March 26th 2006
Let’s say that there is a new buzzword in town and is going to stay here for a while. Of course anybody will want to proove themselves as an expert on it and to score for that buzzword in Google and the rest of the search engines. What to do?

The hard way. Start working, train your employees in the new field get some good products out get reviews all the drill. It takes work, it takes people, it takes time and it takes MONEY. Most go this way but very few see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Or the easy way. Make a super basic product with a slight resemblance to the buzzword, put the buzzword in the product name, announce yourself as the biggest competitor of the bad boy in town and than use your PR channels and the blogosphere to let the world know who you are. What do you need? A small team with basic skills, very few money for a server that can take a combined effect of Digg+Slashdot, and an email account to let the people know who you are.

But why take the easy way? Because when you have won the PR and the SEO game everybody will start throwing money at you and perhaps if you don’t plan for a quick retirement you will have enough funding to do the hard way too.
In big lines this is what the guys at Ajax Write did this week. Full coverage on

• Ajaxian: AjaxLaunch.com: An Ajax App Each Week (ok. And the quality will be direct proportional with the releases interval)
• Techcrunch: AjaxWrite, the Newest Ajax Office Entrant
• Solution watch: Online Word Processing with AjaxWrite
• Slashdot : AjaxWrite to “Compete” with MS Word (wll at least they said “compete”)
• Digg: A Web Based MS Word Compatible Word Processor

What else would someone wish for Xmas?

After you get that coverage all the trolls from the blogosphere will be at your feet copying quoting the masters and pointing to your lame product website.

Ok. So? It’s a dirty game anyway why should anyone care?

Well, because when in a few weeks when that website will be on top10 for the word “ajax” don’t tell me anymore bed time stories about search engines relevance and quality of results. Unless you have a strong AI engine behind you can’t tell what the relevance of a page/website is. Is all a game that can be reversed engineered and can be tricked by anyone with an IQ slightly above average and enough motivation to do it.

Is the same game that you see in the real world. Is not what you do or what you know. Is who you know that matters and visibility. That’s why people that appear on TV seem smarter than the audience, that’s why the people with an IQ way below average but who know the right people get elected presidents.

But this is the current game and can be changed only from inside by playing it. BUT don’t tell me about quality anymore.

EDIT (April 5th 2006):

10 days later and they are in Google’s Top 10 for Ajax. As I said…cut the relevance crap talk