"I sold my soul for a quarter a click"
- a closet millionaire

Brett Tabke recently posted in his blog a definition of web spam:

So much graphical and textual noise that you can't determine whether you are clicking on a paid advertisement or an actual old-fashioned honest link. When ads are so thick, that you must study the page carefully to determine where the content is at.

That is probably a good secret to highly profitable affiliate marketing or contextual marketing of any type: put the ads where people are thinking they are going to find content. That is what Google teaches people to do. It makes more money. Who can fault us for doing it?

Eventually web users may adjust, but there is some serious CPC to be made until they do.

Brett also mentions that building better authority allows you to get away with being even spammier:

There is a point where ads become so pervasive, that they over power the content and hurt the credibility of a site. If you have a authoritarian site, then that point is much higher than most would believe. I know of one site that has over 25 ads on the page right now and is still considered a top site in it's field.

Which is a great reason why it is worth buying older highly trusted sites, or being lily white off the start. Get the trust. Then get the money.

A while ago I posted that there was a noticable trend where it seemed like there was a shift away from content optimization to content creation. It seems many sites are founded upon the principal that the only purpose of content is to get ads indexed.

It is amazing how much control search engines have over the viability of many publishing business models. As long as I still have at least one or two high quality channels I don't think I will feel guilty creating a good number of low quality spamesq ones. If Google wants to fund content pollution does it make sense to by a hybrid car? ;)

Mark Cuban recently posted about how evangelical political nutters try to force their views onto others, and through various spamming and guerrilla marketing activities try to silence out other opinions.

Not only crazy, it will be impossible to eradicate the influence of these maraunders.

So rather than fighting them, search sites will join them.

I have zero doubt that in the future there will be sliders or some equivalent that represent "the flavor" of search that users will look for. Looking for information about the war in Iraq; push the slide rule to the right till you reach Bill O'Reilly flavored search, or slide it to the left for the Al Franken flavor. The results are then influenced by the brand you prefer to associate with.

The news is no longer just the news. A holiday is no longer just a holiday. A song is no longer just a song. A search result will no longer just be a search result. We will blow it up into a symbol of something must larger. It wont be of course, but it will happen anyway.

I don't think the sliders will be there. I think engines will just automatically learn to adjust the results to fit your worldview.

Greg Linden followed up stating about how he got a bunch of hate mail for Findory offering too broad of a spectrum of news.

The idea is to avoid pigeonholing, to show people views from across the spectrum, to give people the information they need to make an informed judgment.

For some, that is exactly the problem. They don't want to see both sides. They want a filter, a political lens. As they see it, reading an opinion article on the left should only give them other opinion articles on the left (or visa-versa), reinforcing the opinion they already have.

They don't want discovery. They don't want new information. They don't want to learn. They want to be pigeonholed.

I have always stated that I thought there was a lot more really polarized biased media out there than unbiased media, but Mitch Ratcliffe said that he thought my opinion was likely due to a sampling error. He also said the mainstream media was far more likely to point toward or deliver the biased stuff.

From top to bottom I think that most content producers are more parrots than original thinkers though. When I make many posts I create content that sells ad space, even if I write nothing but me too posts. Original thought is so much more effort. Most people usually prefer to let others do a certain amount of their thinking for them.

Also consider that those who are the most evangelical about something also have the following going for them:

• a possible detachment with reality that allows them to over invest into an idea compared to what a normal person would pour into doing the same thing
• it is easier to cite really biased information because it either fits a bit of our worldview or is so far off that it is easy to debunk
• it is far easier to identify with a known bias.

A friend of mine that goes by the name of Ian said that he thought much of the overt bias and polarization of information online will be settled as more people adopt the web (becoming content producers instead of just consumers) but I am not so sure I agree with him.

Beyond domain age what can a search engine use as a sign of quality that would not potentially also heavily overlap as a sign of strong political bias?

Is there any research on how being able to quickly select unknowingly or unthinkingly biased information from an alleged oracle will effect who we trust or how we create ideas?

Now I know people say you should always be nice, but I sometimes screw that up. Most potential business relationship offers are garbage and the guy who accepts every offer he gets is lucky, born rich, and/or likely eventually homeless.

It takes a dumb business person to try to help everyone who contacts them because if you develop any real brand value many more people will want you to help them than you possible can help. Couple that with the easy of communication and the anonymity of the web and it gets easy to feel a bit shitty if you don't do things to filter out the noise and scamsters (and yet I still get astrology websites claiming to be legitimate charities).

Recently I had one person contact me about 5 times a day asking questions like where is the Overture suggest tool. Stuff that would easily pop on the first page in Google if they used the exact same queries as they instant messaged me with. I explained to them that search is there for a reason and my time was limited, but my explanation was to no avail.

Had I not progressively ignored them and gave continuously shorter answers to encourage reading or searching I would have probably got about 50 questions a day from them. Eventually things were not going to do well.

They asked me questions which to me seemed to show they did not even attempt to read my book. In essence they said they bought my ebook, but I think what they wanted was a full time SEO tutor for a one time $79 fee. Sure I answered a bunch of questions but then after a while I told them I couldn't answer any more because it was not an honest or functional business model for me to continue to do so.

$79 is a bunch to pay for an ebook that you don't read, but $79 is not enough for a real time long term ongoing one on one internet business strategy consultation. People create autoresponder lists and write books and build software to leverage their time because individuals only scale so far.

I think the person who contacted me is probably a good person, but I think that even attempting to make myself widely available on IM is probably not a great idea as it makes it too easy to chat away instead of spending time learning.

I have spent a bunch building free tools to help people leverage their time. Some people are not going to appreciate you do no matter what you do or how hard you try though. Likely their expectations are unreasonable, selfish, or (most likely) they do not place much value on their own time and project their valuations on your time.

You still can learn something from clients who frustrate you and site visitors who seem like they don't have a clue. I am not sure if I will launch it anytime soon, but I think there is a good business model to be made by running an SEO Q&A service for a fee. If I did that it would solve multiple problems:

1. If I placed a tangible value on each answer people would value my time more.

2. I still could answer free questions if I wanted to, but would not have to worry about people viewing me as arrogant if I chose not to.
3. Much of the content on this site is not geared toward picking up newbie targeted traffic from search engines because I can't keep hitting the same questions and ideas over and over as I learn more and the industry changes. Most potential customers are early on in the learning cycle, and this blog started after I had already learned for about a year, and that was a couple years ago. By having a feed of nothing but high quality answers to common newbie questions that content would rank great for many queries and likely convert at around 2 to 5% depending on search query and page layout.

I generally steer clear of awards because they seem a bit gratuitous and self serving, but they are great for link building.

Loren recently created a 2005 search awards contest. The awards have been mentioned on most every major search blog and have even got a bit of coverage outside the typical search sphere.

When Loren did his recent contest he ran it past me first and I said that he should re-categorize some of the stuff and add at least one category that could go viral or would be inclined to be talked about.

The category which fit that profile well for me is

Matt or Jeremy: who is more likely to flame you for spamming?

Sure enough both Matt and Jeremy blogged about it.

I have never done a contest to build links, but if I did here are things I would think about

• which people should I run the award ideas past before it exists so I can refine it? This could help improve the contest categories, and it gives those people a reason for them to want to help market it since they gave feedback on it. Plus asking for feedback is a bit more tactful than asking for a link.

• Are there any official sounding endorsements that would make the contest seem official like?
• Who do I REALLY want links from? Those sites should be listed in small categories that really fit there niche?
• Will any of the contestants get pissed if I email them to tell them they are in the contest? If not which contestants should I email?
• Can I make something funny or interesting that people would want to link at?
• Outside of the problem of self selection can I get a consensus on something that generally has no consensus?
• Can I relate this study to bloggers or any niche markets that typically link virally or link with authority?

There are probably a bunch of other good ideas with contests, please let me know which ones you like.

I hate rules...but I have a new email rule. If a person emails me with Dear Sir
they probably will not get a response unless I know them well (in which case they would not use dear sir).

I recently started doing this a bit more with some of the give me a free ebook because I am a fake charity scam emails and it feels so good deleting it that I want to broaden that out a bit more.

I have to value my time because eventually I will die.