Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:

An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.

Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:

• Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
• Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
• Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites

Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:

The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?

Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”

It’s now clear to me why Google bought Jaiku instead of Twitter. The reason is simply that Twitter sucks. I’m following a mere 5 users, and I have pruned down the people following me to 2, yet Twitter cannot reliably deliver my messages.

For example, this morning I should have received 3 twits, two of which are weather alerts, and one of which is a message from my girlfriend. In reality, I only received one of the weather alerts, and missed the other two on my phone:

This isn’t just a one-time glitch; I’ve been having trouble receiving twits erratically for the last couple months. If I had to place bets, I’d say that Twitter isn’t scaling properly, or is falling apart from the inside out. After all, if Google bought your biggest-but-still-tiny competitor instead of you, wouldn’t you just give up? Maybe at Twitter there’s no one left at the helm.

Another annoyance is that no matter how hard I try, I keep getting twits from a random person:

I’m not subscribed to their alerts, and additionally I’ve marked them as “blocked” but yet I continue to receive their updates on my phone. I’ve tried everything short of sueing Twitter in civil court to get them to stop, but the alerts continue to flow. If you wonder if I’m alone, I’m not. Someone’s gone to the effort to register http://twittersucks.com, and a quick search for twitter sucks will get you a lot more.

Update: I was going to say that things might be getting better, because yesterday I received both weather updates, but today I only got one.

The infamous 1 Click Patent which Amazon filed in 1997 was challenged by Peter Calveley, a random New Zealand blogger. His motivation to scrape together the $2500 fee to challenge Amazon’s 26 claims was, according to Ars, because a shipment took too long to arrive:

I wasn’t frothing at the mouth to destroy them. They deserve to be smacked down.

There’s a great article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Peter, who is a great example of a citizen using our litigious civil-suite global legal climate to get what he wants. Amazon taking too long? Take out their patents in an act of pure retaliation. Not being listed in movie credits? Sue the studio to get your name in.

However, in light of the current patent situation in the United States–see Patent Troll–guys like Peter Calveley might be the silver bullet. Much like Wikipedia took fact-finding out the hands of an elite circle of editors, these anti-patenters might take patent disputation out of the hands of the trolls.