Tim Aten

8 Mile & Woodward – Transformation in US Race Relations

September 15, 2013 By Tim Aten 1 Comment

Some political theories expound on the trickle down. What about the grassroots up?

In discussing anything geographic or demographic in Detroit one should get point of reference right out of the way. It’s always the issue. I’m white, live a few blocks off 8 mile in Ferndale, have lived in the city of Detroit by Wayne State, some time in New York City, Ann Arbor, and Cleveland. In high school I lived in Birmingham, Michigan. Immediately that Birmingham reference draws conclusions and assumptions. That’s fine. We all do it. For all the out-of-towners, and there’s many out of towners visiting and writing about Detroit, this makes me appear to be a college educated white male from a wealthy suburb. Those that know me, read my writings, have read my poetry, know this may be one facet. Like all humans, there are many dimensions.

I lead with all this because I’m going to make a bold statement.

The Meijer grocery store on 8 mile and Woodward is one of the most critical points/events in Detroit race relations. Maybe someday looked back on as important for the United States.

I’ve lived close to 8 mile for over 10 years now and I was always curious what entrepreneur was going to make the first real bold move. There was a flower store years back, Blumz . It closed and headed a few blocks north. I wondered if a restaurant or night club was going to take the plunge. I was taken aback when I first heard Meijer, a Michigan based large independent superstore, was building a store there. I didn’t think it was unwise but wondered if you could support something that big in that area.

I don’t claim to know any politics or jockeying for the area where Meier now sits by the old State Fairgrounds. I’m sure there were intricate and complicated negotiations to get the store built and like so many things in our society – winners and losers. I know of nobody being disenfranchised but would not be surprised if that were the case. (An interesting topic for comments?)

A few weeks back at its grand opening I went with my wife and daughter. Curious. We were pleasantly surprised. The store was spotless, airy, and the produce looked very fresh and well presented. I was intrigued at the positive vibe in the air. Many of us, like our family, were glad to have a Meijer-like store in our area. Currently we have to travel a suburb or two north to go to a Meijer or Target and having one nearly a mile away will be helpful. I think many of the other people in the store felt the same way. There were smiles and head nods. The employees also seemed to be happy to be there and excited. All of this didn’t have racial lines. There were black and white patrons as well as black and white employees and managers. It was almost as if the feeling was like “we got this, we deserve this, and we’re going to keep this. This is normal and no big deal”.

I have to say I was surprised and humbled by reaction. Just as you likely made assumptions about me in the first paragraph of this essay I had a made assumptions about what a Meijer in Detroit would be, what the people would be like, what the feeling in the air would be. It was not as what I had suspected. It was all hard-working people, friendly, and you could tell the people were upstanding and rationale people in society. There was a bright hope. To clarify this is NOT to imply I believe parts of Detroit are the opposite ie, lazy, mean, low-class, and irrational. Far from the truth. Having lived in the city before and working there everyday I do feel a tension and apathy in pockets. In some places it feels like there is no hope, there is resignment to the circumstances that are.

Meijers I didn’t feel that. Deep down maybe I felt ashamed I assumed there wasn’t this volume of hard-working and people who want the same things out of life like me and my family and are just trying to make it in the system we live.

I’m sure Meijer is happy with their first weeks of sales, when I drive by it at 7am there are many cars in the parking lot. The key will be if they can keep up the cleanliness and apparent high employee morale. Security will be another big test. Should bad things go down in the parking lot, they will have trouble having people come there. Then again bad things happen in Birmingham, we just don’t hear a lot about it.

It’s the ordinary day-to-day which forms the subtle and unconscious backbone of a culture and society, not necessarily the obvious things like clothes, food, nightclubs, or even transformative events like riots. Looking at the places of commerce where these goods are purchased, the markets, one can really see the pulse of that civilization. Maybe if we understand what happens there we can see where the future will lead. I give credit to Meijer for taking the bold move to move to an area that may have had a culturally perceived risk. As a citizen in the area I am happy to have those goods conveniently located and as a man living in metro-Detroit… hopeful that things like race have taken a turn for the better at 8 mile and Woodward.

Musings on Google Glass

August 2, 2013 By Tim Aten 1 Comment

Google Glass I remember the first time I picked up an iPhone at the Apple Store. It was magical. I think I was reading Coelho’s The Alchemist at the time and seeing YouTube video on that device was like Santiago picking up Urim and Thummim and the omens that come with it. It was Gollum’s Precious. I had to have it. I was envious of early adopters. Eventually I had an iPhone, found it useful, and I could say it enhanced my physical world and space. All the familiar things which come with a smart phone like email, newsfeeds, podcasts, video content, and maps the iPhone over-delivered. Since that time many years ago I’ve had multiple smart phones and I have to say each one is an upgrade, a tweak to progress.

I remember the first time I read about the iPad. “That looks stupid.” “Who the hell would carry around that enormous cell phone with them?” I think a lot of people shared this sentiment when the announcement was leaked. I had no desire to get one. I was connected enough with my lappie and iPhone. Until I held one.

Within seconds of the first time I held a great graphic designer’s iPad I got it. Content so wistfully flashed through with a finger tip and the lightness of the device attributed to the elegant design. It was sleek. Restful. In a primitive way I wanted to sit down by a fire and absorb content. I believe the designer had some bright day-glo keyboard app for his kids and I was spellbound by the noise and colors. I could see myself playing the app all day. I didn’t want to give it back.

My experience with Google Glass was a little different. Last week I experienced Glass thanks to my friend and colleague Maria Jewett who wrote into Google saying she should be an early adopter. Her story and ideas caught their attention, she flew to New York, picked up Glass, and came back to Detroit. I was fortunate to meet her at the Guardian Building to give them a try.

My first impression is it really does look like simulator videos that show an environment with a little square television in the upper right hand corner that has some degree of transparency. I found it ironic and a bit ominous it is very similar to the technology found in the apocalyptic and transhumanist Google produced YouTube video series H+. If you watch some of the previews it does seem like that’s where Google Glass could end up.

I found it clunky and a little jarring. I imagine someday I’ll look back on the encounter the same way I remember seeing people carrying around purse sized mobile phones or beepers. Having to lift up your head to turn off and on, swiping with your index finger, or say commands didn’t feel natural. Like many I’ve heard the rumblings of people getting headaches and I can understand that.

I was also in guest mode so admittedly I haven’t had the full experience. However, I saw the samples of seeing a person’s social mugshot with their name next to them in your field of vision. All privacy aside, if we were all connected and opted in with our friends, that phenomena and ability is completely new. It’s cool but I don’t think it’s one I seek. When I’m flying on a plane I like my anonymity.

Maria Jewett As I was using them I realized midway through Maria, who I was just enjoying a cup of tea with, completely vanished from my focus and attention. She was talking and quite honestly I wasn’t paying attention, I was focusing on the images of jellyfish on the Glass. It’s sensory over-drive, video game-like. One has to focus on two points. How klutzy and strange it would be for two Homo sapiens each with Glass to have a conversation. I can imagine a lot of “Huh’s?” and “What did you say?”

Another thing that came to mind is the digital divide. Issues of class in our society are now issues of the haves and have-nots of technology. I remember for my company we volunteered in a low-income community at a school to help 7-year-old kids in the computer lab. It was obvious these children didn’t have computers in their homes and time on the standard-issue PC at school was it. I was humbled and inspired by their eagerness and excitement on the computer but also taken aback by their lack of familiarity with hyperlinks and operating systems using my similar-aged daughter and her friends as a barometer. Kids are lightening quick to understand and figure out technology but the low-income communities I fear are becoming isolated further and further from this technology. What happens when these $1500 Google glasses go mainstream? Maybe they eventually sell for $500. Sergey Brin said going back to a smart phone made him feel “emasculated”. He said he felt more engaged with reality and aware of his surroundings with Glass. His hands were free. What’s the opposite of “emasculated”? Powerful? Omnipotent? Watching the video of him talking it looks like we’re getting into cyborg territory. I pose the question when it comes to society at large, we don’t even have to get into class, empowered over what? And why?

Slippery Slope territory. A Pandora’s box is being opened and my thoughts are still out there whether this is cool.

Pimping Portable Power

May 27, 2013 By Tim Aten Leave a Comment

When I set off with the lofty idea to share observations on ways the Internet is structured, used, and marketed by venturing into concepts of cultural change and consciousness I didn’t think I’d dive into the hardware space. I figured I’d leave that to local Detroit boys Icrontic who obsessively research and review all types of hardware and gear.

As I think of new posts, new content, I sense hardware may be coming up more frequently as Singularity seems to be the talk of the intelligentsia.

It’s a bit of a novelty in my family my mother seems to have a fondness for QVC. Often when we visit my folks house there’ll be a brown UPS package on the doorstep. Most of the time we’ll question the necessity of the item or the tech snob in me will scrutinize the printer she ordered that has all sorts of cases, cables, and inks as “added bonuses”. Her most recent purchase she gave me as a gift I shrugged off as another one of these tech trinkets but time has proven my mom right and in-the-know. Even as we get older moms still know what’s best.

She gave me a mega powerbank 8400 which is a portable battery pack. In my new role at work I’ve found myself on location for video shoots, social media on-site events, and a weekly meeting off-site at a partner agency. One day I had a 15 hour day with only one electrical outlet for 50 people in a garage-like building we were using as a production facility. I quickly ran out of battery power for my phone and laptop, not to mention those around me. (FYI and FULL DISCLOSURE – that’s an Amazon Affiliate link for the Power Bank. The gist is if you click on the link and buy I get a %. Read my post “C.R.E.A.M – How to Make Money On The Internet“.) In about hour 7 I was able to charge my phone, my laptop, and a co-worker as well. It’s also come in handy at social events we’re I’m doing battery intensive exercises like taking pictures, texting, tweeting and uploading photos to Facebook and Google+.

Also of interest in writing this post is the increasing presence of QVC in search results. It’s a space I don’t pay much attention when it comes to search but I’m noticing QVC encroaching on the big boys like Amazon and eBay. With their stronghold on TV and integration with apps (that my mother downloaded immediately when getting her iPad) I sense they will continue to be a force to reckon with and pay attention to.

..uhhh…. Thanks Mom.

Cookies, Ghostery, and Online Privacy

April 4, 2013 By Tim Aten 4 Comments

First off this post is NOT for those buying and creating online display ads everyday. You already know this.

The buying and tracking of display banner ads is akin to stock trading with millions of dollars being made on penny clicks. If you want to deep dive and understand I suggest you begin with the LUMAscapes over at Luma Partners. If you go there… welcome to the matrix and the tangled web.

This post is for folks curious how the technology of online display advertising works which also leads to a richer understanding of online privacy.

To get started you need to know about the Ghostery plugin for Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Opera. This plugin gives real-time information for every cookie, tracking software, or tracking company used on that particular page. It reveals what ad networks, data providers, analytic tools, and demand side platforms are used. Initially the pop-up is a bit annoying, however I’ve found it quite useful and have grown accustomed to it. When surfing around I want to know what’s going on underneath the hood. You do have the ability to turn it off. The screenshot below is an example of the pop-up. Notice the red arrows.

For people concerned about online privacy Ghostery allows you to become invisible (get it- a ghost) by turning off these technologies in your browser. You can “go rogue” and see the web as it would be unfiltered.

Maybe you don’t want to turn everything off. Maybe you’re annoyed with a banner ad for a company that seems to be foolishly retargeting you all over the internet. It seems like they’re stalking you. Ghostery will help you identify who this and then you can block that cookie or script.

I have also found the Ghostery tool useful for the following two ways-

Education

You can select to find out about each technology Ghostery has uncovered. To the left is an example of the background information on DoubleClick. Notice in the drop downs it reveals the privacy policy for DoubleClick and supplies the Privacy Contact. Ghostery does this for each technology. I have found by clicking on these companies and the ones I don’t know I began to learn about trending and innovative marketing technologies on the web.

Competitive Intelligence

As we know we need to hammer into our kids nothing you put on the internet is private. Same goes for marketers.

You can freely “spy” with this tool on your competitors to see what technologies and networks they are using in their website and internet efforts.

Ghostery and Evidon

So what is Ghostery? Ghostery is a tool given about by Evidon. Taken from the Ghostery site –

Evidon is a technology company that provides solutions for consumers, businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that enable them to see, understand and control data online. For businesses and NGOs, Evidon provides the technological underpinnings that put the AdChoices icon, which functions as a “tracking nutrition label” into ads, as well as reports on trackers and what they are doing on the web. For consumers, we provide Ghostery. Evidon is able to support Ghostery through our users who choose to opt into the anonymous Ghostrank panel, which allows us to make tracker reports and helps to provide organizations like the Better Business Bureau with information that helps them enforce self-regulation. Our mission, as a company, is to make the web more transparent for everyone involved. We strongly believe that making disclosure more transparent will raise the quality of the entire online advertising industry by enabling advertisers to grow and innovate with privacy in mind.

What Evidon is not:

Evidon is not an advertising network or behavioral data collection service.
Evidon doesn’t work to allow advertisers to be more invasive.

Evidon gives companies a common and standard way to become transparent. When you surf around the internet and see an ad that has the Ad Choices logo it’s likely to have been implemented through a technology from Evidon. Clicking this little logo allows you to opt out right there to be tracked via that ad. Doing this adheres to most companies’ privacy policy and then allows them to have the nice privacy policy in the footer that all legal departments love and require.

So what about Online Privacy?

Ghostery and Evidon have online privacy pretty well figured out and standardized. They have given power to the user, and the marketers with the platform, to turn tracking software on or off. It is a bit technical and there are many features to it but it beats the blanket-approach alternative.

My elitist statement of the blog is users need to become better educated with the tools they are using. I’ll use the same metaphor as parenting again. You need to know what technologies your kids are using along with what’s being used to track them.

And what is the blanket-approach alternative? Europe. Most European countries require all cookies to be turned off. In order to use them a user has to opt in.

It’s interesting. I’m a Net Neutrality supporter. I don’t think there should be a “fast lane” for certain providers and publishers and I’m a what you would call an “Open Source Guy”. I’m inspired and invigorated by the possibilities of the open web. I’ll romanticize the Arab Spring with any techie. Judging from this you may think I’d be an online privacy policeman and support anything that turns off tracking technologies. Quite the opposite.

I rather give this power to users as Ghostery does instead of legislators who don’t understand the digital space. I also think we forget these tools and websites we use every day like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are FREE! Sustainability and research for publishers and search engines needs to come from some place. Subscription models are very hard to implement and advertising can massively scale easily.

These technologies assist the marketers and provide value to the user. If we adopt in the US a blanket turn off of cookies, which there is a movement for, we’ll see blanket ads that have no applicability to us. I could be surfing and could be served an ad for Tampax. The advertiser is throwing their money away and I am annoyed. Marketers who are respectful of privacy and digital social mores like “don’t stalk” and “don’t be a jerk by continuously retargeting” will empower the web and allow for the existence of publishers of the free content and resources we’ve grown so accustomed to.

In the words of the great Alan Watts – “Pay Attention!”

Ghostery will help get you there.

Content Marketing and Campfire Storytelling

February 10, 2013 By Tim Aten Leave a Comment

Wow. Just saw this video from The Cognitive Media about Coca Cola Content 2020. Brilliant. I have a feeling I will be watching over and over. All this talk of “Content Marketing”- it seems like it’s taking over the buzz word “Big Data”. What would our aboriginal ancestors think about all this as they told stories around the campfire. The internet is our campfire.

The Detroit Auto Show – Notes from the Underground & the Ivory Tower

February 9, 2013 By Tim Aten 4 Comments

It was the typical January Detroit Auto Show experience outside.

Finding a place to park. Steam rise creeping out of manhole covers. Cold. Dark. Hunched shoulders trying to maintain body heat walking Washington Boulevard.

I was with my father.

He’s been dealing with heart problems the past few years and this night he was chipper. He had a twinkle in his eye, happy to be out and about and wore his new big poppa shirt. We had a great time that night as fathers and sons do around automobiles. As boys do.

He was proud, I was proud. I work on the General Motors marketing team and our product is something my family can rally around. Talking about Search Engine Optimization and Display Media strategies is not necessarily something to discuss with family, but a vehicle…. everyone has an opinion.

My father, now retired, was an architect and has always been a farm boy from Greenville, Ohio. Having grown up with tractors and combines he knows quite a bit about the internal combustion engine. He is my automotive resource and is eager to point out features on car engines like variable valve timing, how Americans are obsessed with chrome, and telling the quality of a vehicle by the tightness of the seams and its lines.

On this cold night as we navigated downtown Detroit to the Bucharest Grille for the legendary Bucharest Shawarma claiming the crown over coney dogs I thought, “Wow, I’ve been a part of this city almost twenty years now.” It’s changed. I’ve changed. Landmarks that night were marks for my memory.

Some thirteen years ago I tended bar at the Ponchartrain across from Cobo Hall where the autos were under bright tungsten lights. There my bald-headed bar mentor boss hopped over the counter and got in a customer’s face to get the F out of his bar. I have melancholic memories of sitting on the dock smoking cigarettes in our ties and black aprons on our breaks. One jheri-curled co-worker with a girl’s name tattooed on his chest with a little red heart would work on his carburetor in the loading dock smoking a dangling cigarette. Working on his car carburetor in a tie and black apron and going back into the restaurant to wait on his tables in between.

The 4am breakfasts we’d have at the Met Cafe in Greektown after nights of clubbing or driving desolate ghost streets to the life soundtrack of Detroit techno. I remember getting into it with Nation of Islam guys proselytizing about our cigarette smoke negativity and Farouk, the owner from Dearborn, would tell them to get the F out of his restaurant because we were loyal customers.

Or the house party in Woodbridge where music was banging, bodies grinding, kegs pouring and then the cops came. Uh Oh? Nope. The cops wanted to know who had the new yellow Camaro out front and could they race it. I love this city.

And having lived in Detroit you know about getting your car stolen, your buddy getting a gun pulled on him, somebody going to jail, a co-worker getting car jacked and shot five times, and a co-worker getting murdered and tortured after picking up a young kid in a club. Lots of ghosts and gritty memories.

I heard on NPR one time how Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy, was once the center of industry and arguably the source of America’s wealth and power. 70 years ago this city built the infrastructure to bomb places like Berlin and Tokyo and now it’s flip-flopped. Look at those cities and compare Detroit. It is profound, karmic really, but on a night like this with my father I felt and thought about the evolution, the change, the sense things aren’t necessarily coming back how we want or expect. As we looked at all those gorgeous vehicles and their engineering you can feel we’re not going back to the apocalyptic vibe this city had in the 80s and 90s. Detroit will be a model of how to transform. Watch.

The energy of our city’s temple at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Diego Rivera Mural, is palpable. Across the street at Scarab Club I once philosophized to dawn with a friend and a tall Johnny-Cash-Style Artist in Residence. Diego Rivera’s hand-carved signature is overhead in the rafters among other artists. You sense something great happened there. Today you can go to high-tech meet ups like Detroit Startup Drinks and meet patchouli smelling urban farmers moving in from rich New York and Connecticut suburbs with dirt caked into their fingernails. The mural captures their spirit.

At the show my father and I walked over to the dark grey Corvette Stingray on display as so many did those two weeks. Having seen the reveal I was shocked at my emotional reaction at seeing it in person. It makes your heart drop and go, “Damn, that’s a bad ass ride.” In the past two years I’ve seen myself turning into a “car guy” as I’m surrounded and live and breathe it. However, I’ve never really been a sports car guy. I tend to fall into the CTS-V or loaded Lacrosse category. But after seeing that Stingray I was a 15-year-old kid with Stephanie Seymour posters scotch taped to his bedroom wall with popped out eyes thinking “Damn, that’s a bad ass ride”.

I was looking around at all the industry types at the Auto Show and thought of the co-workers and agency folks I work with, many of whom I would now consider friends and confidants. These automobiles tend to personify us, our world, our economy, our culture, our country. We strive to have the fierce elegance of a Corvette or the refined ruggedness of a Sierra. At work I see it in the camaraderie, in the focus, the long hours, the clothes, the ipads, the cell phones, the meetings, the conference calls, the big data, the elevator rides over Hart Plaza and the sacred Power Point decks. I thought of our industry ancestors from the Mad Men era, the Don Drapers, and felt a connection with those giants when the mantra was “As GM goes, so goes the nation“. As my dad looked at that Corvette with me he got teary eyed. He really paused and his lips quivered.

“You guys are going to run out of that. That’s one of the finest cars America has ever produced.”, an Ohio farm boy said to the Detroit kid.

I love this city. Watch.

What’s In A Name?

January 5, 2013 By Tim Aten 1 Comment

Language is no longer free, for time will allow the social forces at work on it to carry out their effects. This brings us back to the principle of continuity, which cancels freedom. But continuity necessarily implies change, varying degrees of shifts in the relationship between the signified and the signifier.

Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics. 1916.

For decades The Pseudonym has been a tool to enhance, modify, and market the identity of a musician and quite prevalent in hip-hop and electronic music genres. The list is endless from KRS-One to Eminem and from Cybotron to Deadmau5. All these entities have real names, Lawrence Krisna Parker, Marshall Mathers, Juan Atkins and Joel Thomas Zimmerman respectively. To take from Saussure these MCs and DJs are breaking down and playing with the relationship between the signifier and signified, or what is the actual physical object (person) and the name we use to describe it. All good if you want to be a revolutionary change agent in the music world. If we wanted to go even deeper we could trace the start of all this to 1970s Jamaica and Zion Dub a la William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

What are the reasons for the Musician/DJ Pseudonym?

Conveys an identity and aspiration above oneself, shifts the focus to the music
Adds to musical and thematic narrative
Aspirational
Power
Anonymity
Leaves an impression, memorability, marketing
It’s what everyone else is doing

The Pseudonym continues to evolve in our connected culture.

We first saw it with the email address and then with the Twitter handle (a10 @ hogpath.com or @hogpath to use a personal example). When @aol email addresses came out almost twenty years ago there was a mad dash for people to claim their names and we saw the rise of numbers and nicknames like timaten73@aol.com or tim-aten-champ@aol.com. Often this was not by choice as someone’s common name was already taken like JoeSmith. We also had a generational gap with many youth emulating the DJs and MCs of their time with a new moniker and sticking with it. Looking back this has a lot to do with my name from that era – a10. It was the way my grandfather etched his name on tractors and chainsaws. I think as this practice evolved, as we had to come up with names, we were in some ways emulating these DJs, MCs, and artists trying to portray and emulate a higher self, something or someone we aspired to be. We (i) were trying to be cool. The nature of internet early days made this all to easy as anonymity was shielded by simple text and a network of crude websites and search engines that tried to crawl them.

Then Came The Social Networks

Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have changed everything. As the internet and our networks mature hiding behind these pseudonyms becomes inauthentic and potentially lame. Personally I find it more work.

Of interest is Google’s somewhat firm stance on identity for it’s Google+ network –

Your profile and name must represent you as an individual.
Personal profiles on Google+ are meant to represent you, not someone or something else with which you are associated. Therefore, your name may not represent a family, business, avatar, gaming handle, or other group of people.

…aka Pseudonyms not aloud.

Most internet social media experts teach you to be authentic. Seth Godin. Gary Vaynerchuk. Guy Kawasaki. All of them will tell you to register a domain name in your name. Myself included duh…. this website, I see my colleagues and peers doing the same thing – Lians Jadan and Jake Sigal are some recent ones I’ve seen.

A shift and an evolution has happened, the pseudonym is beginning to lose some of its luster. Ironically as this has happened those who still do use the pseudonym on the net, aka Anonymous, their mystery and power continues to lure and intrigue us.

SEOs Are Librarians,The Net is a Library, Our Tools The Card Catalog

December 10, 2012 By Tim Aten 1 Comment

An old and consistent internet meme with internet intelligentsia is the Harry Potterish sci-fi Library. Like something out of a MC Escher painting, these pics of remarkable University libraries or those built by web millionaire tycoons are rampant on hip tech blogs. They have a seemingly comfortable and empowering feeling despite their awesome and mysterious labyrinthine landscape. These fantastical landscapes capture the breadth and scope of the human mind’s potential in a photograph. The images also capture what the Internet is or could be.

The Internet to most is the screen in front of us be it a desktop, iPad, Nexus, or any other mobile device. When getting started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a career or, as a business leader trying to understand, keep these pictures in mind. Strive to be the archetypal librarian. If you are old enough to remember the card catalogues keep this in mind as well. Books (websites) were marked with all sorts of meta information with names, titles, descriptions, and Dewy Decimal numbers(URLs) to quickly identify a book’s location and context. The actual card was the compass.

In a sense this is what a Search Engine is trying to do. It will show you where to go. There is a spirit of the internet and a part of the spirit is acting and participating like a librarian. Librarians understand structure and context. They appreciate order. Logic. If they have a fault they may over-categorize. Images need to be cataloged and identified. They feel the library needs to be available for the disabled and those who are blind and those who are deaf. Access for all is the policy.

The information under the broad surface data is as important if not more than the patron-facing information. If we were to get literary an SEO is building the iceberg under the water like Hemingway’s literature. There’s more to it than what the reader sees on the surface.

Banksy — Disclaimer – No discredit or judgement on Bansky, he’s awesome, and one could argue he IS the Spirit of Internet but when we talk about categorizing information… not so much.

This known iceberg is what also hinders our profession. Not everyone understands what goes on underneath the surface or even wants to understand. It is far to easy to hide under the surface and really be fake, a mirage. As the algorithms (card catalogs) get smarter Black Hat SEO is becoming increasingly harder and will likely not be the gold rush it once was. If you are a business owner a word advice is to really grill and interview your SEO agency. Do everything to understand their mentality and make sure they are a librarian and not a Bansky.

An SEO’s job is to the BE the librarian to help catalog and stay as close as they can to the Search Engines. Know and understand how the information is cataloged. SEOs think like a Search Engine and therefore do not despise them nor do they try to game them. Instead, they try to help them and order information as it should be.

So where does Paid Search and Display Advertising come in?

Think of a college campus library. You know all those flyers in the elevator vestibules or on the kiosk out front – that’s display advertising. It could be about anything- an emo night at a bar, a room for rent, a private tutor, or the Young Republican meeting on Tuesday night. Smart display advertising will be placed at strategic places in the library even out front. Display retargeting will know what library you are at and even what row or section you will be traveling to.

Think of Paid Search as flyers at the end of the library bookshelf. Smart and cost-effective paid search promotes a topic for what’s in the row you are about to go down. The book section on basket weaving would have smart placed ads on the bookshelf for buying whicker in bulk. You could place an ad for Viag*r-a (deliberately misspelled) at the end of that bookshelf but you are going to pay an insane premium.

A shady SEO could try and get that Viag*r-a company’s website INSIDE the basket weaving section. Three or four years ago it would have been relatively easy. Not to so much anymore. If you were able to accomplish this now you would be on the 20th or 30th Search Result Page into obscurity. If you did get Viag*r-a on page 1 of a basket weaving result you are talking some serious black hat technology and you would not last.

Putting Viag*r-a on the Basket Weaving bookshelf would make an SEO twitch because the librarian in them would know it’s not right. They’d know it goes in the library down the street which has its own language and structure and they’d know… exactly where it goes. ;- )

Cold Turkey Facebook, Refined Sippin Google +

November 5, 2012 By Tim Aten Leave a Comment

facebook_by_deadly_wanderer-d34nwey — Facebook
by =Deadly-Wanderer

Being in the business of Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search it’s no surprise Google+ has my attention. In the mad dash of marketers, geek hipsters, and NY Times level press last year remember the headline “Is Google+ the Facebook Killer?” The question now seems muted but the network remains a force due to the default logged-in social search toggle button and the appearance of network connections and pluses in paid search.

Like many I used, I liked.

I liked the design, I liked it was relatively easy to use and easy to categorize people into circles. I liked the newness. I stayed on longer more than most and used it primarily for SEO and digital marketing type information and also found it useful in discovering niche content and people associated within that niche content.

A few weeks back I was talking with some friends and we noticed we’re checking Facebook without noticing we’re checking Facebook. If you look around we all have our noses in our tiny screens and it appears the majority of focus is on Facebook. Is it really that important and necessary I check my Facebook feed in between meetings or first thing in the morning while I’m still in bed?

I Decided To Do a 1 Week Test.

Go cold turkey on Facebook for one week. No checking, no updating. In order to commit I had to delete all Facebook apps from my phone and iPad, as well as Facebook bookmarks in my browser.
Get by only with Google +.

I did see my Facebook use as an addiction. I had thought of doing the test for some time and kept delaying. “I’ll just wait to the presidential debates are over”, I thought. “Or the World Series”. Seeing what the extremes are saying on Facebook during presidential debates, the posting of Big Bird Sesame street memes or talking crap about Jose Valverde can be quite entertaining and I didn’t necessarily want to give that up. But I did take the plunge.

Google Plus — The question now seems muted but the network remains a force due to the default logged-in social search toggle button(1) and the appearance of network connections and pluses in paid search(2).

I was surprised. After an unnerving 4-5 hours, by the time I was in day 2 I was pretty checked out and didn’t really care. I was humored by my reflex to go up to my bookmark bar and click on the FB icon and it not being there. Same for my phone. After about two of those self inflicted reminders my habit was broken. I did miss the banter, the music nuggets, Klecko’s divine and culinary rants, Valerie’s cat, Dykehouse’s brilliant art and dry self-portrait faces, my high school friend on the other side of the political spectrum who posts offensive commentary, my cousin’s Japanese pics, a co-workers adorable kid, or my wife’s friends posting pics of our daughter with her friends.

I did feel a little clear-headed in day 3 but… I was a little lonely.

I thought of and reflected on Clive Thompson’s ambient awareness. All this digital socialization has affected our collective unconscious in some way.

I was astonished at the time I seemed to now have available. We (I) really waste a lot of time on Facebook. I tidied up my email and unsubscribed from a lot of useless email. To compensate for my loneliness I took up Foursquare again and began to pay more attention to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has come a long way. In some ways, from an intellectual and business perspective, my LinkedIn feed provides more value than the Facebook feed. I began to feel more in tune with my friends and colleagues’ professional life and could also connect some subtle dots. Diving back into these other networks was extremely beneficial.

The Google+ Test Results

And, here it is – after a few days of tidying up my circles the content on Google+ is more high quality, educational, intellectual, and clean.

GOOGLE_STYLES_by_metstyler — GOOGLE STYLES
by ~metstyler

Very clean. No Advertising, at least no paid ads. If you want to call Zappos’ Google+ page advertising- fine, but that page is completely free for Zappos to create, no media dollars. You opt to put them in a circle and then have the power to categorize that circle and set the frequency of updating coming from that circle.

Google+ content, in general, is more subject focused and to some degree a little more corporate, not in a negative sense. On Google+ you choose what/who you’re going to follow. To make the most of Google+ you need to curate your circles. Like many when I began with it, I threw everyone in the same circle. This quickly turns your feed into a spammy incomprehensible mess. I started with a Chrome extension that will uncircle all people who have been inactive for a timeframe you define. I uncircled anyone who hadn’t posted in 5 months. This made it a little easier to filter and sort. The other key is to adjust the frequency in each individual circle. This will ensure you are getting the desired attention in your main feed. For me I prefer to look at one streamlined feed rather than clicking to disparate circles. The slider in the picture below from an individual circle is crucial for setting this up.

Quick Positive (+) Hits on Google+

Austin Thomas

If you are a photographer or interested in photography what you hear is true- You absolutely need to be on and use Google+. It is that impressive. A large part of this has to do with the user interface and how images are treated. The code gives photos a lot of respect and attention with large sizes and black backgrounds. The photographer community is very thick.
The iPad app for Google+ is one of the most elegant and free-flowing user experiences I’ve seen. It’s akin to Pulse or Flipboard. Content wistfully flows by with large pictures sprinkled in. Selecting circles are very easy and there is no noise from other third-party apps or advertising. It’s content in its simplest and purest form. The iPad app will almost guarantee I keep coming back.
The community management or “circle management” is brilliant. Adding and sorting friends, family, companies, brands, entities, or intelligentsia is intuitive. After what is probably 10 years on Facebook I still haven’t bothered to figure out how to organize and categorize friends. Sure it’s probably easy but I need to navigate to some help forum somewhere to figure it out. With Google+ I figured it out instantly. Again, self-community management is key to have a positive experience on Google+.
In good post-modern “respect for the author” fashion Google+ gives an entity a voice. In Facebook I fear we sometimes fall victim to the crowd. For instance when the Detroit Lions won over the Seahawks last week, I typically would take in the revelry with fellow Lions fans who may have posted a link to a video from ESPN or the Detroit Free Press. Without a Facebook connection and no football fans in my Google+ circles I decided to circle the Detroit Lions. By circling them the Detroit Lions were feeding me directly and I actually watched some lengthy press conference videos from Jim Schwartz, the head coach, and the quarterback Matt Stafford. I felt I actually had a better understanding of the game, felt a closer connection to my home team, and that the Lions had a voice. We’re only talking about a football game here, imagine how this transcends to news stories, politics, or even a company’s reputation. All too often we fall victim to the herd mentality and pitchforks which Facebook so easily perpetuates. Google+ seems to subtly level this playing field.

Quick Negative (-) Hits on Google +

While the iPad app and mobile apps are great they still are in their infancy. If you need to do heavy lifting like organizing/creating circles or switching between personal and brand accounts it is a little clunky.
Beyond embedded YouTube videos music is really lacking. I really enjoy my musician/DJ friends who share music via Soundcloud on Facebook or the record label that is promoting and posting their stuff. This community seems to be virtually non-existent on Google+. Resident Advisor has a presence and posts with links to their podcasts but the interface needs more…. a partnership with Soundcloud or the like would be great.

Facebook Is A Frat Keg Party. Google+ Is A Cocktail Soiree.

As I was a little lonely in my experiment I reached out. Recommended Users was a good place to begin to follow people. This blog post is mostly from a user’s perspective (not the publisher) but an interesting note about etiquette to point out. I began to follow let’s say an additional 10 – 15 celebrity/famous type people in my test, everyone from the likes of the Dalai Lama, Jeff Jarvis, Robert Scoble, MLS, and others. In this list was Arianna Huffington and Guy Kawasaki – pretty typical people for a digital marketer to follow. Even after I had curated my circles and set up my feed settings Arianna and Guy were relentlessly posting every passing thought and seemingly unrelated and haphazard content. It seemed like they have people to just upload for the sake of doing so. Are you really that important I need to have dozens of posts from you all day? Within a day their posting for the sake of posting was annoying. My response was simple- just create a new circle call it “the rest” and throw them in there with the slider to show less of this content. Now my main feed is not being bombarded with them.

This goes back to subheading of this section, Facebook is a frat keg party and Google+ is a cocktail soirée. Screaming and bombarding with content may work on Facebook (and Twitter), but with Google+ it pays to engage with your followers and also be elegant in how you publish. Talk and engage about what you know, and are a part of, rather than try to be everything to everyone.

When I came back to Facebook after my week-long hiatus I was underwhelmed and somewhat annoyed. My reaction was a la seeing MySpace 7-8 years ago – tons of advertising, apps and widgets everywhere, and gratuitous information. Our Facebook screens have become overwhelmingly chaotic and the advertising is almost over the top and in your face. It’s creeped up on us all.

With only a year into it how Google+ rolls out remains to be seen. Google has been subtle in its adaptation and keep in mind all that data, sharing, and plussing being tracked and incorporated into their algorithms. They’ve kept Google+ clean and appear to have left the ad revenue to come from Adwords and their Network, likely fed information being shared on Google+. A very sophisticated strategy compared to Facebook. It will be interesting if they’re able to pull people away from Facebook to use their more intuitive and minimal interface. It’s possible that ultimately is not the goal. In the end MySpace defeated itself.

As I played around with Google’s multiple projects and apps in this study, Android for example, and all the Google Chrome extensions it is apparent they have really thought this through. Some criticize as a company they have too much going on, not enough focus but maybe Google+ will be a hub of sorts. Curate your circles.

See you at the soirée.

The Spirit of the Internet

October 18, 2012 By Tim Aten 4 Comments

Often when new initiatives come up or I find myself in an online marketing conundrum, in one of those gray SEO areas or online privacy situations, I begin with the question “Is this in the Spirit of the Internet?”

I was once asked to do some SEO work where money wasn’t really an object and ranking for certain phrases needed to be guaranteed. Red Flag – an SEO should NEVER guarantee a ranking. This job quickly plummeted me into researching all the black hat techniques. My coworker and I would joke by saying, “this isn’t in the spirit of the internet”. I’m grateful we turned the project down, this was pre-Panda Google update and the techniques we were contemplating would have been severely penalized.

Since then that phrase has been in the back of my head and here are some points that allude to the thinking. The Spirit moves me. I have a feeling I will be updating this list. Comments?

The Internet is a reflection of our individual minds and collective consciousness. It contains the capacity for heavenly grace as well as the dark revolting id. These forces are present. Educate yourself. Be aware. Be careful where you go. This applies for businesses and individuals.
Paradox abounds. There is no such thing as privacy. It still needs to be defended. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Community and social is not about YOU, it’s about YOUR CONTRIBUTION.
- It’s ok to lurk for research.
Provide value.
Ghost In The Shell.
Have a thick skin, almost blasé. Come to terms with griefers, wikileaks, and Anonymous.
Take disclaimers and privacy policies on your site seriously.
Cite your sources. Give outbound links.
Protect your Intellectual Property (IP).
The Spirit of the Internet is Net Neutrality. SOPA is not cool.
When getting technical with webservers, hosts, and domains being ELEGANT is your North Star. Don’t cut corners or manipulate things to make it appear like you’re something you’re not or somewhere you’re aren’t.
Ambient Awareness from the web spreads to the real world. (Arab Spring)
Wifi is like water.
“Don’t be evil”
Use the force. Don’t go to the Dark Side.
Spock is a Patron Saint.