Is a Data Addiction Really Useful?

You see people collecting online data of all kinds. They collect it everywhere, all the time, on everything. Absolutely every kind of data that can be collected is collected. Sometimes I feel annoyed that there are people with so little to do that they feel picking up my scraps is a useful thing to do. I realize my data isn’t worth anything, but when you put all of that information together, you have either a lot of wasted space, or some help in making certain kinds of decisions.

Google got huge for a reason, and that’s because they essentially laid claim to any data on the internet. Is it useful? Is it valuable? To someone, certainly. If you throw enough crap at the wall something will stick, and if you collect enough information, someone somewhere will be interested in it. When the numbers get that big (“google” or “googol” means 10^100), even the most insignificant piece of data becomes valuable.

Even on my websites, I get piles of statistics. But what do all of those numbers really do for me? Information only has value if you can make use of it – if it helps you make some sort of decision that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to make. What decisions do I make on my site? I rarely post something on a Friday or a weekend. If I do, I schedule it to hit early Monday morning, you know, so the Brits have something to read when they get to work. What else? Well, I stopped writing about obscure CAD minutia. Nobody really likes that except me. Writing about topics that are of more general interest than just CAD and engineering tend to draw a bigger crowd.

If I get a surge of clicks on my home page, but that surge doesn’t go any deeper, I know that some site mentioned me, my site, or my business in a way that was maybe interesting, but out of context, and people looked me up without reading much else.

But you know what the biggest thing I’ve learned from reading stats is? Everybody loves a train wreck. This blog isn’t that popular until I take a stand and express a firm opinion, and start stirring the muck. And really, that’s something we’ve known for a long time. How long have news papers reported controversial, exaggerated and fabricated stories just to boost readership? So we learn stuff we’ve known for a long time. Again, is that really valuable?

To me, data mongering is a bit of a waste of time. It’s marginally interesting, but mostly a waste of time. Aside from things like artificial intelligence discovering hidden patterns in data to discover conflicts between drugs, subtle symptoms of diseases, or correlations between weather and health, data-based decisions for more mundane things like marketing are complete or nearly complete bunk. You’re better off in many cases just depending on your intuition or even random fluctuations than risk the mis-interpretations many people make based on data. The big danger here is that you spend all of this time and effort collecting data, and then you choose the wrong action. Luckily, I think, most companies allow most data to go unused. So often reading the tea leaves is totally subjective, unless it’s obvious. I can tell readership drops off on weekends, but I can’t tell why. Is it because people only spend work hours browsing work-related subjects? Is it because people don’t use computers on weekends? I can also see that 90%+ views come from desktop, not from tablets or mobile. That tells me that a lot of predictions from a decade ago were totally wrong about mobile business access.

Companies get all of this data, and all they can do is put up advertisements for sneakers for a month after I’ve done a search on sneakers? I’ve already bought my sneakers (from a local brick and mortar store where they do a great job of fitting me). The last time I bought shoes online, I sent them back 4 times because they didn’t fit. Maybe someone should be using that data to make more consistent shoe sizes.

Companies are obsessed with collecting all of this information, and yet I don’t think it does them much good. In fact, it mainly just annoys customers, and foments distrust. I think they collect the data because they’d be embarrassed not to. We have people whose entire livelihood depends on collecting data. Not because it produces anything valuable, but because companies are expected to do this, even if they fail to convert the data into any kind of positive results.

So what kind of stuff is popular here on this website? It’s probably not what you’d think. I don’t write that much on 3D printing, but that would probably be a topic that would bring in a lot of traffic. Notice there are only a couple of CAD geek articles in this list of popular posts from the last year. Some of the articles are new, and some are years old. I’m sure a lot of these get false search hits, like the Spaceballs article probably gets a lot of unintentional traffic from movie buffs, a great example of Google getting things completely or mostly wrong. But then this site gets an inordinate amount of traffic on Subdivision modeling type of topics. Not because I’ve written a lot of deeply insightful super-geek articles, but because I’ve written some general introductory explainers.

So do I write for traffic? What do you think? Would you be reading this if I were writing to attract unwashed hoards? No, I do write for what I think is an audience. My audience in my mind, is who I was at some earlier point in my career – product and gadget designers and engineers, plastic design pros, people solving geometrical and manufacturing problems, CAD geeks, etc.

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of those things that I think people put too much stock in. A decade or so ago, we knew what kinds of things Google used to value search rankings because that information came in with the click referral, but now that information is encrypted, so I can’t tell what search terms people used to get to my site just through the Google link. Companies go to great lengths to try to recoup some of this information, but again, it’s not clear to me that they get as much out of that information as it cost to obtain it.

SEO is the kind of thing that gives us:
– clickbait. Everybody hates clickbait. Such as, if I posted “Hirschtick returns to SolidWorks?”, and it turns out that they put a portrait of him in the main office.
– news headlines that are incomprehensible, but contain a lot of important words. All the major news sources do it.
– articles that repeat a given phrase 3 times before you’ve read anything of interest or consequence.
– articles full of links to stuff no one ever clicks on
– buzzword soup, or the corporate echo chamber where everyone uses the same phrases regardless if they have any meaning or readers find them unoriginal or even annoying.

In my mind, if you’re using anything aside from common sense ideas for SEO, you’re probably selling snake oil.

• Google has striven for decades to achieve an algorithm that works like the human brain. To try to turn that around and make the human brain work like an algorithm is to me a serious waste of time.
• Decide if your goal is to score one click today or a generation of fans in the future.
• The very highest priority is to write good stuff. Ok, this article excluded of course, here I’m mostly blowing off steam and organizing thoughts, with zero expectation that anyone except maybe my mother will read this far down the page. Good stuff makes people mention your article and name to other people, and makes them interested in you and topics around you. People still count.
• You have to write like a human being. Yes, get your spelling and grammar correct, but not so correct that you forget to try to get your point across. You have to be relatable. You have to have good information. You have to put it together into sequence that makes sense, or tells a story, or shows a progression. Ever listen to Ravel’s Bolero? It has a certain rhythm that you can really follow and understand, even if there are no words, no subtitles, and no program notes.
• With any luck, the stuff you write today is going to still be accessible in the future, and SST (stupid SEO tricks) are fickle. Don’t write to try to guess what’s going to give you good search results. Write stuff that will be lasting and of benefit as far into the future as possible. You’ll continue to benefit from that writing as time goes by.
• If you’re trying to attract customers, being genuine is really the only thing. Yes, you have to get noticed, but you can use some basic common sense to do that:
  • Create an unambiguous title that gets right to the point
  • Avoid rambling introductions – state the main idea in the 1st paragraph
  • Use common keywords
  • use standard practice regarding acronyms, contractions and abbreviations
  • name and caption image files something relevant to the story
  • write and understand your topic well enough that you’re willing to leave the comments open
    

If you do the right things often enough, you will get noticed, and that person collecting data and not having the first idea what to do with it will still not have made a real contribution to the effort.