I think it is, and I tweeted so yesterday. And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.
But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams from Google trends for websites below.
Website traffic for 5 major IT companies
Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies
While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.
At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.
Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies
Search volume for 5 big IT companies
In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:
- oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
- apple is increasing,
- dell increases too although less quickly,
- and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.
But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news, recommendations and answers.
I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time it’s good too. Not so abundant as search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?
Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.
What should we expect? What else than these two inversely related trends accelerating? Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.
There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?
Is Google shooting its own foot? So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.
Is the Salmon protocol tasty enough?
October 18, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:
Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.
This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.
To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon
Salmon protocol logo
and you can get a basic idea of its workings from this presentation.
Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem. As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the full picture will be available in whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.
But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.
But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.
I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.
The question is how?
The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.
A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.
I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.
Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon
Posted in technology | Tagged Aggregator, atom, comments, digital identity, protocol, salmon | 10 Comments »