Paid Links and SEO – game over dudes

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It has now been over two years since Google started their crusade against paid links.  I first understood this crusade back in 2005.  It was the first time I’d met Matt Cutts, and we were sitting at the hotel bar during the New Orleans WebmasterWorld PubCon with a handful of SEO folks. I asked about the practice of paid links.  “Don’t buy links”, he said.  Matt was a bit vague about the consequences and other details, and the the Google guidelines back then were not very clear on this point.   In fact a substantial paid link economy had developed and continues today.  However over time Google has become very clear about paid linking.

In my opinion this this recent post from Matt Cutts, Google’s uberMeister of spam tricks and SEO, should sound the death knell for this strategy even for those willing to take the risks that have been associated with paid linking strategies for some time.   Clearly Google is dedicated about this, and will continue to crack down severely enough that the risk outweighs any likely gains.  Certainly any of the sites and folks I’m familiar with in Travel and Tourism should *not* use this practice to raise their pagerank.     I’ve been advising this for some time, but I knew the practice was still fairly common among some elites in the SEO community which meant it was still working.   I’m sure there are some exceptional cases but the basic advice here is easy – don’t buy links.

Like Graywolf, one of the most vocal critics of the Google anti-paid-link jihad, I have a lot of concerns about fairness, best practices, and how much pleasing Google has come to distort the production of good content.   But jousting at Google’s windmill has probably become a waste of time, especially given that many of their concerns about buying and selling links are legitimate.  That practice certainly did distort the relevancy of rankings in a significant way.   In fact Google’s core brilliancy – the pagerank algorithm – put in motion a variety of online linking practices that have reshaped  web content in dramatic, mostly negative ways.    People used to link freely and often as a matter of course because links are the heart of the web and commercial concerns were not in play.  Now, free links are doled out by many very sparingly in an effort to preserve pagerank at their own websites and to deny others a competitive advantage.    I hope Google is considering this factor as they revise the algorithm.  e.g.  linking out to other sites should tend to *boost* ranks for a given term more than it lowers the rank due to leaked pagerank.

Make Ads, Not War

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As I’ve noted many times here I believe that our massive US defense spend is unwise, returning a fraction of the return we’d get by putting most of the annual approximately $500.000.000.000 spend into high ROI global and national development projects, pro USA marketing campaigns, and other infrastructure improvements.

Interesting to me was the number just cited for the 2008 global advertising spend –
486 billion, just shy of what we’ll probably spend on US military.   Global military is about 2x the US number, or approximately one … trillion … annually.   

For you  bogus-fiscal-conservatives-who-call-themselves-conservatives-but-believe-in-huge-military-spending you owe the world at least a 250 billion per year apology, because this military spend is so ineffective at obtaining the desired objectives that no business would ever tolerate it going into the future.  It’s tolerated out of ignorance and mathematical stupidity – the same foolishness that drives huge social spending.  I think the flawed logic generally spawns from the assumption that projects that *might* work to bring stability (e.g. war) actually will work.    Since many such projects often bring a negative or low return rather than the desired one, the ROI on our military spend is spectacularly low.   Vietnam, for example, was left in worse shape than if we had spent zero on that war, and it now appears that Iraq may wind up suffering the same fate.

So, I propose this:   Let’s try to corner the advertising market for a year with out half-trillion.   Instead of weapons, lets see how effectively a global advertising campaign  would sway global public opinion in our favor.    Think about it.   Every TV, every billboard, every radio, and all online ads are featuring themes favorable to the USA.   For every propaganda piece against us, our almost Orwellian media dominance would counter with wine and roses and happiness in the USA.   Maybe we could just corner half the global ad market but reserve a hundred billion to include lots of giveaways and promotions to butter folks up.   Free turkies, cheeseburgers, and flat screen TVs …

Oh, and then that last hundred billion would come close to solving all the major pressing infrastructure problems on earth.

A disclaimer –  I guess I’m only partly serious here.  We need to maintain an adequate defense, but current pork barrelling, inefficiency, and bad strategy have bloated the defense budget out of proportion with its return on the huge investment.   I’d guess we could cut it by at least 60% with no appreciable dilution of our US security, and we could *certainly* do this for a limited time with very little dilution in security but a huge benefit to infrastructure projects all over the world, which would create incalculable good will.   No, this would not solve all our problems.   My point is that it would solve more problems than our current use of the funds.  

Singularity – the Movie – is near

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Ray Kurzweil is one of the most exciting thinkers anywhere, and unlike some “futurist advocates” of the past he’s distinguished himself in several fields relevant to those he speaks about.    He’s producing a film based on his book “The Singularity is Near” that will take the form of a narrative storyline featuring cyberterror, nanotechnology, and virtual beings and also a documentary with interviews featuring many leading thinkers about the future of technology.    See the Singularity website for more.

Ironically the early misguided optimism about AI has led even some early AI pioneers to scoff at the notion we are near the brink of conscious computing.  Yet a lot of evidence now suggests we are near reaching the capability of creating consciousness in machines. 

First, the IBM Blue Brain project is within about 8 years of a good working model of the brain.  They are not claiming to seek “consciousness” with the model  – rather they are focusing on brain and disease research – but I see no reason to think they won’t soon attain a conscious computer as the machine approaches the number of connections we have in our own brains.  

Second, the computational power of computers is approaching that of a human brain.   Kurzweil discusses this at great length in “The Singularity is Near”, noting that exponentially improving processing and memory capacity will soon lead to plenty of power in computers to replicate human thinking patterns.

Third, the explosion in profitability for massively parallel computing power – such as that used by Google and Microsoft – will fuel innovation for many years to come.

The question of “Do you believe in a technological singularity” needs to be replaced with “what are we going to do when the singularity happens?”

Hey, I’ve written a lot more about the Singularity , because I think it’s the biggest thing to hit humanity since….ummmm…. the advent of humanity?

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.  

Notebooks, Laptops, and the luggability factor

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2008 is shaping up to be a big travel year and I’m dreading lugging my Dell 8.2 pounder around  (not to mention it’s old and sucky) so it’s time to shop for something lighter.    I have a good laptop backpack but even with that I notice my back gets really sore if I lug it around for a conference day.  However I like to live blog sessions so I like to have the laptop available.  Some conferences, like SES, do an amazing job of providing computers in press room and in lobbies, but it’s still best to have one on hand at all times.     Hmmm – I really should look into Treo keyboard interfaces as well.  

 Mark Kyrnin at About.com had a nice little article that helped, especially this breakdown of relative size and weight for the various notebook and laptop classifications (not sure where he got those):

 Ultraportable: <11″ x <10″ x <1.3″ @  <4  pounds

Thin and light: 11-14″ x <11″ x 1-1.5″ @ 5-7 poundsDesktop Replacement: >15″ x >11″ x >1.5″ @  7+  pounds 

Luggables: >18” x >13” x >1.5” @  12+ pounds

Looks like I’ll be OK with a “thin and light” in the lower weight range.

Beowulf * * *

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Beowulf has some simply remarkable animation sequences, especially those showing the title character.   I need to study up to see how they transition between the real people and the CGI computerized animations, but in the best scenes it is difficult to tell the actor from the animation.    In general though the film appears as animation, which makes it a bit harder to suspend your disbelief.    The quality is high enough however that one wonders how long it will be before we can’t tell real characters from animated ones.

The poem Beowulf is one of the oldest surviving stories in the English language.    Unfortunately the film takes too many liberties with the actual story, though I suppose Zemeckis could argue that in some storytelling traditions it’s normal to embellish and change things with each telling.  

He appears to have embellished to bring more nude Angelina Jolie scenes into the film since in the real Beowulf poem Grendel’s mother is killed rather than … bedded.

Here’s a great summary of Beowulf, the epic poem.

Blogger and OpenID

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Reshma Kumar over at Webguild is reporting on Google’s upcoming launch of blogger based blog commenting that will support OpenID.   This is a great development and kudos to Google for again doing the right thing, which is making it easy for people to comment without having to do a separate login.   Also, along with Open Social, this approach is coming closer to the ideal online environment where you log in ONCE, and then interact in a robust way with all online environments and other onliners.   The analogy we should all be using is that of a massive party where everybody has a searchable name tag that contains all the info they care to share including pictures, writings, and resumes.    The complication is obvious here – some people will want to keep some things from some people.    I’m not sure how to manage that part since turning the info “on and off” does not work well in our cached and oft-downloaded online info environments.

Reshma notes:
 Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account.

 This may not sound like much, but it will increase the ease of commenting on other people’s blogs.   I’m concerned by how blog commenting is becoming a dying art.   This is due to part to spam comments and in part to blogger selfishness where they don’t want to add to other’s blogs for a variety of SEO or ego reasons.      Ideally I’d like to see every person with their own blog, and then an auto-trackback feature so the conversations would span multiple blogs and instead of comments you’d just have dozens of interconnected blog posts on a topic.   However many people don’t want to have a blog but do want to participate.   This will help with that.

WordPress to Blogger

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It seems like it should be easy to move a WordPress blog over to blogger given how easy it is to move a Google blogger blog to WordPress via the WordPress import scripts (which I think are based on Google blogger APIs).

But I’m concluding it will be easier to just cut and paste the content over on the 20 or so posts I have to move rather than try to unearth, configure, and hope things work out by using the small number of routines people have cobbled together for this task.

I suppose it’s to Google’s credit that they have helped make it easy to move *away* from Google but have not made it easy to move *to* Google in this case.

Generally I’d say WordPress is a superior blogging platform but Blogger has gotten much better with lack of ability to easily use categories the only major defect.

I’ll be taking our Travel blog now at   blog.ohwy.com  and moving it to blog.u-s-history.com where we are slowly setting up a very rich history and travel site.

Venture Capitalism – luck or science?

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Over at his excellent blog, A VC, Fred Wilson is bearing his Venture Capitalist soul and offering a lot of insight into his very successful VC firm.     Today, his analyses of why some startups fail sounded really compelling to me in the same way many stockpickers sound compelling.    Yet in the stockpicking world it’s common knowledge that past performance is no measure of the future.   In fact a lot of the ideas about “good” vs “bad” analysts are bogusly based on after-the-fact analysis of records.    Predictions, not after the fact stuff, are what we need to test hypotheses about what works and what does not.

Fred also has this post suggesting VC is not like stocks, but I’m not seeing data to support this.  In fact if he’s right – that the top VC funds can pick a lot more winners than losers – then why doesn’t *all the startup biz flow to them immediately?*.

My working hypothesis is turning into the following ideas:

Winning VC firms are like winning stock pickers – they for the most part are the firms  hat were at the right place at the right time.   The winning record is NOT the product of conscious, clever, consistent application of any sets of rules.    It is simply the product of math – you’ll have a top tier by definition.  

I also apply this rule to my own successes and failures in biz and life in general, though I always catch myself thinking I can “outwit” chance.    I think egos get in the way of good analysis about the world, which suggests a lot less control over things than we’d like to think.    This is still in the working hypothesis stage and I have not reconciled that fact that I can predict with enormous accuracy that, for example, I’ll be drinking coffee tomorrow morning, yet I can’t even tell you if Google stock will be up or down tomorrow.

NO – you can’t time stocks either, and I’ve got huge money to bet you if you think you can predict stock up and downs even slightly better than chance. 

With stocks when you use a performance record you don’t find good predictive relationships between the past and the future.   Many people think they *do* understand those past to future issues, but in the stock world this does not hold up to scrutiny.  If it did, staggeringly huge returns await anybody with even very modest  level of long term predictive power and a modest initial stake.   How?   

If you could predict the daily up or down movement of any stock  with even a modest level of accuracy you could use options (or buying short and long) to quickly turn a buck.  If the stock was highly volatile and options were available your leverage would turn a few thousand into a few million in a year thanks to leveraging of your success percentage predicting the up or down movement.   If you could predict things with high accuracy – well above chance – you could turn thousands into millions every month.    This does not happen.  

I’m open to a disproof or alternative hypothesis for VC firms.   But don’t tell me about successes and failures  – I want predictions.   There will  *always* be a top tier of winners.   What supports my hypothesis is that those winners change over time and past does not predict future (in Stocks – I’m really not up on VC stats except that the average returns are negative).  

I think VC may have more of a schmoozing human component than stock picking so that may play a role here.   I’ve noticed from the few Venture Capital folks that I know how they tend to be very bright and personable.    Yet even this is somewhat conspicuous given that average VC return is negative, where the average bright personable person is doing well.