At Facebook they analyzed everyone’s status updates and arrived at the conclusion that there is one day all year when Facebookers are happiest. Christmas.
Data crunchers in other labs have revealed that if you live in Vermont you will live longer than if you live in New York.
Science interprets stuff like that and makes it really useful. (“Honey, call the movers – we’re going to Burlington on Christmas.”)
Okay, so what if a doctor told you that getting a vaccination against swine flu would be good? Would you get the shot?
Guess what — according to a University of Michigan poll, 60 percent of parents surveyed said they do not plan to vaccinate their children against H1N1. Many were worried about the vaccine’s side effects. People believe that getting the shot might make you more likely to get sick. Bill Maher told his 60,000 Twitter followers, “If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.” Even the popular Dr. Mercola is against the shots.
The news is bad for flu vaccinations and it’s even worse for others. Some parents, including Jenny McCarthy, believe that having your children vaccinated against measles might make it more likely that they’ll be diagnosed with autism. Fewer people, therefore, will take the good advice of their doctors and get a vaccination that might help their children and society at large.
People don’t trust science like they used to. A Pew Research Center poll says that only 27 percent of Americans think our greatest achievements are in science – down from 47 percent a decade ago. One explanation is that the days of Big Science – landing on the Moon, inventing the transistor – seem far away. Science is routine now. We expect our smart phones to do the laundry and make photocopies.
Even the innocuous Bill Nye the Science Guy is making people mad. A story appeared on Rainn Wilson’s website about the time Nye was giving a science talk in Waco, Texas:
He cited Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Nye stated that the lesser light in the aforementioned quote was not technically a light, but a reflector, as in it reflects the sun’s light. The God-fearing folks of Waco were furious. One woman shouted, “We believe in God,” and proceeded to usher out her three children.
Just because your doctor says get a flu shot doesn’t mean you have to get one. (I’m not getting one.) Just because NASA says we should go to Mars doesn’t make it a good idea. (There are a few old bosses I’d like to send to Mars, believe me, but I’d rather we spend the money on solar power and electric cars.) It’s good to question science and medicine.
In the void brought about by all that questioning, however, sometimes you get ignorance. Not good. My fear of getting a flu shot comes mostly from ignorance – I admit it, and by not trusting science we could be creating an epidemic of ignorance worse than the flu.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I’m taking a break from deep topics to write about something shallow: Social networking. But hey, I mean shallow in a good way. Social networking has a huge reach. Yes, there’s something vaguely totalitarian and Hitler-esque about having “followers” on Twitter. But Twitter has been used to get the word out about the fixed elections in Iran and to track emergency weather. Two million people are following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. I know that Jane Fonda had a knee operation because she tweeted.
I don’t know about the usefulness of all that information, but I do know that information feeds SEO – that stands for search engine optimization. It’s the magic stuff you do to get people to find your wisdom on the web – the keywords, text and phrases you embed in your content. I’m going to share what I’ve learned recently about all this from some experts. Let’s start with
SEO guru Scott Edwards.
Scott sets up social networking sites to help people group themselves by their interests and get content they want. There are more than 200 million users on Facebook. That makes Facebook something like the fifth largest country in the world, a country without borders but formed by people who are obsessed about high school. The high school connection aside, Scott encouraged me to start Facebook pages related to projects we’re working on. Good idea. Over coffee at Peet’s he also told me about a site called fmylife.com, one of the most active on the web. People contribute a few lines about something terrible that happened to them and end with the telling initials FML.” It’s sick, but people like to contribute and it will make you laugh.
Buzzwords and buzzphrases have become important. There’s a company called Hubspot that will sell you some software that makes your content more search-friendly. They’ve done something smart – popularized a buzzphrase called “inbound marketing.” They practically own it – Google it and you’ll see Hubspot’s fingerprints all over it. That’s called having authority over a search phrase. Hubspot told me that DocuCinema has good authority, and 500 Words also has good authority as a search phrase, so I must be doing something right.
Scott and I also talked about Digg.com. This site gives people a chance to vote on sites they like – and if you make it to the front page of Digg by virtue of these recommendations, you are gold. There’s stumbleupon.com, a useful site with a funny name. When you sign up, stumbleupon asks you about your interests and tries to throw interesting websites your way. It’s a bit like wandering in the library and plucking books from the shelves. It may lead you to cuteoverload.com, a waste of time but very good if you like photos of sleeping kittens.
You can join LinkedIn, sometimes called Facebook for people with jobs, and post your resume. If you really want to geek out, you can write a blog and optimize the title of it by putting the most search-friendly word first and then go in descending order of searchability. That would make the best title for this post “Web Weave We Tangled Oh.” Hmm. Guess you can’t optimize everything.
