SteamedPenguin

What a manipulative little shit Dave Winer is. Not only is he wrong, not only does he slander WaSP members, (oh wait, it isn't slander, it is his opinion), he does an about face and sets Matt up as trying to turn around the WaSP and wishing him the best of luck.

Nowhere does Matt state that, in fact he wants to turn around the WaSP, or that it needs to be turned around and yet Dave is able to divine this all on his own and give himself another pat on the back for being so affirming as a human being and wishing Matt well. Aside from 'inventing' RSS he appears to have invented ESP too and while being smarmy might predate Dave Winer, he certainly takes ownership of it on a whole new level.

This was precipitated by Winer kissing Scoble's ass because Scoble can't handle being shunned. Scoble is supposed to be Microsoft's "out there" dude. He's nice and cuddly on the outside, but really he serves' as Microsoft's thought police and information czar. If you come too close to creating a bad buzz about Microsoft he steps in and creates anti-buzz to diffuse the situation. This appears to be a man who so thoroughly sold his soul to the corporation that his grand-children will be making residuals everytime somebody prays and mentions evil or 'The Devil'.

Go ahead and read the Scobelizers original posting, pure bullshit as it is, and read The Head Lemur's response.

A lot of people spend a whole lot of time and money selling Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you read SEO and hear snake oil then that's the right idea to have approaching this.

The very basic idea of SEO is this. You pay an expert money and they take your site and up its rankings, hence the visibility, in search engine listings for certain keywords that you are interested in. Mind you the experts we are talking about are experts in human manipulation. They manipulate into giving them money. What methods do they use to 'optimize' your search engine results? Usually all the methods search engines punish sites for using because they are unethical, blatantly selfish, and harm the ecosystem of trying to find useful stuff. So the more they 'optimize' the more you get punished, and the more they say pay us more and we'll get you up there. It is a perpetual-motion machine. From afar it looks like it'll run forever like that, but upon scientific examination you notice the there is always something feeding it energy. That little something on Search Engine Optimization is the web site owner shelling out money like a golden goose. Not only do they make money off of the goose, but SEO charlatans get to stick their fingers up your rear-end to check for freshness.

At the same time a page on my site appears very high in google rankings. This is dues to people linking to me, sure. But it isn't an inordinate amount of people. It is also due to that I filled that page with content relevant to the search terms. Not just crap, but actual information. Ooh, what a fucking concept. Last but not least, my information is properly structured with headings. Wow, earth shaking. You know who are your best Search Engine Optimizers? A real writer and a real markup monkey. No not some designer fanboy who lugs his iBook around to show off his cool Flash graphics and groovy sounds so you can all think different while getting your brain rotted by Macromedia. You want somebody who chews angle brackets for breakfast, likes them, and asks for seconds. You want people who think dissecting information is more stimulation than feeling up a new girls' tits. That is hardcore optimization.

Of course, if you are an online marketer trying to make a go at it selling Viagra then you are pretty much fucked I think.