Here Comes Another Bubble
I haven’t posted any videos here before but I figured that since Blogging is such a large part of Web 2.0 it was relevant.
I’m not sure whether the bubble is close but I do think that a second bubble will come, when? I don’t know. I wish I did, but that is just not how things worked. hopefully it will be quite a while but at the same time, maybe it would be better for it to just get over with.
I’m not going to talk much about this because I don’t know enough about business to understand this stuff, but I do understand that most of the last bubble was fueled by IPOs, this time we don’t have that, but we do have a limited number of advertisers and I think that the money being thrown at online advertising will start to dry up, and that, in my opinion, is going to be what fuels this next bubble.
Google Bans Ads for Paid Links
Last night on Waxy.org: Links I came across a nice article talking about paid links. It basically said that Google has banned ads for paid links sellers (the original article is on Google Blogoscoped).
The article talks about Google cracking down on paid links that don’t carry the nofollow attribute. The article shows two picture of Google search results for “pr8.”
First off I will say that I personally believe that paid links should be allowed, if anything Google should change, not website owners.
But, it doesn’t look like Google has completely fixed the problem, a quick Google search for “links” showed this:
As you can see by clicking on the picture above in the “sponsored links” section on the right the ads are as followed:
- Buy 500+ Lnks
- Oneway Links $20 a Month
- Buy Links Here
- 5 Ways to Build Links
- Buy Marketing Links
- Massive Link Popularity
And on the top of the page:
- 1000s of Links from $10/m
- Buy Links
- Buy Links
(it doesn’t look like they did that good of a job banning them)
As a side note, at the time of writing this, that is what you will get but I do understand that by the time this is posted it may be a little different.
It just goes to show you that what Google is doing WILL NOT fix the “problem” of paid links, it will only push further and further underground making it harder for Google to distinguish who is and who isn’t selling paid links (potentially making it more difficult to penalize those who are doing so).
Like I said above, I believe that with all of the PHDs in Google someone there should be able to figure out a better solution to this “problem.”
WP Theme Marketplace, Feedburner Glitch, and WordPress Plugins
WP Theme Marketplace will soon be opening. WP Theme Marketplace is going to be (as the name implies) a marketplace for WordPress themes. WordPress.com bloggers will be able to pay to use the themes in the marketplace while WordPress.org users will be able to use the themes for free. More at Everybody Go To.
Google’s Feedfetcher stats weren’t showing up when users were looking at Feedburner stats over the weekend. More at Problogger.
WordPress Plugins - Admin Drop-Down Menus, Different Posts Per Page, Download Counter Lite, Download Counter Advanced, etc. More at Weblog Tools Collection.
Two Themes I Hate and One I Love
Remember we may have differing opinions, and that is fine, leave a comment and tell me why I’m wrong.
Quite frankly I really don’t like this theme. It has the effect that the title implies but that effect isn’t that great. It is too red, I wouldn’t be too opposed if it had a little red, I’m not against red, but this just screams REEEDDD!! If you like that, it is fine, but it is not for me.
This is another that I do not like, it is just too stripe-ey. I do like that it is nice and wide, there is nothing better then a blog theme that fills your whole browser window. But, unfortunately the color scheme for the theme is just too strong.
This is actually a really nice theme. It is loosely based on Tumblogs and I have to be honest, I am a sucker for a moderately well designed minimalist WordPress theme. This single column theme is just beautiful simplicity. I absolutely love the background on the left and right sides of the main column, it looks great.
Gravatar Acquired by Automattic
Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) is an extremely popular service which allows its users to have an avatar to use on my websites (mostly just a picture next to your comment on blogs). Gravatar was hit by some scaling issues and had to shut down for a short time a while back, but Automattic, the creators of WordPress have decided to take over Gravatar.
Automattic has already shown their skill at scaling with WordPress and Akismet and have already started improving Gravatar.They have moved the Gravatar service to WordPress.com’s infrastructure and have sped up avatar serving by 3x.
I don’t currently use Gravatar but if Automattic improves it like I think they will I will have to reconsider it. I could actually see Gravatar integration into WordPress in the future, which would be pretty amazing (and extremely interesting at the same time).