Category Archives: Websites

Death by Google

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My Airport Codes Website, AirportCityCodes.com , was completely removed from the Google index last month.   Not at all clear why and I’m hoping it’s just a a fluke.    The site was very stable and although it was somewhat uninspired it offered airport code and other information on about 9000 airports.     Google traffic has become so critical to a website’s success that without Google a site is generally almost “dead” in terms of traffic and revenues.

The site had enough sloppy construction and odd duplication across directories – problems that I had simply left intact after taking it over several years ago – that there could be hundreds of reasons the index didn’t like the site, but usually Google reserves a complete deletion like this for a major transgression against Google guidelines.    

I’ve posted questions over at the Google forum and the answers should be interesting.  

Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.

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Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray.   Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure.   I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization.   Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.  

Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.   

Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:

I wrote over there: 

…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.

I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.

Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.

I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one

Copy, right?

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I’m writing to so many blogs these days it’s getting hard to keep them all straight.    Here’s my thinking on the Lane Hartwell incident over at the Webguild blog.

Webguild is the Silicon Valley marketing and internet networking group that meets at Google every month and sponsors a couple of conferences each year.   It’s a volunteer effort but run with exceptional professionalism and innovation by Daya Baran (Webguild President) and Reshma Kumar (Webguild Vice President).    I’m looking forward to the Web 2.0 Conference to be held in January.

Facebook to everybody: “We’re sorry”

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Mark Zuckerberg is profusely apologizing for Beacon’s shortcomings.  

I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better …

It sure looks sincere to me and I don’t think sincerity even matters all that much in this case.  They srewed up, they are fixing things fast, time to move on.

Like many I’ve been cynical of Facebook valuations and some of the ridiculous hyperbole, but this whole fiasco was a great study in now quickly you go from being tauted as “the next big thing” to tauted as being “dead”.    Also an example of how major media still does not quite get the web thing – just yesterday we read “Facebook RIP” which foolishly suggested this could be a major event for them.    

Google social is a major stumbling block for Facebook, but Beacon is just a tiny bump in the road to more riches.    That said I still think 15 billion dollar valuation is absurd.   But, I thought Google was overvalued too and I was sure wrong about that…. so far at least.

Who is clicking at your online business door?

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Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again.    The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns.   Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large

Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable.    If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.    On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.

Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written,  and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though – they looked at billions of data items).  However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return.     A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico  or other commonly travelled points south in the winter.   Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.

Oban Scotch for Christmas

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I owed a friend a pretty good bottle of Scotch for a favor, and knew he liked Oban Scotch.   Unfortunately I had not checked the local price which is consistently $69.95.   Not bad, but I was shooting for a $50 “thank you” gift.   Enter the internet shopping thingie at Google which offered up Turnpike spirits way out east as having the best price by far on Oban – $42 plus shipping.    Unfortunately the website showed “not available” so I called them and got excellent help.  He had some bottles and I managed to order 4 of them.   With shipping I’m going to be under $50, and have a few more nice gifts to give.   Hey Dad – don’t read this post!

Shopping for scotch shows that the internet has not stabilized pricing at all – at least for Oban Scotch.   This single product has dozens of different online prices, which is especially interesting given that locally the price seems almost “fixed”.    I’m guessing few people buy liquor online – perhaps it is an impulse or very-close-to-Christmas purchase usually and therefore people go local?  However it would seem this price inefficiency could be monetized somehow by matching  low online pricing to high priced areas.    I’m guessing that our local liquore store paid more for the bottle they are selling at $69.95 than I just paid Turnpike, so somewhere in here there is a business.

Facebook’s Brandee Barker – the web’s most thankless job?

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Kara Swisher noted the challenges facing Facebook’s PR head Brandee Barker these days, suggesting she might have one of the most thankless jobs on the web, navigating as she must the frigid and hazardous storm water still swirling in the wake of Facebook’s many recent challenges.

First, Facebook launched “Beacon”, which they foolishly tauted as some sort of landmark in the history of advertising.   Beacon turned out to be more a nasty stain mark as bloggers roundly criticized the approach, and then the New York Times and major advertisers like Coca Cola basically said they were lied to by Facebook.

As if that wasn’t enough bad news, Facebook managed to look like the ultimate hypocrite when they sued a news site for posting too much information about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.    This from a site that had just started an ad campaign to capitalize on the profile information Facebookers provide at sign up, information Facebook had promised to respect and protect from prurient commercialization.

Of course they lost the court case, so now Facebook is maintaining a very high and negative news profile across the board for misleading Facebookers, misleading advertisers, and hypocritically wanting to be treated differently from the way they treat others.

So, hats off to Brandee Barker, PR director at Facebook.   If you make it through this you deserve every penny of your Facebook options value, which hopefully won’t be the next big scandal.

Associated Content monetizing plagiarized content.

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update:  I’ve rewritten this post after realizing Mashable is not saying AC did anything illegal.

Mashable is falling just short of charging Associated Content, a well-funded content distribution portal, with plagiarism.   Apparently an AC contributor has lifted a lot of Mashable articles verbatim and posted them at AC.     Mashable argues that since AC claims to edit contributions they should have caught this. 

As Mashable notes what makes this scraping and stealing more conspicuous is that AC is a relatively big online publishing player, not a junky run of the mill “made for adsense” site that would soon be delisted from Google and abandoned.

Of course, few sites screen contributors fairly carefully.  In the rush to create profitable social communities, many sites are willing to turn a blind eye to who is posting what and from whom.    Google’s getting better at delisting plagiarized content, but it’s still a big problem.    The solution is fairly simple but so far few are willing to implement better screening of publishers and writers.   Google adsense, for example, is often run on the lowliest of scraped content websites.   Since Google has a record of payments to those publishers  I find it hard to believe they are doing a careful job of deleting them from the system.    I have not even heard Google claim that they do anything much to ban people from the Adsense program.     With adsense as a prime monetizer of online content both legitimate and plagiarized, it would be nice to see Google blacklist abusers and pass this along to other advertising networks.

However based on my experiences as an advertiser Google is probably the best at following up and creating at least a minimal level of accountability for publishers.   I bought cheap traffic from Enhance and the number of junk sites was very conspicuous in the logs.  Conversion was close to zero and I discontinued the campaign.  

Mixx versus Digg?

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During weekends and holidays my favorite news site, TechMeme, gets wilder than usual because I think there are fewer news outlets posting stories and even the big tech blogs dry up on the weekend.   Even more wild are holidays, which may explain the odd top story today at TechMeme today about MIXX versus DIGG.

Mike over at TechCrunch is reporting that a lot of Digg users are heading over to the new social story tagging site called Mixx.     He notes that Digg users have become increasingly frustrated with the Digg communities and mini-scandals.   A quick Alexa take on Mixx did not really seem to support the idea that MIXX poses much threat right now to DIGG, though since MIXX is still in beta it’s possible MIXX is going to be a contender when it’s known to more people.  Mixx appears to have 150k-250k daily visits (per my rough Alexa extrapolation from approx 35k Alexa rank).     Given the up and down traffic pattern at MIXX though it’s not clear it’s “taking off”, rather than it’s setting in as one of the many DIGG “also rans” that have little chance of even catching the big DIGG.

Coffee Calendar

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[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings AGAIN to bring you EVEN MORE mildly shameless promotions of friend and family projects ….

My brother-in-law Ricardo Levin Morales is an artist in Minneapolis who has roots deep in the fertile coffee-bearing soil of Puerto Rico.   His Coffee Calendar is a vibrant, thoughtful reflection on the history and culture of coffee over the past few hundred years and would be an excellent gift for any coffee enthusiast.    My wife has been showing the calendar to some coffee shops here in Southern Oregon and the response has been great.
Check out the Coffee Calendar online and if you like it … order a few for Christmas Gifts. 

Pipo Nguyen-Duy is another artist I know with a unique and provocative vision of the world.  Check out some of Pipo’s work here:   Pipo teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio but lives here in Oregon and is the top player at our  Ashland Oregon Table Tennis club.