I’ve always been intrigued by Jeff Jarvis, ever since he single handily brought a firestorm down upon Dell and coined the term “Dell Hell” so seeing his keynote at Search Engine Strategies Chicago was at the top of my priority list.  I wasn’t disappointed this morning either, Jeff Jarvis hit some very relevant points with his presentation, especially when it came to this changing world of search, online marketing and “old media”.

I found his keynote very poignant, taking a look at how big media (newspapers) have really got it all wrong when it comes to Google.  Murdoch and some of the other media industry giants want to blame Google and paint Google as a monster, when in reality its their own lack of knowledge of how to operate in this new medium that is the actual boogie man in the closet for these media conglomerates.

I wrote about Murdoch’s idea to block out Google a few weeks ago, and I keep coming back to the same thoughts that Jeff Jarvis has.  Google’s not stealing content, Google is actually providing opportunities, it’s just that these old huge media companies don’t know how to properly and efficiently turn this opportunities to their favor, instead all they really want to do is blame someone and right now that easy target is Google.

Jarvis pointed out that the way the media outlets operate now is that they make people come to the news, they expect to dictate to the audience what is news and that they decide it.  That way of working is at an end.  People want the news that they want to find them.  This isn’t fairytale wishes either, with the internet this is going to be reality very soon.

Jeff Jarvis then questioned why haven’t these media companies gone the way of what YouTube has, by making everything embeddable?  By making things portable, you can reach more people and its easier for people to share what they think is important with their audiences.  There are some places experimenting with this already, The Guardian, Jarvis explained is one example.  The Guardian wants to be part of the fabric of the web and they are understanding that they need to come to you with their content.

At the end of the day, Google isn’t the enemy for newspapers.  As Eric Schmidt pointed out in his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Google offers 100,000 opportunities to newspapers a minute to win loyal readers.  They do that for FREE.  It’s not Google’s fault that “blustery” CEO’s like Murdoch can’t figure out how to capitalize on these opportunities that are being dropped on their virtual doorsteps

A lot of companies are facing a crisis of conscience. Should I use an agency to ghost write my blogs, tweets and other content? Is that ethical?  If it’s great content does it matter if it wasn’t made by my employees? Will my audience care as long as it’s great content? What if I can’t build the same level of content internally?  Li Evans and her co-panelist Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur, will tackle these and other tough questions in their Ghost Blogging, Tweeting, Content Production – Ethical? Does It Matter? at SES Chicago at 4:30pm on Monday, December 7th 2009.

If a picture really is worth a thousand words then you don’t want to miss out on Li Evans’ panel at SES Chicago on Images & Optimization at 1:45pm on Monday December 7^th, 2009.  Join her and her co-panelists Grant Crowell, Senior Media Analyst at ReelSEO.com, and Mat Siltala, Founder of Dream Systems Media, as they discuss everything from image search to geo-tags to accessibility issues to alt attributes to file sizes to image-specific search engines.