As I finished up the three part video series that Robert Scoble produced, I had to chuckle somewhat at what appeared to be the beginning of a battle not too unlike the recent movie 300 regarding the Xerxes battle with King Leonidas. I have been reading the responses throughout the blogosphere and I have a feeling the arrows being sent in his direction will virtually blot out the sun. As in the movie, I’m sure Robert would reply with the fact that he will just have to fight in the shade.
Why is he so outnumbered in this battle? He is taking on the almighty dollar, and the master of all things monetary, Google. I have not had an opportunity to re-watch the videos and take notes, but I wrote a few things down as Robert uncovered his revelation of the death of Google. What it seems he was getting at was the destruction of paid search. This of course is the core of Google and how they became King Xerxes, eating up and devouring everything in their path to the search world domination. He preaches of a land of milk and honey that we would all consider “organic search”. The perfect results of each query, without the “noise” of spam or paid search.
His champions in the fight seem to be Techmeme, Facebook and Mahalo. These three fighting side by side may be the answer to his call, but unlikely to be the final answer to the new age of search.
Techmeme is difficult to understand somewhat as it relates to the search world, but I do tend to get my news in the tech industry from this site. I do trust its results but don’t always find that it is all-inclusive of the things I might find important. I have to go outside the realm of Techmeme to get more in depth of what I’m looking for in information.
Facebook is still to young and too untested for me to really put mush stock in it as a search tool, but we did discuss Facebook at length in our show today.
Mahalo? This seems to me to be a little too controlled by the man behind the mask in Jason Calacanis. He discussed the idea of bias at Gnomedex, but until I can filter out the human filter side of things, I really don’t want to have 100 people dictating what I can find on search. It will take a while for this application to really show promise, but it might be one of the better ways to eliminate the paid search noise discussed by Robert in his video. The only thing I don’t have an answer to is when will Jason Calacanis throw the switch and create his own noise?
I have some reservations about Human whisper and the Computer noise, but I think we are early in the war. I like the idea of mashing the above models together for the perfect search tool. At this point I’ll stand behind Robert and fight the spammers, the sploggers, and the noise he identifies. Where I don’t stand is next to him when he lumps the likes of Danny Sullivan and the rest of the SEO world into the spam world. I think there is room for the technology types to help shape the tool he discusses.

consumer had a problem with their product after purchase. They found the blog on the company website or through a search engine, and used the contact page on the blog. They could have also used the comment section of the blog as well, but chose to use the contact form. They explained their problem in the contact page and the blogger was able to immediately help them connect with the proper person to correct their problem or to allow an exchange of the product if necessary. This all seems very common in many cases, but it also provides a great opportunity to show other consumers that you are on top of customer concerns and work hard to resolve their problems if needed. This scenario offered a chance to post an article about the product problem, the reporting of the problem, and any resolution that has occurred as a result. This allows other customers to find perhaps the same problem and use the same process for resolution. A blog can also serve as a great customer service tool, and the resulting service can be used for some very important blog fodder.
A couple of days ago,
Finally, I looked over at the
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