Make Money Online With Snowboardjohn

After reading Jason Moffatts recent post about how much he disliked Facebook (which I did a market analysis on a little while ago). I thought about the amount of super useless Web 2.0 sites people seem to be hyping but really don’t serve any function.

Let’s start:

1. Twitter. This is seriously the most useless, ridiculous piece of crap I’ve ever seen. 25 word snippets about people driving around town, doing shopping, and other useless communication. If you’re reading people’s “Twitters” you’ve got WAY too much time on your hands.

And as far as reaching your market through Twitter goes? Are you kidding me?! Sure it’ll sort of work for tech fan boys who follow Morgan Webb, and major CEO’s or celebrities, but for the average everyman, NO ONE wants to know the minute aspects of how your day is going.

2. Mahalo. What, exactly, is Mahalo supposed to be doing? It’s pretty much a link directory for a tiny range of subjects. Calcanis calls it an aggregator - but if Mahalo is aggregating information in a new way - so is the DMOZ directory… oh wait… DMOZ has been around for a decade… so it’s not so new after all!

3. Yahoo Answers. And you thought wikipedia had questionable information! When it isn’t clogged with spam, Yahoo Answers provides the pure, unedited insights of nameless, faceless, unqualified nobodies from all over the planet. The only question Yahoo Answers provides a reliable answer to is “can you have a website that provides super low quality information succeed in a big way?”

4. Hubpages. The success of Hubpages is completely bizarre to me. Low quality information, anonymous users, high placement search engine results. Huh?

5. Wikipedia. The internal politics of wikipedia has everyone wondering about who has what interest in what wikipedia entry. The problem with wikipedia isn’t so much that it has bad information, it’s that wikipedia information is TRUSTED so much. The over trusting, and over citation of wikipedia as source, has turned it into an “information cancer” - cells of information that have been influenced (or written) by people who have a vested interest in smearing or vindicating topics, companies, and people.

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I’m a harsh critic of Google, I don’t trust their business practices, and I don’t think they come CLOSE to living up to “not being evil”.

So I’ve just installed the new Google No Follow Plugin.

This Plugin puts a no follow attribute on all links to Google - it’s a way we webmasters can put a vote of no confidence into Googles business practices.

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I don’t get it.

I’m not a defender of John Reese or anything (though I do think it’s funny that people attack small entrepreneurs who enjoy some success - meanwhile they don’t have a bad thing to say about evil companies like Google who screw large amounts of people daily) .

But what’s this silly self contradictory criticism of BlogRush?

I’m reading a lot of “the click throughs are so low, so why would I have it on my page when all it does is lose my visitors to somewhere else, instead of bring me them?”

Which is impossible - either - it’s bringing you many visitors (and losing you about the same amount), or it’s not bringing you any visitors and not losing you any either. It’s not like you’ve got a defective blog rush widget which specifically LOSES you traffic.

If the widget is only getting low CTR’s - then that’s the reality - FOR EVERYONE. Small gains, small losses.

I think the real issue is that the “something for nothing’ers” didn’t get a free lunch. And now they’re bitching about it.

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Is it just me, or do the Sphinn users seem to vote up stories depending on who submitted them, instead of the actual content inside them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for community participation and rewarding those who take the time to contribute to the community by voting for their stories. However, I’ve read several things on the front page which frankly make me scratch my head wondering why they are there in the first place.

I’m not going to link to the stories, because it’s not the authors fault these stories are getting so much exposure - and in any event I’m glad for anyone to get their hard work rewarded - even if it’s not up to my personal expectations of “important news”.

At the same time, I start to devalue resources when I begin to see collusion (either implicit or explicit) and I was regarding the Sphinn homepage as a short cut to important news, or great insight.

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In a clever marketing manouver, Bob Parsons and Godaddy have become College Footballs main sponsor.

Says Parsons “College football viewers are the perfect audience for Go Daddy. Their demographics such as age, education, income level, Internet use etc., match Go Daddy’s target customer perfectly. As sports fans go, our research has also shown that they are loyal fans and in intensity rank only behind NFL and NASCAR fans”.

I know many College football fans who are exactly as Parsons describes. Many are successful entrepreneurs who feel that College football is a much purer game than the NFL - as it contains all the athleticism without all the hype.

Another bonus of sponsoring College Football is that Parsons is dealing with ESPN, a cable TV network - as opposed to a public TV network. This means advertising censorship is not as tight, which is something Parsons has already taken advantage of:

“Because ESPN is a cable network, we expect that they will be slightly more liberal – than network TV — when it comes to the type of commercial Go Daddy will get approved. For example, one of the commercials that was rejected for last year’s Super Bowl – and one that I and many others thought SHOULD HAVE BEEN APPROVED — has been given the thumbs up to air during our advertising debut on ESPN2.”

The question I’d love Parsons to answer, however, has little to do with advertising censorship or marketing.

I want to know if the Google buy out rumors have any truth to them. I sure hope they don’t, but time will tell I guess.

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1. Google is possibly buying Godaddy - that sucks BIG TIME. Has anyone noticed how quickly you lose traffic if you put Google analytics on your website - imagine what’s going to happen if Google can measure your traffic through Domain requests. F&*k.
2. Gaming Wikipedia for link love… using… images. Anything that games wikipedia for some value gets the thumbs up from me.
3. Unlocking the iPhone has never been easier, this Gizmodo video shows you how.
4. Google is getting sued for misleading advertising. As critical as I am of Google, I think that this lawsuit is BS and hopefully gets thrown out.

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“Let’s set the record straight.” Says Andrews.

(I can see this article is going to be pretty direct, just the way I like them.)

He continues, “Competitive SEO is about exploitation of “secrets”. You look at the target search results page, examine who ranks and figure out why they do, and take a look at the web materials you have to work with yourself. What secrets do you know, that the current ranking web sites don’t seem to know? What exploits can you execute, that will overtake those players at the top of the SERP? If you come up dry on any of that due diligence, which I don’t expect from any competent SEO today in all but the most competitive SERPs, then you re-think your content strategy.”

This type of lucid discussion is so rare on the internet these days. So do yourself a favor and go read John Andrews article about why SEO secrets DO exist, but in a way that is balanced and logical - not hypey and markety.

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