Seth Godin reveals a "spam" e-mail he received recently. Trouble is, I don't think Seth got this one right. It's not spam.
Is Seth secretly developing a side business of Ostrich farming? No. But, enter in "seth godin ostrich farming" in Google and you might be able to understand how some guy in Singapore contacted Seth asking him for advice on ostrich farming. Here are the search results...if you were an up and coming ostrich farmer, wouldn't Google suggest that Seth is the guy you'd want to talk to?
Furthermore, just type in "ostrich farming" in Google and here's what you get. What is sixth on the search results? "Seth Godin: A Warning About Ostrich Farming". It's a March 2005 blog post by The Great One on ostrich farming, and some of the perils of getting into the business.
So, back to his post Thursday about this e-mail being spam. Nothing could be further from the truth! The sender, using the latest technology available to him, found Seth Godin and assumed he was an expert on ostrich farming.
Kind of funny, really. Here's this wonderful tool called Google that we've all started using and have made a verb in the English language for cryin' out loud, and yet its not perfect. Not even close. It's good, but you can see that the Internet has a long way to go.
Seth's solution? He's building Squidoo, the next generation of searching for topics on the Internet. It's a super cool site. Great idea. I wish I had thought of it, dang it!
You can see where this is headed, can't you...that's right, I went to Squidoo and entered in "ostrich farming". Here is what it came up with. Relevant Google ads showing on the page? None.
Yep, this whole Internet thing has a long ways to go...
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