Archive for April, 2007
The Google and Doubleclick… a bad combo?
Google’s purchase of Doubleclick is stirring a lot of discussion. Most of it isn’t pretty.
Cocoa & Medicine says:
If you aren’t familiar with them, DoubleClick is in the business of selling banner ads — those flashing, annoying advertisements that sit above, beside, and even above those web pages you visit. That, in and of itself, is not why I dislike them — in fact, thanks to Privoxy, I almost never see their ads. But I’ve been doing the web thing long enough to recall back in 2000 when DoubleClick announced an frighteningly Orwellian scheme to identify every single web user and track the pages they visit.
After DoubleClick’s announcement there was an uproar. Numerous organizations including EPIC and the ACLU filed petitions with the FTC, which launched a 10 month investigation. Eventually DoubleClick backed off of its position and the investigation was dropped.
Fast forward several years and the poster child of online privacy invasion is getting hitched to the poster child of online corporate responsibility. I suppose we could interpret this in a positive way and hope that Google’s values infect those of the DoubleClick unit more than the other way around. But I can help but feel a bit nervous.
The timing of this buy is not at all comforting after seeing Matt Cutts pronounce that Google is now looking down on paid links. Sounds like big G wants the throne to itself. Continue Reading
TellMe, a new company seeking to get in while the getting is good, has just launched its 100% FREE 411 information service!
To find a phone number, simply call 1-800-555-TELL. When prompted say “business search”. The fully automated system will then search its database to find a relevant result for your query.
No more cell phone bill fee’s for talking to an operator. The service is free of charge and you can use it as often as you like.
I could have used this last week when I called for a cab. I’ve now plugged the number into my Treo so charges for the service are now a thing of the past.
OH! Google has a similar service as well. I love it!
Yeah, I changed themes yet again.
I really liked the last one, but it was taking WAY too much time to load. It only took two e-mails from readers to realize it wasn’t just me. The theme was slow. Period.
Plus I was getting quite a few errors in the code and I know the high and mighty search engines didn’t like that. This theme is very bare bones and quite simplistic. Hopefully it loads quick and gets right to the point.
Enjoy!
Friday I learned that a local business here in Nevada was ready to cut me a small check to host a link to their new website on one of my blogs. The business is a web design firm here in Northern Nevada. The owner is a friend of mine and he’s now ready to do some advertising.
Unfortunately, thanks to Matt Cutts, it has come to my attention that Google appears to be positioning itself to penalize sites/blogs who sell text links.
This doesn’t hurt me too much, and the reason it won’t hurt me is a bit ironic. I already sell text links to Google. Yeah, that’s right, Google sends me a monthly check for displaying the text link ads you see to the left of this post when looking at the single post page. Google also pays me to display the image banner at the top of the main page of my site. Continue Reading
Google has claimed to be fighting spam for years, but thanks to a link coming in to my recent post about Digg Widgets, I’ve seen evidence that could point to the contrary.
The spam post uses data from the summary found at Digg.com. But instead of just posting the summary text, the spam blog adds completely unrelated keywords to the summary.
The spam keywords are in bold.
X Men 3 spoilers As Digg grows more with each new day, many users, including myself, are looking for ways to better network with friends and content. I propose the Digg Widget to help do just that. X Men 3 music
The keyword stuffing that is going on here would seem to be obvious, and one would think Google could pick up on it right away. But Google has more than 2,400 of the sites pages in its index.
It isn’t just my post that the spammer stuffed with junk keywords. He/she is doing it with MANY blog posts. Take a look at the spam site’s blog.
And does the homepage look worthy of being indexed?
Curious…
My purpose for posting on the suggested Digg Widget is already bearing fruit.
Vino2Vino’s Mike jumped right on the challenge by pumping out a fairly simple Wordpress plugin that will display a user’s friend list of recent Diggs.
You can see the plugin in action here.
This is headed in the right direction, but it doesn’t yet have any style. I’m hoping to see someone help out in the style realm for those of us who know little about it.
Either way, a big thanks goes out to Mike for jumping on this and creating a plugin that gives us a great starting point.
Thanks Mike!
I felt it fitting to post pictures of the newly released Digg Case Mod since as of the time of writing this I have received 3,000+ visits from Digg for the day.
My question is… where’s the order form?
HUGE hat top to the creator, Computer Choppers.
