The Internet & Search Engine Optimization

A writer must empathize with her audience and so I must always be attuned to what my readers want to know. Many of us were born before the Internet was invented and so this piece is for those of us who are catching up with this electronic age. So, since many of my readers are into the marketing of ideas, we might as well be well versed in knowledge management through the Internet. Knowledge management ( KM) is simply a set of systems or practices that individuals or organizations use in creating and marketing of ideas, insights and experiences.

I am now linked to a national group of bloggers and political pundits who are into electronic marketing of ideas and so let me share with you some tips. For example, how do we promote our websites? This is the concern of the webmasters or content providers which could be you. The first tip is to use keywords that are search engine friendly from the title tag to the content. Google, Yahoo and Bing are examples of search engines. Savvy webmasters are skilled in website design, menus, content management, imbedding images & videos, etc. To promote a website or a blog, a content writer must use frequently searched keywords and must be in touch with what people want to know or are frequently searching. A writer who wants to be on the first page of a search engine result, among others, must understand the concept of search engine optimization ( SEO). Good SEO ( white hat ) is simply effective marketing of the website and there are yet no laws for this. For now, the guidelines are simply that what a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Bing catalogs ( or indexes) and orders in a hierarchy of search results and ultimately publishes in the search results are the exact results that Internet users want to see.

But, keywords can also be abused by webmasters such as when popular title keywords are not represented in the content of the website or in individual pieces in the blog or website. I have also come across some gray practices in the Internet. For example, what are the ethics involved when another website uses my entire web page ? A profit oriented travel website used my non profit blog entry and all I could do was ogle at the travel website page which was imbedded with a galore of advertisements. Is acknowledgement and attribution enough? I would prefer also to be sent a copy or link or thread of the usage. In fairness, the website owner retained my byline and so perhaps it can be argued that my own website was promoted, as well.

The URL is the address of a website page and I have promoted some of my work by sharing URL links to popular websites or even popular Facebook accounts. For example, if I want to share information about peace talks then I attach the URL of my published work or the link to the popular Facebook account of the chief peace negotiator.

A likeabilty feature can also be imbedded in your website. It has been determined by a group of bloggers that a blog or website entry is likeable when it is friendly, it has relevance, have empathy and the information is ready. It has empathy when it is able to feel others or when it is able to capture what people want to know.

What do people want to know? In truth, it is really different for various audiences across generations, across social classes, across gender and sexual orientation, religion and belief systems, and various persuasions. So, the challenge is to capture what most everyone and all want to know.

When one is in the business of sharing knowledge through the Internet one will experience sheer joy when one’s work lands on page one of the search results of popular search engines.

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps




This is the first movie I saw on the big screen this year so I might as well revisit it with you.

As a sequel of the first 1987 Wall Street movie and made relevant with a poetic treatise of the real 2008 financial crisis, this film is worth writing about.

Manhattan is postcard pretty as ever as the financial center of the universe.

The screenplay is made familiar by a show of the state of the art of the financial markets and some of our current concerns such as energy requirements of the future and progressive non profit websites that are tools to change the world for the better for our children and the next generations.

This Oliver Stone ( 1987 Wall Street JFK & Nixon fame ) film opens with Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) being released after eight years in jail for financial fraud, which as the character explains later in the film, is actually a much larger crime than the insider trading crime, the initial transgression that we saw at the end of the first Wall Street film.

After seven years we find Gekko a star again as the author of a best seller book : Is Greed Good?

But, the angst of the life of Gekko is mostly about his estrangement with Winnie ( Carey Mulligan), his daughter who blogs in a non profit website, that started to get 50,000 hits or website visits per day and ultimately got 200,000 hits per day when indications for market corrections were published.

The daughter blames the absentee Gekko in jail for all the tragic events in their dysfunctional post modern family : a brother who died due to drug overdose and a mother who went mad.

The partner of Winnie is Jake Moore ( Shia LaBeouf) an energy investment expert working in Wall Street who thinks that energy fusion using water, through hydrogen fusion, is the next “bubble” that will solve our energy problems for the next generations.

The poetic screenplay ( Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff ) is actually narrated from the point of view of Jake, a protégé of Lou ( Frank Langella of Nixon fame), who commits suicide after his financial investment bank falls. With the help of Gekko, Jake finds out how and why the company of his mentor went bankrupt.

The next scenes are about the so called “ market corrections” in the financial meltdown that is ailing Wall Street. These corrections largely use the legal and justice system structures.

This film tries to explain in scenes, not unlike the television clips we saw in the real life 2008 financial crisis, what is wrong with our financial markets :people borrowing to the hilt, all of the profits coming from financial services such as trading, leveraging, hedge funding and some of these funds are used to finance industrial military weapons of mass destruction ( WMD) and that only about almost a hundred people in the world control these transactions.

That speculation is the mother of all evil.
Gekko describes the current Ninja generation as the generation with “no income, no job and no assets.” The solutions to all these in the words of Gekko are three words “Buy My Book” as the answers can be found in his best selling book.

Gekko, while introspecting in jail felt that he was the lone sane man inside and everyone and all out of prison were crazy.

The conflict in the movie is the struggle of Jake to make the corrections in the cancerous financial market mess, not unlike the real life 2008 financial mess that as we saw was bailed out by the United States treasury in what was called the billions worth “stimulus package.”

The concept of “ moral hazard” is explained: “someone gets your money and that someone is not responsible for it.”
The villain in Bretton James ( Josh Brolin) is exposed; the wall street crook was found committing securities fraud : trading for his own account and betting against the market he was making.

One of the scenes described by A.O. Scott in the New York Times movie review, that also caught my fancy was the fundraiser soiree event where one finds the beautiful people of Manhattan dressed in designer clothes and the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography, zoomed in on the bulky & beautiful earrings of the women in gorgeous gowns.

 It was such an ostentatious display of wealth for charity.

The beauty and the beast that is Manhattan & Wall Street as further described
by A.O. Scott is the intersection of “ material excess…. with genuine beauty”
and that “ what went wrong” in the financial center can be explained in two words: “ human nature.”   

Social Networking Tales

We are in the post modern age and as predicted people who own information virtually rule the world. The founders of Facebook are called accidental billionaires for launching one of the most popular sites in the world. We hear that a film about the Facebook story is underway and we are looking forward to this in October this year. Anyway, let me share stories about social networking. On the top of my list is a friend who announced that he is very proud that he cannot be accessed on Facebook simply because he wants to keep his privacy. Last year, while I was in Europe, one of the heads of a government intelligence agency had to resign because his wife unwittingly published in Facebook their family whereabouts (as in where they were or where they usually go) which was of course a breach of security, as it turned out for the well meaning wife, after the fact. If they were ordinary people not working for gathering intelligence for Her Majesty, the act of publishing these photos or album would have been just very benign.

Employers are able to access these social networking sites to learn about prospective applicants. Which is why, it is important not to misrepresent ourselves in these sites. But, social networking is a wonderful medium. One is able to connect with friends from a half a century ago and from many parts of the globe with the option to do all these all at once.

Now and for the future, it is no longer difficult to write history or biography or the obituary of a person by just culling information from these sites. Lately, one of the sites has apologized for not being able, in the meantime, to monitor deaths of users and so they are not also being able to update other users.

The obvious downside to the use of these social networking virtual sites is that these sites can derail you from the more important things in life like actual bonding with family and friends or finishing tasks related to making this world a better place or simply by derailing us in doing our livelihood or paid work. One can really get lost in connecting with friends. We connect in these sites with friends that are beside us, or sitting with us in one table or with officemates working with us in the same room.

Some employers have discouraged accessing these sites during working hours. Of course, these sites can also be tools for doing one’s work like the announcement of a product or a meeting schedule or to interact with clients and partners or for virtually almost anything imaginable that will make work easy.

One of the most powerful usages of these sites is that it was one of the tools that was used for the campaign and election of President Barack Obama to the most powerful post in the world.

Today’s challenge in the Philippines, though, is making these social networking sites available to most everyone in the countryside. Many towns in the Philippines are still not connected to the wired world.

The other challenge is how to harness these social networkers in the wired world (who are just, otherwise, going on with their business oblivious to the many problems in our immediate communities) to the great task of making this world a better place than it is now.