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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
I’ve written a few times about sites which offer bloggers the chance to write paid posts. Some of these are PayPerPost, Blogitive, Blogsvertise and Smorty. It was the last of these that alerted me to something that Google has begun to do.
Seemingly unhappy with paid links causing certain sites to rise on the Page Rankings, Google has set about reducing the rankings of those sites, which will make them less effective.
Apparently amongst the sites most affected are those that write for PayPerPost. According to the notes on Smorty, the PayPerPost tag (which became obligatory for anyone writing for that site to have on their posts) is the one primarily being targeted by Google.
Smorty recommends getting rid of these tags, so that Google is less inclined to chase you up. I don’t know how that will stand with PayPerPost themselves, as they’re rather insistent on them being used. I took a quick look at the PPP site, but couldn’t see any info about Google targeting them. Maybe they’re ignoring it; certainly they don’t seem to be short of opportunities for bloggers.
There’s a good deal more discussion on this topic on a blog called Search Engine Land. Check it out.
And if you really want to do some research on the topic, try this link (which is from the same site).
The Nemertes Research Group, reporting on the increasing size of the Internet’s content, says that by the year 2010, there will probably be ‘brown-outs’ (due to an overloading of the capacity of the Net).
Just as most of us, when we buy a new computer, find that the memory capacity has increased exponentially, (my brother-in-law’s new laptop has 130 gigabytes) so the Internet, hour by hour, is continually adding more and more material. The biggest increase, of course, comes in the area of video and music downloads. Whereas only a year or two ago most people barely downloaded any video, now, with films and tv archive material being increasingly available, the Net may soon be struggling to cope.
Nemertes are quoted as saying: 'Our findings indicate that although core fibre and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.'
According to some Internet prophets, Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year.
Exabytes? Crikey, I’d only just got used to gigabytes. (The first computer I owned had something ridiculous like 64 bytes, so that if you wanted to add a program you had to delete the previous one.)
For those who, like me, don’t know what an Exabyte is, it’s a quintillion bytes; that’s 10 to the power of 18. So far, most of us don’t talk in exabytes, but as an example of its use, (according to a Wikipedia article) astronomers expect to be processing 10 million gigabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometre Array telescope. The array is thus expected to generate approximately one exabyte every four days of operation.
To bring exabytes closer to home, however, Internet users are expected to create 161 exabytes of data this year.
The cost to bring the Net up to more capacity is likely to cost $137 billion. Investors may fund much of this, but my suspicion is that the end-users – you and me- may pay for the larger percentage.
Before we came to the UK for our holiday, I was selling some stuff online via TradeMe, New Zealand’s very successful equivalent of eBay. I mostly sold books, since I’ve had some experience in that line, but occasionally we sold some pottery, the odd toy and other items. Our next ‘bestseller’ to books was jigsaws. Surprisingly, these were very popular. We used to frequent garage sales on Saturday mornings, to stock up our shelves, and one day we came across a woman selling a large number of jigsaws, all of them in mint condition because they’d belonged to her mother and she only ever did them once.
Trying to keep track of the stock was a bit tricky at times. I use a programme called MYOB (mind your own business) but I’m sometimes tempted to go for something more like shopping cart software, which keeps everything on track much better – and does more of the work for you. MYOB is good at calculating the accounting side of things, but isn’t much good (at least the version I’ve got) at dealing with stock. There’s too much manual labour, as it were, that has to go on, to make it completely satisfactory.
I probably won’t be going back to selling online so much, with having a fulltime job in the offing, but it’s still something that’s fun to do. There’s nothing more satisfying than parcelling up a book or jigsaw and sending it off in the post. It brings a great sense of closure. It’s similar to what it used to feel like when I sent off a typed manuscript off to a publisher. You felt you’d finished with that thing and could start something fresh.
After a few weeks when I haven't been able to access the Internet so readily, I'm pretty much back in business.
To many people using the World Wide Web/Internet, it must seem that this system has been in place forever. And it’s beginning to feel like that to me, too, although I can remember when I first ‘discovered’ the Web after my son and I joined up to use email
[ Click here to read more ]
Poker is something I’ve never got into either in the real world or the online one. But plainly plenty of other people are up with the play: poker is huge online, (as is most gambling/gaming).
There’s an online poker site that allows the person looking to find the best sites in the gambling scene; apparently there are some 3000 gambling sites on the Net (possibly more). This one doesn’t just focus on poker but also on craps, roulette and slots. It also shows which sites are US only, the size of the bonuses you get for registering, how players rate the site, as well as giving a full review of each site.
In NZ, poker has finally made it onto television as well - though of course it isn’t quite so interactive there. But I guess it shows just how popular this game remains, even though there are plenty of people who couldn’t do a poker face to save themselves. (Me, for one.)
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