It’s the time of year when awards are handed out for jobs well done. The search engine marketing industry likes to recognize people and web sites in this way. It’s easy to suggest nominees when the category their work or web site falls into fits neatly into a niche.

Not so easy when the person straddles several industries, or the work they do is exceptional for perhaps their own company or local community, rather than being globally recognized. For the Search Engine Journal’s Search Blogs Awards of 2007, the same sites you see every year are there, with a few new breakout ones. I was pleased to see these few new folks were noted.

The forums I founded, Cre8asiteforums, was nominated in the forums category. I’m happy someone nominated it because the forums Community and the moderating staff deserve acknowledgment for their dedication in time and knowledge share. It’s a group project that many people enjoy being part of.

The web site I covered search marketing conferences for as a volunteer, Search Engine Roundtable, was nominated for a few spots, including “Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007″. Owned by Barry Schwartz, he was the first person to do what is now called “live blogging” at search engine marketing conferences. Several years into it, others have joined in to do the same thing, but none can claim to have the dedicated reporting team that he does. I spent over $5000 of my own money as a volunteer to cover conferences for Barry last year. He’s managed to attract some big name people to report for his site. Several of them are speakers at conferences or persons whose companies were already sending them to the conferences and one of his employees, Tamar, covers sessions.

No Awards for Support or Inspiration

I was disappointed to see no categories for volunteers, support persons and inspiration.

There were plenty of people who did amazing things this year like starting educational programs, forming local organizations, organizing dinners to recognize peers and launching new tools.

I’ve never taken a salary from Cre8asiteforums. Rather, I gave away $1600 in ad revenue to educational programs, search engine optimization internships, contests and student certification sponsorships. Not a lot, but it felt right to help the SEM industry by putting money into improving skills.

I was a volunteer judge and prize sponsor for Marketing Pilgrim’s writing contest. I write for free for a print magazine on usability for the SEM industry and write for several blogs as a volunteer. I’m the volunteer webmaster for two local web sites to help my town.

In a marketing oriented industry, volunteering and donating back to the industry aren’t recognized as honorable deeds. With a few exceptions, what gets attention are those who become overnight millionaires, have figured out how to manipulate processes to earn a ton of money for themselves or those who work for and represent big-name companies.

Inspiration is important. It keeps us feeling positive about our work and who we are. How many awards sites acknowledge inspiration or creativity?

The popular series that Li Evans ran all year about women in the SEO/M industry was started because I questioned why these women weren’t acknowledged for their contributions.

Some other bloggers had a nice run of posts and recognition when I stood up against Digg. I even let one of them have access to my server logs to be written about and used in a presentation.

Usability and user centered, persuasive design are making inroads into the SEM industry and I believe I’ve had something to do with that. When I griped that Danny Sullivan’s new Sphinn social site didn’t have a place for usability for the marketers, he added the category. Our verbal exchange made for some great news fodder for a few weeks this year.

I was featured on video twice at search engine marketing conferences and in one podcast for the SEM industry, as a usability spokesperson. However, there are two people who speak on usability and seo at conferences, who can afford to travel around the world, so they get the recognition that comes with that.

In the marketing industry, it may not be what you do that matters. You have to be seen constantly talking about it to be remembered.

When I reviewed the list of nominees at SEJ, I noticed some missing names of people. A few of them had amazing adventures this year, like when Jennifer Laycock went up against the pork industry. She handled that with such grace and professionalism. Fantomaster came back to help rescue Threadwatch. Bob Massa threw himself into his new advice web site to reach a new generation of folks.

Some old friends are fading away too. I know they’re around, but they’re no longer fighting to be out there in the public eye. Rather, they’re working in the background, taking their time on projects that fill them with personal rewards.

To Shana, Marty and Brendan, I wish you many congratulations on breaking out into the SEM industry this year. It’s been fun watching you. You’re each a winner to me.

Next?

I’ve had weeks of mixed feelings about 2008. It’s the year I turn 50. I was 37 when I built my first web site and started down the SEO path. In 2008 I guide Cre8asiteforums into new territory for its 10th year (it was once a club in Yahoo!, launched in 1998.) My days of paying my own way to “live blog” are done. It’s clear my family needs me here and they need me to be earning money for us, not giving it away to support two industries I love.

So I’d like to end this year by sending a big “Thank you” to Sphinn’s programmers, the many folks who organize, agonize and setup conferences, (Brett, Joe, Danny, Chris and the Kevin’s), the bloggers who write from their hearts (Donna, Tamar, emoms Wendy) and those who churn out constant humor (Lisa, Susan), the brilliant support for small businesses (Matt M., Jen, Robert), the launch of Catalyze, Li and Bill, Jill, Christine and all the Cre8asiteforums Staff for their unwavering friendship and support, Rand, a remarkable friend, and my husband Eric for his extreme feats of understanding and moral support.

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Agree/Disagree? Cre8asiteforums has begun a discussion - 2007 Awards For Support, Volunteers And Inspiration.

Wishing my friends, subscribers and loyal readers a peaceful, laughter-filled holiday season. I may have some time next week to drop in here, but if not, stay tuned. I’ll show up, sooner or later…

In the meantime, there are lots of end of year blog awards events going on. My blog never fits into a category, so I sleep during the all ruckus.

Or hide in my Christmas stocking.

Much sexier.

Every day my blog posts are ripped off, cannibalized, reposted and credit is not given to me as the original writer. It’s done by “scraping” content, scripts that insert keywords and a new form of my post is spit out, either in full or in part.

In many cases credit to this blog, the original source, is not given. Not my name, not my domain. No link. But my sentences are there on their blog.

A fellow blogger has inquired about this practice at Cre8asiteforums, in a thread called Is This Blog Calling Me A Personification Of Evil? She describes a blog that has reposted her original content but in a way that is nothing like what she wrote:

Their post contains the following colorful language:

“admin excreted this detailing eBay

this quite hilliarious author

I can implore this personification of evil to dig deeper into what their niche may be writing about eBay.“

We recognized the practice and informed her that her blog is being scraped. The author of the blog who scraped her blog discovered our thread and wrote this in defense:

Congrats, you found my little experimental “AI” blog.

Yes, the “article review” category is auto-generated, sort of like the old ELIZA program. Like ELIZA, which was a parody of a non-directional psychotherapist, the generator program is a parody of a rambling and ranting blogger.

It reads the Google Blog Search RSS feed based on keywords and generates a random article. I manually select which articles to upload based on title quality.

Unlike the typical “here’s a quick excerpt” splog, which you and your friends at Cre8asite Forums have no doubt seen, I don’t generate bothersome trackbacks. That’s both useless and annoying. You get a free backlink out of the deal, which is always helpful to your site.

There’s nothing intelligent about stealing and there’s no possible credible excuse for taking someone’s original blog content and reposting it without permission or without proper credit. In my own case, my blog doesn’t host ads, but my content is used on other blogs that do.

Every day I find links to my own blog posts, digested and thrown back out in some insane new format credited to names I’ve never heard of, in some cases not linked here at all, and hosted on domains that are no more than a keyword puzzle-game.

What is the value to original blog authors to get a link back to their own work from a version of it that inserts content they didn’t write and in some cases, credits someone else for writing it?

This is yet another example of links hysteria and page rank score greed gone too far.

Okay.

Here you go.

Have at it.

I wrote this one just for you.

……………………………………………

Example of my blog post, shortly after being posted today. This screen shot is from an adoption scraper site.

I was young the day John F. Kennedy was killed but I knew the world had changed. I remember my college house mates and I huddled in shock the day John Lennon was shot and killed. Maybe it was the influence of those two tragic events because on the very day I first saw the Internet I thought to myself, “This can help create peace (cre8pc).”

Next year Cre8asiteforums will be 10 years old for me. For most everyone else, it’s younger. But for me, it’s 10 because I launched its first incarnation, the Cre8pc Website Promotion club, in Yahoo! in 1998. Its present forums-like format came about in 2002.

As the forums and I grow older together, something has been nagging me. I am not doing what I set out to do in 1995 when I decided to become a webmaster. I’m not consciously participating in creating a good world. I’m not doing enough of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing and of course, every day I wonder what the heck that something is.

I decided one day that I’m not alone. There are others like myself who are using the Internet to do good things for other people, places, countries, kids, organizations, clubs, animals, the planet, parents, business support, etc. Who are they? Where are they? What can I do to help? What can they can teach me? How do we connect? Are their efforts worth it?

In January, Cre8asiteforums will have news on our new non-profit forum. We will showcase people and companies devoted to marketing non-profit organizations and web sites. We want to explore who they are, what they do, how they do it, who they do it for and why they care.

But why wait until January?

I Have Great Friends

First, is Elizabeth Able who, despite personal hardships, has a blast rallying for causes and educating along the way. She’s launched a meme, called Tips for Nonprofits Meme.

I’m starting a round of blog tag in support of nonprofits that have an online presence. The idea is to write up one tip for how nonprofits can benefit from an online presence, and challenge others to do the same. Don’t worry about having the same tip as someone else, as long as your take on the tip adds something to the original idea.

This meme comes with four guidelines:

1. Offer one tip
2. Tag three people. Bonus points for including blogs that support or represent nonprofits.
3. Please link back to this page. If you link, I will contact you about including your tip in a compilation of tips generated by this meme.
4. Remember to pass on the guidelines

Unsure how to respond to Liz when she tagged me for this meme, the answer came when I got word from my friend BJ Cook of the soon to launch company, Eleho.org. He’s helping to get the word out about Burma and the genocide happening there. He wrote to me about TheRoadFilm.com

“5 local San Diego young professionals risked their lives to share never seen before footage with us and are now on a mission to bring it to the world.”

The web site is about a journey and following through when you’re called on by that Inner Bonk on the Head. It’s a story of doing, not sitting back and waiting for someone else to take action.

I hope Liz doesn’t mind that my “tip” for nonprofits is simply to find ways to get the word out on your project. All I did was to get an email from a friend about his latest adventure. He was smart to tap me because he knows I love to support my friends. Marketing can start with gentle conversations.

I’m tagging:

I like the conversations from people like Jennifer Laycock and The Lactivist, which supports an Ohio breast milk bank.

Heather Swain, owner of Rememberwell.net, “The spot for alternative death and dying information”.

Seo By The Sea’s, Bill Slawksi, because his post on Green Communities and Social Networks was viewed by a large number of people and is an excellent resource for anyone researching nonprofits and conscious living.

Next year, in addition to the steady stream of usability, user experience design, marketing, search engine, search engine marketing and social media news, there will be one more angle coming from here and Cre8asiteforums.

Inspiration.

I’ve been tracking recent news and following discussions pertaining to web site planning, user experience design, and usability testing that are good reminders that there’s no such thing as a cozy, orderly, agreed upon approach to any of those things. Not only this, there are grumblings about why user centered design is probable at all.

Pure Baloney

Conglomerate Tests? offers one man’s opinions that usability testing is a crap shoot.

To his way of thinking, the only way to get accurate results in user testing is to test everybody, not 5, 10, 20, or 100 people. User personas are a joke. Methodology is too, because usability testing is performed in various ways. He feels there is no way we can justify a set of usability guidelines for such a gigantic vast of user circumstances.

He writes,

Well… the question remains… why aren’t we, as a body of businesses, not getting together to carry out an independent set of survey’s and test cases and sharing the results? How about it?

A whole bunch of tests devised to handle the numerous color usage, text size, screen resolution, ages, readability, scroll-size, font-faces, preferred navigation, location of XYZ, wording of ABC etc. We could punch huge wholes in numerous “common beliefs” or provide data to reinforce them.

I wrote,

It’s not a matter of throwing together a bunch of test plans and creating guidelines on a wide cross section of users because each site being tested has its own business and functional requirements. What is desired for one type of site or application is not desired for another.

This is why test plans and test cases are based on requirements gathering.

He didn’t want to consider that. He’d like a wide angle lens focused on a planet sized set of web site users that will give us precisely the kind of information we need to make web sites that work for everyone, because everybody has been asked what they want.

Would this work? Several days later, he holds onto this idea and believes it to be so.

Who Cares What They Need?

Cre8asiteforums has had an ongoing discussion of interest called Site Aesthetics Vs. Customer Involvement: How perceived risk relates to usability. Today, someone wrote about a situation many of you are familiar with.

When an executive gets a bug in their ear to make a pretty picture, it’s hard to derail that movement with logic or experimentation. It’s like a drug. All reason gets lost. You’ll spend your food budget even as you starve.

The analytics guy/gal are a threat to their idea. Nobody wants to hear things like “analytics are the voice of customers.” Analytics are boring. Testing is for propeller heads. Go away while I look at my design.

Even when broken down in a simple, side-by-side chart showing before/after effects, I’ve seen “marketing vps” say something like “but the staff likes this one better” - as if that should be the end of the story.

In a conference call I was on yesterday, I guided the company president into considerations for potential customers that went beyond what he or his team may have been considering. I wanted to be sure they weren’t approaching a redesign with rose colored lenses.

Though intelligent enough to get usability consulting to make sure they are being objective, I know they’ll have to do ongoing testing. They’re redesigning because they face a fierce competitor. To increase their conversions and perform better in search engine results means combining what they presently know about their customers and adapting to changing customers’ needs.

The one thing we can always count on is that people change their minds. What they wouldn’t or couldn’t tolerate a few months ago on the Internet may not be an issue anymore. User habits change too. Something as simple as how we look for things on web pages changes as we learn and unlearn browsing habits.

Do We Really Know What We Think We Know?

From the site aesthetics discussion someone felt:

Evidence doesn’t matter when the politics of power is all that matters. The only evidence that matters in such situations is the number of times the decision maker can say “black is white” and have others agree — whatever the consequence for the long term viability of the business.

In such cultures the only customer experience is “the willing suspension of disbelief” a.k.a the reality distortion field. My experience is that computers are great primary enablers of reality distortion fields.

Indeed, there are those who aren’t satisfied to accept the current reality of user centered, human oriented design and what we think we know so far. HFI’s Chief Scientist, Kath Straub, PhD, CUA, wrote in Meta-Usability: When the method is not the message:

Practitioners want research to solve a problem, or justify a specific design or business decision.

The paper’s theme looks at the difference between what researchers study and what practitioners want, as well as what practitioners present and what clients want to hear.

Is it all for nothing? Don Norman’s latest thoughts on innovation and product development, Filling Much Needed Holes, didn’t beat around the bush.

Ethnographic research is fun. You get to go out into the world and watch, take pictures, satisfy your curiosity and inherent nosiness. Back at the office it is great fun to scribble notes, to post them on walls and rearrange them to form patterns. Then we can create personas, colorful little artificial people with cute, interesting lives, or maybe overstressed, over-busy lives. We delight at personas, at prototyping, at watching people go through their paces. New products galore. Innovation is the new hot topic. But does all of this activity lead to actual success in the marketplace? I fear not.

Is there something in the air?

We Always Want What We Can’t Have

And usability people will make sure we give it to you.

For search engine marketers, the year has been difficult due to search engines cracking down on what they’ll accept, whether it be web pages or web links. There are new rules for SEO’s and web designers to follow. Add to this increasing demands by site users with specific needs, disabled persons and accessibility laws and standards. Web site competition for conversions, brand, rank and reputation is pushing user experience design and usability practices into the web site planning playbook.

Social networking is connecting people in new ways and the lessons are coming in fast and furious. Facebook, for example, discovered user testing can come in the form of petitions when they launch something members can’t stand.

Despite everything, there are more and more groups branching off and doing their thing because they see where they fit and where they can help. Organizations continue to pop up, like The Interaction Design Association, whose purpose is “user experience design that defines the structure and behavior of interactive products and services.”

It isn’t so much that designers and developers have no idea what they’re doing. It’s more like there’s so many people involved in the creation and usage of something that global satisfaction or acceptance may never be possible. Nevertheless, there will always be those driven to achieve the Wow factor. Nothing intends on sitting still.

And neither will the growth of usability oriented design.