So it seems like Google is acquiring FeedBurner for a smooth $100 million.

I like FeedBurner. They provide a useful function. Their support is fantastic. Even had the president email me when we had a few issues. The site exudes charm that is missing from most companies (including quite a few of ours, I will be honest).

So everyone has covered how Google is acquiring a very large audience. Just like Yahoo! locked in Flickr into its ad-network, Google is basically doing the same.

But while that is all obvious and what not, the other benefit is the ton of data that Google is getting (again - similar to what Yahoo did with MyBlogLog, but on a larger scale imo).

Google’s two big pushes in search have been relevance [removing spam] and personalization [give people what they want]. This is why products like Google Analytics and Google Reader haven’t been directly monetized - the entire point is to find out what people find useful and what they like. Google Analytics especially is scary - they know what pages people are visiting, what links they are clicking on, etc. Lets say someone is searching for ‘food’ and two pages come up with near identical relevancy internally. Using Analytics, Google knows Page 1 is on a domain people find more sticky, and that people spend 3x the time on Page 1, while also clicking on 2x the links. So what is better for the user? (both can be argued - Page 1 in terms of longevity of user on the page, Page 2 in terms of user coming back quicker). I’m still surprised Yahoo beat Google to the punch when it came to Del.icio.us.

So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).

I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties - Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now - not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.

Scary.

Over the years, I’ve been a ‘fan’ of Google. I say that with hesitation - I’m not an unbridled fan that runs around saying how Google is the bestest ever. I simply try to take a step back, see what they are trying to do, and think it through. I’ve made many a snide comments on Webmaster World to people who do nothing but bash Google non-stop. But I can see reasoning. As someone who has lived in highly oppressive countries, I believe that education is the single best way to help people. So I sorta understood why Google wanted to operate in China (the altruistic companion to their desire to make more money).

I only mention the China incident to separate me from the usual Google-bashers. Sometimes second-best is better than nothing.

But the recent post by Matt Cutts (lead of their quality control team) on reporting paid links really ground my bones.

As in most things in life, there is black, there is white, and there is a ton of gray in between. Matt’s previous post on hidden links was quite slam-dunk - that was a concentrated effort to hide the link from the users. The trifecta of link posts came with Matt agreeing with Matt (Mullenweg, creator of WordPress) that sponsored WordPress themes are bad (something for another day).

Four separate issues to tackle.

1. First off, I agree with Michael Gray - Google is now trying to dictate what we can and cannot do. The common argument is that if an advertiser is buying adspace for traffic, why not just nofollow it? The problem with that is nofollow was never intended for such use. The intention behind nofollow was links you could not throw your merit behind. When someone posts a comment on my blog and throws in a link to his/her website, I have no clue if that website is spam or not. Nofollow was a way of covering my ass. But advertisers are different. I’ve vetted them. They make sense for my audience. I am only going to allow related ads on my site. Just like Google ensures ad-quality by having relevant ads, I do that myself. So I can vet for these links, and nofollow makes no sense. I have no problem with recognizing that these advertisers exist, and are useful.

2. The one place where Google’s hypocrisy shows - dealing with sites they ban. They’ve publicly caught, banned, and shamed large companies like BMW for using spam-techniques (keyword stuffing, black text on black background, etc). Matt hosted spam content on Wordpress. What did BMW and Matt get? A slap on the wrist - they were back in the index within a few days. If I did the same? Good luck to me. I’m still fighting to get domains unbanned that were banned a year ago (when I didn’t even own them). The double standard here is bullshit.

3. What exactly construes a paid link? This is a huge gray area. What about partnerships? What if I happen to like a site (most webmasters do not worry about SEO and PageRank - thats why Blogflux.com has 2.6 million backlinks, of which most are not even required). How is Google going to make the distinction that a link is paid or not? On my personal site, I could link to sites that I own. That is now suddenly a no-no? On Enthropia.com (PR7) we link to sites which we own and operate. How does Google know if those are paid links or not?

4. What about pre-filled links? The WordPress installation comes with a default blogroll, and links to quite a few sites. What do we do with those? Does Ryan deserve his PR8? Should I report it? Over on the Wordpress Trac, Matt Mullenweg completely dismissed the idea of removing any of those links. So those are suddenly fine now?

As a webmaster, we have a very tenous relationship with Google. This latest call by Google is so close to a witch-hunt that it makes me feel uncomfortable all over.

Learn more about who I am and what we do.

Ugh. I just read that VeriSign is increasing the base cost of .com domains 7%, from $6.00 to $6.42.

Some background: A while ago, ICANN and VeriSign sued each over. In the settlement (as VeriSign has tons of cash, and ICANN doesn’t), ICANN agreed that VeriSign could continue to be the exclusive provider of .com/.net for the next seven years. Furthermore, VeriSign was given the ability to increase the base cost (which at that point was $6.00) upto 7% every year. The word ‘upto’ being useless, as how many corporations decide to go for 5% extra profit instead of 7%?

Anyway, VeriSign, being the opportunistic monopolistic company they are, jumped at the first chance to make some more money.

This is a company that has an exclusive lock on .com/.net domains. For every year I renew this domain, they make $6.00. Now instead, they will be making an extra 42 cents. Going by TechCrunch’s math, that means $27 million extra per year. For doing nothing.

What is rather disheartening are the people spouting out comments over at TechCrunch without having a clue what is going on. The basic arguments:

• Domains used to be $100. Thats great - they used to be free. Stupid argument
• Don’t use them. I don’t know what people are smoking - if you buy a .com or .net, VeriSign will get your money. The low-cost registrars still pay that fee. And they had nothing to do with how ‘cheap’ VeriSign is (ie - they did not exist until the price went down, not vice-versa)
• Domainers. Love them or hate them, it is Google and Yahoo that give them the money on their PPC pages. $6 vs $6.42 - you think that is going to stop domainers?
• Infrastructure. This one really irks me. Do you remember the cost of hosting 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Newsflash: technology makes things cheaper and cheaper. VeriSign states 30 billion DNS queries a day - and yet OpenDNS does over a billion without much problems. Somehow .info operators are able to run a registry at $1-$2 per domain, and that is with much smaller volume. Scale up from 5 million domains to 65 million domains, and the cost per domain goes down, not up.

What is just disgusting is how people are actually defending a monopoly. VeriSign answers to no one (well, they are supposed to answer to ICANN, but just observe the Registerfly debacle and how incompetent they were at that).

If something costs me 50 cents, and I used to charge you $50, but now charge $5 - I’m not doing you a favor - I’m still ripping you off.

We get all sorts of legal threats and what not.

The latest one (in a long line of bizarre ones) comes from ISPhost.org. Yet another web hosting company out there (with what has to be one of the ugliest designs out there) sent us a nice little letter threatening to sue us. It was boilerplate: We are from XX, how dare you track us and attack our servers, cease or we will sue.’

A few things that really bug me about this:

• In many cases I think - “that’s nice, go ahead and send your C&D.” But in their case, we are actually providing them with (very targeted) traffic to their website. Removing them from the directory was elementary.
• How do they know we aren’t a customer? As a customer, do I not have a right to know if my website is up? Are they hiding something?
• The attack claim - we ping them once every 10 minutes (if they are down, we increase the speed at which we check). Assuming they have 0% downtime, in one day thats 6×24 = 144 checks a day. Are their servers so weak that they cannot sustain 144 ‘pageviews’ by a single user in an entire day?

Just another case of over-reaction (and I know full well both what DDOSes feel like and what running a server infrastructure entails).

Every day, I get more and more scared of Google. Not in the sense that they are going to suddenly remove me from their rankings, but by how much they shape the internet experience.

A lot of people still think the Internet Explorer ‘e’ icon is the internet. A wizened reader (like you) knows that is absolutely ridiculous. But scoffing at behavior exhibited by millions is a foolhardy exercise (just ask all the domainers making millions because a ton of people insist on writing out domains).

Using the Internet Explorer example, to many the internet is Google. While IE ’starts’ the web, Google ‘is’ the web. The entire internet experience consists of going to familiar sites (ala cnn.com, espn.com, etc). For many the place where their actual internet experience starts is Google. Very strong brands like CNN and ESPN can stand on their own - others must be found through the internet.

So it is with that thought that start pages have the power to be so painful. Any time someone becomes an active user of a website, they essentially invest (their time) into that site. The more a person uses that site, the less likely they are to leave. One can argue that there are superior alternatives for social bookmarking, but the undisputed king is Delicious. Sure exporting bookmarks is easy, but who wants to go through that burden?

So going back to start pages - when a person starts using a startpage (such as NetVibes), and customizes it, and becomes more comfortable with what it does (and doesn’t do), the inertia created is massive. I could pull a superior homepage (faster loading, easier on the eyes, new features super easy to switch), but the amount of people switching over would be minimal. This trend of course applies to anything software - I still use WS_FTP95 for my FTP needs. It bases everything off of C:\ (the ‘root’ is not the desktop), but hell - it works for me, and I cannot be bothered with the newer FTP programs.

So the ‘winner’ of the startpage race will have a lot of weight to throw around. Lets say tomorrow the race is over, and NetVibes is the winner, with 50 million users. These are users that have set NetVibes as their homepage. 50 million people whose daily ‘introduction’ to the web is this one website. Instead of seeing ESPN, they see Yahoo! Sports. Instead of seeing weather by AccuWeather, they see weather by Weather.com. Just imagine if Yahoo! was the default search instead of Google - the revenue from the resulting searches would be a damn lot. Enough to pay NetVibes to make it worthwhile. After all, blind tests show Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have relatively equal searches - most people wouldn’t even care much.

But (and you know this was coming) … every single startpage sucks. NetVibes, Page Flakes, Protopage, Google’s, Yahoo’s - they all are complete crap. I’ll explain why … tomorrow

Looks like Yahoo watches references to their sites like a hawk.

Just saw a hit from this URL: “http://bug.corp.yahoo.com/process_bug.cgi”

Thats right - you fix up your Yahoo! Sports.