Rand’s going to be on the Oprah show, and writes:
We had the Oprah film crew spend 4 hours here this morning (before we went caucusing for our candidates of choice) and it was a bit surreal – the sad part is that TV, particularly of this type, is not interested in the real story – they’re interested in creating a story that they think will fit their audience. The “coaching” of the producer made for some very odd tape – she literally just wanted me repeating what she said, not putting out the story as it is.
This is not necessarily about Rand’s business, nonetheless–while a lot of Search Engine Optimization is about getting to the truth of a client’s site, some of it ain’t, and the irony dealt me a haymaker. Then again, I spend a lot of time looking at webspam 
That said, kudos to Rand and Geraldine!
But Brian – SEO is marketing and there’s no hypocrisy where marketers claim that they tell the whole, unadulterated truth in a perfectly balanced way. Google certainly doesn’t describe themselves that way in press releases or news articles – I assume you had to go through the Google “PR Training” program
The difference is that when you look at an online marketing campaign or at a company’s website, you expect them to put a positive, marketing sheen on what they do. Compare that to a news or, in Oprah’s case, pseudo-news program where the expectation is for more of an independent (albeit editorial) look at a story and you’ll see the disconnect.
Thanks for stopping by, Rand.
I believe that SEO is also the technical practice of helping what you have, be it your own site or a client site, put its best foot forward when it comes to search engines and how the site is represented within. And bad SEO goes as far as creating chicanery that attempts to create a distorted story (see three posts down). My thought wasn’t more sophisticated than noting that similarity
@Brian
You sir are becoming extremely jaded. (:
I prefer realist
Coming back to SD anytime soon? Keeping up with the Chargers while out of the country?