The StateStats mashup displays Google query results by popularity in U.S states self describing as:

It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman’s rank correlation. The middle column shows the results of these comparisons, with the strongest correlations listed first.

Google Insight For Search provides the raw search activity from 2004-present, the Google Chart API for the state heatmap and runs under the Google App Engine.

The service points out in its description in bold that one must be careful drawing conclusions from this data. With that in mind I put this post and you should the title of this post tongue-in-cheek in the humor category.

Comparing the console gaming systems: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3

Couldn’t resist running some comparative queries across the various game consoles in order of sales: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and finally the Sony PS3.  Why video games? In Google’s 2008 most popular product search queries 4 of 10 involved videogames (#1 Nintendo Wii, #2 Wii Fit, #4 Xbox 360 and #5 Nintendo DS). This is a big win for attention for Nintendo.

Nintendo Wii

The top five states for the Wii: New Jersey, Utah, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Unemployment, violent crime and density are positive weak or stronger.  Negative weak or stronger would be Percent elderly, age, frost, energy consumption and suicide.

Unemployment - I guess it’s understandable that the least expensive game console would be searched for more from states with the highest unemployment rate, although states with high unemployment and videogames showed up for all three consoles.

Percent elderly and age surprises me more as we’ve seen several articles about how popular the Wii has been with all ages, particularly senior citizens due to the often physical games the Wii provides.

Xbox 360

The top five states for the Xbox 360: Washington State (Microsoft home), Kentucky, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. Unemployment, obesity, violent crime and density are positive weak or stronger.  Negative weak or stronger would be latitude, age and frost.

Obesity - It’s curious that states with higher obesity rate are searching for the Xbox 360 and yet not the PS3. It makes sense not for the Wii because that console promotes more activity, but what is the difference from a physical standpoint between the Xbox 360 and PS3? I can’t think of any.

Sony Playstation 3

The top five states for the Sony PS3: California, New York, Florida, New Jersey and Texas. Density, violent crime, unemployment, same sex couples, income and illiteracy are positive weak.  Negative weak or stronger would be percent elderly, age, energy consumption, suicide, latitude and frost.

Same sex couples - interesting to note correlation of states with higher same sex are searching more for the PS3. You cannot draw the correlation — although I’m sure somebody will bemusedly — that same sex couples prefer the PS3 over the Wii and Xbox 360.

Violent crime states for all gaming consoles

I’m not in the crowd who believes videogames lead to violent crime (see: Video games don’t cause violence, people do), but it’s interesting to note that besides states with high density and unemployment, violent crime is the only other positive indicator in these search queries for all three gaming consoles. This could be that where there is high density there is also more violent crime or that where there are less dense states like Montana, they don’t do much videogaming.

I’ll leave this to the comment section. This could be a fun one to discuss.

This morning Jason Falls shared his thoughts about linking effectively and where to find good sources to link (emphasis mine):

That said, while you’ll get more blog exposure and promotion by linking to other blogs, you’d be foolish not to link to traditional websites or news outlets that also contain good content. Some bloggers are unnecessarily self-righteous when it comes to traditional news outlets and think there’s better content to be had in the blogosphere. Frankly, they’re short-sighted. Some blogs offer great insight and context. Most traditional media outlets do.

Jason closes an insightful post asking for link habits and tricks learned from others but then, as (too many?) other bloggers are doing out there, uses the automated Zemanta related external links plugin and closes with a link to Sphere related links (machine 2X).

I’m curious, did he choose any of these links or let the machine choose all for him? If he didn’t vet these links, I’m wondering why he uses these services?  He writes a post about the importance of finding good links and then ends the post by letting some third party software choose what links on other websites are related to his post for his readers?

Or is the message: follow what’s in the post body and ignore what follows? If so, too many blogs are like that these days.

The good news

The related links under the heading of "Related articles by Zemanta and Jason Falls" are all on topic and related. So good in fact that I added Zemanta to my to-do list to learn more.

The first Zemanta/Falls link is a Google webmaster blog link: Linking out, often it’s just applying common sense keys on a couple things not to do which include:

1. allowing unmonitored linkage, especially user-generated links
2. undisclosed advertising links (not using rel=nofollow) can reduce site credibility
3. too many links on a page. Suggestion has always been keeping number of links on any page under 100.

Second up is a post cleverly titled Self-linking could make you go blind which goes through the pros and cons of self-linking. The author, Mark Dykeman, doesn’t really answer if self-linking is good or bad from his own point of view in the post and hopes his comment area will help. Fortunately, it does. This is a great blog post technique, post an article with research results and then flesh out those results in the comment area.

As of this writing Mark made eight comments, some of which that would have been nice to see opined in the post body like:

It certainly makes sense to me to link to relevant content. However, it also makes sense to me to link to the outside world on occasion to recognized pillar posts or other authoritative pieces of information. That’s only fair and you’re doing your reader a service by linking out to the best stuff. And when your stuff is the best stuff, then it’s just sweet.

And:

Ultimately it’s the blogger’s choice. I’m just saying that people look at the practice of self-linking in different ways.

Bingo! Check that out, three links for Mark with two of them for his comment area. It continues to be my opinion that a smart comment section is worth its weight in goal many times over.

The third external link from Jason leads to a Search Engine Land blog post about link building that starts by talking about review spam and then moves into Google personalized search, where author Eric Ward writes:

From a linking perspective, the common thread through all three of these news items is that at the end of the day, when the dust clears, when the results are toggled and tweaked and reshuffled, trust reigns.

The fourth link covers how and why you should link internally on your website as well as targeting keywords. The majority of what this post describes I never do intentionally. I don’t set out to build pages to link to past pages, in fact, I try not to do that (even though there are links in this post to past posts).

If I’ve already written about something before I usually pass unless something new/additional of substance can be added or I’ve changed my position on something (consistency). If you change your opinion on something you felt strongly about in a past post you owe it to yourself and readers to explain why the change.

I look more at this blog’s individual posts as pages in a book moving the story of life forward. Editors would frown on hashing and rehashing the same topic and inconsistency. Some bloggers rewrite their content every week and that gets old for me as a reader fast. I try not do that here. Won’t say I’m always successful, but readers should know the effort is there.

In the case of linkrot, this is a subject I care passionately about and don’t mind revisiting. I want my friends, some of you reading this now, if you are thinking of starting your own blog or making your existing blog better to take what you link to seriously.

In the fifth and final link a post by Mitch Joel highlights a lot of how I feel about linking too:

I think links are what makes reading content online so interesting, engaging, exciting and fresh. I choose to link in hopes that others do as well. I choose to link in hopes that it becomes standard operating procedure and a best practice for online content. I choose to link so that you can choose where you want to go now or next. Linking has become way too much about what it can do for the content creator. I think it’s time to go back to the beginning and start linking because it’s about what it can do for the reader and their online experience.

Again, these collection of Zemanta/Falls links are a very good example of using a machine. Even so, it’s too bad though that Jason didn’t find some way to weave these links into the post body. Sticking at the end as automated external results is a high risk play.

The bad news

Don’t think so? Now take a look at what mess turned up when I clicked the Sphere: Related Content link in his post (and no, not going to link any of that here), which is the very last link before the linked post tags:

Please tell me what Electronic Investor or an ad for Bank of America has to do with link tips and tricks? Blogger’s talking about "This Topic" = Flexibility? Seattle Celebrate Local and Save Green This Holiday Season? Videos for Blogging 2.0 and finding a blog in a haystack?

Unrelated external link nightmare

Sure, there appear to be a couple related posts in there like "Blogging is about linking, 5 reasons to link" or (maybe?) "Seven sizzling ways to turn targeted traffic towards your blog." I don’t know, didn’t follow. And if I don’t follow, I don’t link. Something tells me that Jason wouldn’t have linked to most of this either.

That’s the problem in a screenshot. I don’t trust machines to figure out what is related on external sites. I barely trust them on first party content. Once upon a time I tried Sphere and despite thinking it was "promising" it didn’t last long here. The concept is great when it works but when it doesn’t, it looks like the garbage in the screenshot above and isn’t useful to readers at all.

We’ve been using a plugin (machine) for related posts from this site and sometimes links will be duplicated in the post body as I’m suggesting above. Beyond the number of links being displayed none of these ‘related posts’ links are human vetted. It’s something about this blog that I’d like to improve someday. I’d like for those links to be vetted with some sort of short commentary about why it’s related, why it fits, why a follow-up was written, etc. It’s possible with the new footnotes feature that might be one way this is fleshed out over time.

It’s too much like a crapshoot using a machine only. Not bagging on the plugin, it’s one of the best out there at what it does, but sometimes the results are as unrelated as the Sphere example above.

Machine or (wo)man

Let me throw Jason’s post a better bone to end on than the Sphere link. The wise linkers of the web today are mindful of what happens to the source of those links tomorrow and beyond. That is, if they want to continue to receive search traffic tomorrow and build reader confidence in the links found on their sites.

There’s a very good reason that top search engine Google rewards related linkage in its algorithm and it’s my belief that they will lean even more extreme on this algorithm going forward. Blogs that refuse to manage linkrot in their backyard are as they get older in for a search engine beating.

Google already promotes a lot of blog posts when they are fresh but as time goes on, the blog post is treated less favorably. I see this every day with blog posts made here. In the beginning they rank high, but as time goes on the rankings fade — and so does the resulting traffic.

Some posts this doesn’t happen though, which suggests a strategy one could employ to help more of their blog posts stay relevant.

These non-fading blog posts are often the ones that continue to receive updates and links in from external sites. The latter is out of the blogger’s control, but the former can be controlled. An update to an archived post can come in the form of a comment made, update to the bottom of the original post, basically anything that alters the text on the page. There are good search engine related reasons to revisit archived posts.

Please note that I’m not suggesting changing history. The way updates are handled here are in the form of dates and/or footnotes so that readers can clearly determine what is old and what is new.

If you are a blogger who cares about continuing to receive quality search engine traffic, then watch how many of your links point to nowhere (404) and/or have been redirected somewhere besides what you intended to link. Google offers webmasters a list of links on their sites that lead to 404 and encourages webmasters to fix these broken links. From experience the absolute worst offenders of linkrot are mainstream news sites. Yes, the very sites Jason’s post is suggesting you’d be foolish not to link to that I emphasized in his quote at the top of this post.

Hmm.

So which is it: link to news sites or not?

The answer is both. Wait, how can that be? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately and have a few suggestions.

Jason is correct that linking to news sites is important, especially when they are the best source of what you are writing about. You should strive to add links when and where they are necessary.

The problem is that (too) many of these news sites often use page links that expire. Even Google with their own AP articles are expiring news stories. This means if you link to them today in a blog post in a couple months those links will turn 404.

From related to dead

What is needed is a way to link to pages until that link goes 404 and then linking to a cache copy or removing the link when no cache is available. This way people that visit your page will continue to be able to understand the full context. As much as I’d love to point to this solution right now or offer it as a download, I’m empty-handed.

The third party Wordpress plugin I shared recently in How To Manage Dead Links In WordPress goes part way toward fixing the problem. It identifies which of the links in posts are problematic and gives you an option to edit/remove the link. It needs to be automated one step further to link up the cache page when the link goes 404 so you don’t have to manually fix the link. Maybe I should drop the plugin author a suggestion to add this or maybe even work out the code myself and share that back with the world at large.

Wish I could report that the anti-linkrot process is anything but time consuming, but that would be a lie. This blog still has over 1,800 links to go through and edit/remove here in posts made over the last 5+ years.

Where do we go now? Links are web children-like

A Guns N’ Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine reference to swoop for the close. Maybe it’s worth thinking of your links as web children of sorts? No, not in an overprotective parental sense, but in a cautious and responsible way. Linking out to other sites is an important part of the web and having some plan to deal with inevitable linkrot is an important part of any link discussion.

Guess that’s what got me started on this post. Jason’s post doesn’t discuss linkrot. So many articles and posts I read out there skip discussing what happens to links in your posts tomorrow and beyond.

Blogs or any medium that is focused too much on today will become yesterday tomorrow. Not trying to be profound there, it’s common sense. Some people I’ve spoken to say they don’t care what happens to links in archive posts or mistakes or updating/correctly any archived post. That it wasn’t worth the time to fix.

But how important is this post to a first time visitor five years from now?

So for the record, unless you can vet related posts from external sites, it’s more useful to readers to just end your posts. We don’t need or want links to unrelated external sites and ads. This is the kind of thing that drives people to filtering RSS feeds and ignoring websites altogether.

When it comes to tech support, online still isn’t used as much as one might think. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study was conducted on the percentage of users of computers, music players, cellphones, smart phones and internet service found only 2% solve their own technology problems online. The rest?

About 38% of respondents called customer service, 28% fixed the problem themselves and 15% got help from friends or relatives.  The rest — about 15% — gave up.

If this study is accurate, would it be a great time to start a local tech help service?  Although this study doesn’t say how many got help from a third party tech support service, I’m curious how many factored that into the nearly 40% who call customer service? Don’t know how it is for most the folks reading, but I’ve long been on the receiving end of the 15% who friends and relatives go to for tech help.

I try to fix my own problems using the information online, but will sometimes call customer service if it’s something that well placed search engine queries don’t resolve. I’m not a fan of knowledge bases online, which often seem like the customer service equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack. I’ve found on several occasions that the built-in support search engines are lacking compared to targeted search engine queries.

I’m also not shy about using Live Chat help functions on sites, but find it frustrating when I’m sent to somebody using a script instead of common sense. It’s not a problem to have a script funnel into fixes for problems, but listen to what the customer has tried before diving in and backtracking. Scripted help reps too often in my experience don’t listen and will incorrectly diagnose what you’ve already tried and hasn’t worked.

Where do you fit in this study? Are you one of the 2% who try to fix the problems online? I’m pretty sure most readers of this blog will not be in the 15% who give up.

Microsoft has released a new program called Search Perks (U.S and Internet Explorer only link: getsearchperks.com) which incentifies up to 25 live searches per day between now and April 15, 2009. You get 1 ticket per search (max 25 tickets per day) and these tickets can be traded in for various prizes.

The SearchPerks program is new but club.live.com has been incentifying search activity for some time now. It’s not a new concept for Microsoft or several other search engines like Blingo and Winzy.

My personal feelings on incentifying search is that it’s not a working strategy for dethroning Google but won’t go as extreme as Paul Glazowski at Mashable who writes:

A sensible person might say SearchPerks, as with the Cashback, only serves to devalue the company. Something of a last ditch attempt. Or attempts, plural. And that may well be true.

OR, Paul, maybe some people who are already using Live Search will simply add the counter, rack up tickets and bag some freebies for doing little extra. I see these sort of perk programs like swag at conferences which doesn’t in any way devalue companies, in fact, it promotes them.  We’re already in attendance to the conference, so why not accept the free magazines, t-shirts, pens, coffee cups and more? I don’t hear people crying about how this swag devalues any companies.

As for Microsoft’s Live Cashback program, which I wrote about back in May, I still don’t get what the general bashing was about there either. Fine, bash the program if you tried it and didn’t like it, bash the program for not having your favorite online store(s) (as my wife did), bash it if you don’t get your rebate (like for my first and only order, gasp), but bashing it because it was too "complex" or because you think it’s a lame attempt to get people to use Live Search as some people were doing is bogus.

While it wasn’t any kind of requirement when I started working with the Zune Team in the podcast area in June I decided to switch my default search away from Google to Live Search. I was curious if I’d be able to get along without Google search. Since then I have found myself navigating away from Live Search a few times back to Google for some searches but mostly Live Search has done the job better than I expected.

That’s right, Google, which I still own stock in BTW, isn’t that much better than Live Search. It’s still better, yes, but you won’t be completely lost by switching to Live Search if you want to seriously compare as I’ve been doing.

My most used browser these days is Firefox although I still must have IE open every day because I need it for both our businesses. Some of the corporate sites we deal with in our offline business only work with Internet Explorer. Escaping IE 100% simply isn’t reality for all of corporate America.

Since I still average at least 25 searches every work day, Microsoft is now giving me some swag for doing something I was already doing, thanks SearchPerks. I use Live Search in Firefox too and it’s a bummer that they won’t incentify me for that, but something like SearchPerks isn’t going to drive me back into using Google as my default search there.

The SearchPerks program is not going to have me trying to drum up extraneous searches just to earn these tickets (that would be a violation of the TOS anyway). I remain curious how many other people are already using Internet Explorer with Live Search? The only thing these folks need to do is add the counter install which takes a couple minutes and then it’s business as usual.

Now for the folks using Safari on the Mac, Google Chrome, Opera or Firefox with Google, etc. Well, you are already set in what you’re using for search and the browser you’re most comfortable with and I don’t see SearchPerks being enough incentive to change. That’s ok. It’s also ok for people to be happy using what they are using and getting a little addition swag.

Now there’s something people might also find to be a sensible perspective, Paul.

Thanks dooblet for reminding me that I can’t be replaced Don’t think I’m on some ego trip, you can’t be replaced either.

Fortunately you can find replacements for common things like car model, software name, music group, technology names and more. If you don’t like the results, you can "discuss alternatives" in the Dooblet forum but don’t expect much action there yet (a big goose egg for posts as of this writing). Bonus points for the ability to use OpenID to register there though.

Dooblet seems a bit like it should be a plugin for a bigger search engine to narrow results rather than a standalone service but posted here because it’s a worthwhile idea.

Check out what dooblet offers as replacement for Metallica:

I would have put Judas Priest in there before ‘napster’ but with the whole suing fans stigma, you can see how that one is bubbling up for Metallica. Speaking of them, I did buy Death Magnetic over the weekend. Wife was sick on Friday so didn’t get there on the street launch date, but have been listening to it for a couple days still trying to wrap my ears around it.  Early feelings are positive.

When are we going to see a new search engine that blows us away? Not today.

Having a series of vanity queries armed and ready for quick testing of new search engine, Cuil, I chuckled at one of the prominent results of querying tdavid’s blog. Look, there are two of four results (50%!!!) for my aging, forgotten, seldom used Netscape.com profile page:

LOL, one result is a freaking PHP array dump! Where’s the QA testing? Thanks for the chuckle, Cuil. If not for the humor of seeing this PHP array dump, I’d probably never have written this post. An array dump for non-developer readers is the contents of an array output to the browser page. Something that should never be shown in a totally unrelated search result like my vanity search above.

People can argue against basing the quality of search engine results on vanity searches, but in my experience you should search for something that you know the best results and I can tell you with 100% authority that a search for ‘tdavid’s blog’ should not reveal results for dead netscape.com profile pages and PHP array dumps. Ok, Cuil gets a few points for getting this blog as the top left blog, but they lose on every other result on the page. Clipmarks? Metacafe? Performancing? Political Base? Those aren’t my ‘blogs’  nor any place I’d recommending sending anybody looking for my blogs. Heck, Cuil would be more timely using my FriendFeed or Twitter pages, both of which have been updated in the last 24 hours.

I don’t know what the Cuil bot is smoking, but it must be some good stuff.

Don’t even get me started on people foolishly, predictably comparing this to Google. Cuil has a few small things going for it: one is that the search results are not the traditional search results that too many SE are copying from each other these days. But having scaling problems at launch is rarely anything to be excited about (and I’m not helping by piling on with this post, sorry Cuil).

I wrote earlier on a FriendFeed comment my feelings on THE search engine that will someday replace Google. The only thing I’d amend in the following quote is that it could be two PEOPLE, not only "guys." Think I’ll go back and edit that to say ‘people’ instead. It is cool (that’s what ‘cuil’ sounds like) to see that Cuil was created by a husband wife team like Flickr:

The next true "Google killer" (and I despise the use of the ‘killer’ label) will be two guys in their garage somewhere, just like the original Google and it will look *nothing* like the current search engines. We haven’t seen it yet, but will someday and it will blow us away.

I can’t wait for the day to read and write about this search engine. The search continues.

Many of the comments I’ve been reading about Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback program since the official launch yesterday have been negative. I’m not exactly ecstatic about the service, but can a service that is trying to help you save money be that bad?

Unfortunately, too many of these opinions seem to be coming from people who didn’t fully try out the service. Instead they seemed to have glanced the service over, whipped a post up as fast as they could and competed to write the best ‘let’s trash Microsoft’ posts they could so they could race to the top anchor spot on Techmeme.  If you go off hyperbolic headlines Microsoft is being accused of: bribery, stealing ideas and more. I don’t want to read armchair quarterback opinions about what this means for the future of Microsoft gaining search share from Google, I’d like to know if the Cashback service is worth using.

Fact: considering the Cashback program’s own FAQ states that it can take several days for a purchase to even show as "pending" there can’t be many true Cashback customer experience posts out there to draw from yet. Pure logistics.

Some commented on the shopping experience like Danny who points out that the Cashback team sort of went halfway by not providing important comparison shopping features like reviews. He also labeled the system "complicated." I think the word Danny meant to use based on his post was convoluted, not complicated.

Using Cashback is pretty non-complicated, just search for what you want, go to the store with the price you like — if you are logged into Cashback (and you only have to login once) then you’ll see a message that your shopping at the merchant’s site is being tracked for Cashback. Then it’s very much like any other shopping experience online. Danny’s fellow writer, Barry, has walkthru screenshots. Complex? Hardly.

Yesterday, I went through and searched for something I wanted to buy — and was available from a merchant using Cashback — and ordered. Other than having to fill out the necessary ordering details at the merchant’s site, the process was straightforward. Like any other online order. People like us who do a lot of shopping online are used to the process. The only caveat is that we go through the Live Cashback search first. Big deal? Not really.

Where is your favorite online store?
Now here’s a bigger deal when it comes to online shopping: what if your favorite online store isn’t part of the Cashback network (yet)? My wife complained that Cashback didn’t have her favorite online store: Bed, Bath & Beyond, so she wouldn’t be using it that much. They offer an A-Z list (search.live.com/cashback/stores) of what online stores they are partnering with and while it’s a decent list, it’s not all inclusive, meaning you won’t be getting any cash back from those stores unless they offer their own deals. Hell might freeze over before Amazon surfaces on the list.

This is a major flaw. How can any useful shopping search be valid if it only includes search results for stores that are being partnered with? Wouldn’t it be more useful to show all shopping search results and simply display 0% cashback (since the site isn’t a Cashback shop partner)? Allow shoppers to toggle on/off non-Cashback partners. Now that would be useful and empower the people. I like it. Do it, Cashback team, please.

Since Microsoft isn’t making any money from the deal, I don’t understand why this isn’t an option at launch. Fine, toggle it off by default, so you highlight your own partner list, but who do we want to help most here? The people in your network or the shoppers?

Cashback order price accuracy
Loren suggests offering free shipping, not cash back, a la Amazon Prime (emphasis mine):

For instance, I wouldn’t do a Detroit-style cash back program, instead I’d join up with UPS and FedEx and provide free shipping for everyone, or free shipping upgrades, if the company already provides free shipping. This is a lot easier to communicate I think than a nebulous price-oriented cash back program.

Loren, what is nebulous about the cash you get back? You see exactly what your rebate is before clicking through to the store’s website? However, I agree that the shipping and handling can add up, check out my order of Gibson guitar polish below, which is half the price of the item ordered (ouch):

There are a couple other problems here. Compare this order email receipt to what Live Cashback showed me:

Notice that Cashback doesn’t show any tax being charged. You’d think since Cashback knows where I’m located from my Live profile, they would be showing tax being charged. Second, and I’m not sure who to blame this one on. The guitar polish showed as ‘available to ship’ on the merchant’s site but when they emailed me a receipt see what word is hyperlinked: backordered. Huh? That’s a quick way to annoy your customer: by showing them on the website that something is available and yet sending them a receipt that shows the opposite.

Good news: this morning I received another email that the guitar polish had been shipped. I logged into Cashback to see if my $0.80 showed as ‘pending’ yet? Nope. Again, the FAQ says it can take several days and not to contact them until 7 days has passed. I will add another post or update this one below or in the comments if/when I’m credited with $0.80.

You like saving money, don’t you?
For me the bottom line is will I remember to use this? When I’m shopping online, I tend to have specific stores in mind. Stores that I trust and like doing business with while a number of the Cashback stores I’ve never heard about erodes my confidence. I don’t frequent the deal sites as much as I should, so having Cashback show me different stores comparatively helps, but as mentioned above I’d like to see the option to aggregate all the online shopping sites and let me decide if I care about the rebate.

One of the reasons that I use Google more than other searches is because it feels like it is giving me the most relevant search results. When I shop for something, I know what I want and don’t just want to buy it at the cheapest price, I want to buy it from a store that won’t give me service nightmares. Live Cashback is a start, but feels incomplete.

Finally, the title of this post mirrors my biggest concern with rebates: you have to wait for them. I understand that they can’t credit a sale right away because of returns, but I’ve become very leery of rebates. I won’t label them a ’scam’ but they feel like they are because of the length of time it takes to get the money back to you. If a store is going to discount me, then they should do so at the time of sale, not later. Mike at TechCrunch ran a few sales through and his rebate showed right away, so maybe I chose a slower site to report back to Cashback that I made a sale?

This negative connotation may not help Live Cashback gain enough traction. A system which minimizes the error correction and time customers wait for these rebates would help. If I were on the Cashback team, I’d be pushing to make this service as useful as possible for shoppers. It doesn’t feel there quite yet. What do you think?

We could be seeing a major battle in the making between Amazon and Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) down the road.

Look at what Amazon’s been having a huge amount of success with lately: their S3 storage and server processes. They are building out datacenters and bulking up servers, quietly getting more and more companies and developers to use them as their server infrastructure. Their recent S3 competition had the winners taking a giant gold hammer to a server. The message: you don’t need servers to scale, you need us.

Let’s not forget Amazon tried to take on Google with Alexa search and failed, then they tried OpenSearch and didn’t make a dent. The new battlefront is hosting.

Meanwhile Google is offering mostly ad-supported products and services with clean UI where they provide the hosting. At first glimpse one might wonder why Google wants to be in the content business. If you’re in the content business you have to deal with spammers.

Controlling how the world’s information is searched is largely impacted by having the data at your disposal. The more direct control Google has over the information, as they do by hosting, the easier they can combat spam and search what they feel is the best content. Google is extremely careful to clarify what I italicized there, by saying it is what each individual user deems the best content, but Google — and any search engine — already decides what is the best on some level in the way the results are returned.

Ranking.

This is becoming very tantalizing with news of their Google Knol project. In their own words, Google Knol:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

This sounds like a promising, worthwhile project and history shows that not everything Google does is a runaway hit. A lot of what they do, most of what they do frankly, isn’t as successful as their search and Adwords.

Writers could always write, long before Google and long after Google will be gone. Do writers want to make Google the new Random House? It’s one thing for Google to organize the world’s information, but they are fast becoming the hosting company of the world’s information with only Amazon as their major competition on this front.

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to wonder if I want Google to be my hosting company. Giving any one entity too much control and power requires a huge amount of responsibility.

Can we continue to trust Google to do the right thing?

The growing Google content business
Google has already been in the content hosting business since buying Blogger from Pyra Labs. The number of Google content-related projects include, and this list is incomplete, the following services:

Blogger - create and store your own blog, hosted by Google
Google Base - store items that rank better in search
Google Code - download APIs and open source code
Google Page Creator - create and share your own hosted web pages
Jaiku - mobile microblogging service like Twitter
Picasa - store and share pictures
YouTube and Google Video - share and store videos created

It’s way too early to speculate on what impact Google Knol will have, it’s in invite-only stage at this point, but if it can make the list above as a viable alternative to the heavily spammed Squidoo and what Techdirt labels too early to call Mahalo, I’m sure both those services won’t be pleased.

As for being any competition to Wikipedia? Predictably, many are out there already talking and speculating too. Remember how Google offered at one time to host Wikipedia and was denied? Google would rather host Wikipedia than compete against it. But what do they do when they are denied? They find another path to take. Welcome to Google Knol.

In this morning’s reading I came across a new search engine called IRSeeK.com which has built a searchable index off spying listening to chats, most likely employing bots to do the dirty work.

In the IRSeeK About Us tab I became curious about this passage (emphasis mine):

By constantly archiving thousands of active, highly-focused, public chat-rooms in a wide variety of topics (e.g. Linux, soccer, Christianity, poker, business and others) then indexing, processing and publishing the content on the web using advanced Web 2.0 technologies while maintaining the privacy of the users, we are creating a knowledge base different from any other.

A couple issues here. One, they are “creating” a knowledge base? No, they are becoming the peeping tom’s of IRC channels without the permission of the people chatting. Two, how are they maintaining the privacy of the users when their entire conversations are being logged? Try searching for one or more handles you’ve used in IRC. Are you finding messages you’ve made in various IRC channels? I found messages I hadn’t even made in IRC, but on Twitter that was picked up by an IRC bot somewhere.

Strangely enough, the IRC server we’ve been running for over five years didn’t yield any hits. It appears our server isn’t on the IRSeeK server list. In the spirit of being open it would be nice to see a complete server export list of the IRC servers IRSeeK is mining.

Good idea, bad idea?
Mining public IRC channels for information and making it searchable isn’t an altogether bad idea, there is a goldmine of information being shared in IRC, but the execution here by IRSeeK is a bit questionable. Do their bots identify themselves as spies? Let’s put this in the context of a respectful search engine spider. Good bots identify themselves like Googlebot and give you the ability to refuse them access. Is IRSeeK following these same principles?

What IRSeeK is doing might be entirely legal, so don’t misconstrue my comments. Just because you can on th web doesn’t mean you should.

My problem with IRSeeK is one of manners. Taking without permission on the web is using bad netiquette. It’s like screenscraping or hotlinking without permission. There is a lot of great information on IRC and that’s what there is to love about IRC but there are also some semi-private conversations that people in niche groups have, yes, even out in the open “public” channels.

As a channel op and IRC server administrator based on experience I wouldn’t feel comfortable logging every word in the public channels and making it searchable without notifying the people in the channels the second they joined that this was happening. Why not? I can think of a couple cases where we’ve posted the public IRC channel logs of the live radio show we do on Fridays and people have come back to me and commented about something they said in the channel being published. People assume, either rightly or wrongly, that what goes on in IRC stays in IRC unless it’s made very clear otherwise. IRC etiquette.

I would be interested in hearing a reply from somebody in the IRSeeK team as to how they are addressing these sensitive issues as well as how they currently are disclosing their bot activity. If they aren’t, then do they plan to do so in the future? If they don’t feel compelled to disclose their intentions, then expect IRC server administrators to be up in arms and this is certainly not an organization or site I’d recommend to anybody. Their “idea” for making select IRC servers chat logs isn’t original, it’s just something few have had the stones to do because of obvious privacy implications.

Just wanted to take this moment to thank StumbleUpon (SU) for helping me to discover thousands of hmm-inspiring pages. I doubt many readers haven’t at least tried SU and I’ve found a good amount of material to write about here using the service.

Whether or not you like serendipitous surfing, SU helps you explore (possibly) unchartered web waters. That’s a good thing.

Google tried to copy, comes up short
For those using the Google Toolbar, in April of this year they released a similar stumbling-type feature as an add-on button by clicking the dice icon which hasn’t caught on yet. Perhaps because there is more to SU than stumbling sites. You can form and/or participate in groups. I started the Blogs ‘R Us group at SU years ago and it now has over 1,400 members. Conversely with the Google toolbar all you can do is bookmark the page.

One strength of the Google Toolbar over SU is the ability to create your own button add-ons, so it would be possible to add more SU social-type features. Would be nice to see StumbleUpon add some sort of API/plugin structure to their toolbar.

History
Back on January 18, 2004 I joined the site StumbleUpon, then a Canadian startup, today owned by eBay. Unlike Skype which has less synergy with eBay, you’d expect StumbleUpon would have more auction-related functionality. Stumble auctions button at least? Not yet. Also missing is the ability to add Stumble-thru to your own site. Matt created a random posts Wordpress plugin but that’s not related to the page you’re on (there’s a good idea for an improved SU-type Wordpress plugin).

After taking nearly four years to thumbs up 2,500 pages, I’m reflecting on how I’m still using Stumbleupon today. Customer (yes, I sent them a few bones for sponsorship, have you?) longevity is one of the greatest compliments for any product/service. I know a lot of webmasters like SU because they get extra traffic from people stumbling their pages, but the wave of webmasters and bloggers selfishly filling SU with too many subpar blog posts has damaged the quality of the service somewhat over the last year. No offense to bloggers who use SU non-selfishly, but I liked using SU better when it wasn’t used by as many bloggers, when it wasn’t part of eBay.

With that said, the good still outweighs the bad with this service. Thank you again, Stumbleupon.

Update 3:45pm PST: After an hour or so of dice button pushing in the Google toolbar I reached this screen:

That’s right, there’s a limit to the number of dice searches in the Google Toolbar. I’ve reached a wall with keywords in StumbleUpon before, but that’s never happened with the “all” category.