Category Archives: Random Musings

Google has said that they’re going to be more aggressive in dealing with content farms and their effect on search results.

In a funny way, it seems as if it’s almost good news that Google has been so effective in making outright spam into an unproductive tactic that people have resorted to creating content that’s at least real even if it’s not very good. There is a definite problem, though, in having to wade through a huge number of search results of content from people who obviously don’t know very much about their topic whenever you do a search on something specialized.

It’s an interesting quirk of the Google algorithms that the quality of what comes out is determined partially by the work of the collective Internet. I just wonder if we might eventually see a time when the best solution again involves more manual intervention into the nature of the search results, so that content is devalued if it comes from people who obviously aren’t trying very hard.

In the meantime, every time we direct a link at anyone it’s worth remembering that we’re making them a little more important in the eyes of the search engines. Bad publicity can be a good thing.

WordPress pointed me to some interesting commentary in another blog on How to Find Time to Blog. I responded a bit with a comment there, but I wanted to ramble on about the topic a little bit more.

It’s interesting how easy it is to feel like we’re always incredibly busy. After all, no matter what state our life is in we generally tend to find ways that we can fill in all the hours of the day as it is. Any time that you’re adding something new that you haven’t done before, you’re always going to be displacing something that you’ve been in the habit of doing in the past.

The problem isn’t time, then, it’s priorities.

The question about doing something new isn’t “Is this something I want to do?” but “Is this something that I want to do more than whatever is currently using the amount of time that this will require?”

I guess the trick of actually putting that into practice is something that you have to work on, though.

I was reading some commentary on the way advertising is done through Twitter and it’s actually a pretty interesting concept. I’m sure that they would never come out and say that they need one advertising program for things people love and another one for things people hate, but even if they don’t do it on purpose it’s an idea that makes sense.

In another sense, I think that it sounds like companies could be using the Earlybird program in a way that’s similar to the way that some companies treat the Amazon Vine program. There are some things that come through that are actually just hitting the market, and other things that either received no attention at all or very negative reviews.

One of the dangers of social networking for companies seems to be that if version 1.0 of a product has some kind of serious flaw it can attract so much immediate negative attention that it’s very difficult to get people to give you another chance later so that you can improve your reputation. Programs like these give you a shot at convincing a specific group of people to try your product out so that you might get some feedback out there that’s a little bit more favorable.

This seems like it has the potential to become a more necessary part of product marketing as the reviews of other users becomes a more central part of the average’s person’s decision making for purchases. I’m curious to see how it plays out.

I joined the challenge on the Plus 3 Network to try to get at least 417 points a month. They released the list of people who met the goal in the first month on the Plus 3 Network blog and I got to be on it.

It’s a three month challenge, so I’m looking forward to trying to do it again for the next couple of months.

I was going to delete the original “default” post that WordPress.com starts you with. Then I decided that I should just edit it, because I loved their choice of title.

It’s little things like this that make scattered geeks of the world into a community. We have a shared culture, even when it’s just about silly things like the fact that nearly every one of us who ever wrote a program began by telling the computer to greet the world.

In a bizarre way, “Hello, world!” is one of the few things in computer and technology that transcends the boundaries of fanaticism over operating systems, development methodologies, and programming styles.

Besides, “Hello” is always a great start to build on.