Archive for 2009
Forgive me for going mommy blogger for a minute, but I had an interesting conversation last night with a friend about believing in Santa Claus. It’s a worldly tradition that we blindly pass on from generation to generation without stopping to actually think about it.
Is believing in Santa bad for a child? Sure it may seem like lots of innocent fun, but think back to the day you learned the truth about Santa. Maybe you woke up in the middle of the night and saw Dad putting out presents. Perhaps it was your peers making fun of you in elementary school. Or, perhaps you were that kid in middle school who still believed and everybody made fun of behind your back. We had one of those kids, and he didn’t turn out too well.
How devastating was it when you realized that everybody – your parents, friends, family, tv – was blatantly lying to you? It’s probably one of the saddest memories of everyone’s childhood.
So why do we put our kids through this? As a parent, you are your child’s model for God. For the first few years of that child’s life her parents are the most perfect people she knows. Now, imagine what it’s like when she finds out her godlike parents lied to her. She’s got to be crushed!
Isn’t it much better to instead teach our children about the benefits of giving?
Of course, then there’s the whole Santa as a bad influence. Here’s a fat, pipe smoking man who spends his time watching little kids (creepy) while forcing minorities (elfs) to work under slave like conditions in an inhospitable climate. This is the type of shit that goes on in China and Africa, not the type of bedtime stories we should tell our kids.
And what about the kids who won’t have a Christmas because they either aren’t christian or their families just can’t afford it. How do you explain to those kids that Santa visits all of their friends but not them. They’re too young to understand religious differences, and they’re still likely to be upset when their friends talk of all the gifts they’ve received from this magical man who shunned them.
During our conversation we decided that should we ever get really really drunk and somehow produce offspring together, that we wouldn’t let them believe in Santa. Instead, we’d teach them about the benefits of giving and doing good for others. The only challenge with that though, is preventing our own kids from ruining christmas for other kids – as that job belongs to their parents.
December 18th, 2009
Outspoken Media has a great post dealing with Google’s new social search feature where they talk about the possibilities of real time spam and threats to children. The author gives some great examples which serve nicely to fuel the fear mongering – but should we really worry about it?
Ted Dziuba once said “The revolution won’t be televised, but it will be twittered; and then completely forgotten as it scrolls off screen.” Every time I see another post about Google’s real time social results I can’t help but think of that quote. It’s not just funny, it’s also true.
When SugarRae was doing her test tweets for the post they all showed up in my Twitter reader. I quickly gathered what she was doing and started monitoring those search results she was spamming while she was spamming them. The average tweet only showed up in the search results for a few minutes – tops.
That led me to do some experimenting of my own. It seems if you tweet from a new account, or one with very few tweets, followers, etc, then it’s not very easy to show up in Google.
Now, I know any spammer who knows what he’s doing can easily have multiple accounts following trending topics and posting stuff to keep himself fresh – but will even that matter? For a topic like “Miley Cyrus” there’s so much noise out there that even the best spammer’s efforts will easily be lost among the crowd.
So what about less popular topics? I just don’t see them having tremendous spam value either. Sure, you can do some nice cloaking like SebastianX points out, but I just don’t see that lasting too long. It’s the same cloaking technique used in the past to trick Google’s spiders, and they’ve developed pretty good techniques to prevent it. Those techniques easily transfer over to the real time results – so I don’t expect this trick to last long.
Won’t somebody think of the children though?
One of the commenters on the original post said “I don’t consider exposing potential dangers to children fearmongering” but that logic is flawed. Theoretically, everything is a potential danger to children. To live by this philosophy you’d have to wrap your kids in bubble wrap and leave them locked in a room until they’re 21 to keep them safe – it’s the only way.
Let’s face it. There’s far worse things that children can find by searching Google than somebody trolling Twitter. Your child is way more likely to be abused by a family member than he is to be harmed by somebody online. If I had kids, I’d spend more time worrying about what they’re doing with their cell phone (sexting anyone?) or who they’re friends with on Facebook than what they could see in Google search results.
It reminds me of when people threw a fit about Google Streetview saying that a predator could use it to see where children live. Guess what, predators can also drive down your street anytime they want – but nobody’s raising concerns about that.
At the end of the day though, it all comes down to educating your kids. Every new technology that arises can pose a potential threat. If you teach your child not to talk to strangers (or, more importantly, not to be looking for sex from old men,) then it won’t matter whether the original solicitation came from an email, text message, IM, facebook, google social, or an old fashioned snail mail.
So what’s my take?
At the end of the day I just don’t see Google’s social results being that useful. If I wanted to see what people were saying on Twitter, I’d simply search Twitter and get much better results than Google can ever offer. If I want news, I’ll search Google News. It’s the same thing here. As far as the spam goes, I don’t see it being very profitable for spammers so I’m not keen to jump on the fear mongering bandwagon just yet. Who knows, maybe somebody will prove me wrong and make millions by spamming the results. If so, Kudos to you!
December 11th, 2009
There’s been a big uproar on the web lately about Google’s latest sweep in which they appear to have banned thousands of Google Adwords accounts algorithmically. It looks like plenty of people have been complaining about the ban lately.
Ordinarily I’d say good riddens to bad rubbish, but it appears that I, too am one of the people who have been banned.
I received the same stock email last week as everybody else explaining to me that my Adwords account had been banned for a violation of Google’s TOS.
While the form letter accuses me of deceptive ad practices, I can assure you that I have done no such thing. In fact, I haven’t even run an ad in the last couple of months. It seems pretty odd that I’d be banned over ads that haven’t run in a long time right?
I’ve emailed Google 3 separate times asking for clarification, apologizing for anything I may have unknowingly done, and asked how to get my account re-enabled. Sadly, all I’ve gotten back is another form letter explaining that I may have violated the Adwords TOS and telling me to enjoy my lifetime ban.
So what did I do? Since Google wouldn’t tell me, I did some digging on my own. Having once been a Google quality rater, and having manged multiple Adwords accounts in the past, I have plenty of insight into how the process works.
From what I can gather, my ban isn’t related to ads I’ve been running at all. It seems to be related to my usage of Adwords for SEO keyword research.
Like most SEOs out there, I use Adwords all the time to create ad groups for SEO research. It’s the only accurate way one has of gauging what people are paying to bid on terms, how much competition there is out there, or what your website’s quality score is for a specific term. All of this information is extremely useful in both SEO strategy and in monetizing natural search traffic. I’ve used it at both the personal and the fortune 500 company level. It works great.
What I didn’t realize at first though, is that every time I create an ad group quickly and give it some random landing page (I’ve used example.com a few times) that it actually goes to editorial for them to review. Even though I never spent $0.01 on the ads, many of them were still reviewed by humans and flagged as pretty bad. After all, I wasn’t concerned with the ad text or landing page, simply the cost for the keywords.
A few times I was even seeing what it would cost a site to bid on some unrelated terms that they wanted to attempt to capture. Before creating new content for the site, I had used Adwords to get a baseline quality score and bid cost. The hope was that by creating the new relevant content, I could re-visit this data in a few months and show the client that the site was indeed now more relevant, and the pay per click cost had been lowered.
Not anymore though. It looks like Google’s attempt to remove the “make money with google” and “acai” style ads have caught legit advertisers as well – and there’s little to no recourse that we can take to solve the problem. Sure, I can create a new Adwords account, but it’s not certain if Google has tied the ban to my physical address, billing information, or any other plethora of data that they know about me. I simply haven’t tried yet. I’d rather have my main account that I use for everything else also be my Adwords account.
It gets even more complicated now that Adwords has been linked with Analytics and Adsense accounts as well. There’s really no telling if this ban could extend to those accounts in the future.
Google’s Not Talking.
What I’d really like is some sort of response from Google. If they don’t want me using Adwords for keyword research, that’s fine, just tell me. But please don’t accuse me of having misleading ads – I haven’t done that.
No algorithm is foolproof, including those written by Google. I’d be shocked if there was really no way to undo an Adwords ban. I’m hoping that the Google employees are just backlogged and haven’t had time to give me a personalized reply yet. Hurry up Google, I’m waiting.
UPDATE: Google Responds:
Google has responded with the following:
Hello,
As mentioned in our previous email, your Google AdWords account has been
suspended due to multiple LPQ violations. We are unable to revoke your
account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the
future.
Please note that our support team is unable to help you with this issue,
and we ask that you do not contact them about this matter. If you need
more information about our content policy guidelines, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html.
As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to
terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions,
please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.
We appreciate your cooperation.
basically, they won’t tell me what I did wrong, and there’s no way I can appeal the suspension. They basically told me to go fuck myself and stop emailing them. That’s some top notch customer support.
December 9th, 2009
Just a quick note to let everybody know that I launched new site last nite. I’ve turned Cheesehole.net into a fantasy hockey news site where myself and others will offer (almost daily) insights into what’s going on in fantasy hockey, what players you should look to acquire, and who you should trade for them. We’ll also be covering NHL news and other fun stuff like betting picks and awesome goals from around the league.
You may remember Cheesehole from way back in the day where it used to be a “talk about everything” blog. Those were the days before livejournal and myspace and facebook though, where people actually read that kind of shit. I’ve been sitting on the domain for a long time, and since the term technically means “5-hole”, not what you think it does, I figured it should host a hockey themed site. That, combined with my dominance in fantasy hockey, made me feel like I should share my insights with you.
Football and baseball have razzball and now hockey has cheesehole.
November 10th, 2009
One of the caveats of using a 3rd party site to blog is that you really have no control if and when that 3rd party site ever shuts down or goes away. I shutter to think of all the content that the web lost when Geocities shut down last week, or how the web’s link graph was suddenly altered with the disappearance of the tr.im URL shortening service. These things may seem minor, but in the large scale of the web they certainly can have a significant effect.
All of the past shutdowns have changed my way of writing on the web. I now almost always double-post, or at least save a local copy of every post I write. I’ve even started using my own URL shortening service Tiny.tw so that even if I ever have to take it offline, I can still control where all the links go.
But what about content that you didn’t backup? Is it gone?
One of the first things I always tell parents to advise their kids about the internet is this: Once it’s out there, it really never goes away. Even if you upload something to one site, that’s not going to stop somebody else from using it.
Case in point: scraper sites.
I spent hours last night looking for an old post of mine that I posted on Shoutwire almost 2 years ago – but I couldn’t find it. Then, after some creative Google searches, I managed to locate the post on a made for adsense scraper site. Somebody had stripped out my name but taken my content. Normally I’d despise such a thing, but in this case it saved my ass and I was able to dig up the post.
If anything, it got me thinking about permanence, the internet, and what happens when sites you rely on disappear. It’s also made me realize that spam sites could just be a bit useful after all.
Oh, if you’re wondering what the post was, I re-posted it on my Blog here: 10 Endangered Ideas
November 3rd, 2009
Just wanted to get some of your thoughts about sponsored tweets. There’s a lot of companies popping up offering cash for twitters, and I’m sure we’re going to start seeing an influx of the #ad and #sponsored tags.
What will you do if people you follow start trying to make a buck with their tweets. What’s your twitter ad threshold? Please vote in the 2 polls below: (results are in the first comment)
October 28th, 2009
Danny Sullivan recently posted a rant about link spam where he uses his wife’s site as a sympathy case to display his hatred for link spam.
Danny, I agree 100% with you that link spam is evil and that people who do it should DIAF, but I also think the responsibility lies on the webmaster to prevent the spam.
It’s not that hard to prevent automated link spam. Sad sympathy story aside, your wife’s site got spammed because she let it get spammed – the rest of the back story doesn’t matter.
As somebody who’s done his fair share of messing around with black hat SEO, I can tell you that link spam attacks are rarely (if ever) directed at any specific sites. Choosing targets takes too much time. When I wanted to spam I simply pulled out a copy of my spamming software, (see xrumer) pointed it at a Google search result for content unique to a standard wordpress, drupal, joomla, phpbb, or whatever install, and let it run.
There’s millions of sites out there all using the same backends – and that’s what makes spam so easy.
The trick to fighting spam lies in separating yourself from the crowd. Change the file name, add a required form field, put in a captcha or a mathcha, hell you can even implement kitten auth if you want.
It really doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you differentiate yourself from the host of other sites using the exact same form as you. Once you do that, the automated bots won’t be able to post and your spam will drastically decrease.
On this site, I simply added a box that says “type Ryan in the box”. When I did that, I went from averaging 250 spam posts per day to 3 – so I know it works.
Again, I agree with you that link spam is evil (recently it’s even becoming less effective thanks to Google,) but you can’t blame the spammers for walking through the open door you gave them. It’s irresponsible to blame the community for your wife’s own laziness and unwillingness to properly design her site.
October 19th, 2009
Tonight is the first (of hopefully more to come) 21slides social media presentation at ZAAZ in Seattle. If you’re looking for a fun time discussing social media (or just some free beer,) stop by ZAAZ tonight at 6pm PST for the event.
21slides is a unique concept: 8 social media presenters, 5 minutes each, no more than 21 slides.
You can register to attend the event at the following URL: 21slides facebook event
or, if you can’t make it in person we’ll be broadcasting live online at 21slides.com.
Tonight’s topics include:
Lessons Learned from LOLcats – Mira Crisp
The Social Media Mindset: An InfoCamp case study – Rachel Elkington
OMG my (online) life is over. Mom’s on Facebook. – Lana Carlene
The Desperate Housewives of Facebook: Why are they so goddamn bored?! – Kristen Gill
Humanizing Social Media: A Few Stories. – Bansi Patel
Government is no longer the bureaucratic monolith you thought it was – Jeremy Bertrand
Defamation and Social Media – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass – Jason Carmel
An Ecosystem Approach to Social Media: Turning Crap Into Fertilizer – Aaron Louie
As I’m stuck in Detroit, I’ll be on the webcast – but I hope to see you there.
ZAAZ is located at 414 Olive Way, Suite 500 in Seattle.
October 15th, 2009
I know I’m helping his cause more than mine by linking to him, but Derek Powazek (who?) seems to be causing quite a stir in the SEO community with his recent rant about how SEOs are useless and all SEO should be done by web developers.
While it’s true that SEO starts with web design, and should be done by web developers, Derek is missing the bigger picture here.
In an ideal world, the web developer would know about using proper HTML coding standards and how content is king. They’d even know (As Derek doesn’t) how to configure WordPress to get good URLs instead of ones with strings of numbers – but that’s not the point.
Ted Dzuiba already talked about how just telling friends and family about your content won’t do the trick, so I’m going to concentrate on the other missing element.
I’ve already said most of this as a comment on Derek’s blog, but I wanted to reiterate here.
What about the Analytics side of SEO?
A web developer can’t tell you what people are searching for in the marketplace. Can you really expect a programmer to know what terms people search for so they can include them in the content?
Is your web developer aware of the competitive marketplace and the user demand around certain topics? A good SEO is. Does your developer keep researching and tweaking after the project is done like an SEO does, or do they move on to the next project and not look back?
Do they analyze the data to see what pages people are visiting and how they’re finding them? Do they compare what people are searching for versus what they actually find and how long they’re staying on that page? Can they identify content opportunities based on bounce rates, search terms, internal site search queries and various other factors?
All of these things are involved in a good SEO program and are well outside the scope (and educational background) of a web developer. This is especially true when it comes to 3rd party developers who you wouldn’t trust with the data anyway. While it’s quite common for SEOs to sign non-competes, my experience as a web designer tells me it doesn’t happen too often. The only website developer I trust is this azure Brisbane web developer.
A good SEO uses data to make informed business decisions. Sure, sometimes SEOs recommend trivial stuff like proper site design, but often times SEO involves much more strategic decisions that shouldn’t be left to a programmer to make.
That’s the true benefit of hiring an SEO instead of just relying on your web designer.
October 14th, 2009
With more and more news agencies (like newscorp and the AP) demanding payment from places that don’t owe, it’s pretty clear that newspapers just don’t get the internet. It’s also clear they just just don’t want to try to understand it either.
Newspapers demanding payment from search engines is like grocery stores demanding payments from farmers. It’s like flushing the toilet before using it – it just doesn’t make any sense.
I say it’s time that major search engines and websites call their bluff. I’d love to see Google, Ask, and MicroHoo remove all Newscorp and AP content from their search engines. Give them what they’re really asking for under the guise of trying to get more money to prop up their dying business models.
It would only take a week or so before they saw the data (assuming that newspapers are even tech saavy enough to install analytics on their sites) and changed their tune.
In fact, let’s all stop linking to their content. If you own a blog, online publication, aggregator, or anything else, join the campaign and stop sending traffic to news sites that demand payment from those sending them visitors.
There’s plenty of news related sites and amateurs out there working hard to cover stories (not simply copy and pasting off the news wire) who understand the internet and are much more deserving of links than the AP sites who simply refuse to adapt to the changing times.
From here on out, I vow never to link to an AP or Newscorp story on dotCULT unless the news agencies pay me to do so. In fact, following their logic, I should charge them for all the times my other websites have been linked to and mentioned in the news. Let’s see Time.com sent roughly 10k unique visitors this year, and so did CNET.com. How much does NewsCorp owe me for that by their own logic? Where should I send the bill?
Let’s all get together and stop giving in to the whiny, nonsensical demands that the major newspapers are making. It’s the only way they’re going to realize just how wrong their position is.
October 12th, 2009
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