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Philipp Lenssen Interview
Mr. Pratt Interviews Philipp Lenssen
Philipp Lenssen is an all around kind of guy. How many people do you know who are thinkers, bloggers, designers, coders, musicians, artists and writers all in one? To get a quick rundown of this mans skills checkout his Outer Court which is just one of his very cool websites. Most of us know him from Blogoscoped which he claims is 80% focused on Google. Phillip’s writing is clear and focused, he also welcomes others to blog on Blogoscoped and they do. Here is my interview with Philipp Lenssen.
Hello Mr. Lenssen, is it ok if I call you Mr. Lenssen? For some reason the folks I interviewed before you do not like to be called Mr., I just can not place my finger on the reason why.
You can just call me Philipp…
I looked all the way back to your first post on blogoscoped titled “The Online Brain” (though the waybackmachine shows older posts) about a future world where people are able to plug-in to a shared channel that allows them to access information which results in a kind of communion. It is interesting because I found myself relating to it in many ways including the part about annoying my wife by spending all my time on the computer. What is it that made you write this interesting story? Do you have a wife or partner who is feeling alienated by the long hours you spend on the computer? If Google offered a chip some day that would interface with your brain would you be the first one to signup?
I would not be an early adopter of a brain chip that connects me to the internet. Simply because there’s a little too much risk it crashes and destroys parts of my brain. I might try it out after a good test phase.
But in a way, we’re already using Google as an extension to our brains. For example, when we forget the name of a celebrity we’re thinking about, today we might just open Google and quickly search for a film she starred in, or similar. After 10 seconds, we have the name. However, we also lost 10 seconds of training our brain synapses to retrieve the name from our memory. I think in the long run, this could lead to memory getting worse. We can become that overweight cat which doesn’t understand how to hunt for mice anymore… but at the same time, that cat really doesn’t have any reason to know this stuff. So we can think of it as a mere trade-off.
Also, the internet also shapes our brain into more of a short attention-span wanderer, reading up on things we didn’t even know we were interested in 5 minutes ago, just because we stumble upon them in search results. We have a lot more input than the generations before us through Google and the internet in general, and this changes how our brains adjust. We don’t necessarily digest more input, but we adjust our focus to different kinds of input. Today, it’s much more important to know how to get to information, than to memorize the information itself.
As for my girlfriend complaining about me being too much in front of the computer, sure, I guess so. As a programmer or researcher you can enter a zone of full concentration, and then it’s hard to have to leave that zone. Imagine you had a friend in your living room and you would be in a deep discussion with him, and then your wife would enter. She would probably say hello, or sit and listen, but she would not immediately interrupt this discussion telling you of her day. But when we’re online, and someone else sees us, it’s just impossible to know if we’re randomly surfing or deeply involved in something, like a chat discussion with someone. At my old job, management pondered giving us red flags and green flags, so that when we’d be “in the zone” we could put up a red flag. This wasn’t implemented for different reasons…
My blog is very new; I launched it during the Jagger updates on a whim. I needed a place to collect my thoughts, vent and write about stuff but it has quickly become all about the people who I enjoy on the internet. Your blog appears to have come alive of or around the time of the Google Florida updates? What was your motivation behind your blog back then?
I started my blog in May 2003 in Malaysia. To my knowledge, the Florida update was later that year. Again, I could look it up on Google right now to check, but let’s make it a point not to… When I started Google Blogoscoped, I was reading Microdoc News (the former
Google Village) and loving it but the posting rate was low at times. Elwyn Jenkins, its creator (I believe he’s from Austriala), did original research and looked beyond just daily search matters. So basically, I started my own search blog with a focus on search culture, philosophy, impact and so on, because I wanted to have one around to read; only there wasn’t. After a while, Microdoc News completely disappeared.
I enjoyed reading your post about what your blog went through during the Jagger updates here. I also noticed Google was kind enough to link to Blogoscoped, their blog is titled “Official Google Blog” (which shows of their concern with copycats), please explain to us what you think happened and how are your rankings doing today?
For a brief time, it looked as if my PageRank had disappeared, but it came back after a while. After I saw it happening I thought strong and hard what could be “spammy” about my blog, and I realized I don’t want to have my Google Encyclopedia anymore. The Google Encyclopedia used a dictionary with thousands of words and automatically grabbed the content of Google’s “define:” operator to make up its content. I still think the idea is fun, but it was too much like those linkfarmish directories which appeared in the last years. Google definitely hit those with the Jagger update, and many had problems afterwards.
As for the link from the official Google Blog, that’s very nice of course.
I believe that you have done the best Matt Cutts interview yet, how does one contact Mr. Cutts for an interview? Is the lady who commented in the interview a few days back calling herself “Betty Cutts” really Matt’s mom? Ahhh, how sweet is that, having a mom who is Googling his name to make sure we are all being nice to him? I wonder if she sews his ninja socks? Did you know that it is rumored that Matt is a sword fighter and martial arts expert? ;)
I guess she is his mother, though I didn’t ask Matt to confirm. I just contacted Matt via email for the interview. Understandably he’s very busy, but he had time to do it. I didn’t know he’s a martial arts expert! But I just learned he’s nicknamed the “Porn Cookie Guy” in the Googleplex because he’s involved in Google’s SafeSearch, and everyone who’s pointing him to unwanted porn gets some of his mother’s cookies.
I have not found a person who speaks so fondly of Google before, explain what it is about Google that you like, and is there anything you have not liked or wish they would improve upon today?
I’m not a Google fan in the sense I blindly would accept when they do wrong. When they’re screwing up I’ll be there as much as when they’re releasing a cool new service. So far, they’re doing more right than wrong — most importantly, putting the user first, with on average technically great, great implementations — but they’re also doing things wrong. I don’t like the fact they do not mention they censor search results in some countries (including Germany, where I live). I want a note on those results which says, “We do not display all results thanks to your government”, so people can complain to their government. I thought them agreeing to Chinese demands to remove a bunch of sources from Google News is highly dubious. It’s also a double-edged sword, I discussed this in more detail in my blog, and I don’t think there’s an easy “good” or “evil”. These things are incredibly hard to define and agree on and I’m sure internally, Google is discussing this all the time. The only problem is that they rarely communicate in the open about these issues.
Oh, and I also don’t like Orkut much… it’s small-small, slow, and kinda non-Google like. I also don’t like how Google is releasing products at higher frequency with a lower quality than before. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I’m getting a feeling there are much more bugs and lags today than say 2 years ago. Many new services don’t scale well on the first days or weeks and you wonder why they’re doing that. Like, I’ve inserted their tracking code from the new statistics software Google Analytics (the former Urchin), and at some points, it broke my site because it wouldn’t load. So they destroyed my trust in them to do these crucial things right. Similar issues have been there with Google Base, or Google Web Accelerator.
All your websites are visually appealing and fast loading, they have a minimal flavor to them which I like, did you make them yourself, do you do it all including the graphics?
Yeah. Jack of all trades, master of none! Historically speaking I could draw well before I could program. I’ve always liked drawing and as kid, I started playing around with D-Paint on the Amiga… but not at home, I would draw at the computer shop because I didn’t own a computer at that time. That must have been the early 90s. I did more complex designs in around 2000 working for a German web company, but these days I just like to do things the minimalist way.
I suppose that’s why I like Google too; in most of their services, there’s not a single link, button or color which is not absolutely needed. I think long and hard e.g. about the trade-offs between displaying this or that information piece on the front-page vs. the added complexity it brings to the site. As Joel Spolsky says (he’s an ex-MS employee, and software usability guru), “nobody reads long help texts.” Navigation, footnotes, buttons, form fields, many things like these should be regarded as help texts and be approached with minimum prose. It might sound trivial, but speaking from experience, to convince a customer to go for a short help text is often much harder then to convince him to write a whole page!
I’ve coined this phenomenon the pink elephant approach to help texts. Instead of focusing the user on the task at hand longer texts which are detached from the intended point of focus will divert his attention and make the site harder to use.
I always like to ask people what color hat they wear but I just get this feeling your backlinks to your sites did not come from using the latest SEO tricks, am I correct?
Yes. Whatever I do (except for fun-only SEO contests, which I did participate in but will not anymore) I do in terms of readability and usability, clean HTML and so on. I believe search engine rankings come naturally when you have good content and you don’t mess up technically, e.g. your HTML isn’t completely broken. This is the only long term option anyway. In the long run, anything shady will only kick you from behind. Some make it their business to spend a lot of energy adjusting short term approaches, but I’d rather have a working long term approach and then concentrate on content. After all, the most popular search engine must always focus on returning the most relevant results. (Today that’s Google, and probably for a long time to come, but even if Google one day would lose the spam battle, people would just switch to search engines with better results.) So I’d rather have good, relevant content in whatever topic I choose to blog about. And I’m not saying the “dark side of the force” is powerless, if you look at Star Wars it took 3 movies to make Luke win over his father!
Is blogoscoped exactly 80% Google, have you ever done the math?
No, that was just a fun caption. Actually, I introduced that circle-shaped element as a pure design choice to break the rectangle and balance the layout. I made two buttons, the other one reading “Guaranteed 100% Weblog,” so you can see I wasn’t too serious. But the “80% button” at least has some merit because it tells people that my blog is a lot about Google, but not exclusively. At times, I post things totally unrelated to Google. So I kept this button.
What kind of computer and operating system do you run?
Windows XP at the moment… after the Amiga 500 died, I’m very pragmatic about the choice of PC. Back then I thought the Amiga 500 was by far the best system, and I would worship it religiously, but when it died that disillusioned a lot of people when it comes to the “best system winning”. So when I bought my first PC with Windows 95, my choice was not to get the “best system” because I already owned it, and it was dead. Windows to me is the tool with the least hassle in terms of software compatibility. That’s probably why I got an iPod too instead of another MP3 player. Not because I like Apple, or because I dig this gadget, but because I want a relatively high chance of long-term software compatibility. Apple may screw me over but then they have to screw a lot of other people too, so I hope this decreases the chance they will anytime soon.
What kind of online games do you play?
The last online game I played was Ultima Online a few years ago. So after work, I went online to make virtual money in this world. After a while I realized I was working another 4 hours after my regular real-world 8 hours job, so I kinda stopped that! Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Halo 2 at my last job, though that was multi-player it was still offline. That game is a lot of fun.
Close your eyes and tell us the first thing that comes to your head?
Hmm, that would probably depend on what I would want to think about! I’m currently playing around creating a program to generate “realistic” scribbles from photos, so I’d probably think about that…like how to do a local equalization algorithm as a first step to increase contrasts, because I’m still using Corel PhotoPaint for this step. My Google brain didn’t solve that one on a few tries…
Thank You Phillip
Thanks
Similar Post:
December 11th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/
There is always a possibility of writingto Google to bring their Algo Flaws to their attention, there is a policy of manually reviewing those concerns and making Specific and eventually, ALGO adjustments.
There should never be any need to remove any valuable feature ever -
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES - what good does THAT do :? ?!!