The Core

His daughter announced his passing on Bill's FB page.

Bill truly lived up to his nick, incredibill. He started in programming working for big companies in Silicon Valley, from before the Internet. From there he went into affiliate and AdSense work. He was in the business since before there was a business.

At one point he was coding a white list based bot blocker. It worked devastatingly well at blocking all scrapers, all of them. In addition to the white list, it included honeypots and browser behavior analysis to correctly identify bad bots.

There were many nights in the early 2000's when he kept me in stitches with his dark humor, conversing over Yahoo Messenger.  I am grateful for the privilege of having known him and counting him among those I call friend.

Rest in peace, dear friend.

I was contacted by someone who wished to join. They reported they received a Database Error message on sign up.

They contacted me because I had linked to this site from an article.

FYI

I've had these observations about Google's algo for the past three years, maybe longer. I've been meaning to put these observations into an article all this time and finally got around to doing it.

"This is why I use the phrase Fruit Loops Algo to refer to Google’s user intent focused algorithm. It’s not meant as a slur. It’s meant to illustrate the reality of how Google’s search engine works.

Many people want Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch breakfast cereals. The supermarkets respond by giving consumers what they want. Search algorithms operate in a similar manner. That’s not keyword relevance to search terms you’re looking at. It’s relevance to what the most users are expecting to see.

Understand the Search Results
The ten links are not ordered by which page has the best on-page SEO or the most links. Those ten links are ordered by user intent.

Write for User Intent
Understand what users want to accomplish and make that the focus of the content. Too often publishers write content focused on keywords, what some refer to as “semantically rich” content. In 2015 I published an article about User Experience Marketing in which I proposed that focusing on user intent will put you in line with how Google ranks websites.

Part of it is that he's reading a lot of stuff. But he's essentially a thoughtful guy. Here's some of the stuff I've been liking lately.

http://programmaticadvertising.org/2014/11/21/lets-talk-programmatic-marketer-spotlight-jonathan-allen/

I think we have to go beyond sharing to daring. The next generation of companies needs to help people really achieve things. Right now we have a great sharing info system, but it’s still very passive. For the advertising community, sharing is very much just a tactic that ends up falling back on all these old ideas of interruption.

The general direction that mobile technology is going is all gearing up towards using your body as a data field and create all kinds of metrics for you. I think that it’s potentially quite dangerous because, as with all software, there would be data leakage and that kind of data could potentially be used in a harmful way or completely incorrect. Say you have a rare condition that could affect your job prospects, you could be retargeted – essentially all of that data could be sold and put you in a compromising position.

On thin-slicing topics by what I call tribes.
http://www.stateofdigital.com/learned-content-marketing-2014/

The thing that I like about Peretti’s advice is that he’s not just telling us to write tactical articles that are designed to be shared because they hit some kind of emotional trigger—the kind of strategies that make clickbait so effective. Clearly that stuff works, but I would argue Peretti’s strategy points to something content marketers too often forget: that the audience comes first. How big or small that audience doesn’t really matter, because the real test of content is whether anyone is paying attention at all.

BuzzFeed’s strategy is proof of a theory that’s been put forward by papers about Google and Twitter, namely, that news travels faster in smaller groups. And the source of a message is just as crucial to its delivery as the content itself.

For example, Duncan Watts wrote a research paper for Yahoo entitled, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter,” the major takeaway of which was that, despite the openness of social networks, people actually tended to talk to their own peers (and by extension, their audiences) rather than broadcast to the entire Twittersphere. His research found that celebrities tended to follow other celebrities, bloggers followed other bloggers, and media companies followed other media companies. Furthermore, the amount of content that diffused through the network was created by a remarkably small number of users, and it was usually opinion leaders that triangulated the key stories for their audiences.