Seth's Blog: Advice for authors

Very interesting post about writing a book from Seth Godin.

He explain to many things like for example the differences between printing and publishing... and from my point of view the most interesting thing, it could be that we don´t need to have a lot of expectations from the book because 'Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. '

Read more at sethgodin.typepad.com/s...

Why do most people prefer to be a public sector employee?... and Why do most people prefer to be a private sector customer?

The worst thing about our problems is that they are not of other people's business.

Mario Quintana

When I started this blog I make the promise to myself to write something every day .... mainly because I need to improve my writing English.

This blog is also a way to try to understand how, why and where some written words reach other people, with the Google help of course.

I have been around five days without to write, mainly because I wanted to say something about the Public Sector,... and at the same time to try to be neutral in my comments and sometimes be neutral is easy to say but difficult to keep.

I don´t know in North America, but in most of the Europe when you talk is very usual to find people that would like to be employee of the public sector and at the same time they prefer to receive services from private companies.

There are some "buzz" that try to put in relationship " poor quality service" with "public sector service",... and even now, I don´t want to be included in "that group", because at the end I believe that the main problem that they need to improve is the "quality control" in every process of the Public Sector System. If we don´t know what it needed, We will not be able to improve anything.

I said the main problem is the quality control because most of the times the people are satisfied with the received services level.

The problem is when someone don´t agree about something related with the received service (health care system, educational system etc), when this happened all system seems that need to be protected from the customer, even before to know why is complaining.

I have been talking about this issue with some Public Sector employees and the answer is that they have in every place a " customer care department" or even a "customer defender department", but I am not able to explain them that they are not going to collect valid data if like sometimes happened the person that will answer the customer question is the person that the customer complain about or if the person in charge of the customer service try to convince about the useless of the complain. It may be one of the reasons that the statistical perception quality improve at the same time that the "poor quality buzz grow".

In private companies, (not in oligopoly), the first level of the customer care service is to know the customer complain, listen the customer and transmit that they are going to take care and to try to solve the problem.

The private companies don´t use..

... to put "the employee ego" in front of the customer.

... to try to defend the work partner even if he is in a mistake.

The private companies try to learn from the mistakes, and the customer care department is a good place to know the perceived quality from the customer. The company CEO like to work with a bad perceived quality stats from the customer´s point of view instead a good perceived quality stats from the company staff.

The Private companies knows that in a competitive market, the "reputation" is most of the time the biggest asset from a company, and the reputation is builds in two ways:

• Providing a very good service most of the times..


• Recognizing and solving the problems that some times happened to the customers.
  

I´m sure that there are more reasons that produce that the global perceived quality of the public Sector Services is poor and expensive, and at the same time that this "buzz" grow more people will request why the Public Sector Services are not managed by Privates companies.

Of course there are a lot privates companies that use to manage the complains in the same way, but at the end the customer is able to choose to receive the service from another.

Instant Domain Search Widget

I think that is very useful widget for the web site visitors, but it could be better with the availability of translation like for example in Spanish:

Comienza e teclear.

Tus resultados aparecerán al instante.

El resultado de tus búsquedas no se graba.

Instead of:

Just start typing.

Your results will appear instantly.

Your search results are not being recorded.

Read more at instantdomainsearch.com...

Something about the Invisible WEB.

The truth is the light and light is the truth.

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

There are many reasons to be connected to Internet, and in my case I am not able to say the most important ones.

One of them is looking for in the Invisible WEB, or to find something that is not easy using the conventional Search Engines queries.

Most of the new Search Engines technologies are starting to use the Power of the Social Networks, the problem that I see which these kind of techniques is that there is an "Open Door" to the manipulation, because there are 2 main problems:

• Most of the times the Social Networks results could be manipulated, because the voting system follow the recommendations of few people.


• Most of the people don´t report their impressions about any site.
  

In the other hand Google is looking for an automatic answer that could be represented by a finite number.
I don´t know now the use that Google make from the information analysis provided by the adwords program, Google desktop and Google analytics etc , but I feel that these data could partially solve the possible manipulations problems, although is going to increase the Google knowledge about us; But at the end the Invisible Web is not going to be affected too much because of that, because the Invisible Web is mostly invisible because most of the people doesn´t care about that kind of resources , and even for Google is going to be difficult which parts of the Invisible Web should be visible , could be relevant for the regular searcher.

Keywords , SERP and Optimization

Quot homines tot sententiae: suo’ quoique mos.
There are as many opinions as there are people: each has his own correct way.
‘Phormio’ by Terence

I was reading during the weekend the Jill Whallen Blog and one of the posts more interestings for me was one about the over SEO optimization. It is not the first blog that speak about this issue, but sometimes is good to remember that at the end the Search Engines tried to anticipate the human behavior, and the humans don´t use to value the content of a WEB counting keywords or using other SEO techniques that sometimes could include some myths.

Something else about adwords... not Arwords

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
‘Notebooks’ by Samuel Butler

I receive an email last week from a friend that was asking about how to increase the visibility of one organization. At least the domain is. org.

They have a site from around 3 years, but until the moment, they do not achieve the performance that they expect. They are looking for a fast way to increase the traffic using Adwords.

We have been talking about the same issue several times during the last 6 months, and I used to answer in the same way:

What do you want to achieve with more visibility? Alternatively, do you know what is the actual target of your organization?

It is possible to think that the last questions have an easy answer, but from my experience is very unusual to find people that provide a clear response to those or similar questions. It is more common that the people talk from the beginning about the cost, the percentage of new traffic etc.

Like every task in any organization or company, you need to test and refine, trial and error, every process in the system. The marketer needs to know the real targets or the company mission. The marketing campaign need to know the core, the idea that move the company and only after, it will be designed the best envelope for that idea, it will be tested, refined until the advertiser receives the expected results; and in some cases, it should be possible that during the process the company not only adapts the marketing campaign but even every process of the company system.

At the end the Adwords campaigns have many things in common with traditional advertisement techniques, but the best thing from my point of view, is that the advertiser is able to test very fast the results of the campaign, and it is possible to use those results to refine or redesign the campaign, and to use the results in other areas of the business.

Arwords relevancy and Google.

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley

Just few hours ago, I posted about the relevance of the results in several SE or the possible advantages to use WEB 2.0 SE.

I want to complement the last post with the relevance of the adwords for the user that wants to be introducing about something new. I have had a little surprise today because there are a lot of posts that comment the agreement between Google and another well known company (http://publishing2.com/2006/07/21/the-hypocrisy-of-googles-user-experience-policies/), in order to put Adsense in parked domains at the same time that Google penalizing Adwords advertisers with poor landing pages.

The initial idea was to test for the word chondromalacia and to see the relevance of the adwords, by checking the ... landing page but the problem is:

“For this word with around 65000 searches per day I found only two adwords campaigns”.

That means, that the problem now is not to check the quality of the two advertisers landing pages, because there are many chances to appear always for that word. The problem now is that only two advertisers appear with that word and there are to much competition for words like “pain knee”, that is around 60 times more popular (around 3.800.000 searches), but there are many competitors and the chances to appear in the first page are very low.

The marketing “problem” for the sellers that have suitable products for chondromalacia but the term does not appear in the adwords campaign is that the visibility decrease at the same time that the adwords campaign increase. These kind of companies, (good content but poor Keywords selection) are the main beneficiaries of the penalties established by Google in poor landing pages, because allow them to increase their choices to appear in the first page, but the original problem remain the same, a lot of searches of words like chondromalacia, are going to spend more time looking for a product because the campaign marketers didn’t realise about the power of some very specific words.

Most of the posts that appear about the Google agreement show from my point of view to much emotion to critics the Google action; My opinion is that the agreement could provide some relevance loss in the Google adwords results, and the users (Advertisers and Searchers) could penalize Google; also I think that Google has the right to decide the visibility that is going to provide to the advertisers with low quality landing pages, although I believe that it should be better to focus to teach the advertisers to establish campaigns with the right keywords, because that movement is going to benefit:

• Google because It is going to be able to put adwords for more search terms.
  

• The marketers because they are going to have more visibility in niche markets.


• The searchers because they are going to save time.

Search in a hurry...

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

‘The Brook Kerith’ by George Moore

I had the choice yesterday to test the Search Engine results relevance in order to look for information about something that I have/had idea.

The term was chondromalacia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runner's_knee) and defines a kind of knee problem.

I checked first with google.com and google.es (Condromalacia), and I found that even looking for the term in Spanish, the results, (from my point of view) were more relevant in google.com.

• For the term in Spanish appear 40.200 results (40.300 in google.com).
  


• For the term in English appear 277.000 results.
  

I test the same terms for Yahoo:

• Spanish: 13600 and 13000 in Yahoo.es.
  


• English:242.000
  

In both cases I have to refine the search in order to find the information in my logical order (description, symptoms, treatment etc).

I decided to make the same test with 2 or three Web 2.0 Search Engines.

• In http://clusty.com the results are around 60.000, but in the 5 results of every area I reach the relevant pages that I found using google and yahoo.
  

• In http://www.wink.com the results were 273.000 (very close to Yahoo) and I didn´t found many differences with the results from yahoo or google. I know that I could provide my opinion about the relevance, but I am acting like a normal user and I am in a hurry.
  

• In http://www.lexxe.com Only appear 100 results and are organized in clusters like http://clusty.com, and I could not find differences in the relevance of the results.
  

At the end the best option remains for me remains in Google, clustering the search with the “more” parameters like “more:alternative_medicine”.

I believe that we are at the first stages of the SE development, the new search engines introduce algorithms that value the users opinions (Social Networks) or develops new ways to analyze the content relevance, but I think that for the regular user that look for information about something without previous knowledge, the new SE technologies don´t provide more relevance results that Yahoo, Google or Ask.com.

I think that any development trend for the SE algorithms are fine, because at the end are going to be the end users who approve or refuse the new development. But for my point of view it should very good to have algorithms that start to integrate in the SE response, the results translated, from different languages and IA algorithms that analyze the value relevance of the content

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A Quotation, a Beta, a Book

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
‘The Advancement of Learning’ (1605) by Francis Bacon.

These days there are many posts about WEB 2.0 projects over funding, showing that it could explode like a 2001 dot.com bomb.

I am not an expert in VC capital funding but some of the differences from 2001 are:

• The VC invests less money per project basis.
  


• Most of the new start ups don´t go public during the first 4 years.
  

I found yesterday a very good article about Venture Capital and WEB 2.0 http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/index.php?p=264

The post is about Doriot that was one of the pioneers in the VC , and the rules that he established to fund a new project.

One of the things from that post that is interesting from my point of view is that show that every day is easier and less expensive to implement an idea, and show that a lot of Beta projects are developed during weekends for fun, and if the promoters of the idea after the test feel that could be good, They will develop a business plan.

It would be possible that a lot of VC funded WEB 2.0 project could not succeeded, but at the end I believe that this time the global results are going to be quite good because at least are showing a lot useful ASP models, where I hope to see the main Internet trends during the following years.

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Lets Begin

First of all I am going to introduce, the reasons to write a daily blog about entrepreneurs, innovation, marketing... Just the same that millions of blogs that are available.

Although I’m a daily blog reader from about 4 years; I didn't try blogging before mainly because I didn't think that I would be able to write something better or new; but just around one month ago I was reading a book about the "The Wright Way ”, 2004 from Mark Eppler, about the multiplication factor produced when the two brothers worked together.

It’s quite possible that I would not be able to write, comment o add anything new but may be, just may be... I hope that a different point of view about something that I could write, will produce somewhere the needed multiplication factor to produce value for most of us....

Let us begin to learn and write.