SearchInfluence

Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

I am a man of simple pleasures. I love Internet marketing, terribly bad action films, and stunt queens. So when I learned of Anik Singal’s Lethal Commission I knew I had to watch it.

What is Lethal Commission? From its trailer it is dubbed as the world’s first full-length Internet marketing movie. In actuality it is the most meta-tastic and downright embarrassing way to sell a product I’ve ever seen. To save myself some keystrokes, let’s just bypass the incoherent plot (involving a portly Indian spy stopping some sort of third-world Paypal thievery) and get into the meat and potatoes of what Singal is selling this time around.

Jeez, it’s been practically seven minutes since I checked for new notifications on Facebook. Refresh, nothing. Ohhh, there’s a picture of a kid I vaguely knew from high school and now he’s linking his tweets into the Facebook feed, let me click over there. Do I follow Kim Kardashian or just Khloe? Any new tweets from the Biebs?

When it comes to the world of SEO and general web technology, some of us are so jaded we think we’ve heard of everything. Phones we talk to? Check. Virtual reality? Won’t be long until we’re standing on the holodeck. And as far as SEO, everyone and their mom is on deck calling themselves “social media experts” and promising they can make your business blast to the top of the search results.

Thursday, Google acquired Carnegie-Mellon University spinoff project PittPatt, which specialized in facial recognition software for businesses like GE. We’ll be a bit naïve here and take Google at their word when they claim they won’t implement full facial recognition software without “strong privacy protections” and intentionally excluded the feature from Google Goggles. It seems clear that Google will use the technology to enhance video quality and would otherwise be caught in crass doublespeak during a time to play it straight.

It is striking that Google seems utterly unfazed by two government commissions investigating it for its aggressive vertical integration into niche search and social media.