I’ve taken on the task of fighting spam in the past.  This domain, vrooms.net, was dedicated to it actually.  Anyway, it’s 3:00am and I’m not asleep yet.  Do you want to know why?

I hope you do because I’m certainly going to tell you anyway.

This time I really know how to do it.  I still have the technology that categorizes and detects spam.  The software is still up and running on the BlockAlert web site.  However, that site doesn’t really fight spam so much as help network operators find spamvertized hosting and remove it from their networks, if they are white hat network operators anyway.

No, this idea is a big one.  I won’t say it is foolproof, because that would be foolish, wouldn’t it?  However, it’s a good idea.  I can see what I want to do in a series of steps.  I know what to do and I know how to do it.  I know who to contact when I get certain portions completed.  In fact, I just registered the domain name that I’m going to use to do it.

Anyway, let’s just say a series of technologies, ideas and capabilities have just coalesced into a great idea.  I’m not going to reveal a damned thing until I have the site up and running… so you are going to have to wait a while to see anything.  I’ll try to post updates when I can, I’m already pretty busy and this isn’t going to help any.

Wish me luck!

Based on a Zdnet writeup of BloggerCon on the topic of how to make money blogging, the answer is either “we don’t know” or “we aren’t telling”.  You can read the full writeup and of course listen to a podcast as well if you care to.  Maybe there were secrets revealed but the writeup simply failed to pass them along?

One of the few points I found interesting…

Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome said making money on blogging is about branding, and leveraging your personal brand. Many bloggers make money through sponsorships on blogs and podcasts, as well as from consulting and events, based on the visibility they have from their blogs.

Alternately, this little tidbit starts to go where you might want to hear more…

Affiliate programs suck–forget about Amazon.com links. Cost per click like AdSense, but there is a certain art to it…

Unfortunately, whatever that art is, it wasn’t discussed.  There’s an art to it, so you’d better just figure that out on your own.  I am not a good source of inspiration in this regard, I’m not even running Adsense here.  Oh, some tantalizing hints here…

Toni Schneider of Word Press said he sees a whole range of opportunities for making money, but blogging should be about writing, not about making money primarily. When you start to let that happen it starts to look like link and spam blogs, he said. When a blog has a big audience and lots of traffic you can have interesting ways to make money, he added. Bloggers can be more financially successful by selectively choosing ads to target the audience, not just relying on AdSense type targeting. He doesn’t recommend putting ads in RSS feeds.

Whoa, hold the presses, blogging should be about writing and not earning money, but when you do advertise, target your audience.  Excuse my language, but no sh*t Sherlock!  I’m glad I didn’t make the expensive trip to be told such tripe.  Maybe it was invite only anyway?  I don’t know.  Here’s the next gem…

Terry Heaton said that there is no forumla, and blogger should be open and experiment with business models. Elisa Camahort disagreed with the ‘just experiment’ strategy, and said you have to have a plan and a strategy.

Well, that clears everything up.  It’s a good thing these experts are out there with our best interests at heart isn’t it?  Speaking of conflicting advice, the next blurb flies in the face of not using links for places like Amazon…

Susan Mernit said the emerging blogging economy would be powered by bloggers making niche recommendations, taking the traditional magazine model of editor’s recommending products in a completely transparent way, and making money when people act on a blogger’s recommendation.

The following sounds close to the truth, but read to the end and I’ll tell you why I think they simply don’t actually know…

Toni Schneider said that the blogging community is good at helping each other how to blog, but when it comes to making money their is a big silence. People are looking for the magic bullet to make money in blogging. Blogging is so diverse, there are many ways to make money. Many people don’t want to share ideas about how they make money, Tony said.

Anyway, I’d rather not quote every piece of the article.  Please, go read it or something so I don’t feel guilty about using so much of it.  However, I am sitting here shaking my head after reading that article.  I don’t know whether to be disgusted with the participants or with Zdnet for the writeup.

It sounds exactly like these people got involved early and the rising tide of blogging interest in general has floated a lot of their boats.  Basically, they were lucky and have no idea why and that is why they are having a very hard time telling us how we should emulate their success.  Most of them didn’t actually have to figure out how to succeed, they just got in early and had the ability to write.

Sort of reminds me of the dot-bomb period.

If you want some real tips, here’s a little write-up that gives you some nitty gritty on what you can actually do to build readership.  Be sure to read down to the end as that is where it gets interesting.  Hey, it may or may not work, but it is a list of tangible strategies you can apply to your efforts.  Of course, there is the assumption you can actually write something interesting from time to time, because if you can’t, then it won’t matter what strategies you employ anyway. 

I searched the Internet for a while looking for a good image plugin for WordPress, but I couldn’t find one.  Well, I did, but it required options that my PHP installation doesn’t have compiled into it.  Lucky for me the WordPress application is written in PHP.  So, I rolled my own.

Here is a short synopsis: 

Edit the template specific file comments.php to add random image generation and a few additional fields to store a calculated key and to collect the user input.

 

Edit the WordPress file wp-comments-post.php to collect the data from these input fields and to check that the verification field has been entered.

 

Use the entered verification input to calculate a key.  Match the hidden field key from the entry form to that calculated based on user input.  A PHP function such as md5 can be used as it is difficult to reverse.

 

If the two keys don’t match, simply fail out with an error message.  Otherwise, all other checks and verifications are perfromed as previous.

This is not exactly what I did, but it is fairly close.  Maybe at some point I’ll figure out how to write plugins and make something available.  Based on the fact that not everyone has full control of their PHP installation I might do something that doesn’t require images though.

Oh, here is the plugin I tried… from Nio’s Weblog.

Yes, I’m really going to make this statement.  You might think I’m crazy, but Google has a nearly fatal flaw.  It’s possible that they are aware of this flaw and are madly slaving away to solve the problem, but if not, their days are certainly and definitely numbered.

For those of you that are not Internet insiders or that don’t know enough to realize why Google is so successful, let me give you a short history.  Google developed proprietary algorithms to rank the importance of web pages.  This allowed them to deliver the best results for a user based on their search terms.  This concept is aptly known as page rank and it is accumulated by having other people on the Internet linking to your site.

Frankly, it was genius.  Google had the best search engine on the Internet and everyone flocked to it.  Today, except for those people that are somewhat and somehow strangely captive to AOL, Microsoft or Yahoo, we are all predominantly Google users.  They were the savior of the web and allowed us all to find everything with blinding speed.  Heck, they’ve even went public not all that long ago.

So, why on Earth am I predicting their demise?

The simple and short answer is that it doesn’t work anymore.  Oh sure, the concept of page rank is still brilliant, but in the real world you no longer have a simple way to determine it.  Yes, you can still count links to a page, otherwise known as backlinks, and come up with a score.  No, it is no longer going to be a clean representation of worth, value or rank.

Are you wondering what has changed?

The Change

We’ve changed.  The people that create web sites have changed.  The way we make money off the Internet has changed.  Although I have nothing against the companies I am about to list, they are in fact harbingers of the death of Google.

Ezine Article Submission

Article Search Engine Directory

Submit Your Article

Do you see my point yet?  Let me start to explain why these are important examples of what is wrong with Google.  Each article written and submitted to sites such as these is immediately available for download by other webmasters.  It is a win-win situation.  Webmasters get free content and article writers general get a link from that article wherever it is published.  In theory, this is great.

However, perhaps you should investigate the actual articles.  I am sure there are quality articles out there, but most of the material submitted to most of the directories is crap.  Personally, I have subscribed to private label article services in an attempt to get quality content.  These articles were also pure garbage.  The purpose of these articles is not, in fact, to provide quality information.  The link they contain, when published elsewhere, is not a valid vote with respect to the page rank algorithm.

If you are confused at this point I don’t blame you.  However, to reiterate, the purpose of those articles is to increase the page rank of the sites that the authors wish to promote.  On the other end, the motivation of the webmasters using such articles is to target additional keywords.  As you know, Google will examine these articles, considering them content, and perhaps show a link to them on a results page.  By the way, for the less aware, search engine result pages are often referred to as a SERPs.

There is a huge incentive for people to play this game.  If you are uncertain, sign up for an account at the Digital Point forums and spend a week reading up on the topics there.  People are creating web sites with hundreds or thousands of pages of spurious content, on various domains, in order to target keywords and or otherwise provide page rank to other sites.

At the same time, if you have a site with page rank, there are people that will pay you to link to them.  By linking to someone from your high page rank site you confer a heavy vote for the quality of the page you have linked.  This increase in page rank allows them to show up higher on the SERPs.  There are services that exist to broker such transactions, link sales, invisibly and efficiently.

If you still aren’t seeing the problem, then let me try to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Explosion of Poor Quality Content

While a great idea in theory, the article directories are providing the means for an explosion of poor quality material which is then published in an untold number of sites.  The information may or may not have small changes or additions in order to help with keyword optimization.

The people who suffer the most from this problem are the surfers.  We scour the net looking for information and run across the same rehashed and uninformative information over and over again.  The only thing that saves us from this fate, if we are lucky, is the idea of page rank which helps to keep these sites out of the SERPs.

Unfortunately, people publishing these articles, either alone or with other content, are greatly incented to acquire page rank and get these article pages to rank for various keywords.  Traffic is money.  Free traffic is free money.  Getting a page into the SERPs is a license to slowly print money from the keyword specific traffic driven to that page.

Massive Page Rank Acquisition

Wait a minute though.  When someone writes any crappy article, whether it is accurate or not, they are given hundreds or thousands of backlinks as people grab those articles and publish them in spammy blogs or article driven Made For Adsense (MFA) web sites.  While this isn’t the only way to acquire backlinks it is certainly one that is available to almost anyone quite easily.

This is one reason why links from one page to another are no longer representative of the value of the site being linked to.  Another way to trump up your page rank is to submitting your site to one of the thousands of small free directories that exist on the net.  Yet another way, as mentioned above, is to purchase links on sites that already have a higher page rank than your own site.  I don’t intend to make an exhaustive list, but trust me, there are other ways to do this out there.

One of the problems in trying to combat this issue is that there are in fact quality articles or blog posts that deserve and acquire a lot of links.  How a very large spidering system is supposed to know who has written a worthy article and who has written a not so worthy article is a problem that will not be solved trivially.  Bring out the geeks!

Monetary Incentive

The driver for all of this is the massive monetary incentive.  There are people out there earning hundreds or thousands of dollars a day off of their Internet activities.  Whether via a large network of MFA sites built using freely distributed articles, e-commerce sites that are creating articles, or other more legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, these people are making a living by playing the Google game.

As with many systems, the success of Google is the very same thing that will lead to it’s downfall.  It is because they are so successful, that so many people rely on them to provide the best results, that they are creating such a huge financial incentive to beat the system.  Their very own Adsense tool is what makes it so easy to make money off of simple traffic.  In essence, Google is paying people to figure out how to break their system.

It’s Inevitable

With the game set up as it is now Google’s failure is inevitable.  However, I do get to put a caveat in here.  If Google has not become blinded by their own success, and a lot of companies do become blinded by it, then they will have seen the potential for this problem and have new systems planned for the measurement of content quality.  Oh, by the way, I didn’t quite connect all of the dots for you.  I don’t really want to make a complete road map, but I guarantee you a lot of people do see a complete road map, if they are involved in this area at all.

However, back to Google, it is also possible that their founders, while brilliant, are (or were) a bit naive in there expectation that they could monetize their brilliance without creating powerful incentives for people to find ways to take advantage of that very system.  How surprised would seasoned business professionals be that young successful Internet startup executives, who have been working on one endeavor since their school years, are a bit naive?

Google was able to get away with a lot at first.  Now, as time goes on, Google pumps more and more into an economy based on their very own rules.  The fact that there are various ways to take advantage of this system and that those ways work together in a symbiotic manner for the denizens of the Internet, spell doom for Google.

Again, if Google does not have something else up it’s sleeve, their own success will spell their demise.  Stay tuned for the next decade to see how this plays out — as I’m not saying this will happen overnight.

Indeed, as I speculated, Jason is no dummy.  His recent blog entry concerning competition and growth for all involved is precisely the point I posted a few days ago.

After everyone calms down about the size of Netscape (12M uniques a month) vs. the scrappy upstart DIGG, they will realize that us launching Netscape has tripled the value of DIGG. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Fox are now thinking “if this works for AOL/Netscape we gotta get into the space.” When they do they will look and see that the best way to win the race will be not to build but to buy DIGG–heck, if this model works I could see AOL offering to buy DIGG to consolidate the market. So, it’s not like AOL has been taken out of the race to buy DIGG or other social bookmarking sites. I think this space is the future, and I could see us owning seven different social bookmarking sites some day–just like we own dozens of content /services like TMZ, Engadget, TVSquad, MoviePhone, Mapquest, etc.

 

We are going to bring the social news concept to more people than DIGG ever could, and those users will become DIGG users as well (like I am). This is not a winner take all space–very few spaces ever are in fact. Hotmail/Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL all share the IM and email markets.  The news market online is shared by dozens of folks. To think that Netscape would crush DIGG, or that DIGG would crush Delicious is silly. It’s what the silly inexperienced bloggers think.

 

A rising tide does lift all boats.

This is wisdom.  A successful man that thinks in terms of growth and success for all is one to follow.  That, combined with a sense of humility in spite of success, is the hallmark of someone that you want to invest in.  Maybe at some point in the future if I reenter the mainstream fray I can work with or compete with such people again.

It’s good to see they are still out there.

You may want to read the previous post before you assimilate this one.  Basically, as you can see from his Blog, Jason Calacanis is no dummy.

It seems that Netscape’s foray into the community news arena is raising some interesting questions.  Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb has written a few articles on this topic and I thought I’d discuss some general issues I see based on this post.

I’ve written two posts about the new Netscape site. In the Read/WriteWeb post I had two main points:

1. I think introducing paid editors into a community site may end up being as problematic as the ‘hive mind’ that it aims to prevent - because it introduces potential bias and favoritism.

 

2. The prominence of internal links and editors influencing discussions with “commentaries”, IMO deflects attention away from the actual articles - which leads me to think Netscape wants to keep people onsite, in order to expose them to more advertising (which there is a lot of on the new Netscape site). This of course is an old-style portal strategy.

I followed that up with a ZDNet post which suggested that the paid editors now hold the balance of power - and how appropriate is that for a community site? I also pointed out that because Netscape has released a working version of non-tech categories before Digg, that this could spell trouble for Digg as it attempts to expand beyond tech.

After this introduction we are given Jay Adelson’s comments on the issues as well…

In his email to me, Digg CEO Jay Adelson questioned how active Netscape’s users will be. He suggested that to achieve true interactivity, you need minimum intervention - i.e. no editors! He told me:

“A significant amount of our visitors are active (meaning they participate, not lurk). I’m curious how many interactive users Time Warner will have on their site. That was one of our greatest challenges, building that base.Digg is extremely focused on transparency and absolutely no editors/intervention. We will never have a small group of people provide oversight.”

Jay also questioned how scalable Netscape’s site will be, with Netscape putting so much emphasis on manual editing:

“Another question I have is about scalability. We feel that there is a technical scale issue with user submissions, in that if you have thousands, or tens of thousands, of submissions a day, how does a few editors parse them? Ultimately, we need the users to both digg and bury stories, provide the editorial, in order to keep up with the real-time world of Internet-based content.”

Wow, to the discerning eye there are a lot of fascinating issues happening in these communications. The very first thing I will note is that if Jay is actually discussing strengths and weaknesses as he perceives them between the two systems, that he should rethink that immediately. Providing key insight and analysis to your competition is not necessarily a good idea.

The general public will like or dislike the two offerings for reasons of their own choosing.  The apparent spin being put out by the entrenched users or businesses is not a significant issue.  Jay, please focus less on how the competition does or does not measure up, but instead focus on making sure that they continue to not measure up.

Anyway, with that aside, here are some other thoughts which may be applicable to the situation at hand:

• A heavily funded competitor is very dangerous.  If they are smart and capable then they should be able to succeed in the long term.  Luckily, not all heavily funded competitors are smart and capable.  Also, on the other hand, entering a market against well entrenched competitors can be very challenging.

• Online communities generally do require some type of moderation.  This is because the quality of spontaneous content can be questionable and will include both very low quality material or judgment as well as malicious intent.

• The design of current social systems must already implement moderation of a sort to allow the cream to rise to the top.  In effect, the community is the moderating system.

• It is easier to convince people to participate in something when it is new and interesting, or if they understand that there is value to them in some way for their own participation.  This ties in well to Jay’s comments but again, I don’t think making such issues apparent is a wise move.

• Big competition in your market validates your enterprise.  This is a signal that the concept appears to have value to people that are trusted to manage large sums of money.  If Netscape starts to see success with this then other big players will be forced to enter late.  At that time they will certainly consider purchasing their way into the game instead of starting from scratch.

As you can see I really enjoy the analysis side of the game.  I see what could be some statements made in haste, but depending on the end plan in Jay’s mind it is certainly possible that he feels well positioned and wants to make sure the market becomes established with the presence of other players.  You can never tell in these things and that is what makes them so fascinating.

Anyway, I suspect we will see lots of innovation and change as these two try to stay one step ahead of each other.

Okay, just for the heck of it, I’m going to rewrite a little bit of code that I found while in my travels.  The original:

include_once (’tracker.php’);
$serverUA = $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’]; 

 

$UA1 = “Googlebot”;
$UA2 = “Mediapartners”;

 

if (strstr($serverUA, $UA1))
{
   header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
   header(’Location: http://www.where-to-redirect.com/’);
   exit;
}
elseif (strstr($serverUA, $UA2))
{
   header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
   header(’Location: http://www.where-to-redirect.com/’);
   exit;
}
else
{
   echo ‘Text for real visitors’;
};

Of course there is nothing wrong with the original code, at all, but as a computer geek I just felt the need to create something a little bit more elegant. Here is the updated version:

include_once (’tracker.php’);
$serverUA = $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’]; 

 

$UA = array();
$UA[’Googlebot’] = ‘http://www.where-to-redirect.com/’;
$UA[’Mediapartners’]= ‘http://www.where-to-redirect.com/’;

 

reset($UA);
while ( list($uaval,$dest) = each($UA) )
{
   if (strstr($serverUA, $uaval))
   {
      header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
      header(”Location: $dest”);
      exit;
   }
}

 

echo ‘Text for real visitors’;

You’ll notice that this is just a cleaner way to support a multitude of possible user agents without requiring a large nesting of if then else statements.

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey asks the question of whether or not Google’s Adsense has gone too far:

Google has to be commended for providing one of the best ways to monetize a website. It’s so good because even the most average Webmaster can easily cut and paste some code to start earning some cash from their web property. Even sites that have a clear purpose and real content still apply some AdSense here and there for the “extra cash” that can be earned. Afterall you would rather someone clicked AdSense ads on your site when they exit so you get your 20 cents.

 

The problem is that when a webmaster gets a taste for the money suddenly their eyes start to sparkle and you hear that “cha-ching” noise. The possibility dawns - I can make real money on the Internet - and suddenly the motivation behind building the website goes from one of indulging in a hobby to making money. More and more AdSense blocks appear on sites and it becomes harder to find the real content.

 

Read the full story…

However, I would characterize the question in slightly more sinister terms.  While Yaro does talk about the proliferation of Adsense, he only hints at the problem of faux content.  There are many thousands of sites popping up that have no interest in providing actual content.

You might ask how this works, because supposedly “content is king”, but it isn’t the content itself that is king, it is the search engine ranking.  There are an untold number of people building web sites for the sole purpose of achieving a high ranking on a search engine result page.

These people have no interest in developing content because that requires time and effort, or alternately, investment.  No, these people are playing the SEO game to a hilt, recycling any old content from an article library, and applying strategic page titles, headers and bold text.

No, the real problem isn’t that the advertising hides the content.  The real problem is that the content isn’t needed to rank well in the search engines anymore.  There are formulas based on links, link terms, page titles, headings, keywords and so on.  Industries exist to take advantage of these formulas, to provide links to these sites, to achieve PR, to generate good results in the search engine results pages.

I think the real issue is the following.  Search engines have given away their methods, and now those methods are being systematically brutalized in the effort to make an easy dollar.  The next big search engine will be the one that can both allow people to make advertising income while simultaneously having a new an not yet abused method of determining the quality of a site.

In short, once quality metrics are fully known, there will be a lot of very clever people finding ways to take advantage of them.

This is just an initial entry to get me started.  I’m probably going to talk about Internet related things in this blog.  Maybe not.  Who knows?