September 2009 Archives

Jason Fried of 37Signals, a Chicago-based web app development company probably best known for inventing Ruby on Rails, just penned a satire on the Valley tech press and venture-funded company valuations. It's a hilarious read...this is good enough to be in The Onion!

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

Read the full article here on the 37Signals "Signal vs. Noise" blog.

Today Google officially announced that the meta keywords tag is 100% unused. Again. According to WikiPedia, Google Research Director Monika Henziger stated it was essentially unused way back in 2002 (though to be fair, other engines may have given it some value, so we all continued to use it, and many still do as an "it doesn't hurt" move).

While this isn't really news to anyone who has been working in search for any length of time, it does provide a further indication to the evolution of search. It's moved beyond on-page edits. Way beyond on-page edits. Yet to this day, when describing search to friends, clients, or colleagues, I'll occasionally hear things like, "Oh, you mean you tweak the tags and stuff?"

Granted, that's still a part of our search toolkit, but it's a very small part at this point. In fact, the whole concept of driving people to one specific website is slowly starting to lose importance depending on what your goals are. Sometimes the goal is to be findable, and the specific touchpoint through which a consumer interacts with you or your brand is of lesser concern...as long as it's a positive result of course.

//img via Noah Sussman