Is Google too powerful? It’s a question asked by many. But much of Google’s future depends on two simple lines of code.

When Google floated, its SEC Filing listed many potential future threats to its business:

• Our ability to compete effectively.
• Our ability to continue to attract users to our web sites.
• The level of use of the Internet to find information.
• Our ability to attract advertisers to our AdWords program.
• Our ability to attract web sites to our AdSense program.
• The mix in our net revenues between those generated on our web sites and those generated through our Google Network.
• The amount and timing of operating costs and capital expenditures related to the maintenance and expansion of our businesses, operations and infrastructure.
• Our focus on long term goals over short-term results.
• The results of our investments in risky projects.
• General economic conditions and those economic conditions specific to the Internet and Internet advertising.
• Our ability to keep our web sites operational at a reasonable cost and without service interruptions.
• The success of our geographical and product expansion.
• Our ability to attract, motivate and retain top-quality employees.
• Foreign, federal, state or local government regulation that could impede our ability to post ads for various industries.
• Our ability to upgrade and develop our systems, infrastructure and products.
• New technologies or services that block the ads we deliver and user adoption of these technologies.
• The costs and results of litigation that we face.
• Our ability to protect our intellectual property rights.
• Our ability to forecast revenue from agreements under which we guarantee minimum payments.
• Our ability to manage click-through fraud and other activities that violate our terms of services.
• Our ability to successfully integrate and manage our acquisitions.
• Geopolitical events such as war, threat of war or terrorist actions.

One thing they never mentioned (explicitly anyway) was “Site owners continue to give us permission to crawl and index their sites”. Without that permission, a large part of Google’s business model disappears.

The permission can be taken away with two simple lines of code placed in a site’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Sure, every site owner in the world would need to publish this file to their sites. But if they did such a thing, the Google search engine could no longer crawl or index any of the Web’s content. It would be defunct.

So, fellow site owners, Google’s future is in our hands. If you want to go “on strike” and stop Google profiting from the fruits of your labours, simply publish the code. Be warned that your site will eventually be removed from Google’s index if you do so. As a unilateral step, this may do you more harm than good. But if we all do it en masse, then beware Google!

Hello, world! Welcome to the Silver Spike, the “Official SilverDisc Blog”.

If you don’t know who or what SilverDisc is, then check out www.silverdisc.co.uk, our main Web site.

I’ve always been slightly sceptical about a SilverDisc blog. I was finally persuaded it might be a good idea while reading “Naked Conversations” (by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) on holiday recently. While there is much in the book that I disagree with (Scoble and Israel admit to being biased and evangelical), in the end I was forced to agree that they had a point – reading blogs without writing a blog is like owning a telephone where only the receiver works. And the name of this blog, “The Silver Spike”, comes from the concluding chapter of Naked Conversations:

But if blogging is truly part of a revolution, will it be bloodless? We see a clear and present danger for practitioners of traditional, one-direction advertising, marketing. We see its champions in a change or die situation. Blogging and the social media are steadily pounding a silver spike into the heart of it.

So, it’s not called The Silver Spike because it will be the spiteful, vehement outpourings of SilverDisc - we’re not like that :). It’s called The Silver Spike because it’s got the word “silver” in it, which was important to us, and because we like the quote - although to me it seems that Scoble and Israel have mixed up their vampire and werewolf metaphors.

While I’m on the topic of Naked Conversations, I’ll cover off the main things I disagreed with in the book. The first was the Six Pillars of Blogging, the fact that blogs are:

1. Publishable
2. Findable
3. Social
4. Viral
5. Syndicatable
6. Linkable

The problem I have with that list is that many other Web sites, or types of Web site, meet most if not all of those criteria. For example, forums are very similar to blogs - better in some ways since they provide many-to-many communication rather than one-to-many. I really needed some convincing of the difference between a blog and a Web site, and the authors failed to deliver it with these six pillars. The main conclusion I came to is that blogging is particularly powerful in the “Syndicatable” sense, in that it makes syndication very easy, and this in combination with the other pillars was arguably blogging’s unique strength. The other conclusion I came to is that unless I gave it a try, I might never truly understand it.

Another thing that really annoyed me in Naked Conversations were the constant references to “Google Juice”, i.e. the power of blogs to influence your rankings in search engines, particularly Google. A couple of examples:

Every time you post, Google notices the update and that boosts your ratings. Google also pays attention to links—other sites that connect to you. Bloggers who find what you write interesting, will post on their own sites and link back to you. Those links also boost your “Google juice.” In fact, nothing will boost your search engine standing better.

I told him that because he didn’t have a real blog, he had no Google juice.

I wonder if the authors cringe that they actually published that. IMO, far too much emphasis was placed throughout the book, naively, on the influence that blogs have on search engines.

A third thing that troubled me was the implication that because people are switching off to advertisements and push marketing, blogs were a good way of marketing to those people in a less obvious way. I was left with the impression that blogs were a good means of advertising to people without letting them know you were advertising. That’s very dangerous ground, but the authors seemed to think it was a Good Thing.

Anyway, despite all of that I thought the book was a good read and I’d recommend it to you. And it forced me into doing what I’ve been thinking I ought to do for a long time, but never quite got around to - starting a SilverDisc blog. Take the second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.