Brett Tabke recently created a supporter's only thread about the potential downfall of blog ad networks, claiming that they may end up undermining our ability to trust what we read. Bill Hartzer (who I am generally a big fan of) added

There are still unbiased sources out there, you just have to look for them.

I responded to the thread with (roughly) the following (edited on my blog for better formatting and grammar, and I added more depth to my opinions here):

There is no such thing as an unbiased source. Unbiased = unreal.

I think as user / consumer is transferred into a market participant beyond just what they consume that we will

• see our own influence (and influences) better

• take better care of our attention
• be more likely to find things we are passionate in
• get better at judging the intent of others
• generally trust most things we see less.

While on the surface it is easy to paint that lack of trust as a negative thing, I think a lack of trust toward authority (ie: questioning what you see, why you were shown it, and who placed it there) is an important component in any functional society.

The only reason that learning to not trust what you see is a negative is because there is so much fraud in the world perpetrated by power source who only retain power through the ignorance of the average citizen. Why are most articles in the mainstream media about SEO usually focused on black hat techniques? Anything that challenges any established authority system is deemed to be wrong by default, especially when evaluated by existing sources of power.

Would I have joined the military if I knew more about the military industrial complex? Not a snowball's chance in hell. Should I be quiet about them doing illegal things like destroying some of my work records prior to processing me out of the military? Not a snowball's chance in hell.

I believe consumer generated media will transfer power away from macro-parasites toward creative and passionate individuals who are driven to change the world.

I also think that anyone who communicates, even if only for themselves, is selling something...even if that potential gain is just trying to understand our own faults and why we think the way we do.

On another front, which is more ethical and legitimate? Blindly trusting an ad system that promotes products you know nothing about and is pushed to no end by the goal of achieving an efficient market. Or, writing about things you know about, and occasionally getting paid for the value of your time, feedback, and influence?

How relevant is a Google AdLink with my name and brand name in it that links to a list of ads that does not even include me? How is that any more legitimate than getting paid to review things you find interesting?

Some of my other blogs have no commercial intent to them, but they still rank for a lot of things, and I still learn a bunch from other's feedback, and I also think I learn a lot about myself by reading how I was thinking when I was doing different things.

The biggest thing that is killing off traditional publishing is the lack of personality, lack of passion, and a lack of bias (or watered down pro corporate bias) which is contained in nearly every piece of content they create.

I would rather read a passionate author than one that abides by some arbitrarily crafted ethical standards. Would a newspaper ever publish a self analysis like this? No. And if I read a person long enough I can understand their biases much greater than I can by reading random published articles. And if earning the trust of readers is harder then it will be valued more.

The big reason that people are against open networks, paid placement, free markets, paying individuals what they are worth, or anything that redistributes power is that many of the most powerful sources in the world stand to lose power if we question authority. And so they must play down the roll of or try to undermine the credibility of competing business models (or anything that threatens the ideology they sell or their business model). Nothing new there, it has been going on forever (even if the sources of power do not hold themselves to the same standards they want to hold amateurs to).

Microsoft recently announced the ability to research what pages a domain links at. For example, see what pages this site links at using LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com. You can also use their advanced search features in combination with LinkFromDomain to look for links pointing at domains within a specific geograph region, and / or adjust the result order by popularity and freshness.

As most seasoned SEOs knows, Google gives sucky inbound linkage data. You still can get a decent sample of recent inbound linkage data from the Google BlogSearch link function though. For example, here are recent blog posts linking at SEOBook.com. Technorati provides similar linkage data.

You can get a more comprehensive view of linkage data using Yahoo! Site Explorer.

I plan on updating SEO for Firefox to include the LinkFromDomain feature and check if URLs are linked from the Wikipedia.

In addition to all of these forward and backward link tools many video content sites and social bookmarking programs allow you to use other's work to explore interesting items, which sorta brings the fun back to the web...finding all kinds of cool stuff.

As technology evolves, and more users become editors, the value of being a general editor will be commoditized to nothing unless you work long hours, have a community helping you, are heavily biased, passionate, or can add some other significant value to the information you consume and sort. But if you are an agressive marketer being able to sort through information so many different ways makes the job much more fun because it gives you so many options.

If you create a site about information retrieval and see medical ads on it that might be a good sign there is a bunch of money in that market.

• Google's internal AdSense optimization is based on earnings potential. If they give an ad excessive exposure, even on off topic sites, it probably means that the ads stand a good chance of being expensive.

• If advertisers are buying expensive clicks from off topic sites then they got plenty of budget to blow through.

I am not saying that off topic ads are a great thing long-term, but they might make for an easy way to follow the money trail. If you have any interest in the ad topic then create a few pages about it and test the earnings potential. You might also consider joining a related affiliate program and buying cheap traffic through other ad networks, such as AdBrite.

In case you think this off targeted advertising is a short term condition, consider the following data points...

Recent market size:

The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion). - Marcia Angell

Future growth prospects:

If medical spending rises to 25% of gross domestic product by 2030, as many economists expect, health care's share of jobs could grow to 15% or 16% of the labor market from today's 12%, based on historical patterns.

Such a shift in employment would require health care to be the single biggest creator of jobs in the economy for the foreseeable future. And while the U.S. could in theory afford to spend 25% of GDP on health care, it's hard to imagine a world in which our children have to choose between working for the local hospital or the local health insurer. - Business Week

Drug companies are off manufacturing diseases to make up for our poor rushed choices and hollow lifestyles:

75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it. - Wired

Drug companies sponsor research

The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 96 percent of the industry-funded efficacy studies of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil in children were positive. That compares to just 63 percent of independently funded studies published in medical journals.
...
If one looks at just published clinical trials that contained a placebo-controlled arm, industry-funded clinicians reported the drugs were effective in 9 out of 10 cases. But among researchers not funded by industry, only 5 out of 9 reported positive results, which is surprisingly low given that other studies have shown that medical journals are biased toward publishing positive reports. By comparison, just 3 of 15 FDA reviews of pediatric antidepressant trials, many of which have not been published, were positive. - Center for Science in the Public Interest

Drug companies market directly to consumers via shady prescribe yourself websites.

And if all the above wasn't scary enough, consider the fraud baked right into the system:

The Justice Department has charged a former chief of the Food and Drug Administration with lying about his ownership of stock in companies regulated by the agency, according to media reports on Monday. The government accused Lester Crawford with falsely reporting that he had sold stock in companies while he continued holding shares in firms governed by FDA rules, the Associated Press reported. - MarketWatch

I recently posted that I thought almost any successful marketer could be defined as a spammer at some point in time. The main point was that to be successful, you have to be willing to live outside of other's boundaries, and be willing to accept arbitrary labels people will throw at you for doing so. But that is not to say that everyone will succeed ONLY by spamming. I got an email today from a guy who was down and out. I got a call yesterday from another guy who seemed to be in a similar market position. The biggest commonality I notice amongst people who seem like they want to do well but are not is that they either lack focus or passion. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to stay focused and avoid burnout.

WebmasterWorld recently had a thread about authority which has a number of great quotes in it.

whitenight:

So for most people, an authority site is built as a labor of love on the subject.
It's that "This is the site I wanted to find on the subject when I was looking for info, but couldn't" mindset.

MikeNoLastName, being a contrarian with the thread theme, stated:

So NO I do not agree that the internet is anymore (if it ever truly was) the great playing field leveler that many still believe it is. Perhaps, for a while you'll out-fox your bigger competitors by knowing more about SEO, at least until they wise up to the potential and hire a whole staff of SEOs, but in the end it will still be who is a better business organizer and who can afford to throw more marketing money in the ad buying pot, which is greatly encouraged by the likes of G & Y.

In some cases Mike is right, but Google just bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, which shows that the underdog can beat the giant. In most cases they probably do, as long as they are truly passionate about the topic. If a person lacks passion then they are typically far easier to steamroll over though. Why?

There are people spending $5K to $100K+ a day on arbitrage or spamming. If you try to compete just on numbers and are starting with a smaller chip stack you are fighting an uphill battle.

That same WMW thread linked back to an old Googleguy comment:

Of course, folks never know when we're going to adjust our scoring. It's pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.
...
Let me clarify that last post a smidge. You can try all sorts of stuff to "conserve PageRank," but that's no guarantee that something will work, or that it will work in the future.

If you lack passion then you may feel you have to get something before you give anything out. If you are passionate about a topic it is much easier to become a platform.

Not only is it easier for passionate people to become topical platforms, but if you are passionate

• you are more likely to want to understand what ideas are important (and why)

• you are more likely to see what ideas are spreading
• you are more likely to see why ideas are spreading

And as a net result of those you are more likely to be able to create ideas that will spread. When you start seeing things like unrequested quality links, mentions on high quality sites, or other people saying I wish I would have thought of that it means you are on the right path.

Once you learn how ideas spread in one market it is easy to apply that line of thinking to quickly analyze another market.

So how does the passion bit relate to the spamming stuff I mentioned at the top of the post?

• The more passionate you are the easier it is to create signs of quality and the more people will trust you.

• People trusting you means you will do well even if you temporarily fall out of graces with the search engines.
• The less effort you have to put in to build your backlink profile the more likely your site is to look like a natural part of the web.
• Many authority sites started out as hubs.
• Sites with more signs of quality can get away with doing a lot more shady things (or accidentally screwing up lots of things) while still being in the realm of normalcy.

Dave Taylor recently spoke about blogging at Affiliate Summit. Dave posted the video online here. It is a nice introduction to blogging for those who want to understand the benefits of blogging and how it can help improve their businesses.