Wikipedia is adding another layer of trust to its user generated content system called WikiTrust. This article in Wired Magazine does a good job of covering the positives and the negatives of Wikis in general as it related to content generation, search engine optimization and Wikipedia specifically.

On the one hand, the WikiTrust system is pretty straightforward. New editors have a low level of trust and over time as their edits survive their level of trust increases. That’s good. It’s the way it should be. On the other hand, Wikipedia in general depends on consensus, which means that it is the global village by democratic rule that determines what is accurate knowledge. The consensus has been wrong before, can it be wrong again?

Here are some examples of how the majority, by consensus, got things wrong:

• At one time, the world was flat
• The sun revolved around the earth
• In early America, if you could swim after being thrown into a lake, you were a witch

So the problem is, the consensus cannot always be trusted. Which brings into the question whether the WikiTrust system itself can be trusted since it based in part on the consensus.

Despite its obvious weaknesses, I think the WikiTrust system has some merit. Like other systems of trust, it isn’t perfect, but it does provide some basic checks and balances in a system that is inherently flawed. My question is, could such a color coded system of trust work for the entire Web? Might the search engines themselves be arbiters of trust in like fashion of individuals who produce content (as opposed to individual websites)? In other words, could Google ascribe certain qualities of trust to individual IP addresses so that any individual who produces content for any website online can be judged according to the level of accuracy and trust built over time? Is it feasible?

Watch this video then keep reading:

Will 25% of India’s population be better Internet marketers than most Americans?

Will the top 10 jobs in 2010 all be Internet related?

Of the 10-14 jobs your children will have before they turn 38, will at least one of them involve search engine marketing?

If 1 in 8 married couples met online, will the 50% that end in divorce end their marriage online?

How many of Google’s 31 billion questions asked are pertinent? I mean, really pertinent?

What percentage of the Earth’s population are responsible for sending and receiving all the text messages every day?

How long will it be before someone reaches a market audience of 50 million in one day?

What year will there be 10,000,000,000 Internet devices? How many of them will connect with Twitter?

Do we really need that many words?

How much unique information will you create this year?

Is your college degree still relevant?

How many people will actually spend $1,000 on a computer in 2049?

Have you illegally downloaded any songs lately?

If you update your website today, how bad will your search engine optimziation be this time next year?

Just a few things to think about.

Greg Sterling wrote a very interesting blog post on Augmented Reality, a new mobile phone technology that allows users a chance to get reviews of local business simply by scanning the area with your iPhone video. But Greg says this is primitive technology compared to what’s coming. I’ll have to agree.

Being able to use your mobile phone, or a hand held device of any kind, to scan your local area and retrieve background information on that area is a huge benefit. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet. Seeing reviews of local businesses is just the beginning. How about being able to scan a street corner and receiving a history lesson on that corner. “This is where Billy the Kid was shot and killed.” Or, “a brothel once frequented by America’s most influential politicians and businessmen once stood here.”

There are all sorts of ways this technological innovation could be used. Perhaps you might scan an area with your iPhone and be offered a menu of choices concerning information that you’d like to receive about the local buildings in your video view.

For instance:

• Restaurant Reviews
• Store Hours
• Real Estate Data (MLS maybe?)
• History Lessons
• Literary Allusions (which works of literature have mentioned this place?)
• Famous People (who has been associated with this area?)
• Weather Forecast
• Recent Local News
• Specials and Sales Being Offered By Businesses In Your Phone’s View
• Directions From Point A (Where You Are Now) To Point B (A Pre-Determined Grid Coordinate Or Address)
• Estimated Taxi Fares

The list could go on. Just pick up your mobile phone and scan, or take a picture of a particular building or geographic location (an open field even), and tell your phone what information you are looking for. Wouldn’t that be cool? How long will it be before we see that? And what kind of wild and crazy things will webmasters be able to do to let people know more about them and where/how to find them?

Local search engine optimization keeps getting better, but sometimes what is perceived to be an improvement is not necessarily an improvement. At least, not in the short term.

Such is the case with Google’s recent inclusion of Street View photos of businesses in Google Maps.

Now, let me start off by saying that it may very well be an improvement. The jury is still out. But as Blumenthals points out, there is the danger that StreetView could have the wrong photo and that Google could associate another business with a particular address. Or worse, it could be a competitor. And that would certainly lead to some hacked off small business owners.

The lesson here is you’ll need to keep an eye on your Google Maps listing to ensure that doesn’t happen. If you are one of the lucky businesses to see your StreetView go up first then you can check it right up front to ensure its accuracy. But don’t think that things couldn’t change in the future. You’ll need to check in from time to time to be sure that Google hasn’t switched your photo with another.

In my eyes, this makes local optimization more difficult. Not easier.

Here’s an interesting take on brand names. It seems that more and more searchers are searching for brand names by name in the search engines instead of just typing them into their browsers. A few years ago it was actually the reverse. I think I know why.

In 2001, most of the people searching for specific brands online had been online for quite a few years. There were relatively few newcomers to the Internet. The people who were searching for information knew a great deal about how to find it. If they knew where they wanted to go then they just typed it into their browser as time saving measure.

Today, however, there are a lot more new Internet users. Every day more and more people are using the Internet to find information – everything from real estate to jobs. Of course, they’ve heard of the top websites (Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist) even if they’ve never been to them. Chances are, they know someone who uses those websites on a regular basis. Many of these people know how to conduct a basic search, but they probably don’t know how to style a website address properly (yes, they are complete newbies). It’s easier for them to type “Craigslist” into a search box than it is try and figure out how to get the http:// correct followed by the correct spelling of the website address and the dot com.

That’s what I believe, any way. More new and less tech savvy Internet users is the cause of this. And what that means for marketers is you’ve got to really make sure your brand name is optimized and that’s probably more true for local brands because people in your area may be looking for you.

The race is on for dominance in real-time search. Google is playing. Bing is playing. Twitter is playing like they’re playing. And now OneRiot is playing. According to WebProNews, OneRiot recently received $7 million in venture capital. Will that matter?

Let’s face it, $7 million doesn’t even scratch the surface of what Google and Microsoft have available. Both of those companies could throw that much money in the ring in one day. But I like OneRiot. It seems to have something that neither Google nor Bing have going for them. An actual real-time crawling bot that returns useful results.

One search I performed at OneRiot turned up a top result that was 2 hours, 41 minutes old. The second result, however, was 4 minutes old. You can’t really get more real-time than that.

Another feature that OneRiot has that is really useful is the share feature. Click on the shared link and OneRiot will tell you who shared the result and where (i.e. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.).

OneRiot has two settings for ordering your search results. Pulse, which, best I can tell, orders results according to relevance and popularity, and Real Time. The Real Time setting is self explanatory, but in the way of ensuring you get it, it orders your results according to latest updated. And OneRiot also allows you to search Video results in real time.

Both Bing and Google have toyed with real-time search results, but neither of them have done it to the same level that OneRiot has. The only question now is how can webmasters use real time search to reach their intended audiences better using search engine optimization strategies tactics social media marketing?

I’ve seen companies taking SEO into their hands and doing some pretty strange things, but it’s important as an search engine optimization professional to keep an open mind and to try to understand a company’s goals before you start criticizing their strategy. Just because things don’t seem to make sense, there may be legitimate reasons for doing them a certain way.

We know that updating your website with original content is a necessary thing. There are several ways to accomplish that goal. First, and one of the most popular ways of updating a website today, is to put a blog on it. If you blog every day then you’ll get original and unique content on your website every day. That invites the search engines to crawl your site more often and give you more pages to rank in the indexes. That’s one way. It’s not the only way.

Recently, a client came to me with a new website and a blog that they had put off site in order to promote the main website they wanted to drive traffic to. That can sometimes be a useful strategy, but I don’t always recommend it. In this client’s case, I thought it was a bad idea initially because I saw no plan to include original content on the main static website. However, there was a page on the site for articles and even though there was only one article link on that page, there was a plan to update that page weekly with a new article. The question is, is that a viable strategy.

Yes, I think it is. Particularly if there is a moderate amount of competition in your niche, but not overwhelming. The article page will serve to keep fresh new original content on your website. Granted, it isn’t daily updates, but weekly can be effective if the content is good. The blog, since it is on its own domain name, can rank according to its own merits and serve to filter traffic through to the main website. Not only can it drive traffic, but it can also build a fair amount of inbound links. I would not, however, rely on the blog alone to build links. I would have another link building strategy in the works to supplement the blog.

Keep in mind that there is more than one way to accomplish an optimization goal. The important thing is to feed the robots while providing your human visitors with great content.