What is the Adobe Blog Squad? What do they do? Who are they?
My first run in with the Adobe Blog Squad was a week or two ago when I wrote an unfavorable article about Adobe Flex. Shortly after, I had received a comment from James Ward.
James Ward is an employee of Adobe. According to his blog, he is a Technical Evangelist. I don’t know if this is an official posting at Adobe, but it almost has to be these days.
Mr. Ward seemed to very nicely critique my article. This is called the Good Cop. He swooped in to graciously and coherently rebut my opinion. Fine, all good so far.
Shortly after, another comment appeared by a man named Mike Potter. A quick background check shows that he is currently involved in marketing at Adobe as well.
So, shortly after posting a negative article, two people from Adobe show up, both involved in marketing or self-proclaimed “evangelism”. Hmm…
Mr. Potter was, on the surface, as amicable as Mr. Ward, and yet here he is posting on my blog like it somehow matters and he needs to quell the uprising before it begins.
It’s pretty obvious what’s going on. Adobe has employees that are scouring Digg and other sites for anything that can be construed as being negative press, and making sure they try to squash it. Whether this behavior is condoned by Adobe or not has yet to be seen.
It would be in the best interest of Adobe to silence these men, in my opinion. Looking at their websites, as well as some of their previous blog comments, you can tell there are some things they are (or were) ignorant of.
One of them is search engine optimization. From a blog posting a few months ago, the author had a few issues with Flex, including the ability to search Google and other search engines for the content inside Flash. This point sailed right over Mr. Potter’s head:
Search engines index .swf content no problem. A Google search for filetype:swf gives 48 million results for me.
Bravo at looking somewhat foolish. Of course it’s not a terrible mistake to make for a nontechnical person, but for a technical person working at such a public technological company, it is a sin.
In fact, it does nothing but showcase the issue that Adobe, and Macromedia before them, had: lack of knowledge about search engines.
Flash sucks for search engine optimization. Exclusive Flash sites are SEO suicide. This is because the content in the Flash is completely invisible to crawlers. Sure, there is a half-assed tool from Adobe, but without jumping through hoops, Flash is a terrible tool to use in large doses. Same goes for Flex, obviously, as it is just a complex Flash compiler.
Adobe, please leave your crack blog marketing squad at home, and instead listen to people’s complaints and issues without an immediate defensive stance. A little listening, and less arguing, would go a long way.
