Trust me

Do you have faith in internet content? As search marketing soars, insidious content spammers are overwhelming and choking the net. Only a return to value will restore the balance.

I love Seth Godin. Who doesn’t?

The best-selling author and Business Week’s “ultimate entrepreneur for the information age” is a smart guy. A genius who tells the truth, particularly when he’s talking about it. Says Godin: “Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left. No one trusts anyone.”

Thanks to the tsunami that is email spam we don’t put out the welcome mat to unfamiliar names that pop into our inboxes. Missives that start with “Dearest one. I am a dying woman who … ” or have “You are a winner” in their subject line are viewed with the contempt they deserve. It’s like picking up hitch-hikers in Johannesburg. We just don’t go there any more.

Thanks to those disingenuous men and women who gave us unsolicited bulk messages, email marketing’s not as effective as it used to be and your inbox takes work to manage and keep under control. And now that search marketing’s the new holy grail, Spamalot Inc have set up sweatshops in Bangalore and other outsourcing, low-cost labour hot-spots where people become mini content factories pumping out volumes of crud embedded with links and targeted key words to manipulate online behaviour.

Like hamsters running the wheel, “writers” employed by these con artists spew out stories for $1 a piece. They’re roped in by a lie parading as self-determination, the promise that they can set their own salaries. Write a thousand stories and earn a thousand dollars. Not bad for anyone who has access to the internet and really needs the money.

As virtual sweatshops exploit the poor and needy, search engines get bloated by meaningless commercial data parading as content while false economies are created that see writing become less of a skill and more of a commodity. More importantly the relevance of search and content is undermined as spam insidiously takes on another guise. While some might argue for literacy, employment and the democratisation of information, the real question is one of value.

Ultimately a network of networks bloated and choked by spam serves no one except the greedy and criminal who use questionable (at best) or fraudulent techniques to fool people into buying or engaging with them. Ferris Research, the analyst group expert in messaging and content control, says spam sent in 2008 is costing worldwide business about US$140-billion. The losses are ultimately picked up by business battling recessionary markets, ISPs and people like you and me.

There is light at the end of the tunnel and that light is value. Search engines will have to revise their algorithms and the manner in which they sort content based on the value consumers place on that content. Hopefully ordering online content will no longer just be about the interrogation of data, but will be about the data itself. The use of data and the real value it offers people.

The internet, mobile phones and networks that connect humans to data, services and resources have proliferated exponentially, threading themselves into every part of our existence because they are useful. They provide value. They can enrich our lives and make the living of those lives easier and better.

As guru Godin says: “Finding new ways, more clever ways to interrupt people doesn’t work.”

For me the real truth is that the value of technology lives in its ability to be of service to humanity. In how it helps make the world a better place.