The article corroborates a theory I’ve had for quite a while now – that the reason people will get pissed off hearing that a local government employee took a two hour lunch (and all the money that this represents to them in tax dollars) will get top billing on the news and spur fantastic public outrage, but the notion of us coming up on a trillion-with-a-T dollars spent in Iraq barely works people up at all - is because of this very thing.

The problem is frame of reference and context. As numbers get larger, they get harder to understand and therefore are less grokable by the average Joe and is why, to the thesis of the article, that Bill Gates makes an excellent, if unlikely, philanthropist.

But I hypothesize another derivative: it is this very “Large Number” understanding that makes the BH community so different. Really smart geeks understand the notion of a million websites, with a couple hundred thousand pages of just as many keyword phrase - and the systems and techniques for managing it all - as effortlessly as some people walk their dog. It is this very same principal that makes the war between the Googlites and the AdSenseSlammers both fasncinating and utterly incomprehensible to the normal web user.

An excellent read and a good gear turner, it can be found here:

Wired Geeks Article

MORE than 140 sex offenders convicted in New Jersey had profiles on the networking web site MySpace, the state’s attorney general has revealed.

New Jersey is among several states leading the way in working with MySpace to curb online sexual predators.

Of the 141 sex offenders identified as having been active on MySpace, 80 were found to be on parole or probation, and officials are working to determine if those individuals violated the terms of their sentences, said David Wald, a spokesman for New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram.

The identified individuals may now be subject to tougher prohibitions against using the internet, Mr Wald said.

FULL STORY

Lots of breakaway blogs and forums have been created recently so there is dissemination of the news we used to have from a few sources on seo meets and 4eyes is hopefully trying to keep track of them all.

This is very good news and myself and gurtie started a site like this two years ago but as with most sites built on a whim we never did anything with it so thankfully someone more competent like 4eyes has setup something that will surely be a great success.

More about seocircuit here and pop over and register to support the site.

Why would someone want to pay $6200 for a new site like this with little content and in such an already overcrowded seo blog/news market?

I never thought this site would ever really take off and just threw it up like the dozens of sites i throw up daily.

To get an offer to sell it so early shocked me to say the least because its the last thing i was thinking about.
This puts me in a very tricky situation because there was some very strange plans for this site and they were very far from actually selling the site.

The site has picked up a few backlinks and even a pr7 but it still seems strange.

What would you do?

Lots of folks think that linkbait is scammy, like promoting a false story just to get attention and links. False stories do happen, that’s reality, but that’s not the definition of linkbait, imo.

In Matt Cutts Wordcamp July 21st 2007 Talk, (transcript), Matt was giving an example of being creative in order to obtain visitors and backlinks. One example was of a chiropractor that was attending the Wordcamp. The Chiropractor was sketching cartoons of other attendees in their dream job for his chiropractic site. Naturally, the cartooned attendees will visit their cartoon page on the chiropractor’s site, probably link to it, and probably tell friends about it. Links!

Then Matt says:
“..This sort of thing is generally called link-bait. Some people call a link-bait, saying : “Oh, link-bait it’s an ugly, bad thing.” I think people should kind of embrace the idea that there are different ways to get attention. There’s lots of ways to get attention. And many of them are completely white-hat…”

Matt Cutts on dashes or underscores:
“…dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same. but in engine world dashes are nice because if there is no space at all the search engine has to segment it.”

Matt Cutts on crawability:
“..if you’re bloggin on Wordpress, you’re pretty much guaranteed your site is crawlable, and in a very nice way sites that are hierarchical, treat it like structure, things like archives, you know, 2007 june and then the posts are prefect for search engines. so the default Wordpress install is almost optimal in terms of crawlability”.

Enuf already, I’ll let you read transcript yourself.

And/or you can view the Matt’s PowerPoint Presention of his Wordcamp talk.

One last flash, Supplemental Results!
Matt:”O.K. we got a power user question about supplemental results the short answer is supplemental results are determined mainly by page rank and so there is not much you can do about it but get more links but not to worry about them in general.”

Yah, just don’t worry about it, LOL.

chill,
Tony

I thought I had seen it all til I saw a post by mauiman on digitpoint.com announcing a support group for a affliction he calls “The Google PageRank Update Disorder”.

“I’ve doubled the size of the clinic so we can at least treat the patients with the most severe cases of ‘Post Google PR Update Trauma Syndrome’. We’ve also stockpiled video games, bubble wrap, alcoholic beverages, and we’ve contracted some yoga instructors to be on hand as well. We need more….”
- mauiman

All in good fun, I assume.

The blog uses the term ‘googbies’ to denote those afficted; it was the first time that I have heard that term.

Googbies
“Googbies are earthbound creatures that evolved over recent years from humans that were once considered just Webmasters. Googbies are not mere Webmasters. Googbies are obsessed with things most earthling’s haven’t even heard of yet like; SEO, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SERPs, keywords and the like. This Googbies blog sheds light on this new creature called a Googbie, their obsessions, and also feeds their obsession at the same time.”

When I visited the site, I did not see anything that looked like a clinic. Too bad, that could’ve been some very funny linkbait. Ah well, I guess the potential is still there if he wants to run with it. In any case, it shows us that creative marketing ideas have not been exausted.

And while we’re on digitpoint.com there is an older thread going on there titled: Boycott Google! 10 Reasons To BOYCOTT GOOGLE!. I just could not resist reading the thread. This is anoher creative, viral, linkbait example, and when I say linkbait, I do not mean it in the same sense as “bait and switch”, (like my posts LOL). I mean toss out something which is irresistable, something they just have to link to or they will miss the boat. LOL

chill
Tony.

Yup, once again, the old debate “Is TBPR a valid value?”, (combined with “Should TBPR be discontinued?”), rages on at webmasterworld.com. They have over 100 posts in the last two days on the topic.
(http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3416514.htm)

(For SEO newcomers: TBPR is Google’s Tool Bar PageRank)’

Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal.com takes advantage of the discussion with his entry titled: Goodbye Google PageRank?. That title got my attention, nice one Loren!

In the last twelve months or so, Google has put a lot of resources into increasing it’s communications with webmasters and I think every webmaster is grateful for that. However, possibly Google needs to put more energy into updating it’s help documents since that’s where webmasters go to research Google’s official stance. In the case of TBPR, Google Says: “PageRank Display Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRank™ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you’re viewing”.

So, what am I to think? It seems to me that Google’s official stance is that their TBPR, that little green bar, is a valid measure of how they assess the importance of whatever page I am viewing. If Google thinks the page is important, so do I. Simple.

thanks for reading,
Bompa

PS: For the right price, I might be available for the editing/updating of the docs.

Sorry about that jazzed up Title, I just couldn’t stop myself.

It seems that every week I’m hearing of another startup search engine. Here’s the two most recent:

QueryCat Has indexed 4,000,000+ frequently asked questions (FAQ) from across the web and made them searchable.

So, to get into that search engine, put some FAQs pages on your site.

Guess what? QueryCat doesn’t have a FAQs page for itself.

I thought since I’m writing about it, I should give it whirl so I queried the cat: “How can I build a nuclear bomb?”

#1 Result: http://www.nuclearterror.org/faq.html

Bravo! Bravo!

———

Our second new search engine of the day has Google-like ambitions, they are striving to index the name of every one of the six billion people on earth. (This could take a while.)

From Helene Labriet-Gross via Yahoo News: “Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding a million names per day on the invitation-only, beta version of its website, which will be made available to the public in mid-August.”

To get into this search engine you’ll need people’s names and profile data on your site.
In all fairness I figured I should also do a search on spock.com. I entered my real name. It did find someone with my name, but it did not find me.

Have a nice search,
Lynn Asbury

This thread is funny.

Members at the seochat forum are voting who gives the best life advice; Matt Cutts or the Dalai Lama.

The voting stemmed from the Retiredat21.com blog. I had never heard of this blog before, but after checking the homepage, I think I’ll be reading it occassionally. It’s author, Dean Hunt, has a cool sense of humor and some interesting things to say about SEO.

Example from the blog:
Dalai Lama: Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
Matt Cutts: I urge folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site.

Anyways, his site is just a standard blog, but what a great idea for a user-powered voting site! Compare quotes from well known people, (especially two people from different walks of life), and let your members vote them up or down.

later,
Lynn Asbury

Here’s the full story at download squad:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/08/08/google-disables-an-official-google-blog-after-deciding-it-was-sp/