Of SEO Handcuffs and Productivity-induced imbalance
While doing my daily blog reading, I came across a few articles that taught me interesting new things.
First was Marksonland Blog piece about Tin Handcuffs of SEO. Having been at Ugenie during its evolving days and seeing the struggle to gain traffic through all the ways, SEM, SEO and offline activities, I know what he is talking about. But this is a thought provoking new insights about how not to get bogged down by the Google Juggernaut and find interesting new ways of gaining traffic. Indeed, at Ugenie, we learnt that gaining traffic through all these methods could prove prohibitively expensive and our attempts to acquire traffic through alternative means such as Social Networking seems pioneering in hindsight. Of all the cases mentioned YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are classic examples of how networking effect was utilized to the full potential. A must read.
The other great article was an interview with Ravi Batra on Paul Kedrosky's blog. His specific mention about increasing productivity and not-so-increasing wages are extremely insightful. I am not a qualified Economist, but I do try out various scenarios of economics as a hobby and one angle that I had never considered was this imbalance being created because of increasing productivity. Excerpts from there:
"When workers become more efficient and their salaries do not rise commensurately, it is not only unfair, it is also unhealthy for the economy. Everybody is happy when productivity soars because of new technology, but if the real average wage trails the productivity jump, a huge problem is created. This is because while productivity is the main source of supply, wages are the main source of demand; so when wages trail productivity, demand trails supply. The natural way to solve this imbalance is to introduce policies that raise wages; but governments around the globe have not done this;"
Again, a must read piece
First was Marksonland Blog piece about Tin Handcuffs of SEO. Having been at Ugenie during its evolving days and seeing the struggle to gain traffic through all the ways, SEM, SEO and offline activities, I know what he is talking about. But this is a thought provoking new insights about how not to get bogged down by the Google Juggernaut and find interesting new ways of gaining traffic. Indeed, at Ugenie, we learnt that gaining traffic through all these methods could prove prohibitively expensive and our attempts to acquire traffic through alternative means such as Social Networking seems pioneering in hindsight. Of all the cases mentioned YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are classic examples of how networking effect was utilized to the full potential. A must read.
The other great article was an interview with Ravi Batra on Paul Kedrosky's blog. His specific mention about increasing productivity and not-so-increasing wages are extremely insightful. I am not a qualified Economist, but I do try out various scenarios of economics as a hobby and one angle that I had never considered was this imbalance being created because of increasing productivity. Excerpts from there:
"When workers become more efficient and their salaries do not rise commensurately, it is not only unfair, it is also unhealthy for the economy. Everybody is happy when productivity soars because of new technology, but if the real average wage trails the productivity jump, a huge problem is created. This is because while productivity is the main source of supply, wages are the main source of demand; so when wages trail productivity, demand trails supply. The natural way to solve this imbalance is to introduce policies that raise wages; but governments around the globe have not done this;"
Again, a must read piece
