John Andrews's blog

Okay so now everybody's friend Mike Grehan is with Bruce Clay Inc., the company that Yahoo!

Google is a domain registrar, but doesn't (yet) register domains on behalf of the public. The reason?

Some time ago an informed source suggested that "I was going to love" Jason Calcanis' Next Big Adventure. I didn't get the details, but since I didn't know nor care much about Jason C., and had only witnessed his dissing of SEOs over and over again, I didn't think much of it. When Webmasterworld "featured" him I thought it odd. But it is the small clues that detray the truth....

It's a report in the New York Times about a research report out of MSN, on systematic publishing of junk pages designed to only show ads, by a few organized efforts suported by Google (blogspot and adsense) and more. The article goes 5 paragraphs in without mentioning SEO, describing the perpetrators as "rogue actors", "shadowy operators", and "rogue actors". The article properly reports on the identification of two ISPs/hosts seemingly involved, and repeatedly highlights how it is a defined activity of a small group with purposeful intent. When SEO is mentioned (paragraph 6), it is mentioned respectfully, properly, and positively:

Nice review of Web 2.0 from SXSW meeting. Some classics:

It seems everybody's out to disintermediate Jason these days, and he doesn't like it. This time it's sponsored blog posts. As someone who built media networks (blogs, specifically) in order to sell sponsored advertising, I suppose he is threatened by the idea of individual bloggers earning revenue. No need to be a network, or part of a network. Of course he has to mention prostitution and "making love".

It must be hard to be SEMPO.

I was looking at one of those "guaranteed results" SEO offers, and read this pleasant assurance:

I'm not generally fickle about Microsoft. I've been a F.O.S.S. advocate for almost a decade, and have been burned repeatedly by my insistance upon testing the bleeding edge of tech with each new "innovation" (Winblows Mobile 5, for example). A year or so ago I so mussed my IE6 security settings so that every half k of page load caused a modal warning...but I didn't care cause I rarely used it. Then Firefox failed me for the umpteenth time and well, it was time to bleed again with IE7 on my notebook.

Time to start using more double negatives and longer words, because what we do is now a formal academic discipline to be henceforth referred to as none other than the not unsavory, yet somewhat ambiguous token "Web Science".

Interesting post on Blog maverick about the Google - YouTube purchase, cross posted from a "trusted" discussion forum. The poster is an alleged insider, who says that at least $500 million of the Google purchase has been set aside for copyright liabilities, OldMedia worked a deal with the Big G / YouTube to buy/sell partial ownership in YouTube as a way to avoid paying artists a share of the profits, and that Google has basically purchased a 6 month royalty free license for copyrighted content via the complex YouTube deal.

Odeo is gone. Evan Williams bought it out and formed Obvious Corp., which he describes on his blog. His business model sounds exactly like mine:

I am an independent competitive webmaster, and this sounds like what I (and many SEO practitioners) have done for years. I build web properties using

I did a double-take when I saw the Squidoo blog cite 2 Squidoo Lensmasters who reported that Squidoo was getting them top ranks in Google. Then I took a look. Show 'nuff, they report they get top rankings. And the Squidoo people, while taking the roundabout route, seem to suggest that Squidoo is good for SEO. But is it SEO?

Anybody else remember when you could actually FIND stuff with search engines?

I mean, you could actually go to Google or AltaVista and query "this exact text, including punctuation" and it would return a list of web pages that included that exact phrase. It was magical. It was why we started calling these things "Search Engines" instead of webpages.

I've only had one regular job in my life, and I think it only lasted because it was 1997-2003 and I was the IT lead chasing this emerging thing called the Internet. Four supervising Exec VP's in 6 years also kept it interesting. SEO has been changing reliably ever since I went solo, helping to keep back the boredom but I gotta say, innovation has sure slowed down and with this 2 horse race (Google and EveryOtherEngine). Things are feeling mighty stale.

I often marvel at how certain movies connect to define generations. Not always generations in the geneology sense, but in the "values formative years" between 17 and 25 years of age. Even that age group is flexible.. some of us grow up late, while others grow up younger (and some, indeed, never grow up at all). Yet there still seems to always be a movie that sticks with the psyche of a group of like-mature individuals. And I find it...

Google has released a beta verison of "GRoll", a blogrolling service for websites. Basically, it combines Google's oversight of link quality with AdSense, creating a way for webmasters to cross link between websites on the www without worrying about violating Google's unstated "link quality enforcement algorithms". According to Catt Mutts, this new offering from the Quality Team at the Googleplex (codename 'cutie-plex') brings webmasters yet another tool in the war on Spam:

I am one of those geeks who has been on the Internet before it was capitalized. Back when it was non-commercial. Back when there was no such thing as email, and we used tty mesg commands to "message" our friends at other universities. In a moment, I'll be asking for help finding a term more offensive than fukwit...

The company is selling a mobile phone spy application as "the world's first spy software built for mobile phones". According to their website:

That's it. I'm pissed again. Last night t-mobile shut me down just after I started a large..."activity", and locked me out. The normal logoff/on didn't work, so it was something internal. They fixed it today, but also just about agreed that some type of anti-evil activity detector was probably responsible.