Two plus two makes four. Four plus two makes six.

I can clearly remember the sunny day at the beach when my father made me repeat several times this short poem by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer

Little drops of water,
little grains of sand,
make the mighty ocean
and the pleasant land

I was probably four or five years old. I learned it. I still remember it. I fly back to that fine day every time I see how small things, when combined, could make big things, and big differences.

Earlier this week, regular visitors to our site might have noticed a set of icon-buttons on top of articles, recent news and blog posts. The buttons let you recommend the reading to others, or yourself.

There are options to “Facebook-Like-It”, tweet it, share it in LinkedIn or give it a +1 for Google searches. Of course, there is always the opportunity to send someone an email with a link to something interesting, but these recommend options are fast and certainly would be less intrusive considering that our subjects of interest generally deal with tax policy and administration.

The recommendations are not anonymous. On the contrary, they would appear in your profile of whatever network you choose to use. LinkedIn is always an interesting alternative due to the professional nature of the Web site, but the Google +1 option is probably the most interesting. First, you can check all the recommendations you have made, second you can decide if your +1s are to be public or just for you, and third, according to Google, it influences your future search results.

The two following screenshots show the results of the same query. The first, logged out, the second surfing with my Google user logged in.

As you can see the results are different. The first article is the one that has been recommended by two of my contacts and somebody else. The article did show up in the anonymous search, but it was way below the others.

Clearly, my colleagues that work with electronic invoices, and prefer to search with their Google user on, will see my recommendation, or that of other colleagues, next to an entry in their search engines, and so might want to take a look at that article (or maybe stay as far away from it as possible).

The system is designed to resist narcissist attacks, and will not allow me to vote several times for my own articles. There is no such thing as multiple votes for the same article. It is one per user. Actually, clicking the button for the second time will remove the first vote. And, no, we are not hiring a service to give us a hundred +1s.

We expect some recommendations, just a few of them, at least during the next couple of months. But, we hope that our articles, news and posts will gain your click. We know that, as coach Tony D’Amato(1) would have said, these are the inches we need.

Good day, and good luck.

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