based on the details of any given engagement. They don't put it on their clients to dictate it, nor do they try to dictate it themselves in a vacuum. Rather, they partner with them to translate the bottom and/or top-line needs into a map of what details actually matter (so their clients can then sleep easy, staying largely out of the details).

As a business decision maker (read: signature authority):

• Are you ever questioning if the right calls are being made about how much to spend on online vs. traditional marketing?
• Are you managing an online marketing budget but not sure how to best allocate it across channels, in part because some channels' ROI (like SEO) is just damn hard to nail down?
• Are you managing just a couple channels in particular (like both paid and organic search) but frequently trying to find the right balance?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, this post is for ye.

The bl.asphemo.us Online Marketing Budget Estimator

The following tool is a quick, high-level business questionnaire. It will dish out no hard dollar numbers whatsoever. Instead, it offers relational estimates based on situational attributes. Beyond a basic law of averages it draws on probabilities as I've tapped from a number of different sources, some of whom you've probably heard of but all of whom I'll leave unnamed, hoping you'll trust me when I say they're reliable and reflective of an actionable sampling pool (i.e. a few recent years' worth in particular). I don't normally do any strictly original research but I do survey surveyors (so to speak), and weight their conclusions based on the scopes of their studies and how much I trust their methods for gathering and interpreting data and the overall quality of the sources themselves. Then I draw my own conclusions and develop normally basic models in suit.

Try the Estimator and compare its suggestions to your experience, needs and challenges, past to present. Naturally it's just one method; this one's a top-line (Revenue) approach whereas another way would most likely work up more from a Profit aims perspective... Anywho, it will take just a few minutes to give it a spin.

Looking forward to feedback!

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It just got more complicated. In case you haven't noticed, right now Google and Facebook are in a scrap over the issue of which one can position itself to appear less untrustworthy in the marketplace when it comes to matters of handling users' privacy. Off on the sidelines, other brands like Apple, Amazon and others are getting to watch and learn from whatever mistakes they might make, as they continue to grow their businesses online.

Google's latest move, within the past 48-72 hours roughly, has been the unveiling of SSL Search as available at https://www.google.com. It's in Beta, which I suppose helps excuse the glaring canonical issue of how https://google.com doesn't redirect to it as of this writing. Also at the moment, their SSL Search is now coming to Chrome as an option.

The Guardian recently published a bit on how this "casts shadow on web analytics," also Danny Sullivan published an article examining how it might be the "Death of Web Analytics" wherein he admits that like many of us in this business, myself included, he blocks his own referrers from going outbound anyway.

in the wake of that and catching up with a bit of associated chirping in the Twittersphere, I spent a little time this morning digging into this. My take is basically that the sky isn't falling, but it sure is getting more cloudy. I ran a few tests using a super-simple criteria of trying to determine if, when users visit sites from Google, referrers would get stripped all of the time or just some of the time.

My checks worked like this (though I didn't test every combination as that wouldn't be applicable much):

1. Secure (search) to Secure (URL)
2. Secure (search) to Clear (URL)
3. Clear (search) to Secure (URL)
4. Clear (search) to Clear (URL)

I hit a few different sites using FireFox with WASP enabled, visiting some of my favorite local peeps (South Beach posse in da hooouuusssee!) to see how various publishers' installations of packages like Google Analytics, Omniture and Webtrends responded. Being that I know offhand that they're among a number of sites that currently use a mix of HTTP and HTTPS on their domain, I also added in Lending Club's site to this morning's survey.

Understanding the responses:

• In OMTR, when a referrer is passed it'll appear as "referrer (r)" under "Traffic Source" whereas if it's not passed it won't appear.
• In GA, the referrer variable is "Referrer (utmr)" under "Content". When a referrer is not passed, it will appear but its value will show as "-".
• In WebTrends, the referrer variable is "dcsref" under "SDC-Parameter Override." When a referrer is not passed, it won't appear.

Some screen captures, wherein when possible, I've highlighted captured referrers as well as their keyword portions:

Test A:

Subject: AKQA; Clear (search) to Clear (URL)

Test B:

Subject: AKQA; Secure (search) to Clear (URL)

Test C:

Subject: BigDeal.com; Secure (search) to Clear (URL)

Test D:

Subject: Expensify; Secure (search) to Secure (URL)

Test E:

Subject: Lending Club; Secure (search) to Secure (URL)

Conclusion

So there you have it. As you can see, sites who are already serving all their pages on HTTPS don't have anything new to worry about, seemingly. If you're in this situation, you should still be able to pick up Search visitors' referring engines and keywords details as you always have.

If you're not in this camp though, think about how all this might take a chunk of visibility away from your Web Analytics. For companies whose business relies significantly on referrers hand-off, i.e. market analysis providers, this looks like a can of worms. For publishers and webmasters whose direct concerns are more just on the sites they own and manage, there are some more controllable things they can do to minimize how disruptive this change needs to be.

Up until this point I held the position that defaulting to HTTP, and using HTTPS only if/as really needed in select areas of a given site, was the best thing to do. I'm not so sure I do anymore. Back then that was at least partly on behalf of avoiding potential impairment of select 3rd-party services, e.g. Alexa etc. ... but if SSL Search starts to get wired into more and more places and starts to look increasingly pervasive... well, forget that. Situations where everyone needs to focus on retooling their own stuff to roll as much as possible with disruptive change, they are what they are.

I also think all this stuff about the potential demise of the referrer... the whole idea of it does spoil some of the fun, as far as occasionally pushing snarky fake stuff into competitors' logs like "http://youcannotbeat.us/because-yourcompany-sucks&we=rule" goes.

Ha ha, I kid you! I'm a kidder...

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Here are a few popular myths, some of which may not have yet been given a good poking at:

01. Myth: Being really social online is the mark of a Social Media Marketing expert.

Prelude: "Those who can do, those who can't teach." (Yeah, it's a dogmatic adage but please bear with me for a moment...)

Fact: Socially, people usually converge and carry themselves online as they to offline, for the most part. Being really social online might make you Type A, outgoing or friendly, and it might even make you an evangelist (not to be confused with a promoter / guerilla cheerleader). It does not however, necessarily make you an influencer to any degree i.e. someone who has experience in methodically generating customer acquisition, if not at least traffic / buzz, without spending money on advertising. Beyond the obvious PR considerations, that's the real point of social media marketing. Principally, while it can often be about building relationships it's much less often about making friends, and in any case it's about doing a job. It's about doing things that help elevate companies' business, directly and/or indirectly. It's about getting customers and/or things that help make it happen such as measured, increased brand visibility and Web presence, paying mind of how social campaigns can easily and/or frequently crash and burn, or yield marginal returns (e.g. traffic, nonetheless limited actual leads).

Some of the smartest social media marketers I think I've ever known keep at least relatively low profiles. They don't spend a lot of time Tweeting or proliferating photos of themselves getting drunk at conferences (not that that doesn't have its place within limits), some don't Tweet at all, and as far as I can tell keep relatively small and tight, trusted personal and professional circles. They often don't like to spill the beans into the blogosphere when they find tactics - whether new or old - that are working for them because they don't want it ruined and rendered useless fast by copycats jumping all over it. They like to make a point of not spending their whole lives online, as well.

02. Myth: Having well-ranking personal sites is the mark of a good SEO.

Fact: Not all experienced professional SEOs spend a lot of time building up their directly-owned domains. Not all SEOs can technically be presumed to even have them (though it's highly unusual). Not all SEOs are self-employed affiliate marketers. Being an experienced SEO isn't the same thing as being an experienced self-promoter. Sometimes it means one has spent most if not all their career promoting not their own stuff, but that of others. Often, it moreover means one has spent much more time doing some things within the field of SEO than in others.

At the time of this writing, this blog's Google PageRank has dropped to "Unranked" / 0. Maybe it was something I said (Were I to ever get into any debacles running my mouth about something online, this would probably be the place). Maybe its PageRank will return in a couple days or weeks. Or maybe I need to audit its outbound links to see if they're pointing to places that might now be considered "bad neighborhoods." Or maybe it's just that I've only a little over a hundred inbound links to it, only a portion of which are passing PageRank and few if any of which contain keyword-targeted anchor text. Maybe you get the point.

That said, short of disclosing confidential information of course, all successful SEOs should obviously be able to speak to online successes they've had, demonstrate their expertise and/or be willing to have it measured and tested.

03. Myth: Being a frequent blogger is the mark of a good Social Media Marketer.

Fact: One can be a good social media marketer without blogging frequently, if even at all. When I first heard that statistics started appearing about a year or more ago that the blogosphere's growth was starting to slow, I was kind of glad. We're not living in the Information Age anymore. We're living in the Noise Age. There's a ton of great stuff on the blogosphere, but much of it is also a big echo chamber with - to put it diplomatically - spatters of spam. There's something to be said for publishing not just to uniqueness, but quality over frequency or quantity. Just sayin.

04. Myth: When it comes to building links, old-school methods like dofollow link exchanges and forum signature links are useless and have been for years.

Fact: Quite the opposite. Devalued, sure I'd normally say so... but last I checked, valuation of links was one of the trickiest and most nebulous things one could try to tackle in SEO. The point is, if one just buckles down and does one's homework, sure it's laborious and "low-end" but it can also be helpful, sometimes surprisingly so.

I do totally concur with the idea that one great link can trump a thousand not-so-great links. I'll also say however, that in recent weeks for one project, I took a site optimized for a particularly targeted and competitive keyword from the bottom of SERP 6 to the top of SERP 3 for that keyword on basically just a partial-weekend's worth of targeted link exchanges (start to finish). From there, I took it from the top of 3rd SERP to the bottom of 1st SERP over a week or two of making occasional postings in forums. These are all ranks that have been holding consistently, moreover, as served to searchers nationwide. Was making this happen particularly intellectually stimulating? No, but because all the domains involved had a reasonable amount of trust, history and unique, relevant content all in between, it got done. There probably wasn't a single domain involved without a PageRank of 4 or less BTW. Nonetheless, having improved ranking on the keyword has, for the one I was building links to, become pivotal for growing and sustaining its profitability.

05. Myth: SEO should be a strategic priority for everyone trying to build a successful site.

Fact: Not if the larger online marketing strategy doesn't include developing substantial content and domain(s) history, it doesn't. For example, I've occasionally had folks come to me asking about SEO with sites built mostly or all in Flash, which in some cases where basically campaign properties meant to drive traffic to something that lacked temporal permanence, an event like a concert or a movie or record release. Thinking about SEO is due diligence for online marketing. It's not something everyone needs to make a top priority of. Maybe it's taboo for me, a guy who sells SEO services, to say it. It doesn't make it any less true.

06. Myth: Search marketing, whether paid or organic, is all about catching existing demand and not about generating demand.

Fact: This can be true in strict theory, but that theory is so strict that it discounts the increasing intersection between SEO, PR and Social Media marketing. I mulled over this occasionally in recent months, after one brief discussion with a couple people working for a pretty hot company (and I do use the phrase very, very rarely) who posited this basic notion. I thought it had merit as a thoughtful point at first. Upon thinking critically about it at the application / production level afterward (where real work gets done), I have to call it at best heavily caveated, at worst significantly flawed and ignorant. It's the kind of thinking that can come off as authoritative and decisive to all sitting around a management table, nonetheless is dismissive enough to be strategically errant in leading to missed opportunities. There's a reason we have such a thing as "linkbaiting," even if for most of us 9 times out of 10 it doesn't automagically work if even at all. The best linkbait generates not just links, but also demand, because when people choose to link to something there's a chance they did so out of it being something they liked enough to want to see more of (and will hope for, from the found source).

07. Myth: SEO and Affiliate Marketing should be segmented / sandboxed, never mixed.

Fact: That's up to every advertiser running an affiliate program to decide for themselves. Keeping tracking between channels and campaigns clean isn't the same thing as blatantly ignoring or disregarding potential cross-channel benefits. Myself, whenever I'm working on the advertiser end, even though my main concern when working with affiliates is direct conversions I'm nonetheless extremely interested in the organic quality of their sites. Worst case, if a given individual affiliate sends me few or no customers but is still sending me link juice, that alone can still be worth keeping him or her in the fold. Plus, think about it this way: When both advertiser and publisher can each walk the walk (not just talk the talk) in a given arrangement, sometimes it can go a long way in building a potentially valuable relationship.

08. Myth: Having any kind of certification from Google makes one a good SEO, and/or is directly representative of any degree of substantive hands-on, real-world Search marketing or Web Analytics experience gained.

Fact: Google's Professional Certification Program for individuals and companies is for demonstrating proficiency in using Google's advertising platform (AdWords) and related services such as Google Analytics, Conversion Optimizer and Website Optimizer. Prominent members of the SEO community have occasionally openly and freely admitted that they're "terrible with PPC." I've been doing SEO and PPC since 2002. I didn't pick up my AdWords Certification(s), fortunately passing each respective test on first attempt, until just within the past week or so. Late bloomer perhaps, I'm nonetheless happy to have finally gotten it done.

* * *

Fact: This post technically contains far more opinions than facts.

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