Bloggasm

If I wanted to open a link in a new tab, I would right click on it and do so. Please don’t set the page so every time I click on a link it opens a new window.

Thanks,
Simon

Ps. Is there a way to override this? Also, I noticed that sometimes when I click on links at Digg it opens the page in a new window and other times it doesn’t. What am I missing here?

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.

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.

It is not uncommon for pundits to try and develop scientific ways of measuring bias in the media. These methods, of course, are usually rife with logical leaps and aren’t really scientific at all.

But today I stumbled upon an article published in a mainstream news source that used a particularly stupid methodology of detecting a media slant. John R. Lott, Jr, writing at FOXNews.com, offered this as proof that the media only reported on bad economic news when there was a Republican president in office:

A Google search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,610. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 50,763. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 7,310 news stories.

Now Lott gives us very little information on how these Google searches were conducted (the few links he provides to the supposed searches are complete gibberish), but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the internet can immediately spot the inanity of such figures.

I mean, c’mon. He counted the number of news sources in 2000 and compared them to 2007? Do you have any idea how many blogs and websites are currently indexed in Google News?? Of course there are 50 times the number of “news stories” that use those keywords today; it’s because there are thousands more websites that exist today (it’s not very difficult to get a blog listed in Google News) that were non-existent in 2000.

Unless there is some way that he conducted his Google search that only examined the exact same news sources, FOXNews.com should publish a correction with that story, since it is using incredibly bogus numbers to prove a point.

UPDATE: I figured out exactly how his bogus Google searches were done because I was able to reproduce the figures above perfectly. Basically he ran those search terms through Google News and clicked on “past month” for one of the searches and then on the second search clicked on “other dates” and typed in 7/2000 and 9/2000. This means that the numbers he used are complete and utter BS. Fox News needs to run a correction.

Man, this is too good. PZ Myers, science blogger for Pharyngula, tried to go to a screening for the documentary narrated by creationist-flack Ben Stein, Expelled. It’s a film that makes arguments in favor of the pseudo-science known as Intelligent Design.

Anyway, Myers was quickly spotted in line by one of the filmmakers and told by a policeman that he had to leave the premises immediately or get arrested.

But the most ironic thing about the whole incident? HE WAS STANDING NEXT TO RICHARD DAWKINS, WHO WALKED FREELY INTO THE FILM.

Read the entire account over here.

Every now and then Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald will find an article published by a major news source that is so littered with factual errors and blatant propaganda that I actually get depressed when reading his post tearing it apart. I got that depressing feeling today when I read his post on a Time Magazine article that tried to argue that Americans really don’t care if the government doesn’t use warrants when spying on them. This was a news article, not a column.

Can anyone tell me why the hell Hillary Clinton’s campaign decided to set the press corps up in a men’s bathroom in a Texas building? And then she complains about how the press treats her? Jesus.

As a commenter in one blog put it: “Do you think this is a sign the Clinton campaign is on its last legs? Kinda of a humorous “eff off” to the press as they go down in flames?”

UPDATE: Well, it must be the day for bizarre candidate/press relationships. I had heard that John McCain was hosting a barbecue at his ranch for his press corps, but it wasn’t until just now that I read an actual first-person account of the whole affair.

The campaign booked the senator’s aides and reporters into one of the only big hotels in town: the Enchantment Resort, a five-star hotel nestled so far back in the picturesque red rock canyons of Sedona that most in the group found that their cell phones were out of range. To cope with the stress of being incommunicado, people booked massages at the hotel spa and went on hikes, including one on which an instructor sought to help participants unblock their “inner chi.” “Let me tell you, I’ve got a lot of chi today,” joked Steve Duprey, a close friend of McCain’s from New Hampshire who has been traveling with the campaign. Others played golf, went swimming or simply explored the hotel compound. “I haven’t walked this much in eight months,” one campaign regular confessed. Perhaps this scene gives some insight into why McCain jokingly refers to the media as his base.

This is one of those cases where a news article makes satirists redundant.