My sneaking suspicion is that a lot of SEO optimization either masks or leads to bad writing, and we don’t need any more of that. Yes, that is the job of the search engines itself – just as creating an index for a manual has to include all the terms someone might look for in trying to get information (went through this at Christmas time with a Nikon user trying to help a Canon user to determine what an error message meant and how to fix it – the Nikon user naturally went to ‘troubleshooting’ in the Canon manual and found nothing – I went to ‘error messages’ and got the oh-so-surprising answer: turn the camera off and then turn it on again – could I have those five minutes of my life back, please?).

On another note: are you on Twitter? And if so, might I follow you? I’m @ruthseeley. :)

Beyond that, is SEO really something we should be trying to do ourselves? Isn’t that the job of the search engines themselves? There’s value in striving to make oneself comprehensible, but optimizing our creativity for findability seems like the wrong path to me.

I like how you identified some stats that point more to making a connection with someone, and especially your note about the ratio of writing to reading time. I never read Finnegan’s Wake, but I remember a prof telling me that Joyce said it took him 15 years to write, and that it should take 15 minutes to read. From the few pages I actually worked through in class, I think he hit his goal.

If you’re going to Northern Voice this year, let’s look for each other and say hello.

After attending Northern Voice in both 2007 and 2008 (including Dave Olson’s wonderful ‘Eff Stats, Make Art!’ presentation (to which I should link, but you’ve probably already seen it, and I’d rather focus on what I’m trying to say here, and perhaps even avoid typos by not frenetically leaping from one web site to another), I became much more clear about why I blog. I realized the stats that mattered to me were which posts resonated with readers, and how long someone had spent on my site, not number of visitors or number of links. I’ve been neglecting my personal blog due to the pressure to create content for my corporate site instead (there are only so many words, after all).

Your slow reading post resonates with me too – I have been ashamed at the rate at which I consume books, concluding that it was a form of intellectual gluttony. With collections of short stories in particular, I have learned to ration myself to one a day – otherwise it becomes a blenderized stew. If I’m reading at 100 times the speed at which something was written, I’m probably not doing justice to it.

Will see if I can get someone to translate the manifesto into French.