Playing around with Alexa

This is interesting. Alexaholic has built a neat tool to use looking at Alexa stats.
http://www.alexaholic.com/cointalk.org
http://www.alexaholic.com/the-gauge.com
http://www.alexaholic.com/writingforums.com
http://www.alexaholic.com/lit.org
http://www.alexaholic.com/cardmodels.net
http://www.alexaholic.com/rcdrifter.com

You can combine several sites, and come up with something like this.

Pay attention to the little tabs at the top of the chart.

Robert, and the other Podcast guys, this is what you’re missing.

You’re missing something here.  You really are.  It’s not about whether “we’ve had this conversation before” because if you’ve only convinced yourself you’ve only just started.  It’s not about whether some guy walking in the Scottish Highlands can listen to a podcast, surely he could, but why should he?  It’s not about whether commuters can download your latest podcast and listen to it in the train/car/bus on the way to work tomorrow morning.  It’s about whether they will.

Convince me of the quality of podcasts.  Too many of the ones I’ve listened to are excercises in narcisism than they are useful or entertaining.  The ones that I have found useful are just so esoteric they’ll really never have a wide following.  In my opinion, this is where podcasting shines the brightest, in making it possible to do shows that would never be commercially successful.  I can still get the same information in text version, though, so it will take some convincing to bother listening to the podcast.

So, the question remains, just because we can, will we?  Certainly, there’s a small army of well equipt geeks who’ve commented here and at Robert’s blog, and posted to their own blogs.  They will listen to podcasts.  Is the audience big enough to get the attention of advertisers?  I don’t know.  Is it a fad?  It sure looks like one to me.

To get back to the point, what you’re missing, it’s not enough to tell people that we can do it.  We can do a lot of things.  Why should we do it?  And, I don’t mean why should someone produce a podcast, I can think of a thousand reasons.  But, the real question is why should I (or anyone else) listen?  You need to convince people how it’s going to benefit them.  Why should the guy stuck on I93 heading into Boston to his office fumble around with his iPod to listen to a podcast instead of just turning on his favorite radio station?  Why should the young lady riding the Green Line to her class at Boston University put one of your podcasts on her iPod instead of listening to her favorite music during the ride?

Are you banking on “if we build it they’ll come”  ??

Podcasts, an efficient means of content delivery?

I’ve been following some podcasts on and off for the past six months or so, and have begun to question whether it’s an efficient use of my time.  The content of the shows I listen to are generally very high.  I follow my friend Patrick’s Community Admin Show, and now a new one covering communities from another angle.  I also listen to some of the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm.  They’re great for picking up tips on how to spam the search engines. 

But!  And this is a big issue with me.  But, it begins to seem to me that this is an inefficient means of receiving information.  In the time I can listen to an average podcast, I could have caught up on my 50 favorite blogs, or read a chapter in a book, or read the latest issue of Red Herring magazine.  I do read super fast.  It’s a habit I learned as a grad student.  You learn to read fast in grad school, or you get crap for grades.  Podcasts deliver information slowly.

I’m not sure I want to say that this is a flash-in-the-pan, but I think podcasting has some significant hurdles to overcome if it’s to last.   It might be foolish, at this point, to jump full force into it.  it certainly has the feel of a bubble-type business plan.  Perhaps Google will come up with an Adsense for podcasts, but I’d be hesitant to put money into a business depending on Adsense at all, let alone something that hasn’t even been unvailed yet let alone tested and proven.

So, here’s the question.  Why listen to a podcast when you can get ten times the content when you read?

Adsense: The Trailer Parks of the Web

I’ve been feeling a groundswell of animosity toward websites with Adsense. I’ve seen directories starting to make the decision to list a site or not based on how obnoxious the Adsense ads are. I’ve seen Wikipedia editors, the ones who even bother to look at a site listed at the bottom of an article, remove a link to a site because it had Adsense ads on it. A few years ago, it was the affiliate site that was the www version of a trailer park, now it’s the MFA site.

MFA (Made for Adsense) sites tend to be low quality, light on the content and heavy on the Adsense. In the worst cases, the content is scraped. Scraped content is assembled with software that scours the web, and will either blatantly steal content from other sources or put together search engine result pages as if it were genuine content. One step up from scraped content is the article sites. There are many websites that offer collections of articles that webmasters are free to use, which usually are given because they contain a link to the author’s own website. The intent of giving those articles is that they’d be placed on a relevant website, and people who read the article and liked it would click to the author’s home page. What the MFA sites are doing is instead of taking individual articles to offer to people visiting their sites, they’ll take the entire collection of articles. Thus, we get thousands upon thousands of versions of these articles posted which decreases the value to everyone involved.

Who does this hurt? It hurts legitimate publishers. It builds a prejudice against websites using Adsense as a revenue generator. When we submit our websites to directories, will we be treated the same as the MFA sites, because the directory editor can’t look beyond the Adsense? Back when I was an ODP editor, this was a big issue with affiliate sites. Many of the ODP editors couldn’t look past affiliate links on a site. When I spoke up and said that the ODP should not consider affiliate links, that if the site’s content was good enough to be listed without the affiliate links, it should be good enough to be listed with affiliate links. For saying that, ODP removed me as an editor. I’m seeing the same fights brewing over Adsense.

It hurts advertisers too. I won’t go into whether MFA sites increase the click fraud problem, but certainly a dilution of quality harms advertisers in several ways. First, the dilution of quality will make advertisers think twice before allowing their Adwords campaigns to show on the content network. That hurts publishers, advertisers, and Google. It hurts publishers because they’re going to miss out on the good as well as the bad. Sadly, when the bad overwhelms the good in Adsense, I can’t blame advertisers for staying away. It also hurts advertisers by crowding them out of the natural search engine results pages.

So, what do legitimate publishers do? Some of us will certainly move away from Adsense. When having Adsense does more harm to us than the revenue is worth, we’ll go away. We can approach the advertisers directly. It makes more work for us, certainly, but in the end the results will be justified. We also need to be careful who we link out to. Linking to MFA sites will do you no good, and can potentially harm your TrustRank. We also need to become more vigilant about content theft. We need to lobby Google to increase quality control on where they allow Adsense to be placed. We also need to lobby Google (and other search engines) to help us by removing scraped content from their index. Overwhelming? Yes.

Updated to note that Seth doesn’t seem to agree with my observations on the perception of sites using Adsense ads. He seems to think that Adsense ads can enhance the perceived quality. I’d agree with his point in general, with adverts on target to the websites general audience, I’m just seeing other things going on with Adsense incentivised publishers than he’s seeing I guess.

You might be a search engine spammer if…

you use Digitalpoint’s Ad Coop to drive traffic to your site.

you insist that the text links you buy not be in javascript.

PageRank is more important than topic when considering a link exchange.

ringtones mean something to you other than the annoying sound your mobile phone makes.

you appreciate the different way that Link Vault places links.

you have webmasterradio.fm bookmarked.

you have recurring nightmares of Matt Cutts finding a complete list of the sites you own.

the term “c block” plays a role in your marketing strategy.

you think that MSN’s search engine is doing a pretty good job.

links from a .edu or .gov domain get you excited.

you would pay good money for a sub-domain doorway page based on the domain’s age.

Any more to add? 

Sitepoint’s Marketplace Succeeds Again

Jeremy Wright writes that Sitepoint’s marketplace has brought the sellers a higher price than the first time they tried to sell it. Kudos, and hope the sale is completed this time. Jeremy tried to broker the site, BlogExplosion.com, a few weeks back, thought he had a buyer but didn’t. This time around, he posted it up in Sitepoint’s marketplace, and got a bunch more interest.

I’ve been involved in Sitepoint’s marketplace for several years, as a moderator, buyer and seller. I’ve had a few people complain to me that they’d like to see me write on my blog about some of my experiences with buying and selling websites. Most of the deals I do aren’t as significant as that, but if people want to hear it maybe I’ll start posting about it.

The Google Adsense Survey

This is the first worthwhile communication I’ve received out of them other than that monthly check that come like clockwork. The questions were pretty much routine, and I made some comments about how I’d like to see some more detailed reporting on the ads shown on my sites. The other thing I commented to them is my age-old complaint about not being able to have human contact with Google. It feels very sterile and impersonal doing business with them. I’ve only ever contacted them on a handful of occasions, two-three, maybe four times. The replies are so impersonal, as if a bot generated them. Obviously form letters. Never any followup, on anything (excepting this survey). My business is certainly small potatoes to them, but it is five-figures per year to me from Adsense. There was one question that somewhat indicated to me the direction they may be going in with making their customers (me) feel good about doing business with them; one of the questions asked how I’d feel about paying to be able to speak to Adsense customer service on the phone. ‘Your call is important to us, please hold for the next available Adsense representative, and type in your credit card number so we can charge you for it as well.’ Yea, thanks for making me feel like a valued customer Google.

When I proselytize for backups

What would you do if your hosting company somehow lost your data?  With my own sites, I use a three-tiered backup process, 1 the host, 2 a thrid party (another host) and 3 my own hard drive.  I have not had a significant data loss on any of the sites I use this on.  Recently I did have a problem on one site, and the host’s backup failed (it was hosted on a Servint VPS), but thanks to having backups in other places, I only lost a few hours of data (rolling back to the most recent uncorrupted backup.  Do it, and do it religiously.