Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

A Remarkable Life

First published August 30, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This morning, my plan was to do a column about the wrap-up of SES in San Jose last week. And for those that urged me to share my ideas about personalization, I was going to tell you about a new white paper. But I’m going to push that to the back burner until next week. This week, I’d like to share a story about a remarkable lady.

At 10 this morning, my wife called and asked me to come home to look after our kids while she went to stay with her grandmother in the last few hours of her life. So I’m writing this from home, knowing that just a few miles away, there’s a hospital room filled with far more visitors than it could possibly hold, all holding hands and praying for a woman who has lived an exceptional life in so many ways. My wife is Italian, her family is large (a typical family gathering numbers more than 60) and for many years, including the 20 I’ve known this family, Yolanda has quietly sat at the head of it. She doesn’t talk often, and very little of it in English, but there’s never been any doubt about who the boss is. Yolanda has a spine of steel, with a stubborn side that has made itself apparent in some rather amusing ways in the last few months. She is everybody’s Italian Nona, and she is loved dearly by many, many people.

Yolanda came from Calabria, which would be the top of the arch of Italy’s foot, across the strait from Sicily. Her home was a small stone house high on the side of a hill a few miles from the Mediterranean. I had the opportunity to see it last summer when we visited. The entire home was smaller than most people’s garages here.

Life was never easy for Yolanda. First in Italy, and then here in Canada, she built a life for herself, her husband and eventually six children through back-breaking work and sheer iron will. After immigrating to Canada, Yolanda’s husband passed away, shortly after the youngest child was born, leaving Yolanda to raise a large family in a largely unfamiliar country where she didn’t really speak the language. Today, all six children are successful, many have their own businesses and at various times, they have all asked Yolanda to come and live with them. She refused, preferring to live on her own in a small house on a small street that will forever be known as Nona’s house. Today, the house is empty (Yolanda was moved to a nursing home as her health started to fail) but the memories that live in it are rich and abundant. I’ve always said that the measure of a person is the size of the footprint they leave as they depart this earth. How many people have they touched, how many memories have they forged, and how many hearts will ache with their departure.

Yolanda’s small, black, no-nonsense leather shoes will leave a gargantuan footprint, and many tears will be shed for her over the next few weeks. But what is remarkable to me is how the world has changed from Yolanda’s vantage point. The village where she was born in 1924, Aiello, had not changed much in the past few centuries. There was no electricity, transportation was by foot and communication was solely through conversation, as olives were picked, grapes were crushed or bread was made. From that, she lived to see her children, grandchildren (16 of them) and great-grandchildren (13, including one born just last week) all communicate with relatives around the world, including those back in Calabria, through the Internet.

This Yolanda won’t come up for any Google searches. She never went online. But I think somehow, she understood the importance of connections, especially between family. Although she never had the chance to return home to Calabria, I believe she would be happy to know that the generations that have followed her are reconnecting with family there, thanks to technology she never tried to understand.

In some ways, the wired world today is a little like Aiello, the tiny little speck of a village she grew up in. We’re closer, we communicate quickly and informally while we work and we are part of a large extended family. Somehow, I felt it was important to leave a very small trace of Yolanda online, because although she never used it, the Internet was part of the world she lived in.

Yolanda was a remarkable lady. When I look at the world through her eyes, I can’t help but wonder what it will look like when I’m her age. I just hope I can leave half the footprint she did on it.

Creating Conversations, One Column at a Time

First published July 12, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been writing this column for almost three years now. In that time, one of the most rewarding and often humbling aspects is when I get to connect with the community that’s formed around the Search Insider column. I applaud MediaPost for introducing the Search Insider blog, allowing us to turn each column into a conversation. As a writer, you get lazy and a little sloppy when you get too far disconnected from your audience. Getting feedback brings you back to earth. It reminds you that your musings are not going out in the great void. You’re connecting with readers, and hopefully engaging them enough with a concept with which you elicit a response. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet.

Rewiring Communities

I’m tremendously intrigued by how the Internet has rewired our concepts of community. I’ve talked about this before, and it formed the basis of my opening remarks at the Search Insider Summit in Florida in May. I love how we can participate in so many communities that are not tied by geography, but form around ideas and concepts. The online manifestations of our communities are the conversations that ensue. Each one of these columns can instantaneously create an ad hoc community that debates a topic.

My column a few weeks ago was a great example. We formed a community around the concept of whether advertisers “get” search advertising in Canada, and together we created content through our conversation. I started the ball rolling, but the 18 of you that chose to leave a comment picked up the momentum and left something of value. You provided different perspectives, and the conversation grew richer for it. Some of you questioned my premise, some questioned my delivery and forced me to defend it. Many of you, while agreeing in principle, went further and added your own vision and expertise.

For as long as MediaPost decides to leave that conversation accessible, anyone who chooses to see if such a community exists can pick up our threads through a search. They can connect our conversations with others that may have happened on the same topic through linking. They can build on the community by starting their own conversation. They can do a little detective work and track down some of us that commented and re-engage us with further dialogue. The community has permanence. It is real, and it is defined both by the concept we shared and by search, which connects the online outposts that make up the community.

Is Anybody Out There?

You know, for as long as I’ve been writing for Search Insider (and I believe David Berkowitz and I are the two remaining original writers) I’ve had no idea how many of you were out there, reading it. At the beginning, I asked MediaPost what the number of readers was; I never did get a reply. At first, this question was important to me because I was looking at the column as a promotional vehicle. But I think one of the reasons I didn’t pursue my inquiry was because I realized that the purpose of my writing each week is more than just getting my name out there. As I travel from search show to search show, this column acts as a way for me to connect with many of you. The connection is more one-sided than I may like, but it’s gratifying when you mention that you read my Search Insiders, or that the topic of one piqued your interest. They’re like little “community seeds” that can in turn sprout into another conversation. And isn’t that what the Internet is all about? Isn’t that where its tremendous power lies? It’s the world’s largest conversation, and it’s most powerful as a reciprocal activity.

Sorry to get all philosophical on you, but I’ve actually been doing research for a book and these concepts are inextricably tied into its topic. I’ve been threatening to do a book for a long time and someone (probably tired of hearing me go on and on about it with no apparent intention of actually doing it) told me that committing publicly is a great way to make it happen. So I’ve gone on record, and I hope each of you when you see me at a show asks me how the book is going. Or just tell me to get my butt in gear! One of the biggest challenges is for me to take the same interactive conversations that happen online and figure out how to incorporate that into the creation of a book. The Internet has changed everything else. Why should writing a book be any different?

But back to the topic at hand. I often wonder about the future of anything that is centered on search, and this column is no exception. I’m an ardent believer that search is such a fundamental online activity, the glue of the Internet, that soon search will disappear as a distinct function. It will go under the hood, powering the new evolution of the Web, connecting us with the very best matches to our intent. I hope this column evolves along with search, and the conversations continue. In my mind, the best ones are yet to come.

The Cranky Canadian is Back from Toronto

Apparently I stirred the pot a little bit when I was in Toronto. Yahoo invited me to give a breakfast talk to the handful of Canadian advertisers and I managed to hijack the session for 10 to 15 minute rant about how Canadians don’t get search.  I quickly followed this up with a column in  the SearchInsider to the same effect. I did make one mistake.  I did mention that the Ontario government doesn’t do search for their official tourism information site.  I was quickly corrected in that.  There is in fact the search campaign going on.  It just wasn’t registering for any of the searches I did.  I think I’ll follow up on this a little more for next week’s SearchInsider column.

I apologize to show chair Andrew Goodman for breaking the cardinal Canadian rule of politeness.  Andrew is shipping a case of generic cola with a Canadian politeness serum cleverly mixed in to try to return me to the accepted norms for Canadian behavior. I noticed another blogger who picked up on my rant indicated that as a Canadian living in the US, I would be well advised to escape back south of the border. I don’t know if this is good news for Canadian advertisers or not, but I actually am a resident Canadian.  I call Kelowna, B.C. home.

You know, the funny thing is, other than poor Nick at the Ontario Tourism Board who I mistakenly said had his head up his ass, most everyone else has agreed with me.  Perhaps being a cranky Canadian pays off.  To my knowledge there’s nobody who really is filling this role currently, although Canadians have a long tradition of being cranky.  Notable cranky Canadians in the past included Gordon Sinclair, Pierre Berton and Jack Webster.

If it makes you feel any better, Canadian advertisers weren’t  the only ones I turn my sights on in the past week.  I also took a few shots at Yahoo during an interview on Bloomberg TV. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been traveling for past 2 1/2 months and I think the last time I actually got seven hours of uninterrupted sleep was back in March. This weekend I think I’ll have a stiff shot of Canadian whiskey (we call it rye up here), have a good night’s sleep and maybe I’ll come back next week kinder, gentler and more polite.  Or not.

China is so Last Week: Welcome to Seattle!

This is my first post since returning from China. I have to say that it was good to be home. In the plane flying over British Columbia, I had a new appreciation for the vast amounts of land with nary a human in sight.

So now I’m in Seattle, attending the first SMX, and it’s fair to say it’s a hit. I’m at the end of day one, the show is a complete sell out and everybody I’ve talked to seems to be generally pleased with the content and quality. It’s always tough programming the first show of it’s kind, but there’s been a lot more hits than misses. I think it may take a couple of cycles for the level of content and the level of expertise of attendees to completely mesh, but it’s a hell of a good start.

I’m particularly enjoying the size of the show. I’ve got to chat and meet more people here than any show I’ve attended previously, including many of my favorite people in the industry. There’s a great showing from all the engines, and everyone is very accessible. If you choose to work this show (not just in the sessions, but in the networking events) you can walk away with a lot of valuable take aways. One of the problems with many search shows is they outgrow their original appeal and loose a lot of their value in the process. I hope Danny, Chris and the Third Door crew keep the show size about where it is.

The experience of the attendees is also coming through in the Q&A. There’s a lot of experience sitting in the room and it’s coming across in some very savvy questions. Generally, I find the attendees to be high level practitioners, and as more of a strategy guy, I’m finding the show a little tactical for my taste, but I really believe that’s what the audience is looking for. The personalization panel I was on was more of a strategic look at the future, and the number of questions was noticeably less than some of the other more tactical sessions (i.e. dupe content or social media optimization) but it was interesting none the less.

The experience of the Third Door team has come through with a very smooth show there. So far, everything has gone off with almost no hitches (save for a little trouble with internet access earlier today) and no box lunches! A hot meal for lunch..imagine!

Logging in from China – Part IV

I’ll soon be on NW 08 back home (well, technically, Seattle, but close enough). Beijing proved to be less frantic that I expected. It was certainly intense by North American standards, but it almost peaceful compared to the chaos of Xiamen.

This is definitely a city that’s preparing to welcome the world. That becomes apparent even upon landing. Two huge new terminals are being built at the airport. These are massive buildings that run forever along the existing runway.

My visit to Beijing was limited to what could be seen in one day. Chris (Sherman) and I had planned to spend a rather full day seeing as much as we could. We got to the hotel in the evening and both agreed that we weren’t prepared to hit the town quite yet. We opted instead for the hotel’s own uninspiring but adequate buffet. The consolation was that included unlimited, serve yourself draught beer. Now, this is an idea that should be adopted by the west!

Our hotel was the Prime, about a 20 minute walk from Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. The western chain hotels in the area were more than twice the price and the Prime was rated fairly well in TripAdvisor, so I thought it should be adequate for a couple of nights. It was no Sheraton. Even when I cranked the air conditioning to full, the barest whisper of air could be felt coming out of the crate. The air in the room was about a dead as the Ming dynasty. The place was inundated with German tourists and the service was decidedly indifferent, after the almost fawning approach I found at the Sheraton in Xiamen. It wasn’t a disaster, but this is probably the first time that I found a TripAdvisor rating perhaps a little too high. I’ll try to remember to post a comment to this effect.

Early the next morning, after a picturesque sunrise that unfortunately was made more colorful due to the thick layer of smog perpetually hanging over Beijing, we negotiated with a taxi to take us to the Great Wall at Badaling and then back into the city to drop us off at the Forbidden city. We got to the Great Wall in good time and missed the worst of the crowds. Word of advice. Don’t go to this location of the Great Wall in the middle of the day. You’ll be fighting crowds the whole way.

From the parking lot, we had two choices. We could go explore the Wall to the east or west. On the west side, the Wall climbed at a near vertical angle up the Jungdo pass high to the mountain above. On the other side, the Wall climbed at a much more leisurely angle up the other side of the pass. Chris and I are two middle aged guys that are letting youth go reluctantly, so of course we chose the more vertical of the two options. Beside, we reasoned, the view at the top will be better.

First, let me say the Wall was amazing. As we climbed, the views were spectacular in every direction, with terraced mountain sides towering over the river and temples below, with small lookout towers and temples dotting the mountain side above us. But this is no westernized tourist experience. This is slogging up uneven stone steps, some a few inches in height, some over a foot, sometimes with no handrails, squeezing past picture takers and those that just need to catch their breath. In each watchtower, there were treacherously narrow steps leading to the top lookout. In some cases, the steps were so warn you had to precariously try to find a foothold on either side. This would never be open to the public in the west, the liability exposure would just be too great.

We made it to the top, after climbing up well over a 1000 feet, step by step, and were rewarded with a spectacular view. Another group reached the top at about the same time and we asked one of the group if they could take a picture of Chris and I. They in turn asked us to take a picture of them. They asked where we were from and what we did. Every time I’m asked what I do, I never know exactly what to answer. Search engine marketer is too obscure for most people’s frame of reference. So when Chris mentioned he was a search marketing consultant, I expected the typical glazed over response and polite nod, indicating the person was thinking, “I don’t know what the hell that is and I really don’t want to know.” Therefore, I was surprised when the group grinned and one of them said, “Do you know who this group is?” We had climbed up the wall with a group of Google engineers from Mountain View, who were in China for a joint workshop with a bunch of their Chinese counterparts. What the hell are the chances?

After the Great Wall and a quick visit to the temples at the foot of the pass, we met up again with our taxi driver and headed back into Beijing to the Forbidden City. The immense scale of the place defies imagination. The palace is in full restoration mode for the Olympics, and the difference between the weathered and grime encrusted non restored buildings and the freshly restored ones were amazing. Two of the bigger palaces were completely shrouded in scaffolding, so we couldn’t see them. Just as well, because the day and the previous climb was starting to catch up with both of us by this point anyway. We exited into Tiananmen square, were suitably impressed by the vast expanse of the space and the monolithic architecture of the surrounding public buildings(why is it that the more repressive the regime, the less imaginative their architecture?) and then decided to try to find our way back to the hotel.

Our hotel was on Wangfujing Road, which Chris assured me just one year ago was a major thoroughfare. Today, it’s being transformed into a pedestrian mall. This served as an example of how Beijing, and China at large, is being transformed for 2008. There was an army of workers, basically ripping up the old road top and replacing it with tiles. There was almost no equipment in sight, other than the odd ancient air compressor and portable generator wheezing away. The work had been done by pick axe, shovel and sweat. You throw enough people at a project and it’s amazing what can get done. The coincidence of the historic tie to the Great Wall and the amazing work that went into it two thousand years ago was not lost on us.

After our own “long march” we made it back to the hotel and both collapsed for a couple of hours. Then, we rendezvoused and headed to out to dinner at Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant, the home of the original Peking Duck. This restaurant is famous in Beijing and is on the “must stop” list of many visiting celebrities and dignitaries. We fit into neither of these categories and so were ushered to the fourth floor, which I suspect was reserved for all the westerners who don’t know what they’re doing. We ordered the Masterwork, a full duck, along with some accompanying soup, rice and greens.

The duck emerged on a cart and was brought to our table, accompanied by a skilled carver who soon masterfully sliced off every scrap of meat, leaving nothing but a picked clean carcass. The thinly sliced duck was given to us, accompanied by thin pancakes (almost resembling a tortilla) and condiments. We were given a quick lesson on how to wrap the duck into small little bundles. Our instructor used chopsticks and made it look much too easy. After the first attempt we both gave up and used our hands. This is probably why we were sent to the fourth floor, reserved for the “Peking Duck” challenged. Saves embarrassing yourself in front of the locals. Despite the awkward preparation, the food was amazing, washed down with the ubiquitous and very cheap Chinese beer. A cultural experience and a great dinner, for less than $50 US for the two of us. A bargain!

After dinner, we hit Wangfujing Road again for the walk back to the hotel, just a few blocks away. Our construction crew was still hard at it, at 11 at night. In fact, the pace in the street was more frenetic that it had been that afternoon when we were there.

The visit to Beijing was a perfect end cap to an unforgettable trip. I won’t bore you anymore with how amazed/dumbfounded/assaulted I was with China. It was important to be here. It’s important for anyone from the West to make their way here. It’s the emerging Yin to the western Yang and will form a very powerful counterpart to the historic western world dominance. I will never understand the market, the people or the culture, nor should I. It’s not really for me to understand. I was glad to experience it, even just for a week. In chatting with Chris over our decimated duck, as little as I know, I’m probably still ahead of 99% of other westerners. You can’t get a sense of China unless you’re here. There’s no way you can do this at arm’s length. It’s an immersive experience.

I know I’ll be back. And it’s not the romantic return I envision to Europe, where the culture beckons on a very emotional level. It’s an inevitability. The market is too important, the tide is irresistible. No matter what you choose to do or where you choose to do it, to be successful, your path and China must inevitability cross. And on my return, I’ll have all the mixed feelings I currently do about the country and its people.

Logging in from China – Part III

“How did you like China?”

Knowing I have less than 48 hours left in the country, I’m just beginning to prepare my answer to the inevitable question. But there is no easy answer. You see, you can’t “like” China. Like implies a relatively calm and detached, non-committal response, a distant discernment that you have some control over. You can experience China or survive China. You can be amazed by, immersed in, assaulted or befuddled by China. You can be bemused, disgusted or delighted by China. Often, you can experience all of these things at the same time. China is a tidal wave, a sensory explosion, a cultural monsoon. You don’t just “like” it. You live it, and try to figure out the impact afterwards.

I knew participating in SES China would be interesting. It proved to be more than I ever imagined. One of my favorite things was meeting Deb and Jim Fallows, two US ex-pats who are making Shanghai home for two years. Jim is a noted author and journalist for The Atlantic. Deb works with the PEW Internet Project. Together they decided to dive into the incredibly deep pool that is China and try to provide some perspective for their US audience. I naively asked how they were finding the experience. Each, independently, gave the same answer. “Some days I don’t think I’ll make it through to lunch, and some days I think two years won’t be nearly long enough”. Check out Deb’s one week journal she wrote for Slate and Jim’s website. It will give you a tiny glimpse of China, through worldly but still western eyes.

There’s a lot here to digest. Part of me (admittedly a very small part of me) is intrigued by taking the dive myself and following in the Fallow’s footsteps. There is an incredible market emerging, and one feels that you have to try to get your bearings relative to it or you may be missing something of tremendous importance. But I fear that once you started down this path, it would be all consuming. I’m not sure I’d emerge intact. Most of me wants to run for home and try to digest all that I’ve heard, seen and experienced.

One of the stats I quoted in my presentation was that China is now the second largest internet market in the world, at 150 million users, just slightly behind the US at 154 million. But that represents 68% market penetration for the US, and slightly more than 10% for China. I was here presenting the results of an eye tracking study we did on Chinese users interacting with Baidu.com and Google.cn. The results were puzzling, but I found that permanent puzzlement is the norm here, at least as far as westerners go. By the standards we would apply to North American engines, Google offered a significantly better user experience, but Baidu’s market share is 62%, compared to Google’s 20%. And the trends are not moving in Google’s favor. China has chosen Baidu, even though Google may be the more logical choice. Logic is only one of the factors at play here, and it’s a relatively minor one at that. Searching in China is a totally different experience than it is in the US. We use search as a tool. China uses it as a window to the online world. They spend more time on the search results page. Way more time. The average time on a search results page in North America before a click is less than 10 seconds. The average time we saw on Google China was 30 seconds, and on Baidu, almost a full minute. In North America, we tend to very quickly scan a few results, looking for signs of relevance. In China, the entire listing is scanned, and in Baidu’s case, the entire page is scanned. I interpreted this as a less successful user experience. One person who came up to me after the presentation offered another interpretation: this was how the Chinese spend their time online. In North America, information is something to be begrudgingly waded through. In China, information is treasured. We tend to scan and discard the irrelevant quickly. The Chinese like to savor information, to digest it more slowly, to take the time to judge the relevance for themselves. Remember, in the west, we have a lot more trust (sometimes that trust may be misguided, ironically the topic of one of Jim Fallow’s books) in our information sources. The Chinese have learned differently through experience.

Also, in North America our interactions with the search results page are linear, logical and efficient. We zero in on what we’re looking for quickly. The Chinese tend to pick up the information in a pattern that would seem haphazard to us. Eyes dart around the page, scanning here and there. This didn’t make sense to me until I went to China. Now, in the appropriate cultural context, it makes perfect sense. Deb Fallows told me there’s a phrase in China, renao, that, loosely translated, means “hot and noisy”. That’s how the Chinese like it. Explosions of stimuli, amounting to what we in the West would consider an assault on our senses. When you translate this to a search experience, it’s a frenetic scanning of the page. Sure, Baidu’s page is loaded with affiliate spam and pay for placement links. Sure you have to dig deeper and take twice as long to find what you’re looking for. But that’s okay, because time on the internet is valued highly here. Maybe, just maybe, Google is too efficient for its own good in this market. We’ll be publishing the full study soon (mid June is the optimistic date).

This morning, I had my own taste of “hot and noisy”. Chris Sherman and I were to catch the ferry over the Gulangyu, an island highly touted as the favored tourist attraction here (this is a link to a virtual tour that you, like I, will have to be satisfied with for now). But with limited time available (our flight to Beijing was leaving at 1:30 pm) we decided to instead just randomly wander the streets in the vicinity. It proved to be a good choice. The ferry terminal was on the main drag, and on the opposite side was the inevitable stretch of newly erected high rises. Throw in a McDonalds and Pizza Hut for good measure. But just a block further in, we found the real Xiamen. We found ourselves in the middle of a traditional Chinese street market that stretched for blocks. There was not another westerner in sight, as we walked past stall after stall. If it walked, crawled, slithered, hopped, swam or grew anywhere in the vicinity, it could be found here. My wife, Jill, is deathly afraid of frogs. As we were wandering, I saw frogs for sale by the bag. The thing was, they were still alive, packaged in netted bags about the size of a small shopping bag. There were probably 12 or so large frogs in each bag. There was food of every description, live and dead, including a rather large carcass of some kind that was being energetically hacked to bits by a petite woman with a huge cleaver. And there was no refrigeration in sight. Eel and squid lay right next to cookies and biscuits. While it was a sight to see, it did nothing to whet my appetite.

Now, I’m on the plane to Beijing. From everything I’ve been told, my immersion into China has been extraordinarily gentle to this point. Xiamen is, according to one guide book, “the softest of landings into China”. Beijing represents “hot and noisy” at it’s most frenetic. I’m preparing myself. I’ve got somewhere around 40 hours left before I board the plane back home. I’m both treasuring the time left and dreading it. I can sympathize completely with Deb and Jim Fallows. I’m not sure I’ll make it to dinner tonight, but I also hate to leave.

“How did I like China?”

That’s like saying “how do you like being alive?”.  It’s just too big a concept to be adequately covered by such a small question.

Logging in from China – Part II

My first experience in Mainland China was an awe inspiring cab ride from Xiamen airport to my hotel, and I mean awe in it’s archaic sense: the power to inspire dread. It’s not that I hadn’t been warned. But I had exactly one option to get from point a to point b, and that option was an impossibly dilapitated vehicle, painted a brilliant shade of mauve, with matching seat covers, that loudly proclaimed to the world that it was a taxi, in big block letters 2 feet high painted on it’s hood. i admired it’s positive affirmation of it’s profession, even if it looked a little under qualified for the job.

I climbed in, gave the driver my printed sheet of directions (thanks to my friend Pavan Lee at Microsoft. Pavan, your translations have already saved my butt a number of times) and before I had a chance to settle back in my mauve chariot, we had screamed away from the taxi stand and had entered the melee that is Xiamen traffic.

This experience had been described to me, but the description did no justice to the reality. I know my attempt will likewise fall far short, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. First, it was night and pouring rain, so visibility was minimal. There were roads, lane markers and traffic lights, but other than to lend justification to the job of some traffic control bureacrat somewhere, they seemed to serve no other purpose. The traffic lights were a complete puzzle to me, with blinking red, green and blue lights spread in random patterns, with no indicators of what they might mean. The cab weaved back and forth across the entire width of the road, often running down the lane marker itself, cutting in front of vehicles, then being cut off in turn, always accompanied by blast of horn. Bikes appeared out of nowhere, often carrying two passengers and assorted baggage, all wrapped in plastic in a futile attempt to stay dry. And the bikes came from every direction, then took off in every direction. It seems that riding a bike in China makes you invincible, because these riders were obviously not concerned for their safety. It was one gigantic game of chicken, involving everyone in Xiamen, and the loser would be the first to back down. It’s probably a blessing that my senses were dulled from the flight in, otherwise I would have been cowering on the floor. But apparently, it could have been worse. I was chatting with Chris Sherman, and on his ride in from the airport, he got caught in a traffic jam that was irritating the hell of out everyone, and they were making their displeasure known. Obviously, something was obstructing traffic ahead, and drivers were hitting new heights of aggressiveness, trying to get past the blockage. Finally, Chris’s taxi pulled even with the obstruction and he got a chance to see what it was. It was an old man, who had the unmitigated gall to get in the way of a car, which hit him and left him sitting injured in the middle of the road, bleeding profusely from his head. No one was offering assistance to the old man, who just sat and rocked back and forth, holding his head. The biggest concern of all drivers was navigating past the unplanned delay.

I recount this experience, because with some time to reflect on it, I realize my cab ride (hopefully not Chris’s) was somehow symbolic of China itself. It’s an ancient vehicle, going at breakneck pace to an undetermined but vitally important destination, with no apparent plan or directions to guide it. It doesn’t so much matter where you end up, as long as you get there quickly.

I’ve been struggling to put into words my impressions of this place. This is a culture of immense complexity and contradiction that defies the attempts of the western mind to define it. My brain is a linear thing, that tends to value unambiguity and clarity. In China, my brain is on overload. Everywhere I turn, there is contradiction and schizophrenic bipolarity. There is an explosion of stimuli and activity, of signals that are often diametrically opposed, of monumental ambition and dense cultural (and governmental) restriction.

Here are just a few of the contradictions I’ve noted in the last 48 hours.

Inside my hotel, which is a beautiful 5 star Sheraton, all glass, polished wood and gleaming tile, the service is deferential and gracious to the point of near embarassement. I walked out of the fitness club yesterday and suddenly the girl at the front desk bolted upright and started running after me. I thought I must have forgotten to do something or had left something behind. I stopped as she shot past me and lunged for the elevator button. She was just sending me on my way back to my room. But should I step foot out the front door, and not pay complete attention on the busy street in front of the hotel, I would be run over without a second thought. There is no consideration for pedestrians here.

Just down the street from my hotel is a huge shopping complex, complete with a WalMart’s, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Western brands like Levi’s, LaCoste and Esprit are prominently displayed. It’s a temple built to consumerism at it’s extreme, with prices comparable to what I would find back in Canada. In Canada, the average yearly salary is probably around $45,000. In China, in the cities it’s about $1000 and in the country, $300. The gap between the rich and the poor in China is widening every day.

From my hotel, I can’t access sites like Wikipedia, yet Xiamen is a hot bed of domain registration and unabashed online entrepreneurialism that definitely crosses into some pretty grey territory.

Monolithic structures are being erected everywhere, as the government continues a full scale campaign to scrub China’s dirty underbelly and erect a new, gleaming showpiece of affluence and modernism. But the showpieces are being built to cater to an peculiarly eastern view of western ideals, big, glitzy and screamingly commercial. It’s as if somebody Feng Shuied (Feng Shui is officially illegal here, by the way) Las Vegas. And in the process, many reminders of one of the world’s oldest civilizations are being erased.

That’s just a few. Literally, cultural contradictions are everywhere here. But perhaps it’s not a problem. China has lived with complexity for thousands of years. For the Chinese, it’s business as usual. It’s only the western mind that tries to impose clarity where none may be required. China is a vast, dense and vibrant organism, a society of immense ambition and near unlimited resource. For now, they picture the affluent west as the ideal to be obtained at all costs, but in a peculiarly skewed eastern way. But I sense that as China stirs and finds it’s global potential, it will rewrite the definition of success, eliminating the Anglo-American bias that marked the last two centuries.

There are a number of challenges that China has to face. I can’t help feeling that this culture is straddling the tracks, caught between two rushing locomotives that surely must collide. The results will either be catastrophic, or cataclysmic. One thing is for sure. Now that this dragon has been unleashed, there’s no turning back. The world will be a different place.

Logging in from China

I’ve been in China for about 40 hours now, and I’m still trying to decide what my first impression is. It’s a little unfair, because the first 20 of those hours were spent in Hong Kong, which isn’t really China.

I get the sense that China is collectively cleaning the house for a visitor, and they’re determined to impress. Unfortunately, (to me, anyway) it seems the standards they’ve set for impressing are western ones. It’s as if China is trying to embrace all things Western, all at once. But, like I said, those are very early impressions.

Hong Kong perhaps epitomizes this attitude, but it’s nothing new for this city. It’s always had one foot in the west and one in the east. And it’s also been used as a showpiece for over a century. I have to believe the pace of the “spruce up” has picked up in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics though. Entire sections along the Harbour on the Hong Kong side have been razed and are being rebuilt. In 20 hours, many of which I spent sleeping after spending over 24 hours in the air and various airports getting here, it’s pretty tough for me to get a sense of the real Hong Kong. I do believe it wasn’t in the few places I looked, however.

Hong Kong does seem to be built to be efficient. I transfered from the airport to my hotel, the Harbour Plaza in Kowloon, with nary a hiccup. The Airport Express, a high speed training linking the gargantuan airport to Kowloon and Hong Kong, zipped me to the Kowloon station in about 20 minutes. It was fast, antiseptic and terribly efficient. I was a little worried about taking public transit at close to midnight, but I needn’t have been. I’d be in more peril taking my daughter to the mall at home (significantly more, which is why I just won’t go there). I was deposited at the station, a 10 minute drive from the hotel by cab. Thankfully, I had printed out directions in Chinese and gave them to the cab driver. I think he was the only person I met in Hong Kong that didn’t speak English.

If you’re going to Hong Kong, definitely check out the Harbour Plaza by Whampoa. Once again, TripAdvisor doesn’t let me down. The room was a little small but very tasteful. The lobby was spectacular. (A sidenote here..that seems to be common in China, spectacular lobbies to impress the guests, which goes back to my original point. China is out to prove something to the West). The highlight was starting my first morning with a visit to the fitness room and a swim in the rooftop pool, overlooking the harbour. Okay, I’m impressed!

I asked the concierge what I could do in the 4 or 5 hours I had before I had to head back to the airport. He suggested a trip to nearby Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district and the famous Nathan Street. Here, I was the victim of racial profiling. Every single shill man for cheap tand sleezy tailoring shops in a 400 kilometer radius descended on me. I literally had them running across the streets, pushing people out of the way to get to me. Okay, I was one of the few caucasians, and I stood out like a sore thumb with my suit jacket slung over my shoulder and my laptop in a backpack in the stifling humidity (more about this in a minute) but I didn’t see anyone else accosted in this way. I’m pretty sure I served as a source of immense amusement for the Hong Kong natives who were watching me get mauled like a t-bone in a dog pound. Normally I would have just ignored them, but I wasn’t sure what was culturally correct. After saying some polite “no thank you’s”  which led to a much longer conversation that I was looking for, I realized my first plan was better. Ignore..ignore..ignore. I walked several blocks up Nathan, realizing that this was not really the Hong Kong I was looking for.

And now, the humidity. It’s a stifling, hot wet blanket that sucks the life blood out through your pores. I live in a semi arid climate, on the northern tip of the Sonoran desert (yes, Canada does have a desert..one) and I don’t do well in humidity. New York constantly throws me into a shirt drenching spasm of perspiration. But New York is bone dry compared to Hong Kong. I had worn what I thought would be a nice light shirt. Within 3 blocks, it was literally soaked everywhere. I might has well thrown it in the harbour and then worn it for my little tour around town. I was drawing stares (polite, but noticeable) and several bemused looks as I left a trail of melted Canadian in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui . By the time I decided to turn around and head back to the shuttle stop at the foot of Nathan Street, I hesitated to run the gauntlet again, due both to the cascades of perspiration dropping from me, and the phalanx of eager suit hawkers just wating for me to once again cross their paths. I opted to go a few blocks off Nathan and walk back on a side street. It didn’t help with the humidity, but I did miss most of the “really nice custom suit for you” come ons.

I still had a few hours, so I decided to hop on the Star Ferry over to Hong Kong Central. It’s one of those “must dos”.  The harbour is really spectacular. I landed on the other side after a quick but refreshing 8 minute ride. A quick look on the map showed be there was another ferry terminal close to the new massive Convention Hall. I thought this might be a nice walk along the harbour, after which I could catch a ferry back that would drop me a few feet from my hotel. What I wasn’t counting on was that the Chinese Government has decided to rip up that particular stretch of the harbor to rebuild it. So after hitting dead end after dead end, I zigzagged far away from the harbor, trying to find my way to the other ferry terminal. Of course, the exercise brought on another drenching bout of perspiration. People were crossing to the other side of the street, sure that I had some dreaded condition that caused me to expell copious amounts of fluids through my pores.

I finally found the terminal and headed back to the hotel. And it was here that I found my little slice of Hong Kong heaven. There was a nice park and walk way by the harbor, with a breeze blowing in. I found a park bench, put on my headphones and just watched the amazing scene as spectacular cloudscapes blew in over Hong Kong’s mountains while the ships and ferries passed below.

Blog Overload

Hello Gord..where are you?

Well, to be honest, I don’t even know. I was in NY last week for SEMPO’s planning retreat (great board this year, by the way..look for good things) and right now I’m in Florida (which is literally burning up around me) for the Search Insider Summit. So, my blogging has been sporadic on this site, but I have been doing some posts on the Search Insider Summit Blog, along with David Berkowitz, Aaron Goldman and Lee Odden. Try to catch it…

I’ve got a back log (or would that be back-blog?) of stuff and I’m actually in the office for more than a few days (then it’s off to China and I promised a few people I’d try to do a bit of a travelogue, as I did when I visited Europe last summer) so hopefully I’ll be doing some catch up.

By the way, another reason for the sporadic blogging is that I’ve been up to my ears in new research. We’ve got the first release of new B to B data coming out very soon, we’ve done a Chinese Eye Tracking study (and that promises to have some very interesting data) that I’ll be unveiling in Xiamen, and we’ve got a few other things up our sleeves. So I apologize, but it’s not like I’ve been lounging around the pool or anything…honest!

Pete Blackshaw: 10 Reasons Why You Should Keep Blogging

Earlier this week Pete Blackshaw wrote a column in the entitled 10 reasons why he should stop blogging.

So, should I stop blogging?

Seriously, I’m starting to feel really anxious about keeping up with my main blog.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my blog and its topic, but frankly, I’m struggling to keep up. I’m just not cranking out content like I used to, and feel as if I’m contributing “too little too late.” I’m starting to freak about folks potentially sending unsubscribe pings my way, and I just can’t handle the thought of such rejection.

Pete’s not the only one going through this dilemma.  After a year of blogging I found that my blogging output has its highs and lows.  It is hard work keeping a steady stream going and they’re not always going to be pearls.  But I really believe it is worth it. I still get a charge when I’m at a show and somebody walks up to me and says, “I love your blog”.  I can’t help but checking to see if a new post generated some buzz and is getting picked up around the Web.  And I profess to check my Technorati ranking more often than I should.

Adding to the aggregate doubt about blogging was a video appeal by blogger Michael Gray asking bloggers to step away from the keyboard.  If you don’t have anything useful to contribute, don’t regurgitate, just give up.

It’s all blog content good?  No.  Is there a lot of it that’s redundant?  Yes.  Do I waste a lot of my day sorting through crap content?  Yes.  Does that mean people should stop blogging?  No, and I’ll tell you why.  In fact, I’ll give Pete and the rest of you out there who are wondering if this is worth it 10 reasons to keep blogging:

  1. New ideas have to be expressed frequently and in different ways to be heard

    The thing I like most about blogging is its immediacy.  As an idea pops into your head, it’s really not that hard to post to your blog.  That means that blogs are often the seed beds for new ideas.  It’s where we first express them, seeing if they resonate with anyone else out there in our readership.  If they do resonate, other bloggers start picking up the thread and embellishing on the original idea.  Ideas can spread very quickly this way.  And that’s tremendously exciting.  Let’s face it, it takes a while for new ideas to gain traction.  So when new ideas are expressed in different ways in different places around the Web they’re given a better chance to grow and survive.  Blogs are like incubators for new ideas.

  2. Everyone has a voice

    Freedom of speech is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  We all have voices.  Blogs allow us to express those voices.  It’s not for you or me or Michael Gray to say what is important and what is not important, which voice deserves to be heard and which voice should be silenced.  None of them should be silenced.  It’s your choice whether you choose to listen or not.

  3. You can’t find your voice unless you use it

    The first time you speak up, you usually do so timidly.  The first time I spoke in public, my words barely came out as a squeak.  The more often you choose to express yourself though, the more confident your voice becomes.  When I first started blogging , somebody told me it would take a while for me to find my voice.  To be honest, I’m still not sure if I’ve found it.  My voice seems to vary from post to post.  But the fact is, the more I post the easier it gets to express myself.  Eventually you find your voice, your viewpoint and, more importantly, your audience finds you.  The best bloggers out there have the consistency of message and voice that attracts huge numbers of readers.  But unless you push to keep blogging, you may never find the voice or the confidence to speak out.

  4. Generating dialogue is a good thing

    Blogs are forums for online conversation.  Sometimes the conversations can be affirmative in nature and sometimes they can evolve into debates.  Either way conversations are a good thing.  Ideological debate is a good thing.  Blogs fuel online conversation and that is one of the most positive aspects that the Internet brings to our society.

  5. The Web is a big place

    We have all defined our favorite paths online.  We’ve all identified the blogs and sites that we like to frequent.  Repeating important stories and news isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  You may be reaching an audience who just wouldn’t have heard it anywhere else.

  6. There’s News and then there’s Views

    Most often, when I am passing along a news story ,I try to add my own viewpoint and analysis.  I believe this adds value to the original story and colors it, giving it dimension and perspective.  The best bloggers try to do the same.  It’s one thing to just regurgitate news.  It’s another thing to digest it and come back with thoughtful analysis.

  7. Communication is essential to community

    No doubt about it.  The Internet is a global community and the fundamental glue of community is communication.  Blogs represent the most vibrant form of communication online right now.  It represents the free flow of ideas back and forth between the citizens of this community.  If you shut down blogs, you shut down a substantial portion of communication that makes the Internet the largest, most vibrant, most engaging community that has ever existed in history.

  8. One post can make a difference

    You just never know what the post is that could make the difference.  The idea may seem like a throwaway to you, but once posted it may find it takes a life on of its own and you’ll be amazed by how far and wide it can travel.  Sometimes just expressing your viewpoint about one simple idea can make a difference for someone else out there who reads it. It can open their eyes to a reality they hadn’t seen before.  Paradigm shifting can be a tremendously powerful thing and it can be initiated by a single blog post.

  9. Ideas shouldn’t die alone

    There’s nothing worse than having an idea and never giving it life.  Nothing kills an idea faster than locking it in a dark cupboard.  Ideas need air to breathe and light to grow.  Most of all, ideas need support.  They need to find others who get it and grow it.  Like I said before, blogs are a place where this can happen. By the way Pete, one of your articles did this for me, and I posted on it on my blog.

  10. Not everyone can do this

    This is hard work, and perhaps that’s the best reason to keep doing it. There will be many who try and give up. There will be more than never try in the first place. The latest numbers indicate that there is about 80 million blogs out there.  Pete’s blog has a rank of 21,503 right now on Technorati. That means he’s in an elite group, amongst the top .02 % of all blogs on the web.

Don’t give up Pete..I’m reading!