So this series of Scoble videos are making the blog rounds and well, Scoble pretty much caught a nasty case of foot-in-mouth disease if you ask me, brought on by a nasty Calcanis infection. Apparently Mahalo is going to end Google in 4 years (as well as Yahoo! and MSN) and SEO is entirely devoted to spamming the engines.
Wow, now I haven’t seen that level of reckless ignorance since, well, earlier today when Michael Vick said he thought his torturing dogs to death after laying wages on battles-to-the-death was childish. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff kids do in their care-free summer days Mike, adults usually grow out of that.
So back to Scoble, who has with this string of Al Queda style low budget video pod-craps ended any chance of hanging on to any long term relevancy that might earn him the right to be played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a made for TNT movie. Others have done a better job than I could of picking him apart statement by statement, so I’ll just stick with a couple things that popped into my head while watching what of his videos I could stomach.
Scoble mentions that nobody uses any of Google’s hundreds of services, which I found funny as I came across a mention of his videos through some blogs I read completely through Google Reader, which I access from my Google Homepage where I can also see my latest Google Mail. I’m pretty sure I’m not Google alone in that Google area. He also boldly claims that if you are looking at the video then you haven’t gotten there via search as the ONLY way you can find that video is by someone first hand (you see, Scoble intentionally tried to un-seo his video page, that rascal!) Really? Google is not going to index the articles and blogs that mention your video and link to and derive the keyword relevancy from that? Have you not heard of the affects of Google bombing? What am I saying, you are the Mainstream Tech Media (MTM tm), why would you ever have a full comprehension about that of which you write?
So Scoble starts talking about his comparison of “HDTV” result pages from Google and Mahalo. First off, seriously Scoble? You are this supposed tech guru and you search like an 80 year old granny’s first sitting at a computer? I’m pretty sure you throw at least one qualifying statement in there so I’m going to chalk that demonstration up to staged setup. So let’s try something useful, like say looking for tips on how to shoot a video podcast that does not sound and look like you are making a ransom video. So pop say “video podcast audio tips” into Google and Mahalo. Google gives some noise, but some good results in there too. Mahalo gives you… er… Google results… and links to other pages on Mahalo they think might be related, such as Veronica Belmont (who is now in production on a daily podcast for Mahalo), How to Speak French, Twango (which has nothing to do with podcasts) and a general page about Podcasts where upon halfway down I find, ah, what I was looking for “Podcast Tips and Tricks”. So with Google I got a page that was geared towards my words, a handful on the first page that were dead on what I wanted, and with Mahalo I got some irrelevant links, something that looks like blatant promotional linking (we call that SPAM), a link to ANOTHER page that does hold what I’m looking for, oh, and then Google results that does hold what I’m looking for. Actually Mahalo missed a perfect opportunity to unite me the searcher and my query with that click and some scrolls away relevant info, all the needed was some kind of system that could have systematically paired what I searched with content they know about. Some kind of, I don’t know, algorithm. I guess I could always wait for a Mahalo editor to create the page and then they’ll be happy to email me. Super!
The last thing I’ll comment on will be Scoble’s over the top swipes at SEO as an industry. What the hell dude? How uneducated can you be? Here’s a quick primer: SEO helps sites with information relevant to a given query be found for the query. The keyword here is “relevant”. If you are spending time doing things that are presenting your site as being relevant for a term OTHER than what your page/site has to offer, that’s not spamming, that’s stupid. You can call it spamming if you want, but I would just call it poor SEO that is going to drive in bad quality traffic that doesn’t convert. So what’s left is people helping people find the information they are looking for, which is pretty much what your bed buddy Mahalo claims to do. SEO just uses the existing vehicle of algorithmic search to accomplish that. You say SEO like it’s a dirty word, but all SEO is is helping the poor schmoe’s at your HDTV manufacturers with their unindexable flash monstrosities reach the customers who are searching for them. I suppose in your world we could just wait for Jason Calcanis to write a page about every industry on the planet, but in the world we all live in, we’re just going to do some SEO so everyone can get on with their lives today.
I don’t know Scoble, maybe it’s just sour grapes, perhaps you are finding your profession of journalist has become sort of a four letter word these days and you felt the need to take someone else down a notch to make yourself feel better. Whatever the case is, perhaps next time you’ll search Google to get your facts straight and maybe a few tips on making a video that doesn’t suck. You sure as hell ain’t going to find that info on Mahalo… well, maybe in the Google results fed in.
