Monthly Archives: March 2005

cashing in on PageRank

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Still not sure what I think of this . . . apparently, all those links to WordPress.org (as seen on most WP-driven sites) create such a tempting PageRank value that the WP developers were approached by someone to host some articles (17) that could leverage that PageRank.

So on the one hand, we have a community building a well-liked product in Internet gift culture mode (7) but with some bills to pay (hosting, bandwidth, etc.). The idea is to get some cash in a way that wouldn’t trash the site (the articles are not linked off the main page). But this is where it gets bit dodgy — the links are obscured by CSS to appear offscreen.

<div style=”text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;”>
<p>Sponsored <a href=”/articles/articles.xml”>Articles</a> on <a href=”/articles/credit.htm”>Credit</a>, <a href=”/articles/health-care.htm”>Health</a>, <a href=”/articles/insurance.htm”>Insurance</a>, <a href=”/articles/home-business.htm”>Home Business</a>, <a href=”/articles/home-buying.htm”>Home Buying</a> and <a href=”/articles/web-hosting.htm”>Web Hosting</a></p>
</div>

Waxy.org: Daily Log: WordPress Website’s Search Engine Spam (20):

The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.

Why WordPress? The WordPress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8, largely because every WordPress-powered blog links to the WordPress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes WordPress very attractive to advertisers.

I stumbled on this issue from a support topic, which was immediately closed without response by an unknown moderator. (After I pointed it out, Matt reopened the thread to add a final comment.)

So, last week, I instant-messaged Matt to ask him some of these questions. He was very helpful, giving me the full story.

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he’s paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. “The /articles thing isn’t something I want to do long term,” he said, “but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I’m willing to let it run for a little while.”

He added that if the user community didn’t like it, he’d end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don’t want it. At the same time, if you think people don’t care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”

I think this WordPress user cares enough to want to know what expenses this is supposed to cover and how much comes in as a result: in other words, what price is WordPress (the collective) charging for it’s reputation. I don’t object to anyone making money, but I just want a little more clarity on how projects I support do it. [deletia] Josh points out that WordPress.com and WordPress.org share nothing more than a name: I had been under the impression that an open domain scam using a variant of their name was affiliated: I’ve removed the text (since we are talking about PageRank, after all).

I think an open request for donations would have been a better idea, especially given all the improvements we’ve seen since 1.2. Have I donated? Not yet.

I have a hard time with someone as clueful as Matt not thinking this would have negative karma about it: the fact that the stuff is hidden is bad. I’m still thinking this through. Much depends on how WordPress.org responds.

Now playing: Die Moldau by Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra/Walter Susskind from the album “Smetana – Má Vlast” | Get it

[updated to incorporate corrections]

a dissenting view on Unswitching

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Return of the Mac (20):

If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.

And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.

Paul Graham sees Apple differently than Tim does (20). Granted, Solaris never enters the picture (though curiously, x86 hardware and the OSes that drive it’s sales are mentioned).

It looks to me like leaving OS X for Solaris — as a desktop/laptop OS — is abandoning a boutique product, as people describe Apple, for an even more esoteric one. If I am going to run UNIX on fast commodity hardware, it will be with Linux or one of the BSDs for driver support, etc. If I am going to have shop around to find hardware that will run some esoteric OS, I’m not really able to leverage the competitive nature of the commodity market and I’m getting closer to where I just was: I’m buying specialized equipment again.

Tim and I passed each other

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ongoing; Unswitch? (5):

This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird. Maybe I’ll go back, but I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.

Hmm, I just switched back to Safari after getting hosed up by Firefox (my fault: I was using the hardware-specific builds and the one-size-fits-all 1.0.2 release didn’t). I found fault with a lot of the aesthetic concerns Tim does (the crummy looking widgets mostly).

So far so good. It still visits the beachball on me, but it doesn’t last too long (1-3 seconds) and in general it seems to feel better. And the Services menu is there.

I understand Tim’s angst about infofascism but I don’t really care all that much (does owning AAPL stock and watching it quadruple in value and then split, while SUNW has been circling the bowl over the same period make a difference?). Does it work for the company and by extension it’s shareholders? And by transparency, does he really feel that SUNW and MSFT have more in common in terms of transparency than SUNW and AAPL (the names Darwin or Darwinports ring any bells?)?

But in the main, there are more differences that similarities (how much consumer lust does a Sun workstation engender?). Apple is a consumer-facing company and Sun is an enterprise shop: Apple does have some designs on the enterprise (XServe/XSan) but the bulk of their success comes from products that start with a lowercase “i”.

For one thing, if anyone at Sun wants to get into a pissing contest about speed vs price, Intel will be glad to oblige: at CNN.com we ran all Sun from 1995 to the early ‘oughts for one reason — software. At that time, revenue was tied to products that only ran on Solaris or Windows (tough choice). As soon as the AOL merger was done, ad service migrated to the AOL ad infrastructure and hardware is now mostly, if not all, Linux/x86-based.

http://cnn.com was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 23-Mar-2005 18:44:32 GMT

It’s a competitive world. I still remember visiting the nice people at Oracle in 1999 and, for all their talk about the evil that MSFT represents, every laptop-based presentation I saw was in PowerPoint on Windows.

I give Sun a lot of credit for realizing some years back that to have anyone else’s hardware in their datacenters was not credible, but I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing the desktop/laptop segments. Star/OpenOffice are one thing: they undercut the “I need this OS to run these apps” excuse.

Better to make Java, et al, the true “write once, run anywhere” infrastructure it has been billed as for 10 years. But does Java 2/SE5 on all platforms? Or just SPARC/x86/AMD? Does J2SE 1.4.2 run everywhere? You can guess the answer, but go look.

<digression>I get so tired of the “you must run IE to do this” or “you’re using an unsupported browser.” I have been working on an elementary school yearbook and their web application demands you use IE. I can’t figure out why: I enabled Safari’s debug menu and happily masquerade as MSIE 5.2.2. Works fine, as far as I can tell.

The promise of Java has been fraught with this nonsense as well: running it on non-Sun UNIXes — or anything but Solaris and Windows — has always been a nuisance, and OS X is no exception. </digression>

If Tim really thinks “I work for Sun, I’d like to run our software. (5)” why does he think it’s Apple fault? What Sun software doesn’t run well on Apple hardware and how hard has he worked at making it run on his choice of hardware?

Maybe I misunderstand his argument — he emailed me to say he didn’t understand mine, though that could be the TheraFlu talking on my end. I just don’t know that ripping on an OS vendor — your partner/customer — when your code doesn’t perform well makes sense, and for anyone at Sun to make a plea for more cost-effective hardware jars.

<update Wed Mar 30 09:21:25 PST 2005> So what he means is, (per email) he wants to run Solaris on something fast. Well, if that’s the case, then a PowerBook is a non-starter. Beating around the bush about Safari and “infofascism” is just a distraction.

Now, to be clear, showing the flag in public is fine, nothing wrong with it at all. If your employer offers a product in a given space and you’re visibly not using it — guys like Tim get around in public – what does that say? But if what he wants is a faster laptop that runs Solaris 10, just say that.

Ah, jeez, now I see in an update this morning that he’s running fink and an update-all run stomped all over a bunch of stuff. I gave up on fink, what, two years ago? If he stays with OS X, I’ll suggest he run Darwinports.