Twitter 404 Error
Originally uploaded by jnunemaker
I never really understood how CPUs managed all that information. Now I’m even more confused since cats are usually more annoying than they are helpful.
(This is from a 404 error page at Twitter)
One is always torn between 1) complementing Google for their cleverness, generally good internet stewardship and 2) pointing out how they always manage to find Google gold in the “internet virtue” equation. Now, I’m all for internet advertising and as an information publisher elsewhere I’m also a beneficiary of this change since I run Google Adsense advertising at several sites. However I’d say the explanations of how what’s good for Google is good for the gander (FYI YOU are the gander) can sometimes be a little nauseating to read as in the latest post by Anne W. at the Google Blog: [cue symphony here]
By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. Advertising is the lifeblood of the digital economy: it helps support the content and services we all enjoy for free online today…
As an aside to the point today I would be very interested in some exceptions to this rule if anybody has one – ie where has Google sacrificed significant revenue long term in an effort to improve the internet ecosystem. Please don’t use stupid examples like “no ads on home page” which arguably would have lost market share and hurt Google in the long run. Too many ads (I can say from personal experience trying this tactic) often fails users and gets you in trouble. Google has been brilliant at optimizing the advertising equation for their profit. Nothing wrong with that at all, but I’d sure like to see some cases where they sacrifice their own interests for the greater good. An area where this remains desparately needed is in advertising quality control and site feedback for mom and pop websites. Google has made hundreds of millions running ads for sites that are exploiting customers, running ringtone scams, and worse. This situation could improve but it would impact Google’s bottom line and be expensive to monitor since the exploitative sites are very clever, change, etc.
The latest example of Google advertising innovation are tests running now that will match your site viewing history to the ads you see. The idea at first glance is very reasonable – Google can better determine your intererests using this data combined with the immediate “on page” information at a particular website and then deliver ads of more interest to you from their huge stable of online advertising. However given some of the matches we find at regular Google for scammy companies with questionable business practices (I just had such an experience buying a camera I wrote about over at Technology Report. I found the “discount” via Google’s ad for Broadway Camera and their salesman then misled – I would say boldface lied – to me to upsell unneeded accessories. In that case I got some satisfaction after two calls to customer service, but clearly this and thousands of other companies advertising at Google have very questionable sales practices. Yes Google could monitor this using community feedback and as far as I know they do little to screen for anything but illegal advertiser behavior.
Although some online company abuses fall into under ‘Caveat Emptor” = let the buyer beware, there is no good reason – other than profit – for Google to effectively place their stamp of approval on questionable online merchandising. Quick example (there are tens of thousands more) is right here with Google’s ads for “Free Ringtones” which, for those of you silly enough to think they are free, arent’. This is not a suggestion! DO NOT BUY RINGTONES *EVER* and make sure your kids are not buying them. This is one of the biggest scam markets of all time.
The “real solution” Google could implement with respect to advertising would be to more aggressively remove advertisers who have a lot of complaints from users. ie become an advertising ombudsman and policeman.
So, when we combine the predatory advertising practices we find at the regular listings with the new context matching how will things shake out?
Dunno, but you can bet Google will be turning a good buck on the deal.
Here in Talent, Oregon we’re lucky to have not one great coffee shop but two, each with a different “personality” to suit your mood or temperament. Where Downtowne offers free wifi, the Whistle Stop is the place to go to mingle with the city.
I’ve written before about the Downtowne Coffee Shop but also wanted to give the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop a big shout out as they serve great coffee and tasty light fare like pastry breads and scones. If you want to feel the heartbeat of Talent, Oregon drop in to the Whistle Stop and say hi to Marina, the owner of the Whistle Stop who was recently voted Talent’s friendliest barista. The Whistle Stop is located right next to city hall on Main Street in a beautiful rennovation of Talent’s Railroad Station. An hour and a coffee at the Whistle Stop will introduce you to our fine little town in no time.
I liked Obama’s speech. This will be among the most challenging times in US history by all accounts and I think we were right to pick somebody who can speak and act powerfully dealing with both the rich and the poor here and also around the world. We often do not realize how important our international image can be as a strategic advantage against the enemies of the USA, and Obama’s confidence earns a lot of respect internationally and will earn us alliances we would not otherwise get. More importantly his overall sensibilities turn moderates away from extremists and towards our more human approaches to international politics and internal human rights issues.
Although I was hoping for more specifics in this speech I think the Obama team must have felt the country needed a shot of spirited pride and enthusiasm more than an economic lecture. We probably need more of both, and we certainly need a stimulus plan that focuses more directly on massive job creation rather than what I think will be in phase one far too much Govt busy work that does not add enough productivity to justify the costs. Many critics think the plan is to use this crisis to bring in the new health care system and other things that will cost huge sums and I think there is some justification for that. Of course it is incredibly hypocritical for many to only now start jumping on the anti government spending bandwagon. As Obama critic Charles Krauthammer suggested yesterday the Republicans abandoned their core value of fiscal restraint long ago, and have a long way to go to regain credibility in that area.
I’m a fan of Louisiana Governor but his talk last night was almost a charicature of the alternative way forward even though I think on balance his approaches are probably more in line with my own thinking on how to dig ourselves out of the hole – ie work more within our means and with an eye to smaller government.
The markets as predictions of our economic future have spoken (are speaking might be more accurate) and appear to think the stimulus spending plan … won’t do much. Optimists can note however that they also are not predicting a finanacial catastrophe – rather we seem to be resetting a lot of economic indicators (DOW, SP, Home Prices, etc) to the levels of ten years ago.
The tendency of economic forces to reset the whole show to 1990’s levels actually makes a lot of sense to me, and a quick look at stock index charts suggests that we may be seeing a very simple thing right now – resetting many metrics to the values they would have if we had simply skipped the economic exhuberance era and grown the economy the good old fashioned way – with real rather than paper wealth. I’m not saying the big upticks in the indexes and housing were not “natural” – in fact i think they were the natural extension of several factors including reduced regulations (a small factor IMO), personal trading stock investment frenzy (a big factor IMHO), and the speculative real estate bubble combined with low interest rates (the key factor IMO).
As details of the TARP and stimulus plans come out I think many pundits are starting to see what most regular folks have known for some time – the economic groundhog saw his shadow and we’re looking at a lot more economic bad news and trouble before the sun shines again. But the indexes are predictors of the economy of the future so I think people should not look for things to spring back anytime soon – once we have “reset the economy” to a reasonable level we can reasonably expect things to start growing again at modest historical rates rather than with the exhuberant frenzy of the last 10-20 years.
Is the stock bloodbath over yet? I’m guessing pretty much yes – we have now about halved the indexes from their highs and returned to the places we’d be without the bubble, and the trillion about to be pumped into the economy will at least add that much to the GDP yielding a modest and expensive but noticeable positive effect.
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Soon almost everybody who spends much time online will be on Twitter, the world’s most popular, fastest growing, and best funded microblogging service where you can share and obtain snippets of news, wisdom, and drivel in 140 character doses from friends, followers, and if you are interested also these celebrities, news anchors, and technology leaders.
Movie, Music, Sports, and TV Celebrities
Jimmy Fallon http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon
Taylor Swift http://twitter.com/TaylorSwift13
Kathy Ireland http://twitter.com/KathyIreland
Penn Jillette http://twitter.com/pennjillette
Britney Spears http://twitter.com/britneyspears
Greg Grunberg http://twitter.com/greggrunberg
David Lawrence http://twitter.com/dhlawrencexvii
Lance Armstrong http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
Shaquille O’Neal http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ
John Cleese: http://twitter.com/JohnCleese
Ashton Kutcher: http://twitter.com/aplusk/
Demi Moore: http://twitter.com/MrsKutcher
MC Hammer: http://twitter.com/MCHammer
Tiny Fey: http://twitter.com/tinafey FAKE
Steven Fry http://twitter.com/stephenfry
Kevin Smith http://twitter.com/ThatKevinSmith
Levar Burton http://twitter.com/levarburton
Natalie Gulbis http://twitter.com/natalie_gulbis
Brea Grant http://twitter.com/breagrant
Politics and News Celebrities
Barack Obama (staff writes this so it’s not as interesting) http://twitter.com/BarackObama/
Al Gore http://twitter.com/algore
Arnold Schwarzenegger http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger
Maria Shriver http://twitter.com/mariashriver
Anderson Cooper http://twitter.com/AndersonCooper
Rick Sanchez http://twitter.com/RickSanchezCNN/
Technology Celebrities
Pete Cashmore http://twitter.com/mashable
Veronica Belmont http://twitter.com/Veronica
Mike Arrington http://twitter.com/TechCrunch
Biz Stone http://twitter.com/biz/
Evan Williams http://twitter.com/ev
Leo Laporte http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte
Robert Scoble http://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Wil Wheaton http://twitterholic.com/wilw/
Kevin Rose http://twitter.com/kevinrose
Matt Cutts http://twitter.com/mattcutts/
Shel Israel http://twitter.com/shelisrael
Here’s a website with excellent celebrity following built right in: CelebrityTweet.com
(More coming as I pull this list together)
I don’t make my own celebrity list but of course I’m on Twitter as Joe Duck: http://twitter.com/joeduck/
John Dvorak has an interesting article today about his own misadventures with SEO – specifically URL renaming to improve Google indexing. Based on advice from a friend and SEO expert John renamed the URLs at his website and wound up suffering a huge loss in traffic.
In my opinion he makes some good general suggestion about SEO: beware the SEO snake oil salesman and beware any extravagant claims, and try to simply work on basic and obvious issues relating to the structure and content at your website.
Ironically, though, his main beef about URLs is probably wrong – ie URLs are best named for the post and not with a number and ?. This “best practice” comes from the advice of no less than Matt Cutts at Google who is as close as you come to the final word on best practice SEO. Matt’s been the senior webmaster contact person at Google for years and has given countless presentations on the topic.
What likely happened in Dvorak’s case was that the *change* of URLs confused his Google rankings leading to they problem he describes which was a large traffic drop which has now recovered. Best practices would have him naming the URLs at the beginning, not after they’ve been indexed with the inferior naming structure.
Generally massive changes at large sites is to be avoided as I have learned the hard way … twice.
So, is SEO snake oil? Sometimes, but I think it’s fair to say that as with so many things it should be used in moderation.
Want some simple advice on best practices? Matt’s happy to oblige at his SEO Section which is “must reading” for anybody with any interest in Google ranking. The big caveat is that Matt does not talk much about the specifics of how the Google algorithm works, and for many websites it is algorithmic penalties and downranking that have hurt you. For specific questions a new excellent source of advice are the Google webmaster forums where there is an abundance of free and excellent SEO advice that is under constant monitoring by many, generally keeping things very helpful.
The Encyclopedia of Life is a wonderful project
spearheaded in part by Harvard biologist E.O.
Wilson. The idea is simple but ambitious: create a website with a single page for each species on earth – about 1.8 million pages in all. Like Wikipedia the EOL will use the expertise
of the online community to create, update, and ehhance the Encylopedia of Live.
I’m also feeling some biological guilt for focusing so much on the alarmism that now characterizes the climate debate while peI have failed to recognize that the number of species appears to be going down faster than at any time in history outside o the massive extinctions of the cretacious..
Charlie Rose hosted an excellent segment about Biodiversity where Wilson of Harvard, the President of of Rockerfeller University, and Novacek of the Natural Museum of History are discussing the dire significance of this challenge of species decline.
OJ Simpson is getting sentenced in Las Vegas but it’s hard to understand exactly what all this means, though I think he’s in the slammer for at least 5 years and probably more.
The judge initially seemed to be defending herself as much as sentencing simpson, and is reading the sentences very fast.
Fox is reporting that the sentence is 16 years with parole eligibility after 5 years but there is also a “consecutive” sentence which means another 1.5 years, so Fox suggests 6.5 years minimum though there is some confusion about how this will play out for Simpson.
Joe Duck 