Category Archives: technology

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Leave JC Penney Alone!

Last month, the New York Times published a fantastic story about the way JC Penney figured out how to get great placement in Google search results. Around the holidays, if you typed a generic product into Google — like “dresses” or “bedding” or “area rugs” — the first result would inevitably be JC Penney. Which — theoretically — increased chances that you would buy these products from JC Penney instead of one of its competitors.

This was also true for some specific brand names, too. If you typed “Samsonite Luggage” into Google, your first result would have also been JC Penney, which sells that product.

The store accomplished this by basically gaming the system. It didn’t do anything illegal, just something that Google and other self-appointed web police look down on. It either created or hired a bunch of meaningless, empty web sites and posted links on them that pointed back to JC Penney’s site. This made JC Penney seem very popular on the web, and thus it achieved higher page rankings.

I looked into this topic for a radio show I was working on, and while I interviewed potential guests, I couldn’t help getting frustrated that no one would give credence to my devil’s advocacy. “But what did JC Penney do wrong?” I kept asking search experts. “How is it different than naming your pluming company ‘AAA Plumbing’ just to get listed first in the phone book?” None of the experts answered that adequately, but they all insisted Google was right to punish JC Penney for its “black hat” actions.

This all happened last month. Today, I was listening to an old episode of public radio’s On The Media, and the hosts were reading listeners’ letters. One listener wrote in to comment on the JC Penney story. I wanted to kiss my iPod when host Bob Garfield read it. I’m posting the audio and a transcript below.

[gplayer href="http://radiofreewalsh.com/audio/otm-letter-jcpenny.mp3"]On the Media: Listener Letter: JC Penney[/gplayer]

On our interview last week about how JCPenney gamed Google to achieve better search results, Ted Bunn of Richmond, Virginia writes, quote: “I’m baffled by your use of the words ‘sinister’ and especially ‘illicit,’ to characterize JCPenney’s search optimization strategy. Nothing in your report suggests that anything the company did was illegal. You can bet that all of JCPenney’s competitors do their best at search engine optimization. They’d be negligent in their obligation to their shareholders if they didn’t.

As far as I can tell from your report, JCPenney’s only crime was to be better at it. If Google wants to remain preeminent in the search business, its obligation is to plug holes in its algorithm. No one else is obligated to refrain from walking through any holes they find.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Trust me, I tried.

 

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The E-Memory Revolution Might Be Televised

When I was in college, I started archiving all the messages on my answering machine. Instead of taping over them, I saved the mini-cassettes and wrote detailed logs of each call on each tape. I did this for about two years. I still have pages and pages that list the date and time of every voicemail, the name of the caller, and a quick summary of the content.

This isn’t normal behavior. I know this. But I thought that someday, listening back to old, mundane answering machine messages would give me a better snapshot of my college life than a photo album or diary. And I was right. Ten years later, hearing the voices of family and friends – some long forgotten, some dead, all much younger – is as close as I’ll come to getting into a time machine and visiting myself as a young man.

totalrecallIf that seems weird to you, go talk to Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Compared to them, my exercise in obsessive documentation barely even registers. The two Microsoft researchers have spent years scanning, digitizing and categorizing every part of their lives, no matter how insignificant. And according to their new book, eventually we’ll all do this. Even you.

The book is called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything. According to Bell and Gemmell, most of us will someday wear little tracking devices and cameras everywhere we go to record our every move. The information they capture will be tagged, uploaded, and stored online. Years later we’ll be able to instantly recall everything we did on any given day: Where we went, what we bought, who we saw, and what we said.

Bell and Gemmell say we’re already doing, this to a certain extent. The obvious examples are Facebook and Twitter, where we constantly update the minutia of our days. Our GPS devices log where we’ve been and how we got there. Joggers carry tiny computers that log their stats. Dieters can link their bathrooms scales to their computers to keep track of their weight. And etc.

According to Bell and Gemmell, the e-memory revolution is inevitable, unless our society changes course dramatically. Obviously, this scenario raises huge privacy concerns, if you believe it. And I don’t know if I do. But it’s hard to believe we won’t at least continue to move in that general direction.

You can hear Jim Gemmell talk about this with Virginia Prescott on Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio this Monday (9/21) around 12:30pm Eastern time. Later that day, he’ll join Ross Reynolds on KUOW’s The Conversation in Seattle. That interview airs around 12:30pm Pacific. I’ll post links to the audio when they’re available.

UPDATE: Here are those links I promised:

The Conversation (KUOW): “This is Your Life in Total Recall”

Word of Mouth (NHPR): “The E-Memory Revolution”