Cycled and fished instead - not regretting it either

• Sam Zell “bought a terrible business” - newspapers. I think Zell has it right when he says newspapers have to give customers what they want, not what some internal agenda prescribes. As a result, I admire the man, and hope he doesn’t wind up paying a terrible price.
• Is Yahoo! manipulating bloggers? Doubtful - such action would create even more of a black purple eye. If anything, it’s more likely a renegade faction within. Then again, blog manipulation (i.e. shutting them down) seems to have found its way into the political process. Quelling discontent, or just one more way of saying blogs are really starting to matter?
• Should Congress let home prices fall? You’ll get a resounding “yes” out of me - propping up asset classes, particularly right before elections, is a way for politicians to feign working for the better good. Unfortunately, situations generally wind up worse as a result, and history has a way of repeating itself. You’ve been hearing about government’s plans for saving the housing market going on a year now - nothing seems to be sticking, and maybe that is the best possible outcome.

And my prediction for the week…

• Citadel Investment Group will soon make an offer to purchase the country of Iceland. Citadel bought multi-strategy fund Amaranth Advisors when it made bad bets on natural gas. It bought Sowood and portions of E*Trade after their sub-prime dice rolls. Now banking is melting down, and the volcanic island of Iceland is going with it. Why not?

UPDATE: Via Steven Pearlstein…

Since last June, we’ve seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic mood swings. Every three months or so, there’s a round of bad news about housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string of disappointing corporate earnings reports.

Let’s not forget the government announcements of salvation immediately thereafter. Me thinks Mr. Pearlstein is spot on, and you should read the whole thing.

VCs are doing it. Should you?

It’s pretty obvious by looking at these pages that I don’t have much taste for widgets. Now, it seems, at least one blogging venture capitalist is taking widgets to task - cleaning them out because they slow down page loading time. While I’d like to say I’m a trendsetter, alas it’s really just a matter of having no time and/or patience to find useful, easy to use widgets to slap on the site. The ones I have found that are useful simply take too much time to create and/or maintain.

I would have commented on Mr. Wilson’s blog - maybe snarkily offering the New York venture capitalist my stylesheet - but the comment section didn’t load. I’m now wondering if it too is a widget of some sort.

I’ve cursorily seen a trend towards cleaner blog pages, and web pages in general. Even one of Mr. Wilson’s own investments, Tumblr, is built on the idea of clean, easy to read pages full of content originating from the owner. Yet, widgets seem to be growing and thriving in places like MySpace and Facebook (and yes, I know all the junk on Facebook pages are called “apps” - sorry, but they look like widgets to me).

Is there a shift in the midst - widgets coming off of personal/independent pages…finally finding their rightful place in social networks? Or are widgets beginning to join the ranks of the homeless?

UPDATE: If social network widgets can’t start producing real revenue, extinction may be the foregone conclusion.

Very cool. (h/t to one of “the included”)

Companies uneasy about online criticism.

Techdirt points out the foolish arguments over who is liable for website comments - the website owner or the commenter. The catch here is it is very very difficult to figure out who commenters are (despite what some think). Of course, I suspect a lot of the hubbaloo is about what is posted to blogs (and those who would love to know who the comment posters are), so I have a simple (albeit potentially temporary) solution:

All blog owners turn off all comment capability, and turn on trackback capability (if they haven’t already). Anyone who wants to provide feedback must do so via their own blog (even if they use it only to provide said feedback). That will weed out the trollers anonymous types (at least until some smarty figures out a hack around it). And who knows, those newfangled feedback-only blogs may just generate some revenue for those previously scared of airing their views. They can use AdSense for goodness sake. Sounds like Google might be needing the extra revenue any day now.

***UPDATE***

I obviously agree here.

A Chinese blogger wasn’t a very good spokesperson for their government, so Microsoft removed the blog from the MSN Spaces service. If the possibility of censorship doesn’t cause MSN Spaces users to go running for the doors, I don’t know what will (but maybe trashing everyone’s email will help?).

The Redmond crowd desperately wants a foothold in the online world, and screwing up prime services is not the way to do it. If you are going to upset the balance of power, you have to execute with laser precision, something MS has had the luxury of not having to do up until now. And while they are flubbing around, the forces are hitting them from the flanks. Don’t be surprised if people start carrying their blog and email software around on a USB stick, much like they can now do with a free office productivity suite.

***UPDATE***

And now there is talk of regulating companies that promote censorship. A tax surcharge for that “regulation” might help too.

A couple of weeks back I commented that some of the “old” dot-com ideas that CNET shot down might not deserve the slamming they got. The premise was that some of the dot-com failures had merit in one way or another, and not to be surprised if some of the same business models rear their not-so-ugly heads again and make someone a lot of money.

Well, the October ‘05 issue of Business 2.0 has an article entitled “Everything Old Is New Again” that suggests much the same thing.

Now, I am neither suggesting that Erick Schonfeld got the idea for this article from Thought Market, nor am I suggesting I am some brilliant genius. It is just nice to know that other folks are thinking the same way about some technology-based business models, particularly when it comes to the web (something I am still very bullish on).

Interestingly though, Schonfeld also noted that investors are going nuts for models that revolve around the latest concepts: blogs, social networking, user-generated content. Why do I find this so interesting? Because some colleagues and I are working on a project that involves all three buzzwords, simultaneously, and I thought it might be fun to tease you a bit.

Lets face it folks..while email spam is still a problem, and a growing one, spammers know that it is all about economics. If they can’t make money off of the exploit, then it is time to move on. Secondarily, if the space gets crowded enough, with spammer and anti-spammer alike, then it is time to try something else. If the attention (and the cash) is focusing on other channels in cyberspace, then maybe some ingenuitive folks can get the jump on the rest, and the payoff, before that scam gets overrun.

Lets sit back and watch, as they take the search engines bait..

Right now, the attention is all over search engines. Keywords, ad space, search engine optimization, and other buzzwords cover the press. There are some holes in the way some search engines work and money is pouring into the sector right now, so scammers and simple cheats alike are running to it as well.

Link farming, ad click fraud, and keyword hiding are popular and effective ways of gaming results and their revenue end-sources, but these are short-term plays. Now we even have software and services specifically to sculpt keyword efficient content (see www.hotnacho.com).

I think it is all stupid, and here’s why:

The focus of gaming is short term. Search engines frequently remove “gamed” pages from search results, so cheats are constantly chasing their tails (this is true of link farms and keyword optimized pages). Second, the guys that run the search engines (particularly the big ones like Google and Yahoo) are not dumb. In fact, many are EXTREMELY smart. And they are aware of the problems with their own systems, and I doubt they are just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for the problem to die on its own. They have a vested interest in fixing the problems, or a crashing revenue line and shareholder lawsuits are eventually going to rear their ugly heads. Last but not least, good content will prevail - if you want a steady stream of revenue, you know the kind that builds enterprise value, then you have to develop a core viewer base.

Now you may think some of the above thoughts are a little naive. Maybe they are. But they also reflect simple common sense business principals. Simple and common sense is the mean that everything in the natural world migrates towards. Simple is the shared pot for those who add real value to the online world. That shared pot is gargantuan, and gargantuan means there is plenty to go around. The trickery is the tail of the distribution curve, and I don’t think it is very fat.

You can read a little more about search engine spam in The Spamming Of Web Search, or type a popular keyword like diabetes, mesothelioma, or even SEO into your favorite search engine and see for yourself how irrelevant some of the top results are. But be quick about it, because I think they are going to disappear just as fast.

Adrants posted this quicky (see Adrants: Weblogs Are The New Spam) regarding a report by Dave Sifry of Technorati, pointing out blogs as the latest spam culprit. They used the term “horrifically depressing” right at the front of the post, for additional FUD factoring.

Thank goodness Dave responded, to clarify matters.

Upon investigation of Dave’s report, Sifry’s Alerts: State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs, I thought I would point out a few things.

Dave never says that spam blogs (fake blogs set up to increase Google PageRank) account for all the growth in blogs. In fact, he emphasizes the fact that the growth charts shown have spam blog data REMOVED from them (although he qualifies by saying Technorati can’t catch everything, and to please report anything you find). Nonetheless, this shows that Technorati has gone to some length to make sure the data from their index is accurate. It further shows they are aware of the problem, and are on top of the issue.

Nice to know some people actually do something about issues before yacking about them.

Meanwhile, the spam blog issue might just reflect the fact that the legitimate blogging community is making good use of implementations such as rel=”nofollow”, and that the spammers are being forced elsewhere.

Six Apart, the folks that bring you the MovableType Publishing Platform, recently released the Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam.

Pretty comprehensive look at the comment spam issue, and how to avoid big wastes of time deleting kazillions of un-approved comments that sound like complete nonsense, but do contain great links to cheap Viagra.

Anyway, between it, and a solid implementation of MT Blacklist, you should be wasting little time, and this is good. You will have to find another job in order to afford the pharmaceuticals at your local Walgreens, and this is bad.