Bloggasm

It’s getting to the point that when I see a picture lacking a caption of successful Web 2.0 website owners I can recognize and name the people in the picture the same way a person might be able to name celebrities just by face-recognition. I’m guessing this is a good thing.

The New York Times has managed to find three bloggers recently who have either suffered or died of heart attacks and concluded (in an open ended wishy washy way) that full-time blogging is so stressful that it’s deadly. It then goes on to quote TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington:

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

As someone who tries to exercise regularly, I don’t understand it when people who work from home say that their health has gotten worse because of it. The reason that I’m not able to exercise more often and eat healthier is because I often, as a newspaper reporter, work late into the night covering meetings, meaning on those nights I can’t work out and I end up eating fast food. If I were able to work from home, my health would improve, not worsen, because I could take time out of my day to cook, exercise, or go on a walk.

Arrington has several bloggers working for him. If he’s so worried about someone scooping him during the night (and btw, how many tech deals happen in the middle of the night? In the article it makes it sound that by not being up at 2 a.m. he’s going to miss out on some Microsoft merger), then why doesn’t he just hire someone to work a night shift? Some of the other tech blogs do this.

This is just one of the NY Times famous “trend setter” stories. Where they form a thesis, and then move forward with the research based on the assumption that the thesis is true, that it’s a trend.

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

So since Bloggasm’s creation I’ve written 799 posts. Now that I’ve been harshly downgraded in Google’s index for most posts, apparently the only thing I’ve produced of any worth in those two years is a post about nerdy pick-up lines and one about feminist porn. At least that’s the only thing I can conclude when I see that probably 95% of my Google traffic now goes to those two posts. Why did they remain at the top while practically everything else got hit? I mean, that post on Feminist porn is nearly two years old and I don’t even remember if anybody linked to it.

Sorry, I don’t mean to obsess over this. One bit of good news is that I read at least one SEO post today that predicted that Google is still in mid-dance and that the rankings will improve once again when it finishes updating. I guess I’ll give it until the end of April to judge whether this is permanent.

This is my first night getting home at a reasonable hour since Monday. I start nights like these with an overly ambitious to-do list and then it’s three hours later and I’m watching Youtube videos while eating oatmeal. So much for productivity.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. Romenesko gets the award for quote of the week: “”60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt told a lunch crowd in Seattle that he once told Dan Rather to sock Abraham Zapruder in the mouth, “grab his film” recording the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, make a copy, apologize to him and then give it back. Hewitt said he called Rather back to nix the plan.”

2. Hypocrite sighting. Fox promotes a new film that is sympathetic to the immigrant experience and in the preview makes several jabs at CNN’s Lou Dobbs for his anti-illegal immigrant stance. But given that Fox News is a right-wing breeding ground of immigrant hatred, I’m surprised that they didn’t take the opportunity to engage in some cross promotion.

3. Maxim publisher, Felix Dennis, told a journalist that he once killed a man. But after reading about a thousand words of the profile you begin to trust this assertion less and less. Every journalist interviews someone like this once in awhile; a man so hyped on his own amazingness that he’ll shoot out every bullshit claim imaginable to try to shock and awe.

4. Remember the Craigslist hoax that resulted in an entire house being illegally looted? Well, the police nabbed the perpetrators by tracing the IP addresses through Craigslist. The internet wins again.

5. Here’s the first person account of a citizen journalism news room. While some might read this and feel inspired about the future of journalism, I react with a feeling of “bleh.” To me, this account boils down to “convince a bunch of amateurs to write mediocre copy for free and let you profit off it.” Why can’t citizen journalism result in all those amateurs starting their own individual blogs and creating the content themselves?

6. Venture Capitalists are apparently distraught because they can’t find enough websites to dump millions of dollars into. For some reason they’re upset they don’t get to create a new tech bubble of over-valued Web 2.0 companies.

7. Given my latest problems with Google, I’ve been of course thinking a lot about web traffic lately. Given that the internet is a form of media that is more measurable than any other, it’s odd that those measurements are so unscientific. Maybe this sheds light on how idiotic Nielsen and subscription numbers really are for other forms of media.

Google is all about doling out authority.

Measuring the number of links coming into your website, it gives you authority on any number of subjects and keywords. So when your website suddenly gets downgraded within its index, it’s effectively taking your authority away. It’s coldly telling you that you’re not the expert that you previously were, that you’ve been toppled from the castle from which you had previously ruled.

As I wrote here previously, I noticed about a week ago that I had been harshly and inexplicably downgraded in Google’s index for several keywords, a move that effectively cut my traffic from the search engine by half. This, of course, upset me, because I had worked very diligently to write quality content –content that has been linked to by thousands of blogs and websites — only to have my authority whisked away in such a short span of time.

Over the next few days, I began exchanging emails with SEO expert and friend Stephen Ward. He determined that Google bots were able to still crawl my website and therefore theorized that I was experiencing something called “Google Dance,” which means that as Google updates its algorithm websites tend to get thrown through a loop. He advised me to sit still and eventually the dust would settle and my posts would rank well once again.

Well, Stephen emailed me today with confirmation that Google has completed a major algorithm change, and that I shouldn’t be surprised if this trend continues for a long time. For whatever reason, Google has likely thrown me into a hole that I will have to somehow slowly crawl out of.

So how harsh was this downgrading that I experienced? As I wrote to Stephen in an email:

For instance, let’s return to my name “Simon Owens.” There is no doubt in my mind that based off the thousands of links that bloggasm has gotten, many with the anchor text of my name, I am the most prominent Simon Owens on the internet, and of my different websites (my livejournal, an old livejournal account, and bloggasm), Bloggasm has seen by far the most links with that anchor text. Why then is it ranked third, when obviously anyone searching my name would most likely be looking for Bloggasm? Why is it ranked behind a livejournal account I haven’t updated regularly since 2005, one that probably hasn’t seen any fresh links in that amount of time? It’s absolutely silly.

Since Bloggasm was first created, I have had my posts linked to by over a dozen of Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs on the internet. I’ve made it onto the front page of both Digg and Reddit. I’ve been interviewed and featured in articles in The Washington Post, ABC News, and several other major news outlets. I’m currently ranked within the top 10,000 on Technorati.

And on top of all this, I produce a good bit of original content. I actually conduct original research and publish feature-length articles — all in my spare time.

But despite all this, despite the fact that I don’t engage in any questionable website practices (selling links, link exchanges, spamming other websites with links), Google has for some reason determined that many of my posts aren’t worthy of a decent ranking.

It’s absolutely maddening when you really think about it. All false modesty aside (and obviously I’m biased on this), Google’s new algorithm change has actually weakened its search results in regard to this website. There is absolutely no excuse for why Bloggasm should come up in third place, behind a livejournal that hasn’t been updated or linked to in years, when you Google my name.

So in an effort to spread whatever Google love this front page may still have, here are some links to original articles I wrote for this site — articles that gathered tons of links and should have plenty of authority but sadly don’t:

1. Youeditor: Anthology Builder and the self-selected table of contents

2. Tor Books to offer social networking, original short fiction and nonfiction online — this was one of the posts that were harshly downgraded, despite the fact that it was linked to on BoingBoing and dozens of other websites.

3. The rise of the genre ezine: Will it ever find a profitable model?

4. Is journalist burnout on the rise? — this article got harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by Romenesko and dozens of other websites.

5. Readership of major liberal blogs declined in 2007 while conservative blog readership increased — this post was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by some of the most popular blogs on the internet, including Andrew Sullivan, Think Progress, Little Green Footballs, Crooks and Liars, Newsbustors, Salon.com. Are you getting the point yet how fucking stupid this algorithm shift has been?

6. The Dawkins Effect: How The God Delusion mainstreamed atheism — this one was harshly downgraded even though it was linked to by at least two A-list blogs and dozens of smaller ones.

7. Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?

8. The Sideways offensive: Will Merlot sales ever recover?

9. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals — this one doesn’t even come up first if you google the words “Bloggasm” and “million writers award” in the search field. Pathetic.

10. When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

11. The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales — this one, like all the others, was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it got linked to by dozens of sites and at least two A list blogs.

Well there you have it. Thanks a lot Google for rewarding my hours of hard work and thousands of links with the ranking I deserve.

I actually got a chance today to comb through my RSS feeds at length, so for once you might find some of these links to not be a week out of date. Either way, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. I’ve long said that the reporting on the demise of the newspaper industry rarely contains any real context because it tends to ignore the journalism industry as a whole. Though newspapers are laying off reporters, we’re seeing an increase in the number of journalists who either blog full-time or write for other online venues for a living. Gawker has published a chart of newspaper revenue over the last few decades and as you’ll see it adds even more context to the equation. Chris Anderson explains the chart at length.

2. Here is a brilliant account of the tension and parasitic relationship that website owners have with Google. Considering I’m experiencing my own falling out period with Google right now, the piece rang especially true for me. I’ll probably have a longer post on this later.

3. I’ve noticed that hard-core Digg users have formed odd, cyclical alliances with certain political figures or themes. At first, you couldn’t visit the social bookmarking site without coming across a pro- Ron Paul story. Then it was nonstop pro- Obama articles. Now, on a slightly related and perhaps more bizarre note, we’re seeing intense anti-Clinton articles making it to the front page. Here is a good example. How do these trends begin, and why do they suddenly end for a new tide of political stories?

4. I don’t find Maureen Dowd funny at all, but this post explaining her writing sure made me laugh.

5. It’s kind of neat when every now and then we get to see a Gawker Media blogger go and bite the hand that feeds him by attacking his own boss on the blog. You don’t see things like that in traditional media outlets. Look here to see a Valleywag contributor complain and viciously attack his boss for a new round of pay cuts.

6. There have been a number of news stories showing that CNN has been winning the ratings game against Fox News, something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. I have a love/hate relationship with cable news, but when I do tune in I usually stick with MSNBC.

7. A South Carolina senator is proposing a tax surcharge on purchased pornography, saying that the money should go toward managing sex offenders. Because we all know the completely made up connections between looking at porn and going on to become a sex offender.