One of my best friends tells me that people who wear slogans on their backs are losers. Same with people who put bumperstickers on their cars. I think he’s wrong…

According to this friend, who is the one person I’m acquainted with that might literally be a “genius” – he has his Ph.D. from Princeton and has completed some important mathematical and logical proofs – people deceive themselves when they wear slogans. Instead of doing the hard work of actually articulating and defending your viewpoints with arguments, you are ramming your ideas down other people’s throats. He calls it cheating. He calls it an illusion…just like he thinks that watching TV is a willful illusion (e.g. you deceive yourself into perceiving that there are real people on the tv screen).

An example of the illusion, he says, might be when you feel like you’re actually helping people in Darfur by putting a bumper sticker on your car. Of course, he doesn’t even think it’s our duty to actually help people in Darfur. Nope. Our only duty is to the people in our immediate physical neighborhood. Or so says he.

Well I think he’s wrong. I think we should wear our ideas on our backs. Given that the individual has been so thoroughly incapacitated to make a difference in today’s world…why the hell not? Why not get my place at the podium…since the only chance I have to get my point across is when I’m walking through Target or home from the movie theatre.

So here’s this guy who 1) has his Ph.D. and has an annual podium of 100s of pliable students…and he’s telling me to reject the impulse to speak my mind…on my back. Screw that. Maybe I’d take him seriously if he were in my position.

But honestly he sounds just like an ancient Stoic telling a suffering man that pain is an illusion that must be overcome in order to acquire true happiness… Yeah, sure…so let me cut off your arm and we’ll see if you still believe it.

We all need a voice. And sometimes the only voice we have is the clothing on our backs. So be it.

Note To Readers:If you think that wearing snark on your back is koshure, then make sure to get your free snarked-up t-shirt from Fusilly.com.

Mosey’s latest post unleashed the tiger in my soul… Wait! Maybe I don’t have a soul… I buy and sell links after all.

You know what. I think all this fuss about the PageRank economy is all a load of BS. Sure, you can raise a bunch of hypotheticals and point to the success that Google has had in solving problems algorithmically in the past. You can talk all you want about people who have gotten screwed in the past by relying on a business model that was, in the words of Google, pure evil! Broohaha!

I don’t care. Really, I don’t. Linking works now and linking will work in the future. Perhaps the value of bought links will go down slightly as the meme spreads of an imminent, pending Google crack down. Perhaps the strategy of fear will pay off ever so slightly.

But linking is linking. At its best, Google can decide to deflate the value of linked lists. Lists of links. But there are plenty of good lists of links. Not all linked lists are bad linked lists. So tell me how the logic works? Does Google have an algorithm for determining which linked lists are good and which are bad? If so, then you just emulate the good lists better. Bundle links into patterns of semantically relevant topics.

Or…better yet, watch the link buyers and sellers develop semantic link generators. What’s this you ask? Well, let’s say I want to buy a link on site X. I pay $30/ month and in exchange, site X installs a wordpress plugin that dynamically places your link in semantically relevant locations throughout the blog post content. Now let Google do its algorithmic dance.

The point is this: the value of run of the site links might dampen over time. Sure. And legit blog networks will get just as hard as evil link sellers. But even so, the value of links are still central to the SEO game, and so long as there is motivation for link building, there will be an economy for buying and selling links. The distribution mechanism of the economy might get more sophisticated, but it will be there and it will continue to stay strong.

Oh, and by the way, stop slobbering at the feet of Google. They don’t have all the powers you ascribe to them, anyway.