Category Archives: failure

Surrealist poetry or “key search words”

Sometimes our language has a fixed distinctive expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the combined meanings of its actual words – this jargon based spaghetti can in itself be termed as an art form or the keywords in website optimisation.

T H E L A N G U A G E OF M E . The sharing of personal information, feelings, personal details (could be fact or fiction – the majority of online persona are fake) is a strange concept. Do we like to talk about ourselves – do we think we are special? Is our online persona more interesting? Are our ‘friends’ as insecure and as dull as us? What does your boss think?

The fact that most of us have an on-line persona suggests that computer communication enables us to visit places and have discussions with people we would normally avoid. We are engaging in the pseudo-anonymous system/society. Underground activities have long since migrated out of analog media (the printed word, film etc.) into ‘this world’. This world has evolved into a global system with multiple layers in which new authorities compete to control its uses; platform wars, chip races, and operating system alliances etc. The pseudo-identity of the user is being exposed; law is punishing non-conformity, censorship and the rules of globalization have invaded the system. The Klondike Spirit has taken over the open system and turned it into the homogenized high street we all know. The art of language and communication has been shackled.

This emphasis on words as a search engine tool has in many respect created a censorship, we can only use language in a manner that Google prescribes to gain a placement in their searches. The very nature of language has been changed an altered to accommodate this new set of rules. Closing the door on non-conformity.

Words taken out of context lose their meaning. Publishing documents that contain controversial language puts the author at risk. Any constructed environment can promote alienation, but it can also enhance communication to form a quasi-organic platform for human interaction, unless of course Google disapproves of the dialogue.

Falmouth boats

Falmouth boats (Photo credit: 35mm_photographs)

The art of language and communication has been shackled by Google.

Creating good solid business keywords is not a decorative process it is a complicated exercise. Juxtaposing words together is a bit like creating a collage, the mind always tries to create a narrative when confronted with the written word. The main problem is creating a text that not only makes sense but is also effective in attracting good search engine placement. All this weight and burden the written word carries somehow devalues the purity and the the soul of written conversation, making us slaves to the likes of Google.

(A non-homogeneous system, whose terms and relationships are not constant, allows language to break up, to stumble over the rules of its grammar, by necessity it has to respond radically to other linguistic components, creating a new linguistic order and syntax. )
PB
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Self Indulgent

The hungry artist, starving in a one-roomed hovel is the traditional vision we have of a creative person, the painter, the musician, the geek, the hacker, the actor, the cracker – this modern day tortured soul, consumed by poverty and deeply in debt, starved of recognition and acclaim.

These self-proclaimed heroes who wallow in this self-indulgent quagmire achieve obscurity and a lonely demise. To actively follow a creative path that benefits no one is the path of the pathetic and the failure – the everyday is supposedly where taste and inspiration is to be found, the shared pleasures of popular culture, with its homogenized high street and celebrity peddling, porno dreams. Quick fix, new trick, global consuming societies who have ignored the potential cultural backlash and philosophical implications of this bulldozing revolution called ‘choice’ and ‘popularism’. To ignore it is a mistake but to not understand it is a catastrophe. After modernism, postmodernism and global terror, is there a space left for the romantic? ‘Celebrity’ is a relatively new definition of success. The cult of celebrity has turned Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame into an art form in itself. ‘Celebrity Chefs’, ‘Celebrity Gardeners’, ‘Celebrity Cleaners’ even ‘Celebrity Entrepreneurs’. Is ‘Celebrity’ part of this outdated nineteenth century romantic paradigm?  Where is the intellectual discipline? Where is the social profit?

We are not living in a romantic age – the speed trap that captures the mind and soul is dependant on its bandwidth and download time.  This gets us to the end of the day but it remains relentless – tick tock. This fast lane we find ourselves hurtling down is the failure of our twenty-four seven society. This impacts on everything we do creating more and more collapse. It is engrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’  ‘Am I a failure?’

Do my friends think I’m successful?


It is ingrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’ Is it all just a facade, we have been taken in by what we see and what we are being told.

In many ways this hierarchy also applies to successful site maps and web sites. Sitemaps organise information on a site into a logical order – you can confuse or overwhelm the user with to much information. A successful website (and its sitemap) relies on the principles of efficiency; success is that knife-edge that teeters between effectiveness and catastrophe. Too many unimportant pages or non relevant pages can harm your site. Excluding some pages from a site map can be advantageous. The trick is to tempt catastrophe and not create it.

It is important to survive and once your site is accepted by the search engines, with time, maturity will make you more successful. Being around on the web for a few years is better than being the new kid on the block – just hang in there and create your own history.

Where do you place a link to a site map on a site? The most common place is in the footer navigation.