I met up with a friend today. This guy is a web developer at a small agency, but he mentioned that he’d been doing some SEO stuff as well. I asked him the best place to get started, since whenever I’ve tried looking up basic intros to the topic, I just get overloaded with information.

His recommendation? The Google Webmaster Guidelines. Basically, Google’s algorithm is so advanced now that techniques like keyword stuffing are unlikely to work. The best strategy is to make your website fit what Google wants, ie, providing high-quality information in a logically structured why. I like to imagine Google as a professor who has learned to detect the students that try and cheat or take easy shortcuts. To get high grades in Dr Google’s class you have to actually learn the material.

I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars
They criticized me for it, yet they all yell “holla”

Jay-Z, “Moment of Clarity”

I highly recommend the blog of Ben Horowitz, a serial entrepeneur turned VC. His posts are consistently great, and he often talks about lessons from the frontlines of building companies.

Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.

The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

http://bhorowitz.com/2012/06/15/the-struggle/

Every economy that has moved peasants to an export-orientated manufacturing economy has had rapid economic growth. Great Britain industrialized at about 1 percent per annum. It was slow because all the technology needed to be invented for the first time. During the 19th Century US economic growth – once started – ran about twice the rate of the UK. They copied the technology which was faster than inventing it. Later economies (eg Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea) went later and faster. As a general rule the later you industrialized the faster you went – as the ease of copying went up. In the globalized internet age copying foreign manufacturing techniques and seeking global markets is easier than ever – so China is growing faster than any prior economy.

From “How the Chinese Kleptocracy Works”: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-chinese-kleptrocracy-works-2012-6#ixzz1xPktkXkF

I came across three articles today that discussed a similar theme.

Business Insider, Why Grilled Cheese Is The Next Frontier Of Technology

It’s the same thing with McDonald’s. Each burger is really a piece of technology: each ingredient has to be thought through in terms of how it can be procured, sliced and diced, frozen, taken to restaurants all over the world, and then assembled on demand quickly and effortlessly, and how it fits into the whole chain and the company’s offering and brand.

Forbes, The Rise of Developeronomics

This means that if you are in apparently more fundamental professions — perhaps you are a baker with a small business — you are effectively useless, not because bread isn’t important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage. If your bakery doesn’t have an iPhone app, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp.

 

Peter Thiel/Marc Andreesen, Stanford Startup Class Notes

Peter Thiel: Your claim is that software is eating the world. Tell us how you see that unfolding over the next decade.

Marc Andreessen:  There are three versions of the hypothesis: the weak, strong, and strongest version.

The basic, weak form is that software is eating the tech/computer industry. The value of computers is increasingly software, not hardware. The move to cloud computing is illustrative. There’s been a shift to high volume, low cost models where software controls. It’s very different from the old model.

The strong form is that software is eating many other industries that have not been subject to rapid technological change. Take newspapers, for example. The newspaper industry has been pretty much the same, technologically, for about 500 years! There had been no significant technological disruption since the 15^thcentury. And then boom! The digital transformation happens, and the industry frantically has to try and cope with the change.

The strongest form is that, as a consequence of all this, Silicon Valley type software companies will end up eating everything. The kinds of companies we build in the Valley will rule pretty much every industry. These companies have software at their very core. They know how to develop software. They know the economics of software. They make engineering the priority. And that’s why they’ll win.

It’ll be interesting to see how this unfolds over the next 10-20 years.

Pop quiz: what was happening in America during the fall of the Roman Empire?

I found this interesting link the other day: http://geacron.com/home-en/. It’s an interactive map of the different states and nations at different time periods. Fun to play around with, and makes you think about some of the less-well-known empires and epochs of history.

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.

However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

From George Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf.