Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

After Google’s recent Farmer or Panda update, where untold thousands of webmasters, including myself to a lesser degree, perceive themselves as collateral damage in Google’s attempt to police the quality of online content. See my other post on Panda and solutions here.

Admittedly, things were pretty out of control. LOL.  The economics of outsourcing content creation, , then monetizing called Content Farming, are, hehe or were, compelling.    Freelancers overseas will produce blog posts for $1 or $2, a web page created, with advertising, ranked on the search engines, which earns back the ‘investment’ within days. Multiply by millions and a huge industry prospers.  And what fun it was!  But all good things come to an end. (more…)

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Conan O’Brien, who I don’t really care for, actually had something interesting to say at a Commencement speech to Dartmouth Grads:

Fogbound, with no compass, and adrift, I started trying things. I grew a strange, cinnamon beard. I dove into the world of social media. I started tweeting my comedy. I threw together a national tour. I played the guitar. I did stand-up, wore a skin-tight blue leather suit, recorded an album, made a documentary, and frightened my friends and family. Ultimately, I abandoned all preconceived perceptions of my career path and stature and took a job on basic cable with a network most famous for showing reruns, along with sitcoms created by a tall, black man who dresses like an old, black woman. I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous and seemingly irrational things and guess what: with the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life. To this day I still don’t understand exactly what happened, but I have never had more fun, been more challenged—and this is important—had more conviction about what I was doing.

My Visual Diary from joehollier on Vimeo.

More on my previous post about the kooky end of the world preacher Howard Camping.

From Huffingtonpost:

The fact is, we Canadians, a primarily secular, increasingly diverse, almost entirely urban citizenry made up of largely literate people, love this stuff. We love The Rapture! We love to read about it, we love to join Facebook groups about it (I’m “maybe attending” post-rapture looting). We might crack wise, we might just use it as an excuse to get awfully drunk and say things that’ll make us feel like the world ended that morning after all, but we do pay attention to it. (Speaking of morning, apparently Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbasias had a lovely post rapture breakfast – so lovely she posted a picture of it on the ‘Net here).

Google Panda continues to be-devil webmasters – the original stated intention was to kill content farms, but the collateral damage has been huge. Google claims on 12% of searches were effected, which sounds pretty low, but when you consider there are 100′s of millions of searches every day, the actual number is huge.

Some of the best solutions I have seen are Jim Boykin here.

The logic behind the update is very clever.

From Google Webmaster:

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

This forces sites to review and clean out old content, which previously was not a problem – now it is and it has to be dealt with. Otherwise sites build up more and more of mediocre content. Some have suggested that simply cutting and cleaning out pages isn’t going to help. I disagree – the logic of G’s move is so clearly focused to provide an incentive to do just that, I can’t believe it isn’t going to help.

And going through hundreds of blog pages on several different sites, I do indeed find that G has somehow managed to identify low quality filler pages and other pages which I think are well written and informative, G has indeed identified as well. So cleaning out content isn’t going to hurt.

The other interesting thing many have pointed out is that no one has come out saying “my traffic is back.” That shouldn’t be too surprising – one of the last Google wrath of God updates several years ago, G penalized link selling and turned up the dials so to speak. There wasn’t another page rank (the key metric for selling links) for some months as G starved out the link sellers.

Manually reviewing hundreds of pages of blog posts using 3 or 4 different metrics, which unfortunately can’t all be seen on the same screen, takes a huge amount of time. G knows this and is waiting.

Should be a few months yet before we see any changes.

Wacky preacher Howard Camping, in a hilarious must see interview, says the end of the world really did happen on Saturday, except that it just didn’t happen so that we could see it, you know, with our eyes.

One hapless follower, who sold his house and spent the proceeds on a good-will mission advertising the Apocalypse, said, “I just can’t tell you how I feel.” It must be quite a feeling! But when you consider what is happening outside the window, selling your house right now is a pretty good idea.

Financial Apocalypse? Or maybe consumer immolation! Think I’m kidding? Think we are ‘recovering?’ And everything is getting back to normal? Think again!

In 2010, 59% of Canadians indicated they would have difficulty making financial ends meet if their paycheque was delayed by only a week. In fact, 1 in 10 state they could not handle an unexpected expense of $500. Perhaps most startling is the fact that 63% feel their debt limits their ability to reach their personal and financial goals such as going back to school or saving for retirement.

According to a stress test scenario by the Bank of Canada, it would take only a 0.5% increase in interest rates for 1.1 million Canadian households to become at risk of defaulting on their consumer credit or mortgage-related debt. Projected income increases will be insufficient to offset the increases in debt payments that will occur with even such a small increase in interest rates. Fr. TheEconomicAnalyst

Back to the wacky Reverend. Rev. Camping now says, with a straight face no less, that Saturday was only the first part of the Apocalypse. The second part is coming in Oct.

“On May 21, this last weekend, this is where the spiritual aspect of it really comes through. God again brought judgment on the world. We didn’t see any difference but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world. The whole world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct. 21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed.”

Even if the wacky Reverend doesn’t know what he is doing, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey sure do

Used to be like this:

LOL LOL

Now we get this –

I like the second one better.

Working and earning a living online you live by your wits. Having great ideas, original ideas, or taking an idea and molding, altering. re-purposing, or re-packaging it into something else, which is in itself a creative process, is what it’s all about.

Which most of the time is great – going for long walks to mull things over, retreats HERE or HERE, meditating, doing yoga and generally hanging loose and allowing inspiration to come. There are other aspects. Much less glamorous and much less appealing.
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New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They’re losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties).

What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It’s one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it’s another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn’t guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over… and it isn’t their fault, because they’ve always done what they were told.

This isn’t fair of course. It’s not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade. Read full article at Seth Godwin Blog