Well, looks like there’s another PageRank update underway, and it looks like this blog has been penalized / slapped down, for what I can only imagine is the fact that I have paid links on this site (or, used to be: read on). It used to have a PageRank of 6, and now its been kicked down to a humble 3, and yet others being zero.

Is it a surprise to me? Well, no. I mean, as you may have noticed (or not, if you only read this through your feed reader of choice), that Text Link Ads, the company which puts puts the Pay in Paid Links, has generously sponsored this site for many months (I used to have a giant banner on the top of this blog).

Now, at this point, many bloggers would beat their chest and throw up the proverbial finger to Google. Furthermore, they would include other culturally appropriate / rude gestures as well in the mix, ending with the “PageRank don’t mean squat to me, it shouldn’t mean squat to you, and I’m just going to carry on selling links”.

Well, here’s a sad, shallow, fact about me.

I *do* care about this site’s PageRank.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with this site’s perceived traffic, which is minimal to begin with, and which I don’t believe will materially change with the downgrading of my pagerank; nor does it have anything to do with PageRank as a metric that is used by other sites to rank DJI — for example, ironically, text link ads.

No, the reason why I do care is because, to *me*, its a yardstick of how well I’ve done with this blog over the past year (almost two) that I’ve been blogging for, independently of traffic, as its all about the quality of their inbound links.

And you know what?

I like that metric.

This blog has humble amounts of traffic and a humbler amount of people subscribing to my feed, but the quality of those in bound links don’t have anything to do with that. And for a guy who

• blogs part time,
• only writes opinion columns,
• is rarely in a position to break news,
• doesn’t write link-bait material

… I’m rather proud of how far this blog has come — and for those reasons, I don’t mind people checking out my PageRank, as it stacks up to other blogs which have a lot more traffic / much more popular than mine.

And in many respects, that public metric, to me, is a measure of the great links I’ve accumulated over the past year or so, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, Valleywag, ReadWriteWeb, 37Signals, CNet, Direct2Dell, and the UK’s Guardian Unlimited are included as well.

To me, those inbound links are a small recognition that someone somewhere (’professional’) thinks my writing is worth something. And if PageRank is one of the only well recognized, albeit troubled, public validation of that metric, then its one whose rules I will have to respect and abide by.

The bottom line is that I’ve realized what those links mean to me, and as a surrogate, what PageRank means to me, and they are worth much more than what any specific sponsorships or paid links bring in.

So, I would like to publicly thank Patrick Gavin who has been nothing but gracious and supportive of this blog, but as of today, I will no longer be accepting paid text links, nor allowing public sponsorship of this blog *by* Text-Link-Ads.com, in hopes that one day my PageRank might be restored.

(And yea, I do recognize that Google is a fickle creature, and lo, I may not have my PageRank restored even though I do banish these looked-down-upon practices … by Google).

Am I making a lot of sense?  Am I merely being weak and vain in the face of The All-Mighty (Google)? Shouldn’t I take a stand on all of this on principle?

I don’t know the answers to much yet, except that for the time being my answers are “maybe”, “yes”, and “not right now”.

Looks like the blogosphere has jumped on Fred Wilson’s back-of-the-envelope financial analysis of Google, in light of Google’s apparent troubling click-fortunes (honestly, did anyone think we’d be having this discussion 6 months ago?).

He has a good point though: Google’s spending a fraction of its revenues on the one pony that’s actually making it cash money.  Personally, I’m looking at it from a glass half-full point of view. I *like* the idea of Google putting money into unfettered innovation that has a good chance of defining what the “internet” is, via software-as-service while owning the infrastructure behind it (don’t forget, Google has secretly been buying up dark fiber and building huge data centers, also largely in secret, to buttress this initiative).

Its obvious that the minds behind Google are looking well beyond its current incarnation, into a role that will not just compete, or lead, but to define and dominate new categories of technology that are nascent today.  So let the analysts quibble over click fraud data and decreased earnings.  As far as I’m concerned nothing’s changed with Google’s management, nor the direction that its been taking over the past year or so — and given that, I’ll be happy to continue betting on Google’s “one trick” pony for the forseeable future, because I know there are a few thoroughbreds in the stable that we haven’t even seen yet.

More:

• Henry Blodget has a more interesting Wallstreet-oriented discussion, using words like “EBIDTA”, and “run-rate free cash flow”, and “revenue”, and concludes that the reason why Google’s been spending like a drunken sailor on these capital expenditures is *because* its been a wash in cash.

Seems like there’s a bit of a hubaloo around Google’s recently changed settings with respect to its “Shared” feature function in Google Feed Reader — mainly in that Google decided, a couple of weeks ago, to include a new feature where things that you’ve marked as shared will automatically show up in your friend’s Google Reader under a new section.

This has some folks crying foul, as this smacks of a unilateral move to obliterate one’s sense of privacy. Others say that this is merely the meaning of the word “share”, so what’s up with that?

Ultimately this is how you define the word share, and in this case, how Google defines the word “share” (almost like how Bill Clinton defined the word “is”?) Its clear from Google’s own support folks that they fall into the latter camp, from the above, where they feel that if you’ve shared it, you’ve implicitly given your permission to share it with the world. Heck, that’s what the shared function means, where your shared news feeds show up on a link which is — quite literally — accessible by the whole world.

The people who feel maligned by this either

a) don’t know about the latter, or, probably and more like

b) know about the latter, but know that most people — let’s say, important personal people, such as friends, family, co-workers … very *specific* groups who you aren’t explicitly sharing with — don’t know that this function even exists.

Robert Scoble has hit the nail on the head with the term Granular Privacy Controls, which Facebook does pretty well (and has had to do well with, given the level of scrutiny that its gotten).

At the end of the day, people should have control over where their data goes – not the hosting service. And there should be absolutely no ambiguity over how that information is shared. Yes, on one hand, it makes the people who are complaining about this service feel like whiny crybabies because JEEBUS, don’t they understand what the word “shared” means?

But on the other hand, I think its clear that people who feel violated don’t share the same definition of the word or the term, even if Google had outlined things in their terms of service (which no one reads). And I’m pretty sure it has to do with the knowledge that even if one puts up things up on the web through an exotic link, there is the realization that no one will find unless you directly send it to folks.

(Heck, its one thing to even set up a blog with your real name without telling anyone, or blog under your real name for that matter. I rank number one for “Tony Hung” via the BlogHerald, and no one at my workplace or school still knows I blog unless I tell anyone about it)

Or, put it another way, its because those folks who have used the share button might *not* have wanted their things explicitly, in fact, shared with “everyone” – there being a distinction between the “everyone” of the world wide web, who might know or care about you, and the “everyone” including the very personal people you might have corresponded with or chatted with.

And in that sense, I think Google was wrong to make that assumption. Sure, you might sound like a whiny crybaby about it, but at the end of the day, I think there are not many golden rules about online behaviour; but explicit control of your own information is surely one of them.

And in that regard, Google could have handled it a lot better.

Not merely content with indexing the web in all its forms (and serving applications to help people work online, tell other people where they are in the world and what they’re doing, creating a platform for mobile devices, and … God, is anyone keeping track of this stuff?), Google is now making a run, as you may have heard, to start populating its own search results by itself.

Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch poses the question of whether its going to far, and I think its a good one.

Because think of it this way — as I’m sure many of you already have.

1. Google derives the majority of its income through serving ads.
2. Google serves a great deal of those ads in its search engine results pages, where they bracket organic search results.  Above them and to the right of them.
3. It doesn’t directly derive income from any organic SERPs unless those pages are also filled with Adsense ads.
4. Therefore, to maximize revenue, Google must logically populate its organic SERPs with pages filled with Adsense Ads.

Even if we remove our tinfoil hat for a moment (and I have a few), and suppose that Google Knols won’t intrinsically rank higher in its own SERPs, all we have to do is look to see how fantastically well Wikipedia ranks in its own SERPs to see that the *potential* is  already there.

Couple the fact that Google is danging the opportunity to derive revenue from said pages (and if you want to place a twist on it, allow people to do a kind of “reputation management” with Google’s stamp of approval, since it will be placing such a high premium on the identity of its authorship), and you have the potential to create a powerful loam for Google Knols to grow for real.

What’s the flipside to this?

I’m going out on a limb, by saying it might “Google’s total and utter destruction”, and I am only being mostly facetious here.  Let’s all think about this for a second.  What happened if most of the knols were utter rubbish *and* they were achieving high organic rankings on Google?

You would have a situation where it would get most people thinking — and it would be ordinary folk now, not just geeky tech bloggers — “why search on Google when all you get is Google results? (and some of them aren’t even very good)”

Which of course leads to a subtle change in perception about how Google does what its meant to be doing best — which is indexing the web.  Perceptions power all kinds of things, including stock prices, which many people believe is vastly over priced in Google’s case, anyway.

Long story short?

Google’s Knols sound like a way for Google to fiddle with its Golden Goose, so that it can maximize how much it can milk it for its Golden Eggs.  Its got to be very careful, however, with how sharp its trying to be with this new experiment (particularly as there are no editors and no obvious sense of quality control), lest it lop off the head of said goose.

You may have heard about the ongoing drama that is Google and how it has laid the smacketh down on paid links — and now, possibly paid postings.  Besides the fact that it may be hypocrisy writ large, as Google does a bit of “link trading” on its own with Google Mini (buy one and get a testimonial on Google, which includes a link back to your own page), I wrote yesterday about what its larger purpose was at the BlogHerald.

To summarize my rantings, I thought that perhaps Google was trying to make an example out of bloggers who use PayPerPost by penalizing them with a pagerank of zero; that by doing this, it would cast Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the hearts of all bloggers everywhere, thereby permanently (or, for quite a time) blemishing the thought of paid postings.

But I do wonder — was it really all that harsh?

Its been widely acknowedged now that the initial page rank drop that many blogs had suffered because of paid links hasn’t in fact changed their traffic or rankings.

So, what was really the point?  

Well, besides making an example out of PayPerPost Izea, I *also* wonder if all of these PageRank shennanigans are a way of Google telling us that — once and for all — PageRank isn’t important.

[caution: stream of consciousness rant coming forthwith]

Specifically, to use a published PageRank as a means of valuing your site, for the purposes of *selling* things like paid links, paid postings, and yes, perhaps even advertising?  Is this Google’s way of telling us to drop it?

Has Google recognized that there is an entire industry — worth in the millions of dollars, likely — which predicates itself on these highly malleable metrics, which, some might say is a twisted image of what PageRank as built for in the first place?

Well, one could argue that Google shouldn’t really care as long as it doesn’t change the purity of the organic results.  But perhaps that’s exactly the point.

PageRank has become a defining metric for all the wrong reasons, and although Google has some culpability by assigning value to in-bound links in the first place, perhaps Google does view the entire industry — in really broad strokes — as a spreading cancer that threatens its search results as a whole.

Anyway, total speculation on my behalf, but in thinking about this whole affair one is almost reminded of Google as the State clamping down on rebels who are trying to subvert the rule of law.  There are arguments on both sides of the coin, but with this recent development, one is tempted to think that these consequences for such subversion may be a little too harsh.

Well, rampant speculation about all things Google seems to be on the rise these days, what with Google getting into cell phones and now another rumour that its getting into TV courtesy of the Guardian.  Turns out Simon Fuller is in talks with Google about revolutionizing life as we — *sorry, I mean, television as we know it.

Although the Guardian piece goes on for another few hundred words about what Mr. Fuller has done in the past (Spice Girls, American Idol, X-Factor — all populist reality dreck that has made hundreds of millions of dollars), there’s really no more substance to the rumour: Google + Guy-behind-American-Idol == Game-Changing-Event-For-Television-As-We-Know-It.

While I could speculate about what all this means, I think its real importance is its timing.

I’ve yakked about it before and I think its something that’s worth remembering: the Hollywood Writer’s strike, if it its prolonged, could have some interesting and dramatic (lame pun intended) effects on what comes up as new media alternatives — and more importantly, how legitimate these alternatives become as the strike carries on, and the stock pile of scripts dries up, and key demo’s look to other media for entertainment (and it looks like I’m not the only one).

Or rather, more so, really, as males 19-25 are already spending a great deal of time on the ‘net, playing console games, and otherwise not-watching mainstream entertainment.

There’s an interesting article in my local paper, the Toronto Star, about how some enterprising individuals have already striking while the iron’s hot.  quarterlife.com, for example, is a new web based television “series” behind the guys who wrote thirtysomething and my-so-called life.

There are a few other web based shows that its joining on MySpace, such “Clark and Michael, Pale Force, Coastal Dreams, Mr. Robinson’s Driving School and Roommates.”

The writer makes the point that the quality of these shows (even quarterlife, in spite of its impressive writing pedigree), is questionable.

I think that the quality, is actually immaterial.  Just like it doesn’t really matter how “good” American Idol or the Spice Girls are.

What many of these ventures are trying to do is create something that’s watchable and good *enough*.  And all it will take is just *one* of them to get big — Lonelygirl15 big — for it to puncture the public’s consciousness and run away with the whole thing.  And once *that* happens, *because* of the strike, it will really legitimize _serialized_ for-web-entertainment as something that “ordinary” people do.

So, if you’re like me and have updated to Wordpress 2.3, you may have also noted that on the Wordpress dashboard, the “inbound links” list is now being populated by Google’s Blogsearch and not Technorati.

There’s been some talk about how relevant Technorati has been (including a particularly shrill post by yours truly), and perhaps because it *hasn’t* been, getting Google to index inbound links, therefore, is a Good Thing.

But is it?

Is Google’s Blogsearch *good* at finding those inbound Blog links? 

Now, a quick look by myself shows that for Deep Jive Interests, the answer is resounding “HELL NO.”  The last time Google shows any inbound link is October 30th, but in fact I have inbound links all the way until yesterday.  In fact, Technorati is able to find blogs that have linked to me within the minute those posts (that have those links) are published.  Google looks like its about a week behind.
Now the caveat here is that I am still waiting for my blog to get re-indexed by Google after I was hacked.  So, maybe *that*’s the reason why Google doesn’t look so good, right?

Well, I had a few cursory looks at a few of my other favourite blogs, and the same sort of pattern emerges.  Technorati is able to find the “reactions” within minutes of those inbound links actually being published.

Google?  It has trouble.

Now, I don’t know the actual “why’s” for this happening; perhaps its because everyone and their sister who has a blog registers it formally *with* Technorati so they can follow their own Authority ranking and so on.  And furthermore, because by Default, Wordpress pings Pingo-matic, which by default usually pings Technorati.

On the other hand, I’ve read that Google also monitors Pingo-matic, and should therefore also update whenever Pingo-matic updates.  If that’s the case, then, I don’t know — perhaps actually registering your site (and pinging) with Technorati makes it easier to work these kinds of relationships out and in a much quicker fashion.

In any case, I suggest you try and figure this out for yourself.

1. Go to Google’s BlogSearch at http://blogsearch.google.com/

2. For the search term, enter “link:URL_OF_YOUR_BLOG” –> and of course replace the URL of your blog as necessary.

3. Note the results which are sorted by default according to date.  Marvel at how dated some of these results are.

4. Then, go to Technorati at http://www.technorati.com (naturally)

5. Enter your own blog URL again, and note the number of reactions.  Marvel at how fresh these results are.

If you find that I’m totally off my rocker, let me know.  However, in the few blogs that I’ve checked I’ve come up with similar results.  Maybe I *will* install this plugin now. ;)