Week In Review, News From The Internet

I have been using Twitter some lately, so it caught my eye and the eyes of many in the tech community when Google purchased Jaiku, a competitor of Twitter. I was wondering why they didn’t buy Twitter instead, but I think it simply has to do with the fact that Jaiku had a little better grasp on the mobile sphere than Twitter. Twitter is certainly more prominent, but that doesn’t mean they had the best technology. And Google is moving forward quickly to get into the mobile arena (see my video post about this).

China made some news this week when it came out that they had banned all western search engines from the mainland. The story is that access to the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) in China is now being redirected to Baidu. As Techcrunch points out, this move is likely an economic one, where China is using it’s censorship powers to take power away from US search companies and redirect to a Chinese company on the NASDAQ. There was some back-and-forth on whether this story is indeed true. Search Engine Land is reporting they got numerous reports from China that this block was indeed the case, yet Scoble linked over to a blogNation China blogger who is reporting it not to be the case. My guess is that this is indeed happening, but that the Chinese IT guys are like our own – they just can’t get it all to work sometimes.

Facebook made some news when it came out that their traffic had declined. My first impression is and was – whoope doo. On the short term, every website goes up AND DOWN. It is the trend that is important. And Marketing Pilgrim states that the same exact thing happened with Facebook this time last year and Facebook hasn’t exactly shown any signs of subsiding.

Google PageRank is something a lot of site owners pay attention to. But, is it as important as some say? DailySEOBlog has posted 10 Reasons why I Don’t Care About Google PageRank. And, from my experience, PageRank is overvalued. Just over at PCMech, I get my stories routinely posted to Tech Dispenser, a new site from ComputerWorld. Tech Dispenser has a PR of 0 right now, likely because Google doesn’t update their pageranks very often. At the same time, PCMech got linked up on Chris Pirillo’s blog recently and I got very little traffic while his blog has a PR of 7. Tech Dispenser routinely sends in more traffic than Pirillo did from his post. I guess if Google updated PR values more often, it would have more meaning. But, do not make the mistake of thinking PR is a measure of the quality of a website.

Yaro Starak did a great post: I Made $10,899.83 From Blogging in September. Yaro does great with his blogging, obviously. He goes on to explain a few lessons on how to do it, and the most important one is diversification. He notes in his post that he did not make that revenue from any one source. And I can tell you from experience that it is hard to make that kind of money from any one source. I have never divulged exact income amounts anywhere online, but let’s just say that I make close to the same amount of money per month in my web publishing business. I have my hands in many different pots to make that happen: advertising, affiliate income, e-commerce, some consulting work, etc. It all combines. I’ll send a shout out to Yaro and point some attention at his Blog Mastermind program if you want to learn more. As of now, I am not an affiliate with the program and I have not yet seen what it contains, but I know Yaro knows what he’s doing.

Smashing Magazine is awesome, and they posted another classic: Best Practices for Bulletproof Email Delivery. If you send out mass email to your mailing list, definitely check this out.

Lastly, CopyBlogger has released a free report: Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online (And Start Making Some). You can download it here. I haven’t read it yet, but I plan to in a little bit. And Brian Clark (the guy behind CopyBlogger) usually has good things to say on his blog.

So, that’s it for this week. Tomorrow I have been assigned the duty of painting the baby room at home. All is well on the baby front. My wife is due in less than two months, and she has a baby shower coming up in 2 weeks. So, I guess we’re in the home stretch! Now, I need to paint the baby room the color of my wife’s choosing so that she can start setting things up properly. So, that’s my weekend. Fun fun.

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