When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.

The airports included are listed here. Information about the free inflight service on Virgin Atlantic (I don’t know anyone who actually flies on VA…) can be found here.

They even have a nifty photo contest running for the event.

In the past, Google has joked about the service, even poking fun at it on April Fools day.

Of course, Google has always made hints at the possible service, and has strongly supported an open and free wireless broadband internet service.

Google has even provided 100% free broadband access to the entire city of Mountain View, the place the company calls home.

Is nationwide Google Internet on the horizon?

-Eric Odom

These “junk results” (this is what I consider them) basically show Google.com as the referrer, and include no data on the keywords or keyphrases searched to reach our pages. Usually what we see is the full URL for the search query, which gives us keyword data and in turn helps us understand our audience and what they’re looking for.

At first I had no idea why this was happening, and my first instinct was to blame GetClicky for providing the junk data. However, when I logged in today I saw a link to this GetClicky blog post.

I’m not going to quote any of the post here because unless you read the entire page you might end up a bit confused. In summary, though, Google is testing a change in the way they handle referring URL’s that essentially blocks analytics programs from being able to track search data.

What this means for you and I is that if Google proceeds with this (and we’re already seeing it roll out into production stage), you and I will have no clue what people are searching for when they find our pages.

And if that doesn’t already get your blood boiling, here is the real kicker… Google can STILL track data and provide it via Google Analytics. Why? Because Google still has this data internally, so there is really no reason to assume they can’t push it into Google analytics.

In other words… Google appears to be telling webmasters and anyone who tracks search data that you have to use Google Analytics or you simply can’t track search data at all. Which, in effect, might render stat trackers obsolete.

The Smackdown blog has a great rundown of the situation. I highly recommend you have a read.

I think this is a really low blow if it turns out to be a permanent change. What say you?

It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.

In looking for a search engine optimization against McCain, the first step is to choose good websites to optimize. Here some criteria for good websites:

* The website should already be in the Google top 100, for searches on John McCain, making it easier to increase the ranking over time.
* The website should have the word “McCain” in the title of the search result making it easier to optimize.
* The website should be from a well-known news source, making is less obviously a partisan attack.
* The website should have a long life span, and not in danger of being removed before the general election.
* The website should be a negative news story on McCain, not an opinion piece.

So, in essence, the left isn’t even trying to hide their efforts. Instead, they openly admit their shady practices and bluntly put together a game plan via a publically accessible blog post.

John Hawkins of RightWingNews asserts that Google bombs could go as far as making or breaking the 2008 Presidential Elections.

Of course, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and in 2006, the right side of the blogosphere actually put together a more effective Googlebombing campaign than the Left did, even though it didn’t make much of a difference in such a lousy year for the GOP.

That being said, it will be significantly harder to make it work this time. Google has changed its search engine rankings to cut down on the effectiveness of Googlebombing, plus, there is so much coverage of the presidential candidates that it’s just plain old harder to drive up links on their names.

Still, making sure a few negative articles show up under a search for Barack Obama’s name could, over the course of the year, turns tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of voters off to him. In other words, if the election in 2008 is as close as the elections in 2000 or 2004, Googlebombing could be the difference between the winner and loser.

This is going to be fun to watch!

My first website went live in late 2003. It was at Backpackerdeals.com, but for some reason Archive.org has nothing previous to February of 2004 and even then the cache seems to be missing.

Anyway, the site was an affiliate site for student travelers. It was a lot of fun, and the site made a few bucks. More importantly, it helped me learn what NOT to do and opened up a lot of doors for my internet marketing career.

My main mistake with Backpackerdeals.com was that I knew nothing about code when I started it so I used an out of the box solution. Which, at the time, was complete crap. After a few months I began to learn a bit about code and felt backed in to a corner with the site builder.

In the summer of 2004 I launched two more student travel websites. Backpackearth.com and Traveljive.com. I’ve since sold both sites, and it looks like the new owner took the content and parked the domains. But the two sites made me quite a bit of money from 2004 until early 2007.

This is Archive’s cache of TravelJive in the summer of 2004.

As you can see… it’s quite laughable. But in those days it was quite popular. On average, any given day in 2005 would result in about 600 unique visits. Backpackearth.com was doing MUCH better!

In 2004 the main source of revenue was Google Adsense. I was getting decent checks every month and it felt worth the effort. In 2005 Google Adsense started paying so low that it was almost insulting, so I yanked Adsense in favor of the new Yahoo Overture network. Overture paid more per click, but was still somewhat lacking.

This is when I entered the text link market. Yes, I was one of those…

I had an account at Linkworth.com that was paying $300+ per month and I had another five websites that I was spending a lot of time on. I was also running affiliate programs for Lowestfare.com and a few others.

2004 and 2005 were GREAT years to be making money online because the search engines were naive, the markets were easy to tap into, and blogs hadn’t yet started dominating over static content.

In early 2006 I was working in a completely different realm online. I started moving away from money via websites in favor of consulting work through private contracts. I was also heavily involved in politics and in the summer of 2006 I was working in politics as a political and internet consultant.

In 2007 I took a consulting job with a national political organization as “Director of Internet Operations”, which also allowed me to serve as Director for a national politically flavored new media conference.

November of 2007 brought great things as I took a job with Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago as “New Media Coordinator”, where I currently hold employment and work as an internet consultant on the side.

Not bad for a guy in his 20’s who started fiddling with websites while working at Wells Fargo Bank, right? The internet certainly changed my life forever, and it’s been a wonderful ride ever since.

Tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance. You know the drill: you won’t be able to log in to your account during these 4 hours, but rest assured that we’ll keep serving ads to your pages and tracking all clicks and impressions in your account.

4 hours for me has become 8. And now the site is back up, but all it does is continuously reload. I can’t even try to log in…

Kind of a bummer…

This morning I woke up and started searching for information about the Wyoming GOP Caucus. I started with regular search, but the results were old, outdated, and some what irrelevant. Clearly the wonderful live search results I experienced Thursday night during the Iowa Caucus were not running things this morning. I then jumped to Google Blog Search and sorted the results by date.

Here is what I was met with.

In my opinion, it couldn’t be more clear these blogs are spam just by viewing the results. And there were tons of these results flooded the results for the past 45 minutes in the “sort by date” SERP’s.

Just for kicks, I clicked on a few to see what they were all about. Much to my surprise, these sploggers are stealing YouTube screenshots for profit. This is what one of the Splogs looked like.

Looks like a normal video post, right? Wrong. The video in the post is actually just an image that links to another page ripping YouTube’s design. None of the links work, and once again, if you click play on the video it just sends you to another page.

Notice the URL of this “YouTube” page.
http://gift-vip.net/videos/?name=wyoming+caucus

Once you click the video, you’re taken to a page that tries to force a file on you. My Linux Ubuntu system wouldn’t have any of it, but some other poor Windows user might not be so lucky.

Now, you might say these splogs aren’t really that many in number… well, apart from the obvious swarm of them hitting the results for Wyoming GOP Caucus, all one needs to do is look at the user profile for the splog mentioned above.

My question is… when you have a blogger profile that has MANY domains that look like this:
http://nhpollnlz65.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html
http://drzhivlsb26.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html

Wouldn’t it be easy to have some sort of red flag go up? I mean, if that isn’t obvious then I don’t know what is.

Come on Google, if you want the user experience to be solid, then get rid of this junk. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

Here is a summary of those links…

Putting the Bali road map in context

At the outset of this conference, we noted that the scale and complexity of the climate crisis demands collective action by the world’s governments. The Bali roadmap, while leaving much to be desired, represents an important step in this process. All the parties are still at the table and are now committed to spending the next two years crafting a more comprehensive global solution to fighting climate change. Many were hopeful that the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election in 2008 will help breathe new life into this process, regardless of whether the President-elect is a Republican or Democrat.

But given how difficult it was to reach an agreement in Bali and how acrimonious the negotiations were, the rest of us can’t afford to wait for the world to negotiate a new climate agreement. We need to take action now. Fortunately, many people around the world are doing just that. The numerous panels and side events at Bali were filled with examples of concrete actions people are taking now to build a cleaner future. We wrote on how the world’s local governments are launching their own initiatives to fight global warming and how others are working to ensure that any solutions take into account equity and justice considerations. Another hot topic of conversation here was the growing efforts of many companies to reduce their carbon footprints and take a leadership role in promoting smart energy policies.

Demanding climate justice in Bali

Though all 15,000 participants of the UN climate conference have come to Bali to discuss the global response to climate change, there are many points of entry to the debate. Some enter through the policy door, seeking better rules to mandate emissions reductions. Others enter through the investment door, seeking profit from carbon markets and clean technologies. And an increasing number of participants come through the global development door, seeking “climate justice” for poor populations effected by global warming. As Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International in Malaysia explained, “We all agree that climate change is happening, but now we have to ask the question of how to share the burden of adjustment.”

For more from Google, click here.

Now, set all of that aside for a second. Let’s take a look at the Al Gore connection with Google… shall we?

Can Gore buy the 2008 election?

Al Gore has such a fortune in Google stock that he could easily fund his own campaign for the White House, Democratic insiders say.

Gore became a senior adviser to the Internet search engine back in February 2001, and is a close friend of CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt. Google shares went public in 2004, and the stock has soared from $85 a share to more than $400. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth an estimated $11 billion each.

Also see Gore and Google team Up

It’s interesting to watch a company who claims to be so interested in climate change team up with one of the biggest hypocrites of the global warming alarmist movement.

Al Gore has said the following.

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a “carbon-neutral lifestyle.” To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. “Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb,” warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin.”

Al Gore, a man who enjoys MANY hours of private jet travel and several mansions that are far bigger than the average home, makes millions from the global warming hysteria. It’s a simple marketing plan in that anytime global warming is mentioned, Al Gore comes to mind.

A company like Google could do well with this kind of marketing. From the quotes above, it looks like Google really does care about climate change and wishes to do its part in helping out.

The problem is… Google is a major contributor to emissions. I mean, they’re driving an army of heavy vehicles down every major street in America for the Google Maps Street View application. And as I understand it, Australia and New Zealand are coming next.

Or how about the fact that Google’s own founders like to fly around in a Boeing 767?

It’s probably safe to say that the Googleplex has no shortage of plastic and environmentally unfriendly materials on their property.

And do we even want to begin discussing the amount of power required to run such a company? Aside from things like endless pools, Google has thousands of servers that certainly don’t run on batteries.

Granted, Google does use a lot of solar energy. So that’s a plus.

But in the end, I find it odd that a man who has used global warming to make millions and create a marketing powerhouse for his name, is teaming up with Google. And now Google is venturing in to the same realm.

Am I alone on this?

Obviously, Google likes it when we use image ALT tags, and here Matt Cutts appears suggesting it will help make your site much more search engine friendly.

ScratchBack is an online “tipping” system. It allows you, the publisher, to accept tips and “give back” links or images in return.

You name your price on your tips, and you earn money from every interaction through our easy-to-use automated system. It’s free to sign-up, and you can have a TopSpot widget on your website or blog in minutes.

In other words, as I read it, you “tip” a blogger and in exchange you get a link. AKA… text link selling.

But unlike Text Link Ads, Linkworth, and Pay Per Post, ScratchBack is playing by rules of the Google god.

Do My Links Pass Page Rank?
They do not. Every single link, including the link back to Scratchback, in the TopSpot widget has a “nofollow” hard encoded in them. The code is delivered in Javascript format as well. That means that Google and other search engine spiders “won’t follow” the link. I doesn’t mean your link isn’t clickable, it is.

You cannot remove that code, nor should you attempt to as per the user agreement every publisher and advertiser agree to upon registration. Google has made it perfectly clear that “selling page rank” is not something they believe in. We don’t believe in it either. This system is built for fun. There are plenty of other solutions out there you can use if you want to “pass Google juice”, just not this one. Did you hear that Google?

So yes, it is a form of link selling. No, it’s not going to be looked down on by Google.