Today I'm taking a break from the meaning of search series simply so I can take a moment to give thanks.
North Americans as we may be altogether, this Monday you might feel a little bit out of sync with your remote neighbours as Canada celebrates Thanksgiving more than 6 weeks ahead of the USA. We're a country naturally optimized for Thanksgiving and so, sorry, by the time our southern neighbours get to joyfully expound on the gracious gifts bestowed on them this year they are, frankly, too late to the game.
That obligatory jab out of the way - they like to make fun of our "eh!" while we're used to being at least 6 weeks ahead of the game (ouch, jab #2!) - let's stop a moment to be seriously grateful.
If everything has gone the way Life should go, you're looking back at some big changes. I know that in my life a lot of things have changed; some dramatically so but let me be free to not bore you with the details and suffer alone in silence instead (he said, sort of tongue in cheek but firmly believing in at least some separation of The Blog and The Personal).
Some of those Life changes you've experienced are good, some bad, no doubt. But today, right here on a blog dedicated to search and search engine optimization, I'd like to focus on our work and what we may be grateful for there.
Whether you're reading this blog as a blogger who finally received a $100 payment from Adsense after toiling enormously hard on your site for months or you're here as the in-house SEO of a multi-billion dollar company (adjusted for current economic circumstances that's a 20 dollar company, I guess…), whether you're here as the pro or the beginner; you're having a job, self made or not, which could not have come to pass but for this wonderful third wave of technology.
• I'm thankful for the existence of search engines; they're part of the basis of my job, my pay, my fun.
• I'm thankful for the huge explosion of sites in the past 10 years; it's that very large number of sites which helps make my job needed.
• I'm thankful for contextual analysis; it's what feeds our PPC department.
• I'm thankful for Flash which can make the most beautiful content the most deep-link unfriendly; thankful for CSS and plain HTML styling which can make any element look like an H1 while avoiding to use the actual H1 tag itself (don't ask…). It's sites like that that make site analysis feasible.
• I'm thankful for Digg, Sphinn, Stumbleupon, Grox, I Am Bored, Fark, and many, many others; they've opened up new ways to do our current jobs and new jobs for the Next Big Thing.
PS: I'm also very thankful for Twitter and today I used it to ask others what they are thankful for in their SEO jobs.
Will Reynolds, Seer Interactive
Steve Spalding, How To Split An Atom
Mark Pilatowski, Pilo SEO
Yura Filimonov, Effectize
Michael Streko, Streko (dot) com
Stephen Smith, Productivity in Context
Casey Yandle, Web Entrapments
Melanie Phung, All About Content
I loved doing a post together with you on Twitter! This is fun!
Anyway… The photos are by Joe Error who took them, apparently, during his 2006 housewarming party in San Fransisco. Just before I'd considered using some of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten's photos from the 2008 TheNextWeb conference in my birthplace Amsterdam. This one would have been nice as we tend to react good to human faces. I think the one I picked instead does well too, don't you?
I have 3 wonderful daughters and man, I tell you, that is something to be thankful, nay, grateful for.