SilverDisc is 15 years old today!

SilverDisc was established on March 10, 1993 by three people (Alan Perkins, Allan Todd and Eric Barfield) who had met while working on interactive CD applications at Philips in Surrey. That is why the company is called SilverDisc – because its first products and services were delivered on CD, a “silver disc”.

Alan, Allan and Eric were three guys who enjoyed making a living while having fun doing techie things. Well, they considered it fun anyway! In 1993 they were using very low speed dial-up modems and Compuserve to communicate with each other and a small world of CD developers. In 1994 they got their first Web server and started hosting Web sites for clients. In 1995 they developed a fully functional shop with online credit card capabilities for one client, and started hosting the Web site for HarperCollins, a major publisher – not bad going for three guys working from home and having fun.

Early Years of Search Marketing

In late 1995, on the day AltaVista launched, SilverDisc realised the potential that search engines held for marketing purposes. They started marketing themselves and their clients through search engine optimization, although that phrase was not in use at the time.

During the mid-to-late nineties SilverDisc continued to deliver CD and DVD products and services as well as Internet services and Internet marketing. It remained three guys having fun. Then, a few things happened in quick succession:

• Allan moved back to Scotland and got a real job working for somebody else – he wanted his young family to get a “proper Scottish education”
• Alan moved back to Northamptonshire, mainly to tap into a support network for his young family, but remained with SilverDisc
• Alan and Eric teamed up with a distant relative of Eric’s and formed a new company, e-Brand Management, to take advantage of the “dot com boom”

1998 to 2000 was spent developing patents, products and services based around some ideas that Alan had in the years since 1995. In parallel, SilverDisc continued to service its existing client base.

The patents were filed in 1999 and have since been granted. They cover some very fundamental search engine ground. One patent is in crawling and indexing, and the other is in personalisation – both are hot topics today, nine years later. The first product, Search Mechanics, was launched at the very first Search Engine Strategies to be held in the UK and e-Brand Management was one of only five exhibitors there.

That covers “SilverDisc - the early years”. In a future post, I’ll look at what has happened since 2000.

Charity Christmas cards are commendable, but still a large part of the cost of buying and posting charity cards does not end up with the charity itself.

So this year, SilverDisc has chosen to donate its entire Christmas card budget of £250 to local charity Zach’s Helping Hand, and instead send an electronic Christmas card.

Zach’s Helping Hand is used by families with children near to the end of life to receive palliative care within the love of their own homes. It is dedicated to the memory of Zach Sanders, who died of a brain tumour aged just two, and was set up by Zach’s parents Andy and Claire.

The photo shows me, Andy, Bella (Zach’s sister) and Lynda Litchfield of SilverDisc.

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.