Need More Data...

Books:
Open Content Alliance - Yahoo! fights Google on book front. Gary has commentary from the founder of Project Gutenburg. And there is Wikibooks. I have not read any of them, but it sure takes a ton of effort to write a book.

As more and more people realize how easy it is to publish Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

And it was all Yellow...
Consolidation on the yellow pages front. R.H. Donnelley to buy Dex media for 4.2 billion. How does a company worth 2 billion buy another company for 4.2 billion and assume 5.3 billion of their debt as well? They have to be getting squeezed by search, and it is only going to get worse ahead.

Philadelphia Chooses Earthlink for City Wi-Fi Service

Free WiFi equals targeted ads and user data. Philadelphia chose Earthlink [sub req], a company which recently called Google's free Wi-Fi in San Francisco unsustainable. From the Philadelphia article:

In the Philadelphia program, the high-speed service will be available for free in parks and other public places. To get wireless broadband at home, low-income families in the city will be charged $10 a month, while all other households will be charged $20 a month.

Interesting to see the web causing a real world landgrab.

Eventually I predict that these services will not only be wide spread & free, but that web service providers will be willing to pay large cities for the privilege of being able to be their exclusive Wi-Fi partner. It all ends up as a game of margins. With Google's huge advertiser base and cheap computer cycles I wouldn't be placing too many bets elsewhere.

On This Day in Interweb

I just wanted to use InterWeb in a title, even though some of this stuff is not from today :)

first proposal via search
ThreadWatch turns 1
SEO article goes viral. surely that will help Rands rank :)
RIAA gets sued
Wikipedia eats Google. I think their are a few pieces missing there, but in general, as Mike Grehan long ago said the rich do get richer.
Van Morisson - the obligated album.
38,514 hours of wiretapping errors. How absurd is that?
Google to partner with Sun today. Sun is up over a billion dollars on market speculation.
tsuji-giri: a Japanese word from samurai days meaning, "to try out a new sword on a passer-by". The Meaning of Tingo is probably a cool way to help come up with domain names.
Wired on Tim O'Reilly. Tim also recently wrote on What is Web 2.0

It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.
Anatomy of a Photograph - The sin of omission

Google Duplicate Content Filter

~~Captain~~ Caveman posts on Google's duplicate content filters.

Interesting tactic by Google. If too many pages on the same site trip a duplicate content filter Google does not just filter through to find the best result, sometimes they filter out ALL the pages from that site.

This creates an added opportunity cost to creating keyword driftnets & deep databases of near identical useless information. One page left in the results = no big deal. Zero pages = big deal.

Not only would this type of filter whack junk empty directories, thematic screen scraper sites, and cookie cutter affiliate sites, but it could also hit regular merchant sites which had little unique information on each page.

On commercial searches many merchants will be left in the cold & the SERPs will be heavily biased toward unique content & information dense websites.

If your site was filtered there is always AdWords. And if there are few commercial sites in the organic results then the AdWords CTR goes up. Everyone is happy, except the commercial webmaster sitting in the cold.

Yet another example of Google trying to nullify SEO techniques that work amazingly well in it's competitors results. I wonder what percent of SEOs are making different sites targeted at different engines algorithms.

I have to be somewhat careful with watching some of these types of duplicate content filters, because I have a mini salesletter on many pages of this site, and this site could get whacked by one of these algorithms. If it does changes will occur. Perhaps using PHP to render text as an image or some other similar technique.

The Value of Trust in Social Networks:

On any social network trust can be leveraged for profit. Sounds obvious, but when you think of playing many networks as a game of margins sometimes that means working on zero or small margins until you create a profile you can leverage.

eBay:
A friend of mine buys and sells stuff on eBay, keeping the stuff he really likes, and selling back the stuff that was not as good as he would have desired. The stuff he did not like frequently sells for more than he paid for it because he posts in a clear and honest manner and leverages his reputation.

Some people go one step further and also drive traffic to third party networks for monetization. Others start opening bidding price at way more than an item is worth just to use eBay for cheap exposure to targeted traffic streams.

Other Auction Sites:
As you go on the smaller networks you go into an area of greater risk, since a seller being blackballed from a small auction site would not hurt them as much as a blackball from eBay would.

Sometimes the variety of networks create arbitrage opportunities. In the past I bought some groups of a half dozen or so exceptionally old cheap baseball cards for a few dollars and then pieced them out and resold them on eBay for a decent profit. It was not uncommon for people to pay $10 to $15 for an individual card that was part of a $2 to $4 group.

Amazon:
Amazon has a ratings and review system, just like eBay. Sometimes people will not be interested in buying from you unless you have a profile built up.

As a writer you can make a number of book sales by making sure you review every competing book on the market. After you review enough other books people will trust you more when you review friends books in exchange for friends reviewing your books.

Some people also mention their books in so you want to... lists, even if their book is not on Amazon.com. Originally unknowingly to me, someone else did this for me, and I know it caused at least one ebook sale.

Wikipedia & Spam:
Recently I created a meta search engine and mentioned it on WikiPedia. Was my mention WikiSpam? Maybe, maybe not.

If I had a long established profile with tons of submissions I am sure it would not have been considered WikiSpam. As it sits now, in spite of coverage from SEW, someone at Wikipedia thinks Myriad Search does not have any notability.

Eventually I bet some SEO companies will heavily focus on creative ways of using the Wikipedia for SEO. There may eventually be a company that exclusively works on editing the WikiPedia.

If you can't fit direct links to your site into the guide some people will go so far as to build indirect linkage data, working in articles from well known media sources. For example, I probably could not add a link to SEO Book to the WikiPedia, but I could create a linkable thesis that made linkage more likely, or link from the Wikipedia into an article from the WSJ about an SEO company suing me on some Wikipedia page covering blogging & free speech.

Websites:
Search engines trust sites more as they age. They also trust sites with more quality link popularity as it ages. That sounds like it makes sense without saying, but if you fail to give people things to talk about then slowly you will lose market share to people who do.

Off the start even if you are doing a good job few people are going to see it. As your site exists longer there are going to be more and more ways for people to randomly stumble upon your website.

Personal Branding:
A few years ago would there have been anyone interested or any reason for Andrew Johnson to interview me? Would there have been any reason for others to mention that interview? No way. In the same way algorithms learn to trust you so do people.

After people become exceptionally notable some people will even link in to their reviews of other products (or others reviewing your product).

I Was Here First, etc:
In the Navy one of the guys who was a couple years ahead of me hated me because I did not give him the respect he felt he deserved (just for coming a couple years before me). Sure enough, in spite of him trying to hold me back, I still qualified faster than anyone in my division.

Some people who are more successful are there only because they came first. If you can think of different & better ways to build trust you can quickly pass them up. Look how quickly Threadwatch has taken off. I think many of the other blogs are better because Nick's raises the bar.

Niche:
It is not to say that anyone could walk in and just become synonymous with search the way Danny Sullivan is or Google is, but within every market there are niches that are going to be much easier to do well in.

Richard Splain & Potential Healthcare Scam? Traffic Power Story Continues to Unfold...

Well I have not verified all this data, but it sure does not sound good...

here is an article on MSNBC, claiming Richard Splain was involved in healthcare insurance scams & Wholesale RX scams:

Take a look at Nevada Health Care Network now.

The "for lease" sign in the window tells most of the story. The empty office behind it tells the rest.

"I could not locate the company. The phones were disconnected."

"After everything was closed down, we were still getting ripped off. Our account, our credit card, was being looted for the monthly fees.

There is also a KVBC news video on this page, and this article covers Wholesale RX:

News 3's Darcy Spears first exposed a local company called Wholesale RX that sells low cost prescriptions from other countries. Problem is, the drugs are not approved in the US, so they're illegal and could be dangerous. Since the investigation, the FDA has started to crack down on these companies.

And this site aims to connect the same person to Traffic Power & home buying scams.

PLEASE follow this guy Splain! HE IS A CROOK! He burned my wife and I in 2001 in a "we buy houses" scam. We got sued by the bank and had to file BK!! He also has ties to an Intenet Placement Company on Jones formerly called Traffic Power. I think called First Place. He needs prosecuted. I'd help!

The same name, Richard Splain, is also listed in a customer complaint email on Traffic Power Sucks:

I had even talked with Rich Splain one of the owners of TP who refused to help me get the service promised. I feel I was ripped off and deserve a refund like everyone else who was cheated by TP.

Wonder how many loose ends are still left untied? I doubt Richard tries suing MSNBC anytime soon, eh...

I know, I know, there might be multiple Richard Splain's, but this SEC info page lists him next to Matthew Marlon:

Xtreme Webworks has retained the Law Firm of Gordon & Silver, Las Vegas, Nevada to represent its interest in the pending litigation against former employees and defendants, Matthew Marlon and Richard Splain.

This document on Edgar Online also connects Richard Splain to Xtreme Webworks.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Not too long ago the Wall Street Journal also profiled the same Matthew Marlon & his street name:

Mr. Marlon, 61 years old, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy-court protection in 1996. In 1997, Mr. Marlon was indicted on charges of conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, related to possession of a chemical used to make methamphetamine, and was sentenced to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement. The court record for his drug offense said he also had an alias, "Jimmy Ray Houts."

In case anyone is wondering why I care about this information, Traffic Power is a company that cold called me to promote a junky website that I am embarased to own. They later sent me a C&D claiming over a million dollars in damages, and then sent me a lawsuit. In spite of hiring a lawyer and personally talking to their lawyer I still have no idea of any specifics in why the lawsuit occured - other than them thinking they could push me around.

I spoke to one of their former employees last weekend, and need to talk to my lawyer about it first, but I may soon interview him. Stay tuned!

Inefficient Markets...

Andrew Goodman on why so much more offline stuff could be sold online, and better. Likely an area Google will be a big player in.

Meanwhile AdBrite adds site tagging, but they should have made an about page or something...give people something to link at & give them a story to tell...why is tagging important, how will the publishers and advertisers earn more, etc.

Although Google is making ad buying easier they still do not let most people tag their sites, so my poor friend Mike is stuck serving worthless Pokemon AdSense ads on his video card site.

As more ad formats appear, and contextual advertising comes in many forms, what competing ads will Google allow? The answer so far is that they are unsure, but just like the limits with search spam, they don't want to approve anything too broadly & too clearly, especially considering that for some people those competing networks may have a greater payout.

For the mass market contextual ad market to be efficient it needs to have automated ways to understand content, and accept user data from advertisers and publishers to override targeting errors to help the machine learn relevancy.

There will remain a bunch of niche ad providers to serve people who for one reason or another do not want to work with one of the major players, but the feature lists continue to improve as they fight for publishers and ad dollars and make more efficient markets.

Google Wi-Fi in San Francisco?

SF Gate has an article about Google proposing to offer free Wifi to SF. The interesting bits:

Sacca said that Google, which makes virtually all its money from online advertising, had yet to determine whether it would include ads in the service. But Google said it would make its Wi-Fi network available for a fee to companies that want to offer paid Internet services. Sacca said there were no plans to share any revenue with the city.

Of course there will be ads...they will promote Google out of the deal...and ads are all that drive their business model :)

SBC thinks the city is already fairly well covered:

SBC spokesman John Britton said his company encourages competition but believes that governments should seek greater investment from private companies to increase broadband service. He said San Francisco already was served by SBC and enjoyed more than 400 free Wi-Fi hotspots, more than any other city in the country.

Earthlink does not like the Google idea:

"We've looked into free service, and we haven't found a model where free works," said Berryman. "At some point free becomes less sustainable because there's no way to upgrade service and the networks when no one's paying for it."

No surprise Google's competitors think Google doing free Wi-Fi is both unnecissary and unsustainable. Of course it's competitors do not have the largest database of human intentions and the largest ad network in the world.

Some think San Francisco is a bad test city because of it's rough terrain, but that - along with it being a tech culture mecca - is probably a good reason to use it as a test city. If you can get it to work there it should be no problem to get it to work elsewhere.

Others also made bids on the project, but Google is getting the press. How many business models Google kills before they are done achieving their goal? How far will public officials let Google control the information streams when other companies worth a few hundred billion dollars may go under if Google does everything they want?

Whether or not you like Google, you have to admit that in many fields they raise the bar on the competition, but I don't think it is good for anyone if one company is too dominant in the web - and Google seems to be making ALL the right moves thusfar.