A snapshot of now.
Hello friends, travel and hospitality people.. I have abandoned you for too long! Well, my mind has been racing, and I am trying to put all these pieces together… how will it all fit? How will interaction by the brand influence, connect, or impact the future of the social graph legitimizing and strengthening search? *That’s* not even the important question – The real question will be how will a search built off network science control and influence brands? Will there, finally, be a thwarting of the spam through human powered relevance ranking? Will poor management styles, lack of interaction, or opaque manipulation of the consumer made to be transparent in regards to the brand? These are small beans compared to the impact of wikileaks on the future of human government. If you want to catch up on the *REALLY* important stuff, listen to this NPR Fresh Air episode with Bill Keller, from the NY Times, on the impact of Assange and Wikileaks. But back to our silly little vertical.
Google search is inundated by spam – even their CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that “The Internet is a Cesspool“, and at the time 2 1/2 years ago, he insisted it would be brands that sorted out those murky waters. I think that’s part of it, such as a brand interacting with the social graph, while publishing meanginful content to an interested audience that actively supports or bolsters the brand’s online relevance and presence. But where Schmidt agreed the future of meaningful editorialism or content was in question, I think it’s the tapping into of the social graph that will sort all this out. People will always try to game search, but the amalgam of a human powered network will wield sorting relevance like a skilled warrior, making antiquated algorithms look clumsy and slow.
The spam problem for Google is multi-layered. (more…)