Welcome to the early days of Keyword Culture. That's my name for this new, yet-to-be-defined era in which the words we type into a search box, the words that are within reach of robotic crawlers, the words that are pulled up in our list of query results, are the words that have the biggest impact. Having the right word is everything. Without it, seekers will never find the pages they are looking for and webmasters will never get their pages noticed by the seekers. Marketing campaigns will languish and consumer retailers will suffer. Iimportant texts will never be unearthed. Questions and answers will pass in the night.
Yet when the engines of life are fueled by simple keywords -- nouns and phrases known to all -- something is inevitably lost. What happens to poetry? Where is there room for diversity? What about the electric thrill of hitting upon a new word, a new phrase, to describe what is usually pared down to bare bones cliches?
1:58:06 PM 
|
|
