So, the Official Google Blog is Encouraging people to contribute knowledge to the Internet by creating what will hitherto be referred to as knols. The big selling point for this shiny new thing is author recognition. I have the same name as an author and playwright that is moderately famous. I actually wrote him to ask about maybe obtaining the URL that is my name when he is done using it. He changed the subject to politics and music. He is one of those Baby Boomers that treats his web presence like something obligatory rather than his primary vehicle. I somehow doubt that he will be contributing any knols.
I don’t think I will be either. I am not an expert on anything. I think a lot of knolwriters in the near future will not be experts. The benefits of being an expert have been drawing boring and dim human beings to the field of expertise ever since the days of Egyptology, and probably before that.
Solar energy is free. It is abundant. It is largely untapped. Most of our food supply relies on solar energy. Some homes are effectively trapping it as a heat source. Google has decided that it wants to be a driving source in the effort to develop technologies and systems that can convert solar power to electricity at a lower cost that what we presently spend using coal. We aren’t there yet.
I hope somebody is working on making two way meters cheap and abundant so we can all invest in our own solar panels and offset our electric bills soon.
SEO tends to focus extensively on Google for the most part. MSN and Yahoo each have a piece of the search engine pie and everyone else gets crumbs. I was very surprised to see how many small players are on this decidedly unlevel playing field. One particular search engine appeared up on my radar today. It is called StrategicBoard and it is based in Israel. It is focused on blogs and has a human editorial element that is designed to exclude spam. If any of you readers are attempting to operate Google-free for ethical and/or spiteful reasons, you should check it out.
There has been and continues to be what can only be described as hysteria in the blogosphere lately. I have suffered some disappointments along with many other people, but I have tried to remain calm. I have tried to have some perspective.
Many of the things that people have been doing over the past few months in hopes of maintaining and/or improving their own page rank have backfired. I purposely avoided a few of these on this blog. I joined the Do Follow movement with my personal blog, but not with Slamboard. I took part in weekly memes with my personal blog but not with this blog. I joined blogrolls with my personal blog, but not with Slamboard.
The Google pagerank for Slamboard went up to a number that made me happy for several days and then dropped back down. I still had a net gain of 1. My personal blog dropped by 1.
I think that I am going to continue writing and managing my blog in much the same way that I always have and hoping that I move up the rankings through attrition.
I don’t want to be accused of cherry picking intelligence for this story. Actually there is no story. I used Google’s own search engine to see if anyone had looked into this possibility. Late last year Loren Baker connected enough dots to make for a fairly sensational report. He put a question mark at the end of his title as well.
He did find web pages on Orkut that were ideologically supportive of Al Quaeda and that were monetized with Google Ads. Supposedly click fraud was rampant and unchecked. Google estimates that $1 billion dollars per year is lost to fraudulent ad clicks. I saw no estimate as to how much of that is comprised of organized crime by terror organizations.
The ideology of individuals in these organization is such that any type of lying or stealing perpetrated towards an infidel is not considered morally wrong. At the time of the report, there were forums that openly encouraged members to repeatedly click the ads.
Diet scams and email based fraud can also potentially be supporting terrorist organizations.
Imagine pulling up to a gas station in a strange town and stepping out of your car to find that the display on the pumps includes a local map from Google with directions to some key points of interest. That sounds pretty cool. Lots of people are reporting on how cool it is. Some people, me included are a little lukewarm about this. Apparently to initial version will allow the owner to choose the points of interest based on their own criteria. You can expect directions to various places that want your money. You might not get directions back out of town.
PPC Professional Steve Baker has a website that is devoted to helping people better understand how to run an effective adwords campaign. He has created a a comprehensive guide to . He guides you through the basics of keyword generation and grouping. He gives valuable advice about writing your text. He reveals some important details about creating a landing page that the Google will like. The thing that most novices are intimidated by is the bidding process. Obviously a campaign will usually have the goal of increasing your revenue so overbidding is asking for disappointment. Steve Baker has some great rules of thumb on how to start your bidding based on your goals and your budget. Adwords has built in tools to help you manage things. Steve points them out and explains them in language that a newcomer to the process can easily understand.
When you have adwords on the landing page associated with your ad campaign, your expenses will be offset by some increased revenue. If you look at the ads by Google that are on this page, you will probably see some that are relevant to the content of my site and some that are not as relevant. Some of the advertisers are getting a better return on their investment than others.
Everyone in Web Business and the Blogosphere have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for Google to run and update. Now that it has happened, there is a lot of emotional outpouring and ill-informed post game analysis going on. There is not really anything informative coming from the Google.
Truly important sites like Forbes.com and Washingtonpost.com suffered a drop in Page Rank.
Techcrunch.com is listed in an article on Forbes as one of the fallen. An early post on Techcrunch itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge any drop. The Techcrunch post used the word Jihad in its title and received many, many comments from people who were offended or pretended to be offended. I am offended by the Washington Redskins (or maybe I am just pretending).
If you are an outsider reading about all the Page Rank related anxiety and frustration, I will sum it up for you…It’s all about the money.
Google Trends is a tool from Google that has not really caught on. I guess the disclaimers about accuracy might have something to do with that. Nevertheless, when I was researching something entirely unrelated, I got the idea to see what the Trends Graph for Kimkins looked like.
Take a moment to picture what you think it might look like before you click the link.
