When it concerns digital technologies we here in Britain are used to be feeling like living in the Stone Age when compared to the advanced wonders of the Far East. Miniaturisation and digitalisation entered almost every aspect of their daily life continuing to surprise unprepared Westerners. Almost every British visitor comes from Japan with a regular story about electronically equipped public toilets which turn a rather mundane and touchy process into some kind of elaborate and lavish ritual accompanied by a row of unexpected pleasures. However, even Japan is way behind in terms of toilet digitalisation when compared to one neighbouring city-state where recently a network of advanced 21st century public toilets was installed all over this tiny city-state.
The government of this tiny country decided to celebrate the entry into the new millennia by unveiling the most technologically advanced network of public facilities. It was indeed yet another world wonder with advanced auto-sensing flashing system, built-in 3D washing device, automatic wiping glider and many more things we have no name for in English language yet. Not only each node in this network is connected to the central hub and to all others via high-speed digital link but also they are interlinked in a complex network relaying all of the matter produced in the process to the highly advanced faeces treatment facility where they get sorted and processed for further recycling and that’s why the facility was dubbed EcoTech Loo. What is however crucial for our story that these toilets are of course featuring broadband high-speed wireless internet access with 35-inch sensor touch screen and virtual keyboard provided. But to understand the importance and the true significance of the issue raised by recent events we need to look into the history of the service in question first.
Despite of all these technological advances, shortly after the open day the system had run into some sort of unforeseen trouble. When designed the system was supposed to be free for all citizens of the country except certain categories that included among others criminals on probation, high income earners, sex offenders, known members of terrorist organisations and so on. As all those belonging to these categories have almost natural tendency to cheating the system it is not surprising that the number of paid entries into public toilets for the first year was next to nothing. The alarm was raised after the annual first report of the EcoTech Loo PLC. As soon as this figure was revealed to public, concerns started to spring up regarding mainly not the financial loss as such, but the very principle of fairness which was compromised in this case. Although the fee when paid was rather substantial nearing 10 pounds in UK currency (roughly US$ 20) the EcoTech Loo PLC is a public-private partnership and essentially not for profit enterprise, so the main issue was to find a way to restore the justice in this sensitive area. Initially the solution was to introduce personal entry cards providing free entry for all eligible individuals and charging appropriate fee automatically from the accounts of those who had no right of free entry. But the pilot scheme failed miserably as it turned out to be that it is not only extremely easy to clone the first generation cards equipped only with magnetic strip, but also there is no way to verify the true identity of the user. Some criminal gangs immediately sniffed the opportunity to make a quick buck and organised groups that provided an entry for a smaller fee using either counterfeited or stolen entry cards.
The solution obviously had to cover two aspects: increased security of the card itself as well as to introduce some way of verifying the identity of the actual user. If the former problem could be solved relatively easy just by replacing magnetic strip with a miniature chip the latter required the use of some advanced technology. It was decided to install some advanced biometric sensors right into the seat but this was not the most complex part of the system. The key to its success was brought by state of the art biometric recognition software, programmed not only to take into account significant differences between male and female private parts, but also to be able to provide 100% accuracy while recognising male standing position. When the second generation toilet cards with on-chip biometrics came into use in 2002 it was such a success that many were queing over night to replace their old cards despite of the significant cost (90 UK pounds or over 180 US$) and initial biometric recording that had to be performed on a special recording seat in presence of two independent witnesses. Needless to mention that re-recording of biometrics had to take place annually to take into account natural changes that occur in human anatomy with time.
This new system was not only efficient, practical and convenient on its own but also triggered an unimaginable chain of innovation that brought public services in the country to unprecedented heights.
Firstly the Department of Health seized the opportunity to identify toilet users and proposed to install express test devices right into every toilet to run a quick test on urine and faeces. Test results were passed direct into individual computer files kept in the department, thus allowing not only to gather public statistics but also to provide each toilet user with valuable health recommendations displayed on a special LCD screen together with test results and also available in paper format for free. It also proved to be an invaluable tool for real-time monitoring of epidemiologic situation throughout the whole country. If carriers of dangerous infections were detected with express tests the toilet emergency auto locking feature allowed to detain a person until the emergency medical team arrives to provide the necessary help. To counter cross-border spread of infectious diseases in cooperation with Immigration and Nationality directorate the Department of Health put forward an initiative according to which all entering the country were issued temporary Visitors Toilet ID cards at the expense of the state and biometric recording facilities were installed at each point of entry.
Immigration and Nationality directorate also developed it’s own programme based on existing facilities aimed at controlling the problem of illegal immigrants and have effective and measured immigration flow. The system not only greatly simplified the procedure of detention and subsequent deportation of illegal immigrants but also allowed to monitor the process of cross-border migration in great detail. Food Safety Agency soon followed the example as express test results allowed to monitor the quality of food eaten and interview the user right in the toilet about sources of food he or she consumes, which helped immensely on their clampdown on producers of substandard food and drinks. Environmental Agency took the opportunity to sort the material right at the place which eliminated the need for a rather costly excrement sorting procedure at the recycling plant.
Next there were various debt collecting agencies who established Digital Debt Collecting Association which was authorized by the government and most of other creditors to collect outstanding debts using the facility already present within the system. Each Toilet ID card is initially tied to a current account held in the State Bank which each citizen has from the age of 5. Initially it was designed to charge the entry fee direct from accounts of those not eligible for free entry. As this state was not permanent, all Toilet ID cards were linked to corresponding bank accounts by default. Quite soon other types of charges started to be processed through this extremely convenient system including particularly various types of fines. The ease of processing fines allowed replacing traditional long-term prison sentences with substantial fines for most economic crimes, petty theft and basically for the majority of crimes not involving bodily harm. Instead of locking people in the state decided not to deprive the economy of qualified labour force and not to damage the social fabric but rather use economic leverage to gain beneficial effects. As the amount of fines was often substantially larger than sums usually held on these accounts the government instituted so-called Liberty Loan automatically assigned for the period of 20 years equal to the outstanding remainder of a fine. These measures helped boosting the economy of the state as current Finance Minister proudly remarked we now have both, budget proficit, and zero inflation rate plus unprecedented growth of GDP, all thanks to reforms that had been made possible following the introduction of our high-tech Toilet ID cards.
And finally of course the facility got attention of a number of Law Enforcement agencies. Some in the Drugs Control department of the Ministry of Internal affairs realised that the express urine test could also detect the presence of illegal substances and in cooperation with General Penitentiary Directorate introduced a programme of correctional detention for drug users. This used the emergency auto locking feature to lock in those in whose urine traces of illegal substances were detected and detain them for a period until their urine test comes clean. Combined with some anti-drug treatment supplied with drinking water and correctional messages and educational documentaries played all day long on the plasma screen it helped to significantly reduce the number of drug addicts throughout the country. The Chief of the General Penitentiary Directorate praised the success of the scheme in following terms: It greatly streamlined the judicial process, saved us from completely unnecessary burocratic procedures as well as masses of paperwork and made it more objective since the duration of the sentence now is not arbitrarily imposed by judges but directly depends on the bodily state of the offender. This is much more measured approach. It creates the atmosphere of fairness in the society. With the help of the technology of the future we are building safer and more just future for our society today.
Soon the idea of streamlined detention was extended to other petty criminals covering offences usually classed in Britain as Antisocial Behaviour and it proved to be very effective. Why you may ask? Why would a criminal ever enter this kind of facility knowing that he or she will be immediately locked up in there? There are two reasons for this and both are quite logical. Firstly the fine for leaving excrements in public place (which is for most citizens is anywhere outside their own private loo) is unbelievably high and surely there are moments when you just can’t hold it. Secondly and perhaps even more significantly the only alternative to being confined are various types of corporate punishment provided by law for these types of offences. If you had a choice, which would you prefer: getting forty or fifty lashes or spending a couple of weeks in a rather warm and comfortable hi-tech environment equipped with high-speed internet access and coming out clean afterwards? You guessed what I’d choose.
And of course it came only natural that a year later it was decided to abolish old-fashioned electric chairs used for the execution of capital punishment in favour of so-called Execution Plug-in which supplemented EcoTechLoos throughout the country. The advantage over traditional electric chair came from the fact that the executed did not actually need to sit on it as the lethal charge could pass along the stream of urine. There were concerns expressed over the reliability and safety of the system but they were quickly countered by a number of field tests. In words of the Interior Minister of the current government of the country: there is no chance of the system accidentally misfiring. We can guarantee absolute safety of our execution device. Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. It’s criminals who should be afraid. Our country holds a moratorium for capital punishment so it is not likely that our execution device will be ever used in practice but its efficiency in crime prevention as a deterrent for potential criminals is beyond comparison. Soon all the police cars too became equipped not only with Toilet ID card readers but also with ecologically friendly biometric devices which along with its main purpose provided a much needed convenience for the officers on patrol.
It all went good until today, when a huge controversy potentially leading to international scandal emerged ignited by a punitive detention of a British national who allegedly violated the pornography laws of the country. Nick Green of West London, a biology student (name and address are changed for privacy reasons) who is visiting the country as a tourist this morning downloaded and watched a video clip from YouTube that graphically depicts the process of plant pollination while using the EcoTech Loo facility. As a result he was automatically sentenced to five plus two days of corrective detention starting this morning. Immediately after the emergency auto locking feature activated Nick Green started an active internet-based campaign in his defence. He contacted his lawyers in Britain and a number of non-governmental organisations defending the cause of Internet privacy including the well-known Privacy International. In his statement he insisted that he was unaware of the fact that watching graphical depiction of plant pollination that is classed under category of animal sex especially when insects are involved into the process, constitutes a criminal offence he also called the current pornography laws of the country " ridiculous and stupid " and called for international pressure to change the definition of pornography and even proposed a convention to define what constitutes a criminal offence in relation to pornographic images. Understandably, he suffered a great deal of shock as a result of his unexpected imprisonment so he could not control his initial reactions. He also protested against the additional two days sentence for the involvement of insects arguing that plants and animals belong to different species and hence it does not constitute a natural sexual act. I’m afraid this argument may only make the matters worse.
His lawyers in their statement took a different approach arguing that based on US v. Zeigler case Nick must have had a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the Internet from the EcoTech Loo facility also arguing that satisfying this type of natural needs is by definition a very private act and hence all actions associated with it are to be considered as private hence the evidence can not be admitted. The problem however is that the decision was made automatically according to legal algorithms programmed into the EcoTech Loo facility and there is no appeal procedure provided by law. This creates an interesting legal precedent as under international pressure the government of the country is already willing to release Nick Green from his detention, but the only way of doing it is through the procedure of pardoning but Nick Green is refusing to plead guilty at the stage which creates a kind of legal standstill which is only possible to overcome by changing the draconian laws of the country and that is a mammoth tack that can only be achieved by mounting constant international pressure on the government of the country.
I fully support Nick’s efforts in this direction and as a sign of protest I decided to place the video that caused his imprisonment here in my blog. Ironically, the video is narrated by David Atenborough who was once described within the country as "a known English pervert" and whose entry to the country is prohibited on the grounds that he allegedly sponsored "the largest series of animal pornography in history". On the same grounds BBC reporters are also banned from entering the country and reporting from there.
WARNING! Watching these videos may constitute a criminal offence in some parts of the world! Watch them at your own risk.
I also decided to supplement this video with more instances of the so-called plant pornography just to keep you entertained.
P.S. it might seem ridiculous when you first look at it but we all should perhaps use it as a lesson before introducing such dramatic technological changes into our society. The rapid penetration of new technology into our dense and fragile social fabric might sometimes lead to consequences completely unforeseen at the beginning. Let the tragic fate of Nick Green serve as a warning to our government too!
So picking up from where we left off in the post on the Internet History let us summarise in condensed form what we may take from there and use in our further reasoning.
The transformations described in that posting eventually lead to the explosion of Web 2.0 were secured through gradual introduction of three distinct states of Internet presence. Whilst online, an individual may act in one of the following three capacities:
Visitor – freely surfing the net: anonymous, invisible and passive, can only read and download
Legal Self – predominantly when engaged in some sort of monetary transaction, government or job-related activities: tied up to various offline ID tokens (SSN, Credit Card Number, Legal Address etc.) mostly sporadic, purpose-driven and compulsory, creates two-way tunnels between "real" and "virtual" worlds transferring tangible goods or services
Internet Service User – authorised with login/password combination, recognisable by nickname and/or avatar active contributor to user generated content and participant in online communication (at the moment fragmented and scattered all over a large number of isolated services)
In purely technical terms of course Legal Self is just a subset of the User state as to be identifiable one has to be logged into a certain service. What makes these two states taxonomically equal is not heir relation to an internet service but their relationship to the outside world. In other words, looking from within a server the former is just a type of the latter but looking from the offline point of view these two are different in kind.
For the part that is to follow it is crucially important to establish that there are only three possible states of presence and no other states exist.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
from "Reason in Common Sense", the first volume by George Santayana
not my favourite philosopher, I admit, but the quote is too good not to use it
Well, of course there is no new thing under the sun but problems we are facing with the rapid introduction of Web 2.0 are even more severe than those arising at the time its predecessor Web 1.0 took over the world. In its early days Web 1.0 looked like a mysterious cyberspace inhabited by semi-robotic creatures travelling over the paths of hyperlinks. Overexcited zealots preached nothing short of digital revolution and it might have been looking very much reasonable at the time. All that existed in real world seemed to be easy to digitise and place on the InterWeb (where else?). This was imagined as nothing short of a parallel reality both mimicking the real world and obscuring it. It looked as if some sort of parallel reality is about to be born. Matrix (the movie) comes as perhaps the best illustration of the spirit of the time. At the time it looked indeed like a second virtual reality structurally opposed to the real world coming into being. Now we may look back and see how exaggerated this whole thing was, how much fantasy was projected into something that was not even nearing this image.
So, what was in fact this Web 1.0? We need to look at it now with the benefit of hindsight as without the clear understanding of Web 1.0 all talks about subsequent versions of the InterWeb will inevitably just produce an equivalent amount of hype that can only obscure the reality. At the foundation of Web 1.0 lied HTML. And it was just this – a HyperText Markup Language – perhaps the most crippled computer language ever devised it could only do what it says on the tin. Tied up with HTTP protocol in an inseparable mass this HTTP/HTML alloy was placed right in the foundation of the WWW and that’s exactly the kind of burden we have to carry into the future. In those early days the vision of the Internet was no more than just a collection of texts enhanced, in comparison to paper texts, with the ability to link otherwise separate documents with hyperlinks. No more nor less. Behind it was still the idea of printed books. The whole Internet looked as a huge library with universal 24/7 access. More importantly all content structure of the Internet itself was also modelled from printed books, with web sites being in a way similar to specialised libraries and their directories being books with web pagers clearly standing as separate documents with separate single titles and the continent was assumed to be linear and one-dimensional.
The same concept of linearity applies to larger Internet structures. The general assumption was that the content is guided by principles of linear narrative, or in other words that it should be read from the beginning to the end and from top to bottom. Actually it was assumed that any given piece of content must have its beginning its body and its end. Once again we are dealing with an idea of a written text that originated in classic literature of 19th century. So at this stage, search engines appear as a form of a catalogue allowing quick keyword search through those structured and subject oriented texts.
Now we have a library, a catalogue, and we have users, who are not even users just yet, they are only readers. And what those readers could do in that global library? Well, only what they were supposed to do, and they were supposed to read. HTTP protocol allows read-only access. HTML language was not designed for constant editing of documents. What advertised itself as second reality turned out to be just an enormous collection of texts.
This created a certain type of user self identity that would have been better characterised by the word of the time: a visitor. The state of an Internet user formed at this stage could be seen as completely anonymous passive recipient, an invisible traveller, a museum visitor who is only allowed to see objects, but never allowed even to touch, not to say to modify them. Production of Web content was primarily limited to a very tiny circle of Internet professionals and was out of reach for those who viewed their computer as just a sophisticated typewriter. Static pages, passive visitors, huge catalogues, plus constant buzz about virtual reality - that’s how our beginnings look like.
It’s not that Web 2.0 came out of nowhere. Changes amassed gradually within a period that might be called Web 1.5. First your typewriter with a screen turned into a multimedia PC - remember how a simple addition of a soundcard and CD-ROM overturned the whole concept of this device? Now text stopped being the only possible continent on the Net. With it came filesharing for which neither HTTP, nor HTML were designed and which required user authentication. Two other things, contributing to these changes were e-commerce and interactivity.
E-commerce was perhaps the most significant in breaking through the virtual barrier as it provided a bridge between the real world and that virtual reality, previously separate from it. Now you could find a virtual object in this virtual world, provide your real details, pay with your real credit card and a week later a postman would bring it to your doorstep in a form of a very tangible real object - the first and perhaps the most important breakthrough in this real vs. virtual dichotomy. Real credentials placed in a virtual world and a virtual world producing a real object in return, that’s a very demystificating experience. In addition, our visitor for the first time became active, online shopping required definite actions and produced tangible real-world results of those actions.
But what finally turned our visitor into a proper user was interactivity, where bulletin boards and forums are perhaps paramount examples of the genre. It’s there the final transformation took place – now our visitor could quickly switch from an invisible observer to active and personified participant. Nicknames, usernames, passwords and avatars all suddenly became attributes of nearly everyone who ever spent some time on the net. Now another state of internet presence emerged – instead of having a homepage user became accustomed to having profiles. Notably, those two are differently related to the concept of online self: if the former was about that very self and presented some text or images produced by that self, the latter is actually a facet of online self or at least being perceived as such. For the first time profiles established not "is authored by me" but "is me" relation between online self and a URL. In other words, "this URL is me in syberspace".
Although being scattered all over different services these profile pages became constituent parts of a new type of online personality representation which is different in kind to the one provided by homepages only. Bulletin boards and forums or, broadly speaking all that comes under the term interactivity, also changed the type of content, adding to the previously prevalent linear narrative a different tree-like conversational structure that came not out of planned writing of a single individual (author) but as a result of a conversation between an indefinite number of participants.
This collectively produced content had no single author, no linear structure and perhaps no pre-defined narrative structure at all, as even if a particular subject in forum discussion might have a beginning, it surely has no end and at any time can stroll away from the initial subject to some off-topic deviations that may sometimes never to come back to the initial point. This type of content better known as "user generated content" is fluid, dynamic, progressive and growing and only this variety content can be seen as truly and genuinely specific to the Internet.
In the same way as printing revolution produced after some time a bunch of literary forms from pamphlet to a novel, the Internet, or better computer revolution, begins to produce its own specific modes of existence for written word, changing on the way the meaning and the perception of the written word as such. In many respects it is the most significant cultural consequence of this revolution and I promise to discuss it in more detail in a piece on Search Engines I am planning to write next.
Suffice to mention for now that as a result of this our visitors or guests became gradually trained to act as users, they now expect to be identified and recognised, expect to be able to contribute to almost anything, expect to be able to leave a trace either in a form of a comment or in "last visited" logs, expect to be seen when online and addressed by their fellows. This gradually turned the perception of the net from being a tool of information dissemination to the one of active real-time communication. Instant Messaging too contributed to this training albeit in an indirect form. Remarkably, it’s been brilliantly reflected in traditional paper literature already in the book Loneliness on the Net by Janusz Wiśniewski.
Needless to remind here that for all these activities neither HTTP nor HTML were designed, but in the absence of native solutions twisted and crooked implementations of HTML and HTTP became common practice to such a degree that to this day we all prefer to turn a blind eye on the perverse nature of these solutions.
Please, consider this being a first part of a larger article that I just had to split as otherwise it would be over 7000 words To be continued…
My dearest SEXiest SEO – I’m infinitely sorry. How could I be so stupid not to post my virtual greetings in time? How could I think that it’s enough to make a non-virtual presentation? Forgive me SexySEO.
Well, not SexySEO actually. It’s Lora’s birthday, not hers. But she’s angry with me. Who? Lora or SexySEO? I’m totally confused and the more I think about, the more confusing it seems. Lora wasn’t angry with me when I met her at the party. SexySEO is angry that I forgot to post my greetings in her blog. But they are the same person, aren’t they? I know they are! I’ve seen them both! Both in real life and online. Admittedly not at the same time and moreover SexySEO can only be met online while Lora predominantly circulates in real world.
Surely they are the same, as it clearly isn’t the case of split personality. Perhaps it’s very much like when writing a novel author feels that when characters become more and more developed they become more and more independent and even the one that was supposed to be the alter ego becomes detached and starts demanding the right for independence. Banal comparison it is, but still worthy of taking it a bit further. Online interaction is different indeed, as you can not detach yourself from your online personality to the same degree, and the narrative of online interaction is forged daily and is never completed. It demands consistency. You can’t get too distant from your online image but you gradually realise how it attaches itself to your offline you and now we can’t make any distinction between Lora and SexySEO. But were they ever separate?
SexySEO is neither a fiction not a function and neither is Lora. It once started as an experiment. Once I suggested that Web 2.0 SEO isn’t about unique content at all. It’s about social interaction in online communities. This became known as zero content SEO in our circle but remained just an untested idea until Lora decided to put it in practice. And the course of events took SexySEO from being just a nickname to becoming a separate phenomenon, almost a brand name if you allow. Something that was started by Lora as just a proof of concept suddenly became an integral part of our online environment. Honestly. I have no clue how she did it. Perhaps the key to her social media success, along with unquestionable expertise in conventional SEO, is her remarkable and friendly personality. Not only she managed to make otherwise dull and booring business of SEO to look sexy but somehow she is able to see the best sides of all people she communicates with and find nice and comforting words exactly when one needs it (the skill I am admittedly short of). And now again I don’t know if I am talking about Lora or SexySEO, but who cares since they are the same.
So, happy birthday to you, Lora and my sincere apologies to SexySEO!
Better late than never
PS: for those who never met SexySEO here is her blogspot: SexySEO
Now, how do I start this story? Once upon a time, sometime in mid July to be more precise, I was approached by a group of guys from a young start-up company who wanted me to assess their in-work project both in terms of conventional SEO as well as from a more generic angle and all because I once wrote an article on Pownce. My first reaction was to avoid this since I didn’t at the time consider myself to be an expert in Social Networks and Online Communities at all. Before continuing with the story perhaps I should give you some more details about the project itself. Initially the project was conceived as Yet Another Social Network Profile URL Aggregator capable only of storing URLs of user profiles on various Social Networks. Somehow logically it progressed to the idea of gathering friends from those social networks thus creating a sort of representation of a Social Graph or better User Circle that can be viewed, accessed, managed and controlled by user from one centralised location. The system is supposed to issue alerts and inform the user of new or orphaned friends and other discrepancies in the user circle. At first I took these guys for a bunch of deluded and overexcited amatures, arguing that to amass and manage this kind of data would require computing resources available only to the likes of Google itself. However, I had to radically change my opinion after a rather impressive demonstration of their working prototype. The guys had already a spider capable of reading friends circle with minimal delay simply by parsing XHTML code and a database server running already several hundreds thousand user circles gathered from several major social networks. Most importantly they had a clear idea about scaling this prototype and some sketches of user interface allowing a very detailed management of this user circle. They also produced a draft version of API and data exchange protocol. Suddenly it all had begun looking doable, realistic and interesting. So I decided to accept the challenge and started working with them. Needless to say that I am continuing working on the subject to this day providing some sort of theoretical and even ideological background for those managing the project and with their kind permission I am going to publish some of my conclusions in a series of articles in my personal blog here.
Now, let us continue with the story. Eventually we’d set up a timeline and all went working on our respective tasks, me doing research and thinking, them doing their stuff which I suppose mainly consisted of some kind of hardcore programming of which I honestly know nothing. Back then, nothing spelled a disaster that was about to happen when all over sudden there comes Brad Fitzpatrick with his now infamous Thoughts on the Social Graph article. Although with the benefit of the hindsight being quite predictable at the time it came as a bolt from the blue and looked like a terminal deathblow for the whole project. The team spirit went so low that I nearly thought it will never recover. Pity, you couldn’t see the expression on their faces after they’d heard the news. The closest analogy that comes to my mind is what perhaps every one of us had experienced or at least observed while still at school. You are about to sit down on your chair and just at the very moment you cunning classmate quietly pulls the chair from under your bum. It’s that split second when you realise that the seat is not where it is supposed to be and now there is nothing that can stop you from falling and hitting the floor in front of the whole class as well as your much hated teacher and neither yourself is now able to stop the force of gravity, that can produce this truly unique and inimitable facial expression. In our circumstances I’ve been given a pleasure to observe this very expression on their faces for several days in a row and this is something that happens not very often in your life. Their reasons for panicking are not so difficult to understand as when the almighty Google decides to move into the domain you rather foolishly considered to be your own, you really need the nerves of steel not to run away and duck and cover. Should I mention that the fact that Brad now works for Google was even back then just two clicks away from the article itself?
It took me some days to convince the shell-shocked guys that not everything is lost and in fact this sudden intervention may even work to their advantage. First of all I had to unveil my treasured theory of second-mover advantage trying to convince them that time trial isn’t at all the worst kind of racing game. Moving in after the leader had already ploughed the virgin land makes following the furrow a much easier task. Besides Brad’s article itself didn’t look very convincing. Not only had he managed to spoil the whole impression by inelegantly trying to promote the Dopplr project to which he personally is seemingly related, but also it had a number of weak points we are about to discuss here. But before we begin with the critique it is customary to acknowledge all the positive sides and achievements of the article in question. The strongest point of the article is obviously the magnitude and the power of the vision: the vision of the project, the vision of the future of the internet and most impressively the vision detailed enough to include such practical things like API, servers, databases, browser apps and so on. The vision that is so close to my own that I must admit I nearly went frustrated seeing it written by somebody else.
Undoubtedly, the most attractive part of the picture drawn by Brad is the openness of user data, but being at the core of the idea this is at the same time is the weakest point in this whole construction and precisely at this point of course our visions differ. However wonderful the idea of a non-profit body taking care of the promotion, maintenance and proliferation of user data might look, this part is the most questionable in the whole article and no wonder it remains the least elaborated. Please, understand me correctly, I am not defending the greedy corporates trying to get hold of everything that’s alive, neither I am an advocate of paid services, and quite to the contrary, I would love to see such a project as being completely free and open for all, but at this stage it looks merely utopian, especially considering the amount of work to be done and the size of obstacles ahead. The starting point for the project, to which I am now related, was certainly different. From the very beginning it was thought to become an independent business venture with a rather banal but clear business model based on selling ad space. And by all means the project is intended to be self-supporting starting from phase two. After digesting the open data idea, obviously there was an attempt to adjust the current business model to the one offered by Brad. To my infinite disappointment it turned out that there is none. The problematic issue here is sustainability of the whole project. To achieve the desired sustainability and growth one simply must have a clear business model; even non-profits do have one. Keeping the project data free at the user level one must have at least an idea where those money needed to set up and maintain servers, to program APIs and browser add-ons etc, etc will come from. Avoiding even remotely any possible outline for this side of the project is either an evidence of a complete carelessness concerning the business side of the idea (something I find myself hard to believe into) or, more likely that the funding had been already promised at least for the initial stage of the project. All subsequent events only confirmed my suspicion. It is not incidental that soon after the article Google itself comes with their Open Social initiative. By all means Google is probably the worst possible starting point for a project of this kind. Let me explain why. Structurally as well as commercially Online Communities, no matter who owns or operates them, in their very nature are antithetic to the concept of Search Engine (more about it in my next posting). Google being a Search Engine is eager to gain a foothold in the competing business area and get at least a partial access to Online Communities data. Hence, an attempt to gather free community effort only to provide Google with free qualified labour and ideas is certainly bound to fail. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. In addition, one needs to ensure a rapid uptake of the service in circumstances where the initial data collection depends largely on a good will of big players in the Online Communities field, and those players are not likely to display any good will at all, clearly seeing this as an attempt to lessen their competitive advantage. Merely, there is no pretext which would convince large Online Communities hosts to share their data with anyone, but to share those data with Google would be plain stupid if not suicidal on their side. To sum up - I can see three highly questionable points in what can be seen as a practical side of Brad’s plan:
absence of a clear business model independent from Google funding and support
consequently his call for community effort in a project that would ultimately benefit Google looks to me a bit hypocritical, to say the least, and by all means not convincing enough to gather independent volunteer developers under those banners
over reliance on willingness of big Online Communities hosts to share their data – just get real, it simply ain’t going to happen, and the only way out is to focus instead on building a robust spider engine capable of gathering public domainUser Circle data from those hosts regardless of their willingness to cooperate
However, much more fundamental follies of Brad’s article are not in the field of practical implementation but rather in the field of theory and general methodology. Like many others before him Brad falls under the magic spell of the word social that is ever present in thinking about online communities. Trying to narrow the problem to a mere representing of pre-existing social relationships in digital form we are running a risk of missing entirely the meaning of the ongoing online interaction. A somewhat longer discussion of this issue can be found in my previous posting while here I’d rather point out some technical issues that will inevitably arise as soon as one has to deal with the actual reality and not with imaginary Social Networks. Social Networks and People Search are perhaps the most evil terms currently circulating in our lexicon. Both are equally deceiving making us to believe that we are dealing with real-life people and real-life social interaction. Undoubtedly most of the data we are dealing with is a result of actions performed by humans, as even robot-generated content ultimately comes from human activity, but it is a serious mistake to represent our dataset as if it contained data on real social relationships between real people. All we can analyse is a dataset containing user accounts and relationships between them (mind you, only positive relationships are on record). Firstly, there are no grounds to make one man - one account equation, as for various reasons most individuals have multiple accounts on the same service and have their own reasons for not declaring this fact. To illustrate the point ask yourself how many email accounts you currently have and have had since the introduction of this wonderful way of communication. Isn’t it correct that you’d prefer not to mix your work email with your friends and family one and will use a third separate email account for registering at free services that are likely to send you tonnes of spam and virus attachments? Consider also that the same individual may abandon one account simply because of a lost password and open a new account instead. Now think about institutions, organisations, companies and simply groups of friends having their joined accounts at various Online Community Services. How about registering an account for your pet? Facebook had to introduce a special policy dealing with accounts of deceased people, placing it in a so-called "memorialization state" but what about other Community Services? And mind you we are not even talking about things like spammer activity constantly generating thousands of accounts from one source and account hijacking that totally confuses the picture. Now, the relationships we are able to see in our dataset: apart from the obvious lack of negative relations that are always present in real world, we have to deal with a completely different set of ties. Nobody in their right mind would go and list all of their rather boring relatives, friends and acquaintances from real life on their internet profile while one has a wonderful opportunity to find new and exciting online friends. Perhaps one of the strongest intents for having an internet identity at all, is the ability to find new friends, not to get stuck with your old ones. Real world friends sometimes can even be a burden online. Generated and supported by offline social environment, real world relationships are rarely needed to be actualised online, as the only reason for displaying your offline relationships publicly is when they may add to your online status. This brings up yet another distinct feature of online friendship – it is all public, and not all of those with whom you communicate online are supposed to know about each other. Sometimes multiple accounts are created precisely for the purpose of keeping one’s relationships of one kind separate from another. More importantly, online friendship is so attractive precisely because it does not function in the same way as the real-world one does. It is capable of traversing geographical and class barriers, state borders and time zones. It requires neither spatial co-presence nor even temporal synchrony as online communication allows for a reasonable delay. Sometimes it can even break through the language barrier thanks to online translation services. On some occasions online friendship can be transferred to the offline world and I assume this happens more often than the other way around. Far from being just a mirror image of real-world ties, this is a distinct type of relationships, the meaning of which should be analysed in its own right. On aggregate all of the above not only introduces a loud noise that distorts otherwise "pure" picture, but creates a completely different one – it is an altogether different phenomena. Once again, the idea that Online Communities are mirroring offline social relationships with each account representing single individual and friendship relations reflecting real-world relationships is no more than a phantasm, a product of wishful thinking and a sick fantasy of marketing executives and election campaign managers. The stronger the tendency to bind online profiles and accounts to personally identifiable data the stronger the backlash to be expected from internet users. The stronger the threat and the pressure the more often Internet users will evade positive identification of their accounts with their real-world identities and the more effective this evasion will be. The fact of the matter is that nobody wants yet another Big Brother, this time not in a form of a potentially accountable state agency, but worse, in a shape of unaccountable private corporations watching over every aspect of their online activity. As recent Facebook privacy scandal reminded us, users tend to become quite aggressive, active and inventive when their privacy is at stake, and you don’t mess with an angry user. The internet is a place that provides the means for effectively anonymous communication and as soon as it looses this ability it becomes no different from any other way of communicating and therefore redundant and hence it is not likely that this will ever happen!
To give a roundup on this:
in our Social Graph or better User Circle dataset we are NOT dealing with people and their relationships, we are dealing with user accounts and a sort of very primitive connections between them
one person – one account equation if fundamentally flawed, instead we are dealing with all sorts of accounts, from accounts representing just a segment of an individual (segmentary accounts) to accounts owned by a group of individuals (collective accounts)
relations between accounts are only of positive value and most often have no direct correspondence in offline world; it is only the fact of a relation that can be registered, as there is no reliable and uniform mechanism of classification (microformats is a step in right direction, but it is too limited to provide a reliable solution)
Ultimately, to answer the challenge we need not to reduce the complexity of online interaction to a mere representation of offline social relationships but finally understand the futility of such attempts and start dealing with the subject the way it deserves. We have to accept online interaction not as a secondary phenomenon but as an activity in its own right and analyse and deal with it accordingly. To illustrate this I can give you an example of a problem that belongs to the same set but had not yet been mentioned precisely because it seems to have a workable solution already. I am talking about a problem of establishing correspondence between accounts held by the same user at different online services. If left on its own this functional feature may easily get out of hands as nothing prevents me or any other user listing account of Bill Gates (or Brad Fitzpatrick for that matter) as my own at some other online service. Fortunately there is a way to verify these connections either with microID or with OpenID. These two solutions are precisely of the kind we are looking for. Instead of attempting to relate Internet accounts to an external real-world identification marker (be it SSN, credit card number or whatever else) it elegantly connects one internet account to another via internal mechanism of the internet itself. It seems the solution to problems described above can be found along the same lines.
And now, back to where we started. The project continues, as gradually all fear and panic happened to settle, all boiling down to the fact that it would be altogether completely stupid to abandon such a wonderful idea only because we are not alone in this field. Considering the enormous complexity of issues one has to work with, dealing with this completely untapped field there will be some room for all - from giants to some petty traders like ourselves.
PS Merry Christmas to you all! To those who celebrate it, and to those who don’t, regardless!
Having to read masses of texts written on the subject of Online Communities I had to face the sad fact that we are all hopelessly confused by the overwhelming amount of information coming from all sides and terminological mess arising from our inability to grasp the meaning of the emerging phenomena doesn’t help a bit in our attempts to catch up with events. As it always happens in moments like this buzz words tend to spring up from every corner of the field quite naturally reflecting the need to name something that only just came to exist. Being rather natural product of the course of events buzz words are just that, buzz words, that came into circulation spontaneously out of scarcity but not as a result of regular analytic attempts. Clear and transparent terms reflecting at least to a some degree the meaning of phenomena are clear signs of the maturity of the field and can provide an invaluable help in our attempts to rationalise the stream of events. Although some of the thoughts presented here might look obvious or banal to some I nevertheless find an attempt to sort out terminological mess a very timely mental exercise even if only for my own sake. Far from being an Internet guru I just first of all need to put my own thinking in order . So, look through the list of terms I find problematic and hopefully this will help sorting at least some things out.
Social Network - perhaps the most abused term in the current thinking of the subject as in free circulation it is being applied to such a wide range of things that its meaning gets almost entirely diluted, hence it seems to be particularly important to return to its strict definition. Being in the centre of all related notions it provides a good pretext for a discussion that is no less relevant for all other terms I am about to list here. Needless to remind, that the term itself had originated within Social Science and has more to do with such disciplines as Social Anthropology and Sociology than with the subject of Online Communities. There it refers to relationships forming between real people in real social context and most importantly the analysis of those real Social Networks is only a small part of the whole which in its entirety includes much more important factors like age, class, gender, kinship and so on, of which those networks are just a direct function. The way this term is currently applied and used in various writings about the Internet (and Web 2.0 in particular) supposes a completely different set of circumstances. Understandably there are certain Online Communities, of which Facebook is probably the best possible example, that are formed with an intention to become a mere digital reflection of pre-existing real-world Social Networks hence their insistence on real names as opposed to nicknames and pictures instead of avatars coupled with an attempt to establish a self-policing community that enforces referential integrity with offline relationships from within. Of course this type of online communities is a dreamland for every advertiser and every PR agency. Having clear and direct correspondence between a user and a real person reinforced by the ability to visualise and analyse real-world relationships between them provides the owner of such dataset with potentially unlimited power and influence in real world which can be actualised at any moment in a huge variety of ways. Luckily for all of us Facebook and various facebookoids are no more than just unfortunate exceptions and the online game is played by completely different rules. The Internet is a place inhabited by avatars, nicknames in imaginary locations not by real names and social security numbers acting from real zip codes. It’s cyberspace after all, innit? Whatever draconian measures those control freaks from Facebook might implement to enforce their sick ideas about real names and locations, even there they had to have a cow as one of their accounts. To cut it short, on the Net we are not dealing with real people, instead we are presented with certain facets of real-world individuals designed and structured in the way that suits the purpose best. It’s only natural that the same individual would have radically different profiles on say job seeking portal, parents association, professional community and ultimately on an adult dating site. Should I mention that it is customary to own more than one profile or identity in the same community or service? Now, the relationships that can be established in Online Communities are of a different nature too. Various Facebookoid fanatics are quick to offer us online services where virtual relationships can only be instrumental applied to relationships pre-existing in the real world. Real world relationships and true social networks do exist without their virtual part and what virtual networks do for them can be viewed only as means of facilitation capable of intensifying them but not essential for their very existence. That’s how they want to see it. Luckily again the internet is not one big Facebook and most of the relationships forming there are virtual ones. The test that can be applied to distinguish between the two is in one simple question: will the relationship under examination exist if the whole Internet with its Online Communities will suddenly disappear? If it continues functioning albeit in a reduced form, the relationship belongs to the real world, and on the other hand if it ceases to continue it is a true virtual online relationship. Certainly there is a full spectrum of possible combinations between the two extremes but the essence and the beauty of the internet is precisely in its ability to generate this specific type of relationships hardly ever possible in real world. To put it straight the difference comes from the fact that online communication is capable of generating new relationships independent from those arising otherwise in real world. In other words relationships that are possible in virtual world are often absolutely impossible in real one. Needless to say that most of them are not transferable to the real world too. They simply can not actualise in the real world as they would invariably meet a huge number of various obstacles. Funny enough obstacles of true social nature like age, class, social and educational background and so on will be playing the most prominent role. Consequently, relationships forming in online world are capable of crisscrossing the real world relationships and in many instances are openly opposing them. If someone needs more explicit interpretation of the latter statement think of an online flirting or a virtual infidelity in marriage (quite a widespread phenomenon of late) where existing social relationships contradict online activity and online activity as such is rarely being actualised in real world.
Admittedly, this buzz word is so powerful that earlier on I named this very section of my blog Social Networks. Mea Culpa! And alas, it is much too late now to change this.
Virtual Community - although Wikipedia places this along with terms e-community or online community in the same row as synonyms it contradicts itself in the very same sentence defining it as a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. Taking it as a working definition, i. e. defining Virtual Community as any community that exists without immediate interaction, one can’t fail noticing that terms e-community or online community are of the different taxonomic level being just subsets of the former. Some other examples of Virtual Community one might think of would be for example armature groups or car-to-car radio users communicating over radio waves. So, all communities depending on a certain media can be called virtual, which reminds me again of Social Science where the term Imaginary Communities gained significant popularity with a slightly different meaning.
Online Community - the article in Wikipedia cited above also provides the following definition for this term: If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Funny enough in strict terms this definition is problematic as well if one remembers a long dead FIDOnet that is at the same time a computer network but also a classic example of offline communication and even Usenet to a large degree too. Hence less contradictory seems using terms Internet Community or Web Community as they reflect the meaning in a much better way. Sadly as the same Wikipedia tells us the latter had been taken already with the meaning of an online community established by a business with a purpose of facilitating that same business. So, we are only left with one precise term Internet Community which Wikipedia shamelessly redirects to the mentioned above Virtual Community article. Having to choose between the conventional Online Community and more precise Internet Community I would of course favour the latter but the power of tradition and already established practice in this case seems much too strong to go against, so for the time being I’ll be using both terms intermittently turning a blind eye on the imprecise mature of the former.
Online Community Service - if the term Online Community covers all those who act as members of the said community, this term should logically mean the vehicle of communication through which the functioning of the community is actualised. For example services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiky etc, etc emptied of all their users would fall under this category whilst each of them taken separately could also be rightly named Online || Internet Community Host which reflects better their place and function.
Social Network Service - in a very sad way this Wikipedia article assigns the meaning that should rightly be referred to by the previous term to this one. The reason why it seems to be completely misguiding should be apparent from the note on Social Network.
Social Graph - a term introduced to the field by Brad Fitzpatrick in his now infamous Thoughts on the Social Graph article seems to me particularly unfortunate. Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am able to grasp the concept, these two words are supposed to denote a user centric set of data that consists of friends of a given user and user identities from a potentially unlimited number of Online Communities. If this is so, than both of these words are completely out of place. Firstly the adjective Social pre-supposes real social relationships forming in real world while in fact what we are able to observe online are specific relationships that can only be formed and maintained via the media of the Internet. Secondly the term Graph is not only extremely user-unfriendly, but also carries a misleading connotation to visual representation of relationships while in fact it might only refer to a set of data regardless of the way the data are represented in each particular case. As the term itself just appeared there is still a window of opportunity allowing to replace this combination of words with something that would better reflect the meaning of the notion as well as be more user friendly. Having in mind that the question of naming still remains open, I would nevertheless like to propose an alternative term I grew accustomed to use in my work. I certainly think that calling the same phenomenon User Circle is much more preferable as in my opinion the former part of the term reflects better the user centric nature of it whilst the latter leaves more room for manoeuvre allowing to denote not only visual representation but any form of data related to a single user. In addition placing a user at the centre of the term we are intentionally cutting off unwanted connotations to social side of things postulating an online nature of our data this way. Although the term Social Graph had been already issued and is currently in circulation I will meanwhile stick to my guns until a better alternative is on offer.
User Circle - a term that in my opinion reflects much better the meaning Brad Fitzpatrick was trying to assign to his Social Graph concept. Firstly, the word user much more precisely positions a user in the centre of a dataset as well as carries the right connotation not to a real-world individual, but to a user of an internet service. Secondly, the word circle is flexible enough to include various forms of data representation ranging from a complex graph, to a simple list of friends or any other data, thus being much more adequate in daily usage. And last but not least the term itself seems to be much more user-friendly and more likely to be picked up by an average user.
Oh, and did I mention that this whole post acts as a kind of a preface to a series of articles on the subject of Online Communities that are in progress as we speak? I didn’t? I do now.
Added 23.12.2007
When I was in the middle of writing my next post I realised that I desperately need another term to describe adequately my new idea. Once again, I am not after introducing the I propose to any sort of wider circulation, I just need them to be able to express some new concepts in clear and unambiguous way.
User - an active party accessing an online service through proper authorisation procedure. Why do we need to define this additional term? Simply because it is the only adequate term capable of signifying the right meaning. From the side of our system be it for administrative purposes or in our analytic activity we have no means to know and no grounds to insist that it is always the same real world individual, in fact we can not even state that it is an individual at all. There can be plenty of various combinations. To list just a few instances: user account that is used by several family members, accounts held by institutions/organisations managed by a number of authorised employees, accounts passed from one individual to another etc. Individuals having multiple different accounts at the same online service tend to complicate the picture even further. Even if via indirect evidence we can suspect that such accounts belong to the same individual/group for our purposes they remain separate users. So the working definition of user might be as follows: someone (or something) who is able to log in to our system under the same username/password combination. Another purely instrumental term could be introduced in relation to this one. An individual who is acting under a given username/password combination at any given time can be called an account operator. The difference is that it denotes not a user as we see from the side of an online service administrator but an acting agency on the client side. To illustrate the difference suppose I step back from the computer and during the same session give access to an online service to my wife and she sends a message to her friend from this account. On the client side my previous actions and the message sent by my wife are performed by different account operators whilst on the server side they are performed by the same user! In other words the term user reflects what happens on the server side while the term account operator denotes what really happens on the client side. The only problem that things that really happen on the client side are completely beyond the scope of our knowledge as service operators hence the term itself has only instrumental significance in our analysis.
Added 29.02.2007
Writing on Web history I came to realise that there are two more terms that need to be included in this list. Although being discussed in detail in my next post they are still needed to be repeated here if only for the sake of consistency.
Surfer - the most generic state of online presence characterised by NOT being logged in into any particular online system or service – the most anonymous and passive with read-only access.
Legal Self - a state in which a User provides real-life credentials in order to make a legally binding transaction. In this state only a user can be traced back to a real-life individual.
Just came form holidays. Well, obviously not. Sorry. Just needed to invent some excuse for not writing for such a long time. My holidays ended weeks ago but as it always happens you come back to work only to discover such an enormous backlog that it takes twice as long as my holidays lasted to sort it out. So, going through the pile of things amassed over time I came about this draft that I started sometime in midsummer. I double-checked the factual side of things and all seems perfectly actual even now. So, after a little polishing I decided to publish this post in a pretty much the same shape it would have appeared in August (better late than never).
Doing SEO myself for quite some time and having a good number of friends and acquaintances of the same trade, naturally I had plenty of opportunities to observe and analyse different SEO practices and eventually I came to a rather strange conclusion: it seems there are probably only two types of SEOs in whole world. All of us have to deal with the same set of circumstances, namely we have to feed something to Search Engines in order to get a desired output from them and we have not a slightest idea of what is happening in the process. Search engines are perfect black boxes for us as we know what comes in and we can see what comes out but we are not allowed to see inside the box. There may be two ways to approach this rather tricky situation. One type of SEOs is practicing an approach that is very much akin to ancient magic. They take their client, perform some strange divination rituals on them and utter their prophecies that are just bound to be fulfilled. It isn’t a big deal if they don’t – there are so many taboos in their recommendations that it’s simply impossible not to break at least one of them. And of course this sin of breaking taboo is the only reason the magic didn’t work, that is of course if it didn’t, because if it did it is only because it is what it is – magic. Of course I know some from this bunch whose magic really works no matter what the circumstances are, but these are rare exceptions. Remarkably, SEO magicians are almost exclusively found among the troops of so-called white-hat SEO. The other party that is quite distinct from the former one consists of those who are mostly fascinated by the workings of the engine itself. The greatest joy for them is to catch a glimpse of those gear wheels, triggers, levers and latches all in motion. The pleasure, I confess very much akin to that of a Peeping Tom watching naked Lady Godiva who incidentally happened to be a patron of all engineers. The grand idea is in this case is ultimately to perform some sort of a reverse engineering upon Search Engine mechanism thus achieving a thrilling sensation of superiority. But this could never be perfected to the end perhaps not only because these black boxes are so carefully guarded by their owners, but also because even for the developers of Search Engines they are now exactly this - perfect black boxes. Otherwise why Matt Cutts would be using the word heuristics to describe the working of the Google engine so many times?
So, the article here is probably naye good for divination purposes but might be of some interest to those among us who belong as I do to the voyeur type.
This whole thing was triggered by a strange example that was discovered quite by chance: once I’ve been checking Google output for a rather unusual search: art power. Don’t ask me why, as it is just my little hobby to check out weird searches. This search phrase is a strange fruit indeed as it belongs to a class of generic searches, those that are likely not to produce large volume of searches but naturally have extremely high competition. This one quite as expected returns 321,000,000 results (at the time of writing). And now allow me just a small side note on the way Google deals with generic searches: the results tend to have much larger than average proportion of pages coming from large media resources, often newspapers like NYT and so on and media portals like BBC etc (you got the idea). Hence, as I observed, if you are able to obtain a link from a resource of this kind it will directly boost the responsiveness of your site to generic searches. But now let’s come back to the subject. Somewhere within results 351 - 360 for this search you will find this strange page. Mind you it isn’t such a bad position considering the competition – we can insist that at least 320999640 pages (321,000,000 - 360) are less relevant in Google’s opinion that the page in question. By now I expect you couldn’t resist the temptation to click on the link above to examine the actual page. Now, what do you see? Correct, a perfectly blank white page, no content whatsoever. Shocking enough as such isn’t it? And now note an even more distressing detail: Google thinks there is the word art on this empty page! What the hell is going on you ask. Although you will not get a definitive answer even if you open cached text version although it will get you much closer. I hope you in no time realised that what we are dealing here with is a frameset. Remarkable on its own and even allows us to formulate our first conclusion: it seems likely that Google assigned the content of frame to the frameset URL. But we’ll pass this remarkable fact without much discussion here as it is only indirectly relates to our question. Suffice to say that the preference to the frameset instead of nested pages is most likely defined by the overall site structure rather than by the framed page construction. Just to remind ourselves that our main question is: how come such a page ranks so high in Google? The only way to learn this is to go to the page itself and examine what it is made of. First of all of course goes our indispensable virtual currency - the Google PR and the page itself has moderate PR 3. Remarkably the word art is present only three times in one tight paragraph somewhere towards the very end of the page plus these three letters can be met as parts of bigger words about a dozen of times. Surely, it’s not enough to achieve such a high position. And what about the second word, power, as apparently it is nowhere to be seen on the page itself? And as always View Page Source is at our disposal to help in our predicament. Now drum roll, please! What do you see? Shock! Horror! We see the old number sign link trick inadvertently used on this page about 30 times. For those who are not aware of this trick here is a brief story. Just to remind you, the number sign as a partial value of the href attribute of the a tag was initially introduced to be used together with the name attribute to provide an easy on-page navigation. Basically it creates a relative link to another part of the same document. Subsequently with introduction of JavaScript this became a tool to create a JavaScript OnClick event without actually sending the browser away from the page and this is exactly how it is used in our example. The SEO part of it mainly consisted of a superstition that circulated since times immemorial that stated that placing a number sign link would somehow magically increase the potency and power of a page. I must admit I used this trick indiscriminately so many times in my youth without even bothering to think what it actually does, just relying on its magic powers. When I started paying more attention to what I am actually doing it turned out to be not so difficult to figure out what is happening with a number sign link. Basically Search Engine for some obscure reason takes these links seriously and assumes they are perhaps as valid as any other internal link. The only difference in this case is that a page links to itself which supposedly creates some kind of a loop back in PR or other link ranking calculations and as a result it should double or at least amplify the importance of the page. Presumably the effect of an outside link pointing to a page with this kind of loop back should also be amplified compare to an ordinary page thus allowing to create powerful pages on purpose. And all this is just because the number sign link somehow temporarily short-circuits Search Engine algorithms. Not bad, isn’t it? But it is surely black hat, isn’t it? Well, as usually it depend on the definition. I assume there is no algorithmically doable way to distinguish between a normal use of a number sign in link and its SEO-related application. Although in theory it is a punishable offence, in practice the prosecution can not be enforced as it remains untraceable. So in effect Search Engines algorithms could not penalise its usage, but only compensate for its effect. Being such an old trick I thought it had been compensated for years ago by all main Search Engines. In any way in my recent memory only MSN had been observed to be still prone to this, but who takes MSN for something other than a joke in terms of their algorithms? And now I am proven to be wrong again. As you can see the mighty Google itself is swallowing the same old bait. What in the world is going on here? We’ve observed hoe this page might have received a preferential treatment but still have no answer to our main question: why it ranks for art power having no mention of power on the page itself? Now let’s take a closer look at those loop back links we discovered. Mon Dieu! (Pardon my French) Yet another shocking revelation awaits us here. What we see an OnClick JavaScript alert that simply throws up a popup message that has the word POWER twice in each text element. If we count all instances this word is repeated altogether 62 times on this page! If this was a part of the page text I would not have been surprised at all. It reminds me so much of a classical keyword stuffing for a two words search where the first word has a very low density whilst the second one is overstuffed. This combination had been known to work since times immemorial and is working even now inasmuch as keyword density still matters. The preference for this unbalanced pair type of pages for two word search phrases perhaps comes from the fact that pages with even density of both search words en even more so with both search words coming together in sequence get penalised for fear of keyword stuffing and those pages that look the least similar to suspicious pages get favoured. All in all it would have worked out perfectly if the text of this JavaScript alert was counted as a part of page text, but we all remember the textbook SEO axiom: Search Engine Robots don’t read JavaScript. Or do they? OK, what we really know with a high degree of probability is that they don’t execute JavaScript. And this is only based on our assumption that it is much too much in terms of computing resources to attempt to run each and every section of JavaScript code on the net. But again, it is only our assumption, albeit confirmed by similar declarations coming from Search Engine spokespeople, but do we always have to trust their statements? Naturally we can not assume on this basis that Search Engines don’t read JavaScript code and don’t use it as a part of their relevancy calculation algorithms. Particularly attractive this idea looks when applied to our case where JavaScript alert message can be seen under certain circumstances as part of the overall page text since human agent can read it after all. Admittedly there are some arguments to counter this hypothesis. Formally the JavaScript alert is not counted as a page content proper which can be easily confirmed by the absence of our page in this search. Surprisingly enough we don’t find our page even if we search in anchor like this.
Equally however we know that Google never tells us the whole truth. Google insists that the word power is present in links leading to our page but at the same time displays no results for link operator search for this URL. Clearly something is missing here. After all Google allows us to see only what it wants us to see. Hence I’ll stick to my guns and offer the only explanation I think is plausible for this example? However strange and unorthodox it might look: Google actually reads JavaScript and hence
Google counts the word POWER in JavaScript alert towards the total in keyword density thus taking the page for the desired unbalanced pair type
Google counts the word POWER in JavaScript as anchor text too (actually I have reasons to believe that virtually any text contained within a tag will be counted as an anchor text)
Google is still prone to the number sign link loop back
This is so far the only possible explanation I can find for the phenomena we just observed but I am myself very far from being completely satisfied by it. The flaw in my analysis is apparent and should I mention that I made no effort to hide it? Having no better explanation myself I’ll be ready to accept the challenge and if you are ready to come up with an alternative I will only be happy to get engaged in a fruitful discussion. To aid those prepared to offer an alternative analysis of this example I may throw in another curious fact, namely the root of irational.org domain itself ranks rather high for our art power search too.
If the line of reasoning drawn above holds true, the consequences are quite intriguing. Not only one may extract some practical tricks from these features, but it also confirms that some statements coming from Google itself were at least premature, particularly that the possibility of effective Google Bowling is still alive and kicking.
For those who expected to discover some sort of magic potion in this article I may only say: I don’t sell snake oil here.
Quite frankly the first item in my ToDo List was to write a roundup on LZZR Linking but the scheduled work on this project that mainly consisted of watching people joining in and backlinks spreading over the network was mercilessly interrupted by getting a long-awaited Pownce Invite. I can’t help applauding their market-entry strategy where the main element is to roll out a public beta but make it an invitation only service (not original per se but beautifully implemented). By doing this they were able to kill two birds with one stone: firstly creating an aura of exclusivity around the service and secondly providing starting points for user trees to branch from.
BTW if someone needs a Pownce Invite ask my lovely friend SexySEO through her MyBlogLog account as she must have some invites left. You can also message me on MyBlogLog but please, care to send private messages!
So what this so far exclusive Pownce thing is all about? Briefly it’s yet another one microblog. Although you have probably guessed my personal attitude towards microblogging from my post about Twitter, this emerging Web 2.0 genre pioneered by Twitter seems to be steadily gaining ground in terms of popularity and traffic. The problem with Pownce is that it has to catch up with Twitter that has a good gain since about a year ago. Pownce appeared just at the end of this June but is doing remarkably well despite of a recent saddle in the graph.
Now, why do we have to bother with a service that seems to be mimicking an already existing one? Is it just another blueprint startup? Without falling into an already common Twitter vs. Pownce comparison I feel I need to point out two important things. Firstly, Twitter in my opinion is ugly while Pownce team did a good job to make the service visually attractive including even changeable skins. Secondly, Pownce was founded (among others) by some Kevin Rose who incidentally happened to be a co-founder of Digg.com at the same time. Taking into account his past service record this guy must surely know something. If you ask me, my money is on Pownce as I believe it will eventually take over from behind. What is your bet? Well, it actually does not matter as in the near future we will see a good run where both players will be willing to put as much resources as they can into promoting their services in terms of popularity, visibility, functionality as well as Google PR. And here we are, standing right under and ready to rip the benefits.
Enough of comparison, let’s see what Pownce is in it’s own right. Honestly, I was shocked to realise the kind of approach they took designing the core of the service. This microblog does not have any kind of mobile integration. Does this mean that microblogging as an Internet activity is considered mature enough already to make it possible to cut off the umbilical cord of SMS and other mobile messaging or it’s just a sign of immaturity of Pownce itself I don’t know and I am honestly puzzled by this. If the absence of mobile interface can possibly be explained by the current beta stage of the project another no less surprising feature seems to be a part of the design. The central page of your profile on Pownce aggregates and displays not only your stuff but also all kind of stuff from your friends! That’s a kind of a surprise I did not expect. They’ve done a thing completely opposed to Twitter structure, pardon me for the inevitable comparison again. And this does not seem to be a mistake but rather a part of the design. I might have guessed from the name… What do you think of the following definition of the slang word pwn taken from reference.com: to take unwilling control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability? This is exactly how Pownce works. In effect your own profile page is being hijacked by messages and links posted from your friends. You are no longer in control of your own frontpage! This and some other rather weird features make SEOing Pownce a bit of a challenge.
So what Pownce can offer us in terms of SEO? I believe that as a result of competition with Twitter Pownce is bound to gain in both Page Rank and exposure power. Our task is to optimize Pownce to make it useful in some bigger project (I hope nobody expects a microblog to become a major content distribution source). So let’s try to work out some helpful tips and tricks to make powncing useful for your main site. Once again the task is not just to optimize Pownce itself as being a microblog it simply has no chance to rank high in SERPs but to make it a point from which your main site will get additional exposure and benefit in terms of Google Page Rank.
Having your profile page stuffed with messages from your friends doesn’t help a bit. Your main profile page is the strongest as it gets most internal links from within the system from all of your posts through author link and avatar and hence it will be gaining most of PR and exposure. At the same time it is the most useless page as not only you are not in control of its content but also it will have a horrible link and content churn rate. What we need is to create some alternative place within the Pownce itself and make it as strong as your main profile. Luckily there is one already – it’s your Me Only page. This page is what you get by default on Twitter only here, on Pownce it had been given a second-rate status compare to your profile. It already has a direct spiderable link from your main profile page, so it has to be known to Search Engines but will be ranked very poorly. Our idea is to give it some additional weight. I assume that Pownce will gain a good standing with Google and eventually Google PR will flow easily within the site. In this case it is usually enough to give it some two or three external inbound links to kick-start PR accumulation.
Hence our SEO tip number one: when you promote your Pownce account at external resources link to your Me Only page, NOT to your main profile. Note: you also have a Sent page which should be the same but isn’t always the same at all! There is also another juicy place within your Pownce estate – your Type Links page where you get only links (both yours and not yours). On Pownce there are four different types of Pownces you can write: messages, links, files and events each capable of generating a stream of it’s own. The only problem with this that type pages (and streams) stay unlinked and Search Engine Robots have no way of learning about their existence. That is of course true only until you show those pages to them. You can post links to your Type Pages from external resources but it certainly won’t hurt to have some internal links too. Unfortunately Pownce is plagued with nofollow too and all links in your profile and messages are nofollowed. The way out of this trap is to post your links as Link Type thus creating a kind of internal loopback.
So here goes SEO tip number two: if you want a certain type of your Pownce postings to be spiderable too – create external links to this type page and use links type to post internal links. If you want to have as many of your pages on Pownce spidered – rinse and repeat for every page type. Mind you if you are a friendly character there is some point in pulling out your friends lists too. Of all possible combinations Pownce links only to your Friends and Fans pages and hides a page with people you follow which is logical enough as those followed by you give only links from their fans page while both friends and fans publish your stuff in their profile streams. All of these three types of friendship relations pages can be strengthened using the abovementioned method. You can also create groups of your friends to gather posts from selected accounts excluding your own strangely enough.
At this stage it is perhaps the time to talk about more dubious SEO and SMO tricks that Pownce is prone to. Please, bear in mind that I don’t endorse them by any means due to their ethically problematic nature and I don’t use them myself (only for experimental purposes). Look at this list as anti-recommendation and use this information to protect your account from falling a victim of these tactics. Perhaps not surprisingly the star of our list is Mass Friending. Although very well-known and widely used across social networks it is particularly powerful on Pownce since Pownce posts your messages direct to your friend’s profile. Having a huge number of friends allows you to swamp the system with your messages and links. This warning might have been completely redundant if I did not see the results of my small SEO experiment strictly as a part of my eSEO programme. I randomly befriended a good hundred of Pownce users with a third profile that had nothing on it and over 50% accepted this friends request. It’s amazing how unprepared are average Social Network users to this kind of malicious activity. Another method is a variety of this one called Mass Stalking. Of course less effective as you only get a link from My Fans page of the profile you stalked but no less dangerous as you as an account owner have no way of getting rid of your stalkers. The last tactic I would consider to be particularly evil and dirty could be called Friends Infidelity and is based on unfriending mutual friends thus gaining an asymmetrical advantage. But this is a No-No, it is pure abuse of trust and I don’t even want to talk about it any more!
These methods combined with alphanumeric trick can be widely used, so beware. The alphanumeric trick itself is based on the fact that at this early stage Pownce is still using alphanumeric sorting when they have not enough of other information and as a result profiles and usernames starting with special characters or letters close to the top of Latin alphabet tend to pop up at the top more often.
Now we are able to compose a small SEO cheatsheet for working with Pownce. It will not guarantee to make you the number one Powncer but will certainly improve your chances and help to avoid the most common pitfalls and more importantly it can be used for other Social Networks as well.
choose username and account name close to the top of the alphabet
post your links as Links Type to avoid nofollow
concentrate on your Me Only and Link Type pages and optionally on other secondary pages while building your external and internal links to Pownce
be reasonable while building your network and don’t become a stalker and don’t annoy others with friends requests and mass posting - remember, your posts are turning up at all of your friend’s profiles
beware of malicious SMO tactics and especially on Pownce otherwise you are running a risk of your account page being effectively jacked (or Pownced) by spammers
remember that by default Pownce posts to all of your friends and doesn’t post to your stream (Pownce indeed!) so you need to switch from default all my friends to the public in pulldown menue
So this is in brief my small tutorial on how to make your Pownce account a SEO success and as a form of glazing to the Pownce cake you can even entirely subvert the Pownce structure by using your account as a subject group. All you need is to use your Pownce invite for another email address of yours, choose subject and start stalking Pownce users writing on this subject and voila your group is hot and ready. Check Pownce SEO Group for working example of implementation of this idea. I’ll write another tutorial on creating and managing Group Accounts on Pownce soon (time permitting). No, really, I promise!
Disclaimer: 1) I dont work for Pownce (I work for myself, remember) 2) Tips and Tricks and cheatsheet presented here a valid at the time of publishing. Pownce is a beta startup, so expect them to correct some of their most stupid mistakes in the future!
We are all hungry for inbound links these days and even more so since the introduction of nofollow which I personally hate as it did not solve a bit the problem of comment spam it was supposed to solve but had a detrimental effect on social networks and blogsphere in particular. It turned all of us bloggers into a particularly greedy bunch. Before placing a link we started to think of how much we would lose if it’s an open link without nofollow. Although my attempt to mock the whole nofollow concept by inventing a rel=follow attribute proved to be popular enough it nevertheless is too limited to change the picture in any significant way. The only solution to this seems to be generosity. But generosity itself isn’t enough in a world governed by the principle of self-interest. Attempts to persuade an average webmaster that outgoing links from his/her site are beneficial since eventually they will bring a hub status to the linking resource were not too convincing. It needed more than just empty promises of some benefits in the future. Linking should be mutually beneficial for both the linking site and the linked one and more these benefits must be obvious and immediate. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about a strategy that would realize these objectives and finally I think I came up with one.
Initially the idea was triggered by observing rather old-fashioned SEO attempts to pull out their own sites from Search Engine results using site: operator. I am sure you are all familiar with this dumb trick and if not just follow this link to see what it does. You see? This is an example of pure greed and selfishness. You pull out your own site and only your own site. Now let’s try a different search this time using not site: but link: operator (example). These are URLs of resources linking to lzzr.com. And what’s the point, you might ask? Surely if you are greedy it does not make any sense to promote someone else’s URL but if you are clever you’ll quickly realize that it’s in your own best interests to have inbound links from strong pages. Think about the amount of time and effort (and very often money) an average SEO spends on acquiring links from pages with good Page Rank. Now, the same goal can be achieved simply by making some effort promoting pages that already have natural links to you! They are already out there, just give them some link love. Of course this way you push up resources that are not owned or operated by you and hence you loose something but the gain which in my opinion outweighs the hypothetical loss you may suffer is that all of those pages link back to you!
From strictly SEO point of view you create a perfect 3-way linking structure where Search Engine Results Page (SERP) serves as an intermediary between you and pages linking to you. In other words you link to results page and results page links to a number of sites each having a link back to you. This 3-way linking is known to be much more effective than a usual reciprocal linking and is not punishable like the outdated link farm method. On a side note: I strongly insist that the structure I just described can not be considered search engine spamming as it makes a perfect sense from user’s point of view. Let me explain: I as a webmaster certainly hold a pretty high opinion about myself and my website. Equally I should value those who appreciated my website by placing a link to it. Thus promoting websites linking to you is just a simple sign of respect and appreciation. I also assume that sites linking to my content are relevant to this content hence linking to them enhances user experience!
However the potential of this structure is limited since search engines are rarely indexing their own pages (Google results page will not be indexed and processed by Google but Netscape results page for example will be seen in Google) and even if they did these result pages are still orphan i. e. have no internal links coming from within the search engine itself. A perfect solution would be to have a page like this to be a part of your own resource – an objective that was horribly difficult to achieve until very recently in purely technical terms.
Now here is where Web 2.0 comes to the rescue. Let’s check this example from Google BlogSearch (similarly you can pull your results from Technorati but Technorati is lame). True it only displays links from blogs but look at the bottom of the Google page – you see it can be pulled out as Feed! Now, do I need to continue? Almost every single Web 2.0 resource or service comes with a built-in ability to pull and display feeds. Now all you need to do to promote blogs linking to you is to set up such feeds at every possible place and watch how pages linking to you grow in reputation and PageRank pushing up your own resource on the way.
This is exactly what I do for my blog. The easiest way is to create Yahoo Pipes page combining Google and Technorati feeds. But the easiest doesn’t mean the best since Yahoo Pipes are notoriously slow and are usually badly indexed by Google. Surely I must have more SEO Tricks up my sleeve. I obviously keep and maintain LZZR accounts on all major social networking services to beef up both LZZR online presence and exposure which is a bon ton thing to do these days. At every opportunity I include a feed with links to sites linking to LZZR.com. Of course different services have different options and consequently different SEO efficiency. On major blog systems such as Blogger, MSN Live, Wordpress.com etc. you are only allowed to display a limited number of feed entries in your external feeds and as a result sites that are at the top of Google Blog Search and the most recent Technorati entries will be favoured. In addition these link blocks are set up as separate page areas different from content and links due to their small number will have a substantial link churn. Not so good but at least something. Squidoo is a better place as they allow including a substantially large number of feed entries and besides they are displayed within the main content area of the page. But the best opportunities can be realised at Tumblr and Jaiku blog services. These two are really godsend as each new feed entry in those systems is published as a separate blog posting thus permanently affixing each link. Another interesting option is to propagate you back links feed by setting up special groups at various services like Bumpzee or the same Squidoo.
Note: I purposly avoided placing such link feed blocks on lzzr.com itself to prevent Link Farm structure.
So here is the deal: you link to any page at LZZR.com and get a bunch of backlinks to your site from places I manage and be sure do my best to promote. Your site must be a blog and it should be already indexed by Technorati and Google. I suggest you write a blog post about this very idea and link back to this very article rather than to the root. This will be more beneficial to you as the article itself already contains a bunch of outgoing links to places where I set up link feeds. However if you don’t want to link direct to the article any link to any page within lzzr.com will do including a root link. I became so excited about this idea that I even designed some buttons for the occasion. I think they visually represent the idea of LZZR linking where a LZZR link reflects from an intermediary.
Feel free to copy them and don’t be afraid of hotlinking as hotlinking is good!
Now if you are still thinking that this whole idea is just a shameless self-promotion – go back to the beginning and read again. I am sure you’ll find a rational core in all this. There is a good deal of self-interest in all this of course. I get inbound links from you. But at the same time you get a number of links pointing to you in return and this number is going to grow for as long as I’ll be finding new places to insert my link feed into. I will also be promoting pages with back links by all means available as this is in my own best interest. Thus there comes a perfect win-win combination!
PS:
Of course the temptation to copyright this idea and call it LZZR linkingTM is huge but in the spirit of true generosity I will refrain from doing so. You are free to replicate this structure for your site as this would be a really effective way to fight the nofollow greed. The only thing I would object to is if you decide to pass this idea as yours without proper attribution in a form of a backlink to this article :-). And should it be mentioned that linking back is in your best interests anyway… It’s good to link LZZR.com!
As you might have noticed from my post about EXIF I am certainly fascinated by the opportunity to squeese out a bit more of SEO not only from the traditional textual content but also from visuals. Every little bit counts and if you can enhance visibility of your site by just another grain, however small it might be it’s nevertheless worth it.
Ever since images appeared on the web webmasters tended to see it as a problem, rather than an advantage for one simple reason - unlike predominantly textual pages which are rarely over 100K images used to be relatively heavy. Not only they slowed down pageloads but also consumed plenty of bandwidth. And this approach seemed to be reasonable enough at the time since even relatively small images could weight several times more whilst large images dozens of times more than the page itself. And you remember the webmaster’s nightmare of not so distant past called hotlinking? Weren’t you just going berserk when some 12 y. o. idiot puts a hotlink to your image from somewhere in Xanga and it starts leeching like crazy eating up megabytes of your daily traffic allowance? Every single trick from referrer check to MOD rewrite we used to fight leechers, it used to be the hottest subject for all webmaster’s forums just a couple of years ago. SEOs too hated images considering them to be useless since search engines can not read images anyways. This negative attitude outlived by far the reasons causing it. Even at the wake of introduction of image search by all major search engines SEOs constantly deranged image search traffic as being not relevant and hurting bandwidth. Some even suggested SEO tricks designed to hide images from Image Search spiders. I am afraid that this is still the predominant attitude in SEO community I am myself guilty of sharing it for quite some time.
Only the recent experience with some of the sites I manage convinced me that this attitude is in most part completely wrong. Let’s look at the most widespread negative arguments and see how relevant they are indeed being applied for sites you own or manage.
1) Images consume too much bandwidth - Dismissed as being completely outdated. Coming from the stone age of the Internet it’s a complete anachronism in our age of Youtube and podcasting. You can’t save a penny economizing on image bandwidth.
2) Hotlinking is bad as another site eats up your bandwidth - Dismissed as greedy and unsociable. Can’t you just allow someone else to use something that belongs to you but costs you nothing? (also see above)
3) Hotlinking is bad because it constitutes copyright infringement - Plausible, but only in part. Most copyright complaints about image theft are completely groundless as most of those complaining just don’t understand that merely resizing an image in Photoshop or other image editor does not produce any copy rights. As for those really holding copy rights over leeched images using proper complaint procedure (see DMCA for details) is the most straightforward and by far the most effective way of dealing with this problem.
4) Image Search Traffic is useless since those searching for images are not interested in products and hence are not likely to become your customers - Plausible but only if you own or manage an online shop. Now, when the Internet is turning from some kind of gigantic department store to a wide arena for social interaction this argument becomes less and less relevant. If your site is based on image content you are more than anybody interested in attracting Image Search traffic since if someone came to your site after seeing one image it’s likely that he or she will enjoy other images from your site too, thus joining your fan base which is a clear blessing. Of course if you are managing a shopping site or most of your monetization is per sale or per action this blessing turns into a curse as logically the type of user coming from Image Search is most likely doing a window shopping rather than the real one. But it flips back to blessing again if you base your strategy on per click monetization like AdSense for example. It’s true that an Image Search surfer is much less focused and less likely to buy online but precisely for this lack of focus this surfer is more likely to click on ads thus increasing your site CTR and overall conversion. I’ve seen it myself - Image Search visitors are a blessing for per click conversion rates. Shall I say that Image Search enhances your site visibility too?
I don’t know if my arguments sound convincing to you, but as far as I am concerned image search traffic is as good as any other kind of traffic if not better in some respects. So now I am going to share some ideas on how to make your site more visible for image search. If you don’t believe your site can benefit from image search traffic, read on anyway, just don’t follow the recommendations I am about to list and do the opposite to this small checklist.
So here is how to make your resource Image Search friendly:
1) The basics available in any SEO textbook for dummies. Give your image a meaningful file name that contains your desired keywords. Put your keywords in alt (which you should do anyway to validate your code accordingly) and more importantly into your image title. Surround your image with keyword-rich textual content.
2) Don’t be afraid of hotlinking! Let every adolescent boy and girl from Facebook or MySpace hotlink to your images. This will do for images the same as normal linking does for text! Don’t worry that these not so SEO-literate young individuals will not put appropriate title or alt while hotlinking: if your image name is filled with keywords anyway this will give Image Robots enough clue. If understandably you don’t want to leave this important issue at the mercy of ruthless teenagers - hotlink yourself! Put it in relevant textual content with keywords in alt and title. The advantage is obvious - it looks inconspicuous, i. e. it does not look like link spam! Spread your hotlinks as wide as possible and be prolific - quick while you can, while hotlinks are not yet as heavily policed as text links with nofollow.
3) You can further enhance searchability of your images by placing a thumbnail that links to your full-size image (NB! not to a page with a full-size image but to the image itself).
4) As a last remedy I may suggest opting in for Google Enhanced image search from your webmaster console - theoretically it should act as a trigger for Google’s Image Search but the only problem I see is that it is not controlled by you.
Although with a benefit of hindsight I can see that my ideas about EXIF are a bit silly but I certainly know about one service that does read EXIF for sure and it is (you guessed it) the beloved Flickr by Yahoo! But this is altogether another story and I promise to write about SEO on Flickr soon.
To be continued…
