Here’s why customer service is just like a restroom in a restaurant. If you’re running a business, any type of business you have to have some kind of customer service in place (just like when you’re running a restaurant you have to have a restroom).

Just eight months apart London SMX (where I spoke on Hummingbird) was light years away from SMX East (where I gave a keynote speech on Entities and semantic search).

There is a revolution happening across the web and it has gone largely unnoticed. Traditionally a disruptive technology comes across our field of view like the Titanic cutting across our bow. The horizon is totally obscured and all we can see is what we missed before.

There simply is no easy way to write this post without reverting to low-value judgments based upon facilely small datasets (well, mainly one). The TechCrunch piece Google+ is Walking Dead just hours after being published has generated a huge buzz on Google+ and become either the joke of the day (amongst those who know better) or a dark cloud building across a horizon that was beginning to look very rosy indeed.

Without Alfred, Batman would be reduced to cooking his own meals, cleaning the Wayne Mansion and bandaging his own cuts and grazes. As a matter of fact, after a good day’s cleaning, washing and cooking he might not even be able to effectively function as Batman, at all.

None understood the cost of value perhaps better than the Ancient Egyptians. The great Pyramid of Cheops (one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World) required ten years of construction and up to 40,000 workers at one stage for what is essentially a tomb to house the remains of a dead emperor.

Uncharacteristically let’s start off with a brag: The search term “Semantic Search Book” on Google.com returns nine out of ten links featuring my book: Google Semantic Search. In the days before semantic search list-crowding the SERPs page was a technique utilized to deprive potential competitors from a slot.

The Superbowl, once a year, becomes one of those touchstone moments in marketing. It allows brands to use an occasion when they have the attention of their audience to actually project their personality.

I could have easily titled this post “Are Facebook’s Days Numbered?” but the question, though it is Facebook I will focus on, is a little more generic. Online Social Networks (OSN) are a relatively recent evolution, on the web, of the natural human drive to form communities.

You can’t study social networks without understanding a little about systems theory. Drawing inferences and data from biology and physics we can see that a social network can either be an Open or a Closed System. The distinction is critical to the long term success of the network and its value to us, as end users and marketers.