My first geeky post and I choose pagerank as the subject??? Yes, I know… terrible. But it is what it is.

Google has indeed updated Pagerank. I read about this over on Mani’s blog, and immediately went to check a handful of the sites I follow. Sure enough, there were a lot of changes.

I had a few pages drop, but most of them shot up in rank. I ended up with a couple 5/10’s and a few that went from 0/10 to 4/10, which is always nice.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that, in my opinion, pagerank doesn’t mean shit. I mean, I’ve had 7/10 pages that couldn’t rank well for a single keyword or keyphrase. I’v also had 1/10 pages rank top three for highly competitive keywords and keyphrases.

That being said, it’s still kind of fun to watch. So, happy PR update!

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Matt Cutts really knows how to stir controversy. In a recent post titled, “How to report paid links“, Cutts lays out the simple process on how to bring paid links to the attention of the Google team.

Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.

I can see it now…

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Google’s purchase of Doubleclick is stirring a lot of discussion. Most of it isn’t pretty.

Cocoa & Medicine says:

If you aren’t familiar with them, DoubleClick is in the business of selling banner ads — those flashing, annoying advertisements that sit above, beside, and even above those web pages you visit. That, in and of itself, is not why I dislike them — in fact, thanks to Privoxy, I almost never see their ads. But I’ve been doing the web thing long enough to recall back in 2000 when DoubleClick announced an frighteningly Orwellian scheme to identify every single web user and track the pages they visit.

After DoubleClick’s announcement there was an uproar. Numerous organizations including EPIC and the ACLU filed petitions with the FTC, which launched a 10 month investigation. Eventually DoubleClick backed off of its position and the investigation was dropped.

Fast forward several years and the poster child of online privacy invasion is getting hitched to the poster child of online corporate responsibility. I suppose we could interpret this in a positive way and hope that Google’s values infect those of the DoubleClick unit more than the other way around. But I can help but feel a bit nervous.

The timing of this buy is not at all comforting after seeing Matt Cutts pronounce that Google is now looking down on paid links. Sounds like big G wants the throne to itself.

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TellMe, a new company seeking to get in while the getting is good, has just launched its 100% FREE 411 information service!

To find a phone number, simply call 1-800-555-TELL. When prompted say “business search”. The fully automated system will then search its database to find a relevant result for your query.

No more cell phone bill fee’s for talking to an operator. The service is free of charge and you can use it as often as you like.

I could have used this last week when I called for a cab. I’ve now plugged the number into my Treo so charges for the service are now a thing of the past.

OH! Google has a similar service as well. I love it!

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Friday I learned that a local business here in Nevada was ready to cut me a small check to host a link to their new website on one of my blogs. The business is a web design firm here in Northern Nevada. The owner is a friend of mine and he’s now ready to do some advertising.

Unfortunately, thanks to Matt Cutts, it has come to my attention that Google appears to be positioning itself to penalize sites/blogs who sell text links.

This doesn’t hurt me too much, and the reason it won’t hurt me is a bit ironic. I already sell text links to Google. Yeah, that’s right, Google sends me a monthly check for displaying the text link ads you see to the left of this post when looking at the single post page. Google also pays me to display the image banner at the top of the main page of my site.

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Google has claimed to be fighting spam for years, but thanks to a link coming in to my recent post about Digg Widgets, I’ve seen evidence that could point to the contrary.

The spam post uses data from the summary found at Digg.com. But instead of just posting the summary text, the spam blog adds completely unrelated keywords to the summary.

The spam keywords are in bold.

X Men 3 spoilers As Digg grows more with each new day, many users, including myself, are looking for ways to better network with friends and content. I propose the Digg Widget to help do just that. X Men 3 music

The keyword stuffing that is going on here would seem to be obvious, and one would think Google could pick up on it right away. But Google has more than 2,400 of the sites pages in its index.

It isn’t just my post that the spammer stuffed with junk keywords. He/she is doing it with MANY blog posts. Take a look at the spam site’s blog.

And does the homepage look worthy of being indexed?

Curious…

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This is a great video that explains the dangers posed by search giant Google and several other online companies who support net regulation.

The video was created and provided by NetCompetition.org.

-Eric Odom

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Yes, Digg traffic sucks for revenue compared to visits from Google. I know, I know… this is common knowledge for most. But, it’s still interesting none the less.

Chitika’s blog has a great post up about a stat finding hunt they recently went on related to the Digg traffic vs. Google traffic debate.

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Is Google Anti-Christian?
Once again, Google has refused to mention Easter in its holiday logo tradition

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter Holiday! Mine was terrific! I didn’t go to a church, but I did get to enjoy a perfectly cooked Sirloin Steak, heaping pile of mash potatoes, and some of the best corn on the cob I’ve had in years. Plus, the weather here in Nevada was absolutely perfect!

I do wonder, though, did Google’s employees celebrate the holiday? I mean, Historically Google uses common sense in changing its logo to reflect important Holidays right?

Wrong.

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I very rarely EVER click on Google ads, but today an ad on Digg.com caught my eye. The title of the ad reads “Cligg - Clone of Digg”. The description of the ad reads “Use Our Quality Pligg Template & Grow ur Site Like Digg.com. Try Demo”.

I run a Pligg powered site so this interested me. I figured I would check out the template and see what the buzz was all about. But after clicking through to the page of the ad, www.moonrank.com, I found NOTHING of the sort. In fact, Moon Rank’s website, for lack of a better word, was complete crap. There is no template on the page being advertised, no “free demo” on the page, and as far as I can see there isn’t even any Pligg templates available for viewing on the site being linked to.

Personally, I find it offensive that a site such as this has the audacity to spam the Digg community with the hopes of gaining clients who are willing to pay to have a custom Pligg template built.

Would it be fair to say that this company is actively using Google Adsense to spam Digg.com?

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There is a BIG shift in the way political campaigns conduct election war these days. During the 2006 elections I was contracted to do some work for Sharron Angle for Congress and it was a very educational experience and the race taught us many things about the new direction of political campaign marketing.

In our race for congress we were lucky that the opposition had little experience in online marketing. The reason we were lucky is that I had my hands full with other parts of the campaign and couldn’t spend any time on the website or out and about in the www community.

In the end we lost by about 400 votes, but the knowledge that came from working on such a campaign is something I’m thankful for. I was able to see one of our opponents get ripped to shreds by the online community because he virtually ignored them and his site did everything possible to avoid having to engage the group. At the time, this attitude worked because the social networks of Nevada were limited. Now, however, these networks have gained big momentum and I believe that if we were to see a repeat of that race he would have a very tough time slipping by without getting the online community involved.

The same can be said across the country. With more and more voters and activists moving their networks to the web, political campaigns are forced to move in that direction with their campaign plans and message marketing schemes. I believe we’re witnessing the birth of a new era in US elections.

Political campaigns would be wise to lend an ear to this massive movement of information and there are a plethora of tools that can help them do just that. I’ve compiled a list of what I believe will be the top ten players in internet activism.

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As a campaign consultant and internet activist I can attest to the direction political campaigns are heading and a LOT of it is shifting to the Internet. Political campaigns such as John McCain’s (by the way I met with his blogger, Patrick Hynes, in DC last week and he admitted that the McCain website was launched with a lot of bugs and was not ready to be public) have fully embraced the power of social networking and the online community, and most other campaigns are beginning to do the same thing.

Digg.com is getting in on the action as well. Digg recently added a 2008 Elections category and it quickly became a happening place. Wikia has also added a political section that in just a matter of days was getting Dugg and mentioned on big sites like Little Green Footballs.

YouTube must be seeing dollar signs in this as well. The video sharing giant recently launched “YouChoose“, a sub-site for political campaign related videos to be published and viewed.

When you have Hillary Clinton announcing her Presidency via a YouTube video, you know it’s a powerful tool.

Even the group I work with as a private contractor, Citizen Outreach, is getting ready to publish a YouTube channel that will display news related to Nevada politics and other tidbits. It’s some thing we feel is too important to pass up.

While YouTube is taking hits on the copyright front, it is still growing and I think Google is pulling the right strings by adding this new YouChoose section.

Only time will tell if it’s successful though…

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