Only Fools and SEO Operatives

I used to work, to some degree, in IT, running an e-commerce website. It was one of those jobs where you end up doing a bit of everything, for cost and time reasons. Good fun, and I like to think I did it well, but finding any jobs in that sector without lots of specific experience in one area has proved difficult, to say the least. The age of the enthusiastic amateur is over, when it comes to jobs in the Irish web sector at least. Which is a pity, because I like food and shelter.

One web area that I've noticed continues to be a big deal is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, for those of you mercifully ignorant of the jargon. SEO operatives (a hopeful noun, if ever there was one) are in the business of helping your site rise up the search rankings, thus making you rich beyond your wildest dreams...

Most businesses looking to get online have no real understanding of what SEO is, so an 'operative' can more or less tell them any old thing. It's the 1920's seance of modern advertising. To sell your SEO skills is to imply that you can game the system in such a way that your clients can outwit Google, Bing and Yahoo. You can't. It's a fiction that people want to believe, and are happy to pay for, even now, it seems. It's incredibly hard to trick Google. If, somehow, you do (far easier six years ago than now), it will discover the trick and punish you. There are many hundreds of clever people at Google, working every day to make it harder to outwit the system. Which also begs the question: what is the point of pursuing such a strategy? The time necessary to outthink Google is time taken away from making your site worth visiting in the first place and you'll forever be like Trotsky, wandering the internet with one eye over your shoulder, wondering when the ice pick is going to descend.

All this occurred to me as I read this great post, which I heartily recommend if for some tragic reason, you find yourself anywhere near this world, or heaven help you, are presented with an SEO report.

If you want to have a site people go to, you must do the following:

1. Make a good site

2. Format it correctly

3. Submit relevant keywords

4. Keep generating content

5. Try not to be evil

- Please do bear in mind that should we meet and I announce I too, am now a SEO operative, all this was youthful exuberance and not to be taken seriously...

Political Footballs of Our Time #1: Education

I’ve just caught a few minutes of the Vincent Browne show, which is a good deal more time than I ever want to give to a man who sounds like my great aunt after one sherry too many. This evening, Vincent and his merry men were considering the Green party’s latest bid to look like they have a backbone.

It’s funny, watching the Greens and Fianna Fail park their wagons around the campfire while the wild Fine Gaelers, Labour and the rest roar. Let’s be clear, at this point, every Irish person with any possessions at all is guarding them more closely than Gollum and his precious. Looking at our elected leaders, one is tempted to employ the line ‘from my cold, dead fingers’ when it comes to power. Or, more likely: ‘Once I’ve got my green card sorted’.

So, for anyone reading this outside of Ireland, the Green party has won some important concessions from Fianna Fail, their coalition partner, which will allow them to remain in government with a clear conscience. In the language of headlines, this means two things: a carbon tax and no reintroduction of college fees. If anything ever illustrated the extent to which political apathy and class is endemic in Ireland, it was this. In Ireland, Fine Gael & Fianna Fail are basically the same party with different accents. Labour is the guy, who when confronted with the sight of a burning house, demands to check each fireman’s bona fides before they touch a hose. Sinn Fein tell everyone what they want to hear, safe in the knowledge that they never have to actually act on their promises (yet…). Libertas, bless them, are what would emerge if PG Wodehouse was writing about Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts right now.

The Greens were the party you settled for, since you couldn’t vote Lib Dem. They never really stood for anything, other than being green, which is fine, if you’re on a county council, but quite another thing when you’re running a country. Nevertheless, plenty of people thought they might be worth a punt, or at least weren’t Sinn Fein, so off they went. With nary a backward glance at the lessons of history (au revoir, Progressive Democrats), they courageously took two ministerial posts in Brian Cowen’s government. Then, rather unfairly, time chose not to stand still.

So.

In the local elections, predictably, Fine Gael and Labour cleaned up. Just as predictably, Fianna Fail and the Greens were routed. Fianna Fail is very big, and can absorb this sort of thing. The Greens are not, and looked pretty rattled for a while. Of course, as both parties reminded us – this was not a referendum on the government. Heavens, no.

Either way, it was pretty clear that come a general election, Fianna Fail was going to take a heavy hit, perhaps enough to cause one of its rare breaks from power, while the Greens would be the latest recipient of the coalition partner booby prize.

At the same time, we were all trying to figure out what to do about this fine recession we’re having, And by we, I mean Brian Lenihan, and by figure out, I mean he asked the bankers what they would like for Christmas:

“I’ll have a get out of jail free card, please Minister! And if you could see your way to throwing in an ‘oul bonus – the eldest is getting married in the Ritz Carlton and those school fees won’t pay themselves, sure you know how it is.”

Good old Brian decided to put us (and the next seventeen generations) in debt for the rest of our natural lives, based on what intellectual lightweights like Joseph Stiglitz called a “massive transfer of money from the public to bankers”. He used some other words, like “squandering”, “nonsense” and “criminal”, but he can’t have meant them pejoratively, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, over in Iceland (I do have a point, eventually), things are pretty grim. Huge budget deficits, bank insolvency, a mutinous populace, and lots of other bad things combine to make the island look very desperate indeed. But, if you compare them to us, the differences are not so great. Indeed, there are many who believe that Iceland’s early bath will prove to be helpful in the long run.

In Ireland, we chose to hide under the blanket. As we did so, things continued to get worse, and they real bottom, when we finally hit it, will be much lower. The Greens obviously asked good old Brian for advice, because delaying the inevitable, as they have just done will only make their pain all the worse. Barring divine providence, which to be fair, usually did right by Bertie, the Greens will be decimated. It’ll be an election that even Enda could win.

- I’d meant to write something funny and non-political, but it’s hard to avoid fish so obviously in a barrel.

- As a by-the-by: the reintroduction of fees is not a bad idea. What is much, much worse is the lack of finance and attention at primary and second-level education. Pay for kids to go to college, if they can’t afford it. Not to boost enrolments at private secondary schools. Expand and fund the public school sector; teach children well from an early age; invest in special needs education. Then you’ll have a ‘smart economy’, not a collection of smart arses with visa-stamped passports.

- Gosh. I seem to have a bit of an opinion on this. Terribly sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I think it’s a touch of sobriety. Won’t happen again.

Fiddling

Dunno about this, but wasn't really happy with the narrow columns of the earlier layout. It also meant every single embedded video had to be resized, which is a huge pain.

Maybe I should switch to Wordpress and create a proper site.

Sigh.

Bit of autobiography before dinner

I remember, when I was about eleven I was in my friend Barry's house. Barry was a year or so older than me and was therefore that much closer to the bleeding edge of cool than I was. Also, he'd grown up in Pittsburgh until a couple of years before. I had no real conception of that place, but it was in America, so he was cool. Another reason for that was his collection of stuff. In every group I was ever a part of, there was one kid who always had every important product - the best Action Man, a Millennium Falcon, a ZX Spectrum (maybe not so much the last thing) - Barry was one of those guys. Poor guy didn't know many people, having only recently arrived in Ireland, which worked out fine for me.

We were on the cusp of things then (the embarrassing cusp, not any of the good ones), and lots of grown-up ideas started to emerge in a haphazard way, like a drunk explaining Wittgenstein. We didn't know any girls and were too small a group to play any sports, so we drifted to the other teenage one-upmanship game: music.

Barry had been given a ghetto blaster (even then that title was a little anachronistic, but from my point of view 'blaster' = Han Solo's gun, so it worked in a strange kind of way) for Christmas, I think. it was one of those designs that were umbilically linked to their time and place, like that TV in the shape of a motorbike helmet that I used to lust after in Switzers. It looked like it had been fashioned from leftover Ferrari parts. I bet some hipster is even now bidding well over €500 for it on Ebay.

What a lead in. Anyway, we were 'into' music, by which I mean Barry had money and could buy albums, while I had blank cassettes and would copy them off him. This is how I first heard Nirvana, The Simpsons album, Tone Loc's Wild Thing, Snow's Informer, and Vanilla Ice. I was eclectic even then. It was the best sort of relationship for this sort of thing - we both got something out of it: Barry got to be the gatekeeper to cool things, which made him cool; I got lots of free music. It wasn't all that different to collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards or birdwatching, except you could imagine not being laughed at or beaten up for doing it.

Having music always used to be a competitive sport. I think cassettes were the mobile phones of 1989, if you were a preteen. In sixth class, one kid whose name I have long forgotten leapt up the social ladder when he brought in a copy of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. This may be the only time in recorded history that be-permed men in leather trousers could be described as aspirational. It didn't last, sadly. A year later, certain older brothers passed Appetite For Destruction down to their siblings in my class. From that point we also experienced the phenomenon of revisionist history. It was like the opposite of Woodstock. Everyone who claims not to remember it was there.

Music functioned as a social measure in another way. Everything you do as a teenager is geared towards being accepted by your chosen group, not being bothered by everyone else and hopefully, getting together with someone of your chosen sex. If you were good at managing that, congratulations. Don't trip and fall on anything sharp on your way out. Knowing about music (as long as you were careful to know about the right sort - don't discuss Dr. Alban with a guy in a Jane's Addiction t-shirt) was an infinitely more socially acceptable excuse for being otherwise monosyllabic and gauche, than having a comprehensive understanding of Dungeons & Dragons (oh, happy days) or just being crap at sports. If you were rubbish at interaction:

EXAMPLE 1

ATTRACTIVE HUMAN OF PREFERRED PERSUASION: "Hi."

YOU: (Panic behind eyes. Sweat glands activate. Brain leaves through back door) "Hey." (directed at shoes. Own shoes) "Er." (Dives into box of umbrellas)

AHofPP: " ."

So, as you might imagine, AHofPP's reaction would run the gamut from 'Huh?" to "Weirdo". But if you were wearing a Hole/Pixies/Rage Against The Machine/Smashing Pumpkins/Sonic Youth (I'm a creature of my time) t-shirt while you had your social meltdown, then at least you were a nerd in a good way (you hoped). It was also a great way to get into social groups:

EXAMPLE 2

TALLER/BETTER LOOKING/MORE JADED PEER: "Hey. Cool t-shirt."

YOU: "Oh yeah. Thanks man."

TBLMJP: "Yeah, 4 Non Blondes are wicked. Really into them."

Even in college, music was a really handy shorthand for figuring out if someone was on your wavelength, whether they would sleep with you, if their friends might, or if they could introduce you to someone who might sleep with you. It's probably the only time in my life when having an in-depth knowledge of Radiohead B-sides could be described as a pulling tool. Not a great one, mind you.

EXAMPLE 3

PERSON YOU ARE SCORING/VICTIM: "You're really cute."

YOU: "You too. This is like that song, No Surprises. Hang on, I'll put it on. How do you work this CD player?"

The funny thing about having kids about a decade before anyone else your age even considers the idea is that suddenly you have a real timetable. Not like the sort with lectures. You didn't need to change lecturers' nappies, or make sure they didn't drink all the cough medicine. Not every week, anyway. One of the casualties of kids for us was music. The sort of commitment necessary to be on top of what's going on in music was, at least in our house, incompatible with being broke and in charge of an infant.

Becoming deeply uncool from a musical point of view is expected when you grow up and get married. If you're tracking the newest and most adventurous music, you probably don't spend too much time in deepest suburbia.

I'm just really glad I discovered cookery books. Now I can be obsessive about Jamie, Nigel, Rick, Madhur, Nigella, Tamsin, Valentine and the Hairy Bikers. Plus, no matter how out of touch I become, at least I'll enjoy the food.

- Hope that made some sort of sense. Not convinced it did. For everyone studying creative writing, this is what happens when you sit down with a glass of wine and no outline and think "I'll figure something out". I'll write something desperately clever sooner or later, so please do come back.

As a quick aside, I'm now back to being eleven and getting my musical cues from other people. Everything I have listened to in the last three years (at least) has been a result of listening to other friends or (more often) by peeking at their collections. Let's hear it for Facebook. Here are some of the things I've enjoyed over the past while (that have been recommended, innit):

Fear And Loathing In Lisbon

It's been a while since I've written anything of length on this blog. I've been thinking about the Lisbon referendum again lately, because for me it coalesces a number of thoughts I have had about politics and how information is communicated.

For anyone not reading this in Ireland, we had a referendum earlier this year to decide whether we as a state wished to sign up to the particulars of the Lisbon Treaty. Without getting into the for and against arguments, the treaty aims to further cement the EU as a federal body, makes the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding within member states and generally speaking brings each country closer to singing from the same hymn sheet. As you can imagine, there are those who think this is a good thing, citing the value of cooperation and that in a world with immense superpowers like the US, China and Russia, the whole of Europe is greater than its component parts. On the other hand, there are those who see more than a shadow of the totalitarian state, or less hysterically, a gradual transferral of individual power (& hence, liberty) to a central organisation. Effectively, it's the big tent approach versus the small government (or libertarian) thesis.

The reason we are having these referendums at all (not every country in the EU does) stems from Crotty versus An Taoiseach in 1987. This resulted in a supreme court ruling that forces the government to ask permission for any significant change to Ireland/EEC (EU as was) treaties, since such alterations would be in effect amendments to the Constitution, that wily document crafted by Dev while the rest of the world was looking west at the National Socialists in 1937. With me so far? If you've ever been to a parent-teacher meeting, a union meeting, or any get together that invites a mass discussion, you may already expect what happens in such cases. Any issue, no matter how general, becomes deconstructed in an ever-expanding sea of minutiae, like cells in a petri dish. So for the 'No' camp, the Lisbon referendum can be about any number of tangential objections that exist on placards, cheerfully removed from context. Signing up means reduced power, increased military presence, abortion, divorce, immigrants, the death knell for Irish farming. Here's Libertas's current poster:

Look at the language of the poster. "Irish Democracy 1916-2009? Vote No!"; the sun, disappearing into dark clouds that rise up from the bottom of the picture; in the foreground an authentic-looking Irish child with startling green eyes and (of course) red hair. This is designed to do two things at once: stir a patriotic sense of pride for the mother country, and to be a call to action, invoking, with 1916, the be-pedestaled martyrs for freedom, and connecting a vote against this treaty as a continuation of those earlier actions.

How about the 'yes' vote? In Ireland, it is supported by all the major political parties. This doesn't necessarily mean automatic success. It was the same in the previous referendum and it didn't end well there either. The yes camp has two problems that don't trouble the no campaigners. First, most people don't really understand what the treaty is or what it implies. Whether because the treaty itself is a typically arcane legal document, or that our media has failed to communicate the gist of it effectively, most people have wildly differing ideas of what it means. So you have a situation where the truth belongs to he who shouts loudest. Last time it was Libertas and Sinn Fein. This time, more sinister groups such as Coir have added their voice.

Second, the yes campaigners suffer from being the captains of the Titanic. Ireland, though we style ourselves irreverent and rejoice in the narrative of the Rising and nationalism (700 years and all that) is, more so than Britain, a nation of shopkeepers.

We more or less invented the idea of ourselves as Celtic firebrands. Our national sports and dance are largely a construct of the Gaelic League, a movement that took inspiration from the Belle Époque in France, in an attempt to radicalise a population that was not nearly as desperate to leave the United Kingdom as later thinkers would have it. Our political parties all sit on more or less the same fence, right in the middle, leaning right or left as the wind blows. So we can have a centre right party that has been in power uninterrupted (barring a three-year gap) since 1989. This party can go into coalitions with other political persuasions with barely a shift in the direction of the ship - in fact, most coalition partners emerge very much the worse for the experience, while Fianna Fail sails on into another glorious sunset. We like stability. For years one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe, we prefer today to be as yesterday and tomorrow to be more of the same.

The problem for the government is that the weather forecasts are gloomier day by day. Allegations of cronyism and corruption were dismissed in years past, since everything was going well, but not anymore. Suddenly the years of being in power are not indications of trustworthiness and reliability, but Exhibit A in the trial of the driver who was asleep at the wheel. The current strategy for rescuing Ireland from the recession, being a variant on 'rob the poor to feed the rich' as far as many people are concerned, contributes to a confidence meltdown when it comes to trusting their advice on the election. Even the opposition parties who are for the election have similar problems.

So how do they convince us? They can't scare us, although there is the odd half-hearted effort:

As it is, support for the yes camp appears to be (tentatively) the majority view. In the light of their failure in the local elections, which is likely to have been the largest shift in Irish voter loyalties for some time to come, Libertas and Sinn Fein may have to resign themselves to being the lone voice at the dinner party, or the crank at the bar. They can win, sometimes, on specific issues and they can count on a certain bed of support (as can any party), but mass support thus far eludes them, because for better or worse, we are not a country of ideologies, but a collection of stories, some true, some almost true, but always - always - regular and timetabled.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes this Friday. By all means comment and tell me how wrong I am about any of this. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this video, which you may find instructive, given the eleventh commandment: Thou Shall Not Question Stephen Fry.