Dylan Greene dot com

Last Friday I posted a link to download the ringtone from the movie Crank.

By Monday it was the first match on Google for crank ringtone and crank ring tone. The ringtone has is getting over 100 downloads/day since.

How did I manage to beat out the studios, the official movie site, and the thousands of ringtone sites to be the first match on Google, and how did it happen so quickly? I'll post all the fun details in an upcoming blog entry.

There's probably tools there you didn't know existed. The author seems to have a Yahoo bias, and MSN probably should have been included in the mix as well, but this is a good start.

Link: Lots of Google vs Yahoo feature comparisons.

Microsoft's new map service called MSN Virtual Earth looks pretty cool:

Click for a larger image:

SimCity view!

It's not available until this summer, but there's a great 30 minute (!) video of the dev team showing off the new features.

Just days after announcing the Google Web "Accelerator" (GWA), Google removed it from their site.

From Ars Technica:

This news was not greeted with universal praise. Some critics questioned the need for such a tool, given the ever increasing speeds of broadband. Cynics suggested that this was simply a marketing tool for Google. Loudest of all, though, have been the security concerns. Testers who used GWA to browse certain forums discovered they were logged in as other users. Despite its friendly image, many are growing uneasy at the level of data gathering Google has at its disposal, and that capacity would expand by an order of magnitude with the widespread use of GWA.

Full Article... [Ars Technica]

From Haacked.com:

Google announced on its blog that they've release a beta version of their new web accelerator designed for broadband use. I'll give it a shot and see how well it works.

Not much later Phil Haacked posted this:

UPDATE Wow, check out the privacy policy for Google Web Accelerator... On second thought maybe I'll hold off on installing that.

From Google's Privacy Policy:

When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

To enhance Google Web Accelerator's performance, Google temporarily caches cookies from third party sites that are used in your Web requests. For more information, please see our FAQ.

To accelerate delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator retrieves and caches webpages before you request them. Therefore, your Google Web Accelerator cache may include copies of webpages you have not visited. You can clear the cache following instructions in the FAQ.

Google: Reinventing Big Brother?

AOL Time Warner finally has something profitable on their hands and what do they do with it?

Sell it...

The New York media conglomerate said in its quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it sold its 5.1 million Google shares on Tuesday at an average of $185 a share, receiving total cash of roughly $940 million.

Continue... [dowjones.com]

Source: John Battelle's Searchblog

Two good ones from ProBlogger.net:

• How the Most Highly Visited Blogs Earn Money
• Why Adsense is Not Suitable for All Blog Topics

Google requires employees spend 20% of their time on something unrelated to their real work, but that will still benefit the company. It's created some great new projects, such as Orkut and Google Suggest.

Atlassian, the company behind the awesome bug-tracking tool JIRA, adapted this strategy as well. Here's a great blog entry of what was created using 20% time.

I don't use their software, but this makes me want to.

Joe Beda, who left Microsoft's Windows team to join Google, has a great post about 20% time as well as a follow up.

One of my favorite blogs is ProBlogger.net from full time blogger Darren Rowse.

I consider his blog entries to be meaty. By that I mean they all contain rich, usable substance.

I love discovering new things, and I always find out something new from his blog. In addition, ProBlogger.net is about making money from your blog, and at $300-$400/day from Google ads, Darren is well qualified to write about this.

Also, while it seems crazy in these days of RSS feeds, I subscribed to his newsletter and issue #1 was great, and even included more information not on the site.

Visit: http://www.problogger.net/

High-paying Google Adsense Keywords:

mesothelioma $84.08
mesothelioma attorneys $80.93
mesothelioma lawyers $69.04
malignant pleural mesothelioma $55.95
Asbestos Cancer $54.17
mesothelioma symptoms $53.66
peritoneal mesothelioma $52.27
trans union $51.91

This is part of a list of how much advertisers pay per click for those keywords, but this information could be out-of-date or even just made up.

I don't get anyting close to these ammounts for clicks on my sites, even when you work in that Google keeps at least half of what advertisers pay per click.

Source: http://www.4morebusiness.com/adsense_keywords.html

Google Maps might be cooler, but MSN Maps gave directions I can use.

Hint: You can't drive in on the road in front of the White House anymore, and DC is full of one way streets, which MSN Maps clearly labels.

BTW, Scoble says Microsoft has some cool map stuff in the works. All I know is that Microsoft's TerraServer has been online for years without any hint of merging it with their MSN Maps service, and even though TerraServer has much higher resolution images than Google's Satellite view, Google's is much more fun to play with since the page doesn't need to reload.

Also, notice on both TerraServer and Google the tops of the White House and surrounding buildings are blanked or blurred out! I wonder what else is missing.

Wow, there's a lot of blog search engines. Yet another reason why blogging is great for business...

1. 2RSS
2. Ageless Project
3. aggregator.weblogs.co.uk
4. Blawg Search
5. Bligz
6. Blogarama
7. Blogdex
8. Blogdigger
9. Blog Dump
10. Bloghop
11. Bloglines
12. Blogmatrix
13. Blogrunner
14. Blogsearchengine
15. Blogstreet
16. Blogvision
17. Blogwise
18. Bloogz
19. Boogieplay
20. Daypop
21. Eatonweb
22. Fastbuzz
23. Feedster
24. Get Linked
25. GetBlogs
26. Globeofblogs
27. LocalFeeds.com
28. Memigo
29. NewsIsFree
30. Pepys
31. Popdex
32. Postami
33. PubSub
34. RDF Ticker
35. Rootblog
36. Search4Blogs
37. Sindic8
38. Technorati
39. Waypath
40. Zopto

Source: EBook Marketing.

Now only if I knew which one to use....

After a disappointing run with Google AdSense, I've decided to try it again.

Google selects the ads to show on your site based on what it think are most appropriate for the site. This means a site about coffee should have lots of coffee-related ads.

This works great most of the time, but Google AdSense decided the most appropriate ads for my site all had to relate to a certain Dylan musician, even though I never write about him.

The ads weren't getting many clicks because they didn't relate to why people where here.

Instead of fighting that battle I made changes to where I put the ads and how many ads I show.

I made the ads more visible and put them in a place that they could get clicked on by accident. By accident? Yeah, that's normally not good, but that's part of making money with ads on the web. You have to keep your click % up, otherwise your ads become worthless. By showing more ads, I hope there to be some non-musician related ads.

If you're thinking about putting ads on your site you should try my Google Ads Tester. It'll show you what ads you might see on your site, or any site you want to try.

WebmasterWorld.com also has a great Google AdSense forum where web masters are shareing their experiences and giving suggestions for how to get more money with Google Ads.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others have decided that the new best way to prevent comment spam is to use an HTML tag that will prevent Google (and other search engines) from following links that could be spam links.

That new tag works as so:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

When indexing sites, this will prevent Google and others from "following" these links. Normally following those links helps a site's PageRank, which makes those sites appear higher in search results. The theory is that if spammers aren't getting their PageRank improved, then they will stop spamming blogs. Ha!

My prediction is that this change will not prevent comment spam because of the following issues:

1. The text of the spam messages will still be indexed by search engines.
2. Humans will still see the the spam messages.
3. Humans will still be able to follow the spam links.
4. Most importantly: Spammers can still post spam messages.

In short, all this does is make life a little easier for Google. Their PageRank system, which might just be flawed, has been abused and blamed for the onslaught of comment spam. Now they have an out - an excuse to to say it's not their fault anymore. I'm all for better search results in Google (ever try to search for a specific hotel?), but their solution simply does not prevent comment spam.

What do I recommend?

1. For automated spam bots: To prevent bots from posting spam comments, I require JavaScript. When a human user clicks the Submit button, JavaScript to renames field names before the comment is submitted to the server. Fields are unique named every time the page loads, and the server will only post comments when it gets the field name it is expecting. This prevents the automated spam attacks because the software spammers are not able to predict the field names.
2. For manually entered spam comments: I have basic spam filtering mechanism similar to many email spam filters. It looks for common spam words, URLs, and topics, and prevents those messages from being posted.
3. Either way, I have a RSS feed which shows me whenever a spam comment is attempted, along with IP address and other information so I can track the progress, and watch for false positives (real comments that the system thought were spam), and easily ban IP's of known spammers.

Something important to me is that my solutions stop comment spam without requiring any extra effort from my users, Some sites now require registration or a CAPTCHA input to add a comment. I feel that this is just an unnecessary pain which prevents people many busy people adding their feedback. I also feel that the links in comments are often important enough that search engines should follow them, therefor always putting a nofollow tag will ultimately be unhelpful to those small sites that should get a higher PageRank.

And most importantly, unlike the nofollow "solution" from Google, my recommendations can actually prevent spam comments from appearing on sites, and that's what we all want, right?

Scott Weston has granted me a coveted gmail account. I'm not sure how much I'll use it because I prefer to use Outlook 2003, but it's cool to see their latest technology and some very cool features:

• When you are building a filter, you can "Test" it, which shows the resulting matches from your current email.
• No folders, but there are "labels" and you can filter by label. Email can have more than one label, which is like storing an email message in multiple folders at once. This is exactly what I asked for in my blog entry Storing a single item in multiple places.
• Lots of subtle DHTML effects to prevent page reloading. For example, when you are reading an email, there is a small text box where you can type a reply. As soon as you click on the reply box, it turns into a full-sized reply text box.
• Very nice inline spell-check by making the whole email read-only and giving misspelled words a drop down with the choices I don't use it though because you can't add words to the dictionary that are spelled right but it doesn't know about. I use ieSpell, a free IE plug-in that gives all text input boxes in IE a Word-like spell checker.

Some things I don't like:

• The list of labels (which are like folders), can't be sorted or nested.
• The list of labels don't show how many messages or new messages are in each one.
• Email is bunched into "Conversations" - like Outlook's conversation view. This is a nice attempt to organize email, but can make it harder to find something by date instead of what the email subject happened to be.
• Lots of actions are enabled even when they don't do anything. For example, you can't use Delete if nothing is selected, but it's still enabled when nothing is selected. If you click it, some text goes on the screen that says "No conversations selected."
• Since both frames and DHTML are used, the back button sometimes works and sometimes takes you back to the sign in screen. I wish this was consistent.
• No way to see when you have new email besides having the window open. MSN Messenger tells me when I have new email in any POP-enabled account. I'd like to use it for gmail too. I'm guessing the next Google Toolbar will have this feature, but I don't use the toolbar.
• My personal opinion: It looks ugly. I'm sure Yahoo fans will like it, it has the same colors and generic boring style, but I prefer something a with a little more personality. I'm not asking for more graphics (like hotmail), I like that it downloads fast, just a nicer CSS style sheet could really spruce it up, for example check out foO's work. Maybe they should hire him.

Thanks to Craig for the info Scott's account offerings and of course Scott for the account.