Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Last night I drove into San Francisco for a meeting of the BALUG (Bay Area Linux Users Group). I’d never been to a BALUG meeting before, but Mark Shuttleworth (the founder of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux) was speaking and I wanted to size up Mark in person. He acquitted himself well. He spoke about the good, the bad, and the ugly of open-source as he sees it and then closed with some stories of being the first African into space. Here’s a (somewhat grainy) photo I took as Mark was speaking:

A few impressions that I came away with:

- he cares a lot about the Linux desktop experience and likes to focus on that. That’s good, because a lot of people in the Linux community pay attention to the kernel and “user space” doesn’t interest them as much.
- he believes that collaboration should be a strong point of open source. Mark mentioned bug tracking as an example: bug reports and debugging logs should flow seamlessly to developers without a lot of extra work.
- Mark did a good job of giving props to Red Hat, Novell, and even Microsoft when he thought they deserved it. I thought this was an especially wise move and gave him more credibility than if he had taken potshots at competitors. Mark pointed out that Microsoft made software cheaper as a good thing Microsoft has done, although he didn’t see a need to license patents from them. I got the idea that Mark thinks that injecting venom into discussions about open-source doesn’t do favors for the community in the long-term.
- At the same time, Mark said that if open source believes that it has more powerful ideas long-term, open-source proponents shouldn’t shy away from engaging in productive/respectful conversations that may eventually win over (say) manufacturers of proprietary hardware so that they allow open-source drivers.

Overall, Shuttleworth seemed to espouse a nice balance of principles and pragmatism. He was a polished speaker and handled the after-speaking mob of people with grace and good humor, even when some folks wanted to talk about the minutiae of their favorite Linux project for a few minutes. I came away with a higher level of respect for Mark, Ubuntu, and Canonical and my interest level is already pretty high.

The night brought a few other fortuitous surprises. I got a couple tips about where to start hacking on my OLPC, which just arrived a couple days ago (thanks for the pointers, Charles!). I found out about the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which takes donations of old computers, refurbishes them, and then donates them to school, non-profits, and other people that need a computer.

But my favorite surprise was walking by two people and hearing the phrase “Digital Tipping Point.” I’m a huge fan of the Digital Tipping Point blog. Officially, DTP is an “open source film project about the big changes that open source software will bring to our world.” So the film project includes a lot of individual interviews about open-source. But the reason that I love reading the DTP blog is that it provides anecdotes of open-source success without sarcasm, rancor, or the venom that some blogs have. If you’re a Linux fan, I think you’ll find that Digital Tipping Point is genuinely uplifting and cheerful. I keep Digital Tipping Point in my “fun” folder of Google Reader, so it was a pleasure to meet Christian Einfeldt, the producer of the documentary:

It was great to run into someone by coincidence and to be able to say “Hey, I love your blog. It brings a smile to my face and is a good example of what I like about the web.” All in all, it was a fun night.

This weekend my wife and I drove up to Daffodil Hill in Eastern California. Daffodil Hill is six acres of daffodils (my favorite flower) and it’s only open for a few weeks in the springtime. It’s free — just drive right up, park, and walk around. It looks like this:

And if you get really close to the ground, it looks like this:

If you have a California weekend free between now and the end of April, you might enjoy it. We drove up on Saturday and stayed in nearby Sutter Creek, which is known for its “Gold Rush” history. We stayed at a bed and breakfast called Foxes Inn that was very nice. For food, I can recommend the Jambalaya at the Caffe Via d’Oro in Sutter Creek if you like spicy food. We even found time to squeeze in a trip to a nearby cave called Black Chasm, where we got to see some nice stalactites and other formations:

Growing up in Kentucky I’ve gotten a chance to enjoy several caves, but it was my wife’s first time in a cave. All in all, not a bad way to spend the first weekend of Spring.

Okay, this is my favorite business card of all time:

In case you can’t read the image, it says:

I found this business card in an old book that I bought at a book sale. So I never met the person who made the card, and the mystery behind the business card remains intact. How many uncreative (boring) business cards have you seen in your life? This business card illustrates that a little bit of creativity can go a long way towards sticking in someone’s mind.

March Madness is here again, baby! The brackets have been released, and the University of North Carolina is a #1 seed. The wonderful thing about attending the University of Kentucky for undergrad and then UNC in grad school is that I’ve always got great teams to root for in March.

If you’re a fan, Google released a basketball bracket gadget for iGoogle. It’s really useful to track how you’re doing.

Danny Sullivan had a big day today. He announced that he’s moving back to California from England this year, and he bought a Mac yesterday. I’m not sure which surprises me more, but it’s probably the Mac thing. I really thought Danny would be the last search/SEO person converted from a PC to a Mac. That also reminded me about a 2008 prediction I made.

I should explain that I love prediction posts. Back at the end of 2007 I wrote a few predictions, and somehow never got around to posting them. Better late than never, although if I waited a few more months I could just recycle them as 2009 predictions. Some of these predictions are more far-fetched and aspirational (as in, “I really wish someone would do this”), but I’ll still throw them out here.

One tricky bit is that I didn’t make any big predictions about Google below — some people still don’t get that this is my personal blog, and they might take my (sometimes wishful) predictions as statements as fact, or assume that I have some inside knowledge when I don’t. With that disclaimer, here are my three-month-late predictions.

• Around February, people will start saying “Holy moly! Apple is grabbing a lot of desktop operating system market share!” In some markets by the end of 2008, Apple’s market share will approach 20%. (By the way, I’m no Apple fanboy; I’m typing this on Windows XP.)
• 2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.
• The most exciting product/start-up of 2008 will not be a Web 2.0 company. Instead, it will concentrate on improving email productivity. For users, as you receive email, it will suggest canned replies and show previous related emails. It will also suggest experts or mailing lists that you could route incoming emails to.
• Someone will write a book or ebook about how to run a small start-up or internet business on a shoestring budget. The book will discuss how to squeeze the most value out of Google’s products and will also touch on Amazon’s web services.
• Someone will launch a “baby startup” that gives advice on baby names, then offers to register a domain named for the baby. For $100, the start-up will power the baby’s domain for several years and will host baby pictures and baby videos. The baby’s domain will be protected by a password, but can be shared with family members.
• An RSS startup will add the ability to take a normal RSS blog feed and produce a “best of” feed that picks only the most popular/controversial/interesting items. You will be able to say (for example) “I want only about three Valleywag posts per day. Pick the best ones for me.” This new offering will cause some controversy across the blogosphere about fair use and copyright. But most bloggers will ultimately decide that they’d rather have the extra “lazy readers” than not have them at all.
• Someone will write a “Google Backup” tool that backs up all your data from Google by saving data from Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Reader, websearch, and Blogger.
• A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.
• Over 1000 people will begin recording the audio of their daily life, every day, all day.
• The 2008 presidential election will capture much more interest in the U.S. than in recent elections. Most election drama will play out on TV and the campaign trail. We’ll see a few tie-ins with search, but internet-related issues won’t play the vital role in the election that the blogosphere would like it to.

Check back in 2009 to see how I did! Do you have 2008 predictions for the tech industry?