The rot begins: Miley Cyrus the young actress/singer had 2 million followers on Twitter – BEFORE SHE TURNED OFF HER ACCOUNT.
Miley gives a very coherent explanation on why she had to say adios to the microblogging craze.
So with this one out , who will be next? and importantly will the flattened twitter graph pick up again (I think not…)
Going flat - oh dear
BTW – I do think Twitter is amazing, but it needs to distill, ie. there has to be mass unfollowing so users can focus on the people they are interested in, as opposed to scoring numbers because they have X followers.
I also see it as an amazing ‘portable’ chat space where memes can evolve rapidly , leading to potent communication – and then die to emerge somewhere else coalescing around another idea or event. Twitter trendsmap will give you a feel for this.
Twitter trendsmap
There is an addendum to the Miley twitter axing:
“To my dearest fans,
You all are the closest thing to my heart & it breaks my spirit to hear that some of you feel neglected since I deleted my twitter. It was a wonderful way to stay connected to you & I really felt like during that time we became very much like friends. Twitter is a beautiful thing if used for the right reason. I love my job so much that it is hard to believe sometimes that it is considered “working. But, in the end it is still a business and I do need some sort of a “normal” life as well. I often complain to the ones closest to me that I don’t seem to have much of a private life any more and part of that is my fault. How can I whine about my life being to public if I am the one telling the world what I am doing? Some things in my life need to say in my life only and not on some gossip site. I never want any of my fans to feel like I don’t love them or care about them BUT, sharing the same love and respect for me I need to have the space to grow as a person and make some mistakes. I need to be able to live and learn in private. I never want to quit entertaining it is my life, my love, and my passion but I can’t have my personal life be other peoples entertainment.
Twitter is not the only thing I am cutting back on. This is not an attack against this particular site, I just think kids all over the world could maybe take a little vacation from Cyberspace. My problem with the internet is it makes negativity so available. It allows people to anonymously hurt others without any consequences. That is not the real world. Not only that, but if we spent more time enjoying what we are doing besides tweeting about it, we would enjoy our lives a whole lot more. I have very little free time and the moments that I do have I should be spending with my family and friends and loving every minute of their company.
Now of course rumors have been started that Liam is the reason that I deleted my twitter. I hope my true fans know how stupid that is. I had mentioned to him that someone made a fake twitter with his name and we both starting chatting about how ridiculous it is. Liam is a wonderful friend and he did not try to make me delete my page, he just helped me realize how much time I was wasting on that site.
I really hope you all know how much you mean to me and how much I truly care about each and every one of you. I will keep in touch through Mileyworld and MileyCyrus.com as I did before twitter. I love you all.
Shame there is so much ‘snake oil’ at the moment, because there are good bits in social and once you understand the core of social i.e. relationships and shared experience, then it all makes sense. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then this Youtube video will enlighten you: (This one is not actually a joke)
Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?
A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.
Q: Who are these human raters?
A: They’re not volunteers. They’re paid, through contractors from third parties. We look for a basic level of education and communication skills, and in particular our one requirement is that they need to be able to some level in English. Other than that, what we’re really looking for is a broad cross-section of folks. Not a technology background, just like to use the Internet. We have some screening around testing of their ability to do some of the tasks we want them to do and follow the instructions.
Q: How important are the human raters vs. the more automated methods? And do you get alerts if search results or search behavior is not what you expect?
A: The human evaluators are pretty important for us today. The more automated or user behavior/click-based things really give you complementary kinds of data. Both have noise in them: Human evaluators make mistakes. Clicks are hard to interpret; people click or don’t click for all kinds of reasons.
It’s well worth taking some time out to trawl through this lot since it will give you a much better idea of how Google uses humans to help it’s search engine.
I was on a speaking gig the other night and the title of the talk was ‘Search is Dead, Long Live Search‘. So I was up with:
Ciarán Norris – Head of Social Marketing & Director, Invention at MindShare (social media)
Teddie Cowell – SEO Director, Guava (SEO agency)
William Tunstall-Pedoe – CEO & Founder, True Knowledge
Alan Patrick – Consultant,Broadsight
CHAIR: Jon Myers – Head of Search / Associate Director, MediaVest
I've got something important to say!
My big theme was around how Caffeine ( yes that one again ) is going to change the landscape where spamming is going to get tougher and tougher. Along with that will come the split out between:
- Boring commercial brand owned stuff that users don’t particularly want to look (you pay for prominence via PPC)
- Interesting stuff written by individuals about those boring brands, where they help makes sense of what is the best consumer wise. (you have to have something interesting to say & be on the consumer side as a brand)
For anyone not familiar with the BIG idea, it comes from a site called cluetrain.com where they say ‘markets are conversations’. Think of amazon and its reviews, then think ‘web wide’ where forums and ‘real conversations’ happen and imagine Google filtering the results so you get those ‘conversations’.
An interesting screen grab:
Its that red box!
So from trying a few searches, the multi links are still generally at the bottom of the page, but assuming users like this stuff, you will see that block rising and you will see stuff like this crowd out the ranking where the ‘brand sites’ used to live.
Here is my message from the Chinwag night. “If you are a boring brand, or not that clever with ‘social engineering’ I.e. creating a footprint so Google thinks your site is important to their users – then you will pay dearly through PPC. ”
And lest you forget, Google is a public company and so is only interested in sustainable maximisation of profits.
By the way, I do think there is a BIG future for SEO with Google, but it will take a very different route than the hack/spam route we hear so much about. And honestly I’m only beginning to really figure it out. [Read more →]
I did a very time consuming powerpoint presentation for wordcamp UK on seo for wordpress, where I went through all the best plugins I have used over the years for SEO.
I’m glad to say it’s been picked up by an SEO guy in Malaysia who give my PPT some praise – so thanks for the respect Ruhan
About: I work within a global online marketing team as an SEO manager for Betfair, a large online betting business based in London UK. Any opinions given are my personal views and not those of Betfair (my employer)
