jwesley

TrustRank is built on the whole site, so every quality link you get into your blog will make your entire domain more trusted. This is why you see massive sites like Amazon and Wikipedia ranking for everything.

You would probably be better off putting the blog in a subdirectory if it's practical. Google used to count subdomains as entirely different sites, and although they have now moved to treating them more like subfolders, you'll still probably help the root domain more from a subdirectory.

I think that's what the 30 something business guys who decided on the name would say.

"There will be no addtional features and functionality for users, this upgrade will be strictly to signal intent to the community."

So basically, all you get for your $20 a month is a badge saying that you're cooler than people who didn't pay. And for your premium membership, you still get the same crap service that freeloaders get.

Are people really that stupid? Asking people to pay something for nothing reeks of arrogance. I'm starting to think Frind got lucky with PoF.

Good assessment of this article. Although I do agree that Twitter search is being overhyped right now. Big time. It's basically the only thing left to hype so TechCrunch et al are milking it for all it's worth.

Twitter search is useful as an opinion poll or for updates on breaking news, but only so much depth and value can fit into 140 characters. More than anything, I think Twitter thrives off vanity and narcissism. It's millions of people saying "look at me" and it's even easier to main and establish popularity than a blog.

Google is easy to pronounce and does not have any slang acronyms. I wonder if they chose omgpop because lolgamez was already taken.

What makes it a good name? Personally I think its pretty terrible. Does not mean much of anything, makes me think of a celebrity blog or something. The domain is hard to pronounce. If you don't use the OMG acronym its completely meaningless. Always amazes me when companies with millions in funding put their sites on such crap domains.

I wish them luck, but I don't think selling ads on a weather site will be easy, especially without a massive amount of traffic. What types of ads will be relevant? Those for umbrellas? Maybe products for storm chasers or meteorologists? These types of businesses are probably not in the habit of buying internet ads, and if they give it a shot, it likely won't convert.

Looking at other weather websites, the ads are generic and untargeted. Basically massive brand campaigns for prescription drugs, insurance, etc. Weather is likely a poor monetizing niche and these advertisers buy massive amounts of remnant inventory.

Yea, I posted this mainly because it shows how desperate the conservatives are to smear Obama. Blaming the economic issues on him is completely ridiculous, yet here we have the WSJ, formerly a highly credible business publication, posting an editorial that claims Obama is destroying the economy.

Conservatives view this crisis as a chance to get back in power, and they will do what they can to ensure Obama fails. Listen to Rush Limbaugh's recent speech to get an idea of how they think. It is truly sick.

If that's true, why would any publisher not discount their work by 30%? Does Amazon control the discounts?

Only 35% rev share for the publisher seems extremely low to me.

Definitely seems interesting, though as staunch said, the barrier to installing a new plugin is significant.

I wonder how Google feels about the widgets covering up the Adwords ads in the right column. Enough people start using it and that could impact their revenue. Is there even anything they could do about it? Maybe they would acquire the company, or just clone the best advances in search interface for themselves.

I also wonder if some of the widgets might be redundant. Wikipedia and YouTube, for example, are already heavily represented in search results. In the screenshot TC posted a few results are duplicated.

Unless they have a contract, they are at-will employees, meaning you can fire them or reduce their salary at will. On the other side, they can quit at will as well.

The problem is that finance is not really an engineering problem. Issues arise because the techniques used to distribute risk change the market value of the underlying assets. This was a major cause of the MBS issue. Financial engineering allowed risk from MBS's to be more easily distributed. This increased the demand for these securities, which increased their value. The price of the assets increased, even though the underlying value of the assets was exactly the same. Much of the value created by financial engineering is an illusion.

Very good collection, but wouldn't the value of this material have been much higher before the financial crisis? It seems like the theories and methods applied in these texts played a large part in the downfall of the financial system. Mathematical models != financial markets. A lot of good math and statistics for people interested in those areas, but it will probably be decades until "financial engineering" loses the stigma of failure.

This is an idea that's given rise to many conspiracy theories about the politicizing of science, many of which make a lot of sense when you look at them objectively. I recommend reading Michael Crichton's essay on second hand smoking and some of the content on Green Agenda to get some background information:

http://veritasvincitprolibertate.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/mi... http://www.green-agenda.com/

It's scary to think that powerful people might justify using science as a political tool, just because they believe the ends justify the means. If you're willing to manipulate the truth for what you perceive is good, it opens the door for many dystopian scenarios.

Newsletters are also the best way to get visitors to return to your site. Far superior to RSS. It's the difference between being one of dozens or hundreds of feeds in a reader and reaching into a person's inbox. Jakob Nielsen wrote an Alert Box about this.

Most web communities are politically polarized in one way or the other. If you do not like the political stories, Reddit allows you to unsubscribe from the politics sub-Reddit. Or just don't visit the site.

Was it an informational product the reveals the secret to getting $10,000 in Government Grants in ONLY 2 WEEKS!!!

Digg is such a mess. The 1% of users who control the content and make up 50% of pageviews are completely at odds with where the owners want to take the site. There is so much payola going on behind the scenes. Not just on Digg, but Reddit, StumbleUpon, and any other social site that sends traffic. I'm talking armies of Indians and Eastern Europeans who do nothing all day but exchange votes and push stories. Eventually, they might just have to ban them all and deal with the huge drop in traffic and engagement that would result.

This will probably not be a popular opinion, but I think that Google must eventually become public property. Once their search share approaches 100%, they will have a strangle hold on the flow of information. This is too much power for any profit-driven entity to have. Think of what you do when you have a question about basically anything? You go to Google. If the ethics of the engine become even slightly compromised it could be disastrous for society.

I'm not saying this is an issue now, but as corporations grow, they are constantly pressured to increase earnings. Over time, they morph into institutions that no longer resemble their origins. It's tough for us to imagine the Google we all know and love becoming a corrupt, blood sucking corporation, but what if they never discover a new Golden Goose? There will be extreme pressure to draw more profits from search in any way possible.

Of course there are tremendous issues with putting Google under government control. The government is quite possibly an even less trustworthy entity. But unless a major competitor emerges in the next decade, something big will happen on this front.

This is what they get for trying to mix advertising with user generated content. There are too many conflicts of interest between Yelp, advertisers, and anonymous users. Who would buy an ad for a page that can be easily defaced? No one who isn't promised censorship. It's a shame because Yelp is a great service. Maybe they could become more like a search engine, with links direct to vendor sites and user reviews in a separate section on Yelp. Then ads could go direct to business sites, eliminating the bad review issues.

The remarkable thing is that this story isn't really all that unbelievable or surprising. Those lawyers, always add value...

Agreed. It was interesting to see original Twitter sketch, but it provides about as much insight into the company and as the first mock up of the Google homepage would about them.

This is a tough question because Google does have by far the best search product. The problems arise when they have such a dominant market position that they control virtually all search traffic. At that point, they can do anything they want to publishers because they don't have any recourse. The only option is to beg for Google's favor.

This is a bad thing, because it allows Google to leech the value out of search traffic that is created by publishers. Jakob Nielsen wrote an article explaining this:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

The web gets hurt when Google sucks so much value out of search traffic that publishers don't have the economic incentive to keep adding value to the web.

Google could siphon off traffic by adding more ads, integrating direct lead generation forms, or funneling visitors toward Google products. For example, take a look at the search results examined in this blog post:

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-stops-showing-search-resul...

Add rel="nofollow" to the widget links and I'll believe your goal is to help people and not game the search results like everyone else. There is nothing wrong with optimizing for search traffic. Competition is all well and good. But your site is nothing more than an ad-laden Wikipedia clone with a Yahoo Answers clone tacked on. Actually, a much better business model than most startups...

I was about to leave a comment about how this isn't really news. It feels like every search market share update for the past few years has been the same - Google gains, everyone else loses or stands still.

I love Google's search product, but this trend is deeply troubling. Websites live off of search visitors, and you wonder as the Google monopoly grows stronger and they feel the pressure to increase quarterly earnings, how they might try to siphon off even more of the search traffic for their own profit. With no other alternatives, it could mean bad things for the web.

Another explanation might be an increase in Twitter spam. I can only speak for myself, but I've been getting tons a spammy followers over the past couple weeks. You'd think that the most popular accounts (like the ones highlighted in the article) would see the highest levels of spam, thus the sharp increase in new followers. I'm sure the suggested followers feature Ev mentioned plays a part as well.

The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything thing they do is for the benefit of the users. It's a straight SEO play, along the lines of About.com. Everything they do is to increase Mahalo's search traffic! Just look at the widget mentioned in that article. Does anyone really want that set of links on their blog? Does it really help anyone? And all of Jason's friends on the blog circuit still give Mahalo good press...

Now if all the Web 2.0 blogs can die along with it we can get some decent tech coverage again.