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Doodling inside my skull
I was down in Brisbane yesterday buying stock for new online shop that we want to open in the next few weeks. It takes around four hours or so to drive down and a little over three hours to drive back and that's plenty of time for my mind to slip into what I've begun to call 'brain doodle' mode.

I certainly did a lot of doodling on this trip and so I thought I might share with you a few of the odd thoughts and paths that my mind wandered down yesterday.

Marketing in Virtual Worlds
In my final article for 2006 I talked about the way big business was beginning to move into virtual worlds such as Second Life because they saw great marketing opportunities. Well we're only a few weeks into 2007 and already we're beginning to see more big businesses stepping into Second Life.

Sears has just announced that, with the help of IBM, it too will be making the marketing leap into the virtual world. Sears believes that, while browsing and buying online offers ease and convenience to potential customers it doesn't offer the same feeling as wandering through a real store.

So they plan to offer potential customers in the virtual world of Second Life the chance to walk through a department store online. That's right, Sears is going to import their entire range of goods into Second Life and give it the look and feel that a customer would experience in their real-world stores.

When Sears open their virtual department store in Second Life they will be joining other bricks and mortar businesses that have already made the transition. Those other businesses include Circuit City and Dell and you can bet there will be more to come.

Of course these are all big businesses who can afford the cost of entering the market place in these virtual worlds but is there room for the small trader who can't afford much?

When human beings first began to barter and trade it was done on an individual basis. One person offering their products directly to another person and even today, all over the world, people are still dealing with each other on that personal level.

So is there room for that sort of interaction in these virtual worlds? Of course those who run the virtual worlds are probably going to try and restrict the opportunities for small traders to sell real products but perhaps there are some worlds where it is possible to do that.

It might never become a major part of your income stream if you did find a virtual world where you could sell products in that way but then a number of small trickles can combine to produce something much bigger.

Google - you're delusional
Recently - perhaps as far back as Thanksgiving - Google began to take some drastic action against the spammers. A number of high ranking sites suddenly dropped into the supplemental listings and of course there was the usual collateral damage.

At the same time they also struck at the adult industry and a number of search engine results pages changed dramatically. If you haven't noticed then just do a search for 'sex'. Right now I'm seeing a site promoting chastity and abstinence at the top of the listing for that word while some other pages for key words have drifted back to listing adult sites at the top of the page.

Now it might be quite virtuous to attack the spammers and there is plenty to be said for listing mainstream sites for some adult terms too but Google seems to be missing something important here. They're missing the scrapers and it's those parasites who feed off the hard work of others who need to be kicked out of the listings forever.

I'm sorry if you're a scraper and that offends you but it's you guys who are going to ultimately bring Google undone.

Just before I headed off to Brisbane Steve and I did a search for an important local mainstream term that we had absolutely nailed for over a year for a client. Not only did we have the number one position in the search engine results pages for that term but we had a description appearing on that page that was attractive and brought a lot of traffic.

You can imagine our surprise when we looked at the page on the weekend and found that our client's site had dropped from the top spot to something like number four or number five on the page. That surprise quickly turned to disgust when we realized that the sites above us had all simply scraped, copied, taken and basically stolen the text that we had used for our client.

You might think that it's to our client's advantage to be part of those top listings anyway and, in some ways it is, but when a surfer goes to the site we built for the client they are directed to the client and encouraged to contact the client. When a surfer goes to those scraper sites they see the message from our client but they are also shown affiliate ads that can distract them away from our client.

And why is that bad for Google? Remember Google wants to give people the ultimate surfing experience. Google wants to make sure that a surfer gets the answers that he is searching for but right now, for that particular term and probably for many others too, they're seeing rubbish.

How long will people put up with seeing rubbish for the terms they are searching for before they give up on using search engines to find what they want?

And while scrapers can beat legitimate sites to the top of the search terms why would anyone want to invest serious money in producing a legitimate site? Our client wants to invest some serious money in a huge upgrade to his site that would really make it what Google wants to see in their listings.

Now however we're going to suggest that he seriously thinks about putting that on hold because his small site is never going to do better than the big scraper sites that steal content from him and from many others to gain the authority status that Google gives them.

Google may think that its algorithm can really identify the quality sites but clearly, Google is delusional. Let's hope that it gets back in touch with reality very soon.

I'm still optimistic
Yes, some of my brain doodles on this trip were quite dark and depressing but I'm still very optimistic about this business and certainly about the little enterprise we're starting. There are a hell of a lot more ways of getting traffic than just relying on Google, or any other search engine for that matter.

Now the challenge is to make those 'other ways' work to our advantage.