A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post on how CNN.com was delivering ads for life insurance (and pretty tasteless ads at that) next to a super sad story about soldiers killed in Iraq.

Today they're delivering ads for steroids ("Legal steroids buy now!") next to the news about how many baseball players have been caught using the banned substances.

Aye yai yai.

Sometimes Google surprises me. Not how good a search engine it is, but how not good it can be. Basically how poorly it can deliver what it is you want, even if you know somewhat specifically what you're looking for. Tonight was one of those times.

So I read an interesting article the other day about how Facebook has "jumped the shark." Basically, the author claimed Facebook was on its way down, and never before in the history of the Internet has any company so screwed itself so quickly.

Those were quite bold claims, and so I decided to write a blog post about it on my Marketing and New Media Blog.

So I know this, the article was posted on a high profile magazine web site. I thought it was Forbes. Those magazines get indexed by Google News right? So off I went to Google News to search for this article.

I searched for Facebook in Google News. Nothing relevant. I searched Facebook Death. Stories talking about people who were killed, who also had Facebook accounts. That's not relevant either. Facebook Forbes. Nada. I went to Forbes.com - searching Facebook was useless.

I went to Digg, because that's probably where I found the story to begin with. Search Facebook among Frontpage Stories. Nada.

I went to Wired. How many freaking blogs does Wired have? Too many. There were hundreds of hits for the word Facebook in the last 24 hours. Sheesh.

It wasn't that long ago - a news article posted yesterday. And I can't find it! Went to Technorati. Went to IceRocket. Back to Google.

Finally, on CNN.com, I saw something that caught my eye in an article on Fortune. That article on Fortune linked to another one, which linked to the one I read yesterday. After 20 minutes of searching, across 5 web sites. I found it.

I wonder why none of the search engines I checked considered Fortune Magazine a good enough source to rank it highly for "Facebook Death" in a news search?

 

I'm switching DNS providers tonight. I've had it with my current provider, which has let me down again.

If this site goes offline for a bit, that's what happened. Sorry about the interruption... Be back soon!

 

When starting a new business, entrepreneurs have a dream. That dream is that there is this great untapped demand out there, who are looking for something and not finding it. There are people out there looking for green widgets, and no supplier currently makes green widgets, and you're going to come along and sweep up this customer base who are waiting, just waiting, for a product like theirs to come along.

In modern Search Engine Marketing, that's impossible.

Internet marketers are watching the major search engines like hawks. They are looking at their analytics tools, their adwords tools, and their estimated traffic tools. They see what ordinary people are typing into search engines. They know before anyone what is becoming more popular.

And they're waiting. They're catching them early. A search marketer finds a term that estimates 50,000 search a month. He sees that the top results for that term are somewhat irrelevant or old. The top result is Wikipedia, or the top result is some news article from 2003.

And they register the domain name for it. Buy it cheaply off someone if necessary. And they build an ad site. They capture that 50,000 right away. They're fast and nimble, they know all the SEO tricks. Pretty soon they're the number 1 result. And it's going to be hard to knock them off that perch.

This is the efficiency of search engine marketing today. There is no known keywords that are easy to rank well for. And they know faster than anyone when a set of keywords gains or loses popularity. And they move with it.

And forget just "ad sites" any more. That was so 2006. Search engine marketers are moving beyond just Google Adsense and advertising based revenue. The company that owns "Phone.com", primarily known as just an advertising site, is building an actual VOIP product. They think they can make more money selling phone service than the $10,000s a month they're making in ads. And they're doing the same thing with "Software.com" becoming a software download store. The same company owns Chocolate.com, Jeans.com, Relationship.com, and a host of other good names.

The internet marketers have arrived. They're not just selling advertising. They're building businesses around the best keywords. And they're going to be hard to beat.

By the way, I searched "Phone" in Google. Phone.com is #3. Software.com is #3 for software too.

 

I'm starting to lose trust and confidence in Firefox. What has happened over at Mozilla to turn what was once the "standard browser" of technology-savvy people everywhere, into the browser that's always letting me down?

It started with the ocassional crash. I remember feeling kind of shocked the first time I saw Firefox 2 crash. After a number of years of being reliable and stable, there it was - falling flat on its face. Over time, as the crashing happened again and again, I was less shocked.

Firefox has gone through a number of security and stability upgrades. From 2.0.0.0  to 2.0.0.1 and on and on. Firefox automatically updates for me whenever a new stable release is pushed out by the developers.

But how did 2.0.0.8 slip out?

I started Firefox today, and noticed for the first time on a particularly ad-filled web site that for some reason Adblock wasn't blocking any ads. I opened the extension tab and saw this:

All of my extensions are broken. Restarting Firefox didn't fix it.

According to the official bug report which was filed TWO MONTHS AGO, developers are still trying to figure out how to fix it. Downloading the latest browser (2.0.0.9) or even one of the development builds won't do it.

Open source is supposed to be better than closed source right? Bugs are found and fixed in 24 hours, or so the story goes. I consider this to be a serious problem - all of my extensions no longer work. And as far as I can tell, this bug has been known for 2 months now. All-in-all, it's a huge knock to the reputation of the supposedly "stable and less bugs" browser. That myth has just been shattered, although truth be told it's been in jeopardy for some time.

 

Aye yai yai.

I've been following Jakob Neilsen for 10 years at least. Ever since a company I worked for invested in some professional usability equipment ($60,000 worth if I remember), and started video taping people using our web site.

Jakob is known as one of the top - and certainly most famous - usability experts in the world. His site is http://www.useit.com/

And Jakob Neilsen says I should stop blogging and actually write useful articles instead.

His advice actually makes sense. If you want to establish yourself as a top expert in some field, you actually need to contribute valuable content to the Internet. Simply a few paragraphs commenting on the controversey of the day (as this very post is doing), doesn't really contribute.

In actual fact, the goal I guess is to get people linking TO YOU and having them do the commenting on your work, instead of linking to other people. This has SEO benefits as well, because establishing yourself as a recognized expert in a field, which causes people to link to you, makes Google think you're a great destination to send people, and so they send more, and it's a "virtuous circle".

What I might do is turn some of my best blog posts, where I think I'm actually contributing new content and not just insights and commentary, into articles with their own organization and hierarchy. Put that on my to do list.

 

I have an ongoing theme over the history of this blog: how much does the United States owe, and what's the credit card limit up to now?

According to the U.S. Government, the current debt stands at $9.111 Trillion. It's odd typing such a large number. I'd rather prefer saying $9,111 Billion. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money, and we as normal humans can't even properly fathom a trillion. It's beyond comprehension.

And the last I heard the statutory debt limit was $8.97 Trillion. So they much have increased it without me noticing - and they did increase it early in October. How come this didn't make the news? A quick Google search tells me the current limit is $9.815 Trillion.

I guess in an election year, they want to give themselves a lot of room to spend so that they don't have to debate the level of debt on the nightly news.