May 30, 2007
Internet censorship seems to be a rather far-fetched issue until it actually affects you directly and personally.
I admit I do things that make a lot of people angry and this time it seems Yahoo! Inc itself decided to get angry with me! I perfectly well know why as my post on Yahoo handcrafting describing exactly how Yahoo! employees fiddle with your seach results clearly annoyed some of them as it was their own stupidity that allowed this information to leak out to the publc domain.
Now they are making some effort attempting to stop it from spreading - all feeds from my website lzzr.com had been blocked in Yahoo! Pipes and effectively censored out. No more Yahoo Pipes for LZZR.com!
Of course they are in their own right as it is their service and they are to decide which feeds to allow to Yahoo! Pipes and which to block out. I am not in a position to deny them this right. Neither I am in a position to deny them their right to act stupid. It’s been prooven too many times that repressive measures like censoring information resources you don’t like always results in an opposite effect! It gets spread by other channels and tends to snowball at each revolution.
Hopefully this is not the official policy of Yahoo! Inc as I don’t believe their top management is stupid enough to ruin their new project by introducing selective censorship. Most likely it is a personal revenge of a certain Yahoo! employee whose actions resulted in leakage of sensitive information. I have reasons to believe this person had to go through some hard times as a result of this blunder. Now this individual seems to be making another mistake.
On the other hand I may be wrong and somewhere at the top level of Yahoo! there is a clear policy of cutting out websits publishing information that is not exactly favoured by Yahoo. Not surprising and equally stupid considering the fact that Yahoo Inc attitudes towards censorship once already resulted in an enormous PR disaster when in 2005 Yahoo collaborated with Communist China helping Chinese authorities to imprison a journalist for 10 years. Shi Tao, a reporter who worked for the Contemporary Business News nwespaper in China was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message. At this time Yahoo! was accused by Western media of providing Chinese investigating organs with information that helped link Shi Tao’s personal e-mail account and the text of the message to his computer.
Allow me a quote from BBC News website:
“We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
So, it may well be that Yahoo! Inc simply likes censorship policies since Yahoo! record on sensorship looks rather consistent - from acting as a Chinese police informant to censoring their owns search results and individual websites.
tags: shi tao, yahoo, yahoo pipes, blunder, censorship, internet, policy, scandal, search results
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Yahoo | Comments (5)
May 23, 2007
Just came across Twitter - for those who don’t know it is a microblog community that encourages people to share all pretty boring and extremely uninteresting events in their life with the whole world at a terrifying frequency. There you will have a chance to learn about digestion problems of people you would never want to meet in real life and intimate details of sexual life of pre-adolescent teenagers. Overall it’s an exiting Web 2.0 resource asking you just one simple question: What are you doing?. You are then urged to provide a quick answer as often as you can and as fast as you can possibly type. You can even post their with your mobile phone or IM client. Not surprising that most messages there vary within a rather limited range from reading such-and-such book or watching such-and-such movie to writing this very Twitter post. Remember you need to be short there is 140 words limit. A perfect abode for a community of compulsive characters with limited imagination, short attention span combined with attention deficit syndrome and good typing skills.
Believe me, I’d never mention anything like this to you, my reader out of sheer respect if it was not for a great Wordpress plugin by Alex King called Twitter Tools. Admittedly Twitter has a good API and the plugin is nearly perfect. It allows posting your twits as they are called to your Wordpress blog (I must confess I opted out, fortunately it’s flexible enough for this). In addition it makes possible posting your normal blog entries as twits which is something. From SEO point it’s a definite advantage that should be used in bSEO by default. So my advice – if you have a Wordpress blog get a twitter account, set up this plugin and on you go gaining more incoming links and additional exposure with no additional effort. I do and here is LZZR at Twitter for you.
There is of course a mild risk of heaving to deal with duplicate content issues but we aren’t afraid, are we?
tags: seo, web2.0, wordpress, bseo, community, eseo, incoming links, microblog, plugin, social
Posted by LZZR under Social Networks, bSEO, Blog | Comments (2)
May 23, 2007
Google AdSense continues to surprise and since my last post on this subject I happened to bump into yet another Ad sense thing that bothers me so much that I just can’t help sharing it with you.
If you are like me do most of your Pay Per Click monetization via Google AdSense you just have to be watching what it does very closely and attentively as good part of your income depends on it. And if you do, you might have noticed as I did some time ago that from time to time AdSense statistics spit out some funny figures. Almost every other day I see some funny irregularities like a channel that had no clicks but some impressions suddenly shows greater than zero eCPM. I am sure I am not the only one who had noticed this strange irregularity. For a long time I tended to write this off thinking that big numbers maths is something way beyond my understanding and all this would have been forgotten if there was not another more intriguing figure that tended to pop up less often but still often enough for me to take a note of. Occasionally in the column directly adjusted to the eCPM one and inconspicuously called Earnings I could see something like US$0.01. Nothing unusual, you say. Well, it would have been so if a corresponding value of a column titled Clicks was not displaying a big round zero. Needless to say that Page CTR cell also quite logically had zero percent in it.
Now, here is the question: how come I earned a cent from a Pay Per Click Network without having any clicks? Must be a miracle - IN GOD WE TRUST - indeed…
Can’t grasp the logic of all this. Setting aside the possibility if divine intervention as being highly unlikely in my case, let’s look for possible materialistic explanations. No big number theory can explain this phenomehae as from the course of elementary maths I remember that whatever you do with zero either you divide or multiply by zero you should always get zero. So, how was I given this one cent out of nothing as The Universal Laws of Science and The Law of Creation and Preservation of Matter and Energy in particular tell us that one cent coins don’t come from nothing under normal circumstances (and even less so do dollar bills). My most immediate thought was that Google rewards not only clicks but impressions as well (hence the title of this post). However strange it might seem if you think about it in fact it is only logical to reward sites performing well in terms of impressions but having users dumb enough not to click like crazy on those highly attractive and clickable AdSense blocks. Now, when temptation to look for AdSense alternative seems to be on the increase it does make sense to add a bit of per impression to the traditional per click concept to stimulate publishers thus saving your Ad network from collapsing. The only problem here is how you do it? The easiest way seems to introduce some bonus per view coefficient. But here another problem arises: where do you get funds to pay per view premiums if you are a per click network? Well, the answer is not so difficult to guess– of course from the part advertisers are paying into your ad network as per click rates (it would have been plain stupid to deduct it from your own profits, wouldn’t it?). But now you are facing another difficult task – how to calculate this whole thing as simple arithmetic i. e. 100% per click fee split between a publisher and a network at a known proportion will be of no help. For this the notion of heuristics widely popularized by GoogleGuy AKA Matt Cutts comes to the rescue.
Here is how Wikipedia defines Heuristics in Computer Science (I really like this one 
):
In computer science, a heuristic is a technique designed to solve a problem that ignores whether the solution can be proven to be correct, but which usually produces a good solution or solves a simpler problem that contains or intersects with the solution of the more complex problem.
Heuristics are intended to gain computational performance or conceptual simplicity, potentially at the cost of accuracy or precision.
Not only this method is something of a black box - we know what comes in and we see what comes out and how it does this we don’t really know and don’t care (see Black Box schematics diagram showing how BlackBox works for details). It also outputs results that are not quite accurate and not exactly precise. A method pretty much the same as Throw Shit At a Wall technique in SEO by Dax. Now, I think we’ve got an explanation!
I can not be sure that Google AdSense does heuristics for the purpose of rewarding per view sites (or should I say only for this purpose?) but I am pretty sure it placed a big black box full of heuristics between an advertiser and ourselves AdSense publishers and guys at Googleplex do not always know what kind of shit comes out of it and I assume they don’t care much as long as it suits their profits.
tags: adsense, googleplex, ad sense, black box, heuristics, money, pay, pay per impression, per click, profits, revenue
Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Google | Comments (1)
