If that sentence didn’t make much sense, and it very well might not have, let me back up a second and try it another way… Memes are shared ideas that can achieve deep cultural penetration through viral sharing. These ideas are cultural units, and they have value.

Chatroulette is one of the newest memes on the web and in the world, and although the technology behind it is nothing new, it has tapped into the spirit of the new web - specifically, the idea that we are all content producers now, and that the barriers have been lowered to a laughable extent in terms of who is able to create content. Chatroullette is a video chat site that randomly connects two guests to each other from anywhere around the world. It is dominated by young single white men and perverts, but deep within the layers of perversion there is something beautiful and wonderful there. It was all explained extremely well by Casey Neistat in this awesome video (that you may have already seen):

What’s most interesting about chatroulette is the idea of it if you think about it as a television program. Don’t think about this as a web site, nor as another goofy web meme, but instead as a symbolic step forward in terms of the modern paradigm of entertainment and content production. When web pundits talk about the democratization of content production they are usually spitting out the word YouTube faster than a teenage girl can scream at a sexy vampire, and YouTube is held up as an example that the masses can create social media that the masses want to watch. But YouTube is still very much a one-way street.

Sure… there are comments and video replies and liking and rating and all kinds of social actions around viewing a video, but when it gets right down to it, YouTube users are still just viewing a video.

Chatroulette has highlighted this because it presents the opportunity for something new. The chance to truly interact with your tv show. The chance to pre-emptively and proactively change the course of what comes through your screen by yelling at the creator of your content directly. Chatroulette is an invitation to take the reins; to jumble the ideas of who is producing content and who is consuming and trade those mantles back and forth in real time.

But there’s just one problem. Most people haven’t realized they can take that mantle yet, or aren’t ready for it, or simply don’t want it. Check out the videos from this Mashable post about chatroulette metavideos (videos about chatroulette videos). What you will see over and over again is that the person creating the video has come to the chatroulette session ready to produce something, and I think ready to ‘play’ in a social sense, but that nearly all of the ’strangers’ they encounter still view themselves as consumers. I.e. they see something interesting come up on the screen and they wait to see what will happen rather than choosing to make something happen - choosing to become the producers and take the reins.

Granted, these people have come to the site expecting a chat experience; expecting to see a person and then type “hi” or “a/s/l” just like in the good ol’ days of the chatroom. But those days are over… or at least boring. It is entirely possible that the urge to “create,” the artistic urge, is something that is hard to learn quickly. Maybe there will always be predisposed producers and predisposed consumers, and predisposed critics I suppose. However, I hope that this is at least partially also an environmental effect of generations of training to sit and watch (or listen in even earlier times), and that we are in the process of training ourselves to break the fifth wall of web content production.

The fifth wall - aside from implying that we live in some weird pentagonal room - represents the move to not just break the wall between the presenter and the audience that was known as the fourth wall, but to go even further and break that barrier again from the other direction. When David Letterman started breaking the fourth wall by throwing pencils and notecards at the camera (for some reason), he wasn’t inviting the audience to run the rest of his show. No - that wasn’t feasible, and he probably wouldn’t have liked that anyway. He was simply reminding the audience that he knew they were watching, and that the television wasn’t a magic box in which he lived.

Breaking the fifth wall is enabled by the web because the other person on chatroulette has no more control over the experience than you do. You are equal partners. The fact that most of them are either holding their penises or doing nothing is a boring choice for them to make as potential producers. Wearing a Stormtrooper helmet or telling people to dance was an interesting choice, and created fodder for the interesting videos highlighted in that Mashable article (link above). But it is still rare to see two interesting choices collide. I hope that is the future; more interesting collisions. That is why I have a tender little space in my heart for chatroulette - for speeding up the collisions.

Part two:

There is a long tradition, that is surprisingly hard to document with any specificity online, of indigenous cultures and first peoples being unwilling to have their pictures taken by visitors with cameras - at least initially. Many of these cultures eventually shifted toward allowance, ambivalence, or even adoption of technologies like the camera, but even today there are people who do not allow their pictures to be taken.

In this modern world it is easy to be arrogant and discount local knowledge as myth, legend, lore, useless, primitive, stupid and beneath us. Check out this thread on a photography website for a good smattering of modern dismissal of this idea (with a touch of sensitivity of course, but dismissal none-the-less). And that’s cool. I think I get it. The worldviews are too different to reconcile easily. But maybe with some help from an excellent thinker like Marshall McLuhan…

Marshall McLuhan said this in 1964:

“Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.”

And this:

“The more the data banks record each one of us, the less we exist”

By heavily engaging ourselves with new technology and using the internet as a counterpart for our transactive web memory, are we effectively outsourcing parts of our brains to the internet? And if so, what does this mean? Maybe this is nothing more than a realization (as opposed to a virtualization) of Jung’s collective unconscious. That is a pretty kick-ass concept in and of itself, but that wasn’t the question. The question is whether we lose anything of ourselves in the process, what does it mean, and is that a bad thing?

Let’s revisit the superstitions of the indigenous peoples viewed through the lens of the spread of information via modern technology. These people believe that having their pictures taken robs them of their soul, or at least it robs them of a piece of themselves - lost in so much as it is not their own anymore. It is externalized, apart from them, stored in a place and form such that others can access it, manipulate, and use it. Once the image is taken, or lost, the individual it’s taken from never needs to be consulted again for that piece to be used, and re-used, accessed and propagated through the world ad infinitum.

This is exactly what we are doing to ourselves voluntarily right now. Putting large quantities of information - some of it important, and some of it seemingly trivial - online. Even in this very post, I am deliberately formulating ideas to put up on this blog for public access, perusal, and hopefully for comment and feedback. But these thoughts are no longer mine, or rather, I no longer have control over them. Like tweets I may send out on Twitter - they’re cached and indexed and archived, and even if I change my mind about what I’ve said, or realize I’ve made an error in judgment, I have very little ability to remove those tweets from the web collective unconscious - from the transactive web memory that other people are continually accessing. It’s like licensing whole sections of your life under the Creative Commons.

There are great benefits to putting yourself out there - potential for financial, social, or other kinds of benefit by attracting attention, getting feedback, or leveraging the ability to place your personal brand (and personal identity) online. But there’s also the danger we’re seeing with traditional celebrities today and their dealings with the paparazzi. By submitting pieces of yourself to others you may just get what you wanted - for them to start paying attention. And in some cases, once people start paying attention to the pieces of you to which you had hoped they would, they may subsequently want to get a hold of other pieces which you had hoped to keep to yourself.

I believe that it’s an overall positive trend that it is becoming easier to share pieces of ourselves with one another. I’m working on another post about the idea that it has the potential to foster more honest and tolerant dealings between people, but even aside from that we should not overlook the fact that we are putting ourselves online. Literally. And there is equal potential for good and harm to come of that.

Also - my thoughts on this matter are certainly not cemented (I may very well be embarrased by this post at some point in the future), so I’d love to hear back about your thoughts as well.

Broken camera photo via “pointnshoot“

…the process whereby people remember things in relationships and groups. Each person does not need to remember everything the group needs to know, after all, if each person merely stores in memory information about who is likely to have a particular item in the future. This capacity for remembering who knows what is the key to transactive memory…

Now that the internet has become such a deeply ingrained part of our daily lives, are we different? Who are we? And where are we going?

This is part one of a two part post; a brain dump of potentially lilliputian proportions. Part one is about the theory of Transactive Memory, and how our relationship with the web is just that - a relationship, and how that relationship is changing the way we think and organize personal knowledge within and without our brains. Part two will be about how various indigenous peoples believed that a camera would steal your soul, about how Marshall McLuhan agreed with them to a certain extent, and about how - without casting it as a necessarily evil development - the internet is accomplishing this same task with increased speed, efficacy, and totality.

Part one:

Think about it like this: when you’re in a close relationship with another individual - a girlfriend, a boyfriend, dominatrix, business partners, family members, friends, what have you - you can outsource some of your memory to them. They become external hard drives to your CPU (and vice versa). You are networked, and together you form, in effect, a cross-relational database. If your girlfriend knows that you have an extensive and deep knowledge of… say… Gaming/Tech/Geek cultural minutia, then why on earth would she need to learn that minutia for herself? It’s much more efficient for her to simply store the link information that points to you. And any time something comes up in her life that would require her to access that kind of information, she can access you as a source of information. If you know that information is safe in a external location that can be accessed, then (for the most part) there is no need to worry about duplicating, backing up, storing that information locally (in your own brain). If you know where an answer is, and can access it whenever you want to, then it’s arguably not important to memorize the answer.

Some have theorized that part of the pain felt during a breakup with a significant other can be attributed to basically losing significant amounts of accesible knowledge. It’s like having your external hard drive die and then realizing that your music collection was on there… and only on there. You know what the information is. You know where the information is. But a change in states that renders you permanently unable to access it = heart-crushing fail.

The Web is Your New Girlfriend (or Dominatrix)

This is exactly the kind of knowledge outsourcing we have entered into in our relationship with the web. It started before we were even online with the onset of [spooky howl] spellchecking. Even now, as I write this, I know that if I spell something wrong it will be underlined in little red dots that are telling me “Hey. Doofus. You misspelled ‘ingrained’. It starts with an ‘i’ not an ‘e’. ‘Engrained’ isn’t a real word… Doofus.”

The effect is that people don’t have to worry about spelling anymore. Just take a crack at it, and right click on it if the little red dots show up. Computer will solve spelling problem for you, but god help you if you need to write something on paper! With ink!!

• Should we still try to spell things correctly? Yes.
• Should we still make an effort to memorize the completely ridiculous nature of this English language, its phonetics, and it’s spelling? God yes - please, make an effort, people! But…
• Do we have to anymore? No. A resounding no.

But that was just the beginning. That first spellcheck application was an offline tool, and now we’ve moved things online, into the cloud. The sheer volume of information we can access is staggering. Our ability to access it is expanding and penetrating further into our lives. We are now approaching a state of near constant access to the web, and with resources like Google, Wikipedia, Email, and Twitter, we can rely on having access to all kinds of information that is important to us.

I used to know all of the phone numbers I needed by heart. These days I can only remember the few relic numbers, artifacts of a time gone by, that are still in use. Actually, that’s not even true - I still remember many of my friends’ childhood numbers that have long since been abandoned… 521-5053 (Josh), 821-8935 (Ted). In fact I can remember more of those useless numbers than I can remember current numbers of friends and family… which is ridiculous. But we’re all in that boat. Even though it would be smart to know many of our commonly used phone numbers by heart, most of us - if we take any precaution at all - just make sure we’ve got them stored in more than one location. And none of those storage locations are our brains anymore.

I think it’s safe to say that outsourcing our information like this has made us vulnerable is certain ways. Have you been camping recently, or caught offline for an extended period of time for some other reason, and the conversation turns to some random actor or movie that you can’t quite remember the name of? How excruciating is the pain of knowing that the answer is only a few clicks away on imdb, if only you were able to make those clicks! If our access is cut off, we’re stewed. Totally and utterly homerow’d. But there are also significant advantages to outsourcing a portion of our brain function.

For instance, SxSW was going off like the Merry Pranksters, and I wasn’t there. But because I was plugged in to my transactive memory drive - my virtual brain, and because many components of that drive which I can access (my friends, people I follow on Twitter, etc.), were there acquiring new information, I was able to gain a certain amount of knowledge from SxSW as though I were attending, even though I wasn’t there.

This is essentially why Twitter has been holding onto the new buzz and Facebook is struggling to regain their mantle of “Hot Newness” - because Twitter is spreading information, and Facebook, until recently, was focused on establishing connections without as much focus on the realtime flow of thoughts between those connections. Twitter may have the capability to expand the size of, and your access to, your transactive web memory.

If we gain inspiration from the things we are exposed to, then our potential for inspiration has grown exponentially because we can now expose ourselves to so much from so many people through the web, social media, and our Twitter feeds in particular. And in doing so we can abandon the necessity to spend so much time memorizing details, instead spending our time on abstract thinking and strategic reasoning - creating or recognizing connections between the details; details we are exposed to through our information streams like Twitter, or details of which we are aware. Awareness of details can be equivalent to knowledge of details if you know where the details are stored and are able (and willing) to access them at will.

So… the internet is our brain. Or at the very least, the internet and our brains are now integrated in a very real way. Just as real as the transactive memory we establish in our relationships with ‘real’ people in our lives. So you’d better buy the internet some roses on Valentine’s Day, ‘cuz you don’t want to see what happens when it gets pissed at you.

Up next, stay tuned for part two: Is the internet stealing our souls? And what does outsourcing our brain functions to the internet mean about our individuality?

1. Dick Costolo (Twitter COO) says interesting things
2. Smart people have interesting things to say about filtering realtime streams
3. Marc Benioff thinks he’s pretty awesome, has never heard of Yammer, wrote a book
4. Professional realtime marketers make for an uninteresting panel
5. Paul Carr is an edge case, surprised by the existence of the phrase “Key Learnings“
6. Geolocation will enable the ambient realtime experience
7. Email can’t die just yet, but it may move down the stack
8. Realtime is impacting search right now and you should brace for more
9. Thao With the Get Down Stay Down rocked my world at The Independent

An Intro to Realtime

The Realtime Web is here. Twitter and Facebook feeds are throwing information around your social graphs in realtime right now. Google and other search engines like OneRiot (which now powers Yahoo!’s realtime search) are getting better and better at realtime discovery, and geolocation applications and technology is about to hit realbig with realtime realsoon. For real. But what is Realtime? It’s the removal of lag in the transfer of information either from you, or to you, or more likely, both at the same time. What information? It doesn’t matter - anything. Everything. That’s the point, and this is why so many people wanted to get together to guess about the future and hear about the present of the realtime Web.

1. Dick Costolo (Twitter COO) says interesting things

Interesting thing #1: RSS isn’t dead, it just got pushed down the stack. >> Some time ago Steve Gillmor said that RSS was dead. Now, TechCrunch writers are known to exaggerate, and I think that Gillmore was really trying to say that RSS was dead to him as a tool on the personal level. He no longer used RSS directly via his RSS reader, but that doesn’t mean that RSS wasn’t still functioning behind the scenes as a protocol to push content around the Web, and this is exactly what Costolo managed to express. RSS has lost it’s utility to a large degree as a direct tool that individuals use, and this has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter streams, Digg, and other technologies that bring interesting content to people continuously. Moving something “down the stack” means that it isn’t gone, but it is not in the interface layer anymore. There are many protocols behind sending an email, but we don’t have to think about them anymore - they are executed for us. There are many protocols behind how the servers that house this information work, but you don’t have to worry about those anymore either. At the beginning of the interwebs users had to interact directly with many of these protocols to get anything done. Now RSS is joining their ranks and being pushed down the stack - it will remain useful as a protocol that moves information, but individuals will interact with it less and less.

Dick also said that Twitter monetization and advertising strategies are coming very soon, but they’re not what you think.

2. Smart people have interesting things to say about filtering realtime streams

The panel on filtering out the noise of realtime streams may have been the most interesting of the day with representatives on stage from Facebook, Seesmic, Futurity Ventures, CrowdEye, Microsoft, Facebook, Thing Labs, and also Ron Conway. Noise in a realtime stream refers to information that you are not interested in, but what gets confusing is that the exact same piece of information may or may not be interesting to you depending on where you are and what you’re doing. It’s not as simple as whether a piece of information is right or wrong, because what you think is relevant changes based on the context in which you exist, so the definition of noise for an individual can change in realtime, making efficient filtering a daunting task.

Ron Conway - a man to be listened to - thinks that the big opportunities in realtime for the coming year lie in acronyms… more precisely, in cobbling together available technologies and APIs together to provide new and useful services out of the data that is currently available. Then add in some proprietary IP (intellectual property) like filtering or ranking algorithms to help filter out the noise, and put an innovative UI (user interface) on top of it, and bang… next big thing.

Amit Singhal from Google is excited by the explosion in the volume of data being created and the challenge it represents in terms of indexing, ranking, and serving it back to the user for their searches as quickly as possible. He also thinks that your private information should go to the cloud so that it can be included in search results for you. This means that it would stay private, but that Google would know about it and blend it into your results when relevant. Imagine your private messages from Facebook being shared with Google, but not publicly, just in reference to you personally so that you can go to Google and get a results page blended with messages to you, tweets from you, blog posts unrelated to you, and anything else. This is, of course, spoken as a true engineer who simply thinks that all information should be available in case it’s relevant, but most of us have privacy concerns… just kind of in general. It was also pointed out that this is why Google hates that Facebook is closed - because they have both public and private information. Google has public information, but not private (OK - they have emails, but have promised not to use them in search… maybe they begin to offer that solution at some point). But hey, point taken.

3. Marc Benioff thinks he’s pretty awesome, has never heard of Yammer, wrote a book

I stopped listening to Marc Benioff pretty quickly. He was full up on awesome juice because he had launched Yammer inside of Salesforce.com a year late, called it “Salesforce Chatter” and managed to talk about it for a long time on stage without ever mentioning that he was ripping off Yammer, which itself is an enterprise ripoff of Twitter. He also gave a free copy of his book to every attendee… I think it might have been called “Marc Benioff - How Awesome My Stuff Is.” I’d go check, but I left it on the floor of my room somewhere and haven’t felt like looking for it since before I forgot to tell the guy at the check-in that I didn’t want it in the first place.

4. Professional realtime marketers make for an uninteresting panel

A bunch of people like a guy from Ad.ly and the lady who Britney Spears pays to tell her that her millions of Twitter followers are a good thing to have talked for a while about stuff. Paul Carr injected some interesting points and levity, but it was a general bust, even with Paul’s funny hat. In a related note…

5. Paul Carr is an edge case, surprised by existence of the phrase “Key Learnings”

Paul Carr went on an on ranting about how disgusting and awful it is to add marketing and sales pitches into Twitter streams, and that Twitter streams aren’t like banner ads because they’re conversational, so it’s the equivalent of being paid to randomly shout “Drink Coke!” in the middle of a conversation with friends. Ok… I get it, but Paul Carr is an edge case. He’s one of the very few people on this planet who has been able to promote himself and his career through self-destructive tendencies. And while I think that’s completely awesome, I think he’s ignoring the fact that much of what we say and do as human beings is marketing. If I meet you and I like you, I may want you to like me back, and therefore I will try to engage you in a way that prompts you to enjoy yourself. Is that disingenuous? Maybe. Is it human nature? Most definitely. Look, Paul… we can’t all get jobs by being assholes, but boy sometimes I wish I could. The fact is that there’s a much thinner line than Carr would like to think between promoting yourself as part of human nature and promoting things in general.

6. Geolocation will enable the ambient realtime experience

Twitter is going to remain “opt-in” for geolocation, meaning you have to choose to share your location through the service, but as mobile experiences become more and more commonplace, and as Android phones and other smart phones begin to plug into sections of the market that the iPhone hadn’t already reached, it won’t be long until everyone can run geo-aware applications on mobile platforms. Things are about to explode in the geolocation space, and this is going to change everything. Just ask FourSquare, Google Latitude, SimpleGEO, and every mobile app that will be developed for Twitter starting now.

7. Email can’t die just yet, but it may move down the stack

Everyone is sick and tired of email. It’s inefficient for much of the communication we use it for, but it can’t go away quite yet, even with the onset of techs like Google Wave and Twitter for one simple reason and many complicated ones. For the sake of time, here’s the one simple reason: It’s the lowest common denominator of ID on the Web. It’s the bottom of the stack, if you will. To sign up for most things on the Web today you still need an email address. Other things will be built on top of it, added to it, made for it, etc, but it can’t go away until we don’t need it anymore.

8. Realtime is impacting search right now and you should brace for more

Realtime and geolocation are already impacting SEO (search engine optimization) and the relevance that search engines have on a user’s discovery process. Andrew Braccia from the venture capital firm Accel Partners shared that every pitch from a startup they used to see had the same breakdown of where new users were coming from - mostly Google, some from other engines, and some direct visits. Already he has seen that profile altered with Twitter and Facebook becoming significant and growing contributors to this discovery process. People are beginning to find information and answers to questions (which are not necessarily the same things, by the way) via their realtime streams, and these are discoveries that no longer have to be made by plugging queries into search engines like Google. This also translates into less ads served on search result pages, and less cash generated by clicks on those ads. The smart SEO consultant needs to start thinking now about what searches are going to migrate away from Google, and how to optimize their clients in alternative search and discovery processes that are being spawned by advances in the realtime Web.

Geolocation is going to be disruptive to search as well. If your phone knows where you are, then you can essentially walk through what Edo Segal referred to an ambient experience where information can be pushed to you based on what is known about you in combination with your location. Coupons that were once cut out of a newspaper can now simply exist in the ambient stream, and when you walk past a retail location (like Starbucks for example), the coupon may be pushed to you with the notification: “Hey [name]. Come on in for a dollar off your large mochaventegrandevanilla over-roast special!”

Search experts will have to learn to insert their clients into the mobile, geo, social, and ambient streams in order to consider them optimized for the searches that are migrating away from traditional search engine queries.

9. Thao With the Get Down Stay Down rocked my world at The Independent

I also went to see Thao With the Get Down Stay Down at The Independent on Saturday night. And while she didn’t tell the jelly joke like she did the last time I saw her, she did rock the house on the last night of their tour with the Portland Cello Project. And I did my part to ensure that San Francisco, and not Lubbock, TX, reigned supreme in their Outkast Singalong Contest. Ice cold.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Rupert Murdoch’s claim/threat/taunt/plan to block Google from the Wall Street Journal. All props to Jason Calacanis for jumping on the news first with the interesting idea that this is actually something that could have real impact on Google, which until now has never encountered a situation where publishers could find a monetary incentive to disinclude themselves from the Google index, and thereby cut themselves off from millions of searchers and millions of dollars.

Calacanis makes the point that the top publishers on the Web could pool together into a bargaining conglomerate. This conglomerate could elect to remove themselves from the Google index in exchange for an offset payment from Microsoft. The Microsoft agreement would cover their losses from ending their Google traffic in exchange for exclusive rights to index content in Bing. Michael Arrington followed up with a slightly more tempered opinion than JCal’s. And then Jeff Jarvis chimed in with his ever-open doom-saying prediction for the newspaper industry as we know it, arguing that these domains that would disinclude themselves don’t represent enough of the top results within SERPs (search engine results pages) to make a significant dent in Google’s offerings - enough so that the users would actually notice the difference.

When I first heard Calacanis’ argument it was really interesting, and I was on board, but it started to stick in my craw like a piece of spicy shrimp off of Rupert’s barby. I think I’ve finally figured out why… I’m with Jarvis - this would still be a bad move for publishers… maybe not in the short term, but definitely in the long term.

Short Term PR/Marketing Win, Long Term Loss

In the short term I can see Bing winning big in terms of PR against Google, and the publishers winning big on PR with the bonus of a moderate financial gain by way of a premium payment from Bing above and beyond the value of their Google traffic. Just the announcement could set off a mini wave of publishers of all shapes and sizes looking to be paid for the right to index their sites, and while some see this as a potential revolution, setting the stage for bidding wars or a free market of paid access to index the content of the Web, I just don’t see it.

1) The vast majority of the content out there just isn’t going to spark a bidding war.

2) Twitter & micromessaging are replacing the importance of search for distribution of breaking news, making that portion of news distribution less lucrative for Google in any case, so why pay a premium for it (okay, only marginally so for the time being, but certainly trending in that direction).

3) The long tail of aggregate news articles ranking highly for searches about news items whose peak has already passed still represents a huge volume of search and ad revenue with regards to the overall pie of news traffic, but the presence of the major publishers for these SERPs is minimally important at best. For the long tail the information has already hit the Web forcefully and there are now secondary, tertiary, quaternary, etc. sources such as well-known and trusted blogs who will have either broken the news before the big publishers in any case, or regurgitated the content so well that the user won’t miss the big publishers one bit.

But there are even bigger problems than that…

No Way to Establish Value to Bing After Disinclusion

Now that Yahoo! is more or less defunct as a search engine (though there are weak signs of a pulse yet), as soon as these publishers remove themselves from Google’s index there is essentially no way for them to reestablish a market value for their voluntary disinclusion at a future date, except to re-include themselves. There’s no other competition aside from Bing to gauge that worth by, and so they will have two choices - to either choose to re-include themselves temporarily in Google’s index to establish a baseline value for a renegotiation with Bing, or let Bing dictate that value based instead on their contribution to market share versus Google, or estimated loss of market share were those publishers to once again be available on either Google or Bing. But the effect of these publishers on the market share battle between Google and Bing will be more discreet than continuous, and perhaps even temporary. Any large shift will be immediate and any affect on market share will decline over time, approaching a number much closer to zero that flattens out on the Wall Streeters, business grads, and old-timers who just can’t give up their traditional and comfortable news sources.

Disinclusion Isn’t Just From Traffic, But From Mindshare & Therefore SEO

But that’s not even the half of it… Who isn’t going to switch from Google? Young people. Also, most people. They are going to establish trust in other sources, and the young searchers will grow up not caring about the Wall Street Journal, just like they already don’t care about Edward R. Murrow, or Walter Cronkite, or even Dan Rather for that matter. The point is that this is hubris on the part of these brands to believe that they are so important that people can’t get by without them, and in the end it might prove fatal.

If these publishers pull themselves from the Google index they won’t just lose a way to establish the value of exclusive indexing to Bing, they’ll also be sacrificing significant mindshare for the future readers of America (and the world, or course), and perhaps more importantly they’ll be sacrificing SEO equity. The loss of traffic by pulling out of Google will most certainly turn into a loss of inlinks directed at them by the blogosphere and other parts of our lovely interwebs ecosystem, and this constitutes long term damage, especially to the long tail of their offering - the archive of thousands and thousands of articles that continue to serve ads over time. This will also affect them if they try to re-include themselves in the Google index at a future date - they will be crippled from whatever time they spend catering to a minority of searchers, and therefore a minority of content creators (because of course we are all both consumers and creators at this point, right?). So even if they do re-include to try to establish a new baseline value for a new contract with Bing, their search share from Google will likely have declined at that point, and so too will their value to Bing. (Not to mention that it provides Google with a perfectly good explanation as to why their rankings have dropped upon their return, not that they’d ever do anything evil like purposefully tweak down the performance of those rogue domains! Heavens, no!)

At that point these publishers, in a worst case (for them) scenario, could essentially only be worth the value of a Bing marketing campaign to prevent them from returning to the Google index, and they will be selling out their own futures in order to save face in the present (which kind of sounds familiar with regards to newspaper Web strategy up to this point, doesn’t it?).

Web Censorship and the Streisand Effect

In the end the people on the Web are looking for information, and these publishers will never have a monopoly on information. John Gilmore once said that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This will happen with the publishers as well - the information will come out through other sources, and their departure from the Google index will potentially create a vacuum for lesser-known sources, bloggers, journalists, etc. to establish their credibility and speed up the transition from old news to new news. In fact, the Streisand Effect states that an attempt to censor information inevitably backfires and causes that information to be distributed much more than would have otherwise occurred. And if the publishers were to announce their disinclusion from Google tomorrow, while I can’t expect that the news would stay relevant to the average consumer for very long given the half life of anything on the Web these days, they could just be creating a whole platform and ecosystem for bloggers and secondary reporters to repackage their information on other sites that are included in Google and easily sop up all that money they’re leaving behind.

Bottom Line…

While this certainly seems like an interesting play, and believe me when I say I’m eager to see what takes place, it still strikes me as a short-sighted short term win with huge negative impacts over the long term. It would be fascinating if he proved me wrong, but it still smells like Rupert is trying to be the Pied Piper and lead the heavyweights of old newsprint into a revolt… My guess is if he gets anyone to follow him they’re going to be lemmings instead of rats, and when he gets to the edge of that cliff (the one Jeff Jarvis keeps trying to warn him about) he’s going to get pushed off by all those furry little morons riding his tail. How’s that for imagery?

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