The same day I circulated the “Shift Happens” video around the office, an employee of mine replied with the video I embedded in this post. It was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I don’t know what you would really call it other than a video essay.

It’s a very cool combination of screen capture and video which makes some really salient points about the future of web technology and the effects it will have on how people interact and express themselves.

It really makes a great companion piece to “Shift Happens” as that video talks about global changes happening in the real world. This piece, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” covers the changes occurring online that are democratizing and socializing the shared online spaces we occupy.

It’s got me thinking not just about what this means for “community” online, but what it can mean for business and commerce. In a lot of ways this kind of interactive development has brought the web full circle. Rather than having global mega-stores that sell everything, we see more and more mom-and-pop corner shops appearing, albeit with a potentially global customer base.

While “Shift Happens” points to an alarming avalanche of new information coming at us in the coming decade, “The Machine” shows that as the web provides us the tools to do so, the people who are creating and consuming this content can more readily organize it according to their own tastes. The Internet only appears vast when considered as a whole, but it tends to segment itself as users cluster around information and topics that matter to them.

This “clustering” phenomenon is what creates the niche markets that many of our businesses occupy, and the phenomenon becomes more widespread as the “cost of entry” drops. Web 2.0 doesn’t just accommodate and empower users. It REQUIRES them to operate.

And as we use these tools we effectively “teach” the internet how we want to use and organize this information, and it makes it more digestible and accessible to all of us.

Plenty of food for thought here. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=

Alphonse Karr said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” According to wikipedia, he’s the originator of the phrase usually translated, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

He said that in 1849.

Now, if the rate of change is affected by the flow of information, it seems that things are going to be changing pretty quickly.

A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information that a person was likely to come across in their lifetime.

This year, more information will be created than in the previous 5,000 years.

This video, Shift Happens, is worth a few minutes to watch. And leave a comment if you can.

I recently attended an all day mastermind session with some of the best internet marketers around. From their picture, can you spot John Reese, Jeff Mulligan, Andy Jenkins, Mike Filsaime, Rich Shefren, Yanik Silver, John Carlton, Jeff Johnson, Ryan Kaltman, and Jeff Walker?

If you were a fly, this would have been a good wall to be on.

So after a reader’s comment that they were able to get Overture to work today, I checked it out, and lo and behold! It worked!

So I dug around a little bit to try something official and found something on Search Engine Journal. They had already gotten in touch with John Slade, Sr. Director, Global Product Management with Yahoo Search Marketing. Mr. Slade had this to say:

“First, I’d like to clarify that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

Yahoo does have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

Since the public tool is still available, there isn’t anything to formally announce. However, when we launched our new advertising platform last quarter, it featured an improved keyword research tool (which we refer to as “protected” since it’s only accessible to advertisers who are logged into our system) to help advertisers discover more relevant and valuable keywords that fit their individual needs. We’ve been getting really positive feedback about this tool and we plan to continue to enhance this tool as we learn how advertisers interact with it.”

So it would appear that the current tool is not being given any attention while they focus on their “protected” keyword tool, which is only accessible from a user account. The red-headed stepchild syndrome, so to speak.

This is a clever way to pull people into their network, certainly. My guess is that their new public keyword tool will be out later this year after they’re done with the overhaul of their advertising network.

Thanks for the heads-up in the comments Jason. You can find the Search Engine Journal post here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4344

As many of you are by now aware, Overture’s “keyword suggestion tool” has gone dead this week after about a month of sporadic behavior. I seem to recall reading that this was part of Yahoo’s plan at the tail end of last year, but I can’t seem to dig up a reference to it anymore. It appears the “view bids” tool is still functioning at this time, but I’m unsure how long it will remain in service. If I understand correctly, this is part of Yahoo’s strategy involving the updates to their PPC service (which you may have heard of by its codename “Panama”).

However, when such a clear void is created with minimal warning, it can impact the entire industry. How many how-to e-books and videos developed over the years mention that tool or even link to it directly? I imagine a lot of editing and updating is taking place all over the web at the moment. I noticed particularly that Aaron Wall’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is down for repairs, as it relied heavily on Overture’s data.

But, there was a very nice surprise to accompany this bad news, as a couple of viable replacements popped up, almost immediately.

The folks over at KeyWordDiscovery.com have provided a similar free tool here:
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

WordTracker.com has also stepped into the gap with a free tool here:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Both solutions are clearly modeled after Overture’s, which for years was THE keyword tool. And of course, WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery are well-known, reputable software companies, and I believe they have the expertise it takes to provide a good alternative. Mind you, without access to all of Yahoo’s data, a lot more extrapolation has to occur to generate their numbers, but kudos for these two industry players. They’re giving the SEO industry what it wanted before it even had time to get upset over losing the old standard.

If you have any comparisons or contrasts between these new tools and the defunct Overture service, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section.