Here’s the first image I sent him, along with the “final” version.

I realized, for the first time, that my initial sketch was absolutely terrible. I’m surprised he ever said okay to it.

Back when I first started the painting, I saw the guy on the right when I looked at the guy on the left. Sure, there was no colors and it was all rough, but it was there. The reflection in the goggles. The stern look. The lingering, unexplained story of the destroyed starship in the goggles. Even now when I look at the guy on the right, I’m probably seeing an even better version of what’s there.

I had the same affliction, as a digital painter, that a lot of startups have running their business: Vision blindness. It’s when your own vision, whether it’s for a business or a digital painting, blinds you to reality.

This oxymoron of a term is crucial to startup success while also being a startup’s greatest liability.

Vision blindness: The prognosis

Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs can’t see through their own vision when looking at their product. I’m certainly one of them, and there’s no shame in it. If you’re reading this, you’re probably vision blind too. (If you aren’t, then you probably aren’t passionate enough for startups. Go find a job at a bank.)

Google definitely had vision blindness when the rest of the world said “We don’t need another search engine.” In a way, it can be an asset. Most successful startups have been told they will fail. Most successful startups have had a crappy product at one point.

And most successful startups have vision blindness. Even after their success.

If you take the first day of Google and put it next to today’s product, the difference would probably be as stark as the difference in my two paintings. Of course, a startup has more qualities than a painting– vision blindness doesn’t just concern the visual.

Treatment #1: Iteration

There’s a month’s worth of spare time in iterations between my iniital piece and my finished painting. Quite a few hours of hard, focused work.

A lot can be said for just making a product better and better. Don’t confuse this too much with adding to a product. Adding things can make it better, sure, but they can also make it worse. When people talk about taste, this is what they’re talking about: Correctly iterating.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. You’re a startup. It costs you basically nothing to iterate, so get to work.

Treatment #2: Feedback

Feedback is one the hardest things to find in startups. Your friends and family will endlessly lie to you. My dad has been completely fine with every iteration leading up to the last one. Most of them sucked. Badly.

Don’t fret, though, they do it because they love you. Or because you’d raise a big stink if they were honest (You don’t do  that, do you?).

Dishonest (even it’s polite, white lies) feedback will make your vision blindness worse. Avoid it at all costs.

Instead, ask people who hate you. Let people be anonymous in their feedback. Ask someone who has no stake in you or your product. Do whatever you can do get good feedback. When you do, assess it as honestly as possible; remember that you’re blind and they aren’t.

Feedback is one of the best reasons to have a co-founder. If your co-founder gives you polite, easy-to-give, white-lies feedback, then find a new co-founder. Or stop being a dick about receiving the feedback. (And yes, the problem is either him or you.)

Treatment #3: Shifting Perspective

You can temporarily fix vision blindness by shifting your perspective.

A trick in digital painting is to flip the image horizontally. The image is new to your mind, so you see a lot of glaring errors that weren’t there before.

Unfortunately there isn’t a great analog for startups. One way is to try to imagine how your product will be used by all the different types of people who use it. Think about the system (your product) not as an overall entity, but as something approached by a single person using it.

Watch someone use it, too. Flaws and errors show themselves really fast that way.

Treatment #4: Abandonment

Cures for vision blindness are pretty rare. The sure thing is abandoning the project. If you drop your vision, there’s no way it can blind you.

“But what if I’m right?” is the question that comes up here. Your Magical Fart Facebook app might be the next Google, sure. Or it might be a huge waste of time.

For every naysayer who says your idea won’t work, there’s an even stupider idea that made someone a millionaire. There’s no way to really know if your idea is good. Stick with it for a while and feel it out. If you’re treating your vision blindness, you should have a pretty good idea pretty fast.

Of course, this is coming from a guy who’s built products for social media newsrooms, educational tech, product placement, and more and only given up on one of them. Ultimately, we’re the own keepers of our vision.

In the end, though, if it’s not working, drop it. If it is, keep it up. There’s no shame in failure. Just consider it an iteration in the overall picture of your startup success.

The post was on the future of public relations, and where PR was headed. One of the explored paths, a scorched wasteland of a future, was SEO. Since my opinion on SEO is really a matter of public record, I disagreed. I said it was an oasis in the desert; drink it up and we (the PR profession) will find it was all just hot sand.

Cue mini-shitstorm. In the next 24 hours, I would brave the following:

• Having it suggested that my clients should be pitied.
• Being told what I was doing, spreading misinformation, was “shameful.”
• Being called a liar and a scammer.
• Being called a fucktard. (I’m happy to see the term has moved beyond the juvenile gaming community and into the real world. I always liked the word when I was thirteen.)

More often than anything else, I was called ignorant. Guilty as charged. I’m completely ignorant as to what SEO folks do. But I felt less bad about it when I figured out that– Surprise!– everybody else is too.

SEO guys don’t actually do anything

I should qualify this with a …that other professions don’t already do better. But I’m prone to dramatic statements, so let’s go with it.

Let’s start with the term search engine optimization. This used to be a really innocent term but, like the cast of Jersey Shore, it somehow got caught up in something bigger than itself.

The basic way of doing it meant tweaking a site to comply with (or better comply with) major search engines. If I could go back in time and shift the mighty river that is the meaning of a word, I’d keep it to this:

Search engine optimization: Optimizing your website (and only your website) to more easily be read by search engines.

NOTE: I should note here that SEO has also evolved to have a second meaning as well, a word that tries to quantify the effect that backlinks bring.  Some people call this “link juice” too. This post is only concerned with the term that pertains to professional techniques employed by individuals, not websites.

Anyway, onto the technical!

The Technical part of it

Anyone who does serious web development knows that this specific SEO is a byproduct of what they do. Semantic markup and quality construction of a page is the stuff crawlers love. Asking a web developer if he does SEO is like asking a carpenter if he drives nails. It’s like asking a barber if he trims around the ears. “Well, that’s part of a haircut, isn’t it?”

SEO (in this sense, not the runaway-train phrase of today) has to remain in the technical realm, and there’s a pretty simple reason why: There’s about a million ways to build a website. Even if we narrowed it down to a dozen major frameworks/languages, you’d still be hard pressed to find a single guy that knew everything about all of them.

And yet, SEO gurus consistently claim to be able to optimize any site, whether it’s a Django site, a custom PHP job, a Joomla site, or a site coded in a Swahili version of Perl.

To me, that’s a pretty amazing claim. I know competent programmers who struggle for months and years to become good with one framework. To me, that claim can only be bullshit. Leave the technical stuff to the guys who know what Javascript is.

And, yes, of course there are very simple things you can do to improve your website’s ranking, if your website is in a bad enough condition. But getting your hair trimmed around the ears doesn’t qualify as a haircut. And you shouldn’t be paying full haircut prices for it.

The non-technical part of it

Websites have stuff inside the tags, too. I get that. Content is the big driver of the web, and it’s a big driver of a website.

If you’re consulting on content strategy or rewriting the content of a website to better suit your market’s searches, then fine. But let’s call that Search Engine Marketing. Because that’s what you’re doing, if you do that. There’s nothing wrong with SEM because these techniques (among many others in SEM) are clear, well-documented and easy to explain.

For a lot of folks, this could boil down to semantics. If you just thought, “Okay, great, he’s not talking about me,” then you might just be right. If you’re one of those folks, go to your various web presences and delete all references to SEO.

Do it because, right now, you’re never been a part of a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. As Obi-Wan said, you must be cautious.

SEO doesn’t have the openness or easy explanations. SEO is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, etched in another language on stone tablets pulled from the side of a mountain. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Building a backlink empire

The final part of “SEO” is the stuff done off-site. Ever since a startup called Google decided to make backlinks a leading factor in search results, this has been a pretty big deal. I’ve heard it described by SEO pros a being between 40% and 80% of the job.

There’s two ways to build your backlink empire: whitehat and blackhat.

Whitehat is the good stuff. It’s getting coverage on blogs or other online publications. It’s getting people to link to your site in their tweets. It’s building a social media presence on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

It’s, well, it’s public relations. More and more, this is (and has been for a while now) a function of PR. There are other whitehat strategies like building partnerships (linkswapping sounds so 90s, but you might know it by this name), but I see those as in the realm of PR too.

I’ve asked about other backlink strategies that fall specifically to an SEO guy and outside the PR realm. That’s when I collected most of the insults I listed above. There are some easy answers too, such as paid listings (search advertising) but again, I see that as falling to SEM. Buying a search ad isn’t optimizing.

Whitehat’s evil twin brother is blackhat. Blackhat practices are unfair to everybody involved except the person doing them. They’re basically a bag of (admittedly, often very clever) tricks that can artificially boost a site’s rankings.

The problem here for “SEO” is that the bag of tricks is running out. Year after year, new tricks are squashed by Google and the other search engines. What’s left? Well, I have no idea. Like I said, I’m completely happy to confess ignorance here.

But don’t ask me, ask an SEO guru which specific techniques he uses to build backlinks. You’ll be met with silence. Or you’ll be called a liar and a scammer, like I was.

Why? Well, in my mind, there’s three possibilities:

It’s a secret sauce: The SEO guru has a bag of tricks that are all above-the-belt, honest techniques that he can use to supercharge your web presence. He just doesn’t want to tell anyone because, hey, it’s a trade secret. This is the pick for folks who still believe in the tooth fairy.

It’s blackhat: The SEO guru makes a bunch of fake blogs that link to a product. Or he knows a hack that will be fixed by Google six months from now, potentially getting a client site banned in the process. Because he uses blackhat techniques, he doesn’t want to talk about it because hey, it kind of makes him look like a jerk.

It’s complete bullshit: All the tricks have run out. SEO is a duct-taped faux-industry running on fumes. All that’s left is to live out the momentum of the glory days and hope that clients keep paying big bucks for a temporary fix that’s best executed by real professionals with real specializations.

I’m leaning towards the bullshit option. SEO has surrounded itself with a shroud of mystery that keeps people from asking questions. Part of what allowed this is the very nature of search: It’s complicated. Google says they use over 200 factors in weighing sites. And it changes literally every day, every hour and most recently every minute.

It’s too easy to label yourself with SEO. And I’m just not buying it. SEO is still a band-aid on the bleeding wound of bad web development.

Next time someone tells you they do “search engine optimization,” ask them which search engine they work at.

That’s the potential headline, anyway. After Oprah put up a show as the prize in a contest on her site, Reddit and other sites championed an unlikely candidate: A very funny guy with cerebral palsy named Zach Anner.

Anner, whose contest video included the quote, “No Atlantis is too underwater or fictional,” quickly became the darling of the popular social news website (and surely others too), tallying over 9 million votes before the contest was up.

Of course, the winners page, where Anner placed 7th, shows him at 3.4 million votes even though his submission page still shows the 9 million.

What happened?

Well, the Internet happened.

Online polls are completely unpredictable. Tying real world decisions to them, like Oprah’s team has done, is asking for a public relations nightmare. A telling example is Time Magazine’s 2009 “Most Influential Person” contest, where 4chan founder Christopher Poole won after the poll was bombarded with scripted votes. Poole wasn’t the only influenced vote; 4chan also picked the top 21 spots.

Time isn’t too bothered by the results, though. They didn’t promise anything to any of the winners of their poll.

But Oprah did– sort of. It’s interesting to note that she promised a show not to the 1st place winner of the contest, but to her favorite of the top 5.  It would seem that keeping Anner out of the top 5 was a calculated PR move: Avoid the appearance of not picking the handicapped guy.

It was completely reasonable in a way. Anner’s a funny guy and probably does deserve a TV show. But for Oprah’s audience? Probably not. And it wasn’t Oprah’s audience doing the voting, either. The top-voted comment on the latest Reddit submission concerning the story is a joke about continuing to not watch Oprah’s in protest.

Backing up

If it was a calculated move, however, they’ve now backpedaled, expanding the top 5 to the top 8, which includes Anner. Anner will be heading out to LA to audition, along with the other 7 finalists.

What was the decision-making process here? We’ll probably never know. On the one hand, it seems unethical to throw out votes. On the other, it’s not exactly right to pick a winner even if none of your fans actually voted for him. If you were Oprah’s PR team, what would you do?

Concept art for the three basic classes of the first Diablo.

The Warrior

As the heavy hitter (he’s the guy with the big ax in the picture), the warrior ends up doing a lot of the damage.

But he’s more useful for the damage that he takes. A team of adventurers will have a hard time functioning without a crazy guy up front, swinging around his weapon and taking all of the big hits.

In web development, the warrior is the back-end programmer. It’s a dirty, bloody, sweaty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The Mage

After slinging around a few magic missiles, the mage is the guy on the team that gets to act like the whole thing was no big deal. He drops a few tidbits of wisdom on awed onlookers in his fancy robes while the warrior gets to pick bits of ogre out of his ragged warrior beard.

That’s right; the mage is the designer. Everyone see the lights of his fireballs from the village, and comes running to congratulate him on a job well done after the village is saved.

But if a Goblin were to slip by with a spiked club, the mage and his fancy robes wouldn’t last long. The Mage has the hardest time on his own.

The Rogue

The Rogue is the most versatile of the three classes. He can attack from afar, like the mage, with his bow and arrow. He can also mix it up in the front lines with his dagger, particularly if he can position himself correctly (ideally, behind his opponent).

It’s this versatility that lends the rogue his real strength. He can be where the team needs him to be.  In web development, the rogue is the guy with an unusual combination of skills. He’s sometimes called a sweeper or just a jack-of-all trades.

Building your team

Putting together a web development team is just like putting together a band of adventurers. You need a balance of classes.

If you have three people, aim for one of each class. Sometimes it’s okay to have two warriors and a mage, or similar combinations. Having three of the same class is almost always a disaster.

With two people, the combinations become a bit more limiting. Obviously Warrior/Mage or Warrior/Rogue is a good combo. Notice that having at least one warrior is always a good idea (the converse, having all warriors, is just as bad as that idea is good, however).

Watching out for the know-it-alls

Adventurers are a boastful bunch. Watch out for the warrior who says he knows everything there is to know about magic, or the mage carrying around a great sword that’s taller than he is. For every day an adventurer spends learning more about the intricacies of shooting fireballs, the less he learns about swinging an ax. There’s lots to know in fantasy adventuring, and there’s even more to know in web development.

We’re long past the days of one person being able to know everything. A balanced team of specialists will always beat out a team of know-it-alls.

StrikePad has been a bit quiet lately. If you’re wondering why, it’s because we just launched our new project, HootCourse, into a public beta about two weeks ago. We’ve been working at a fevered pace since then to get everything just right and deploy a few fixes.

Now we’re looking for feedback and bugs. If you’re interested in helping out with testing, join HootCourse 101, the course for learning about HootCourse.

If you want more information on HootCourse, read our About Page. Or check out a couple of the blogs that have recently featured us:

Thoughts of a Cyber Hero: HootCourse

Free Technology For Teachers: HootCourse

Jane’s Pick of the Day: HootCourse and CloudCourse

We’ve seen an outpouring of support from our friends, both personal and in the educational field. Thanks to all those who have helped!

It’s all about taste.

Ramen noodles are the lifeblood of my small startup. Their ease of preparation and low, low price make them ideal for bootstrapping. I had perfected my cooking technique and couldn’t be happier with my ramen noodles.

Or so I thought!

With the iPan, Apple have once again introduced a complete game changer. Preparing and eating ramen noodles will never be the same.

Apple’s saucepan brings something to the table that other saucepans just can’t match: Taste. iPan ramen just tastes better. The taste continuum below perfectly represents why Apple products, especially the iPan, are superior.

Not just a better development environment: A complete development environment.

Before, my development shop was plagued with the worst kind of problem: Too many choices.

Now Apple have done even more work to lift that burden from my shoulders. I no longer have to go to the store and pick from several different saucepans, with their erratic problems and glitches. I have the iPan.

In fact, I couldn’t go to the store and pick if I wanted to. Apple have extended the terms of their agreement to include the complete development environment– which now includes our kitchen.

Some companies would be content to just provide an alternative. Apple thankfully mandates our development environment, ensuring a great experience for everyone.

They go that extra distance so I don’t have to.

Apple have also quite cleverly ensured that I will always pick ramen noodles. After dropping 1700 on a MacBook, 500 on an iPhone, 700 on an iPad, 99 a year to develop for the iPhone, and 149 on this revolutionary new iPan, all I can afford is ramen.

Thanks, Apple.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to point to the clearly tagged disclosure that’s included with your article? That’s the disclosure tag. And it’s sorely needed in HTML5.

The strengths of semantic disclosure

Portability

One current convention of disclosure is the site-wide disclosure policy. Like a privacy policy, it’s linked in its own section, usually in the footer or navigation.

The major drawback of such a policy is aggregation. An article that’s torn from its home site and posted in different places won’t have that same footer or navigation, opening the author up to potential disclosure violations.

Like the header or time HTML5 tags, the disclosure tag would travel with the blog post, protecting the author regardless of where it was posted.

Separation

Disclosures exist in a limbo state. Sometimes they’re part of the article, and sometimes they aren’t. Authors will often awkwardly paste them in at the beginning or end of their article, or as mentioned above, depend on a site-wide umbrella disclosure. The disclosure tag would keep the disclosure text separate from the post’s text, while still keeping it within the article tag.

Style

As a separate element, disclosure would place an emphasis on developing a style for displaying the disclosure text, something that’s often overlooked now. More often than not, authors aren’t the ones designing their sites; a default disclosure style saves them from the plight of having to style their own (or worse, finding a disclosure plug-in of some kind).

How it would work

The article element

Like header and time mentioned above, disclosure would be a child of the article element. It would be optional; not all articles need disclosures.

In-line disclosure

The HTML5 working draft already includes an example of in-line disclosure under the small tag description. Functionality like this (disclosure: I’m a co-worker of John McExample) wouldn’t be handled by disclosure.  Rather, general article disclosures or site-wide disclosures would be suitable. Some examples:

<disclosure>The author received a promotional copy of the book Strike Up the Web before writing this review.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author is a former employee of Match Strike.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author was paid by SuperConglomerate International to write this post.</disclosure>

Just as articles can sometimes have multiple authors, an article may need more than one disclosure.

Linking a disclosure

Disclosures could be linked within the disclosure tag. This maintains the flexibility of having a site-wide disclosure, without exposing the author to potential liabilities through aggregation. Here’s an example:

<disclosure>See <a href="http://matchstrike.net/d.html">Match Strike's Disclosure Policy</a></disclosure>

Authors could link to external disclosures (from disclosure services, open-source disclosure statements, etc.) in a similar manner.

The growing importance of disclosure

Disclosure isn’t going to be less important by the time HTML5 is finalized. By then, the need will be absolutely clear, especially if the FTC start regularly taking action against offenders. We need disclosure as a tag now, not as a “Wouldn’t that have been nice?” spec in HTML6.

Rowfeeder is like a lot of apps. It tracks keyword mentions on Twitter. The difference, however, is how it records them: Straight into a Google spreadsheet.

For PR pros, this avoids a lot of the problems that the other services have.

• There’s no daily e-mail report (if you’re in PR, you’re already getting a lot of these).
• There’s no new site/interface to log in and deal with.
• The resulting information is incredibly easy to share, whether it’s with colleagues or clients.

At $2.49 for a two-day period, it’s a great deal, especially for product launches, big articles, or events. Did I mention it updates the Google spreadsheet in real-time? It’s impressive stuff.

The downside

The inherent drawback of the service is that it is, in some ways, too powerful and too demanding on both the Twitter side and the Google Docs side. Rowfeeder can’t yet handle the more frequently occurring keywords, but they do have a nifty feature on their site which will tell you if they can handle yours.

It also doesn’t support phrase tracking (any search term with spaces), which unfortunately leaves out a lot of my own search terms. The app itself apparently can handle it, but you have to contact them to set it up.

Since you’re setting up a two-day period, there is some planning time in advance. It’s not a “fire and forget” service like Google Alerts. I imagine the time it saves makes this worth it, although it might be tough to practice this sort of discipline when planning a big event or product launch. Like with phrases, you can contact the team to set up extended tracking over longer periods of time.

If it helps any, know that they’re very approachable guys.

Some things I would like to see

Links: It’s hard to find a site that doesn’t link Twitter usernames to a profile. Rowfeeder spreadsheets don’t. I know it’s possible, and I find myself wondering why they don’t include this feature.

Hand-holding: Rowfeeder gives a lot of extra data in the Google Docs. Some of it is straightforward, like the graph. Some of it’s a little bit more complicated, like the Tweet Data tab.

More graphs: Right now everything is tabular with one graph. If I handed this job off to a person, I’d tell him/her to make some graphs that I can show off at a meeting. I’d probably be paying a person more than $2.50, but the information’s there, so why not take advantage?

The conclusion

Rowfeeder is a steal for what you get. Public Relations professionals seem to be scrambling to show off ROI for all this fun new stuff they’re doing. I think a Rowfeeder spreadsheet is the step in the right direction.

Facebook is rolling out a new layout. If the story doesn’t sound familiar, it should.

You can guess the rest. Some people got it early. It has mixed reviews. There’s a facebook group with thousands of people unhappy with the changes. And the latest step: People groaning that it’s already happening again. (The irony of including this step in this post is not lost on me, but bear with me for a moment.)

It’s starting to feel like they’re just moving the same ol’ furniture around.

Maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing. Has Facebook found the formula for keeping the top spot? Keep it feeling fresh, even if nothing has changed all that much.

Madonna reinvented herself every few years. Facebook rolls out a new layout every few months.

Is it the only reason they have hundreds of millions of users? No. But it’s a big reason that people are staying with the site.

The takeaway: It seems to work.

What have you done lately to keep your site feeling fresh?

Like many others, at one point I found myself asking, “Wait… it’s a 4:3 screen?” It wasn’t because I was disappointed in the new specs; this was hours after I had seen actual images of the device. “I could have sworn it was widescreen!”

I wasn’t quite ready to dismiss my initial perception of the device. After all, the media-consuming public has been conditioned over the past decade to accept that widescreen is just better. Our TVs are wider. Our monitors are wider. Even our Apple laptops are wider.

But the iPad, as it turns out, isn’t wider. That doesn’t stop Apple from giving the impression of width on their website (or, at the very least cleverly transitioning us towards this “new” aspect ratio). My initial perception was wrong, but it took an image rotation in Photoshop to really convince my brain.

Looking at the promo images of the product, it’s not hard to see why. The iPad is almost always presented vertically. If not, it’s slanted away from the camera and pointing off-page, giving an illusion of width-through-depth that, if you don’t look carefully, makes it look wider than it actually is.

Apple isn’t evil and this isn’t a malicious “gotcha” scheme, of course, but it’s worth noting. The folks at Apple are masters at presentation, and I’m positive that they put as much thought into this as any other part of their launch campaign. As far as gripes go, the 4:3 aspect ratio usually comes in pretty low on lists, and I’m betting it’s due in part to this clever presentation.

It reminds me of the old tables optical illusion: Which tabletop is longer?

The answer (like most optical illusions) is that they’re both the same. Exactly the same shape for both tabletops. That one on the left sure looks longer though, doesn’t it?