I found this article, How To Stand Out In A World Of Infinite Choice by Adam Singer on his FutureBuzz blog today when trying out some of the Twitter search functionality.

Adam says a lot of things in his post that I found hit home for me regarding the Web, openness and quality. I, especially, believe that if you’re open, honest, and deliver quality you’re going to be rewarded with interest. There’s no shortcut for this, and Adam’s perspective embraces this.

Here are a couple quotes from his post:

“Getting through the filters of the web (human or automated) successfully is a matter of standing out.

“In a low trust world, real honesty and transparency go a long way to set you apart.  You can’t fake this, eventually everyone’s true colors come out.  Use authenticity as a way to set you apart as a more positive choice.  The filter of the web is smart, and getting smarter each day – being inauthentic is not a sustainable strategy.”

I’ve added FutureBuzz to my reader, and I’m sure that there will be more responses to Adam’s posts.

This morning I was reading Seth Godin’s blog, catching up on items in my reader, and came across the post: “What kind of open are you looking for?” Basically, this is an explanation of some of the various flavors of what it means to be open. I refer to this a lot when talking about electronic communications and the Web, specifically open source technologies, or the LAMP flavor of Web, but also the broader context of egalitarian nature of the Web, so I thought it might be helpful to others to see some other examples of the open philosophy.

I’m actually writing this post out of sequence. I just composed a post based on an article I read at Seth Godin’s blog, here, but I intend to publish this one first, and then follow up with the initital post that I wrote. I’m doing this because writing the initial post, Open, et al… actually got me thinking about what it means to be open. I’ve referred to open source, or the open, egalitarian nature of the Web here, and elsewhere many times over the last decade (yikes, time flies!) and it’s always been a bit of an abstract concept. Tech and Web folks could get the gist of what it mean to use open source software, like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) and others, but when referring to the philosophical nature of open on the Web, as a communications platform, many folks just kind of gave me a funny look. So I started to do some research on the philosophical foundation of open source, with the hope that I find some information that pointed to the open nature of the Web.

Most of the information that I found pointed to open source software, doing a search of open source philosophy on the Web via Google, this wasn’t surprising. However, after some digging, I found this page, Philosophical Tenets of Open Source, and close to the bottom of the page I found what I was looking for, I’ve taken this bit of text from the page:

Open Source Is a Gift Economy

To understand open source, it helps to make a distinction between a commodity economy, to which we are accustomed in a capitalist society, and a gift economy. In a gift economy, gifts are exchanged, forming a bond based on mutual obligation: In the simplest form of gift exchange, when one person gives a gift to another, the receiver becomes obligated to the giver, but not in a purely mercenary way–rather, the recipient becomes very much like a member of the giver’s family where mutual obligations are many, varied, and long lasting. A person may give a gift with the realistic expectation that someday a gift of equal or greater use value will be received or that the recipient will pass on a further gift. In an open-source project, the gift of source code is reciprocated by suggestions, bug reports, debugging, hard work, praise, and more source code.

The commodity economy depends on scarcity. Its most famous law is that
of “diminishing returns,” whose working requires a fixed supply. Scarcity of
material or scarcity of competitors creates high profit margins. It works through
competition.

The gift economy is an economy of abundance–the gifts exchanged are inexhaustible. Gift economies are embedded within noneconomic institutions such as kinship, marriage, hospitality, artistic patronage, and ritual friendship. A healthy Western family operates on a gift economy. In an open-source project, the status and reputation of individuals depend on the quality of the gifts they contribute.

The distinction really is that of the gift vs. commodity economy. It’s funny because as I write this I remember what it was that attracted me to the Web. I was a musician/composer, and I was working on a recording. After having played guitar for years, being in bands, playing shows, and trying to sell music at venues, I saw that the Web had the power to change everything for me as a working artist — the playing field had been leveled. On the Web, in 1999, Mp3.com had just launched, and it was skies the limit for artists to get out their, hang a virtual shingle, and let the world know about their work. However, it wasn’t about huckstering your product and bombarding folks with spam to inform them about your work (though there was some of that); rather there was an openness that permeated throughout this new platform. There were new channels for sharing what you were doing, as well as for folks, from all the over the world, to share with you. I’m sure at some point I’ll go into this story in greater detail, but for now, suffice it to say that the openness of the Web brought me in, and it was the openness and the economy of abundance on the Web that made me want to stick around, even forgoing my musical ambitions to see what a Web-centric world could look like. More to come, on what it mens to be open…

Just because you presented the better solution, doesn’t mean that the client will always take that route. Somehow, this defies good sense, but on the other hand, people are not always using good sense when they make decisions. There’s an emotional piece that equally defies good sense, and there’s nothing related to good sense as far as feelings are concerned, only what is and the hope that one will learn something from the experience of those emotions. Still, though, in the service of the client, you have to research and present the best option for them, and hope that there will be an intersection of what the client wants, what the client needs, and what the best solution is.

The thing about consistency is that you can plan for it, you can intend to do it, you can even develop a strategy for being consistent; consistent in message, consistent in approach, consistent in action, whatever, but if you’re not consistent, it won’t matter. Consistency is tough because it takes presence and discipline; presences to be mindful of what is and discipline to face it even when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye… especially when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye.

Do you what needs to be done, and do that every time.

That’s what it means to be consistent.

Alright, so the series seems to be taking off, see my last post here, because this morning, even with all the coffee in the world, I couldn’t shake the idea of talking about keywords.

Back in the pre-Google era SEO was wholly dependent on keywords, specifically, meta tags. Meta tags ruled; you could put them anywhere, but the head tag was where the most scrupulous Web master put them, as they would only be seen by bots, not humans; however, the system game approach was to put them EVERYWHERE… particularly, you would see them in the body of the Web page, dozens and dozens, sometimes hundreds of keywords that attracted the bots of the day to what may have amounted to one paragraph of content, that frequently wasn’t relevant, or had a page full of ads, or a link to an affiliate program or something… The search engine would get you to a page like this, but you would never come back, because it was a bust, a waste of time.

Enter the Google era… keywords still ruled, meta tags didn’t hurt, but wait there’s more! This is where the SEO content writer piece comes in that I talked about in the previous installment. As I said before, in the old days you just wrote and if the writing was good, and the site had a good search ranking over all (probably due to the intersection of keyword placement and keyword-infused content), it would probably get picked up, but Google changed the game; not only did you have to write good content, and have a pretty good ranking, but now a contributor to your ranking was indicated by folks who linked or referenced you, kind of an early form of the wisdom of the crowds, before the term had been established.

Keywords are still very important, but they play a slightly different role, or rather the writer has a slightly different role when it comes to the placement of the keywords in the narrative; I’ve found that there are two basic rules of thumb:

• Write good content
• Infuse good content with keywords

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there’s no shortcut to getting a good search ranking, but these two rules greatly diminish the time it takes to get picked up. For instance, let’s look at this post. This post has numerous references to the terms: keywords, SEO and Google. These get the post half-way home as far as ranking is concerned, if someone happens to be looking for info on these items, but if people start to link to this page or reference it, Google will say, ‘hey, wait a minute, we need to give this page a higher ranking’… I can’t emphasize the two basic rules of content and keywords enough…