Traveling companions

The cool thing about traveling is that you meet people totally unlike yourself. That almost makes up for me sitting here waiting in Las Vegas for the flight that’s three hours after the connecting flight I almost made….

The Twins

On my flight from San Jose to Chicago, my seat assignment was a middle seat between two identical-twin sisters who were returning to Nashville from their first-ever modeling gig in the Bay Area.

It sounds like a lead-in to some male business-traveler fantasy, but it really wasn’t like that at all. I mean, my seat assignment was great news, but mainly because I hate middle seats, and I figured that since they obviously knew each other well, they wouldn’t mind giving me the aisle … I was right.

I felt a certain cultural distance from my row-mates. They were very Southern, very polite, said “Thank you *very* much” whenever the flight attendants gave them another baglet of pretzels. They were dressed identically. They had _huge_ hair, coiffed and frosted into imposing helmets. They read psalms most of the way. (I hope this doesn’t sound negative or rude – they were really nice people as I found out.)

It turns out that their twinness evokes constant comment, and people they’ve never met come up to them and talk as though they’ve known them for years. The twins like this.

The Casino Marketing Manager

While waiting for a delayed flight in Las Vegas, I chatted with a young woman on her way home to LV. I wondered aloud who casino marketing managers market to, and got what should have been the obvious answer: high rollers. Or in her words, “anyone who bets enough that we need to comp their rooms”.

How had she come to be a casino marketing manager in Las Vegas? By being a casino marketing manager on the gulf coast of Mississippi, until Katrina hit and shut everything down. So she was a refugee. I found out that gulf-coast Mississipians really hate New Orleans and all the attention it has gotten, since they feel that the storm hit them harder.

She gave me her card, and made it clear I should get in touch the next time I was in Las Vegas, if I was the kind of guy who liked to make $500 bets, and didn’t mind losing $15K to $20K over a weekend. I promised I would.

The Escorted Traveler

After making it almost to the front of a very long security line in Chicago, I became aware of a …. jurisdictional dispute behind me. A security person was saying “I don’t care if _your_ supervisor says it’s OK. You’re TSA. I’m not TSA, and I need *my* supervisor saying it’s OK for her to board.”

The “her” in question was in the company of two airport cops and another security-type person. Then a senior-looking TSA person showed up and said “It’s OK. I *know* she doesn’t have a boarding pass, *I’m* saying it’s OK!”. The whole party then jumped the security line right in front of me, and I heard comments to the cops like “So you’ll be escorting her on to the plane, right?” along with grumblings about the opposing security force and a determination to get their names and badge numbers.

After they cleared security and were walking away, one of the TSA guards nudged another one and said, in almost a hushed tone: “That’s *her*”.

OK, so what was the escorted woman’s deal? I have no idea. At first I assumed she was a prisoner being transported by law enforcement. But …. she was dressed in a business suit, seemed to be wearing a badge with a “Chicago Tribune” lanyard, and the cops and security people seemed oddly deferential to her. Anyone have a theory?

Recap – Pubcon Las Vegas 2006

Just returned on Friday from Pubcon Las Vegas. Vegas is the place to be if you are drinking and gambling … and if you’re not (as I wasn’t), it’s all kind of odd. I had the Scrooge-like realization on the return flight that it could have been Salt Lake City for all I cared.

It was nice to see Brett Tabke (WebmasterWorld) and Danny Sullivan (SearchEngineWatch) on stage together, since they have run parallel and competitive sites and conferences for many years (with Danny moving on to something new next year). It was cool that Sullivan showed up, and I’m sure it helped attendance.

Of the keynote speeches that I saw (Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle, Danny Sullivan), Danny’s was my favorite. A lot of it was historical review of the search industry (with Danny having seen it all), but he also argued interestingly that the diversification of search companies into other kinds of advertising has had an obscuring effect on the measurable success of core, intent-based search. Danny also got in a couple of good shots at Y!: an earnings joke (fair enough), and a screenshot full of spammy results (I recuse myself from comment on that one). Battelle’s talk was interesting, and he is a great public speaker. He did, however, explore the risky edge of using the bully keynote pulpit for sales purposes, by devoting a lot of his speech to case studies from his own Federated Media venture.

The panels I was on seemed to go well. Frankly, I wasn’t sure that what I presented at the Site Structure for Crawlability panel was news to anyone, but the Duplicate Content panel seemed to generate a lot of discussion. Brian White from Google gets the good sport award for his starring understudy role on the crawlability panel.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network Party was fun, fabulous&glamorous and also seemed, um, expensive. (Sorry, that’s just the stingy and bitter shareholder in me talking. ) It’s a marketing question I guess (and therefore way beyond my expertise), but I’m interested in the impact on your customer base of admitting 100 to the exclusive party, and turning 500 away. If you’re one of the 500, does it make you think that the hoster is a really cool company who you should try even harder to impress? Or does it just make you mad?

The biggest news, of course, was the Open Sitemaps announcement (here’s the Y! blog post and the Google blog version). The idea of engines reading a common sitemap format from webmasters is so cool and sensible that you know it must have taken a lot of work behind the scenes to get these large companies to come together on it. Props to the Google Webmaster Central people, and to Priyank Garg, who made it happen from the Y! side.

What did I miss? Unfortunately, quite a bit. I really wanted to see the Interactive Site Review session (always fun). But while 1000 people watched that session in a brightly lit room, I was the only person in a similar room next door, sitting in the 35th row or so, talking on my cell phone in the dark. And the conference was basically over for me on Thursday night, as I had to leave earlier than I’d planned. Among other things, this meant that I missed the Pub day on Friday. This is the second time I’ve been to Pubcon, and both times I’ve missed the Pub. Can I really say that I’ve been to Pubcon yet?

The word “spam”

At SEO conferences (like Pubcon Las Vegas) I often introduce myself by saying that, among other things, my group fights search-engine spam. But I’ve noticed that whenever I say the S-word to SEOs there’s a little flinch, an awkward little pause. Not as though I’ve done something unforgivable, but as though I’d … farted in church or something. Kind of like the way that people who don’t really like strong language react when someone curses.

This is a cultural mismatch, because I can tell you that within Y! Search we use the word pretty freely.

Anyway, saying “black-hat SEO” instead doesn’t seem to produce the same reaction, so that’s what I’ll say going forward. Yeah, that’s it.

The convention

“Are you here for the convention, sir?”, the taxi driver says brightly as we pull away from the Las Vegas airport. I love the “the” in that question. I wonder how many visitors to the thousands of of tradeshows that Vegas hosts every year are momentarily cheered to realize that their yearly meeting is so important that even the cabbies know about it….

In Las Vegas for PubCon (WebmasterWorld)

I’m taking a few days to see the presos and meet the folks at Webmaster World in Vegas. I’ll be representing Y! Search on two panels:

Site Structure for Crawlability

Duplicate Content Issues

If you’re at the show, drop by and say hello – or leave a comment – or send me a note at tim underscore converse at yahoo dot com.

A concise counter-argument to the idea of confidence as a desirable personality trait

There’s a pop-psychotherapeutic idea floating around out there to the effect that confidence is a good thing. Confident people are to be emulated; less confident people are to be encouraged to be more confident.

I’ve felt for a while that this idea is wrong and dangerous – that confidence (in yourself) is like trust (in others), in that it’s a good thing when warranted and a terrible thing when unwarranted (kind of like its sister concept “self-esteem”).

So I set out to write a little essay about this. Now I am a wordy guy by nature (and prolix), and so my first draft was 75,000 words (including footnotes, end notes, and of course the occasional lengthy and tangential parenthetical comment). After a month or two of editing with Strunk&White by my side, though, I’ve managed to reduce the length by 74,998 needless words, and am now ready to present my revised essay to you in its entirety. Are you ready?

Donald Rumsfeld.

Thank you for your attention.

Continuous partial attention and notebooks

In an earlier posting I whinged about a conference that had wifi internet available only in certain areas, and implicitly assumed that this was either about cost or logistics. A follow-up comment pointed out that speakers might actually prefer that the audience didn’t have their noses in their notebooks all the time, and the policy might be _intentional_, to compel attention.

Well. That idea had never occurred to me, but I think it’s probably doomed to failure. Take cellphones as an example: at the start we had no cultural norms at all, and had to develop them, and there was a chance that cellphones might have a limited sphere of influence, with cell users as oppressed as smokers are today, in “designated cellphone areas”, or huddling together furtively outside the entrances of their office complexes in winter, sneaking their miserable hasty ration of mobile conversation. But no – mobile phones have essentially won, despite the odd cranky letter to the etiquette columnist. That is, the etiquette has evolved and it’s: turn off the ringer when you’re in a movie, at the opera, or in certain very high-end restaurants and … that’s it.

As wifi becomes more ubiquitous, I think you’ll see continuous partial attention in the workplace become more and more normal and accepted. And so, if you are giving a talk and I am in the audience, you can be assured of my full and undivided attention just so long as you meet one minimal standard of quality: be more interesting than anyone I could be IM’ing with.

Search engine optimization (SEO) from black to white

In one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Tom Ridge” explains the U.S. terrorist-threat color codes:

Tonight, I’m proud to unveil my agency’s new weapon in the War on Terror: the Homeland Security advisory system. It’s a simple five level system, which uses color codes to indicate varying levels of terrorist threat. The lowest level of threat is condition OFF-WHITE, followed by CREAM, PUTTY, BONE and finally NATURAL. It is essential that every American learns to recognize and distinguish these colors! Failure to do so could cost you your life. For those who may have questions, an excellent guide will be found on page 74 of the spring J. Crew catalogue.

Now, what precisely do these threat levels indicate? Condition OFF-WHITE, the lowest level, indicates a huge risk of terrorist attack. Next highest, condition CREAM: an immense risk of terrorist attack. Condition PUTTY: an enormous risk of terrorist attack. Condition BONE: a gigantic risk of terrorist attack. And finally, the most serious, condition NATURAL: an enormous risk of terrorist attack.

Here’s my attempt to give SEO’s more than just two or three colors.

Background: A naive (non-SEO) webmaster or content producer simply makes a site, without a thought or a care to the world of search engines. Or if there’s a thought it’s a thought of hopeful trust: if I make a useful interesting site on topic X, then the search engine will figure that out and deliver users who care about X to my site. SEOs and SEO-aware content creators construct sites instead with an eye to how search engines work, and make content that is designed to be retrieved. The white-hat/black-hat continuum is about the extent to which SEOs are working with search engines or against them. Black-hat SEOs are also known as search-engine spammers.

Dark inky black: The SEO’s (or in this case the spammer’s) interests are totally divergent from both the engines and the users – the SEO wants to trick the search engine into handing over users who are ripe to be tricked themselves into a situation of malicious harm. For example, the SEO might name his domain just one typo-character away from a famous domain name, then install spyware on the computer of any user careless enough to visit, or attempt to impersonate a major portal’s login page to collect logins and passwords.

Charcoal: The SEO tries to trick the engine into showing the user something totally unrelated to the query, and possibly offensive, but doesn’t actually commit any illegal or fraudulent acts within five seconds of the first user click. Example: a (heinous) pornspammer who stuffs the page with irrelevant non-porn keywords targeting innocent queries, maybe via invisible text. 99.9% of searchers will be searching for something else and will be put off; 0.1% will be searching for something else, but will, um, flexibly and opportunistically reorient their interests.

Dark gray: The SEO collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries. The pages have nothing original of value, but do have ads.

Slate gray: The SEO creates thousands (or millions of pages), all of which point (by linkage, or framing, or redirection) to the same content, which might actually be interesting to the searcher.

Gray: The SEO reads the guidelines of search engines, and tries to juice up their sites just enough to fly under the radar on all dimensions – artificial linkfarms that remain small, automatic content duplication that is arguably not too abusive, etc. The goal is to get enough referral traffic as possible, without too much reference to whether it is interested traffic.

Light gray: The SEO creates “original” content in bulk the old-fashioned way, thinking first of all of search engine rules, secondly of duplicate detection algorithms, and lastly of whether the text makes sense to human beings and is something anyone would ever want to read. Then the SEO experiments with all the parameters (keyword density, internal linkage) trying to move up for the queries of interest.

Off-white: The SEO ensures crawlability of the site, restructures it if necessary for size of pages and internal linkage, and then injects terms to specifically target the important keywords and queries. He doesn’t create linkfarms, but friends and allies are importuned to link with specific text and phrases.

White: The SEO starts (if lucky) with a site full of content you can’t find anywhere else, and that answers a need that searchers actually have. Then the SEO makes sure the site is crawlable, and that titles and internal links make sense and are descriptive. Then the SEO thinks hard about the queries that really should pull up this content, and tries to discover if the right terms are present. Then (the hard, artful part), he or she rewrites content with a dual consciousness of the infovorous human reader and the termnivorous spider, making sure that the most important terms and phrases for the spider are present (in all their forms) and forefronted for the spider, without degrading the quality for the reader.

Luminescent pearly white: This would be a case where the SEO designs a site to show up for relevant queries and _not_ to show up for irrelevant queries. Do luminescent SEOs exist? Well, Jon Udell is one anyway.

The Influentials Speaker Series takes it to the next level

I blogged previously about the Influentials Speaker Series that Yahoo! puts on for its employees. I was very very impressed by the influentiality of our previous speakers, most notably Tom Cruise, who is always a strong influence for me whenever I play loud music at home alone. But I am proud to say that the influentialisticness of the average speaker has holistically increased by quantum leaps, with the announcement that our next speaker will be:

Deepak Chopra.

(I report, you decide.)

Hiring: False negatives in the bigcorp

I’ve written a couple of times about why I don’t believe in the “No False Positives” view of hiring. Among other reasons,

o I work in an area (doc classification) where we make precision/recall (false-positive vs false negative) tradeoffs all the time, and I know that there is _always_ a tradeoff

o I believe that many of the ways to reduce your risk of hiring someone you shouldn’t have hired will increase the conventionality of your hiring. You’re more likely to miss a great but unusual person.

o Some of the very companies that promulgate the no-false-positives idea have made some pretty stupid hires IMHO

But most importantly,

o Since your positive mistakes (bad hires) stick around, but your negative mistakes (people you should have hired) disappear, it’s much harder to learn from the negative mistakes. So it’s natural to come to believe that only positive mistakes matter.

Unless, of course, you work for a bigcorp like I do ….

Last week I was at a two-day meeting of everyone at my company who is using machine-learning techniques. At one particular presentation, I found myself thinking “This is a really good talk! good stuff…. who is this guy? familiar name … where do I know that name? Oh, right! that’s the guy we passed on three years ago!” This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, either.

Depending on how your bigcorp does hiring, it’s possible that some people you reject will find a place elsewhere in the same company, and you can get just a little visibility into how your “rejects” do. When the reject turns out to be a rockstar, it’s worth reminiscing for just a moment about why you passed, and (if you were sure) why you were so sure….