Re: How does Google do its Marketing?

Davémon wrote:
>
> catherine yronwode wrote:

> > One method of Socratic teaching is to present the "established"
> > model *as fact* and then encourage the student to discover how
> > emergent confditions require emergent models.
>
> Yes, one method.
>
> > I think that any teacher who posed a 1950s-framed question on
> > marketing strategy with google as the target of the query would be
> > mking a brilliant move, inducing students to have the courage to
> > break open and expose a flawed hypothesis in order to encompass
> > emergent real world data.
>
> In this, doubleqiu served as my teacher, and I thank him/her for that.

:-) Good point. because i am not a student of marketing, i did not
follow that at first, but i see what you mean.

I also have learned something from this exchange: i did not know
until i looked it up that the spontaneous popularity of a new social
item could be recast in terms of *marketing* -- such as "buzz
marketing."

I happen to think that one cannot actually sustain "buzz" on an
unworthy product, and thus it is actually not a significant
marketing strategy in general, only in particular instances where an
item attracts "evangelists" -- and i say this even while i admit to
consciously helping to build "buzz" around products i personally
admire, including google, for which i have evangelized rather
overtly.

Sociological side note on my google evangelism:

It turns out that i am the author of 504 usenet articles mentioning
google.

The first time i gave a public endorsement in which i ranked google
above other search engines was on January 13, 2000. Here is the
exact quote: "By the way, i currently recommend google.com as the
best search engine (after years of promoting and using altavista)."

By June 28, 2000 i mentioned in usenet that "The top search engine
sending people to our site is google.com" -- which, as you might
imagine, gave me even more incentive to keep up the "buzz" about
google's greatness, since it was now feeding us more traffic than
the other SEs were.

So what had begun in January 2000 as my admiration for a clean,
clutter-free, fast-loading SE had, within 6 months, turned into a
co-evolutionary burst of symbiosis, in which google favoured my site
and i returned the favour by promoting google's efficiency through
public acclaim.

Had Yahoo, AOL, or MSN produced results that favoured my site, i
might have recommended them to the public, but they did not and do
not, and so i tend to downplay their existence.

It is important to note that no actual money or recompense in kind
has changed hands between myself and any search engine company -- i
refuse to pay to be listed or to receive high rankings -- so my
relationship with google is strictly one of voluntary evangelism
with reciprocated benefits -- symbiosis, in other words.

> Note that Tonnies responce was not to defend the 'teacher', nor to
> attack my hypothesis, but to take offense, make personal attacks and
> withdraw from the debate.
>
> With such behaviour, there is no learning, for anyone.

Yes, i noticed that. Such stuff is dross.

> <snip nice example of socratic irony>
> >
>
> The technique of socratic irony you've described (where the teacher is
> forced to use a false hypothesis) is only really relevant if one
> participant in the discorse (a teacher) needs to have their authority
> questioned in order for the actual learning to take place.

I disagree. The technique i described can be used by preference, not
out of necessity, if one wishes to educate students to question
authority, In the case i cited it is not used "in order for the
actual learning to take place" but in order to bring about what
might be called "meta-learning" -- learning ABOUT learning.

> Where all participants are equal (for example usenet) aren't all
> theories open for equal treatment in discourse? To do so we should
> question all of theories as equally (in)valid, until sufficient
> reasoning emerges.

This is a great idea, and in my experience it works well as long as
personality issues are excluded -- hence the emphasis in aise on
tests and the stating of actual URLs for personal inspection.

> > It's a scary, open-ended way to teach, and the teacher must, in a
> > sense, be an actor willing to portray the flawed or outdated
> > hypothesis as "truth," but the result is well worth the effort in
> > that students who grasp the principles of the method become fearless
> > thinkers, capable of examinng not only data but also examinng the
> > hypotheses that underlie the data and its collection.
>
> Whether the hypothesis is true or not doesn't matter, its the quality
> of the reasoning and debate of in attack or defense of the hypothesis
> which is important.

While what you say may be true about Socratic debate in general, i
think that in aise the issue is more narrowly defined, for without
some sort of ultimate decision-making (not to mention consensus)
about any given SE hypothesis, we merely have debate for the sake of
debate -- which is fun, but not of practical concern in a group like
aise, where distinct practical goals are always placed nakedly on
the table (viz. attracting more traffic, getting to #1 for selected
serps, achieving good ROI, etc.).

> So, am I weak on socratic method, or are you being too narrow in your
> definition?

I was not trying to delimit a definition of Socratic debate or
Socratic teaching methods, but i will admit to giving an example
that was narrowly focussed.

> or is this way OT?

That too. But i enjoyed it, so it has some value.

Cordially,

cat yronwode

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