Ken Nelson

No, just good at and focused at what they do.

Digg claims changes in the Google indexing rankings algorithm were responsible for less traffic to its site:

According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.

It believe it could happen. Search on Google rankings and you will find hundreds of people baffled and their businesses in limbo because they fell off the front page of Google search terms they care about.

If Google stopped feeding people to my company’s site, we would not die, but it would hurt… bad.

That’s why I hope Bing gets more success.  Every big market needs at least two major players bashing each other competitively.

I wouldn’t call Google a monopoly… users do have a choice as to how they search. But in practical terms, as Google goes, so goes hundreds of thousands of businesses depending on it for sales opportunities.

 
Source: SDNN

Adobe and Apple scrap over Apple banning Adobe Flash from the iPad.  Apple claims “technical reasons” but really they just want to control the desktop.  Adobe claims “access to all content” but they just want to control the desktop.

I’m sympathetic to Adobe’s point however.  The iPad is useful to me as a Kindle book reader and as a portable web browser.  A significant percent of  websites present their content with Flash.  So I regularly hit sites on the iPad that don’t behave or look right. Apple’s decision reduces the utility of their device to me, and billions, of people.

I have an iPad, but I’m pretty sure it will be relegated to the unused heap once DroidPad comes along.

I’m pretty sure Apple will rescind this decision after market forces smack them upside their smug turtleneck wearing heads.

Via Ace

Just click on the Earth tab in Google Maps and many of the cool features found in Google Earth will appear, without you having to download the Google Earth app.

For instance, here is the Pima Pistol Range, near Tuscon, where I will be shooting this weekend.

Microsoft’s VP of “Trusted Computing” wants a broad Internet tax to pay for Internet related security costs.

Well Mr. VP…. this is so stupid as to defy words. But I’ll try…

Who gets the money? Do I get it for that firewall I just put in?  Or is  this just to fund a super cyber security bureaucracy that won’t help anything but will want budget increases?  Is Microsoft taxed extra for having released IE 6?

Oh hell, I give up. It is a dumb idea, proposed at the worst possible time.

I’ve a love hate relationship with Google. Today I love them. This isn’t my note, just something found on the Internet. But it is this sort of small, obvious even, attention to helping the user that makes me love Google today.

Two reasons mainly… they try very hard and they adapt constantly.

That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious. Early on, Google’s algorithm gave special consideration to the title on a Web page — clearly an important signal for determining relevance. Another key technique exploited anchor text, the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another. As a result, “when you did a search, the right page would come up, even if the page didn’t include the actual words you were searching for,” says Scott Hassan, an early Google architect who worked with Page and Brin at Stanford. “That was pretty cool.” Later signals included attributes like freshness (for certain queries, pages created more recently may be more valuable than older ones) and location (Google knows the rough geographic coordinates of searchers and favors local results). The search engine currently uses more than 200 signals to help rank its results

The article was fascinating to this Computer Scientist and I bet you non-technical Google users will find how they do what they do pretty interesting too.

Meet Google Buzz:

Buzz integrates Twitter, and Facebook type functionality into Gmail.  With 176 million Gmail users, that makes Buzz potentially a big player in the social web.

Will it catch on?  I don’t know. Maybe. Facebook e-mail sucks, mainly because it sucks, and also because it can’t reach outside Facebook.

I’m on Facebook but I only check it when somebody tells me (verbally or by e-mail), I’m just not that social I guess.  So I guess I’ll get “Buzz” by being on Gmail, but I doubt I’ll use it.

Kim Kardashian, famous for being famous, makes $10K a day selling one commercial twitter posting:

The screencap above was from a slide show at Advertising Age about current rates in big-time online marketing.

The highest CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) was $364 at the very niche National Journal “Expert Blog” on Energy and the Environment.

The side opposite St. George, UT would be very soggy:

http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html

(But I can save you the trouble… if you are in the US, the opposite side of the earth is wet).

Different approaches, similar results

CheapTalk wondered if sniping or squatting worked better on EBay.  When you snipe, you don’t bid until the last seconds. Squatting, conversely, has you bid your full value at the start of the auction – proclaiming  “I want this”.

Their relatively small tests found the results equal:

We found that these two effects almost exactly canceled each other out for auctions of DVDs.  We expect that this would be true for similar objects that are homogeneous and sold in many simultaneous auctions.  So the next time you are bidding in such an auction, don’t think too hard and just bid your value.

In other words, sniping requires work, squatting doesn’t and with equal results, why work harder?

As appropriate as “sniping” would be on GunBroker.com, squatting worked much better for me there.

 
Node graph of pesky internet

ClimateGate is even more popular than “Tiger Woods” on the internet, ensuring it is well known in spite of a dearth of media coverage:

Updating the comparisons, “Climategate” has 32,000,000 google hits as compared to 4,080 news stories (Google), while “Tiger Woods” has 29,500,000 google hits with 54,018 news stories (Google). Although Tiger has over 10 times as many news stories, Climategate (remarkably) has more google hits than Tiger Woods (and many other famous search items e.g. Britney Spears, NFL, NBA or for that matter “climate”).

And… Al Gore can lie and say the ClimateGate e-mails are all older than 10 years ago but… the Internet he invented knows:

And there are dozens to hundreds more within the last month, the last year, and the last 10 years.

Search for yourself here: http://eastangliaemails.com

Jeeez!! Gore. What a vacuous nimrod, and people pay to listen to him.

You can run, but you can’t hide!

I see movies a lot when I travel. Usually I’ll be at a sales call and have an afternoon to kill after, so I’ll see a flick.  Generally I use http://movies.yahoo.com to scope out times and also to decide if I want to see the flick.

Now comes DoubleFeature.com which will line up TWO movies for you to see.

For instance, my son and I travel to Ft. Benning, GA in November for a shooting camp. While he shoots , I can see Invention of Lying and then Zombieland.

I might even buy a 2nd ticket!