Bloggasm

So you know Mark Cuban? The billionaire who is being considered to join the Yahoo board?

Well he just came out with the fucking dumbest grand idea on how Yahoo can beat Google: Pay the most popular sites on the internet $1 million each to remove themselves from the Google index.

So what happens after Google just decides to get rid of “no-follow” tags and no longer gives you a choice whether to be indexed? There goes $1 billion! And do you really think that the New York Times and CNN will give up their biggest traffic source for a lousy $1 million, giving their competitors a huge edge?

Everyone working at Yahoo probably has palm prints on their foreheads after reading Cuban’s post and watching their future careers go down the drain.

So I was hoping to have a new feature article published by today but unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish it last night. So it looks like it won’t be posted until Monday. In the meantime, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. Ever wonder what domain names Google has purchased? It’s always interesting to get hold of one of these lists because sometimes it gives you some insight into future plans for an online company. Well, now we have such a list. I shudder to think what kind of product Google Poo will be.

2. Popular science fiction writer John Scalzi posted a short story online about a week ago and based it on a Radiohead-like honor system for payment. At the end of the week, he posted how much money has been donated. It comes out to about 5.9 cents per word, which isn’t a bad rate for short fiction.

3. Media Shift has an interview with a creator of the Smoking Gun. What’s interesting is the site pulls in so many readers with only three staff members and a very simple Web 1.0 mindset. They’re only just now considering adding blogs to the site.

4. Conde Naste, which mainly focuses on magazine publications, is vastly expanding its online presence. They recently acquired some travel blogs and reportedly are poised to buy up more blogs in the future.

Why doesn’t Google Blog Search have keyword advertising next to its search results? Aren’t they missing out on a lot of money by not doing so?

It wasn’t long after Google acquired the advertising company DoubleClick for over $3 billion that it announced that it would be laying off 300 DoubleClick employees.

Now we learn that shortly before laying them off, Google required all DoubleClick employees to sign non-compete contracts, meaning that after leaving the company they couldn’t work for a competitor for a full year.

I really despise non-compete contracts for lower-level employees. If you’re the owner of a company and you get bought out and accept an offer, then I completely agree that the company buying out should have you sign such a contract. But forcing an employee who had no say whatsoever in the buyout process, an employee who has no financial stake in the company (other than the fact that it supplies his pay checks) and didn’t benefit from the buyout at all, to sign one of these contracts? I understand why it’s done but I also think it should be tough shit on the buyer’s part.

With the decline of the newspaper industry I think this is going to become a real problem. Just as those laid off DoubleClick employees won’t be able to take a job within the industry for at least a year, these newspaper reporters are getting screwed out of making legitimate career moves just because their publishers jumped ship.

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.

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.