I stumbled upon the coolest post today covering the top 8 consumer robots, and I was mesmorized by this Pleo Dinosaur robot. This robot, created by Ugobe, started by one of the creators of the Furby, is able to respond to so many things using their “sophisticated sensors” and camera, that it comes out pretty convincingly real.
After watching the video, I instantly went to Amazon.com and pre-ordered two (they aren’t cheap, $350 each, please note that I don’t care if you’d spend your money some other way, I’m a gadget/toy freak); one for me and one for a good friend of mine having a baby near Christmas. I figured, great gift for the baby (although they recommend ages 8 and higher, they’ll have to live dangerously and he’s a techy, so he’ll love it) and also great holiday gift for my two sons.
If you want to get seriously geeky (and I know you do), Ugobe is gonna make this open-source and will publish a developers kit, so you can tinker with the program and have him do all kinds of things.
Like SEO.
I will train Pleo (who I will rename “Giuseppe”) to accomplish SEO tasks and work his way up to creating Search engine strategies. I figure, there are now so many crappy search professionals out there that I KNOW I can create my own robotic version that will most likely do a better job.
Hakia, the semantic search engine, now features a new peer-to-peer feature dubbed “Mo” (yes, just like our loveable friend from the Three Stooges) where a person searching for any type of information on Hakia will also have the opportunity to connect with other Hakia search engine users that entered similar search queries.
For example, if you happen to search for “best SEO in Boston” on most search engines, you might be flooded with outdated and spammy sites. Well, Hakia now allows you to talk to another person looking for the same thing by clicking on a “Meet Others who asked the same query” button, and you’ll arrive at a message board where someone already claims that Frank Antonellis is the greatest of all SEOs (okay, it was me, but you get the idea from this example).
It is a clever way to get people to interact with each other and to boost the social aspect and popularity of the search engine so it isn’t just “another” search engine. Bravo!
Now, I wonder if someone is searching for “best looking SEO” for me to spam?
Two things: one Search, one Sopranos. We’ll start with the most important:
According to ‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase just now, after breaking his long silence after the controversial ending that gave most Americans “agita,” he is now saying that Tony Soprano was never murdered on the hit cable tv show. He also sticks up for the fictional mob boss after seeing how all of America was outraged that he never got whacked.
According to Chase, the people ”had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice’… The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”
I think David Chase is getting a little excited here over something that people aren’t talking about anymore, and who cares what people thought about it then. I thought it was brilliant to leave the whole country hanging and banging their TV sets because of the black screen. Though I will say, Tony Soprano could have used a guy like Chase in his own crew, come to think about it.
Search - Been doing a lot of aggressive social media optimization with sites, and I have seen some significant results. My conclusion at this point is that a social media campaign can generate relevant traffic, create backlinks, and should co-exist with your existing SEO strategy. Producing Digg-worthy content and optimizing it is a lot more fun than setting good 301 Redirects and all of the technical things that a good SEO needs to do, but this is definitely one of the next phases after cleaning up a site and creating relevant content that adds a lot more fun to the never-ending process.
If you have a blog (add one to your site if you don’t), and are not sure how to begin, I would recommend choosing two social networking sites to focus on, and it would be Digg and StumbleUpon to submit to. There are other ways to boost the amount of votes and diggs as you go along, and creating “Digg-worthy” copy is just one of them. Testing and monitoring results can show you a lot of data and significant results. Feel free to drop a line if I can help with any tips.
As Journey best said, “Don’t Stop Believin”. Okay, that was lame.
Always controversial John Calcanis believes that his newly released human-edited Mahalo search engine is going to offer top search results and be the next top engine that people will use alongside Google. Big name investors like Mark Cuban are on board, so it is possible that we will see his entire Dallas Mavericks basketball team special guest star as 12 of the existing human editors after being eliminated (embarrassed) quickly from the NBA playoffs.
My question is, will the search query “why did Dirk Nowitzki choke during the playoffs” be fairly answered?
The whole premise of building a team of 40 human editors that will hand-build quality search results for only the top queries (human bandwith issues) to combat spammy search results has about as much appeal as Mr. Garrison’s controversial but “extra enjoyable” method of steering his newly invented “Segway” transport in that South Park episode when he was fed up with long lines at the airport.
Basically, I would rather take my chances weeding through a few spammy machine-driven Google search results and find the handful of results that are most relevant to my search over some editors (that might not be an expert in a particular topic) telling me what sites are most relevant.
We all know Google doesn’t have perfect search results, and they have assigned experts (top educational institutions and experts in the field) to rate sites via their Google Coop system for important search topics such as Health related-topics. Unfortunately, these results are not featured on the same results page and the featured-links to see these hand-crafted results often goes unseen and mistaken for ads when people are searching Google for information.
Danny Sullivan makes a great point when he says “Overall, the best solution probably isn’t all human or all machine but some combination of the two.”
Until then, if Mahalo’s algo team can give me a better reason than Google or Yahoo! on why the Boston Celtics got screwed with the 5th pick of that 2007 NBA lottery, I’ll jump on board cause us boys in Boston are seriously searching for answers. Any thoughts Dirk No-Win-Ski?
then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice’… The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”
top queries (human bandwith issues) to combat spammy search results has about as much appeal as Mr. Garrison’s controversial but “extra enjoyable” method of steering his newly invented “Segway” transport in that South Park episode when he was fed up with long lines at the airport. 
