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culturekitchen's "The Year In Keywords"

Well, our internal statistics for 2007 are finally tallied and we have some interesting data and insights about our work.

Most people who stumble upon our site are not looking for articles on politics. It seems like most are trolling for a sexual thrill --or so it seems by the keywords and phrases people have used to stumble upon our site.

I used to think it was funny but after years of looking at the site's stats and knowing that we don't write pornography, all I can think of is that the search engines definition of "optimization" is what we would call in the real world (and if we were talking about real people), plain and simple prejudice.

Search engines (and I am mostly referring here to Google), have decided that this site deals with a certain kind of material and thusly pushes our content up the top of pages that they have decided to have our site ranked in "with prejudice". Meaning that, the better our ranking in a search page, the more prejudiced or biased the search bot learns to be towards our site.

I am not one to believe that software, especially software that presumes to mimick human thought processes (but only faster) are above malice. After all, code and the software that is created with it is the product of the human mind. It is just another form of expression, another language.

Searchbots are meant to find pages relevant to the strings of text "fed" to them by web surfers. At no point are they meant to make sense of the search string based on the context of a site.

I could go on forever on this one and will eventually.

In the end, what I find incredibly interesting about these search strings is that, especially when there are several strings "tied for the same ranking", when read together, they sound like really bad emo poems.

The top 10 rankings for search keywords and/or phrases


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Words to live by

Nobody needs to be told how to use the lounge chair. "Users" of any age, background, or degree of sophistication can immediately comprehend it: take it in, in almost all of its details, at a single glance. It is self-revealing to the point of transparency, and the same can be said of most domestic furniture: you lie on a bed, put books and DVDs and tchotchkes on shelves, laptops and flowers and dinner on tables. Did anyone ever have to tell you this?

The same cannot be said of the iPod - which, remember, is one of the best-thought-out and comparatively simple digital artifacts ever developed, demonstrating market-leading insight into users and what they want to do with the things they buy. Take off your power user hat, try to imagine life without the chops you've earned over the course of your involvement with these complex artifacts, and you'll see that to people encountering an iPod for the first time it's not obvious what it does, or how to get it to do that. It may not even be obvious how to turn the thing on.

You don't have to configure the chair, or set preferences. You needn't worry about compatible file formats. You can take it out of one room or house and drop it into another, and it still works exactly the same way as it did before, with no adjustment. It never reminds you that a new version of its firmware is available, and that certain of its features will not be available until you do choose to upgrade. As much as I love the iPod, none of this can be said for it.


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