PSoTD

You would think that an industry blog opposing Net Neutrality wouldn't be full of typos, visible code characters and general grammatical nonsense.

You would be wrong.

Maybe this is a sign of the maturation and status of the liberal/progressive blogosphere. I've been visiting blogs for the past 5 years (I think Liberal Oasis was my first "find"...), and over that time, the selection of candidates and then of winners of The Koufax Awards has been a big thing with bloggers.

This year The Koufax Awards haven't seemed to work as smoothly as before, with some delays. Understandable delays, and this post is in no way a complaint. But I think in past years the blogosphere might have shown some anxiety about the delay. This year I haven't seen any (the folks that do Koufax would know about any anxiety much better than I, but the fact is, I just haven't seen many posts about the awards, period).

In the early days of the Web, there were many Web Site Award sites, but over time most disappeared. It is likely that the same will happen to Blog Awards - but I hope that somehow, The Koufax Awards can evolve to stick around.

Jonathan S. Adelstein, Commissioner, Federal Communications Commission, tells the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that...

The nationwide deployment of higher-bandwidth, open and neutral, broadband is critical to the success of our citizens and our country as a whole.

And, adds that, oh by the way, we're not doing nearly enough to achieve that deployment.

Yes, business uses Wikipedia to promote themselves...

In Google, Wikipedia is everywhere. Pretty much anything you type into Google seems to result in a Wikipedia entry being returned as a top-10 result. Wikipedia's status in the search engines as an "authority site" is undisputed. Those lucky, well-connected, skillful or famous enough to be cited enjoyed the benefits of Wikipedia's unique "golden link effect."

Then a new policy instituted in January changed all that. As a countermeasure to thwart spammers competing in an SEO contest, all external links within Wikipedia were "nofollowed." This effectively cut off the outward flow of "link juice" (PageRank) to websites referenced in Wikipedia.

Despite this setback, Wikipedia remains an important component to your SEO strategy. Firstly, having a Wikipedia entry for your company that shows up in the search results lends credibility to your organization. Secondly, if high rankings for a competitive keyword prove elusive, you can get Wikipedia into the top 10 with relative ease. Of course it would only be of benefit to do so if the entry referenced you or linked to you, or if you wanted to displace competitors or pages that were unflattering or critical of you.

Sometime in the past week this blog went past 200,000 visits. All in a week's work for some blogs, but I think the last 100K visits came a lot faster than the first 100K. Anyways, thanks!

I have a question about this story...

Isaac Daniel calls the tiny Global Positioning System chip he's embedded into a line of sneakers "peace of mind." He wishes his 8-year-old son had been wearing them when he got a call from his school in 2002 saying the boy was missing. The worried father hopped a flight to Atlanta from New York where he had been on business to find the incident had been a miscommunication and his son was safe.

Days later, the engineer started working on a prototype of Quantum Satellite Technology, a line of $325 to $350 adult sneakers that hit shelves next month. It promises to locate the wearer anywhere in the world with the press of a button. A children's line will be out this summer.

If your motivation was your lost kid, why did you start by making them for adults?

I just think this kind of stuff is ridiculous. $350 dollar sneakers. Plus $20 per month for service. Why? If you really need the GPS service, there are cheaper ways to do it. What are we really tracking, anyway?

The argument is that shoes are harder to lose than phones and other devices with GPS. They also take a bigger beating. Ever seen a kid use a shoe as a hammer? I have, many times. Kicking rocks? Knocking mud off the tread?

They also don't go everywhere. Dressing up? Different shoes. Basketball or soccer? Probably different shoes. Going swimming? Different shoes.

Bottom line - this seems to me to be a completely impractical idea for kids. If... that's really the point of this.

Good for Jerome. Pair's good to work with.

I didn't realize that Google was holding on to $370 million deemed to be "deferred revenue share"...

One of the secrets of Google’s financial success is its ability to match millions of small advertisers with millions of small content providers through its AdWords and AdSense services.

This strategy means that Google has financial arrangements with a very large number of debtors and creditors, a potential problem it simplifies by automating billing and payment. Unless advertisers choose to pre-pay, they are therefore charged only when their ads have been clicked by a sufficient number of people. AdSense affiliates, meanwhile, are paid only when their account is $100 or more in credit at the end of the month. Until the account gets to $100, they are not paid at all.

The problem with this model is that small content providers - hopeful bloggers with a few ads on their page - can wait a long time to get any money out of Google. Pootle along at a couple of thousand page views per month and it will likely take several years to clock up $100. These sites might seem worthless to a behemoth like Google, but of course the power of its business model lies in aggregation: it can bundle up huge numbers of tiny content providers to create a worthwhile editorial environment for any advertiser.