Internet Babel

Google and an investment arm of the CIA are jointly backing a company working on real-time web monitoring and prediction.

Recorded Future uses real-time analysis of tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to identify relationships between people, organisations and events — both present and still-to-come.

The company says its temporal analytics engine looks at  ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same (or related) entities and events. The idea is to derive, for each event, who was involved and where/when it happened or might happen.  Recorded Future plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

This seems to be the first time that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA, but this is bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government.

Full story: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

Looks as though Google may be rolling out their latest changes now, so keep a look out for how your site is being indexed, and how quickly. Caffeine seems to be aimed at stripping out spam sites from search results, but it is also showing some changes in indexing/SERPS re ‘old’ Google.

See more here: http://www.seoibiza.com/blog/2009/08/19/google-caffeine-observations/

Google have announced the pending (although as yet undated) lauch of their ‘Wave’ product/platform.

What is Wave?

Well – to quote from Google:

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

It is going to be in developer preview for a while, so expect some changes to occur, but looks like it’s going to be big and open-source with a full developer API and toolkits to develop your own apps based on the Wave protocol.

I don’t suppose Big G will be buying Twitter now.

Full details at the Official Google Blog

A few months back, Google announced that they would be releasing a product that would allow easy integration of Social Networking features within websites and Blogs.

As of 4th December the Beta release of FriendConnect has been unveiled – and Google are accepting signups (to go on a wait-List i believe) for a phased roll out of the product.

What is FriendConnect?

Using OpenID, FriendConnect will allow you to add a range of social interactivity tools onto your website, in just the same way that you ad Adsense or analytics code. This will allow people to sign-up as Members of your site, post messages, reviews and ratings plus expected features such as sharing of apps, videos and pictures. 

Benefits and How-To:

Members wil also be able to invite others to join, so the potential for spreading the word about your site is obvious. There may also be tools to allow easy communication between Friend Connect and other social apps such as Facebook and Hi5.

As with other Google tools, you will need to sign up under your Google account and apply to join the program, but after that it seems that adding the Social features to your site really will be just the same as adsense – i.e. generating and pasting the required code into your site/template.

FriendConnect will of course be competing against a number of established players, but I’d be very surprised if they don’t grab a large chunk of the market with this – and they will almost certainly be adding a host of media and application type features into it.

It certainly opens up new possiblilities for smaller sites and new developers who would like to integrate social/membership type features into their sites.

Here’s a handy little video about Google Friend Connect (from CampFire one):

Of course, Facebook have also launched a Friend Connect tool so let battle commence

See more at: http://www.google.com/friendconnect

Well, it wasn’t a hoax and at last Google have finally introduced a level of integration between Adsense and Analytics.

This is still being rolled out at the moment – I don’t have any details on the rollout process so I’ll just have to wait for my invite but it looks to have some useful features for Adsense publishers.

From what I can gather we’ll be able to sign-up to use your existing or a new analytics account to track your Adsense performance.

• Once integrated, there will be a new ‘Adsense’ section within your analytics account where you’ll be able to see some good metrics at a ‘Page’ and ‘Referrer’ level – and will be able to drill down and analyse those metrics by such things as day, time of day, geographic location etc.
• As well as providing useful information on tour best performing sites and pages, this will also let you to assess the effects of any Adsense optimisation you do, and allow a basic form of split-testing where you could experiment with different ad formats and locations on similar pages.

It doesn’t look as though you’ll be able to analyse (yet) at an individual ad level (maybe heat maps could help?) – but from first appearances this could be a very handy tool for all you Adsense publishers out there and all from the comfor of your analytics account.

Now i’ve just got to wait for my invite

Hey everyone – just a quick wrap up about a couple of things making me grumpy today:

Google PR:
After Nicks previous Google bitch slap incident, I had vague hopes that Internet Babel may start getting some of its PR back this time around. No such luck, and even Jim at The Net Fool confirmed my lowly ranking ;-(  It doesn’t really matter of course, PR ain’t that big a deal and I’ve just got to carry on with building the quality content and link building/SEO stuff.

Link-Lies/Link-Fraud:
The term ‘linkbait’ can cover a number of practices – WikiPedia breaks linkbait down into a number of distinct types, but something that really bugs me is the trend towards totally manufactured stories.

Of course, this kind of rubbish has been going on in the mainstream media for a while, and I guess there’s no real reason to assume it wouldn’t take off on the Web as well, but it annoys me when you see some of the people doing this stuff actually being proud of the crap they put out and getting some level of ‘respect’ from other people for it. It’s not as if fabricating a ‘sexy’ story and touting it to a gullible press is so difficult, it’s just that not all of us want to stoop that low.

More to the point is that the big G will start to look at ways of punishing fraudulent link-bait and people using legitimate teasers/bait/promotion methods may get caught up in the crossfire and get dragged down as well. There’s nothing wrong with building and promoting traffic and links but doing it with stuff that has absolutely no basis in truth (while trying to pass itself off as a legitimate ‘news’ piece on a respected site) is just plain wrong. A great short term result for the guy who placed it, probably not so good in the long run for everyone else.

Adsense:
This last few days, Adsense (on my other sites) has been performing  like an arthritic, three-legged nag. Very sad.

Waiting for people:
I put a bid in for some sweet domain names a few days back and the clown isn’t responding. It is annoying.

On the brighter side, I’ve got some nice ideas for upcoming posts about SEO, WP, domain speculation and parking etc – plus I have some Domain name giveaways coming up soon AND a neat little SEO project that I hope to start and that I will update about on this Blog.

On the even brighter side, I’m about to go and sink a few well-earned beers

All will be well soon and I hope your day is going better than mine.

Hi Everyone – I hoped to get this one out a few days ago but the site move has all been a bit ‘hectic’

Following on from its purchase of Doubleclick, Google has re-badged the Performics Affiliate product as the Google Affiliate Network (1st July).

The Affiliate program will operate as a separate ‘entity’ to Adsense, and Publishers will need to apply to join the program even if they are curently Adsense publishers. Once accepted, Publishers will be able to apply to various advertisers and select creative for use on their sites.

Payments will of course be made on a ‘per sale’ basis rather than being based on impressions/clicks and may be flat-fee or commission-based, depending on the individual advertiser. Google says that payments will be made twice per month, although these will be subject to a minimum amount of $50USD per advertiser (it seems that payments due will not be aggregated for the purposes of Publisher payment). I’m assuming that the same payment methods as used for Adsense will be available. They also say that they’ll be offering a VIP/rewards type program to high-performing publishers.

The network’s page currently shows a small but impressive Advertiser list, and my understanding is that the program is still restricted to US advertisers/traffic only (according to a note on this page).

So, it’s a cautious, ‘toe in the water’ type approach but something that will have to be taken seriously, both by site owners who’ll be hoping to get some future leverage from Google’s muscle, and from existing players in the Affiliate marketplace, who may just be getting a bit worried about the effect Google could have on their current cosy arrangements.

I’ve been busy lately with the transfer of Internet Babel but I certainly intend to take a closer look at the program.

I’d really like to hear other people’s thoughts though, both in terms of any first-hand experience and also what you think this is going to do to the Affiliate arena if and when Google really jumps into this in a big way. How will players like CJ, Tradedoubler, Buy.at etc react? Will we see a shake up of the Affiliate marketplace or will things continue pretty much as before with Google just being another of many options?

With Google also dropping its referral program (in August) will we see a gradual integration between the Affiliate Network and Adsense, not just in terms of integrating your Publisher account, but maybe the creation of some kind of Affiliate CPA/Contextual hybrid – where you can choose your Advertiser base but still see a range of contextual ads from those Adverisers on your site?

Might be interesting times ahead – I don’t think the big boys will be too worried yet, but would love to hear your opinions on how this will all play out.

Dave

After the first PR update this blog endured, it was PR2. I then did a few sponsored reviews and a PayPerPost post. The next update this blog then went to PR0!

I think Google may of bitch slapped me for that PayPerPost review.

I don’t care though, PR doesn’t bother me as much as most. It’s nice to have a high PR but it’s not essential to me. What’s more important to me is SERPs, viral buzz, general awareness and credibility within the given niche.

I’m hopefully going to build that over time with this blog. I hope I’ve built some sort of credibility already but it takes a long time to gain all round respect and awareness, especially in the Internet marketing niche.

I should have a good PR though given relevant mention within this niche. I’ve got quality backlinks ranging from PR2 – PR6, all genuine, non-payed, quality backlinks to inbound pages ranging back way last year.

I have also read elsewhere that Google have gone after PayPerPost, so they must have set my PR back to zero as people are suggesting they are doing. Personally I just think that’s stubborn and petty. It’s like they don’t want anyone else to make money.

If a blogger tries to earn some cash, they bitch slap em, if an Adsense publisher makes too much they say they’re cheating. They can have sponsored links but we can’t? 

I don’t care though. Up yours Google, you evil people. Lol

I found this the other day. Never actually used or heard about it before. It really is an awesome little site / tool / sub-Google client.

Google Zeitgeist gives you a peek into Google’s peak searches.

Check it out, you can go back as far as 2001 and see the high points of each year, month or week. The above image is the zeitgeist for the end of 2007.

I don’t see any reason to use anything else but Gmail for your mail.

1. Huge storage space – Gigs worth of storage… unless your Michael Jackson or The Queen, your not going to run out of space no matter how long you let your mail pile up!

2. Very convenient – Easily pick up Gmail wherever you are, you can do this obviously with any web solution for your email but Gmail just ssems… so much quicker.

3. Great functionality – Logs in quickly, displays mail quickly, everything is in plain view. As usual Google’s solution is simple but major effective.

I’ve just never understood why people use Outlook Express and desktop mail clients to get their emails when you have Gmail.

With OE for example, you have a small storage capacity, it’s an external program you need to open, you wait longer for your mail.

Come on people! Gmail is the best thing for your mail. Use it!