the reflexions insider

About a month ago, those of us who follow changes in Google’s search result rankings with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for sports franchises woke up to something frightening: The Dewey Update.

Google normally makes daily changes to their search result rankings, so finding yourself in position 3 when you were in position 4 yesterday is not abnormal. But it was quite shocking for many webmasters to wake up one morning and discover their site completely removed from Google’s search results.

Google’s primary goal should be to deliver the best (i.e., most relevant) search results to its users. This is what ensures that users will keep coming back and what maintains Google’s marketshare. However, the reasons behind this update (although impossible to pinpoint) appear to be focused on ranking Google’s internal pages higher than others.

After the update, Google Books search results were suddenly ranking close to the ever-dominant Wikipedia pages. In addition, Youtube and Google News content was being displayed prominently over other commercial listings. This looks like a blatant abuse of Google’s position. Their mantra “Do No Evil” implies a commitment to being fair and balanced—manipulating search results to put their own pages first is clearly an unfair tactic that hurts both users and webmasters.

Fortunately, this update was short lived. After Google’s spin master Matt Cutts asked for feedback from the community, it appears the Dewey Update was reversed. For the time being, I am confident in Google’s commitment to fair search results.

What can you do as a webmaster to ensure your page gets a fair position? There is a multitude of SEO resources on the internet, and I plan to start including tips and tricks on this blog as well, so check back frequently. In addition, make sure you read Google’s own guidelines. Finally, if you are concerned about upcoming changes to Google’s ranking algorithm, check http://72.14.207.104 frequently. This is Google’s most up to date data server, and changes on it are periodically rolled out to their worldwide network.

If the web of today was the music industry of the 1960’s and if memes were bands, then social networking would be The Beatles. And startups have been chasing after the next killer social networking app like so many crazed schoolgirls.

Tech axiom #1: innovation and perceived innovation are not always the same.

What’s difficult about analyzing social applications and to what extent they will actually change the landscape of the web is discerning the real innovation from the me-too-isms that too often pervade the business plans of web startups. And some of the biggest social networking sites are essentially a rehash of similar concepts from an earlier web. I’m not really sure why MySpace is that much different from Geocities circa 1995 with an embedded mp3 player but maybe I’m missing something.

Tech axiom #2: the most innovative companies are not always the most successful (see also: Xerox PARC).

Despite what some social web evangelists might have us believe, these tools will not fundamentally alter the dynamics of human social behavior. Instead the most successful applications will model and improve upon those dynamics. Finding a good doctor in the 21st century won’t be much different from the 20th or 19th centuries: simply put, you ask recommendations from people you trust. But it will be more efficient.

The currency of social networks — relationships, trust, and reputation — is fundamentally the same online as off. The value added by social networks is that of improved efficiency and ease of utilizing those relationships and reputations to our mutual advantage.

When you’re in the business of working with technology — in our case at Reflexions Data, building web applications — it’s easy to forget about your roots.

The culture of web development is rooted in a unique blend of other more forbidable cultural legacies: those of digital art, interface design, software development, and information architecture.

The web as an experimental intersection of art and technology was best represented in its early years by publications like Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. Editorials by technologists like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Nicholas Negroponte appeared alongside expositions on cyberpunk, digital art, and virtual reality. Experimental digital artists jostled with computer scientists, techno-utopians, and post-humanists in their attempts to express the shifting landscape of the late 20th century. These trends seemed so fundamental as to provoke Wired magazine in 1998 to predict a 20-year “long boom” that would result in worldwide “hyperwealth” and a new egalitarian golden age of cultural and technological achievement (only two years later Wired’s outlook would be somewhat less optimistic, the magazine itself having been sold off to Condé Nast).

While such sentiments of the late 1990’s have been relegated to pre-dot-com anachronism and near absurdity, they have nevertheless matured and are increasingly relevant to the early 21st century, what by comparison feels like an age of measured optimism: a time when the culture of technology has gone mainstream.

This new era has its own luminaries. Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum, is at the forefront of where art and technology meet. Its mission statement: “Rhizome supports the creation, presentation, and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways.” Located in the new home of the New Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, Rhizome is both an exhibition space and a web community for forward-thinking artists and their varied audiences.

I was recently given a tour of the New Museum’s new building by Lauren Cornell, Rhizome’s Executive Director and curator at the New Museum. The location itself is provocative, compelling some to view the museum’s new address as an example (if not a catalyst) of the gentrification of the once working-class neighborhood. But the tenements of the Lower East Side are long gone and the museum’s presence on the Bowery among second hand restaurant equipment and street vendors induces one of those “only in New York” moments (and why not pick up a used deli slicer on your way to the new YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES exhibition?). The building was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA (photos at right).

For anyone who wants to experience the resurgence of digital art amidst the political and economic uncertainties of the 21st century, a visit to Rhizome.org or the New Museum will provide a sorely-needed return to the interplay of art and technology that’s so fundamental to our age.

Building applications with reusable, modular components is kind of the holy grail of software development. To be conservative let’s call it a general aspiration, and if nothing else a guiding principle of Good Design. We’ve been hearing about it since the seventies and several iterations later (OO design, Java/Struts, and more recently, the growing number of web frameworks such as RoR, CakePHP, Zend, etc.) we’re just starting to feel the impact on large scale distributed applications that are becoming the hallmark of this strange collective trip that is the early 21st century landscape of social computing.

While we like to think of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch, we at Reflexions have been admittedly a little slow in jumping on the framework bandwagon over the last few years. Maybe it’s the control-freak mindset that comes with building custom apps, or maybe we just haven’t found the right fit. Whatever the reason, we’ve finally started to embrace the framework philosophy by doing what any other group of control freaks would do: we’ve built our own. More on that in a future post.

What’s struck me about building a framework is that in doing so one engages in the zen-like exercise of modeling one’s own notions of how applications exist and interact with their underlying components. It’s fairly conceptual stuff and yields interesting results about how we as developers perceive and interact with our code. Code isn’t just the paint on the canvas. In many ways it is the canvas, and the easel, and the whole damn landscape.

In a somewhat tangential concluding remark, I’ll refer the reader to a fascinating article from The Wall Street Journal I came across this weekend: Scans of Monks’ Brains Show Meditation Alters Structure, Functioning. Title says it all.

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that have started to take root: “perpetual beta”, “mashups”, “wikinomics”, “crowdsourcing”, “collaborative media.” As a technical person who respects precision, these kinds of words can be maddeningly vague and nebulous. But they’re part of the energy of the current web development marketplace and for better or worse they have value to its constituents.

As the changelog on its Wikipedia entry will attest, the term “Web 2.0″ has about as much buzz-factor and is about as amorphous in its meaning as anything hot off the pages of the marketing trades.

But language, however imprecise, is the currency of upheaval. My hope is that the language of “web 2.0″ doesn’t obscure its implications for the future of the internet.

Tuesday’s keynote was given by Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google, Chairman of Novell, etc, etc. There were two items of note: 1) the announcement by Schmidt that Google has just released a presentation application to their office suite, and 2) the fact that Schmidt’s appearance came on the heels of the announcement by Microsoft and AT&T that they will ask federal regulators to challenge Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for 3-odd billion dollars.

Incidentally, while booth size shouldn’t always be the measure of the relative importance of a company at a trade show, it was telling that Microsoft’s booth was in the “low rent” section and looked like the marketing department had paid for the trip by ransacking their couch for spare change (See the photo I snapped to the right. If you squint your eyes you can kind of make out the Microsoft booth among all of the people who are looking elsewhere). Google’s, by comparison, was along the main corridor and oozing with success, basking in the glow of their giant illuminated logo. Well maybe it was part success and part confidence in knowing that they own each and every one of us.

When Tim O’Reilly pressed Schmidt on the anti-trust issue, his response lacked anything but chutzpah: “Microsoft?! Did you say Microsoft and AT&T? What is the year?”

You could almost hear those poor Microsoft people in the back of the room grinding their teeth. I just hope they’re able to score a ride back to Redmond.

This is a thought-provoking if somewhat pretentious video that was played as an introduction to the keynotes by Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos on Monday, April 16. I captured this on my Casio Exilim so apologies if it’s a little jumpy in spots:

We just heard a Conversation With Jeff Bezos in the main conference room at the Web 2.0 Expo.

To my disappointment, and despite much speculation on Slashdot, there wasn’t much controversy about the One-Click Patent issue.

This is somewhat ironic, given that only a few years ago it was Tim O’Reilly himself who sponsored a bounty for prior art to overturn One-Click. I suppose here in 2007, now deeply entrenched in the Web 2.0 meme, expecting Tim to grill Jeff about One-Click at his own conference is expecting a bit too much.

From the Slashdot article:

Millionaire tech publisher Tim O’Reilly once vowed to torpedo Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent. Against a backdrop of widespread outrage over Amazon’s aggressive use of the patent, O’Reilly created a contest to find prior art to undermine the IP claim, and thus invalidate the patent. However, O’Reilly quietly dropped the campaign; saying he would never disclose it because he trusted Amazon.com CEO Bezos not to use it.

Following that cockle-warming tribute to his integrity, Bezos became a regular star turn at O’Reilly’s web evangelism conferences. These days, O’Reilly’s VC fund AlphaTech Ventures is supported by Bezos, and represented by the same firm of attorneys, Fenwick & West, which is defending Amazon.com against Peter Calveley.

Never accuse these dot.com moguls of permitting ethics to stand in the way of getting rich.

After Jeff gave us an overview of Amazon’s Web Services, Tim O’Reilly threw Jeff a few softballs about the future of S3 and EC2, Jeff’s other startups, and the future of service oriented architecture.

Rather than hearing two rich guys pontificate about the future of web services I’m finding much more substance in the conversation entitled “Built to Last or Built to Sell: Is There a Difference?” with John Battelle (Chairman & Publisher, Federated Media Publishing), Jay Adelson (CEO, Digg/Revision3), Joe Kraus (Co-founder & CEO, JotSpot), and Mena Trott (President, Six Apart).

The Expo floor opens in about 30 minutes. What kind of free stuff will we get? Stay tuned to find out.

This week I’m attending the Web 2.0 Expo put on by O’Reilly at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

The highlight so far today has been a talk by the architect of Flickr comparing the Flickr File System with the Google File System, or at least what limited information is public about the GFS. The talk then moved on to a discussion of Content Delivery Networks (a la Akamai) for large-scale content caching and delivery. What’s your favorite cache expiration policy?

This is the blog of Dan Leslie, all around nice guy and a principal at Reflexions Data, LLC, a web development firm based in Westchester County, New York. We use open source tools to solve business problems with an emphasis on flexible, forward-looking technologies including PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

I’ll be posting on a more or less weekly basis about some of the topics near and dear to my heart, or at least my daily inner monologue. These will tend to coalesce around the intersection of web development, open source, social media, technology, philosophy, politics, culture, and the 21st century business landscape that’s only starting to come into focus.

Even if you think Vernor Vinge is a nutcase (or, as i do, maybe just ahead of his time) you can’t argue with the assertion that the developed world is on the verge of a kind of self-induced evolutionary great leap forward. The wave isn’t just about to crest. It’s accelerating. And we, those privileged first-world souls who are the very ones fueling its development, have a front row seat.

Next week I’ll be reporting from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo happening april 15-18 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.