SEO – The Correct and Right Way

As I study SEO and read the experts’ advice (check out Search Engine Land) I am circling back to where I would have started.  Just write thoughtful, authentic, and consistent articles. Pay attention to your community and link to informative content that adds context to your story.

There are articles on what not to do – essentially don’t trick the search engine with content not meant for your readers.  There are articles on what to do – selecting key phrases, and paying for them. Overall the best approach seems to be to create fresh, pertinent, content that draws a reader enough to come back and share.

This Periodic Table of SEO gives a great summary of the advanced elements of SEO – but I keep coming to the conclusion that good quality frequent writing is the way to improve rank.

Don’t refuse reuse; reuse refuse

Just visited the Alexander & Baldwin Sugar museum in Maui. Fantastic description of using the pressed sugar cane as fuel to create the steam that powered the engines to process the sugar – Elegant, economical, and fossil fuel independent. There are other historical examples of use of waste streams – “refuse reuse” – and counter examples like the Thames sewer system where arguments in favor of using sewage as fertilizer were rejected due to the great health risks in human waste. The Thames’s 1860’s effort and further efforts improved health by getting the waste as far away as possible from the population. There may still be untapped potential in sewage, but its removal was the top priority.
A top area for refuse-reuse is nuclear energy. Three decades after the Three Mile Island partial meltdown can we now objectively learn from other countries and support our scientists in figuring out the best thing to do with nuclear fission as a source of energy? Nuclear energy avoids our political and environmental pitfalls of today’s fossil fuel based sources. But – what to do with the waste? Populations oppose putting it near them, or even driving it through their areas on the way to another area. Use of breeder reactors reduce the radioactivity, and create more energy from the same input fuel, but the byproduct, and the equipment to make it, can be harnessed for nuclear weapons. However there are proposals to mix in depleted uranium to reduce the weapon usefulness.
It is tricky, but it is possible to deal with the waste and byproducts of nuclear power. France does it, Japan does it, even submarines do it . We can apply our best and brightest and utilize nuclear energy to power our economy, hospitals, and homes without harming our political or greenhouse atmosphere layers.

Pretty High Voltage Transmission Lines, like the Victorian Embankment

When Joseph Bazalgette led the building of a complex robust sewer system for London in the 1860′s, the Victorian Embankment was built to cover the sewer (and a subway) and reclaim 37 acres of “festering mud flat”* (ref 1) with a grand walkway. The walkway served as a community center for people and gardens. The combination of technology and beauty added up to a winning solution for health, city growth, economic growth, and community connection.

Renewable energy solutions and smart grid implementation require new construction of high voltage transmission lines connecting our wind farms and solar cells electricity to urban and rural consumers. Imagine if the new towers looked like a correctly sized and safety compliant version of the Tiffany’s bracelet designed by Frank Gehry?

Wouldn't this form make a lovely High Vt transmission tower?

Instead of more of today’s lines.

Classic compliant transmission lines

As long as they follow the criteria, there is no reason not to have today’s top designers add form to the key function of distributing electricity.
Applying beautiful form to the utility of power transmission lines could be the key to improving our distributed grid and gaining acceptance of our communities.

* Ehrlich, Blake “London on the Thames” 1966, Little Brown & Company. p. 21

Growing list of further questions

How does the Thames Barrier fit into the evolution of engineering and the river?

How hard to find scientific records on the Thames from centuries or even decades ago? Can we compare temperature, algae count, width, or flow?

Most of the Great Stink focused on sewer and dead bodies, how much did industry make a difference? “defiled by greed and speculation?”

Who stood to lose if the Thames was cleaned up, or behaviors changed?

What did Britain stand to lose if money were put into the clean-up project and not something else> Immigration, Crimean War? What else was going on?

Parallels between the rise of inhabitants on the Thames Western side, and the rise of the inhabitants of the Pacific’s eastern side today?

We understand where new water comes from, where does new air come from? Can we help by planting the best plants, and making them trendy?

http://www.cleanairgardening.com/houseplants.html

Joseph Bazalgette & the Engineering People Critical to a Solution

Include Nate Lewis -

Include the thousands to millions of others.

Distinction from the Thames – it take a League. A sodality. Not just concurrent concordance, but competition, too.

Greenhouse gases don’t smell anything like the Thames

Al Gore stands out as a famous person placing emphasis and visibility on the dangers of greenhouse gas emmissions. The River Thames was obviously smelly and repugnant. We can’t see extra CO2 in the atmosphere. How can we measure it? Is there a link showing regular measurements?

Here is the IPCC list of greenhouse gases with comparison from 1750 to 1998. What is it today? What are the counts for last week?

This United Nations page publishes fairly recent data on the Millenium Development Goals Statistics.  Page 61 of the Handbook for DG Indicators describes the success of avoiding ozone depletion in the 1980′s and defines measurements for CO2 emmissions. Calculating who is contributiong what percentage – but where is the measuremenr?

Is this mapping effort in current numbers, or just translating older numbers?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090219/sc_afp/usitclimateenvironmentinternetpurduegoogle_20090219211229

Was there an Al Gore equivalent?

Al Gore stands out as a famous person placing emphasis and visibility on the dangers of greenhouse gas emmissions. The River Thames was obviously smelly and repugnant. We can’t see extra CO2 in the atmosphere. How can we measure it? Is there a link showing regular measurements?

Here is the IPCC list of greenhouse gases with comparison from 1750 to 1998. What is it today? What are the counts for last week?

This United Nations page publishes fairly recent data on the Millenium Development Goals Statistics. Page 61 of the Handbook for DG Indicators describes the success of avoiding ozone depletion in the 1980′s and defines measurements for CO2 emmissions. Calculating who is contributiong what percentage – but where is the measuremenr?

Is this mapping effort in current numbers, or just translating older numbers?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090219/sc_afp/usitclimateenvironmentinternetpurduegoogle_20090219211229

While movement to clean up the environment has been around for a long time, it seems to come in and out of fashinon. In the U.S. Al Gore gets a lot of credit, and even a Nobel prize for increasing attention, funding, and action for the environment. Was there someone similar for the Thames? There are centuries of texts complaining about it:

 

Texts from the last 100 years point to even older discussions of the need to clean up the river.

1711: Tobias Smollett – “if I would drink water, I must swallow that which comes from the river Thames, imppregnated with all the filth of London and Wesminster.

1858: Punch Magazine “one vast gutter.”

1885: Richard Jeffries: “a vast stagnant swamp”

ref. Thames Peter Ackroyd

Even direct loss of life from it:

Dr. John Snow proved that the four great Cholera epidemics were caused by the foul water.

Who was opposed? Or was there simply greater competition for the attention and budget of the population? I haven’t been able to identify an Al Gore equivalent – possibly because I haven’t done enough research, but more likely because the problem was much more obvious, and there were many loud articulate voices demanding improvement.

Key Finding #1 — The problem needs to be more obvious. I tried to find a meter, that we could check on the internet, showing the CO2 levels day-by-day. I expected changes with the seasons, or where the measurement were taken, but I couldn’t find a regular measure, only older aggregated data and a report on a failed launch of an orbiting measure. A constant report would show that the levels are rising (linking that number to future global crisis is a different challenge.)

Why the Thames? Why a template?

 

For the selection of a historical clean-up success story – why the River Thames? Why not Chernobyl, Love Canal, the SuperFund site next to my kids’ pre-school? Because the Thames has been a fundamental center of life to a thriving series of towns and one giant city for centuries. For those impacted by the Thames – it was centrally important – just like our environment is to all of us now. If many were careful with the river waste, a few upstream could still destroy it.

For centuries inhabitants of London dumped their trash into the River Thames. In the 1800′s the population swell and industrial revolution added up to too much trash, and the government came up with a plan to clean up the river. They were successful, and the resulting sewers, water reservoirs, and standards resulted in a stronger London and a river that is still source of pride, recreation, and business. 

 

Why study an old event  when we have a new problem to fix? Because their is somthing to be learned in that new event. It is clearly a prototype of today’s challenges. While history focuses on the 1858 Great Stink leading to cleanup, surely there is more to the story. While a summary points to one engineer, there is more to the story – how was he chosen, how big was the team?

 

First of all recognizing that we humans have tackled a truly complex problem like this one before, where the solution is a mix of technology, policy, and influence,  will be inspirational, probably even directional. There are many other environmental clean-up stories which led to a combination of economic growth in concert with care for the land, water, and air — but the River Thames is a good beginning.

In this blog, I will share more about the plans and projects for cleaning up the River Thames with the goal to map this success story with our effort to clean up our atmosphere.