CLICKHERDER

So, an SEO contest got under way on January 15, 2006. It is sponsored by the v7n network. Now, on day 10 of this saga there are 867,000 results for this non-word in the Google index. Right now it doesn’t matter who is winning because it is almost certain that they will not be able to hang on to the top spot. At stake here is $4,000 grand-prize as well as a counter prize sponsored by some other SEOs. It is great internet drama. But now finally I will take a stand (albeit a PR 0 stand). I offically cast my ballot for Wolf-Howl. v7ndotcom elursrebmem. You might ask why I picked Wolf-Howl specifically, and my reasons are simple. He is donating any prize money to charity and Rand Fishkin asked me to. So there you have it, at the present growth rate Google should return over a million results in under a week. Something is for sure, website and content generation has never been easier. Is this a bad thing? I think we are finding out.

Filed by Michael at 1:01 am under Web Marketing
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There’s buzz over at Slashdot about Sunday’s Washington Post article The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet. The Telcos want to charge extra to content providers for carrying their content over a premium carrier. Yahoo! may be faster than Google! eBay may be faster than Amazon! Horrors! The Post quotes AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr:

[Whitacre] complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free — and that’s bull,” he said. “For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!”

There is, on Slashdot, a lot of socialist-flavored corporate vs. consumer saber rattling going on. But the fact is that on the internet we’re all consumers, and the really cool thing is how many of us actually are corporate. And of course the real concern should not be for Google or Yahoo! but, as Alan Davidson (Google’s Washington policy counsel) said, for “bright young start-up with the next big innovative idea” who may be priced out of his start-up’s goals due to higher access costs or slower connectivity to his clientele.

It’s true that network neutrality has been a cornerstone of the Internet’s commercial success. But asking Congress to weigh in is, frankly, a much worse prospect. Remember that the Telcos have competition. The fact that they dragged their feet, clinging to their virtual monopoly on consumer internet access through most of the 90’s opened the door for the rise of cable internet. If the content providers fought back by offering discounts to customers who don’t use the telcos, consumers would have yet another incentive to move away from the telcos. Perhaps other ISP initiatives could find just the opening they need to bring other alternatives to the consumer such as affordable wide-area ether networks or wireless clouds.

The point is that although Whitacre and others’ desire to change the way access is monetized may seem like a threat to our very way of life, we ought to continue to trust the open market which created the Internet as we know it in the first place. The beautiful thing about free markets is that if left alone, they tend to correct themselves.

Filed by Joel at 12:18 pm under Web Development, Web Marketing
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The conventional wisdom is that all the good single-word dot coms are all gone. Generally when I hear that, I pull a word out of my hat, zip over to GoDaddy and see if it’s available as a dot com. Generally it is not.

But the other day I thought “Hmmm. There are nice big dictionaries of English words freely available on the net, and as a Perl Dude™ I can leverage this to let me find out just exactly which words are taken and which are not.” So that’s what I’m doing.

My makeshift script takes a somewhat reformatted version of the AGID word list (AGID: Automatically Generated Inflection Database, available as a zip or tarball here), sticks .com on the end of each word, and sends it up the flagpole.

The script is running now, and having checked just over 72,000 words out of a total of over 282,000, it’ll be running for some time. But for those readers inclined to statistical modelling, here’s how they’re shaping up so far:

Of the 35,719 or so single-word dot coms still available, here is a random sample:

borodinos.com
titanosauri.com
westernizing.com
complects.com
maldons.com
linnaei.com
adenopathyes.com
yucatecs.com
cassonades.com
haematoxylum.com

More to come: I reckon this script will finish sometime tomorrow afternoon, at which point we can figure out whether your favorite word is already spoken for.

PS. although my script hasn’t checked it yet, I note that untarred.com is available. Have at it!

Filed by Joel at 4:26 pm under Web Development, Web Marketing
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Fellow clickherder.com author Michael and I had an interesting discussion about 1000tags.com the other day. The first part of the conversation ended with:

Michael: dude, read the faq already.

and the second and final part of the conversation ended with me saying:

Joel: dude, this is just plain stupid.

No expert on folksonomies I, but I have a couple of notes to sound. I don’t exactly argue that 1000tags.com won’t “work” in some sense of the word “work.” After all, there is no accounting for taste. The million dollar home page (I simply refuse to link to that miserable site) is apparently very successful for the site’s creator(s). But the verdict is still out on whether a 10×10 pixel ad on a site whose main appeal is novelty is a good advertising spend. Me, I still lean toward putting former VC’s in placards on the street corner.

1000tags might enjoy the same kind of “success” which the m$hp enjoys, namely, success for the site’s creator. But the site styles itself as a sort of folksy social experiment, or perhaps a folksonomic commercial experiment. From the FAQ:

1000tags.com is a project that aims to put to the test in its simplest form the viability of tagging as a way to advertise, by presenting a tag cloud formed by tags added by people who try to promote a particular site or page.

My main irritation is that this “folksonomy” really isn’t. Rather than evolving from the way that average users use the site, it evolves in response to how advertisers use the site. If more advertisers buy into a tag, the tag’s font gets bigger. I am skeptical of any advertising venture in which prominence depends on what other advertisers are doing instead of what the marketplace is doing.

Further mucking the folksonomics is the fact that advertisers can, if they have the cash, buy exclusive use of a specific tag, with a font as large as their pocketbooks. This is where I lose all faith in 1000tags’ “project” or “test.” This is about putting casinos’ and porn sites’ advertising dollars into 1000tags pockets and not much else. If it looks like the internet, it’ll be the supply side of the internet, and not the demand side.

Filed by Joel at 6:36 pm under Web Marketing
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