Webcology

An article in Verve titled, "The people who ruined the Internet", teaches hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger a valuable lesson; if you're really going to really ruin something as big as the Internet, you'll want to include a live alligator for extra emphasis. Jim and Kristine, who both know most of the people quoted in the article personally, are awestruck at how badly off-base a really well-written article about SEO could be. There's a lot to unpack, dissect, reframe, cut into very tiny pieces, and virtually snort off the turntable here but, like all good SEOs, we try.

Covering a lot of bases in only an hour, this is a news-heavy episode. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger start with a weird and very rare Google search outage and quickly move to news that sweeping regulation of A.I. will be introduced by executive order early next week. While the White House moves to regulate, Reddit might move to ban A.I. from training on Reddit content as negotiations between it and OpenAI appear to be flailing towards failure. Meanwhile, over at Google, SGE is getting supportive links, paid ads are appearing among traditional organic listings, unhelpful signals about helpful content are being shared, and so much more. Tune in for our slightly slanted skew on news SEOs can use.

As the world turns around in the hardest of ways hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through several trends in search and social media. An episode punctuated early by the political sides of tech, the conversation moves from TwiXter's often hateful Misinformation Environment to secrets revealed in Google's ongoing anti-trust trials to the conclusion of the October 2023 Core Update. Along the way, we also note Mike King's must-read piece on SGE and retrieval-augmented results generation (SEL, Oct19), and the creeping feeling search may be trying to be a more social environment.

Earlier in the day, show host Kristine Schachinger sat on a panel about ethics and A.I. with Morgan McGraw from Madrid-based Contextual Advertising Company, Seedtag. Morgan walks us through how Seedtag's Artificial Intelligence, Liz, works through tens or even hundreds of millions of pieces of page content, user behaviors, and site analytics to help their clients reach the most optimal target audience possible. To explain that, Morgan has to explain how Liz and other A.I. works, what it does, and how it makes its choices. Most importantly, Morgan explains some of the why while addressing the ethical choices made making and training A.I.

Recorded on host Jim Hedger's 55th birthday, this newsy episode covers a lot of Googly ground. Apparently, there's a lot to update with the September 2023 Helpful Content Update following hot on the heals of the August 2023 Core Update but a little bit before the October 2023 InternatSpam Update which, of course, preceded the October 2023 Broad Core Update. We also talk about the mysterious TwiXter playbook, the obvious TwiXter debt load, and a bit about how Bing Search's A.I. is already eating its own tail. Confused? You probably won't be after this episode of Webcology!

In an interesting interview with A.I. researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio, founder of the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (ARRG!), hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss generative A.I. and the arts. After Eyrk explains how A.I. image models work to generate images from chaos, the interview explores the immediate effects of A.I. on the art world, how A.I. might shape or augment an artist’s creativity, how it will impact the business models of creativity, and how to protect artists and content creators. Along the way, we examine some of the ethics of using generative A.I. in art and also explore the ethics of creating art designed purposefully to subvert A.I. training models. The continuation of our series on A.I.s impact, one year on, is a fun yet challenging episode.

A rough-voiced version of Webcology was recorded several days late due to illness. With Kristine Schachinger recovering from a second round of COVID-19 and Jim Hedger getting over a throat infection that temporarily cost him his voice, this is one of those "the show must go on" episodes. We cover a lot of news in this episode from major AI advancements to the outcomes of Google's Helpful Content update. (note, Jim found the document he insisted Kristine send him).

In the second episode of a multi-part series on the impacts of A.I. on search engines and SEO, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with Mark Traphagen, Vice President of Product Marketing & Training for seoClarity, an enterprise SEO platform. Mark talks about the ethical, technical, and business challenges of adding and altering A.I. in popular software products. -- Next, we're joined by Glasgow-based SEO Craig Campbell who talks about how he uses A.I. in some instances but how he won't in others. Craig talks about the current limitations of A.I. in his SEO practice and how Google is looking at A.I.. Always warm and thoughtful, Craig gave us an open and highly interesting interview.

We are in a time of sweeping change driven by A.I. yet there remains a great deal of confusion about how Large Language Models work and how A.I. content is actually generated. Over the coming weeks, we hope to help change that. In the ten months since the public introduction of ChatGPT, we've used a lot of airtime talking about AI and the Large Language Models behind it. We've talked about extraordinary uses of A.I. and very reasonable fears about how A.I. is going to be used. Like many others in the search industry, show hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger have a better-than-average understanding of A.I. but, they also understand that relative to our guests they're merely well-informed laypersons. - LLM researcher Gavin Klondike joins us in this first of a several-week series to explain the basic concepts behind LLMs. Gavin helped organize the A.I. Village at this year's DEFCON which is where Kristine met him. In this episode, Gavin breaks down how LLMs are built and taught to predict the most likely syntax with which to construct a response to a prompt. He explains many of the processes LLMs use to generate responses and provides what is perhaps the very best analogy explaining how A.I. simply can never understand the topic at hand, even if it can help you understand that topic better. - This was a fascinating, frightening, enlightening, and highly entertaining interview that will absolutely help you understand the technology that's rapidly altering the ecology of the Web.

We started this week with the news that Google's original search spokesperson, Matt Cutts, and his wife Lindsay, are the parents of twins! That leads us to talk about Twitter and the "What Could Go Wrong?", attitude that wants to convert X into everything or distill the workings of the Web into X. From there, we have a fairly serious talk about Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), which will be newly improved with links. Should companies be open to allowing their content to be used to train AI and LLMs? Several of the top 1000 websites think not so we talk about the efficacy of blocking your content from LLMs. We round out the show with an index full of Google organic search news and SEO opinions and would like to giggle while reminding link-spammers that emailing Danny Sullivan will not likely produce a beneficial outcome.