Two of the sharpest tools in the Search Engine Optimization “SEO” shed talk about the evolution of SEO in an April 2009 interview of Ralph Tegtmeier by Aaron Wall at Aaron’s excellent blog  ”SEO Book“.

Although I don’t endorse some of the SEO tactics they discuss, it’s important that everybody has a better understanding of what very advanced folks are doing to adapt to the many changes in search over the past several years.    Also very interesting is the discussion about SEO morality.    I’m not as critical of Google as Ralph is in this interview but I do agree that Google’s dominance has severerly distorted the way the internet would ideally assign rankings to sites.    The best example of this in my view is the overzealous use of “NoFollow” tags, which are allowing older, inferior, highly SEOd content to trump fresh, high quality, new content because the incoming links to that content are too often nofollowed, coming in from Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress,  Flickr, and other major sites that are automatically nofollowing links.

Google would say this is necessary to avoid the kind of manipulations that don’t serve users, but I remain skeptical this approach has done more good than harm, and certainly Google’s “very low transparency” working philosophy has stunted the growth of quality content.    I know this for a fact because my own decisions in developing content have changed greatly over the years knowing that quality is often not  rewarded, and site downrankings are so confusing that it leads one to abandon sites rather than improve them.

Social media gives us a wonderful opportunity to use human input to screen out junk, and I think better use of this by Google would open up newer, better sites that currently fall well under the radar screens.

technology Aaron Wall, fantomaster, Google, optimization, SEO, SEObook

As noted before I think the two most promising “Artificial Intelligence” projects are Blue Brain and DARPA SyNAPSE and I’m happy to see in this Boston blog “Neurdon” by some of the SyNAPSE project folks a few of the DARPA bucks going to elaborate on some of the technical goals of the SyNAPSE project:

SyNAPSE seeks not just to build brain-like chips, but to define a fundamentally distinct form of computational device. These new devices will excel at the kinds of distributed, data-intensive algorithms that complex, real-world environment require…

It’s very exciting stuff this “build a brain” competition.  Although I think the theoretical approach taken by Blue Brain is more consistent with what little we know about how brains work, I’d guess SyNAPSE’s access to DARPA funding will give it the long term edge in terms of delivering a functional thinking machine in the 15-20 year time frame most artificial intelligence researches believe we’ll need for that ambitious goal.

My optimism is greater than many because I think humans have rather dramatically exaggerated the complexity of their own feeble mental abilities by a quite a … bit, and I’d continue to argue that consciousness is much more a function of quantity than quality.

Another promising development in the artificial brain area is in Spain where  Blue Brain project partner universities are working on the project:  Cajal Blue Brain

Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology, Singularity, science, technology AI, Artificial Intelligence, blue brain, brain, cajal blue brain, SyNAPSE