Google in the UK owns about 90% of the search traffic. In the US that amount is over 65% and climbing. Google has rules under which it expects websites to operate otherwise they get removed from the index. Has removal from the index become the same as excommunication in our modern society?

In the medieval past, in Europe, the Church held sway. In order to do anything or get anywhere within society, one had to be a member of the church and had to come to the attention of the right people. The individual seeking attention did have to posses both the correct moral qualities and the correct social qualities in order to achieve any modicum of success.

Societal structure was quite regimented and with the exception of Celtic influenced lands, movement between social classes was limited. The church offered the possibility to escape the lower social classes (with notable exceptions) as well as offering a structure to life, belief and morals. Morals were not lacking in society before the church imposed theirs, and often they were more complex and restrictive and originated from many sources. The church changed all that.

Almost mirroring the rise of the church in European history, the Google search engine has risen to prominence within society. People no longer search online, they ‘google’ something. The rules governing inclusion in the index are adhered to almost religiously and they are broken at great risk to ones site/soul with removal from the index/excommunication the ultimate punishment.

There are those who have become fanatical devotees of this new religion and report those who violate the commandments to the church errr… Google in hopes of witnessing an excommunication. Being excluded from the church of Google carries a significant financial and personal expense, excluding the website from society. Google does give out indulgences and offers forgiveness – allowing transgressors back in to the fold like wayward sheep from their flock. The church of Google is mighty and pervasive but, like the church, not dominant all over the world.

The similarities between medieval Christianity and Google are striking and worrying. By following the progress of this phenomenon and witnessing as I have the Spanish Inquisition of the search industry, I find the future somewhat bleak. I can only hope that when Yahoo gain enough strength to nail the 100 theses to the door of Google, they too have enough exposure to survive the inevitable consequences.

Even in a modern society with almost ubiquitous access to the supposed freedom of the internet, we are still shackled by restrictions to that freedom. While some, to our societal morals are just and good, others are more grey. This married with the fanatics among the populous is what plagues my mind.

Perhaps in an industry populated with some of the largest brains around this progress will be halted and splinter groups will form early enough to rebel against the overt dominance of a single window on the web. Perhaps the struggle will become too costly and we will all live for awhile under the yoke of Google. Only time will tell.

This is not meant as a pop against Google nor an attack on a group or single individual. It is a thought piece meant to provoke inspection and introspection and perhaps debate. Personally, I love Google goodies, wear purple, ask questions and live well

Google started allowing gambling ads within their paid search results last week and while this did cause a flurry of activity at many agencies, after the excitement wore off (faster than the taste of a cheap champagne) I was left feeling somewhat hollow.

The lack of gaming ads in Google has become a bit of a joke in some areas, with Google’s geeky origins often mentioned in somewhat unfavourable terms. Google was held up as a paragon of purity, cleaning the paid search results of the perceived smut of the PPC (pills, porn, casino) results. I never understood, it but heard of certain groups who lauded this decision and used it as a justification of their particular world views.

No longer can Google be that paragon. Fallen from it’s lofty height, the once mighty giant of all things pure and clean has… no wait, when has that ever ever the case?

The decision recently to enable bidding on trademark terms had many businesses up in arms and some search experts behind the scenes talking in hushed voices about money grabbing, stock prices and morals. This recent gaming decision has sparked this same conversation. Why though has Google become so tightly associated with “ethics” and “morals”?

Google is a large company and like any other large company, they have a duty of care to their employees and a responsibility to their stockholders. They do not have a requirement to be moral and yet the perception emerged. Perhaps it was the “do no evil” motto which implied a moral stand within the company. Google has emphasized it’s green credentials, social responsibility and other fuzzy, feel-good corporate policies over the last few years. Perhaps this lead them to be seen as the moral champions.

The fact that Google enabled gambling ads just now, in 2008 in response to a decision made in 2005 seems slow at best. I have trouble believing it was done to bring them in line with anything but projected earnings growth. Some estimations have placed possible annual revenue anywhere from $100 – $300 million and that seems a fairly compelling argument. Since they have data from before they imposed the ban they will be aware just how much they stand to earn.

The discrimination against non-local companies also seems to me a double edged sword. While I appreciate the possibility of adding more jobs through the necessity of moving a registered office to the UK, and the tax revenue, part of me still balks at the discrimination by region. Gibraltar is a nice place to live and work though

The weak requirement that a link to gambleaware.co.uk be present on any landing page is not going to prevent gambling addiction nor will it necessarily influence an adult any more than the drink aware mentions on alcohol posters does. Adults – and children – still binge, still drink to excess and still kill themselves and harm others with alcohol.

Regrettably I cannot see this as anything more than a money grab, cynical old cow that I am. Same for the trademark decision. I’ve seen the graphs from that and so I know just what’s happening. The board must be pleased as punch and it has nothing to do with ethics, morals, going green or “do no evil”.

Google has been spying on us for ages and claiming a right to anything we do on and with its properties. It has grown to become an effective monopoly in the UK and tightened it’s strangle-hold on other regions and yet still we almost deify Google. Has Google replaced God and religion for the geekier members of our society? That’s a whole other blog post

If there is one (more) thing that makes no sense to me whatsoever, it’s international power standards. Electricity. That which spews out of the wall when you plug shit in. Juice, and not that of the link variety. It’s the same everywhere. My stuff runs out of batteries at the same rate in every country, yet multiple countries have different power standards. Forgive me for not knowing their technical names, but the prong things that stick into the wall are not the same worldwide. There is also that voltage problem. I am going to England tomorrow and thus I have to deal with it. I have one hundred little gadgets to take with me, but one has caused slightly more trouble than the others.

Most U.S. mobile phones won’t work with international SIM cards unless they’ve been “unlocked.” I could pay exorbitant international roaming rates, but I’d rather not. However, thanks to Gillian at SEOmoz, I have got my paws on a couple of unlocked telephones which will gladly accept other countries’ SIM cards. I took them to Australia. They are not the most graceful telephones on the face of the earth and thus, despite their good service, I have dubbed them the Fail Phones.

Taken with my far-superior BlackBerry

Yes, this story has a point. I lost the phone charger for the Fail Phones and I am going to England tomorrow. I needed a new one immediately, otherwise I’d be phoneless, Fail or otherwise, for almost two weeks. You can get anything on the Internet. You can get freaking unicorns on the Internet. Live ones. You so can. Of course you can get a phone charger for an ancient Motorola V600. I went to Google.

However, I have now discovered the one drastic flaw of online shopping. It’s very hard to find anything that exists at a store within driving distance which you can acquire immediately. There is a disconnect between online research and offline acquisition. It’s 9am Saturday and my plane leaves for Heathrow in less than thirty-six hours, and I have no time for shipping. My searches were useless.

As an avid online researcher, purchaser and overall Internet shopping fan, I had never before considered that I would not be able to find something that I could buy “in real life.” Obviously, common items are pretty simple to come by offline when you’ve discovered them on the Internet. However, these telephones are old. They don’t take a USB charger; the part that connects to the phone is a prong. AT&T, who issued the phones, no longer carry the chargers. Every online electronics store on the Net had one, but would ship it to me by Tuesday, at which point I’d be at the Future of Social Media conference at the Hilton Tower Bridge. Admittedly, I could have had one sent there, but the phones are out of batteries and have been for six months, and I want one to function when the wheels go down at Heathrow.

In short, finding rare goods online which you can purchase and pick up offline is more difficult than you’d imagine. I tried a range of other searches to indicate that I wanted to walk into a shop and hand over cash for my item, but Google didn’t comply. I was also getting very tired of calling stores and being almost laughed at by sales assistants who were stunned that I owned such an antiquated phone.  I was about to resign myself to the fact that my methods of tidying were next to disastrous (I still haven’t found the pillow and don’t expect to), when searching for electronics stores and reluctantly partaking in some vertical searching paid off. I never thought I’d say this about anything, but Circuit City’s website (which I’ll never again call Circuit Shitty) agreed to cell me the phone charger online and let me pick it up at their store.

But I was lucky. Plenty of other stores didn’t hold the product or didn’t have it at a nearby location. However, I can’t account for shops that had the product and didn’t list it on their website as something they’d sell online. I’m completely sure this happens. I was also disappointed and yet not surprised that Google couldn’t identify offline retailers who listed what I wanted.

This fault is traceable to two sources: retailers think that if someone is searching online, they want to buy online. This isn’t necessarily the case. Plenty of people would rather use the Internet than the phone: everything from disabilities to a vague distaste for the telephone will send people to their computers before their phones or their cars. Additionally, there are plenty of reasons, including mine, why someone might not want to make the purchase online after finding the item.

The second problem is not Google’s fault, but it is Google. Google failed at multiple queries asking for products that could be purchased offline, but Google relies quite heavily on retailers to provide it the best information. Circuit City, and other stores that allow online ordering / offline pick-up, don’t make it clear enough to search engines. My natural inclination was to add keywords like “offline” and “in store” to my queries: as a retailer, I’d investigate who else did this and take advantage of it.

As it turned out, I canceled my order today. I had to do that over the phone. I found my original charger, safely filed in an abandoned shoulder bag at the bottom of my linen closet, where everyone would immediately think to leave it. What can I say: intuitive storage comes naturally to me. Thus, online shopping woes or not, I will have a telephone in London and it will have a charged battery. I’ll call you when I land

Normally, I like to spend sometime using a new product before coming to a decision about it, but I couldn’t wait on this one. At the web metrics conference today in Washington D.C (which I am not at since occasionally even I have to do work) Avinash Kaushnik announced the new Google Analytics Beta. Over the last 12 hours I have seen new features start to appear in the variety of analytics account that I work with, and I have to say, it is pretty amazing and I only have about 20% of the new additions.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know Google having all of our information is a terrible thing and could easily lead to a Skynet and a general machine takeover and I have long since agreed with this statement, but I may give in on this one.

 For a little background information, I love the high end analytics packages, like Omniture. Yes, it costs a small fortune, but I love the ease of use and the bells and whistles. Only on my own low-cost projects and a couple of client sites have I used Google Analytics, because if you had the choice and money was not object, wouldn’t you choose the Porsche over the beat up Ford Pinto? Sure they both get you from point A to point B, but you just feel so much cooler in the Porsche.

 I’d always felt that Google Analytics was a great tool, BUT segmentation, site-search, custom event tracking and a variety of my favorite aspects of web analytics took a lot of custom code and were a huge head ache to get working. This is why, when working on corporate site, I chose the pricey already assembled packages with the integrated click tracking for the C suite. GA is about to correct this for me and making it tougher for me to want to go with a premium analytics package.

 Over the next several weeks, GA users will get the ability to set up Advanced Segmentation in their interface as well as create custom reports. They are also adding Motion Charts, a Google Analytics API, and will automatically pull Adwords cost data into GA. To the lucky people on the Private Beta release, you will be able to integrate Adsense with analytics in your GA interface as well. As I get more time to play with my favorite new toy (hey it’s more productive than spending hours playing Guitar Hero) I will put a more thorough review of it all together. For now, I think Avinash does a great job of explaining all the new features and why it is a game changing event.

or the few days around then…

Goals and ambitions, whether personal or work related, keep us moving forward from day to day. And we all love making ourselves feel better by honoring a time-old tradition of setting ourselves some New Years Resolutions…

Before I get to a point of sounding sarcastic, I will get to THE POINT!

As far as New Years Resolutions are concerned we fall into one of 3 groups:

Group 1 – The ones that have all the dreams. They get motivated for “big things” in the coming year. They plan – all in their head – of how great things will be, how much more money they’ll make, and how far up the corp. ladder they’ll climb…

How do you spot Group 1 types:
They are dreamers. They have all the best intentions in the world. Some even have all the right skills to achieve what their dreams hold, but they never take action.

They don’t even go as far as writing down their goals and dreams. By the end of January on the following year, Group 1 types have all but forgotten they even had New Year Resolutions…

What’s wrong with that?
It’s obvious, if you never even write things in black and white, how do you hope to remember them, or take active action towards making them true?

Group 2 – The typical groupie here will do all of the dreaming of Group 1 types, but they will also go as far as writing it all down. Often on a piece of paper. Sometimes in a specially designated area on their hard drive. They would even know that they’re supposed to categorize their resolutions…

How do you spot Group 2 types:
They talk a lot about their New Year Resolutions. They have big ambitions, and they will most likely tell everyone about them (not to boast, but because they really have good intentions). They write it all down, and they swear they’ll work on the goals…

What’s wrong with that?
Most of the time, these people never go far enough to educate themselves about how to set goals that you end up achieving. Had they gone one step further to read up about it, they would have known that just writing down what you want out of life without ever looking back at that list, will not make it happen…

Group 3 – Now these guys have it all sassed out. They do all of the above. They do it not just every year (around New Year’s Day), but in 3 month increments. What sets them apart is that they go a step further. A step that makes all the difference between success and failure…

THEY TAKE ACTION on at least one of their goals!!!

What to do; A.K.A. the right way to set your New Year Resolutions.
I’ll keep this as short as possible.

New Year Resolutions are an excellent way to ‘take stock’ of how productive your past year has been. You can assess all sorts of areas in your life. Personal ambitions, professional goals, physical targets, or mental development achievements…

The problem most people meet is that they don’t know how to set those resolutions and how to effectively follow through. So here are a few points to help you along:

10 Ways to Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them

1. On a piece of paper, write down the headings: Personal Goals, Work-Related Goals. Write your goals under each of those headings.
2. Dig deep, but be selective. Only list the most important goals.
3. Make the goals as specific as possible. Say “I want to earn $100,000 per month by July 2009.” Even if you don’t know how the heck you’d do it – be specific. Also, by being specific, you are making your goals measurable, i.e. at the end of the year, you can tell if you have achieved something or not.
4. Set achievement deadlines – or you’ll have nothing to work towards.
5. Set achievable/realistic goals. Think of it like this, if you set impossible goals, it would be impossible to achieve them…
6. Make it public. Tell your friends and family that these are your goals. If you make things public, you will feel accountable and are hence more likely to act on and achieve your goals…
7. Take action. Yes, don’t just talk about it, but actually DO!
8. Small steps count. You don’t have to do everything at once, and you don’t have to have the full plan in front of you before you can start. Get from A to B, then from B to C, and so on. You’ll gain clarity with every step…
9. Review your list often. Yes, review your list at least once a month. I print mine and keep it with me all the time. By reviewing your goals often, you help your mind keep on track. And if your mind knows the path, it will start seeing opportunities to take you in the right direction… Thing for a second, if you’ve just decided you want an iPhone, have you noticed how all you seem to see around you is iPhones everywhere?
10. Be flexible, fast and be excited. You need to be flexible, to change course when necessary. In this day and age, nothing stands still anymore, so to succeed you need to move fast, and to be open minded.

Be excited – because if you don’t carry the ‘spark’ for your goal, you’ll never create a ‘fire’. Or for those of you who don’t like my analogy – if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you are unlikely to carry through with it to achieve the end goal!!!

The Challenge – or what’s the point of this post?

Most of us reading this post, will fall regularly in Groups 1 or 2.

I’m not saying this to offend anyone – heck, I’ve been in those groups for most of my adult life.

But because I know the value of being in Group 3, I decided to write this post.

New Year’s Eve 2008 is creeping in – and before we know it, we’ll be celebrating the coming of 2009. We have just over 2 months to get better at goal setting, and give ourselves the chance to get a better start on 2009.

I hope the points I made above will make you think. But better yet, I hope you will find the “10 Ways Set Effective Goals & to Actually Achieve Them” list inspirational enough to take my challenge.

The Challenge:

Set up your New Year (2009) Resolutions, by following the list above. Now I know you can’t share all that’s on your list, but to be in the challenge, you need to share at least one of your goals for 2009.

You decide which one to share with us, and post it as a comment below. By making it known to all of us, you’re making a public commitment to do something about it! Don’t forget to include a timeframe for your goal.

Go on, start thinking…
At the end of December 2008 (Dec 31st), we will close this post for further comments, and will review it periodically from then on to see who is meeting their deadlines…

The Prize!!!
The only prize you get is the satisfaction of actually achieving at least one of your New Year Resolutions.

I’m in…

P.S. If you have a tip to add to the 10 tips above, please feel free to comment – it will help us all…

Yes, there are some things that even I won’t do. Unfortunately, I have lowered myself to using Meatloaf (the singer, not the food product) as inspiration so I’ll have to check that one off the list…Joe Strummer is turning over in his grave.

In my line of work (link building), there are times when clients ask me to do some vaguely shifty things, as I’ve mentioned before. (Let me insert the disclaimer here of how I actually do warn the client about potential issues, before any of you start yelling at me about how I’m a moneygrubbing, unethical blight on the industry.) However, there honestly are some things that, when asked, even I will not do…the actuals aren’t important right now, but it’s interesting that there is still honor amongst thieves, so to speak.

*There are also times when we come up with something a bit dodgy on our own so I don’t want to try and blame the clients for all the shadiness that goes on.

As an admitted proponent of blackhat techniques at times (at times, for god’s sake), what exactly ARE my limits? I can’t even define them for myself always, but I do know that when something comes up and it makes me horribly uncomfortable, I simply won’t do it. However, obviously what makes me cringe might be fine for you, and vice versa (although the former is probably not as likely since I’m intensely immoral, so it seems.)

So really, what won’t I do? There are four things that are relevant, if I exclude the following three that are highly irrelevant (mathletic moment-note that they add up to lucky 7!):

1.Transport Dracula at night.
2.Eat a caramel apple along with a coconut, fennel, and mayonnaise sandwich.
3.Combine items 1 and 2.

1. Tattling
Turning competitors into Google for any reason is not something that I will do, since it would be hypocritical as hell for me to cast THAT stone. Yes, it would make my job easier to remove the guy ahead of me, but I would feel like I’d just kicked a one-legged kitten named Peg if I did that and I’d make Google’s job easier, something I am unwilling to do since they don’t pay me. Yahoo’s another story though. OK that’s a joke.

2. Stealing
I won’t tell my smallest client to give me more money even though I could probably get it. I don’t deserve it, as I think that I have a fair deal with him and I am abiding by the price that I gave him years ago, but the fact remains that he trusts me, and were I to tell him that I needed more, he’d probably do it. So think about that…if you’re sitting there judging me for saying that cloaking’s OK, for example, but you charge someone $5000 per month and you work all of 1 hour for him REALLY, who’s the bad seed now? Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I also don’t talk any client into spending more money than he or she can actually afford just so I can buy a new pair of boots. If they don’t need to spend more money, you won’t see me telling them that they do just so I can make an even bigger profit.

3. Lying
I once worked for an agency where we hid behind reporting for a long time because we simply could not properly service all of our clients. We sent out lovely and well-formatted bits of data that we’d grabbed from places where the clients weren’t overly likely to be lurking unless they happened to be a bit odd, while we basically did fuck all of value for the month. I will, however, still lie to my mother about many, many things.

4. Attacking
I will do a serious amount of trash talking about someone in person, but not in print. I’m not at all proud of the cursing that burst forth from my filthy sailor’s mouth a few days ago, in the office with my poor impressionable young link builders who have never heard such foul language or descriptions of what I wanted to do to a certain unnamed individual with my set of keys and a roll of duct tape, but I won’t do it on a blog post, I won’t do it on Twitter, and I won’t do it on Facebook. That reminds me, I really do need to apologize to the poor little cupcakes. I of course know that it’s very poor form to personally trash someone, verbally or not. I’m not going to stop, naturally, since it brings me great pleasure and I like cursing, but I’m not going to do it in any sort of medium that can be stored in a database and later brought up by someone else. That would be foolhardy.

So what won’t YOU do? Do you even know? It’s something to consider, especially if you’re one of those types who enjoys telling other people how horribly unethical they are. (If you’re that type, you were probably the girl freshman year who told me I was going to hell for listening to Sisters of Mercy, while you were banging the geometry teacher in his office after school. By the way if you’re that girl and you read this, stop freaking asking my mother how I’m doing like you give a damn you tramp. See? No names mentioned in writing!)

Recently, the SEO industry debated whether or not we need standards as part of our profession’s requirements. You may have heard about it. I made a bored face. It does not seem viable that any real restrictions could be put on an online industry like this, but I wonder about the pros and cons of introducing SEO as an academic field in which one can earn a college degree. Let’s look at these advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

1. Official training. This is a given within accredited colleges and accounts for everything from my degree in English (I am officially licensed to write good and do other stuff good too) to the certifications given to surgeons.
2. Certified instructors. With university courses come teachers. These are people who (generally) know a lot about their subject and can impart it in an efficient fashion.
3. Trusted knowledge. I’d like to think that between two and four years of structured learning would take care of the basics of SEO and a lot more besides. Training new SEO employees would no longer be necessary.
4. The Idiot Recession. Total dimwits can’t call themselves doctors. Requiring some certification might elimiate some of them within SEO.

Disadvantages.

1. Money. Not everyone can afford to go to university and those who do often end up paying for it for a large portion of the rest of their lives. College educations can be hideously expensive and beyond the means of many people. At present, this expense doesn’t stop a person from becoming extremely successful in our industry. It seems criminal to threaten that.
2. Snobbery. I’m not sure this extends beyond the United States and Britain (it probably does, but it doesn’t seem to affect my native New Zealand), but have you heard what graduates of the University of Random State will say about the graduates of Random State University? Adding degree programmes in SEO is a definitive way to make our cliquey, infuriating industry even worse.
3. Standardisation can kill ingenuity. If too many institutions establish a “correct way” of doing something (and universities are excellent at this), innovation can be stifled as non-standard and thus incorrect.
4. A lack of qualified teachers. Danny Dover, a colleague of mine at SEOmoz, is currently enrolled at the University of Washington. He recently commented about how little true web development education was available at UW, a large, respected state college. He and I are both relatively sure that one of the reasons for this is that great web developers are still developing. Few have yet to progress to teaching, and becoming a web dev teacher is not yet understood as an accepted profession, whereas teaching geology or French is a normal aspiration.
5. Bastardisation. Following on from a lack of qualified teachers, universities will throw non-SEOs at SEO classes. A print-marketer or an IT specialist isn’t necessarily qualified to teach SEO, but do you remember the awful Teacher’s Assistant who taught your Biology session in your second year? The one who knew less than you did? Imagine that person in charge of teaching the difference between robots.txt exclusion and the meta noindex tag and in which situation you should use either.
6. Limitation. Even if SEO had been an option when I was choosing a college major, I doubt I would have picked it. Forcing or even encouraging people to obtain a degree in a subject before embarking in a corresponding profession limits the people the industry will eventually obtain. This isn’t a certainty: I’ve often heard that the subject of one’s degree rarely dictates their career path and that is definitely true for me. I spent four years being an obsessive wordsmith and analysing seventeenth century plays. Now I read .htaccess files and find well-executed CSS replacement delicious. Peter Chilson, you were the best teacher I ever had and I am truly sorry for what I’ve become

I’ve spoken to several people who graduated with marketing and advertising degrees (in New Zealand) who learned about SEO during college. On a superficial level, it seems like regulating SEO by introducing it into collegiate environments is a great idea, but are those benefits worth the significant and undesirable disadvantages? Is it better to put up with the idiots (your junk mail folder confirms that we have quite a few of them) and accept that Julie and I have degrees in English, Rand is one semester away from a degree in Finance and that I’d be even better at what I do if I’d spent the years between 2002 and 2006 ranking websites rather than doing my Modern British Lit homework?

Seems shooting off my gob is becoming a habit - an addictive one at that.  Knowing how much trouble my mouth can get me in, I decided to channel it in to something more productive.  So I’m doing some speaking stuff and in case you’d like to come alone to heckle or support, I thought I’d share.

Today I’m off talking about Online Brand Reputation Management at the Web 2.0 Practical Applications for Business Benefit Conference Something I think everyone needs to do but I’m specifically talking brands.  I’ll be talking people later :-)  Today I’m just focusing on trying to help brands do better stuff online.

Next week, I get to gab about my in-house experiences before I joined i-level.  I’ll be at SMX East talking as part of the In-House day.  I get to gab about how I got around the obstacles inherent in the work us in-housers have to do.  FUN!  Hey - if you’re there, I’m bringing M&S chocolate truffles and Celebrations chocolate bonbons - hit me up for some chocolaty luuuurrrrvvveeee!

Week after next - otherwise known as October 14th & 15th - I’ll be speaking at the A4U Expo on SEO stuff.  My first talk is the basics - just about what everyone can do to optimise their site.  My top 10 tips only I share as much as I can squeeze in to 40 min :-)  Then on day 2 I team up with Rob Kerry and we discuss what you can do given Google is trying to be the Church of SEO.  I promise to be my heretical best

Following on from A4U is Social Media in Business which is a great day away from London in Marlow.  A fantastic line up where my name gets changed Judith De-Cabbit includes Toby Moores who is FANTASTC as are Will McInnes  and Neville Hobson.  Really one to leave London for - it is going to rock!

I get the fantastic honour of speaking at SMX London about legal issues facing search.  I am not a lawyer - my dad is and I almost went to law school but was saved at the last moment by psychology.  I still may go back to school and may end up going to law school eventually but I think an MBA comes first. Anyway!  I’m chuffed to be at both SMX East and SMX London so watch out - MORE CHOCBAIT FOR EVERYONE!

How cool is it to talk about “The Dark Side” - well I get to at the IMS 2008 show the Information Management Solutions Show - what a mouthful!  Well, I get to speak on The Dark Side of Social Media and talk about all those mistakes people have made, how not to make them, how to do it right and the new changes to the law.  So lots and lots!

So that’s me shooting off my gob for this year.  Thanks for your indulgence folks!  I’m passionate about search and helping companies deliver relevant results and one way is through talking about search and related subjects all about the town - and the world