Neomeme

The Internet is the Medium, not the Message.

Read that. Read it again.  Remember it. The medium changes- book–>newspaper–>radio–>TV–>Internet.

Even when navigating new communication paradigms, the message remains the same, only transmitted along a slightly different medium.

So when building your awesome world-changing web application, don’t worry so much about the medium. Focus on the message, which remains very constant, and always will remain constant. I was reading “Scientific Advertising” a book written in 1923, and was struck by how much everything in it can be applied to modern Internet advertising. The similarities are incredible, and perplexing as they are at first, it all makes sense when you realize that even the medium hasn’t changed that much- unless you’re a video site, you’re still basically working with a print medium, not all too different from a newspaper.

You can take lessons about writing newspaper classified ads from the 1920s and apply them, almost verbatim, to writing Google AdWords ads. It’s the same format- three short 45-character lines to sell something, just on a different medium.

Focus on the message

Today, Google has rolled out yet another PageRank update - or half of an update anyway. Google’s PageRank is a rough indicator of the worth and authority of a particular site- there are many factors in search results, but all other factors being equal, a site with higher PageRank will be higher in search results, attracting more traffic, than a site with lower PageRank. Although internal PageRank fluctuates constantly, Google pushes out updates to its visible PageRank every few months. Usually, some sites gain in PageRank and some lose. But this update is different.

In this update, PageRanks are going down, big time. Respected sites like Engadget are losing Pagerank, which will undoubtedly result in lower advertising revenue and search traffic. Why? All the evidence points to the fact that they have been smacked down by Google for excessive linking. Yeah, that’s right- they will be judged in the search engines not on their content or relevance to the visitor, but because they link too much to other sites in their network or their advertisers.

Frankly, I think this latest hit from Google is bullshit, and not because of anything it did to me(my own PageRank, unaffected by the update, remains at a solid 0). Read more »

I think I will be blogging with more discipline now. Everyone needs a break from constant writing, and I think I’m done with mine- I miss your comments Also, no more Adsense, it was only an annoyance.

Anyway, the most interesting news in the blogging/tech world today, delivered to me via my Wordpress dashboard (Wordpress is the software powering this and millions of other blogs), is that Automattic, the maintainers of the Wordpress project have acquired Gravatar, the simple tool popular on Wordpress blogs that creates a unified avatar image for you across blogs.

An acquistion of one small project by a startup is always interesting, but this one is particularly peculiar. Why Gravatar? The creator of Wordpress says it was “A good fit“. What does that mean? Sure, Gravatar integrates with Wordpress, but so do thousands of other plugins. Why this one? Read more »