Guest Bloggers
The success and stature of the DC and Baltimore markets depends upon the collaboration of our digital strategists and online media professionals. Below are periodic perspectives from Mid-Atlantic Digital Media Network members.
Is Google PageRank a Useful Metric?
With search engines becoming more streamlined, strategies and optimization techniques start to fall by the way side. What may have once been a useful tool or metric is now seen as geriatric. But this is the digital landscape we live in; technologies evolve and the elasticity of a specific metric or tool tells the life cycle of each resource. It is with this understanding that I pose my discussion point: Is Google PageRank a useful metric? Two time-relevant articles share opposing views to Google PageRank:
Mike Volpe (@HubSpot) sees Google PageRank as irrelevant. He writes ‘Don’t worry about PageRank. You should get found by creating great content, optimizing that content for search and promoting that content in social media and then convert these website visitors into leads and customers…’
On the other end of the spectrum is Marshall Sponder’s (@webmetricsguru) post, ‘Google PageRank really does translate into more Search Engine Traffic. In summation, he creates an argument that PageRank has some life left in it.
But as Avinash Kaushik (@avinashkaushik) explains ‘gloried data puking, hoping someone will be impressed’ seems to happen all too often with the sheer quantity of tools and metrics available. Choosing the correct one(s) to analyze and measure success can be overwhelming (esp. since so many are ignored or may be no longer useful), yet it is vital.
Is Google PageRank a useful metric within your online toolbox, or is it something which needs to be extricated from our digital vocabularies?
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Your Data is Not Remarkable
Perhaps you have seen the thoughtful work of David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. In Kirkpatrick’s NPR interview, he really demonstrated a deep understanding of the social, political and technological intersections of social media and eloquently summed up why (I think) internet privacy is a very thin debate. Kirkpatrick said:
“As the quantity of data about us grows, the fact that any given piece of data about us might be exposed in the world probably becomes less problematic over time because similar data is increasingly being exposed about everyone else we know – therefore it’s less remarkable.”
In short, by virtue of its mass adoption, Facebook is the telephone book of 2010+. So I pose the questions: Will the rate of abuse on Facebook be greater than that of the White Pages? Greater than what is already available about each of us through Equifax or Experian?
Believing that a conventional use of Facebook is a risk to civil liberties is akin to the self-aggrandizing performance of each perfectly crafted Tweet or Status Update that we put up about ourselves. (C’mon, I know you spent a good 10-15 minutes on that one about the last episode of Lost…)
Ironically, if we’re worried about privacy, we should all post more Status Updates, join more Groups, download more Applications. Because as Kirkpatrick mentioned during the interview, there is a “certain anonymity in obscurity.”
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