After recently writing that people should write about politics on their blogs I saw that Jim gave it a try only to have it backfire. Rand also noted

Aaron - Last night I thought my opinion on this was fairly solid, but reading your piece and recalling some of your excellent posts that dealt with the subject (sometimes slyly, through links), I'm beginning to think that maybe you're in the right.

I don't think I am real good at being sneaky, but I have come to realize that I really only know a small portion of the world and that even if I care about some things there are people who know far more about them than I. I think that is part of the reason why I try to let links speak my opinion sometimes, but another good reason to link out to other things that represent your opinion is that you will go bonkers if you speak your mind about every issue that is on your mind. You have to pick and chose your battles.

Werty recently reminded me of a Paul Graham article titled What You Can't Say which stated:

If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

Obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

So, as Paul Graham was saying, frequently exercising the freedom of thought was far more important than frequently exercising the freedom of speech (especially because if you do the latter too much then nutters will eat up all your time and do their best to reduce you to their level).

Many artists and writers tend to cloak their intent such that only some people get their intent. I think that on business sites a combination of rarely posting political stuff combined with some form of cloaking intent such that only some people would care to comment is probably the best route to go if you want to express political beliefs on your work blog.

Many people are still stuck in the bulk and automation line of thinking with link building. Largely because service providers are lazy. Largely because business models that are highly automated in nature are easier to extract value from if people are not thinking through what they are buying. In much the same way many SEOs will still sell you search engine submission stuff, for many years many SEOs will sell you bulk or automated link building programs. People new to the market may be cheap or too lazy to learn SEO, are heavily pitched bogus offers, and read a bunch of outdated information that reinforces old ideas which no longer have any value.

Why does the outdated information get so much exposure? Because search (especially Google) is biased toward older sites. And, with search replacing directories and link lists at the primary means of web navigation people do not link the same ways that they used to. Google not only wants to automate selling paid links on your site, but they also are even trying to automate recommending related links, thus trying to require publishers to do more to earn an editorial link.

But if something is automated, aggressively marketed, widely used, and was effective at manipulating the results you have to think that the search engines would quickly aim to stop it. If those same techniques are generally associated with other low quality sites is that a good network to actively place your site in? Odds are that search engines would be extra aggressive at deweighting the technique if it was effective and generally associated with junk content.

Sketchy SEO techniques have a limited shelf life, and not long after you hear them mentioned people start patching up the holes, so those technically savvy enough to find new algorithmic holes are typically going to keep quiet about them and extract as much value as they can before the holes are closed.

Matt Cutts hinted that having mostly low quality links may prevent your site from getting crawled deeply, and, more recently, he also mentioned that if a site added pages too quickly it may get flagged:

It looks like the primary issue with the Windows Live Writer blog was the large-scale migration from spaces.msn.com to spaces.live.com about a month ago. We saw so many urls suddenly showing up on spaces.live.com that it triggered a flag in our system which requires more trust in individual urls in order for them to rank (this is despite the crawl guys trying to increase our hostload thresholds and taking similar measures to make the migration go smoothly for Spaces). We cleared that flag, and things look much better now.

Admittedly, if you participate in some markets (like consumer finance or insurance) many automated junk content sites will place you in their network by scraping your site and linking to you, but if you can get a few quality links you can easily beat out people playing the bulk numbers game.

If you want your SEO to be effective longterm it is best to avoid easy and automated techniques, in favor of layered or complicated techniques that are going to be hard for most competitors to replicate.

Improving Customer Experience linked to me (so they are obviously cool), but, more importantly, they mentioned a cool related keyword research tool named Quintura Search. Quintura is a free LSI type keyword research tool which shows you related keywords pulled from top ranked websites in any of the major search engines and major content sites like Wikipedia and Amazon.com.
If you do not know a topic well this can give you added things to think about when trying to optimize for it. If you do know a topic well this can give you a way to test how sophisticated or biased different search algorithms are. In addition to being able to compare various engines, you can grab more results, and adjust the coverage depth of keywords it sorts through to find what keywords are most semantically related. Also when you scroll over a keyword it highlights other related words, likeso:

Awsome and slick application. Well done :)

Jim recently asked if he should post about politics on his blog. Rand recently posted why he thinks politics should stay out of your content. I strongly disagree with Rand's position. Why?

• Almost anything that I have been told was stupid to write, I also had others tell me that they thought it was cool. To me, I would much rather ensure I was memorable over avoiding risk.

• When you go outside of the conventional framework of what you are expected to do you are probably going to be more memorable than when you subscribe to a framework that everyone else subscribes to.
• People who have a strong emotional appeal to what you write are going to be far more likely to remember you and/or want to talk to you. Most others will just let it go.
• People subscribe to their own biases. We are constantly seeking things which reinforce our worldviews and identities. As long as you are fairly rational with what you write, those who disagree with it will usually tune it out. Those who agree with it will be more likely to remember it.
• People use language (and thus search) using queries that will likely indicate their biased worldviews. Thus they are not as likely to find your opinion if your political views differ from their own.
• People are more likely to link at things they can identify with. Just look at the most popular political blogs. Most of them are extremely biased.
• Many political bloggers are link rich. If you can create something that they will link at you soon will be too.
• People are more likely to link at thinks they think are totally screwed up. Even if people think your position is full of crap they may cite it because they want to say just how wrong you are.
• Politics generally is nothing but marketing and a game of double speak. The very fact that people react to it emotionally shows how strong the marketing is and how strongly people identify with it. It is important to understand how that language relates to marketing.
• If you let fears control your actions then you are guaranteed to produce watered down stuff.
• If you are full of crap in your worldview and have intelligent readers who care about you then audience feedback will help you quickly see other ways of viewing the world.

The four potential downsides with occasionally posting on politics and religion I have encountered thusfar are

• It may cost you some top down support, but I think it will get you more bottoms up support from people who find it easy to identify with who you are and where you come from. The bottoms up support will more than make up for the lack of top down support if you are small and passionate.

• If you post about politics too frequently it could alter the perception of your brand to be more about politics than your core value.
• You get death threats, etc. Some idiot has already offered me a dual. hehehe
• The death threats and ideological asshats may start to eat up some of your time and attention, and try their best to undermine your views of humanity and evolution.

But in the end, do I really want to help this person spread their belief system and control my life? Nope.

On Rand's blog he mentioned

The current political environment has exacerbated sterotypes and tensions in the political spectrum such that overarching assumptions about a person's qualities are built around even the smallest admission of idealogical leanings. For example, in the US specifically, those who put themselves far to the right of the political spectrum may create stereotypes of amorality, anti-family attitudes and military appeasement for those on the left. In the reverse, the accusations might be homophobia, racism, close-mindedness & lack of education. When you claim political affiliations of any kind, some of your readers/clients/colleagues are prone to jump to these type of conclusions.

There is an endless stream of amoral profit driven sources that will try to use fear to control your activities so that they may gain further wealth and influence. Why subscribe to thought control? Why let the close-mindedness and ignorance of others limit how you express yourself? I took to the web precisely because I didn't want to let others control my actions, how I express myself, or what I could say.

Only a couple hundred years ago slavery was an accepted practice here in the land of the free. Things are able to become much worse and take a much longer time to get better if people are afraid to talk about them. When you need to be a comedian to be honest doesn't it mean there is something wrong with our perspective of the world?

I probably post political stuff a bit more often than I should if I were focused on optimal conversion. I think if you do something rarely, but do it really well then you really get to drive home your desired message. Like take Danny Sullivan when he roasts Google or another engine. He is typically so mild mannered that when he roasts them you are pretty certain they deserve it. Or take Keith Olberman's recent take on the president. It really doesn't get much better than that.

We are all human, and thus are all biased and hypocritical, so of course we are going to look stupid to some of the people some of the time, but at least they looked. Feel free to throw stones and/or flames below ;)

Update: Paul Graham has a cool article called What You Can't Say, from which I will quote:

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

...

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

....

obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

....

I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

Thinking outside the framework others set up, predict, and control is what allows you to create your own for profit framework (and by profit I do not mean only money).

Via SEW, Google has a new customized homepage module called interesting items for you.

Based on your search history (and perhaps toolbar feedback if you have a Google Toolbar installed) Google will recommend related searches, related web pages, and related homepage gadgets. Right now here is what the interesting items for you module recommends for me:

For Google to be building technology to recommend all types of things I should be consuming you know that eventually that sort of technology is going to work to enhance what ads I see while searching and while on content sites. Thus, Google will be able to exploit for maximal profit potential whatever profitable flaws I may have in my identity (see the recent Bob Massa interview for more info on how that works).

What I find frightening about automation and creating maximally efficient ad networks is that inevitably they promote the businesses with the deepest pockets. Like corporate structures, capital is amoral, and you don't get the deepest pockets without doing some shady stuff. More often there is more money in deceiving people than in truly solving problems and helping people. Plus, as marketing continues to evolve, and it is easier to test and gain feedback, it will be easier to control people through instinctive predictable animal behaviors.

Psychology Today published an article about Why We Hate, which stated:

Researchers are discovering the extent to which xenophobia can be easily—even arbitrarily—turned on. In just hours, we can be conditioned to fear or discriminate against those who differ from ourselves by characteristics as superficial as eye color.

And, to me, that becomes frightening when I think about how I just played a video game for a few hours, and Microsoft bought a video game ad targeting company. It is even worse when you consider how much money the military spends on marketing, and that they use their own high end shoot em up video games and pizza parties as recruitment devices on 13 year old children.

What really concerns me about Google (and others) continually improving social recommending engines is that they may make it harder to realize our own prejudices.

The guilt of mistaking individuals for their group stereotype—such as falsely believing an Arab is a terrorist—can lead to the breakdown of the belief in that stereotype. Unfortunately, such stereotypes are reinforced so often that they can become ingrained. It is difficult to escape conventional wisdom and treat all people as individuals, rather than members of a group.

How long until machines know us better than other people do? Are you comfortable with a profit agenda driven machine making life suggestions for you based on your categories and flaws? How much will we let a machine's interpretation of conventional wisdom make choices for us?

How long until there is a Luddite backlash? And should I register LudditeMarketing.com so I am ahead of the curve?