Steve Yegge, the Google engineer that came in to recent infamy for inadvertently publicising a rant about all he perceived as being wrong with Google, has written another lengthy post, this time explaining all that is awesome about working for Google.

In the first few paragraphs he touches upon something, probably unintentionally, that I feel captures perfectly what is wrong with Google. In essence, Yegge says that a company like Amazon cares about its customers, while Google cares about its employees.

This is, I believe, the crux of the matter. Google, as a company founded by geeky engineers and built on the output of geeky engineers, is composed nearly entirely of said geeky engineers. In his book In The Plex Steven Levy observes that if you’re not an engineer within Google, you’re practically a second-class employee.

Google has become a distributed corporate technology campus, focused heavily on making their supersmart geek employees happy. All those awesome corporate perks you hear so much about, they’re there to make sure those supergeeks are happy and love working for Google so much they’d never consider going anywhere else.

The problem is that these geeks, on the whole, are not in touch with the real world in any meaningful way. Yes, the guys who build these cool Google products are all hyper-intelligent computer wizards, but that is exactly why their products fail so often. The stereotype of the geek with a superior IQ yet awkward and socially-inept is based on truth. I should know – growing up, I was one of them.

So a company founded and run by those types of geeks, with its focus on hiring more geeks and doing whatever it can to make them geeks happy and productive, is bound to become a company that loses touch with the real world, with real people and their real needs.

This, I believe, has happened to Google. They’re a company focused too much on maintaining (and funding) their geek campus, and keeping their geek wizards churning out cool stuff. Cool stuff for other geeks, that is. Not so much for the rest of mankind.

That is why, in the long term, a company like Google is doomed to fail – unless it is capable of shedding that insular navel-gazing aspect of its corporate culture, and instead change in to a company like Amazon whose sole purpose is to provide what its customers want.

Google may be much better to work for, but Amazon is the company I’d be investing in for the long-term.

The Problem With Google’s Corporate Culture is a blog post from Barry Adams.

When my wife and I went on our honeymoon to New Zealand last month, one of the things we wanted to see were dolphins. One of my wife’s life-long wishes is to swim with dolphins.

In between all the rugby and sight-seeing, we managed to do two boat trips that had a chance of spotting dolphins. Alas, the playful sea-mammals decided to avoid us and were nowhere to be found.

Today, inspired by a group of fellow internet marketers, I signed up to the WWF The Panda Made Me Do It campaign. Aside from the wonderful irony of the name – which only SEOs could truly appreciate – it’s a great cause and, most of all, it allowed me to ‘adopt a dolphin’ as a gift to my wife. It’s not the same as seeing them in the wild, but I think she’ll appreciate the gesture.

I would like to urge you to sign up for the campaign as well. Our environment and wildlife are incredibly precious, and a small (monthly) donation will go a long way to preserve it, both for ourselves in the present and for future generations.

The Panda Made Me Do It is a blog post from Barry Adams.

I’ll cut right to the chase: I’m moving jobs. The past year with Visual Script has been exciting, educational, and enormously good fun, but a new opportunity has been presented to me which was just too good to pass up.

As of December 1st I will be the new Senior Internet Marketer for Search at Pierce Communications in Belfast. There I will be taking care of a wide range of SEO and internet marketing projects for a variety of current and new clients.

I’m very excited about this new challenge. In some ways it feels as if I’m coming home, as if I’m going to be doing what I was meant to be doing.

The decision to leave Visual Script was not an easy one, as it’s a fantastic company run by a great bunch of guys. But Pierce Communications is the type of company I feel I belong in, run by the type of people I feel most at home with.

The next five weeks will be a transition period in which I’ll be wearing two hats: my old Visual Script hat and my new Pierce Communications hat, as I’ll be doing work for both. And come December 1st, I’ll be wearing the Pierce Communications hat exclusively.

I want to thank Kevin and Damian at Visual Script and Gerry at the Belfast Telegraph for giving me the wonderful opportunity to work with them. I’ve had a blast, guys. Pints are on me.

New Job, New Challenges, New Opportunities is a blog post from Barry Adams.

In my latest column for the Belfast Telegraph I explore the way the internet has changed our perception of ownership. We no longer truly own the stuff we buy, we merely lease it from the manufacturer, the latter maintaining near-total control over the product.

Belfast Telegraph: How the internet has changed the concept of ownership

The boundaries of ownership have changed. Corporations are keenly aware of it, and have been (ab)using and expanding this new system of corporate ownership of your stuff so that nowadays almost everything you buy that is digitally enhanced and online-capable is never truly yours.

Somehow I managed to find myself nominated on a poll titled “Who is the UK’s most influental SEO?”. I’m deeply honoured and humbled, as there are some proper big names of the UK SEO industry on there. It’s also clever SEO from the poll’s creator Peter Young, as he’s getting loads of links back to his site with a very juicy anchor text. Well done Peter.

Holistic Search: Who is the UK’s most influental SEO

The online editor at the Belfast Telegraph liked my nomination so much he dedicated a brief article to it:

Belfast Telegraph’s search engine optimiser nominated in UK SEO poll

A poll on the most influential SEO (Search Engine Optimiser) in the UK has a Belfast-based internet professional among its nominees. Barry Adams, an employee of Belfast company Visual Script – who manage SEO for belfasttelegraph.co.uk – is one of 33 nominees in the poll.

Internet and Ownership / UK SEO Poll is a blog post from Barry Adams.

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 June 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

In his forthcoming book The Shallows author Nicholas Carr argues that surfing the web has a negative impact on how we think. He quotes research stating that exposure to bite-sized chunks of information, from short videos and blog posts to tweets and Facebook updates, trains our brain to prefer this type of information. As a result we are losing the ability to focus on a single thing for longer periods of time.

This is not a new argument – in an article for The Atlantic magazine in 2008 titled “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr laid out the groundwork for his upcoming book. In a recent blog post Carr outlines a specific aspect of how the nature of the internet affects how we consume information: Links embedded in a text distract us from fully reading and comprehending the text. Instead of linking to other web pages from within the text, Carr wants us to start putting links at the bottom of a piece of online content.

As with his original article for the Atlantic, this latest blog post has not gone unnoticed by his critics. Clay Shirky, another notable author and web guru, stands firmly on the opposite side of the debate, claiming that the internet is a force for good. The web, he argues, allows for a wider spread of information than ever before, and has enabled an entirely new means of engaging with politics and society.

As a web professional spending close to 10 hours a day online, saying bad things about the internet runs counter to my livelihood. Yet I too cannot deny the fact that my mind works differently now than it did 15 years ago when I discovered the internet. Many of the symptoms outlined by Carr are eerily familiar to me, such as the big gaps between short- and long-term memories and an increasing inability to concentrate on a single thing for a long stretch of time.

I’m not sure if this is an entirely bad thing, though. The internet works in a certain way, and perhaps our brains are adapting to this online landscape to allow us to perform better in it. We’re developing new skills and new ways of thinking so we can deal more effectively with a globally connected world. Perhaps this type of hypercharged multitasking mindset is exactly what we need to succeed in modern times.

But at the same time I share some of Carr’s concerns that maybe we are losing something in the process. The question, then, is whether what we stand to gain measures up to what we might lose.

The Internet is rewiring our brains is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Many small business owners that have a poor website don’t realize they have a poor website. This is often the case when:

A) they’ve put a lot of time and effort into building their website themselves, or…
B) a friend or family member claiming to be a web expert has built the site for them, or…
C) they spent a lot of money on a ‘professional’ web developer.

Due to the investment of time and money and emotional attachment they’re unable to look objectively at their website and see its flaws. When asked about the success of their website they usually answer that they’re quite pleased with it.

Sometimes I get the uncomfortable task of explaining to one of them that no, really, your site could do with some improvement. I usually try to drill down to the core of the issue by asking them what the purpose of their website is. What is the goal? What is your website supposed to be doing for you?

Many business owners haven’t set any goals for their website, they’re just happy to be online. Very few look at their web statistics regularly. Even fewer act upon the information.

A typical conversation on this topic goes something like this:

“So, what is the goal of your website? What do you want to accomplish with it?”
“Well, I want my information to be out there, to show my products online.”
“Okay, so why do you want people to look at your products?”
“To make them aware of what I can do for them.”
“I see. So when they see your products on your website, what do you want them to do with that information?”
“Well, I’d like them to pick up the phone or send me an email or whatever. Get in touch.”
“So your website is meant to generate leads, is it?”
“Yeah, basically, that’s it.”
“And how many leads are you getting from your website every week?”
“… I don’t know. One or two I think, I’m not sure.”
“Okay, let’s assume it’s two leads a week. How many people visit your website every week?”
“Well, eh, I’d have to look that up.”
“I see here on your web statistics package that you get about six hundred visitors a week.”
“Oh, well, that’s good. That sounds like a lot.”
“Only two of them are getting in touch with you. Two out of six hundred, that’s not a very high percentage, is it?”
“… Eh, I suppose not, no.”

That’s the beginning of a slow, painful path from ignorance to denial, anger, frustration, and awareness. Ideally this ends in acceptance of the inconvenient truth that a good website requires constant attention. If you want to make the most of your online presence, you need to commit a certain amount of time and money to it.

The good news is that it doesn’t require countless hours and infinitely deep pockets to maintain a solid website. A lot of things can be done easily and cheaply and can yield tremendous results.

So ask yourself, are you happy with your website? Should you be?

Are You Happy With Your Website? is a blog post from Barry Adams.

Welcome to my latest blog project, the Great Websites blog. Here I hope to help you make more of your website by providing tips, insights, resources and advice. I will discuss everything: basic web strategy, layout and design, search engine optimization, search marketing, conversion optimization, and analytics.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form. If you want to know more about me, read the About page.

Welcome to the Great Websites blog! is a blog post from Barry Adams.