By Robert Lockard
Few people are as intriguing and visionary as Nikola Tesla. If this American immigrant had been as beloved and accepted as Thomas Edison, we would have had 2009 technology back in 1909. Unfortunately, this revolutionary genius was given short shrift by many and his image has become obscured by history.
If you’re like me, you first heard about him in 2006’s “The Prestige,” an excellent movie, by the way. I’ve been thinking a lot about him recently, and I want to share my thoughts on this great man and what he might have accomplished if the world had been ready.
Look at all of the inventions he created. He is the reason we have readily available electricity. Edison, his biggest competitor, wanted to use direct current to power the country, but that way was incredibly inefficient and it could only send power one mile away from a power plant. Tesla’s idea was to generate power through alternating current (does AC sound familiar?). We still use this form of energy transference to power our entire infrastructure in the United States and other parts of the world.
Without Tesla, we wouldn’t have car engines, long-distance radio, radar, fluorescent lights, energy-efficient light bulbs (which Tesla created more than a hundred years ago, but was not allowed to manufacture until a few years ago because of patent issues on the socket) and many other useful inventions.
If Nikola Tesla had created the Internet, I’m sure it would be many times better than what we have come up with. First of all, he would have come up with a much better means to transfer information online than comparatively inefficient phone lines, coaxial cables, fiber optics or copper wires. He probably would have started with a wireless system and made it faster than we’re used to. Then he would invent something truly amazing to replace that, just like he always did.
HTML would have been replaced with a much less complex but more elegant way of designing websites. There would be no need for search engines. Whatever form they would have taken under Tesla’s hand, websites would contain the ability to seek the right viewers rather than viewers having to search for the right sites.
This is a fascinating bit of fanciful thinking. Thanks for indulging my fantasy. I might return to this topic again sometime here on the Submit Solution Website Design Services Blog.
This is a complete version of the post on the eHarbor Blog: “If Nikola Tesla created the Internet.” The photo of the Tesla Coil is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of maveric2003.
By Robert Lockard
The other day, I had an image in my mind of a strange object and I wanted to find a picture of it online. The only problem was I didn’t have a clue what it was called. The image in my head was of a scene in “Superman II” when General Zod’s henchman Non is in the Oval Office and he’s staring intently at something. It’s five metal balls tied to strings in a row and the ones on either end keep hitting the four still balls, causing the ball on the other end to bounce away and come back again.
Maybe you already know what I’m talking about.
I turned to one of my coworkers here at eHarbor, Inc. and asked her to help me. She could picture it, as well, but she couldn’t put her finger on the name. I tried searching for “metal ball attached to strings hitting each other” on Google, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. Luckily, my resourceful coworker found it on Amazon.com, I believe. I could now put a name to an image – Newton’s cradle!
This story illustrates my need for a visual search engine and not simply a text-based one. Luckily, Microsoft and Google are both heading in that direction. I read about their efforts in a CNN article entitled, “Microsoft, Google expand search-engine tools.”
None of the Bing Visual Search galleries look like they would help me find Newton’s cradle because they mostly include people, entertainment and electronics. But it’s new, so I’m willing to cut Microsoft some slack. I’m sure they will get better as they get a feel for what people are (literally) looking for.
Microsoft is still trying hard to break Google’s domination of the search-engine market. The CNN article cited a comScore study showing that, in June, about 65 percent of online searches were done through Google, while just 8.4 percent were done through Bing.
I’ve talked about the race between Microsoft and Google to develop a stronghold over a variety of online and software industries before. You can read about it in my blog entry, “Google-Microsoft face-off good for ecommerce.” Their rivalry is bringing great innovations like these visual search engines. I’ll hopefully talk more about Google’s Fast Flip in a forthcoming blog entry. For now, I’ll say adieu.
This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog entry, “Finding Superman image on Google no easy feat.” The photo of Newton’s cradle is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of ƒяαиcєscα яσsє.
By Robert Lockard
I read a provocative post from the Blog Bloke a while ago that I’d like to comment on. The post is entitled, “8 Twitter tips to promote your blog.” In it, the author responds to the argument that Twitter and other social media are replacing blogs and that we should drive traffic to Twitter instead of to our blogs and ecommerce websites.
He points out the many flaws with that idea in his blog entry. I would like to focus on two of his most persuasive points.
The first point is, as the Blog Bloke puts it, “If you are a marketer trying to make money, you will want your Twitter followers to visit your blog and click on your ads.”
To quote Lex Luthor, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Companies often post links to deals and special offers on their Twitter accounts, but those links always go to one of their corporate websites or landing pages. Nothing is bought or sold on Twitter, itself. Social media is an excellent part of Internet marketing, but it is not a replacement for the many other available tools, such as paid search, SEO and blogging.
The second important point is, “Ultimately, your blog is where you want the action to be. You want your readers to follow you over to your real blog on your own domain and a site that belongs to YOU.”
As I’ve discussed before, Twitter and other social-media sites do not technically help with SEO. The only way they do is if other Twitter users find links to your blog and link to them on their own blogs. Twitter and Facebook have no-follow tags, which tell search engines to pay no attention to them, but most blogs welcome search engines to pay attention to their links and include them in their ranking algorithms. You can read more about this in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Experts are wrong: Twitter and Facebook help SEO.”
What an interesting discussion. I’ve had a lot of fun writing about this topic. What are your thoughts on this important ecommerce topic?
This blog entry is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post, “Social media can’t replace blogs.” The comic of the history of blogging is from Flickr, and it is courtesy of stefan2904.
