Being from Colorado, I like to go skiing in the mountains at least a couple of times a year with the family. It feels like a responsibility and justification for living in a climate that can be cold for many months out of the year. It’s strange how, at the same time, I always notice that the skis and associated hardware have changed slightly. You know, the color and design of the skis or maybe the way the boots and bindings work. I’m usually intrigued enough to see if the change could improve my ability to ski or to enjoy the experience.

Skiing in Colorado typically starts at about the same time as Webmaster World’s annual conference in Las Vegas, which kicked off on November 11th at the convention center and ended with the traditional pubcon gathering at the Hofbrauhaus 4 days later. I always enjoy catching up with friends and getting the latest information on the search engines and web development trends. If you have a web site and you want to promote it, this is the one conference no one should miss.

This year I noticed that every session had rows of tables for participants to place their laptops on, unlike past years, when we only had chairs and took session notes manually. I observed people multi-tasking from the rear of the conference rooms. IMs, eMails and tweets were flying back and forth on a variety of devices. I even noticed someone answering customer support messages from their web site using Live Person right in the middle of a session.

It made me wonder if I was missing something. I remembered my old skis and how they had lasted for so many years. Could there be similarities with web development? It seems like a bizarre correlation, but underlying web technologies are moving ahead at a relatively slow pace. We’re just bombarded with a lot of extraneous items that make it feel like things are moving faster than they truly are. The number of options and tasks that we have to monitor has surely increased, but underlying changes in technology happen slowly.

I guess what I’m trying to do is draw a correlation from my latest ski adventure to my latest web conference; after all, it is that time of year and I recently purchased a new pair of parabolic shape skis. Besides the significant difference in my ability to carve up the mountain slopes, I noticed that nearly everyone is now using the relatively new technology.

So what do parabolic skis have to do with this years Webmaster World conference sessions? During the widget (aka gadget) session, one of the presenters showed a slide that overlayed web usage and web traffic to corporate sites and social networks. It showed how valuable it can be to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and provide your content on these networks (and devices) in the future.

It seems like only a few years ago that we were introduced to web widgets, even though they have been around for more than a decade. I believe that is about the same time that Elan introduced parabolic skis. After attending the gadget session at Webmaster World this year we built and served-up several custom gadgets. Somehow, it reminded me of carving up the back bowl at Copper on my new skis…piece of cake!

I’ve always been fascinated with political elections, but the marketing side of me is often disillusioned when observing campaign advertising. It’s just too easy to spot both sides spinning their messages to meet their agendas. Clearly, this year is no exception and the partisanship seems to be more prevalent than ever.

We are constantly being bombarded with political ads from all forms of media communications (i.e. newspaper, radio, television, etc.) this time of year. On my short drive, to and from work, I often find myself alternating between different radio stations to hear the hosts spin their commentary to support their ideology. I sometimes feel that it would be empowering to have the ability to broadcast my views to the masses like the many opinionated talk show hosts on both sides of the airwaves.

One option might be to stand on a street corner and bellow-out my approval of an issue or candidate of choice. Though, I’d probably go to another town incognito since my biggest fear would be that a friend, acquaintance or colleague might see me and think I was a fanatic or something. Perhaps our family wouldn’t be invited to the next neighborhood block party!

Another option would be to become a political volunteer or spokesman, but I have never been very interested in trying to convert someone to my way of thinking. I’m very open to hearing other peoples’ perspectives and I can easily accept the fact that some people have a different opinion than mine. Unfortunately, some people use their pulpits to spin the affairs of others to meet their agenda and it’s particularly obvious with talk radio.

I mostly avoid political conversations these days since they always seem to bring out the worst in people. On one hand, I enjoy listening to political discussions whenever possible, but on the other hand, I often find myself getting aggravated with the way both sides unfairly spin their commentary. It’s an oxymoron and I wonder if other people have similar feelings?

Recently, I was speaking with someone about the accuracy of their web site’s survey data. We discussed how it’s actually pretty easy to manipulate a web site’s survey results. Here’s an example: KHOW, a popular Denver radio station web site, periodically rotates surveys on their home page. Currently, the survey is entitled “Who do you think won the debate?” There are two selectable answers and the results display percentages for each presidential candidate and their running mate.

After submitting your answer, the web site displays the current results. Unfortunately, there really isn’t any guidance regarding whether you can vote more than once. Technically, the web site appears to be using a cookie to track those who have voted before and displays only the results if you have. It’s easy to remove the web site’s “poll_id” cookie and vote again and writing a bot to monitor for any changes in the survey results and to automatically make adjustments would eliminate any manual intervention.

In the real world, this could be considered analogous to a single person being able to vote for a candidate or issue more than once and this seems like it would be a sin. Lately, there has been growing concern over voter fraud and organizations who provide voter registration information for people who don’t actually exist. In cyberspace, when you arrive on a web site you should be considered anonymous and it is important that you can remain that way. This is the conundrum with web site surveys that don’t require registration.

The moral of the story is to not believe everything you see and hear on the Internet. Keep in mind that web survey data can be subject to manipulation. If you have a web site that conducts surveys my recommendation would be to add some text clarifying that you prefer visitors not vote more than once. From a technical perspective, you should at least add some IP checking. If that isn’t enough, you can always ask your web site visitors to register before allowing them to take the survey and/or agree with any terms associated with participating in the survey.

Seems like there is an acronym for just about everything these days and I admit that I use them from time to time too. Especially in situations where there’s a need to quickly articulate the underlying concepts of a more complex topic in a memorable way. Over the last five years, I’ve been fortunate to be a regular speaker at many WMW and SES events. I always look forward to the conferences since they allow me to connect with old friends and visit intriguing places.

There are certainly a lot of different topics at these conferences, but I generally participate on sessions related to some form of research and/or analysis of web site behavior and/or marketing performance. As a small research and web site development firm we are often asked to perform pre-site research to formulate designs and navigation, as well as post-site analysis to document performance results.

At search conferences the majority of the attendees seem to be familiar with quantitative measurement such as those provided by web analytic and business intelligence applications, but a lesser number of people have actually conducted qualitative research such as usability testing. I’m ask to present the executive summary on the latter topic and many times I need to recount different cases studies based on audience participation.

To present an overview on the topic and the many different case studies, I devised the acronym GODS FUEL as a memorable way to present the executive summary of web site usability testing. There’s really no religious connotation here, just an easy way to remember several important elements of the process.

This reminded me of my years teaching piano at Washington Park Piano Studio since we used acronyms with the kids to associate a musical staff to the notes on a keyboard. Does anyone remember - Every Good Baby Does Fine or All Cars Eat Gas? It makes you wonder if the mind of an adolescent is actually similar to an executive, but I guess that is beside the point.

So here’s what to remember about GODS FUEL. The first word (GODS) is used before you conduct your analysis and the second word (FUEL) is used after your research is complete. Clearly, the participants of the research should match the profiles of the users that visit your web site.

G is for Goal: Your goal is what you are actually trying to accomplish. The more granular you are the more specific your tactics will become. EXAMPLE: Our Goal is to increase the number of leads coming from our web site.

O is for Overview: Present any background information on your company or division with any relevant strategic research. EXAMPLE: Acme is the 2nd largest real estate firm in Hometown, USA. We specialize in commercial properties and our research has shown that the web is a good way to acquire new leads.

D is for Description: Describe your usability research. EXAMPLE: Standard in-house lab session with 10 participants using a computer connected to the internet. The testing will be conducted in a single day and remote monitoring will be available using WebEx.

S is for Scenario: The collective tasks of the test are considered scenarios. Ask each participant to complete your scenarios, observe and document the results. EXAMPLE: Participants will find the least expensive 5,000 square foot office space near I25 and contact a broker using the web site. Secondarily, users will be asked to create a personal web page and save a property to it.

As you prepare and conduct your usability testing keep in mind the 2nd word of the Acronym (FUEL).

F is for Findings: Focus on several high level findings and aggregate the data into categories if possible. EXAMPLE: 75% of participants were able to find the identified property and contact a broker via eMail in less than 5 minutes. Only one participant thought it would be useful to save the property to a personalized web page customized just for them.

U is for Usability Issues: Document and categorize any usability issues encountered (positive and negative) EXAMPLE: Users had little trouble locating the identified property, however, there were numerous usability issues encountered when asked to register and utilize the personalization functionality.  Many users said they would use immediate broker property chat if it were available on the web page.

E is for Effects on the Goal: By correlating the usability issues encountered during your testing to the goal of your research you can develop a list of action items for web site redesign and/or cost/benefit analysis. EXAMPLE: Participants said that having a personalized web portal would only be valuable if they had already established a relationship with a broker.

L is for Lessons Learned: Sum up the results of your research and identify any action items. EXAMPLE:  This research showed that immediate access to the brokers online would be the most valuable functionality to increase leads from the web site.

The acronym example above can be modified to meet just about any usability research. I can tell you that I’ve found it helpful in discussing the benefits of a variety of different case studies in a conference setting. So now you try it and please let me know if it comes in handy the next time you need to quickly deliver a high-level executive summary of your usability testing.

Behind the scenes of any good web site implementation is a solid marriage between Marketing and IT. There’s really no playbook here, every company seems to have a little different process for how the two departments should work together and it’s really interesting how the interactions between the two have a lot of similarities to a real world marriage.

Let’s not kid ourselves; every marriage has issues, the ones that last for a long time just figure out how to make the best out of the ups and downs. The ones that don’t, move on and start the process all over again. I actually got married when I was 19 and divorced at 24, we were just too young. I remarried when I was 40 and we are still going strong. Now my parents, they have been married for over fifty years.

I think the things that make a good marriage can be found in similar beliefs, goals and a genuine friendship for one another. Some people say that couples that last a long time have a lot in common, others say that opposites attract; in either case, there needs to be mutual respect from both parties in the relationship.

In business, vendors often work with only one side of their client’s house and it sometimes feels like there is a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in affect. Many companies, as odd as it might sound, actually utilize vendor services because they can remain “under the radar” for some period of time.

The Marketing folks think that IT doesn’t understand their business goals and the IT folks think that Marketing doesn’t have any long-term technology vision. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that this can put the vendor in a rather precarious position.

In a real world marriage, this sort of extracurricular relationship seems to begin in a similar way. You can easily imagine someone confiding with a friend on how their spouse doesn’t “understand their needs”. This innocent discussion could progress into a relationship when the acquaintance tries to help out their friend. Eventually, the outside faction is exposed and often made out to be a rogue charlatan.

To avoid this sort of situation in business, I guess the vendor could insist that their activities be fully disclosed to all other parties in their client’s company, but can this really up to the vendor? In many cases, to win the business the vendor needs to present assets not currently available from inside the prospective company and that might directly compete with other parties involved.

This brings me back to the marriage metaphor. My observation is that good chemistry between Marketing and IT is rare and the exception, not the rule; afterall, the relationship isn’t built upon the same underlying principles as a real world marriage. Still, it may be said that “Marketing is from Venus and IT is from Mars” or vice versa of course.

Obviously, it is important for Marketing and IT to have clear communication paths, but sometimes the biggest problems are solved by the most minute details. This morning I got up and ask my wife to be my Valentine and I can tell you that even with all life’s ups-and-downs this small gesture confirmed that we are in our marriage together.

It can be fun to draw analogies between the real world and cyberspace. For most people, the acronym VIP means “Very Important Person”. The media, and especially the tabloids, focus a lot of time and effort on following their every move. We all seem to get in on the act; for example, when someone knows a VIP there always seems to be a tendency to name-drop them whenever possible.

In cyberspace, I think of VIP as “Very Important Page” and the analogy to a very important person can be made in an eerily similar way, but keep in mind, search engines don’t understand human traits like infatuation. Traditional advertising concepts like “celebrity sponsorship” are not familiar to search engines and don’t really work very well.

I’m glad search engines don’t seem to get “star struck” like humans and try to concentrate on web pages from topic authorities instead of the celebrity sites. It makes the search engine optimization (SEO) process a little bit more predictable. However, many web site owners and search engine marketing (SEM) firms still seek out web pages with high page rank (PR) in an attempt to get a link placed to their web site from them.

This reminded me of a time in my life when I was required to travel coast-to-coast a few times a month on business because our New York 3D graphics firm had been acquired by an engineering software company in Los Angeles. Well, I quickly became an American Airlines Advantage Gold Member and was upgraded to first class on just about every flight I took. As a result, I flew with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Richards, Whitney Houston, Andy Williams, and Frank Gifford to name a few.

My colleagues were all excited about it since they got to hear a lot of interesting stories about the celebrities, but for me it was just too much time away from family and friends. Interestingly, search engines would have probably considered my Hollywood anecdotes valuable information if my business was celebrity gossip, but they certainly would not have indexed them in relation to engineering software design.

There are many instances where a link from a specific type of web site can quickly move your rankings higher in the major search engines, Sites like Wikipedia, Academic and Professional Associations deliver much higher value than any celebrity site ever could. Search engines pay very close attention to how sites link to you and how you link to them.

So this brings me back to the VIP analogy. Of course it is important to have links from sites with high PR value, but I believe it is more important to concentrate on links that are from authority web sites from within your vertical industry or community. Soliciting a link just because it is located on a web site with a high PR value is like grabbing a camera, jumping on a motorcycle and joining the link paparazzi.

When we start the process of building a web site the URL nomenclature always seems to come up. Sometimes we research and buy a new domain name, other times we create a new directory under an existing domain name and then there are times when we use a subdomain.

Clearly, your site’s URL strategy will have a major affect on how your web pages appear in the search engines results pages (SERPS). Here’s an example; for a long time we used subdomains when implementing blogs for our clients. Later, we changed our strategy to use the domain hierarchy because we found that the latter was more effective at increasing the page rank for the root domain through the natural propagation of inbound links to the blog (as a directory).

There are cases where we just can’t use the company’s domain name; server access, backend software, content updates, etc. and sometimes it’s just easier to build the web site on a subdomain located outside the company’s normal IT infrastructure. To accomplish this, all you need to do is to get a CNAME (subdomain) on the company’s DNS server and point it to an IP address located on an alternate network.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about subdomains being treated as directories by the major search engines. My guess is that the search engines are trying to make sure that subdomains are providing unique content and that they are not being exploited for higher SERP rankings. This got me thinking about how search engines evaluate web sites in the same way as we critique our favorite bands.

Like many people, I have been actively listening to music for most of my life and in that time I can remember many songs that I would now say fall into the category of “One Hit Wonders”. Every generation has them, songs like: “The Macarena” by Los Del Rio (1996),  ”Tainted Love” by Soft Cell (1982) and “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas (1974) all come to mind.

Wikipedia characterizes “One Hit Wonders” as short-lived novelty songs deliberately written to cash in on a fad. Early on, I bought into the commercialization of music and actually bought several albums from some of these bands. I think I may still have an Iron Butterfly album in the attic somewhere. I guess we are all young and naïve at some point in our lives.

So how does this relate to URL nomenclature? Well, if you want to get traffic from organic search to a web site and you are using a subdomain, a good rule of thumb is to make sure that the content is unique in nature and there is an adequate level of substantive content. Think of the bands that have passed the test of time, they typically have their own style and many memorable songs accredited to them. Search engine algorithms are like web site critics, in that they attempt to identify valid web sites in a similar way to how we evaluate our favorite bands and their music over time.

Now this isn’t to say that subdomains can’t be used as single pages. Just like a “One Hit Wonder” can sound really good and make an artist and their record company a great deal of money, these “One Page Wonders” can be very visual and achieve their business goals; however, when planning these types of web sites don’t expect any search engines to ever rank them very high and consider the fact that you’ll need to use paid advertising to promote them.

Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.

The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.

At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.

I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96.  He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously.”  It was immediately credited to Confucius.

This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.

There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.

This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.

So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but to a search engine - video subtitles are worth a thousand pictures”.

With all the dependencies we are building to the Internet, I wondered if we should take a moment to address a potential point of failure. Could the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) be a loophole? There are conspiracy theories out there that say “yes”, but with simple Internet Protocol (IP) decoding schemes anyone can memorize their most important IP addresses.

In my lifetime, I’ve observed increased activity and usage of distributed protocols. The mentality of past governmental monarchies and corporate “tops-down” type organizations seem to be giving way to more prevalent use of progressive decentralization.

It’s easy to draw an analogy to Internet infrastructure and packet routing since data can reach its destination in a multitude of ways, but this phenomenon has been in practice for quite some time now. For example, President Eisenhower championed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The highway system was built to provide different routes for military supplies and troop deployments in the event of an emergency, but it’s now routine for commercial truckers to use the system to modify their course based on traffic patterns.

This got me thinking about DNS servers and the inherent risk associated to the system overlay. At a high level, the purpose of DNS is to provide users of the world-wide-web with an easy to remember naming convention, but it is important to know that there is more to a domain name than meets the eye. Each name has an IP address (set of 4 numbers separated with dots) associated to it and the numbers are used by the mechanism routing the data you see.

For years we have used the phone book in much the same way and people often use this metaphor when describing DNS. Take a moment to imagine being in a situation where you weren’t able to access your electronic contact list or even a phone book. How many telephone numbers would you be able to remember?

Some conspiracy theories describe the government takeover of the DNS servers running the web. They point out the vulnerability of the system and show how an entire country could be removed from the web by merely deleting a suffix like (.de) from the name servers. So if the DNS servers or a subset of domain names were to disappear tomorrow what would you do? Could you remember any given IP to access your favorite news sites for emergency response instructions? If the answer is no, here’s an easy decoding scheme to use.

Have you ever used a vanity phone numbers like 1-800-got-milk? If you apply the same methodology you can sometimes come up with names that correlate to a specific IP address. Here’s an example:

The IP address for Viewmark is 216.38.205.162. This is not an easy number to remember, so let’s see what happens when we use the letters provided on a standard telephone to create a vanity name. We quickly realize that we’ll need to specify letters for the numbers 1 and 0, so let’s assume that (i=1) and (o=0) and all other numbers correspond as shown.

Here are two possible vanity names for the Viewmark IP. The first name is a yet to be invented fuel named Binduboline and I understand that it can be safely used as lip gloss, another idea is to generate a hypothetical video file structure for AOL called (aim.dv.aol.inc). I like the first name, but admit the latter contains the exact spacing of the IP address.

Now this article isn’t to say that we subscribe to any government conspiracy theories; however, in the event you ever find yourself offline because the DNS servers are not working properly, remember either Binduboline or bin.dv.aol.inc and you can be assured we’ll post links for you to relevant information on the internet using IP addresses.

I have been fortunate to have traveled internationally rather extensively in my life. Early in my career I worked for a very small company that was acquired by a very large one. At the time, there was no such thing as video conferencing or the internet and we (the product marketing staff) were asked to visit a lot of different areas in the world to discuss 3D modeling technologies.

It’s ironic because the intensive traveling actually inspired me to start Viewmark. It was just a coincidence that new digital delivery platforms emerged, like CDs and the internet, that helped solve the intrinsic burdens associated with global product marketing. In essence, the new digital communication mechanisms allowed anyone to “have their cake and eat it too” by making it easier to sustain professional relationships around the globe without sacrificing significant time with family and friends.

Still, I can tell you from personal experience that there can be a lot of value in immersing yourself in a foreign country. Any American who has worked in Europe for an extended period of time will tell you that making an effort to speak the language of the country you are in goes a long way, but I readily admit that many of the responses to my attempts came back in English.

This reminded me of an experience I had in Sweden many years ago. It was in the late 80s and I was on one of those whirlwind marketing tours of Europe. I arrived in Stockholm after a long week on the road and decided to take a quick swim. The solarium was on the top floor of the hotel and when I entered I found that everyone was swimming naked. This is not commonplace in the States, but I said to myself, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”. After taking a short swim, I settled near the entrance, then several Americans walked in. Stunned with my appearance, they ask me, in English, if there was a sauna in the area. All I remember was responding with the only words I knew at that moment “Krona, Krona, Krona”.

In some ways international search works the same way. We have found that regional search engines like, Baidu, Naver, Yandex, etc. favor results for web pages where the titles and descriptions can be easily deciphered in the native language of the search engine and the major search engines have country specific sites where the results focus on links that are written in the country’s main language.

There are published reports that show the US percentage of global search traffic at 22% and if we add ~11% for countries around the globe that use English as their first language (UK, Australia, Canada, etc.), we can surmise that only one third of the world uses English when searching on the internet. Note: This is not to say that only one third of internet users will read English content. We feel this is significantly higher.

When a user arrives on your web site you can easily detect their language preference. Translation firms use spreadsheets or APIs to integrate content into their systems for localization and the costs for doing so are relatively low. At the same time, content management systems give you the ability to seamlessly provide the localized content on your web site.

International SEO is not one size fits all, but a little can go a long way! We have seen double-digit percentage increases in a company’s overall search volume by simply localizing page titles, meta descriptions and message bundles. The question to ask is: How global is your company and how well are you prepared to leverage the international search opportunities that are currently available?

Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?

On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.

The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was still single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.

We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.

Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.

What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.