So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

A few months ago I wrote a post comparing various online press release services. While nobody disputed their effectiveness at building links, there were questions as to how to measure the full value of Online PR.

For fun, I’m going to take a real release that we recently did and answer each of the questions that was raised.

(Full disclosure, this is a client of ours and he agreed to share these numbers)

Here’s what we did

Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology that will enable computers to monitor user behavior “to facilitate managing and optimising the utilisation of various system resources”.   How scary is this and what kind of seeds are we planting for our employment futures?

Courtesy www.technovelgy.com

Lets look at it objectively.  Using infra-red sensors to measure the breathing patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, etc of an employee can provide valuable information to an employer who is unaware that they are putting too much pressure on their staff or alert others on a project team that someone is struggling with their requirement, or even provide warnings of possible health issues arising due to stress or illness.

I’m a HUGE stumble fan. Both as a user and a marketer. As a user I get treated to new and interesting websites every day - that I would never have found without Stumbleupon. As a marketer, it never ceases to amaze me how much traffic Stumble can drive. Just when you think that a page has received all the stumble traffic it’s going to get…whoosh… another wave hits. Sometimes even a few weeks after the initial submit.

We recently had a Digg submission go Hot. This is the first one that I was personally involved with. Given that I didn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon, I thought that it might be fun to Chart the # of Diggs and resulting traffic to see if we could draw any interesting conclusions.

Here is what I saw…

A friend submitted the Digg article. It got a few Diggs however I didn’t really pay too much attention. I knew that it was really good content but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

I’ve been playing alot lately with the concept of using fun and humour (Canadian spelling eh) in social marketing and networking. For example:

1) the post earlier this week The (un)Official Sphinn Awards (in conjunction with my good friend Dave from Trail of the Fire Horse Blog … cool name eh? I’m jealous!).

2) We also ran an SEO Lyrics Contest back in the late spring and early summer

3) and created a series of industry cartoons .

Hot on the heels of a posting titled ‘Differentiate (Your Avatar) or Die’ by Michael (aka planetc1) over at Sphinn, and following the unique experince had recently by one of the ladies here in our office, I was prompted to create an avatar experiment and then test it. Essentially, she (our female staff member) changed her StumbleUpon avatar, and upon doing so, her friend count increased very quickly with virtually no effort.

Now, I’m sure many of you have theories about this, but it certainly caused many of us at SEP to chat and theorize in the office. After much debate, we hypothesized that:

Imagine finally answering the question; is our collective social consciousness a better predictor of the actual outcome of future events than our own personal guesstimates? Well, imagine no more. Enter ZiiTrend - the Social Prediction Community, a site that endeavors to answer that question for us, and provide us with the collective social probabilities of the occurrence of certain events. Hat tip to Profy.com for bringing it to my attention via their blog.

Given the barrage of new link development techniques and spammy approaches that Google et al have had to contend with over the past year, it appears obvious to me that Google needs some divine insight (he says jokingly assuming that their myriad of PhDs haven’t already considered this possibility) in their efforts to define and value inbounds links in the ranking algorithm. People are always trying to game the system, and understandably so when the value of high rankings is soooooo outstanding.

That said, how do the search engines really know if a link is a vote or not, or if it should be counted towards rankings? Its quite obvious that current link valuation techniques have their share of problems, and consequently Dave Naylor’s posting today that Paid Links are being devalued on mass. So we know that Google is trying to solve this problem of link manipulation, but how else can they work to solve it?

Lets look at this from a different perspective. What if the search engines were able to create a ‘checks and balances’ mechanism that provided a second opinion about the value of a link? To some extent they’re already doing this by filtering based on content relevance. So now, lets add a powerful checks and balances mechanism which we’ll call ‘the click test’. In its most simple variation, the click test is just, if a link from site “A” to site “B” is not ‘clicked’ on over a prespecified time period, then Google would set the value of the link to “0″. If it was clicked on, then perhaps Google gives the link a value of “1″. The click test value could then be multipled by the previous value yielding a score of either “0″ or the previous score. Voila … link values are validated on an ongoing basis, and only quality links are scored. Those scoring a “0″ value are completely discounted.

This of course begs a number of other questions, namely:
a) wouldn’t the search engines need to make sure the links aren’t being gamed? The answer is yes … but the search engines can use simple technologies to ensure that the same person doesn’t click on the same links each month. This would be relatively easy to do for a Google, very similar to the algorithms used by Digg and other social media.

b) what if the value of a link was a multiple of the number of clicks it receives, so that the value is not merely as simple as assigning it a “1″? What if sites with links that did not receive clicks received negative points? Certainly possible, but far beyond the scope of this posting. Our main contention here is that, gaming the system should not be your goal, as the effort is doomed to fail long term. Google can use a number of relatively straight forward approaches to validate link worthiness.

c) could they gather these statistics? Absolutely, given all the tracking information Google has (see Why Does Google Remember Information About Searches and Yesterday’s “the SEP guy” posting on SEP You Have the Right to Remain Silent. It wouldn’t even require a whole lot more computing power to be frank.

So where does this leave us? Apparently, its going to leave me with an experiment to perform. That said, stay tuned, as I’ll set-up and report on the experiment. In fact, special offer; subscribe to our feed through Feedburner, and we’ll make the research findings available only through the feed. Regular blog readers going direct, will not see these results.

Stay tuned!