Archive for 2009
Update: My snarky post has been mentioned on TechDirt
This is a response to one of the most asinine posts I’ve ever seen on Techcrunch calling for transparency and disclosure of search engine algorithms.
The following post was written by a semi-well known blogger. The author has purposely posted his name on the article because he stands behind what he says and isn’t afraid of criticism.
He is starting a discussion on the need for government regulation of Techcrunch due to their extremely asinine views somehow getting picked up and ran with across the blogosphere. There is clearly growing frustration on the constantly deteriorating quality of content being posted to the site.
Imagine if you will all of the world’s venture capitalists were girls in a night club, and that the only way to get into this night club was to get passed the bouncer at the gate. The bouncer is named Techcrunch and he decides who’s “cool” and who isn’t – only his standards of cool are way off and often are just based on who you know. The bouncer knows nothing of actually succeeding in the market, but relies on his friends to tell him what works best and what doesn’t.
In a world like this, friends of the bouncer would have an unfair advantage getting the girls. Sure, you could hope to meet a girl at work, but that’s not very likely – they’ve all already met girls at the club. That’s how today’s tech startup world is. Those lucky enough to have contacts and get talked about on Techcrunch have an unfair advantage. We need government regulation so that every startup and business receives equal coverage on Techcrunch.
Do companies pay to get coverage on Techcrunch? It needs to be disclosed. What about those who donate crap in order to get mentions. We need transparency here. Do anonymous posters and guest contributors get paid? How much? What companies do these contributors work for? What do they stand to gain by posting their articles?
Alright, enough of this crap, let’s look at the actual post and why the author is an idiot.
Let’s ignore the glaring fact that an anonymous writer is calling for transparency and disclosure for a minute. Let’s also ignore that Mr Anonymous probably works for a company that has a lot to gain of Google were forced to reveal its algorithm. Let’s get to the heart of his argument.
Before I dig deeper into your article, I’d simply like to remind you that being listed in, or ranked well on Google isn’t a right.
Also remember, thanks to Pagerank, Google isn’t really ranking websites. WE ALL ARE – whenever we link to another site in our blog posts.
Based on how Google actually works, your LA analogy couldn’t be more off. Search engines don’t “gate access” to anything. From what Google has shared about their algorithm, and how it’s based on links from other sites, they’re simply presenting the websites that are most talked about. A better analogy for you to use would be “imagine if you could only shop at the stores in LA that everybody was talking about.” That wouldn’t be so bad at all. In fact, it would be favorable. Imagine if you could only listen to the songs that everybody else wanted to listen to – you’d have a popular radio station. Do it with websites and you’d have a popular search engine. That’s what Google did. Shame on them for giving users what they want.
You then jump strangely into a rant about “arbitrary accounts” yet fail to provide even one example of an account that was arbitrarily shut down or a website that was arbitrarily removed. The fact is, Google doesn’t arbitrarily shut down accounts or websites. There’s no incentive for them to do so, nor is there a reason. Now, don’t confuse that with shutting down accounts for violating trademark and copyright reasons, posting ads to viruses and trojans, or doing other evil things. It’s also important not to consider sites removed for spamming, or forcing users to download malware. In both of these cases, it’s not in a searcher’s best interest to be shown these sites. If Google returned spammy or malware sites for searches, users would get pissed off. The same is true for misleading trademark ads. If an ad says “microsoft office” and I click it and am shown “open office” I’d be pissed off. It’s not about “arbitrarily banning sites” at all. It’s simply about giving users what they want.
Regulation, is not something users want. I’m not sure how old you are because you didn’t share your information with us, but you clearly don’t remember the past. If you were around in 1995 you would have noticed that search engines like AltaVista were the top dogs – and their algorithms were pretty clear. They simply looked at META tags and the amount of times a keyword appeared on a page. What you may not remember from back then though is how irrelevant many competitive keywords were. Search for a popular musician and all you saw was porn. Search for a new car, and you got porn.
Once spammers knew how the search engines worked they were able to easily rank for highly searched terms. In fact, the main reason Google became number 1 is because it was harder to manipulate its algorithm and rank well. Searchers quickly saw that they were getting better results and jumped ship.
Making algorithms public would actually be a step backwards in terms of progress. I suggest you go read up on the history of search and search engines before pretending to spout off on a topic you clearly know nothing about.
The worst part though, is that many SEOs can tell you The Algorithm Doesn’t Matter. Honestly when it comes to performing effective SEO, it doesn’t matter if H1 is weighted .75 times more than <b> and that the first word in a title is 1.35 times more important than the 3rd word.
You want an algorithm, here it is:
1.) Sites that are useful to visitors will rank high.
2.) Popular sites that are useful to visitors will rank higher.
3.) Sites that don’t offer any value to the web or are irrelevant to the query won’t rank well.
4.) Sites that are harmful or spammy won’t be included in the i ndex.
Seriously, that’s Google’s algorithm in plain English. There’s your disclosure. The weighting factors and code behind it don’t matter – these principles are all you really need to know.
If anything needs to be regulated, it’s news sites who don’t disclose their sources. This type of shit would never fly in the New York Times, WSJ, or any other reputable publication. They surely wouldn’t allow an anonymous article written by a non expert who clearly has something to gain if his position is adopted – and they’d at least take the time to research their claims and provide examples.
July 13th, 2009
Just a quick note to say that I’ve created a “text me” widget for TextSendr.com that allows you to place a small box on your MySpace, Facebook, or Blog so that people can send you a text message. Your number stays encrypted, so nobody can manage to steal your number or actually find it out.
Basically, It looks like this:
(yes, that box will actually send me a text message)
You can create your own widget here. In addition, the first 3 people to leave me a comment with the URL of a page containing this widget will actually receive a link on that page as an example of the widget. I’ll even keep the link up as long as you keep using the widget. I promise!
If it looks familiar, it’s because I invented this feature many years ago for a different site that I was running. I since sold that site, but have now gotten back in the game and re-created a different text message site from scratch.
July 6th, 2009
In an effort to try to boost failing state economies, many states are starting to look for legal loopholes that would allow them to tax online purchases. Take Rhode Island and North Carolina for example. Frustrated with not being able to tax Amazon.com purchases, the states introduced legislation that would count all affiliates as “employees.”
That means all the people who post links to Amazon products and get paid a small fee if somebody clicks that link and buys something would all be “amazon employees” for tax purposes. Why is that important? Counting them as employees means that Amazon has a physical presence in the state, thus could be assessed a state sales tax.
So how did Amazon respond? They said “fine, we’re closing our affiliate program in Rhode Island and North Carolina.” End of problem.
I’m sure that led to thousands of pissed off Amazon affiliates who must now find other ways to monetize their blogs and websites. Hopefully these people will direct their anger toward their state legislation and not toward Amazon.
From my perspective, Amazon did the only thing it could. Re-coding their site, setting up tax collection infrastructure, hiring the necessary people, and paying the taxes would have been a monstrous undertaking – one most likely comparable to or greater than the losses they’d see from ditching the affiliates. Then there’s the legal precedent set by complying with this legislation that would open the doors to all states to do similar. Then, Amazon is screwed.
I just wish more companies would have the balls to pull this. When South Carolina raised a stink about Craigslist, the site removed its erotic services postings. Part of me wishes that they would have said “fine, we’re blocking all South Carolina traffic.”
When news sites threaten to sue Google or just plain bitch, I’d love to see Google say “fine, we’re taking your news site out of our index.”
If more companies started following Amazon’s lead, eventually legislators would come to realize just how stupid they are. If they didn’t, I’m sure their constituents would surely tell them.
July 1st, 2009
If you’ve just recently updated your iPhone to version 3.0 of the iPhone software you may have noticed that the apple Tunes remote application has stopped working. When I updated, attempting to open the remote application would instantly cause it to crash. I quickly looked to see if there was an update, and there wasn’t.
A quick search of forums, blogs, and twitter shows that a few other people are having the same problem.
Good news, there is an update available, except it’s not marked as an update.
Here’s how to make your iPhone remote application work:
Load up the app store on the iPhone and search for remote. You’ll see the exact same application you have installed. Click the “install” to re-download it and you’ll get a popup saying you already have this application. Tap yes to install it anyway.
That’s all there is to it. The remote application should work as normal now.
June 26th, 2009
Scoble and I started a discussion this morning about how a majority of twitter followers are useless (and about how Robert has a big ego.) Scoble’s ego, the echo chamber, and how people in the valley live in their own world is a topic I’d love to discuss, but for now I’d like to concentrate on Twitter, useless followers, bots, and twitter engagement.
The Background
Scoble’s initial comments were relating to how despite having a metric shit-ton of followers, only a small percentage of those followers actually engage in conversations on friendfeed (and I’m guessing even less than that reply to his tweets. Scoble, got any statistics for us?) It’s a common phenomenon happening all over twitter. A majority of people following any given account really don’t react, interact, converse, or otherwise get involved in the conversation.
So Why is that?
There’s a few different scenarios I’d like to discuss. Sure there’s the people who created Twitter accounts, Tweeted their obligatory “I don’t see what the hype is about” and then quickly left the service. For a majority of people, this is the case. With the most common non-article words on twitter being things like “Watchingâ€, “tryingâ€, “listeningâ€, “reading†and “eatingâ€, it’s easy to see how boring most tweets are. It’s hard to even pretend to care what somebody is eating or listening to. If that’s all my tweeple were tweeting about I’d leave too.
Some of these people simply may not know about twitter tools like tweetdeck which make it easy to stay up to date on Twitter without having to constantly reload the website.
It would be really neat if Twitter could show me some sort of “active followers” instead of total followers. I’d be willing to bet that it’s somewhere around 30%
There’s bigger issues here
There’s much bigger issues than people who’ve lost interest in Twitter. Many of the issues revolve around follower count. I’ve always believe that any service that counts “friends”, “subscribers”, or “followers” is nothing but an online popularity contest. As I mentioned in 2005 the problem is that people will “Friend”, “subscribe to” or “follow” almost anybody because they know that the other person will “friend”, “subscribe”, or “follow” back.
For some reason it’s become common courtesy to re-follow everybody who follows us. Why? I’ve got many followers who I don’t follow back because I simply don’t find them interesting. Scoble takes a different approach – he follows everybody then selectively unfollows those who aren’t interesting. Until Twitter implements commands so I can type “unfollow XXX” that approach just seems like it will take way too much time.
By automatically re-following everybody that follows us we’re simply stroking their ego and increasing their e-penis size. Just like on MySpace and Facebook, Twitter has become a competition to gather the most followers.
Whey does epenis follower size matter?
Follower size matters because Twitter users will click anything. Earlier today I posted a tweet that said “Testing to see how many people will blindly click this: ” and put in a shortened URL. Within 30 seconds I had 16 clicks on that link – and it grew steadily throughout the day. Now I only have around 150 followers, so that’s a pretty good percentage. It’s a much higher ratio than an email campaign or adwords ad and it costs infinitely less.
Are URL shorteners the problem?
Part of the problem has to do with how we’ve come to use URL shortening services. In an e-mail, or on a website users are presented with an actual URL that tells them something about where it leads. The URL is important – if only at a subliminal level. Why do you think Google includes it in all of their ads? It’s helpful to the user (@google, a study on clicking ads with/without URLs would be cool.)
On Twitter, users simply see something like http://su.pr/AOco7l (you probably don’t want to click that.) Where I’d normally make a decision based on where the link leads on a website, I can’t do that on Twitter – so I click just to see where it takes me.
And that’s where bots come in
And that’s why bots are profitable and won’t go away. As long as people automatically re-follow each other and blindly click on links, it will make sense for people to use twitter bots to gather as many followers as possible. Leaning how to buy 1000 youtube subscribers will also give you more followers. You can even buy real instagram followers. The bots aren’t going away, if anything they’re just going to become more prevalent until we change our ways. The best way to fix this? Simply stop automatically re following everybody that follows us. It’s about time we start creating an #unfollowsaturday to “follow” #followfriday.
June 22nd, 2009
There’s a ton of fear mongering going on right now in the blogosphere about the FTC’s plans to monitor blogs for claims. A lot of bloggers are worried about what this ruling might mean for them and fearful that it could harm the industry.
I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here. If anything, this can only help the plight of many bloggers. While the article above does a great job of adding flames to the fear, it also links to the official .pdf that does a much better job of explaining things.
Quite simply, if we bloggers want to be taken as seriously as newspaper journalists we need to start following the same rules and guidelines. That doesn’t mean we all need to rush out and buy an AP style guide (although I do reccomend it) – but it does mean that I would have needed to say something if I posted an affiliate link there to Amazon. (I didn’t)
Regular banner ads are fine, the FTC is more concerned with the content of actual blog posts. That means the shady practice of paid posts without disclosure is something to worry about.
If you’re accepting free products then blogging about how awesome they are, you should worry. If you went out and bought yourself a new widget and felt like sharing how cool it is, you’re fine.
If you work at a company and blog about that company, you should disclose it. If you just really like Google and want to blog about them, that’s not a problem.
The FTC regulations are really pretty simple. If you ever find yourself asking “should I disclose this?” then the answer is yes. That’s about all there is to it. As a blogger who doesn’t do paid posts or accept free gifts, I have no problem here. Since I often blog about industry related events, I usually do a good job of letting people know where I work and what thoughts are mine vs my employer’s.
If you’re truly in doubt of what you should do, simply don’t do paid reviews or posts and don’t accept freebies. If you do, talk about it. Other than that, put up a page about yourself saying where you work and have worked, and say that the opinions on the blog are yours and not your employers (if that’s the case.)
Other than that, I think the FTC regulations are a good step in the right direction toward leveling the journalism playing field.
June 22nd, 2009
Online quizzes have always fascinated me – mainly in the sense that so many people take them and actually rely on them to answer more serious questions in their life. It seems like you can find an online quiz for almost anything now. So, with that said, I’ve created a few more fun ones to add to the mix. Go ahead, check them out.
My Online Quizzes:
The Am I Gay quiz – the only definite way to know.
Not sure if that guy likes you? Find out with the does he like me quiz.
Then, if he does and all goes well, you may need my am I pregnant quiz.
And, of course there’s always my Internet slang quiz to test your knowledge of web slang and acronyms. If you pass that one, there’s also a part 2.
So there you go, get your quiz on!
June 19th, 2009
A common example talked about in most marketing curriculums is what we call the sesame seed problem. It’s what happens when businessmen try too hard to cut costs without focusing on the real issue.
Fast food buns come with sesame seeds on them. Every few years some genius MBA will get an idea like “if we remove 2 seeds from the bun, nobody will notice and we’ll save $x.xx in production costs.” A few years later somebody gets the same idea and removes more seeds. Another few years, another few seeds until eventually you’re left serving hamburgers on seedless buns.
All of the ‘non-noticeable’ changes suddenly turned into a very noticeable change that affects product quality.
The same thing is happening with the airlines right now. First, it was the story about airlines removing life jackets from airplanes. Now we’re hearing about airlines shaving fractions of centimeters off of cutlery to save fuel costs.
Seriously? Who came up with the “shave the spoons” idea. And why didn’t he just make them plastic, or out of a lighter material?
If you want to cut fuel costs, stop scrimping on stupid ideas and start doing something significant to address the problem. Hell, fire the guy that came up with the “shave the spoons” idea and you’ve just saved enough fuel to go cross country a few times.
So what should the airlines do?
Eliminate drink service on 45 min flights. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a flight from Detroit to Chicago and been needlessly served a drink for a short flight. Most of the time I couldn’t even finish my soda before they were coming around to collect it.
Cans of pop weigh a ton. So do the carts that carry all of it. If you eliminated drink service you could not only get rid of all the weight from the pop cans and carts, but you could remove one whole stewardess from the plane. The savings would be astronomical.
I know, I know, what about people who want a drink? Simple: Install a vending machine for 20oz bottles at the entrance to the gate and let me bring it on. This will make more money from the vending machine revenues as well as cut down on spills since all drinks will now be in bottles with re-sealable caps on them.
The barf bags are another opportunity. We don’t need one in every seat. Instead, keep a supply in the stewardess section and have them give one to people upon request. If you think you might get sick, request one as you’re boarding the plane. Since most people just use these to dispose of their gum before they get their free soda, I can only assume that a metric shit-ton of these bags get wasted every day.
Replacing overhead bin doors with a flexible net like material instead of a hard plastic door would eliminate a few hundred pounds while also increasing storage space and accessibility (think no more opening and closing bins to see if it’s full.)
When it comes to the small stuff like spoons and life jackets though, I’ll gladly pay an extra $5 ticket price for the feeling of security that having a life jacket gives me. I know that statistically I’ll probably never need it (or survive the crash to be able to put it on) but if that 0.0001% chance ever happens, that life jacket is going to be a hell of a lot more useful than my can of diet Shasta.
June 9th, 2009
Starting Monday I will be selling advertising on the AllSlang family of websites.
The main site in this group is NoSlang.com.
Ads are available on the homepage, as well as site wide and will be accepted in text and banner format.
CPM rates range from $0.35 to $1.00 depending on placement, site, and number of impressions you’d like to buy.
NoSlang’s traffic is 60% female, and evenly split between teens and parents of teens.
Advertising space is also available on TranslateBritish.com, NoSwearing.com, and WoWSlang.com.
If you’re interested, please send an email to Ryan at NoSlang.com and we’ll set up a campaign for you.
June 5th, 2009
update: I should have seen this a mile away, but the comments section of this post is NOT one of the good places to post your links. Please stop trying – they get nofollowed anyway.
Caution: This post is somewhat grey-hat SEO.
Linkbuilding in SEO has gotten harder and harder. It used to be that everybody had a links page and was more than happy to trade. Then directories came about, then social media.
Those days are over. Nobody has a links page anymore, directories are pretty useless, and most social media sites have gone to digg style bars or started using the rel=nofollow tag.
So where does a shady SEO practictioner go to get links to his site? Blogs and other content hosting sites!
Here’s a list of 21 places you can post your own content complete with links that do not receive a nofollow tag. Many of these places are content hosting sites, so you’d be best to write some unique content for each. A few are profile sites that let you list URLs.
Of course, after this post that may change, so your mileage my vary. Good luck:
Identity.net
WordPress
Weebly
Voovi
Blogspot
Multiply
Squidoo
Blog.com
Blogr
Ning
LiveJournal
Quizilla
Beklo
Blogs.ie
Tumblr
Insane Journal
Blogsome
Sampa
Terapad
MTV
edublogs
* disclosure: I used to work for Identity.net. I’m not saying spam them, but if you have a site, by all means go create a profile there about yourself and list your site in it as a URL.
There you go. Create 21 unique blog posts are articles with links and start spamming away.
June 3rd, 2009
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