The launch of a Taurus XL T9 rocket, designed by Orbital Science Corporation, was meant to carry the Glory climate change monitoring satellite into orbit. The rocket instead failed to reach orbit, costing the agency around $388 million.

A “mishap investigation board” put together by NASA in the aftermath of the failure determined that the rocket’s fairing system failed to open fully, causing the destruction of the rocket and its payload.

Fairings are clamshell-shaped nosecone devices that surround satellites on their way to orbit. Normally, fairings are jettisoned soon after launch when friction heat from the Earth’s atmosphere is no longer a concern. When Glory’s fairing failed to open, the fairing’s mass altered the rocket’s trajectory. NASA states in its report that the launch vehicle “likely broke up or burned up, or both, because of reentry loads and aerodynamic heating.”

Though the fairing was determined to be the cause of the failure, the NASA board was unable to figure out exactly why the fairing had not opened. The board, though, did narrow down the possibilities to some sort of failure with the frangible joint components of the fairing’s side rail system. Both NASA and Orbital are continuing to investigate the fairing system, and will be making improvements to future designs based on their findings.

(Image courtesy NASA)

Currently, the Red Sox are a trend, but it’s not to commiserate their epic collapse. Instead, the trend, recalls a great moment in Eric Cartman’s history, by celebrating the tear-shedding from the countless many that make up the Red Sox fanbase. I have to wonder what the “show up to work” rate is in the city of Boston today. It’s not hard to imagine over half the city calling in to work on the morning after the Sox’ failure.

To make matters worse, the Red Sox didn’t give away their Wild Card spot easily. No, they waited until the 9th inning to finish their choking, which only adds to the misery. Holding on that long, only to give it all away at the end? That can’t feel good.

Whatever the case, it’s advisable that Red Sox fans do not turn to Twitter for moral support, because they won’t find it there. In fact, the reaction is downright brutal, but then again, it’s apparently hard to feel sorry for a fanbase that is perceived as arrogant, whether the moniker is deserved or not. With that, let’s enjoy the Twitter reaction, as many respondents are clearly enjoying the collapse for all its worth.

The first sums up the mood of the room quite well:

And from there, the hate flows freely:

In case you don’t get the reference, Tom Terrific got his hair cut yesterday. Like the previous tweet, many of these reactions are pretty creative, adding even more value to the trend:

Ouch.

Remember those New Era commercials that pitted Alec Baldwin against John Krasinski? Folks on Twitter sure didn’t forget:

Even Boston fans got in on the fun as well:

Is this a case of the Red Sox losing the numbers game, or is it the revenge of Bill Buckner?

And then, there’s this. Not really sure what to add here, but one hopes this account is done in jest:

Considering the rest of the content on the linked account, it’s not a joke. Some people really feel that way. Bonus: they can vote, too. Do with that information what you will. Aside from the occasional self-serving tweet, most of the reaction is reveling in the failure. Even BuzzFeed got in on the fun as did CNBC’s Darren Rovell, who posted an image of this nifty t-shirt:

Darren Rovell on WhoSay

Is it wrong to revel in the failure of others? Apparently not, especially if it’s Red Sox nation we’re talking about.

Personal opinions often don’t mix well with business relationships, although, it looks like someone forgot to tell the Brown Coffee Company about that little lesson. After the state of New York passed the same-sex marriage law, the social media tubes were understandably filled with reactionary comments of rejoice and/or rejection. Again, this is completely understandable. What isn’t, however, is why a company that relies on its customers would allow one of their employees access to Twitter in order to respond with a less-than-supportive tweet, of which, a screenshot taken:

Although we won’t tell you what RBC stands for, we’ll let you know it doesn’t stand for intolerance and bigotry, therefore we will not be doing business with The Brown Coffee Co. anymore.

Sprudge.com, a blog devoted to all things coffee has more on the situation:

In the days following, Brown has locked its Twitter account and deactivated its Facebook page. Brown can be reached for contact here and they run a WordPress here.

Regarding Brown Coffee’s blog, there was an attempt to address the offending tweet, and instead of owning it and detailing the punitive steps taken after post was made, Brown Coffee decided to make excuses:

In the post, it mentioned the differences between Natural Law and Human Law and mentioned that they were different and unequal. This was a post about CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY and LAWS (a la Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.), not PEOPLE; but somehow people began to twist what was written and added their own lies to the post to mean that somehow we at The Brown Coffee Company are hateful, homophobic, intolerant people.

Perhaps a better approach would be to acknowledge the mistake, discuss the measures taken after the post was discovered, while offering some level of capitulation. Firing back with an “we were misunderstood” response only adds to fuel to the fire because it comes across as excuse-making and passing the blame to others for their lack of comprehension:

we regret that this has descended into something very ugly based on other people’s incorrect reading of the Twitter post.

So yeah, blame the ones who offended because they didn’t understand the content of the tweet in question. That sounds like a brilliant way to make amends, especially in the business world. With that in mind, considering how well the misdirection and excuse-making strategy works in the political world, why not give it a shot in the business world? Thankfully, customers like RBC NYC are wise enough to see through the facade.

Voters, on the other hand, are an entirely different story altogether.

“At Google, we really focus on failing wisely,” said Matt Glotzbach, Google Enterprise’s product management director, at the Interop New York conference.  “There is no penalty for failure.  In fact we encourage it because if you’re not failing it means you’re probably not trying.”

This philosophy puts Google on the same path as Benjamin Franklin (“I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”) and Henry Ford (“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”).  Those two men certainly did all right, and this strategy seems to be working for Google, as well.

A glance at the corporation’s $209 billion market cap will confirm that.  Or you can look at the enthusiasm with which most of Google’s product releases and updates are greeted; except for Apple, no other tech companies seem to enjoy quite the same reputation.

Huh.  Maybe we all should hope for failure once in a while.

As noted by Jason Lee Miller and numerous others, the Department of Justice gave a thumbs-up to prioritization of Internet traffic. If you want the best chance of consistently delivering content to your visitors, you’re going to have to pay.

So much has been said about net neutrality that it seemed maintaining a status quo that has helped businesses boom (and send more taxes to Washington) would be easy to accomplish. It didn’t happen that way.

CNet writer Declan McCullagh summed up ten reasons (really nine, he blames the Bush Administration twice) why net neutrality fell harder than a sack of wet cement. In his final reason, McCullagh calls vociferous net neutrality advocate MoveOn out for indirectly carrying the day for the other side:

Most technology debates in Congress aren’t especially partisan: Both Democrats and Republicans fall over each other to enact unconstitutional restrictions on free speech when it comes to laws like the Communications Decency Act. The R&D tax credit is another. But somehow along the way, perhaps because Internet companies allied themselves so closely with MoveOn.org (hardly a non-partisan group), it became a partisan issue. And that led to the usual partisan gridlock.

McCullagh also cited a conversation with Heritage Foundation senior research fellow James Gattuso, who thought the for-profit members backing net neutrality became a little frightened at the partisanship, and worse, being affiliated with the stridency of the “hard left”:

“Some of the rhetoric got a bit out of control on the left. They started talking about the evils of pricing and the evils of price discrimination in markets. Anyone in the corporate side had to have second thoughts about that.”

We contacted MoveOn for comments about these views, but the organization, which has been so active in getting the net neutrality message out, has not responded to that request. This seems like the wrong time to go silent.

“We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing , or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.”

Beginning with -

• “If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.
• Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.”

Google bombing is similar to the attempt of ‘spamdexing’ where HTML pages are consciously altered so they appear in the top list of SERPs, the purpose being to mislead and misguide search engine users.

Without even reading too much or too deep into the matter, it is apparent Google IS condoning the aforementioned search results. Nevertheless, damage control is a good PR activity for Google Inc especially as it concerns Bush.

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You may recall such situations as “Dell Hell” or Googlebombing “miserable failure” for examples.

Because these references occur within the search results, many companies percieve search engine reputation management as a SEO problem. But displacing negative search results only treats the symptoms of the problem. It’s not a cure.

While other companies see tarnished brand issues as more of a public relations issue, it’s important to understand that sometimes it’s the PR firm that is at the root of the problem. Look no further than the Edelman and Walmarting across America situation for an example of that.

Negative search results are not limited to standard search engines either. Blog search engines, video sites like YouTube, social news such as Digg and news search can be affected as well. See Google Blog Search for examples of the recent comments about Microsoft from former employee Robert Scoble.

Negative commentary can have a significant impact on brnads that companies have spent years and immense resources to build. It pays to protect those brands where ever consumers can interact with them.

No company wants to experience a situation like Kryptonite locks so what can businesses do? Here are three fundamental concepts to master when dealing with search engine reputation management: Monitor, Optimize and Engage.

What to monitor?

• Brands
• Products
• Company
• Key Executives

Include modifiers: “sucks” “scam” “kudos”

Types of content to monitor include: News Search, Social Media/Tags, Standard Search Results, Blogs and Forums.

Where to Monitor

• Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
• Yahoo Alerts – alerts.yahoo.com
• RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
• Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Optimizing is most effective as a preventive measure rather than a reactive measure. However, reactive optimization for displacing negative search results is what most online reputation management services focus on. It leaves the company chasing after the various dissenters and does not put the brand in a position of control.

Treat the Symptoms

Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact.

Engage – Address the Cause

Once a negative mention has been identified, here are steps in dealing with it:

• Research the situation – is there merit?
• If not, provide the facts and ask for corrections
• If yes, then offer to discuss
• Be ready to respond with your own blog
• Be honest, be transparent and LISTEN

Results can be a anything from a positive turn around to a loyal brand evangelist.

Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign provides insight into the kinds of content interactions audiences are having with your brand. When identified and qualified, situations need to be addressed directly. At the same time, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

What kinds of search engine brand protection situations have you encountered? I’d be curious to hear what tactics others have used and what kinds of turn around situations have resulted.

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The Ask Earthquake Search, and the ‘quake itself, should probably take precedence, though. The tool records the date, location, and magnitude of earthquakes, and plots the data on a map; according to it (and other independent sources), a magnitude 4.2 ‘quake hit the San Francisco Bay Area on March 1.

Since then, seven more instances of seismic activity have occurred in California. The Ask.com team claims to “check [the Ask Earthquake Search] every time there’s a ‘quake nearby. After running for cover, of course,” so the data should definitely be up-to-date.

Now we can move on to the story of the crushed writing utensil, which began about a month ago when a Google-branded pen ran out of ink. This “product failure” occurred while Ask’s Scott Grieder was writing, so Ask created an amusing little blog post about it.

The company’s competitors in Mountain View responded by sending a new, improved pen, and Ask has posted pics of the “old” pen, its replacement, and now, the pen that perished in the ‘quake. The thing is, even though the Ask.com team implies that the damaged pen is the newest one (“We just got the thing, too!”), it’s clearly not – the color and the style are quite different.

Did the Ask.com team make a simple goof? Did its members suffer head injuries in the earthquake? Does it even matter (not that I’m uninterested in the team’s welfare)? Perhaps not, but this is the latest development in the Google-Ask relationship.

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No More Google Bombs?

Doing a search for miserable failure is no longer as entertaining as it used to be. No more seeing George Bush or Jimmy Carter, or a handful of other people, appear at the top of the Google search results for those terms.

Google has implemented some algorithm updates to take the fun out of Google bombing, according to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. He described the change as a move to “stop such mass link pranks from working.”

The change also took out the ‘waffles’ Google bomb that used to bring up Senator John Kerry’s website as a top result. Legitimate discussion about the tactic remains in place as Danny noted:

Google also provided commentary on its Webmaster Central blog:

Now to provide a little context. Google made these changes only a few days after V7N announced it had come up with a link-selling program that would be undetectable to search engines. After Matt Cutts discussed it, V7N dropped the ‘undetectable’ claim from their marketing of the service.

Prior to that, Matt had posted a brief observation about ‘pay-for-blogging’ services. “Links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.”

It looks more like Google’s bomb squad was more keen on defusing possible competitors to AdSense than in saving the world from a miserable failure.

As a business, they may have decided that being a conduit for someone else’s money-making plan doesn’t make much sense. Improving query relevance for a relative handful of search terms is a bonus.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

As Jason mentions in the post, Download Squad is part of AOL, which owns the revamped Netscape – a site that was essentially modeled on Digg – so perhaps it’s an elaborate corporate hit-job. I thought Download Squad was all about cool software, but maybe I was wrong.

In any case, Jason’s criticisms are not really all that new. As far as I can tell, his two main points are: 1) Digg’s audience is full of mouth-breathers and low-foreheads who just pile on and flame each other, and digg down things they don’t agree with. And 2) Digg’s traffic, a kind of “flash crowd” that can shut down even the most robust hosting service in a matter of minutes, consists of window-shoppers who come quickly and leave quickly, and if they sign up for something they never actually use it.

Jason says that the Digg community is “rotting from the inside out,” and that “the sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming.” As with many other critics of the Digg model, or social media in general – including Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, as well as newcomers Andy Rutledge, who I’ve written about here, and Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal, who I’ve written about here - the argument is that the wisdom of crowds doesn’t exist.

The problem with the whole concept of taking advantage of the “wisdom of crowds” is that crowds have no wisdom. Microsoft Windows is an example of an operating system written using the wisdom of crowds and don’t get me started on the majority of large open-source efforts.

As a commenter rightly points out, the Windows crack is a gigantic red herring. Any problems at Microsoft have little or nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds, and everything to do with corporate hierarchy and centralized decision-making. If anything, they could use a little more Digging. And as for the traffic problems, it’s true that Diggers flood in and then disappear, leading some to wonder how much value they actually bring with them. But couldn’t we say that about Web traffic from plenty of other sources too, like TechCrunch for example?

In conclusion, Jason says:

Social media sites are an unproven phenomenon I predict that in the near future sites will start to attempt to block digg as a referrer, since getting a link from digg will simply cost them money. And over time I believe users will tire of the constant negativity that characterizes digg unless digg can find a way to clean up their collective act.

Does Digg have flaws? Sure it does. And so do plenty of other social media sites. But I think Jason (for whatever reason) is being way too negative. What do you think?

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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.