Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

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Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

4 March 2025

From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.

SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.

There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.

Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.

And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.

Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.

Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.

How many people will Oscar winners thank? How long will they speak for?

3 March 2025

A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only a few words long. But a decade ago, they were pushing three-hundred words, says Stephen Follows:

Acceptance speeches in the middle of the 20th century were exactly that, a chance to accept the award and say thank you. Over time, they have evolved into a platform to express opinions, share emotions, and highlight personal journeys.

Why the increase? Having the undivided attention of what was once a large, captive audience, might have been something to do with it. Today, of course, Oscar recipients have the social media platforms, offering a continuous outlet, not just forty-five seconds of television.

On the subject of social media platforms, the size of Oscar television audiences has, overall, been in decline — at least in the United States — plunging to a nadir of about ten million viewers in 2021. What’s going on there? Were people keeping tabs on the Oscar’s ceremony through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, or has there been a general loss of interest in the awards?

Drop the S, add a 16, the iPhone SE is now the 16e

28 February 2025

Aside from a two-year gap, from 2018 to 2020, I’ve had one or other of the iPhone SE handsets since 2016. A distinct feature of the SE models was their size. They were generally smaller than the other handsets in the iPhone range. I have big hands, prompting people to say to me, why the f**k did you choose an SE? I selected the SE precisely for its size. It fits perfectly into my back pocket. I also figured that the smaller size might deter me from using the device too often.

Well, that was back in 2016. The big hands, small handset combination meant — to my mind at least — the device would be that little bit more difficult to use. This especially while I was out and about, forcing me to wait until I was back at my laptop to do any heavy-duty sort of work tasks. That was partly successful at first, but given my phone also doubles as a watch, hands-off time was actually pretty low. Yes, I know: what ever was I thinking.

But now the SE is no more. The range has been superseded by the 16e. This name has been the subject of much conjecture, if that’s any surprise. Dropping the S, but keeping the E, means it is different from the old SE range, but only sort of. Adopting the 16 title is seen by some as bringing Apple’s SE-type handset offering into the annual handset update, meaning there will be a 17e next year. The SE-type handsets will no come along on a now-and-then basis.

That’s what some people are speculating anyway. What Apple ends up doing with the e range, remains to be seen. The 16e is a little bigger than the SE 2 — good, it’ll still slide nicely in a back pocket — and is the lowest priced handset in the 16 range. The camera remains similar to the SE’s, meaning I’ll still be unable to take high-definition video photos of the full Moon.

Not that’ll be switching over just yet, even though the 16e becomes available in Australia today, I think my old SE still a little bit of life left in it. From what I can tell, reviews of the 16e have been somewhat mixed, with some writers saying something like, “it’s good, but…”, while others are unsure why Apple even released the model. John Gruber meanwhile, describes the 16e as an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone.

That pretty summed up what I liked about the old SE range.

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smartphones, technology, trends

Combating food waste with restaurant doggy bags

25 February 2025

Being able to take the left-overs of a restaurant meal home seems like a sensible idea all around. Aside from dishes that, for whatever reason, may not be safe to eat later on, or the next day. While some dining establishments are averse to the practice, we’ve seldom had any problems.

One place doggy bags are direly needed are in food court situations in shopping malls. Here, much food is served as if it were a restaurant, and only sometimes in take-away cartons. We eat regularly at a place near where we live, and the food waste — plates of sometimes barely touched meals — defy belief. It makes me wonder why people ordered the food in the first place. But, if a way to take those left-overs home was an option, maybe not all of it all would go to waste.

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food, trends

Next up: the James Bond sequel trilogy and Bond villain origin stories

24 February 2025

Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franchise of the James Bond movies”.

Who knows exactly what that means at this stage, but looking at what happened to Star Wars, after series creator George Lucas sold the sci-fi saga to Disney in 2012, probably gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Good luck 007.

I gave up on the Bond films years ago. I think 2012’s Skyfall was the last one I went to a cinema to see. I never made it to No Time to Die, the Daniel Craig finale, which was released in 2021.

But Bond had stopped being Bond a long time ago. Indeed, the entire premise belonged to a bygone era. The barely plausible Bond had ceased to be relevant. Even Roger Moore, who portrayed the fictional British intelligence agent seven times between 1972 and 1985, once told late Irish–British broadcaster Terry Wogan, he thought the character was ridiculous:

“Bond films are so outrageous, the stunts are so outrageous,” Moore told Wogan. “Everything is beyond belief.”

In a way though, the slapstick nature of the earlier films was a big part of their allure. The stories were a bit of light-hearted, if fast paced, escapism. Efforts in recent decades to make the series darker, and grittier, to appeal to a new, and wider audience, seemed futile to me. Why not retire the James Bond films all together, and create a brand new character, and story arc, instead of rehashing something that’s decades old? But this is a point I’ve made before.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of new stories to bring to the big screen. That, however, is clearly not the way Amazon sees the situation. As with Star Wars, they know there’s a ready, nostalgia craving audience, waiting to see whatever new Bond offerings are forthcoming.

I take Amazon’s desire to “move beyond” will see movies, TV shows, video games, and graphic novels, among other things, based on other characters — from what will no doubt become the Bond universe — assuming centre stage in stories of their own. With nary a glimpse of Bond in sight. I don’t know, some of this stuff might be ok, but maybe it won’t.

Good luck 007 fans.

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entertainment, film, trends

How would you like to go without technology for twenty-hours?

18 February 2025

20 Hours for 20Talk.

This fund raising event, taking place in Perth, Australia, on Monday 29 March 2025, has been popping up in my news feeds in recent weeks.

Two hundred and fifty participants will spend twenty-hours in a space just two metres square, sans screens and devices. Talking is also out of the question. Instead, those taking part will write their thoughts in a journal. The goal is to raise a quarter of a million dollars to create two thousand and one hundred Mental Health Maintenance scholarships for young adults.

Twenty-hours without screens, devices, and talking? This sounds like an opportunity some people would want to jump at…

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technology, trends

What is a digital mending circle? A sign of the times I think

18 February 2025

Jack Cheng, an author based in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, hosts a now fortnightly online get together called a digital mending circle:

What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

The sessions run for ninety-minutes. It’s a smart idea, blocking off a set amount of time on a regular basis, to devote to these sorts of minor, but still important, matters. I find myself trying to do things like this when a free ten to fifteen minute window randomly opens up.

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technology, trends

Closing down your website when you know the end is near

14 February 2025

David M. Webb, a retired investment banker based in Hong Kong, writes about closing his website, aptly named webb-site, which he launched in 1998, on account of terminal illness:

I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more dysfunctional, I need to make plans for the orderly conclusion of this pro bono, loss-making work rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family. One of the few benefits of knowing that you’re dying is being able to plan the end on your own terms.

Despite being online for about the same amount of time, I’d never heard of Webb, or his website, until I read his valedictory post yesterday. What a terrible time it must be though, for him, and his family, with his illness.

His post raises some soul searching matters though. I’ve not (really) given any thought to what happens to this website after I am gone. I did get as far as seeing if my web host offered advance paid long term hosting packages, so my website survives me for at least some period of time. This was after I saw some writing on the subject about eight or nine months ago maybe.

But I just picture myself keeping on keeping on here, and hope any preservation plans will be easy to implement when they become necessary. Webb says he does not intend that his website remain online after his death. This seems a shame, especially for one that’s been around for some twenty-seven years. Instead, Webb hopes his website, and work, will live on through the Internet Archive.

Maybe that will be the case for many website owners.

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blogs, trends

If social media was all you knew, would you start a blog?

7 February 2025

Tangentially related to yesterday’s post. This is something Jatan Mehta asked a few weeks ago. It’s an intriguing question. If social media platforms, Twitter/X, Instagram, etc, had remained as they started, maintaining chronological feeds, displaying content posted by accounts a member had chosen to follow in their feed, and keeping algorithms and political whims out of the mix, then no, maybe not.

As I wrote yesterday, I was there when (the original) Twitter landed. Quite a number of people who hitherto had been blogging, eventually went all in with the micro-blogging platform. It was just so much easier, plus no financial cost was involved. After a time, many of these people completely stopped posting content on their blogs, which all gradually disappeared as domain name registrations lapsed.

So it doesn’t entirely come down to come to the presence of social media, it comes down to what suits an individual. Maintaining a self-hosted website is more effort, but, to me, feels like second nature. Nevertheless, I still had a Twitter account, and even a Facebook page (it’s still there, somewhere), as having one for your brand was once a thing. However, I always regarded these social media presences as “out posts”.

They were extensions only of my online presence; not an integral part of it. Even back in 2008, there was the risk the service might shutdown abruptly, or the administrators might pull the plug on your account for whatever reason, without warning (or recourse). To some people, going “all in” on social media seemed foolhardy. Others were obviously prepared to take their chances, in exchange for the convenience the platforms offered.

But the social media platforms have changed a lot since 2008. All the more so in recent months. Being reliant on social media platforms has become a liability for some. Even the more “indie” platforms, such as Mastodon or Bluesky, are not, for various reasons, completely risk free either. The question then of starting a self-hosted blog, after being a lifelong social media user, now seems more a matter of necessity, rather than familiarity.

Bluesky reaches 30 million members, are you excited, or not?

6 February 2025

Social media and micro-blogging platform Bluesky passed the thirty-million member mark last week. It must be an exciting time for the Bluesky founders and backers. Exciting also for members who had been looking for an alternative to the likes of Twitter/X. I say this as one of the earlier members of Twitter, which I originally signed up for in 2007 I think. At that point though, Twitter was one of a kind; it was the first of its kind. It would spawn numerous competitors, including Plurk, and Identi.ca, though few struggled to gain traction. By the end of 2009, after being online four years, with about twenty-six million members, Twitter was the place to be.

Up until that point, I’d met close to one-thousand people, many of whom knew of me through this website. But a lot were people who’d just stumbled upon my account, and wanted to connect. Here was a place that was one, big, on-going, conversation. Making Twitter friends was easy in those early days (I could say the same about blogging). Twitter seemed like a big old friendly village. But once sky-rocketing growth came — something founders and backers has been eagerly anticipating — things began to change. And that was good. For some. Good, for instance, for the Twitter gurus, those taking it upon themselves to educate the rest of us about the “correct way” to use Twitter.

And of course of influencers. I’m not exactly sure when either arrived en masse, but I’d say many had made their presence felt by 2010. I think that’s when I began to lose interest in the platform: it’d become too much noise, and not enough signal. Having said that, I kept my account going, ticking over, for another decade, then some. But Twitter was no longer that big old friendly village. And nor, of course, could it stay that way. The platform had to grow, and begin making a return for its backers. Some of the people I followed, and who followed me, became gurus and influencers. Some became both. But by then, I wasn’t really interested in them.

I’d been using Twitter for three or four years, I didn’t need someone lecturing me, especially someone who’d spent less time on the platform than I had. As for the influencers, little of what they said meant much to me. But as a platform, Twitter had matured. It was no longer the exciting, pioneering, experience it had once been. I might — if I were more of a social media power user — call Bluesky exciting, but I could never describe it as pioneering. Twitter, for better or worse, is/was the only micro-blogging slash social media platform to stake that claim. Everything else now, like it or lump it, is a case of been there, done that.

Twitter opened up the frontier, blazed the trail. Kind of like the Telegraph Road, no? Twitter built the cities and the roads between them. Bluesky, Mastodon, and whatever else, may be new, relatively new, but they are picking up were Twitter left off. Micro-blogging slash social media platforms are no longer the undiscovered country. I don’t mean to run down Bluesky in particular. Thirty-million members in two years is impressive. But I dare say there are a few gurus and influencers among that number. Maybe too many, all bringing with them more noise, and less signal. It’s enough to make me fear we’re seeing an early-stage re-run of late-stage Twitter.

I might be a member of Bluesky, and Mastodon, but late-stage Twitter is not something I want to see a repeat of. Give me, I say, a tried and true, though hardly new, personal website, any day.

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