dusky - 3:57 am on Jan 14, 2010 (gmt 0)

That just seems like a ton of work to me and makes things more complicated than they need to be. If your objective is to get ahead of other sites in the serps then it is much less work to watch them, not 100's of unrelated stuff.

Kelowna, whitenight's point was not as I understand it to be about JUST beating your competitors, it was about acquiring a sophisticated system whereby one can henceforth be able to predict future G* ranking ahead of time. It is a ton of work and does make things complicated (in the beginning of the learning curve, which is understandable), but imagine if after years of study, testing and application, you are then able to predict even with 20% margin of error a ranking mechanism or be it the algo pattern upon which the SE itself is built, then you have hit a diamond mine on your own owned land!
whitenight's point is about standing away from outside your own sites and look at how G* works with any and all sites, a point I referred to on one or two threads before when people are praising G* as "Got it spot on" when their own sites and client's sites are doing well, and "G* is absolutely poor" when they are not doing so well. In short, his/her point is about being PROFESSIONAL not EMOTIONAL about SERP changes and G*'s algo.

There are more complicated things for which it is difficult to produce any accurate forecasting, stocks and shares, the weather, economic growth and decline and so on, those are in my view a lot more difficult as they entail a lot of outside and inside variables, pressures, forces, macro and micro as well as political decisions, climate change etc. BUT we have the science for it and that's called operational research or statistics and probability. Historical events which requires data gathering over the years, study and analyze the data, add or take away possible outside influences and in time you have a fairly reliable model