Has Google PageRank Lost Its Significance?

I had lunch with a top local blogger recently whose name I cannot reveal and whose blog, I can safely say, was among the most sought after and one whose Google PageRank numbered at 5. Now, not mant personal blogs get that high but because of the importance of the blogger's site, and which can be testified by quality backlinks, Google gave it a PR 5.

However, recently, it dropped to PR3 at the last review. Curious, and having heard so many complaints from siteowners whose PR dropped from 5 to 3 or even 2, I asked him if his site visits had diminished somewhat or that the quality of backlinks severed.

To my surprise, he said No. Indeed, the PR drop was due to some textlink ads he had posted and I was told that Google is not too friendly towards paid links, which I think is the right thing to do to give readers quality content rather than merely paid for linkages. Apparently, his blog had the same amount of traffic and the drop in PR does not at all affect the performance of his site.

I am now wondering if Google can come up with a better ranking system in view of more monetisation models springing up as the web gets more liberal and broadband widely available. Siteowners need funding to maintain sites unless they sell something. And one of the easiest means to do so is to have ads, including textlinks. I am not saying Google should not be sympathetic to those who use textlink ads. If it does want to keep textlinks at a minimum to protect the interests of its readers who may not like textlink ads, then how about stating how site publishers can host such ads without being penalised.

Back to the question of PR, if from the case stated above, if your PR drops but your traffic remains, or even increase, don't you think Google PR system has lost its significance?

I know, with higher PR comes various perks. For instance, like PayPerPost, sites with higher PR get better deals on reviews and other paid posts.

But now as much as you have realised it, does it really matter if your PR drops?

Wordpress Gets Better With Version 2.5!

If you love story with had been one of love-hate relationship, then you might want to know that soon, it will change for the better. Yes, this blogging software will undergo some drastic changes and for the better.

The #1 most important Matt in the world, has written that the people at the #1 most favourite blogging software will be releasing the mother of all Worspresses, possibly. What does it contain? Well, in their words:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Read more about the sneak peak of Wordpress 2.5 here.

Frankly I am very excited about this and what I am looking at is that it offers the same customisability. Wordpress is as good as it allows free range customisation and that is one feature which made it a favourite among bloggers and more recently, as content management system. When I first saw it, version 1.0, I knew I was betting on a winning horse where content management was concerned and couple of years down the line, I know I was. Version 2.5 will prove I am right - if the same customisation is allowed to produce a variety of formats.

Getting Paid For Your Content?

I just came across a new income-generation site that would definitely excite some bloggers or web publishers, especially those who churn out vast amounts of content on say, photography, or video.

This site: www.vitshow.com says it pays for content. It claims to be "an online service that rewards our members who share videos, images and topics with each other."

Why is it set up? Well, in their own words:

"We believe FREE is Too Expensive. You will be paid according to the popularity of your shared content; and more importantly, you will get extra benefits by displaying your own google adsense or other commercial advertisements on some ad spots allocated by VITshow. VITshow cares deeply about your online privacy."

Nevermind about the privacy thing: so, how much can you earn? This is what I have discovered:

It pays according to Content Impressions - ie. how many views your added videos, images and topics received in a month. Your content will be separated in various groups accoring to countries and payment is made according to that.

ie.
Group-1 countries: $0.2 per 1000 views
Group-2 countries: $0.1 per 1000 views
Group-3 countries: $0.05 per 1000 view

You will also get 10% commission from all your referred users' earnings as well!

Sounds interesting and I am sure many of you will be interested. And probably lured into signing up. But is it here to stay? Or will it end up like many others that came before it and gone, and wisened some of you out there who have tried? I am just wondering...

Blogger making it easy for beginners - Video Tutorials

For those who are too lazy to read Blogger Help Articles, or too busy to do so, Blogger has made it easier for them using YouTube. Why they take so long only God knows. In any case, there are several videos already at this time of writing. Among them are

Adjusting your Blogger privacy settings (1:43)
How to create a blog with Blogger (1:58)
Purchasing and setting up a Custom Domain to Blog (2:05)

I am adding one here:

Google launches Sky - But where is the Sun?

I searched for "SUN" and this result came out (Click Graphic to View)

Just read that Google is now looking skywards with the Google Sky, after its introduction of Google Earth. What makes it different than Google Earth now is that it doesn't require you to download an application. You just view images of the universe from your browser.

Yes, Google launched its Google Sky application yesterday (March 18).

Go visit Mars, or watch the Milky Way from the Hubble Telescope. Listen to podcasts from the Earth & Sky Podcasts. In short, the universe is now within reach in just a click away!

All these are, of course, well and good. But I am wondering how long the novelty will last or what good will the application be for users like you and I.

Except for its entertaining value, I don't think one will be tempted to look at the skies as much as the geography of the land as can be viewed via Google Earth.

Perhaps Google Sky will be useful for teachers and educators involved in the teaching of science. Now they can bring the terrestrial objects into their classrooms using this interactive tool and prepare for a highly interesting lesson.

The interface on Google Sky is highly intuitive and user friendly. Apart from the various hyperlinks which takes you to a variety of high-resolution images of celestial objects, there is also the search box. Search for any heavenly body and chances are that you will find it - except for the Sun. Yes, the Sun is missing if you try searching for it in the Google Sky.

Could this be Facebook's oldest politician member?

Could Maimun Yusuf, 89, an Independent candidate in the Malaysian general election which concluded recently possibly be the oldest politician member on Facebook?

The senior citizen from Malaysia, who ran as an Independent, lost the political race but she just might win the title for being the oldest politician member of Facebook - if anyone out there could confirm it for me.

You can read all about Maimun in the local press here, watch the video here and read more here, of how she came to be a member of Facebook.

Can anyone confirm if this elderly lady is the oldest politician member ever on Facebook?

Wordpress theme for Obama supporters

Prominent blog theme (Read:Wordpress) designers Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson have just released the Probama Theme to cash in on the election fever now gripping the United States.

Posted on Hoyt's Category4, the theme is blatantly loud and geared for the supporters of Senator Barack Obama’s political career and presidential campaign. A photo of Obama is prominently displayed on the right side of the masthead and if this doesn't show how much your support him, what else could.

I like the simple but sleek blue design. There is a built-in control panel options that allow you to easily manage images, video, podcasts and other RSS info. Options include that for Flickr, Youtube and Feedburner and there is even an RSS integration with BarackObama.com.

However, if you are using Wordpress below 2.3, this one is not for you.

Can Somebody Tell Me What Is An Online Journalist?

AT a recent international conference on online journalism in Berlin, DW-WORLD.DE interviewed Michael Rediske from the German Section of Reporters without Borders was asked whether Internet reporting has changed all the rules of journalism.

The interview is carried electronically at this website.

One of the interesting things Rediske talked about is how online journalism has given voice to people who were not able to make their views heard in the past. For instance, dissenting views can now be heard through blogs and setting up a blog is not any more difficult than signing on for emails.

However, as Rediske also mentioned, the rising online journalism has also prompted governments that cannot tolerate dissenting views to introduce blanket bans, which further oppresses the very freedom online journalism allows.

For instance, Pakistan banned YouTube earlier this year because of anti-Islamic movies posted on the site. Thailand also banned YouTube in April last year for disrespect towards its monarchy.

I think the question here is to define Online Journalism. What actually is it? Does knowing how to set up a blog, write a post and air one's views constitute to online journalism and make one a journalist in the name of press freedom?



What is press freedom anyway? Is it unconditional free speech that transcends all barriers including moral and ethics?

I think there should be objectivity in calling anything that can be published online as journalism - If the writer can strictly adhere to the tenets of journalism - of objectivity and neutrality - then it may qualify as journalism - regardless if the writer is or is not a traditionally trained journalist or belonged to a press organisation.

As much as you would hesitate in calling a shaman a doctor (although you can still call him a healer), would you call a blog writer an online journalist in the true sense of the word?

How Not To Write A Bad Press Release

Anatomy of a Press Release
A press release, seen simply, is a piece of communication letter (or email) to inform, announce, educate or deny and sent to a media publishing house for mass distribution through their news channel - print, radio, television or the web.

What should it contain - the barebones, in chronology

a) Information about the sender, including address, correcly spelt names, contact numbers.
b) Clearly stated content - no puffery or advertising slant, although cleverly worded advertising messages are often overlooked and allowed.
c) Supportive information for the content - ie. clearly taken pictures, maps, audio or video supplements.
d) Information about the Press Release writer or organisation - not all companies write their own, many commission publicity managers or public relations officers,

Typical Layout:

[Information about the originator]
[Date]

[Title or Heading]

[Content Intro]
[Content Body]
[Summary]

[Contact Info - Names editors contact for further info. This may be the writer of the release or the company for which it is written's marketing/information personnel]

---

SAMPLE
(This is your organisation's info - include phone/email and other contacts if you have. And make them prominent - Bold them!)
FORTHECLUELESS
www.fortheclueless.net
Malaysia
March 13, 2008


(Title goes here - Bold it please!)
How To Write A Good Press Release

(Write a catchy intro if you can. If not, a simple honest one will do)
Writing a good Press Release is easy. Just obeying the basic rules of commonsense and some sensible writing skills can take your piece of paper (or email) from obscurity to publication.

(The quickly explain clearly your intention or products)
And so on and so forth....
(and don't overstay your welcome, editors are busy! Say what you want to say and shutup)

(Summarise and End)
To find out more about how to write a good press release, or get personal instruction, visit our website at http://www.fortheclueless.net.

---

Insider Tips (from the newsroom) before you hit the road:

1. A good English is essential and there is no put off greater than poorly checked, misspelt and grammatically wrong cotent. An editor is not your college professor or linguist and he is too busy to try to decipher your press release masquerading as a Sudoku puzzle.

2. Give all information he may need to know - nothing is essentially too much. And don't try to lure editors into calling you like purposefully neglecting certain items. He won't - and if he does, chances are that it is to tell give you a piece of his mind.

3. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - This is an overflogged horse. Don't use it unless you need to. It doesn't give that added advantage nor make your release look professional. At best it shows just how amateurish your press release writing skills are and sharp editors like me will eat you up like tacos. If your release is not meant to be used immediately, why bother to send it to the editor now? Think about it!

4. EMBARGO - This is used when your announcement had to be sent out earlier than intended publication. Essentially, it means keeping the release on hold till a certain date. For instance, you may want the news release to come out AFTER your product has been launched but for some reason the release had to be sent out early. Use EMBARGO wisely (and by this, give dates and time the EMBARGO is lifted - such as EMBARGO till 12 noon February 30, 2008 (which will certainly and surely keep your release till the end of time). Clear instructions like this will steer your release off the editor's spike - yes, we still have some in the office and it is sheer pleasure to listen to badly written releases tear through the gleaming steel.

5. If you need to add supportive material, make sure they are well defined and stated and made. Poorly caption photos and blurred images are twin brothers you should avoid at arm's length. So are unviewable video files or unopenable audio formats.

6. Follow up with a phone call if you decide to send press releases by mail - or email - just to make sure the release arrives at the correct desk. But whatever you do, DO NOT BUG the editor every 30 seconds whether to or not to use your story. He knows best. If you want your story used, buy advertising space. It is less cumbersome and you make a good friend of the media's sales manager.

7. Read and keep yourself updated with the intended publication's content and target your releases to their target audience - not yours alone. Ignorantly written releases end up in wastepaper baskets and so do uninformed press release writers.

8. If you are still in doubt, get in touch with a good, proven press release writer.

Traditional Media Owners Better Take Heed of This

Two Thirds of Americans Dissatisfied With The Quality of Journalism
by Jack Loechner, Thursday, Mar 13, 2008 8:15 AM ET

A new WeMedia/Zogby Interactive poll shows that 67% of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news. In addition, the survey found that while almost 70% of Americans think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, though two thirds are not satisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.

The online survey documented the shift away from traditional sources of news, such as newspapers and TV, to the Internet, most dramatically among so-called digital natives, people under 30 years old.

48% of the survey respondents said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from the 40% who said the same a year ago. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source

55% of those age 18 to 29 say they get most of their news and information online, compared to 35% of those age 65 and older

38% of these seniors said they get most of their news from television. Overall, 29% said television is their main source of news, while 11% turn to radio and 10% to newspapers for most of their news and information

7% of those age 18 to 29 said they get most of their news from newspapers

17% of those age 65 and older list newspapers as their top source of news and information

More here

This is an interesting paper which media owners better pay heed to.

The article revealed (results of a survey actually) two thirds of Americans think journalism quality could be improved and that the younger set (18-29 age group) get their news mostly from the internet.

Interestingly, I noted, the researchers did not reveal any data on SMS (short messaging system) news alert subscriptions which is growing very fast in Malaysia. Although currently only provided by the traditional media (read: Print) houses as an extension of their income-model, I believe alternative media companies will soon jump on the bandwagon to tap into this very lucrative market.

What is happening in America? Don't they have SMS news dissemination?

I would expect that with better mobile telecommunication network and greater take-up, SMS news would challenge the internet over there. But there were no data on this from the report - either there were no SMS news subscription models or the researchers have overlooked this means of news vending.

In either case, if you are a media owner, take heed of the story. If you have not gone to the web, it is time to do so. And if you have gone to the web, think about SMS news or mobile news vending. they technologies are all there waiting to be exploited - XML feeds can be virtually output into every imaginable form or outlet!

This is how the news portal of the future should be!

Is this the new way news presentation is going evolve online? (See website here)

This is how a news portal should be. A world map occupies the main section with text-linked categories at the side.

A user reaches the page, looks at the navigation at right, clicks on the category that interests him, and start reading news which is cast in descending order, as they come in.

At right, geo-markers pop up to show the latest five happenings in one's country (even the world) and when moused over would show snippets of the first paragraph of news that is happening.

All these which were once dreamt of can now be a reality. In fact, since the middle of last year, with the advent of geo-tagging and geo-rss this technology was already within grasp.

I remembered attending a Pop-fly presentation in Kuala Lumpur last year which discussed the ease with which various softwares could be mashed up. It was then I stumbled one of the earliest systems using the technology - showing geo-tagged RSS feeds of world news fed via Reuters. A similar map with geomarkers show the latest 10 top news cast from Reuters' RSS feed.

With larger bandwidth penetration, this is definitely a logical design direction to take for future News portals. It makes for less cluttered interface at the Frontpage and gives perceived currency to news with the geomarkers changing position as news come in.

Now, even advertising (local advertising I am talking about) can interestingly be presented using these geomarkers which can be seen at glanced and not glaringly intrusive like eye-blasters or flashy banners. Readers can be given a choice whether or not to click these geomarkers to read the ads and this will account for quality click throughs rather than grabbing eyeball attention.

YouTube - Your next viral marketing tool?

All right, we all know how powerful videos can be and how effective it can send the messages across compared to the best of basic text and picture combinations. However, because of the extensive work involved when coming up with a video, many web publishers ignore it. Another of the put-off is because of hosting space restruction and bandwidth woes.

With YouTube, all these are history. You only need to come up with a video, and host it for free.

But if you are an internet marketer, or a blogger, have you considered it as your viral marketing tool? How does it work? Well, two ways.

One, build a video about your blog or business. Then host it on YouTube. The visibility of your url, on YouTube, and the latter's subscription function, will in a small way promote your core business.

The second way is to subscribe to the business/content that is related to yours. The subscriber's URL is also featured on his/her YouTube profile which also then takes viewers to the main site. Now, if you have not considered this as your viral marketing tool, why wait?

Is this the future of Print?

Just when you think that Print's days are numbered, creative repackaging sees for it the light of day. How do you repackage Print so that it can be used web-wise? Easy, with vector viewer technology - which has been around since Adobe invented PDF.

Take the MyPaper, which is produced in Singapore, viewable at http://www.mypaper.com.sg/.

I was surprised how easy the pages load over medium broadband connection and how flippable and zooming functions easily takes over in a click of the mouse.

Is this the future of repackaging Print news for web?

Or is this the pathfinder technology that will take web content presentation to another new era? Especially one for those who are not keen on HTML, pop-ups, and other multimedia features that can cause much alarm to users who only want easily viewable content - minus the bells and whistles and other irrirants?

I think existing print owners should look into this technology, which if I am not mistaken, was pioneered by the Koreans but not too successfully marketed back then due to the low bandwidth and slower operating systems.

Today, there are so many of them, which allows you to turn Print (or any other) into viewable, scalable PDFs that can be uploaded into the web server and downloaded just as easily.

Blog Theme Generators

IF you are a blogger and have been blogging long enough, you would want a theme/template unique to yourself and the content of your blog.

Usually this is pretty easy to do, just Google for blog themes (free or otherwise), head on there, download and install them. And you have what you need - with a trade-off, sometimes, that you use a link-back.

The disadvantage of this is that somewhere sometime down the line you will come across a blog of similar look and feel, and you might want to go blog theme hunting again - unless you know how to design yours. Of course, that would be a breeze if you knew HTML or CSS. And if you don't, your search ends there. Or does it?

Well, it needn't be. I was cruising through various sites without much direction till I came to this site: http://mashable.com/2007/11/18/10-template-generators/ . It lists blog theme (or template if you like) generators. And some doesn't need you to know HTML or CSS to do that, just idiot-proofed check and preview functions that even a chimp could come up with killer themes if it knew how to log on.

Blogger Picture Uploading/Publishing to FTP Down

Latest! Google has resolved this problem today, March 3. Publishing FTP has never been faster!

If you are hosting your blogsite elsewhere and publishing via FTP, you would have found that the image/picture uploading and publishing onto your FTP server had been down a few days already.

What you usually get is an "Blogger is is taking too long to publish on your FTP" when you upload images. If you publish without images, the "Show published files" link you normally see on the Publishing To FTP dashboard will not list any of the published files. And if you click the link that says you would like to wait, the same repeats itself. Blogger doesnt publish at all.

At the Google Help group, this issue has been raised several times already and so far, there had been no indication of what's wrong nor inkling from Google's side whether the situation is uniquely regional or widespread, or if it would be resolved soon. I have also alerted Google Support but has so far received no news.