Voyaging Outside the Google Box

I know that many/most webdevs are short on time juggling far too many basic bits of making a living but am hopeful there are a few here at WebmasterWorld who have the inclination and time to spend on more esoteric bits of webdev.

It's just past two years since I had a heartfelt PM conversation and I'm going to share one concern more openly:

...where are the discussions about contextual content delivery, about visitor fingerprinting and x-device usage identification, natural language programmed site search, direct ad space selling, API ad delivery... I note the affiliate sub-forum is near dead while out on the web direct affiliate pre-sell has changed greatly in the past several years; video is a major percentage of web content yet the single sub-forum is quiet... in an international space where are the discussions about translating sites... ?

It is not only WebmasterWorld but the webdev conferences, which long ago became SEO conferences became Google focussed conferences. They and WebmasterWorld are so far behind current web marketing let alone the cutting or bleeding edges and everyone appears happily oblivious in their bubbles not realising what has gone on past them.

The thoughtful replies I received in that conversation were sufficient to keep me here and participating, albeit time constraints limited starting threads on the out-of-the-Google-box bits that fascinate me. I was shocked that two years have passed, I thought one at the most. Time, never enough time and it passes faster every year, relatively speaking.

So here goes a public kick at the can [en.wikipedia.org]:

I've been playing, as in hobbyist, with LSTM Networks (Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks) the last while including Attention/Augmented, all via TensorFlo. Yes, I often don't know what I'm doing.

Putting the bleeding edge look-at-me aside, the reason, besides for the fun of it, is to aid in maintaining my sites' competitive advantage. If you want to talk TensorFlo or NN generally, great!

If not, how about how best to:
* accurately segment visitor's referral
---for one aspect of why see How "Direct Traffic" May Be Undermining Your Marketing [webmasterworld.com] initiated by ergophobe.
* implement personalisation
---take the preceding and add:
------recognise returning visitors to sites without registration.
------contextual delivery
* identify and account for/block bots?
* sell direct advertising space.
* optimise affiliate referral.
* leverage site search.
* market one's site outside Google.
---marketing to Google is a foundation of WebmasterWorld and webdev/SEO sites everywhere.
* etc.

I don't mean by just adding a comment to this thread, rather by initiating, and participating in, threads that reference the above or similar topics. The web is far more complex than it was a decade ago and the speed of change is akin to the rice and chessboard fable [mathforum.org], it's been slow but... and far too many who are currently finding it difficult to remain competitive will find the next several years extremely discombobulating.

Internet: the virtual frontier. These are the voyages of the webdev iamlost. My continuing mission: to explore strange new capabilities, to seek out new traffic and new revenue sources, to boldly go where few have gone before.

Anyone want to come along?