I am quoting from a post a year ago….then I will elaborate.. http://www.wayneporter.com/2007/04/16/erik-drexlers-engines-of-creation-from-nano-to-metaphor/

“For example, bulk extractors (think “flint chipping”- moving a few hundred thousand atoms at a time- like American Indians did with their arrow tips) and nanotechnologists (people doing the tagging, social bookmarking, etc- protein engineering and atom sculpting) could be useful metaphors for current search engine analysis, not to mention the sudden utility of the concept of “microchunking” and XML site maps. For example, why not get atom shapers to masticate data for you so it is easier to swallow? Question is (as I pose to Nick of Metaversed in a twitter exchange- is this dynamic make-up of SERP “COMPOSITION” driven by AI or something different? Good question.

(Important Note: I don’t care what “HTML pages” are returned- I don’t see the world as web pages- I see them as media types.)”

OK- what makes the insight useful is that, to the day, I wrote that post a year ago. Drexler was making comparisons flint chipper and bulk extractors…we can extrapolate this idea (using fluid intelligence) to visualize or predict how data might be handled or “chewed up”.

Thus if Drexler felt this was useful (and he is a lot smarter than I will ever be) I could see Google and other SE’s adopting this metaphor. It makes more sense for machines to handle the bulk extraction and for people to masticate or “chew” this data- refine and hone it.

That is when I also realized that it was not what pages that turned up that mattered as much as what media-types turned up- it is not all HTML and not pages.

You cannot run , gun and game personalized search (and be sustainable), but you can marshall your resources into channels that influence search, or channels considered important.

For example, using Twitter has some basic SEO lift, plus it hits the social aspect head on and it is a micro format. Imagine if you had (and perhaps you did) adopted a solid social media plan (I use that term loosely) a year ago?

You would be way ahead of the game…success is part execution and part knowing what to execute and when.

Hope that helps clarify things. The book has other interesting metaphors and concepts. Just read and apply or cross-pollinate the ideas.

best,
wayne

Thank

I will get to that with a concrete example soon.

-wayne