The Techmeme page updates extrememly frequently pulling in stories algorithmically with some additional human curation but I have never seen one writer with a lead story and 2 additional reference posts without any additional “noise”, unless you count the larger child branch below. He has one post in that child branch as well.

I am not going to link to the posts… that would most likely spoil the “triple rainbow”.

Even more remarkable:- none of the articles were “fluff”, and Mike wrote 14 posts on 12th January.

Kudos

p.s. I am sure it has happened before, either for Mike or other highly productive writers especially with the way publishing platfroms can publish content at a specified future time so it could even be engineered. But someone has to actually see it, and note it as something special, as it would still take considerable effort.

Just like a double rainbow

Digg 4 Is a New Aggregator

At least that is what it is meant to be, based upon my understanding – the site now has content from major publishers being fed by RSS to the site.

Most publishers seem to be opting to submit all their content
I added a feed for selected posts to be fed there which might be suitable for a wider audience

But there are things which really shouldn’t be there.

Techmeme

I love Techmeme, I think it is a great news aggregator, but nearly all the stories – especially the lead stories are duplicates of existing content that is being fed to Digg.
It is just the way it is with Techmeme – sure there are the occasional stories that make it to Techmeme by way of a tip on Twitter, but those are only occasional, and even then often are from a large site that would have made it there anyway.

I am not going to single out internet and tech cebebrities but for instance I have seen Google Buzz RSS feeds submitted.

On one such post I saw this

Pretty clear instructions, and later down there were instructions on how to find posts from Reddit.com

http://digg.com/search?q=site:reddit.com

Sure enough that brings up lots of Reddit stories

And these stories are making it to the front page – even blindly

Effect on Digg Home Page

7 of the 10 stories on the home page are links to Reddit

Will Kevin Rose Offer an Olive Branch?

I don’t think so… at least not yet.

• There is no such thing as bad publicity
• Digg is gaining a lot of good publicity with the people it wants to attract – the people who were not Digg elite
• Digg will end up with their button back on tons of blogs and news media sites that previously abandoned them for Twitter – free advertising as soon as a story is published.
• Casual users will either get
  • News from their friends and personal selection = dumbed down crippled feed reader
  • A front page that updates a few 1000 times per day.
• The Digg elite (who grew Digg) will either get used to the idea, be thrown some kind of bone or will defect to Reddit or Mixx or other communities (many ex-Diggers such as Zaibatsu are huge on Twitter.

Digg On Reddit

Nice welcome message for new mmembers who had never heard of Reddit
A little gloating about owning the fron page of Digg – (they have as much right as Techmeme to be there)
Some interesting traffic stats

Digg Inbox Zero

Over the last few days I have been maintaining “Inbox Zero” in my Digg account, just hiding every story (some after I Dugg them)
Most of the people I still follow are fairly inactive on Digg, so the amount of stories was quite small.

Today for some reason I can’t get the “hide” button to work – almost like it has been disabled.

Will I be adding Digg buttons here?

No idea… maybe I will have a vote for it when things settle down a little. I also need to do the same for Sphinn.

I am also evaluating what to do with 3 Reddits I set up 2 years ago
WordPress (lowercase P dammit)
Blogging
Internet Marketing

Oh and just to be a little ironic – more on Techmeme

Recently I have noticed a lot more stories making it into a lead position. Here is just an example for today.

On Google’s new favicon

Google Merchant Search

Google Testing Search Interfaces

It is good to see search engine marketing blogs, who have a vast depth and understanding of Google search products gaining additional exposure and recognition. Thanks Gabe.

Here are some of my previous articles on the topic, which provide a good background

In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent
Google Blog Search | How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! (or not)
Exclusive: Google Blog Search Extended Results | Supplemental Results

Google Blog Search

I grabbed some snapshots to demonstrate how things are currently shaping up on Google Blog Search based upon 2 very similar search terms.

Microsoft Yahoo

After five hours – Search for Microsoft Yahoo

After 19 hours

Yahoo Microsoft

After five hours – Search for Yahoo Microsoft

After 19 hours

• Keywords within the title still seem to be the primary ranking factor
• Keyword order in the title makes a significant difference
• Within the content, keyword proximity, keyword density and keyword order appear to make a difference, especially on less used combinations.
• Site authority metrics, such as PageRank, Feed Subscriber numbers, links, etc seem to play an almost insignificant role, other than possibly as a way to filter out spam
• Freshness when sorting by relevance seems to be marginal – once you have been selected as relevant, it seems you remain relevant, with relevance being recalculated periodically (hourly?)
• Tagging (rel=”tag”) may or may not be a factor – it may just add more keywords together in close proximity
• Social media bookmarking and links don’t seem to be important
• Extended results based upon the search phrase to suggest topical authority don’t seem to be a large factor

It is nice to be looked on by Google Blog Search to be more relevant than the New York Times, though it is difficult to determine why.

From a casual end user perspective, the search results were relevant and fresh – for someone looking to research a story for a blog post, they might have to use additional filters based upon time (within the last 24 hours), and maybe also sort the results by date.

Technorati Blog Search

Technorati is currently, without doubt providing fresher results than Google – refreshing a Google blog search page tracking results sorted by date was providing 10 results in the last 2 hours.
In contrast, Technorati is providing 10 results… in the last 10 minutes… and they are not spam.

Some spam can make its way into both Technorati and Google Blog Search results, Technorati’s way of filtering those out, rather than ranking based upon relevance to a search term, is to remove results based on a particular user defined authority threshold, which even “with a lot of authority” lets most established blogs through (as long as they haven’t been banned)

One thing I can’t quite work out with Technorati is why blog posts aren’t quite displayed in precise date order – sometimes a post from 20 minutes ago appears fresher than one from 10 minutes ago – it is possible that the dates are based upon when they were published, but they are displayed in the order thy were collected.

Technorati used to have a major problem with duplicate results from the same domain appearing in their search index, that appears to have been fixed.

There is no way to “rank higher” on Technorati – you are either relevant to a search or you aren’t – the primary search method is full text – I would look on tagging as more important to appear on tag based feed syndication.

Google Blog Search vs Technorati

By nature I am an inclusionist, and I feel that any voice on the blogosphere should be heard if they have something valuable to say. Google’s apparent poor indexing for me is a huge negative factor.

Google’s relevance in blog search seems to be heavily influenced by what in the old days would be looked on as keyword stuffing.

Technorati doesn’t really attempt to classify content as being more relevant, other than authroity requirements – you can select between the keywords appearing as tags, or within the text – there is no over reliance on Titles to prove that something really is relevant.

Even on a relatively hot topic, neither service is sending me a lot of traffic – the total so far is less than 20 visits… combined.

Techmeme

Lets look at what Techmeme doesn’t do

• Doesn’t include all sources
• No search function – I would love a database based search in reverse chronological order
• No snippets for all headlines, just the lead story – maybe this could be fixed with a mouseover and some Ajax

What Techmeme does well is provide a good overview of a breaking story, and as such it also delivers more traffic – more people find it useful.

If I read about a technology based story in a feed reader or on a social news site, I am more likely to turn to Techmeme than Technorati or Blogsearch.

Whilst Technorati has recently swithced to a more “meme like” front page, it still doesn’t provide me with the width of opinion I am looking for, and as it happens when I first started researching this post, the updates to the Microsoft / Yahoo deal were not listed as a technology news story on Technorati.

Google Universal

It is true that Google are slowly integrating blogsearch or blog results in their primary index, but certainly for breaking news on this topic Google Universal Search provided more of a historical reference.

Where Do I Go Second?

It used to be Google Blog Search, because Technorai had very noisy duplicate results.

I am now switching back to Technorati – I love being able to rank well on Google Blogsearch, but the criteria for ranking doesn’t currently provide more relevant results.

Technorati provides fresher results from a wider selection of blogs – chalk one up for the little guy

Techmeme Sell Links

Techmeme has very clear advertising with sponsored posts

The links they use are redirects

http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

If you check the Http Status Codes

SEO Consultants Directory Check Server Headers – Single URI Results
Current Date and Time: 2008-01-31T03:10:07-0700
User IP Address: 213.158.xxx.xx

#1 Server Response: http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:10:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
Content-Length: 388
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

#2 Server Response: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:09:22 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch7
X-Pingback: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/xmlrpc.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You discover that it is a 301 redirect used for tracking, and in theory could pass “Google Juice” – the link could be counted as a real link by search engines.

However you then need to look at the Techmeme robots.txt file

User-Agent: MSIECrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/

Traditional SEO thinking is that robots.txt blocks the passing of Google Juice and PageRank

That however isn’t how it has been confirmed by Matt Cutts to operate.

As I discussed in my SEO Linking Gotcha’s post, Robots.txt does not prevent a page from accumulating PageRank, it purely stops a page from being crawled most of the time, though that is fallible (There was further discussion on Sphinn).

Confused? So Am I

I can remember seeing Techmeme as a PR6, maybe even as high as a PR7. Robert Scoble seems to have removed his blogroll link to them, but they don’t honestly need the juice any more. Techmeme honestly has tons of links.

I can’t believe as some might suggest that there is less PageRank in the technology sector, as has been suggested about the SEO sector in the past.

Techmeme hasn’t really changed its internal linking structure. From an SEO perspective it isn’t exactly ideal in my way of thinking, but that again would be highly contested as many people believe you can’t benefit from controlling internal linking.

So Why A Penalty?

If those redirects were actually links to a static page, they would still accumulate PageRank, even if blocked with robots.txt, and could still appear in search results based upon whatever data Google derives from the pages linking to it.

Linking again to my SEO linking Gotchas just in case you ignored the first link.

It is possible that for a period of time Techmeme didn’t have a robots.txt file, mistakes happen, though when I last checked back in October the robots.txt was exactly the same as it is now.

The page is blocked with robots.txt, so the Googlebot shouldn’t crawl the page, unless for some reason it did.

It seems to me, relying on robots.txt for paid links isn’t safe

2 safe options

1. Nofollow all links
2. Use meta nofollow on the redirect page

The only people who can confirm that Techmeme has some kind of penalty one way or the other are Google

If Techmeme has been given a penalty, they are not the only ones to have been given a PageRank penalty unfairly.

Update

It seems that whatever caused this has been fixed by Google or maybe hand edited. I wonder whether we will ever find out the cause.

I am not yet seeing the change on my Search Status toolbar, but a quick check on DigPagerank reveals that Techmeme is back to PR7

Ted Murphy rightly questions Google quite openly to explain why PPP bloggers are being punished for not using nofollow on links, yet many prominent bloggers post quite blatant pagerank passing links to their advertisers every chance they get.

Not only do they mention their advertisers in “Thanks To Our Advertisers” posts, but they also name drop them every chance they get as a form of disclosure.

As an example, almost every time PayPerPost was discussed on Techcrunch , either Text Link Ads or their ReviewMe service was also mentioned but rarely other services such as Sponsored Reviews who haven’t got the same advertising budget.

Buying advertising seems to generate a lot of goodwill.

If Techcrunch regard them as advertising, what reason would they have to not include a nofollow on the links? Advertising has very little if no editorial value.

I get a penalty because I sometimes spend 10 HOURS writing a review of a company for a measly $130, but then I also get other revenue, it is more additional compensation and a discount on what I could charge for consulting for having it public, much like you can get building work cheaper if it can be a show home.

All these advertisers have done is paid Techcrunch money.

The juice Techcrunch passes might be worth 100+ paid posts.

Why Such A Strong Reaction?

So today Duncan trys to defend Techcrunch stating that the links are disclosed and they are not distorting the trust with advertorial content.

That means Techcrunch are selling pagerank

It doesn’t take any time to post a list of 8 links to advertisers. Google’s issue is with PageRank passing links. It is nothing to do with disclosure.

Wouldn’t they like to see Google make a statement of exactly why “thanking your sponsors” kind of advertising links are OK, and PPP links are not?

No, because if Google closely examined Techcrunch in the same light as paid reviews, they would probably find that these “thanking the advertisers” links are distorting their rankings more than paid reviews from D list bloggers.

Techmeme – It Seems Techcrunch Have To Link To You To Be News

The news is actually 2 days old already, and Techmeme have only picked it up because Techcrunch linked to them.

This story was news 2 days ago. My post which included a link to PayPerPost has already been linked to by both Search Engine Land and Search Engine Round Table, two of the highest authorities on these kinds of issues, but it seems Techcrunch determines whether a story is newsworthy if it is related to search engine marketing.

There seems to be a core group of “news breakers” and if they don’t link to a story, it isn’t relevant to Techmeme.

The problem is that anything related to Google is technology news, and their primary focus is their search engine and things that have an effect on it.

It seems Techmeme place a very small weighting on search marketing blogs, despite them having more historical knowledge of Google than many of the tech bloggers, and thus can provide more detail and historical context.

I suppose I should be grateful to Techmeme for linking through to a syndicated copy of my original article on WebProNews, posted a day later than the original.

(note I don’t link through to legitimately syndicated copies of my articles because of duplicate content but I am grateful for all the articles they pick up)

This Isn’t A Pop At Techcrunch

This is really Google’s fault for their unclear guidelines that even has experts scratching their heads. I have had many renowned watchers of the search marketing space state that they don’t regard the few paid reviews I write as any kind of search engine spam, and that they have value. I have had them syndicated, linked to and achieve some success on social media sites such as Sphinn.

Want an example of a paid review? How about my WordPress SEO Masterclass

That is about as close to the line of search engine spam as I have gone, and that gets me a -1 or -2 penalty on my PageRank.

Duncan, seriously Techcrunch should be in the PPP camp on this one, as Techcrunch have been a supporter of Text Link Ads (or supported by) for some time.

There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.

I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of WordPress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.

My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.

Encouraging The Selling of PageRank?

It is my belief that I don’t advocate the selling of PageRank, especially considering how I also discourage excessive blogrolls and sitewide links. If you have links coming in for your every utterance, I suppose internal linking structure is less important to you than acknowledging sites you respect (who might also reciprocate), or possibly those you sell links to (if you do) but in general for niche marketing blogs I tend to avoid leaks in the sidebar.

Comments on Sphinn and even here in the comments recently suggest there is some kind of disconnect between how I regard paid review services, and possibly how they are regarded, used and abused by the SEO community at large, and possibly Google reacting to that attitude taken by SEOs and not that taken by the review services, or the reviewers themselves. I think it is important to point out that PayPerPost was created by a marketing company, not by an SEO or link selling company.

Rather than single out individuals for the comments they have made, I would rather answer a specific question asked here on my blog by Lisa Stewart

Hi Andy- thanks for the excellent and well thought out post and arguments FOR services like PayPerPost.

To play Gevil’s Advocate- If a site (like PPP) is offering a fee to post and the fee is based entirely on Page Rank (and sometimes Alexa traffic) then why can’t it be interpreted as paying for page rank?
A post coming from PPP on a PR3 site may cost advertiser 10.00 and the SAME post on PR5 is 50.00.

Why wouldn’t Google seeing this as gaming PR?

Now I should point out that at this time Google is interpreting this as gaming PageRank. I personally feel this is the wrong interpretation, but then my own interpretation could be extremely biased. I have been penalized by Google, even though I believe I don’t sell PageRank.

Advertiser Or Client Intent

Every potential client who has requested a review and I have considered for a review, when told that specific link text is not a possibility, and that any link I give would be for editorial purposes, has responded favourably.

It seems people are not necessarily ordering reviews for SEO purposes at all, though I do give SEO friendly links to things I highlight as part of the editorial process.

Many corporate advertisers have a different need to fulfil, that of creating a buzz about a new product and feel that blogs are an interesting avenue to explore. They will most likely get different feedback than they would from traditional reviews sites, because a reviewer whilst being a consumer, would also spend more time doing it.
In the attention age we live in, gaining feedback from consumers whilst increasingly vital, is also becoming increasingly more difficult – sure consumers might make a passing comment, but constructive feedback is less likely, unless they feel aggrieved.

Google, Microsoft, and even most startups have rank upon rank of staff members and shareholders to “get the message out” about a new product or service, but in many ways those too are paid reviews that don’t mention competing products or services.
Other large companies don’t have such an extensive and influential online presence amongst their staff and investors, thus they look to other alternatives.

• Internal PR – the largest firms retain their own public relations specialists, often with shared ties to advertising personel – this isn’t a cheap undertaking.
• PR Firms – expensive but have access to key influencers
• Press releases – wider distribution costs money, though they are less effective for companies that aren’t monitored continually, and information is less likely to trickle down to niche markets – I have seen a number of popular websites hosting paid press releases
• Focus groups – Google themselves pay $75 per hour for people to test their services, and are probably paying the person monitoring them even more – from this they gain private feedback, but I wonder how many people also write about the experience.
• Product sample giveaways – quite frequently these do not have to be given back, so a blog owner can keep them, or give them away to readers.
• Special events – I have attended special events by major Fortune 500 corporations launching products where many of the exhibitors (including me) had flight, room and board funded, along with display space, and the same was probably true of the press.
• Paid reviews and buzz marketing

For some reason there is a disconnect between paying a blogger $10 to $200 for a post, and paying a staff member $100 per hour to chase a group of bloggers to write something for free, feed them with drinks, sponsor their events etc.

Social media optimization might be looked on as successful if a $5000 budget garnered 50 to 100 links, but paid reviews can garner many more links for a similar budget, and could also be used in conjunction with a social media campaign.

Paid blogging is a way of grabbing the attention of a blogger to consider looking at a product or service and sharing their experiences about it in public.

There are obviously some companies that use it specifically for SEO purposes, and some bloggers who are willing to write something purely for SEO purposes. Then again have you never heard of “SEO press releases” and “Article Marketing” where the content is provided 100% with links just to copy and paste.

I don’t think Hewlett Packard, Ford, or major movie studios really care that much about whether links count for search engines, but they probably do care if links are clicked. If you use nofollow, to a percentage of readers who see the link, the fact that you use nofollow suggests that you don’t trust the service you are writing about, the intent of nofollow.
The same is true for any redirects which suggest affiliate links and commercial tracking.

It is quite possible that 30% of my readers, and possibly more than 50% of my regular readers can see when I have used a nofollow on a link, because I encourage them to use the Search Status plugin for Firefox.

When Google and Microsoft employees start linking to their employers using nofollow, that is when I will start using nofollow on paid reviews and linking to consulting clients.

Leading People Astray

It has been suggested that my coverage of PayPerPost, Paid Reviews, and PageRank is in some way leading people astray, and thus the “Pied Piper” connotation.

My firm belief is that my readership is extremely mature and intelligent, and quite capable of making their own informed decisions.

Many do sell advertising in various ways without the nofollow attribute value, and would choose to use that advertising or not without my intervention, as they chose to use it in the first place without my input.

When half your family income comes from a few links in the sidebar on a few blogs, it is a very difficult decision to remove them just before Christmas, especially if you have long-term contracts.

If I was to denounce PayPerPost, it would have very little effect on the decision process each would make as an individual.

Alternative Metrics For Authority

There is a pay scale in many aspects of every day life, the time of different people has a different perceived value.

Advertisers, companies doing market research, and those looking for a little consulting need some way to determine a suitable pay scale.

• Traffic metrics

  Alexa and Compete are not very relative to niches, and not enough people install Quantcast code on their site to get a real measure.

• Technorati

  easily gamed with WordPress themes and widgets – eventually Technorati do kick sites out of the Top100 but the APis will still send high ratings. Competitions and “review my blog” have also been looked on as a good way of boosting Technorati rankings, and then we shouldn’t forget memes and link chains.
  Technorati really need to move away from counting anything in a sidebar, including blogroll links.

• Feedburner Subscribers

  You would hope that this would be accurate, but due to the problems with default feed packages, and cross promotions of alternative reading platforms, the real number of subscribers could be anything from 30% to 90% of the number shown… and of course that doesn’t mean that people even open their feed reader.

• Comments

  How much can your blog actually stimulate discussion on other blogs, and in your own comments. This is a measure of influence.

• Clicks From Feeds

  Lots of people subscribe to content but don’t read it, or take action by clicking through to an article or referenced site. Feedburner do offer some tracking, but it is hard to use this as an external metric, and to get good results you have to use their tracking URLs which then reduce the numbers of links counted by other metrics such as Technorati. People make linking mistakes.

• Social News & Bookmarking

  Most sites provide some kind of API access, thus allowing you to judge the quality of a page based upon social factors and popularity. These are also gamed to a certain extent. Stumbleupon need to provide an API. Eventually something like the Social Media for Firefox extension might be looked on as more useful than other metrics.

• Meme Trackers

  Meme trackers try to track what is a hot story right now, such as Techmeme and Megite. The nearest thing they provide to an overall measure of influence are compilations of statistics such as the Techmeme Leaderboard. It is a very small subset of sites.

• Custom Metrics

  Scripts such as Blogstorm can give an indication of popularity, but require server side access, and for a blog owner to care about being listed.

• PageRank

  Proving to be too easily gamed (WordPress themes and funny redirects), and the visual representation provided in the Google toolbar is now being adjusted with manual PageRank penalties with arguably commercial considerations. It hasn’t been very meaningful for search results for some time, and now it is no longer a metric of social influence by anyone that understand these things. Unfortunately Google mislead their Google Toolbar users.



• Argus Is Coming

  I am excited about the potential of whatever Izea (PayPerPost) come up with for their Argus project which promised to provide a comprehensive metrics service for both bloggers and advertisers.

  I haven’t seen it, am not on the alpha test, and might not get early access to it because I am not going to be at Postiecon or Blog World Expo.

Examples Of PageRank Used For Ranking

The Google Directory
The Adage Power 150
The Top 25 Blogs About Blogging
The Top 100 Make Money Onine Blogs

The of course there is the PayPerPost Direct – it is an advertiser marketplace and PageRank is used as one of the indicators of authority or influence, but you can’t search the database based upon that field, and it is just one metric offered and soon to be removed.

It is quite possible Google just took that database of sites for its penalty list, without realising that whilst PageRank is used as an indication of authority, bloggers are free to set their own criteria in private discussion with someone requiring some kind of review service. Bloggers are quite able to specify that they will nofollow the links, or use redirects. they are also able (as I do) to insist that all links are editorial..

I know bloggers on that list who have never written a review for PayPerPost.

Techcrunch Crunchies

In closing, Techcrunch along with a number of other technology blogs will soon launch what appears to be an award ceremony for technology startups.
If there happens to be a monetization or blogging category, I know who I am going to nominate, and encourage people to vote for.
In something as serious as an award called “The Crunchies”, I am quite happy to try to influence any results.

Update

I just want to highlight why I don’t support paid links and this is the kind of review I really wish Sebastian had been paid for.

If Sebastian was giving that type of advice in private, it would probably cost someone $1000 or more… seriously, Sebastian knows his stuff, just as he demonstrated with the Blogcatalog redirect problems in the past.

Seth Godin Speaks to Google

In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.

The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.

If the perfect way to market a product is to flip the funnel on its side to become a megaphone, as Seth describes “The fashion permission complex”, then Google is in trouble, because they can’t currently charge for it, and they are constantly denouncing companies like PayPerPost who can make money from buzz marketing.
Google attacks PayPerPost mainly because PayPerPost potentially has the ability to disturb the link balance their algorithms place on the fabric of the internet.

The same is true for PR firms and almost all marketing, PayPerPost however in many cases is cheaper.

Matt Cutts thinks it is good value to do viral marketing, so you pay a specialist $5000 for a few hours work, and you might be lucky to get 100 links. It is not guaranteed.

With PayPerPost you pay $5000, and in general you will only get writers who have some genuine interest in your product writing about it, just like a PR firm isn’t going to persuade a blog on parenthood to write about the latest database system from Oracle. That might be a bad example, I actually know a few blogs that could do such a review justice, who occasionally talk about parenting as well.
PayPerPost delivers 200-300 people writing about your product, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but you are guaranteed the buzz.

The biggest problem? This presentation is from February 2006 – PayPerPost didn’t even exist when this presentation was made, and Google didn’t adapt and fill the void that Seth Godin spotted, because it doesn’t fit with Google’s primary source of revenue.

Thanks for posting the timely video Jack, I had seen it before, but things didn’t connect as well as they do now in hindsight.

Robert Scoble Reinvents PageRank?

Robert Scoble posted 3 videos yesterday along with a short blog post he hopes won’t be noticed on Techmeme, so of course it will ;)

Social Graph Based Search Parts 1, 2 and 3

I couldn’t work out a way to embed each individual video, so I embedded the full channel and provided links to individual parts.

What Robert is saying is that social networks help create a web of trust in the content people refer to, and thus that will eventually play a pivotal role in how searching for content will work in the future.

He didn’t reference Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, but those services also in some situations can provide better search results than Google.

Robert seems to be fixated by the idea that Mahalo provides a list of HDTV manufacturers on their search page, and Google doesn’t.

That fact is based upon SEO, and he seems to think the review sites and trusted vendors such as Amazon are bad results.

Robert blames this on SEOs, when in fact it is the fault quite often of the manufacturers having very hard to navigate, poorly optimized sites, that don’t attract natural linkage.

I think it is testament to Google’s algorithms that some review sites do appear above Amazon.

I disagree with Robert that the Mahalo results page is better, what is missing from the Google search is just a suggested search term “HDTV manufacturers” along with the other suggestions.
Most of the Maholo results were taken straight from the top of Google, and many of the remainder are shopping comparison sites and coupon sites = yes it is those dirty SEOs and affiliates at play again.

You still have to count how many clicks you have to perform until you get the information you are looking for, and for all but general browsing, Mahalo doesn’t offer any advantages.

There isn’t even a decent link to something explaining the difference between the various formats and technology, no links to specific self help forums etc.

The Mahalo page is so good that Yahoo doesn’t even pick up any links to it yet.

Networks of Contacts = PageRank

Networks of friends, contacts and who links to and trusts each other is effectively the same as PageRank, and that is proving to be broken and easy to manipulate.

One of the biggest problems is that “Robert Scoble” as an example might have a lot of credibility when talking about mobile phones, or camcorders, but using one of Robert’s examples a while back, he knows nothing about lawnmowers.

Techmeme overcome this by having separate indices for different topical authority, but that only works partially.
Techmeme certainly doesn’t pick up every important technology story, as an example I don’t think the SES discussion on paid links appeared on Techmeme.

Google Has It’s Failing

Google does have it’s failing, but currently Mahalo and various meme and social networks are only offering a subset of the data Google is dealing with, and Google is slowly making changes to the way it’s algorithms work.
Google does take into consideration topical authority to a certain extent – PageRank is only part of the equation, whereas that is effectively all Techmeme and Facebook could offer as an alternative to improve search.

One of the big reasons Facebook doesn’t open up is monetary, they wouldn’t be able to control search, and the income that can produce.

Rand has already responded, Duncan has already responded on Techcrunch, I am sure others will, and this is already on Techmeme.

Muhammad also has some interesting coverage, from a social network point of view, Google still has a number of its own services yet to be integrated.

David Utter on WebProNews also offers some insight into the TV factor – using Facebook takes some effort to get any kind of quality results.

It also seems that Techmeme seems to have developed some very selective results and doesn’t like me any more, or maybe I have to use specific titles for Techmeme to work correctly, something Robert in his video was suggesting isn’t the case.

Dave Winer has also rumbled and thinks Google is on the top rung and will be hard to shift.
Over a 4 year span I don’t think it would be impossible to take a chunk out of Google, as things are moving faster, but Facebook, Techmeme and certainly Mahalo are not the platforms that will do it.

Yesterday it was announced that Google have managed to untangle their various crawlers and can now report feed usage stats to services like Feedburner. Further coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable, SearchEngineLand and Techmeme.

FeedBurner Readership Prior to Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

It is unfortunate that I don’t have screen captures of all of the following, although I am sure the specific sites I mention will be reporting their own data shortly.

Techcrunch – from memory had between 150k and 170k subscribers being reported
Mashable – from memory had approximately 51k subscribers

For my own stats it is much easier because I have a FeedBurner Pro account

“Reach” currently seems to correspond with how many clicks you have on the site, and not how many unique readers or how many page views on the site.

Here are my MyBlogLog stats from the same day:-

FeedBurner Readership After Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

Techcrunch

Whilst my estimate of previous reported subscribers might be out by 10K, overnight Techcrunch have gained approximately 100K subscribers. This is close to a 60% gain

Mashable

Mashable seem to have gained around 10K subscribers, or approximately a 20% gain

Andy Beard

In this case I have more detailed information

The addition of Google Reader Stats represents a 32% gain

Conclusions

There seems to be a huge variation in the demographics for each site which is actually very refreshing. Techcrunch obviously have a very high population of Google Reader subscribers, and they have given Google Reader significant coverage. Mashable have also given Google Reader significant coverage, but their readership is potentially different, with more emphasis on social networks, and potentially a younger audience.

My own site is relatively new, and also caters for a different demographic audience, of people relatively new to blogging, and also a lot of people who are less familiar with reading RSS feeds.

Whilst the information I have isn’t conclusive, and such figures might only be forthcoming if Feedburner aggregate their statistics and make them public, it seems to me that Google Reader may well have the largest user base in the Feed Reader market, less than 6 months after they updated their user interface.
Google Reader certainly seems very popular among new adopters, and that is actually the largest potential market.

I am not alone in drawing these conclusions, as it seems Steve Boyd and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media) have reported similar gains.

With B5 media it will be interesting which properties gained the most overnight. I have a similar but slightly different demographic to Problogger.net.
Darrens subscribers seem to have shot up by more than the average for B5 Media – Before the Google Reader statistics were introduced, Darren had quite significant gains in readership, and was approaching close to 12K readers.

He is now approaching 19K subscribers:-

This is close to a 60% gain overnight

Jeremy also gave a very interesting breakdown of the top subscription method by each demographic audience:-

One of the great things, though, is that we can actually break these numbers down by some vertical-specific info. I won’t do this for all our channels, but to give a brief view into some different demo/psycho-graphics, here are 3 of our largest channels with their top 3 feed readers:

Business: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Technology: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Entertainment: Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Desktop, Google Feedfetcher

And a few of our smaller channels, with diverse interests?

Arts & Crafts: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, My Yahoo
Personal Development: Google Feedfethcer, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Travel & Culture: Bloglines, Google Feedfetcher, unidentified (followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks)

I wonder if other blog networks will be so open with their information, as I find this fascinating, especially the lack of IE7 users in Jeremy’s stats, despite its supposed lead over Firefox.

I should also link over to the Feedburner blog, because they explain how their statistics work.

Update 06/25/2007

Duncan Riley just linked through to this post in an article on Techcrunch, so I thought it would be appropriate to make a small update.

The initial stats listed above are from 4 months ago, lets see how things have changed.

The obvious thing looking at the follow statistics is that my subscriber base has more than doubled, in fact I could claim my number of subscribers is growing faster than Techcrunch!

The fact that Techcrunch gain more subscribers per day than I have in total is just a minor issue of very little importance.

Among my own readership, Google Reader’s market share has actually increased to 38%, and because my subscriber base has increased, those numbers are now from a bigger market sample, though admittedly still a very heavy technology focus.

I should also note that those numbers are not influenced at all by default subscription packages from many feed readers, which can have a dramatic effect on subscriber number balance and the total number of active subscribers that are reported.

First of all Techmeme gets it partially right, that one of the original sources for the sale was Forbes.

If you expand all the related coverage, it is a shame the announcement on the MyBlogLog Blog doesn’t seem to have been cited anywhere near as many times.

As far as I am concerned that, and the announcement on Yahoo Yodel are the original sources, although it seems the first site they talked to was Forbes.

How about Digg?

I have mentioned in comments in various places that to be dugg and reach the front page, you have to have lots of readers who use Digg and preferably well trained to Digg your content.

Mashable’s story on MyBlogLog was the one promoted very rapidly. It is a good report, but it was not the original source, and that was obvious as it linked through to the Forbes piece on MyBlogLog. That first commentary has so far gained only 8 Diggs.

Note: this is no disrespect to Pete, I love reading his blog

The original announcement on the MyBlogLog blog should have been the one that received the limelight if the Digg rules are true. (Disclosure: it is the one I submitted, which is why I am monitoring this). Currently at 11 Diggs

I mentioned that the MyBlogLog Blog was the original source in the Mashable Digg comments, and after a while, my comment was burried.

It is a shame that many of the reports I read on prominent blogs didn’t even link through to the MyBlogLog blog for a direct perspective.

In my opinion the best commentary, with the whole truth was on Om Malik’s GigaOm

Oh, and I am going to be one of the only people to link through to Scott Rafer’s blog

What is also important is that Jeremy Zawodny will be working with them, so you can expect great things. Hmm, note in that post he links to a Google Search of Fred Wilson’s blog.

I am glad that at least one of the MyBlogLog Acquisition reports was promoted on Digg, as it will be good to help grow the community.