Vanessa Fox. Nude.

If you’re managing the online brand of you or your company, you’ve likely read all about reputation management and how you should create robust online profiles that provide useful information about you on social networking sites. These profiles not only let you have some control about what’s being said about your online (and can potentially rank above less-flattering pages that you don’t control), but you can generally include a link to the site you’d like to direct visitors, thus grabbing you some extra traffic.

For instance, I might include a link in my profiles back to this site so that no one searching for me misses out on my music woes and Apple hostility.

I was checking out Microsoft’s new Tafiti when I noticed a curious thing. The profile pages about me that were ranking the best weren’t at all the ones I was expecting. If you haven’t set up profiles on these sites, you might be missing an opportunity. The highest ranking profile pages for me (several in the top 10) on Tafiti are:

• Wink (your profile is created for you, but you can claim and edit it)
• Blogger (you can create a profile even if you don’t have a Blogger blog)
• Google Groups
• Spock (like with Wink, you can claim and edit your profile)
• LinkedIn
• SEOmoz

I would have expected LinkedIn to rank fairly well, but the others surprised me. But maybe all of this is just a quirk of a shiny, newfangled, objects flying in and out type search engine. So, I checked it out.

• Live has similar results.
• Google (with the what-could-be-easier personalized results off toggle) has the Blogger profile on the first page, as well as bios from Pubcon and SES. And the cre8asite forums profile isn’t ranking too badly either.
• Yahoo also has the Blogger profile on the first page, and I’m starting to think I’d better go update that. Hang on. I’ll be right back. My LinkedIn and Spock profiles are both on the second page.
• Ask has the Blogger profile as the third result — this blog doesn’t even show up on the first page. So, if I’m looking for Ask traffic, I think my very best bet is the link to this site in that profile. Of course, Ask sent me exactly two visitors in the month of August — it has the honor of being tied with AllTheWeb, so figuring out how to optimize for it isn’t exactly going to keep me up nights (no offense, Jim!).

Doing a few quick searches for other people’s names, I find high ranking Flickr profiles, various other forum profiles, and Twitters.

What are the lessons? Don’t overlook that Blogger profile! And stalk your friends to see what profiles rank for them to find out what you might be overlooking.

I would do the same, but I have more music woes to write about.

Last week at Search Engine Strategies, I spoke about SEO in a web 2.0 world. My other panelists spoke about CSS and Ajax specifically, so I covered the overall things to look out for as you take advantage of the latest and greatest. Previously, I’ve spoken at search conferences on behalf of a search engine — I’ve covered the guidelines, the best practices, what works. This time, I was speaking from the other side of things, from the perspective of the audience. What are the things we should all watch out for, and how can we best implement what we know we should do?

The web 2.0 world is great for startups because you can get going with very little money or resources. If you have a great idea and some great data, you can be up and running in no time. SEO can seem like a low priority compared to putting together a working product. After all, if the site doesn’t work, what’s the point of traffic?

I know I may cause my SEO friends to gasp in horror when I say this, but if you have to balance priorities, you’re probably right to relegate SEO to phase two of your product development plan. However, if you do that, there’s definitely one thing you need to factor in to phase one, and that’s the ability to implement SEO later.

If you’re operating from a position of few resources, SEO may become one of your best friends as you build your customer base. It’s free traffic. Free! And it’s targeted like few advertising solutions can be. Potential customers are typing in exactly what they are looking for. There’s really no down side. So what are you waiting for? Stop reading and go implement already!

Sorry, got a little carried away there. What I meant to say is make sure that you build a flexible system that lets you augment the basics and build from there. For instance, maybe you don’t have time to create keyword-rich unique title tags and descriptions right this very minute. Just make sure your CMS or home grown system lets you go in and easily add them later.

And save yourself some time by making sure you aren’t building something that hides you from everyone looking for you through search. Turn off images, Javascript, and Flash in your browser and make sure you can still access your navigational elements. If you can’t get past the home page with your browser in this state, neither can search engines (not to mention me on my mobile phone, and really, isn’t your site all about me?).

And for that matter, can you site be viewed at all? Look at this site. It may not be pretty, but it’s accessible.

Or is it? Take a look with Javascript and images turned off:

In a situation like this, the noscript tag is your friend.

Another time when the noscript tag can make all the difference? When you’re using Ajax. I used Sphinn as an example during my talk to let the audience know that every site is a work in progress and even the best of us don’t launch our sites with 100% perfect SEO from the start. Sphinn is Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land’s social media site. Surely someone who’s been covering the industry since its inception has covered all the bases! Surely! Except that the comments on Sphinn are in Ajax, and with Javascript turned off, they’re invisible. Which means all of that great user-generated content is also invisible to search engines. Of course, he knows about this and it’s on the list of enhancements for the site.

Which brings me back to my earlier point. It’s OK to launch if the SEO on the site isn’t perfect. Just make sure evolving the SEO of the site is on the list and the infrastructure of the site is such that you can in fact evolve it and you don’t have to start from scratch later to make these kinds of changes.

Speaking of evolving sites, I also used Zillow as an example. Again, I didn’t want my talk to be about throwing stones when I’m in one of those new-fangled web 2.0 glass houses! Web 2.0 has somehow become not just about shiny new technologies, but also about shiny new words. Company names, domain names, and product names are all zany and crazy and have rounded corners. Oh wait, that last thing might be more about the logos.

In any case, it might be boring and web 1.0, but fun new words are no substitute for keyword research. I’m pretty sure that someone wanting to know the general housing prices of a particular neighborhood is not going to type “zindex” into a seach box. Which doesn’t mean you have to use boring names and give up on having a site since every domain name with real dictionary-style words is taken. It just means that you want to add a bit of explanation to the page and use things like title tags and headings to your full advantage in incorporating those keywords you’ve come up with using that old fashioned research. For instance, truemors.com has “breaking rumors, news” in its home page title tag. They just need to throw in the word “gossip” and they’ll be set.

Another web 2.0 component is user-generated content. Which is awesome in so many ways. You really build a community of your users who keep coming back, you beef up your site’s content, which helps new and old visitors alike, and you give search engines that much more to index. But if you’re planning to launch user-generated sections for your site, make sure you have a strategy first. Don’t just put the pages out there and expect people to come. User-generated content is not like a creepy baseball field in a corn field.

So, how do you get people to show up and contribute? Depending on the type of site and content, you might want to partner up with someone to get content you can prepopulate; you could engage with active bloggers or customers to seed your content areas; you might pay moderators or writers to get things going. There are all kinds of ways to kick start your content areas, but leaving them empty isn’t one of them. As someone I was talking to about this said, that’s like starting a blog with no posts and expecting to still get comments.

Now is a really exciting time to launch a site. The technology makes it so much easier than back when I started creating web sites in the mid-nineties, when we only had HTML 1.0 tables and the font tag for making things pretty. (And we walked uphill in the snow to churn our butter.) And search can funnel targeted traffic right where we want it. But make sure you’re making the technology work for you, and not against you.

Once upon a time, in a land virtual and secluded, we all went online. And we had the place to ourselves. Never in our wildest dreams did we envision that our moms would follow us on Twitter, or people we met in bars who we gave fake numbers to would friend us on Facebook, or that anyone other than our closest friends would read our rambling thoughts.

So, we explored our new-found anonymity and posted about the mythical archetypes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and flamed each other on Usenet. And what a wonderful world it was. And then our online world, in its pocket of isolation, grew and evolved. Our online lives became intertwined with our the rest of our lives; we shed our anonymity in favor of real relationships and online reputation. And we were joined by the rest of the world, who, through the power of Google, could find out anything about us that we have ever posted in the tiny crevices of the internet. Ah, the future.

At Gnomedex, I led a discussion about how the more you put yourself out there online, the more you may be giving up control of your identity. And it’s not just those who choose to live stream their lives twenty-four hours a day who have to think about how much we give up of the ability to define ourselves to others by putting ourselves out there online and if we’re invaded our neighbor’s privacy by blogging about how he gets the paper in the morning wearing just his underwear and who should have access to pictures of our kids.

I was talking to Stuart Maxwell about this a couple of weeks ago and he likened being a visible blogger to art. Not just to being an artist, but to the art itself. Once you write a poem or paint a picture, the viewers bring their experiences to it and give that piece of art meaning. The artist doesn’t control it anymore. As a blogger, you show whatever slice of yourself you choose, and because you are writing about yourself and your views, it’s not just your words that become the art, it’s your whole identity that people shape and use.

You can become a commodity. You become repurposed as fodder for jokes. A search result. Something to talk about, gossip about. People who don’t know you question your phone purchases, your job choices, your intelligence. And all you wanted to do was hang out with your friends and explain why you fully support Anya’s bunny fear and anyone who doesn’t agree with you can just go back to watching Charmed. (Dammit.)

The day I became set up for a joke and a way for Yahoo to promote its new search suggest feature, I admit that I stopped and evaluated how much I had lost control of my identity online. And how much I wanted to take back and how I might do that. I wondered how I got to a place where my so-called personal life and relationship status were discussed on the official Yahoo search blog.

It was funny. I’m not saying it wasn’t funny. It was just the latest in a long line of events where I wanted to say, as Buffy did to Dracula in the first episode of season five (which I’m sure you all vividly recall), “I’m standing right here!”

Question: Is your life fair game if you put yourself out there? How far is too far?

Someone in the audience said that too far is whatever makes you uncomfortable, and I agree, to a point. The trouble is that comfort levels are different for everyone, and particularly online that can be hard to gauge. Even in my case, it’s not that I felt things had gone to far, it was more the cumulative effect of feeling more like an object than a person. And realizing that I was in a difficult position. If I decided it bothered me, I could stop putting myself out there, which would radically change how I interact with my friends and integral ways I did my job. And I do think that as we move more into an online world, more of our careers will be woven in with our online lives. Even those who don’t have professionally-linked blogs already rely heavily on the professional networking available through sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Another person in the audience recounted how an experience caused her to withdraw from online interaction entirely (including deleting her blog), which had a huge effect on how she lived her life.

Before Yahoo started speculating on my relationship status, others were trying to rank for Vanessa Fox nude. You’re reading this blog right now, so you already know how that story ends. I had become a search result and I figured could get offended, ignore it, ask people to stop, or even change the way I interact online. But I decided heck, may as well claim it and get some control. If anyone is going to rank, it may as well be me. And I do. Of course, now it would be nice to rank for something else too, but I’ll take what I can get. Don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t offended at all. Clearly. My site is Vanessa Fox Nude! But who expects to become a search result? (Well, OK, all of us these days.)

Question: How much of yourself do you put out there? Do you edit yourself? Are you being truly authentic?

We talked quite a bit about this. I said that I do carefully think about what I put out there. The exception, I suppose, being this blog post. (The irony!) Someone else mentioned later in a blog post that it’s more difficult to deal with what you put out there before, in that once upon a time land when you never dreamed everyone you know would one day be online with you and that Google would exist to help everyone find everything you’ve ever written.

There’s all this talk of authenticity in blogging, but can anonymous bloggers actually be more authentic than those who are up front about who they are? Online maybe. But you lose the more personal connections, the social interaction, particularly if you want to extend your online relationships into the rest of your life.

By putting yourself out there, people can criticize what you write, sure. But they can also talk about your stupid hair or your stupid voice (if you podcast too) or your unhealthy obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as though there’s any such thing!).

But again, one thing mentioned a lot by the audience is that you can at least partially control this by making it your own and using it to your own purposes. Write a blog post about it; acknowledge it; use it. Of course, you can also exert some control by deciding what you want to ignore. Often, people don’t know you — they just see this small slice that you choose to expose. You can take criticism to heart, learn from it, but also weigh when it’s valid and useful.

The flip side, of course, is what do you do with the praise? If you choose to disregard anything negative, can you really choose to believe just the positive stuff? Well, hell yeah! Or perhaps you try to weigh it all equally. Some criticism is valid; some praise is valid. But you can’t get obsessed with taking things too personally or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

So you can control what you choose to talk about, you can control how you choose to react to how you’re perceived. As Jason Calacanis noted, you can choose to have comments on your blog or not. He got a lot of heat for choosing to turn them off (and maybe he did it more so people who would ordinarily comment would instead blog, which gives him both links and publicity, but his point still stands — you should be able to choose how much you want to open your self up to discussion on your own site). Ronni Bennet mentioned that she chooses her associations with care because she knows it impacts how she’s perceived. She was active in BlogHer until she noticed that she was beginning to be perceived as a blogger for older women rather than for older people. She’s taking an active role in controlling her image online.

Question: But what about when you secretly record your fiance’s reaction to your public proposal and put it on iFilm?

Before I spoke, Justin of justin.tv was talking about recording his life 24 hours a day. That’s fine for him, but, the audience wondered, what about everyone Justin comes in contact with? They aren’t choosing to live stream themselves on the internet. Most of us don’t have that issue to figure out, but when we talk about our own lives, we talk about our friends’ lives, our spouse’s life, our kids. And they aren’t necessarily choosing to reveal themselves like that.

I brought up Rand’s very public proposal and subsequent acceptance not to pick on him (I thought the whole thing was very sweet), but because it’s a classic love story! Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy blogs about his love; ultimately shows proposal on internet. OK, maybe not a classic love story, but classic blogging problem, right? When you share your life on the internet, do you edit that to avoid sharing the lives of those around you?

The audience talked a bit out how much they share about children. Some people said they don’t post pictures of their kids online because the kids are too young to decide whether or not they are OK with it. Other people said their kids are a big part of their life and of course they share that. Certainly everyone didn’t come to an agreement, and I don’t think the questions we discussed really have one set answer.

Controlling your life online isn’t about a set of guidelines for everyone to follow. It’s about being aware of where you might be giving up control and making conscious decisions.

Question: But what if by putting yourself out there, you find that means people randomly take pictures of the back of your head, potentially doing tequila shots?

Hell, you get a blog post out of it! Which was another point the audience kept coming back to. How can you turn things around and use them to your benefit? Many times, you can take some control just by deciding how you want to react.

And what about those people talking about your Buffy love and taking pictures of your bad haircut and watching your girlfriend’s proposal reaction? As we move more and more to an integrated online/offline world and we decide how to integrate the two and how much to keep them separate, we run into this disconnect in that the rules are different online and offline. How can we make our offline world work with online rules?

Take for instance, Facebook. Why have you said that I’m your friend when I don’t know you? Offline, this doesn’t make much sense, right? But online, we want very much for people we don’t know to come read our blogs and subscribe to our RSS feed, and we get into intense discussions with strangers on forums. It makes perfect sense to use Facebook to build a community with these people. Maybe. Facebook is one of those platforms that is trying to merge online and offline life, but for people who are used to keeping them entirely separate with entirely different rules, it’s a little jarring. Again, we all have to decide for ourselves how we want to use these platforms.

If you think of your blog as a way to get your ideas out there and you think of Twitter as a way to let your friends know where you are, then you may indeed think it’s great that you have hundreds of RSS subscribers, yet odd you have that many Twitter followers. But how we use a platform may not be how others use a platform. An RSS subscriber may follow you on Twitter to get some bonus blogging tidbits. (You really only need to worry if those same subscribers realize if they peek into the windows of your house, they can get even more tidbits.) Sure some of this would be fixed with better permission management online, and maybe that’s the way things are going. For your house, I suggest curtains.

There are other offline consequences right? Your started your blog to talk to other techie geeks, but then your mom starts commenting. You give someone a fake number at a bar (erm, not that I would, I’m talking hypothetically here!) and since they’re in your regional Facebook network, they just hop online and grab the real one.

Really though, the important thing is to decide how you want to use the online tools, how you want to integrate that with the rest of your life, and to know that everyone else is deciding this for themselves as well and may decide differently than you.

I talked to several people, particularly after the session, who said that they keep an anonymous presence online. Are we coming full circle back to the days when the beauty of the web was its anonymity? Some people are doing both. They have a presence under their real names and a separate anonymous one. And that works for some people, but it also means they’re managing multiple identities, including their offline one. And what about your online professional presence and personal presence? How many identities can you manage before you simply go completely insane and end up like Buffy in that one episode when she was in that straight jacket and she decided she had to kill off all of her friends. One hopes you would metaphorically kill them off by deleting your Facebook profile and not trap them all in a basement like Buffy did.

So mostly my presentation was full of lots of questions:

• What do you put online?
• What does your online presence mean for those around you?
• What about anonymity?
• Do you keep separate personas (online, offline, professional, personal) or merge it all into one life?
• What is the future of the web: Do we become commodities or can we control how we’re used?

I didn’t come to the session with the answers. And it was great exploring the questions with everyone during the session and after in the halls and the parties.

So Stuart offered himself up for brainstorming and coffee, Natala put together kick ass slides, and the audience jumped in with really great discussion. Mostly I just stood behind the podium and soaked up the information.

Gnomedex. Where you can be geeky without confused stares and the need to explain what the saying on your shirt means. Or why you would wear a shirt with a geeky saying in the first place. Where no one gives you an evil glare for typing on your phone while having an in-person conversation. Where it’s perfectly reasonable to twitter and IM at the same time with the person sitting directly next to you (or maybe that was just me and Natala). And everyone understands the joy of laptop stickers.

No, the confused stares are not the ones you get in a normal crowd. Instead they are that you have a PC rather than a Mac and a Windows Mobile device rather than an iPhone. But it’s considered reasonable to refer the doubters to your blog posts on the matter.

And that is, of course, the biggest draw of Gnomedex. That you can jump into conversations with people you’ve never met before and dive in deep right away. You start from a place of shared understanding. You’re passionate about the same things. You speak the same language. So even though you’ve never met in person before, you don’t think twice about inviting them to your house for poker.

As many others have commented, everyone was using Twitter and Facebook. And we’re not the 20 year olds you read about always facebooking instead of emailing. (In fact, I’m sure most of us were also on constant email, if only because unlike the 20 year olds, we had to keep up with what was going on at the office, which as of yet, is mostly not available through the Facebook APIs.)

I was trying to figure out what it is about these technologies that have pulled us in. I have noticed that I’ve been text messaging a lot in the last year or so too, which is another thing I thought only the young whippersnappers did. Thirty five is looming over me like a dark, lumbering storm cloud — I mean joyous springboard of life — so I can’t really claim whipper snapperness anymore. And yet.

Sometimes new technologies just work well for what we need. We could have said we didn’t need the telegraph when we could just write a letter. And once we had the telephone, why slow things down by using email? (Don’t you remember the days of the “do we need email” debates?) And with the richness of email, who needs IM? Truth is, they each serve a different purpose (particularly that handy telegraph service).

I can Twitter a short thought when I just don’t have time for a full blog post. And Facebook is not only working really well as a contact management system (I am deeply disorganized), but is just makes things easy for keeping track of people and events. (It’s clearly FAR from perfect, like so far I can’t even see where the road to perfect would start from where Facebook is, but it’s still useful.) I met lots of great people at Gnomedex and collected lots of business cards, but it’s much easier to just add those people on Facebook than to hope I keep those cards around and can find them when I need them.

Deb Schultz gave a great talk about relationship weaving via online social tools at Gnomedex as part of the fantastic Ignite Seattle session (speaking of useful organization, I grabbed that link from Facebook) about how we use technology to stay in touch. The point of her talk was that the technology may change, but we as humans don’t. Technology has definitely helped me stay in touch with old friends and make new ones (in ways beyond the glowing blue light of the monitor).

Which brings me back to where I started. We geeks may like to spend a lot of time in front of that glow, but it’s also great to see each other in person as we Twitter. How else would our fellow geeks get to read our t-shirts?

Spock, a vertical search engine focused on people, went live today and we all rushed out to see what it thought of us. Wait, that was just me then?

I admit it. I’m so vain I think this blog post is about me. I rank #1 for my name (all those years of hard work at being me have finally paid off!) and one thing I find interesting is the tags associated with me. Are these Technorati tags? Spock-generated tags? Whatever the case, I’m pretty proud of my (nine!) tags.

• Google employee
• weblog
• blogger
• aol
• Google
• Search engine optimization
• kirkland
• blackberry
• Zillow

You can not only add new tags, but you can vote on existing ones. Oh the possibilities.

I don’t have a Blackberry anymore, but now that I know I have a whole tag for it, I want to keep writing about it. But why is AOL a tag for me? Maybe because I used to work there? I’m sad I have no pictures. I suppose they don’t have Flickr images indexed and they don’t seem to be pulling images from Wikipedia either, so I’m not sure where they’re getting the images they have.

I don’t exactly get the social networking aspect of the site other than I suppose you can find your friends and tag them. And I just don’t have the energy for more social networking.

You can also claim yourself and upload all the information about yourself that you want, which makes it somewhat of a cross between Zillow’s claim your house feature and Wikipedia. I think I’ll be lazy though and wait for it to start pulling data from more sources. And when it starts claiming that I was born in 1928 and my main hobby is wandering through empty fields with my metal detector, well then I might set the record straight. Not that my real hobby of trying out new applications on my mobile phone by the flickering light of my laptop makes me look much better.

My initial thought is that I rarely do a search for a specific person. And then I remembered that I did one just this morning with dismal results. So, I tried the same search on Spock. Just as dismal. To be fair, this person may not have much online information available. Which is a whole other perspective on people search — we’ve become so used to searching online that we forget that not everything we need may be online and searchable. (I know! Crazy!)

When I do people searches, it’s primarily for business information — who does this person work for, what is their experience, where do they live? LinkedIn generally gives me pretty good results for that. (Facebook probably would with its recent growth, but since I can’t see the profiles of anyone not in my network, searching doesn’t do me much good. I don’t need to find out what my friends are doing. I already know that.)

However, there are lots of other reasons to search for people and I suppose Spock’s advantage is that it can provide a variety of results for more than one search motivation. Well that and anyone reading this can go add whatever tag you think describes me best. Just don’t add “metal detector afficionado”. “Two cell phone carrier”, “coffee-powered”, and “perpetually online”, however, are all fine choices.

Update: I thought I might claim myself, because after all, I am me. First, I had to create an account, which created another profile of a person with my name. So then I was two. When I tried to claim myself, I got a message that I had to email Spock to do it. Odd, since with most of the other profiles, you are prompted to log in to LinkedIn or MySpace. I have a profile on LinkedIn, and added it in my account’s profile, but to no avail. So, I did the wise thing and emailed.

You might expect that with a launch and all of us searching for ourselves and to see what Spock might say about our exes, they might be a little busy. But someone emailed me back within a few hours to say that she had merged my profiles and my login now owned the entry on me. (And that the reason I couldn’t claim online is that I don’t have a LinkedIn account, and while I indeed do, it turns out that wrinkle was the least of my worries.)

Great!

Or, not so much. The original profile, the one linked above that ranked #1 for my name? Now 404s. And all the information from that profile? Is located in a new entry at the end of the exact matches (page 4). Because my new profile is so new, it ranks last. And everything from my original profile has been moved there.

I replied to the cheerful email that had informed me of my good fortune in claiming my name, explaining that the reward for claiming was not as filled with joy and laughter as one may have expected. And now I wait. Last. At the end. Clearly, I have learned my lesson. Being lazy does indeed pay off in the end. (More news as it happens.)

Update 2! I sent the email asking about my sad plummeting ranking late last night (OK, it was like 1:30 am, but I was out that late with good reason! I was at Ignite Seattle (which was awesome, by the way) and then I had to play werewolf (yes I was the werewolf; yes, I went on a murderous rampage and won, so clearly it was worthwhile staying up).) I just got this response (less than twelve hours later):

Your search result hasn’t been re-indexed yet, which is the source of your concerns. I reset your URL to spock.com/Vanessa-Fox. Check back in a couple days, and things should be set.

So, while things may not be running like a well-oiled machine over there (and can anyone really expect that of a small company, just launching?), they are super responsive and their emails are signed by actual people. I know all too well that might not be scalable, but I also know how important it can be to listen and respond. And yes, the tables have now turned and now I’m the one emailing, asking why I’m not number one. Commence mockage…. now.

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been looking for some good music for my iPod. (And as I’ve also mentioned, Apple is a cunning, manipulative technology spider, luring us into its non-functioning web, then leaving us lonely and musicless, yet coming back to Apple for more, and in fact, my new iPod has decided to wreak vengeance upon me for writing such words and has introduced me to a new music mode called silence. The menus work, the music plays, but sound is not forthcoming from headphones, speakers, or car radio axillary jacks. But I digress.) I got some fantastic suggestions, both in comments and in email and have been furiously GIVING APPLE EVEN MORE MONEY IN RETRIBUTION FOR CONTINUING TO FAIL ME and downloading songs from iTunes. As soon as my iPod is working again or I finally escape the cult and buy an .mp3 player that actually works, I’ll report back on my favorites.

But in the meantime, I’m returning to the old school world of CDs. Hakia gave away a CD at BlogHer, so when faced with a musicless commute this morning, I figured I’d give it a try. Of course I loved it. What’s not to love? Songs about search! All the lyrics are from search results! Listen for yourself.

I’m not sure exactly what they’re going for with the first song, “Search for Better Search”. Well, OK, I think they’re trying to say that search is kind of sucky and we need something better. Hmm… what could that be. Maybe something like Hakia. I don’t know. Just a random thought that came to me. But it doesn’t really come across that way. It comes across as search is a hopeless pursuit, doomed to failure and spiraling depression and despair. Why try it at all. It’s a really fantastic song though. Filled with things like searching for lost childhoods and finding them for twenty five cents on eBay.

The second song, “Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road”, seems to conclude that this is no chicken or no road or that chickens can’t cross roads or maybe that asphalt is hot. Then there’s “The Guy You Work With”, which might be about a zebra. Also at one point, someone apologizes to his beard.

The whole thing is a crazy hodgepodge of words and images and music and I’m not sure that it supports Hakia’s notion of extracting meaning from natural language. It’s more extraction of nonsensical musings, well-suited for a night of pondering philosophy, possibly with mind-altering substances. Although perhaps that’s the search experience they’re going for, so who am I to judge.

I talked to the search evangelist for Hakia when I was at BlogHer. He said their biggest challenge was adoption, and I can see that. Although I suggested that a related challenge might be getting people to change the way they search. Hakia shows promise with natural language queries, but doesn’t generally provide a search experience beyond the other engines with the typical 2-3 word queries that searchers perform. So unless searchers change how they query, they’ll have no motivation to switch. Or maybe Hakia’s marketing plan is to be like that show that used to be on MTV, during which fledging bands handed out flyers all over town and tried to get the most people to come to their last-minute shows in divey bars. They’ll convert searchers one .mp3 download at a time.

Speaking of .mp3 downloads, I would review the rest of the songs, but I have to go fetch my lost childhood now. I hear it’s going for cheap and I don’t want to be outbid.