Connective Visions

At the start of my previous blog, I said I’d explain my passive-aggressive approach to search-engine optimization (SEO) in headlines. That was the passive blog post; this is the aggressive one.

Let me start by saying that, yes, I know the name is Nick Schuyler, not Nick Skyler. And, yes, I know that his story is a thing wholly separate from, and in most ways incomparable with, the massive February 27, 2010 earthquake in Chile that, according to the New York Times, displaced at least 1.5 million people, killed over 300 and even (suggests NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) moved an axis around which Earth is balanced.

For those who don’t know – who are most of my readers, friends, family, and even acquaintances – Schuyler/Skyler is a personal trainer who accompanied two NFL football players and his best friend on a 2009 boating trip in the Gulf of Mexico that only he survived. His book about their deaths and his survival, Not Without Hope, was released Tuesday, so he has today appeared on Oprah (nope, didn’t see it) and has been interviewed for the Today Show.

To fulfill my content promise, here are three things Nick Schuyler might do about the earthquake in Chile:

1. He might make a personal donation to earthquake relief through the agency of his choice.  Google is actively working with two, UNICEF and Direct Relief International, should he want a place to start.
2. He might dedicate a portion of his book’s royalties to ongoing support for Chile.
3. He might network with Chilean earthquake survivors to draw attention to the varied emotional challenges of people who survive a disaster while losing people close to them.

I say, he might do any of these. What he wants to do, is up to him.

The only things these topics have in common, that I know of, are (1) they both happened on or around the end of February, though in different years; (2) they both involve death; and (3) they both appeared today in the top-ten lists of Google’s “Hot Searches” and “Hot Topics,” with Nick Skyler (sic) ranking “Volcanic.” (He has, as of this writing, been displaced by Danny Gokey. I’m not going to any more trouble on this, however, so Danny Gokey will have to get my attention another way.)

One thing that happens when you start a blog is that you find yourself bombarded by pundits on the importance of keywords, tags, META data, back-linking, and all sorts of other things. You find this even in the software you are using to write. Most articles that dictate how to do this properly follow a tired, er, tried, and supposedly true, formula that recommends you use for a headline a number of tips on how to do something/mistakes people are making, and that you choose words that will light up Google Trends and other search-engine phenomena.

The result, if not as extreme as my experiment, is a headline that is boring as all get-out – not to mention annoying in its assumption that the writer must be making a mistake, selling a product other than the writing and/or information, or willing to settle for substandard forms of communication. Any joy in the process is especially frowned on. Third Tribe Marketing, for instance, which will help you overcome your gleeful tendencies for a monthly fee, refers to such bloggers as “touchy-feely idealists who promote community over commerce and conversation over cash.”

Interesting choice of what’s important, don’t you think?

Of course every writer wants to be read; and when the writer’s life-sustaining job is to sell a product, services, or a site, these tips may be worth a look. But every writer also desires for his or her own voice, passions, and concerns to have expression. And this, really, is the beauty of blogging: it brings even a few people to one’s writing – to hear one’s voice.

All of which brings me to Steve Biko.

Biko is best known the as the 1960s-70s South African anti-apartheid activist who was a student leader, creator of the Black Consciousness Movement and the slogan “black is beautiful,” and a victim of the system through his death in police custody. His interactions with white journalist Donald Woods, who exposed his death by police brutality, inspired the 1987 movie Cry Freedom – which is how I “met” Biko. A selection of Biko’s writings was first published in 1978 and re-printed after the movie.

It is titled I Write What I Like: Selected Writings.

Steve Biko, Donald Woods, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Frederick Douglass, and countless others have pursued the path of writing what they liked, to their society’s and our history’s benefit. They have respected communication enough not to turn it into a mere popularity contest and get-rich-quick scheme. In the face of so much bombardment on how to reduce expression to something rapidly consumable (and forgettable), I’d find it a betrayal to do otherwise.

Biko would have been a heck of a blogger.