I’m not sure why I didn’t look at the dot com while researching my last blog about Knol, but something made me think of it today. Pretty interesting move by using the name “Knol”, since someone named “H Knol”, from the Netherlands, has owned and operated Knol dot com since November of 2002. (whois source)

After translating this page correctly (Yahoo absolutely sucked at it!), presumably ‘Knol’ him/herself, discussed the recent launch of Google’s Knol,

Google is working on “Knol”
UPDATE 24-7-2008 UPDATE 24-7-2008

On various Web sites (including nu.nl, Google Blog, Blog Hosting 040) is now officially read that Google now has its own wikipedia started with the name Knol. There are articles by professionals and put these can be appreciated by readers.

And that we move google can appreciate Clearly, the focus on, especially our domain, is again grown considerably.

It needs no explanation that we are not here to follow up, as in december.

NOTE: We sell steam cleaning equipment and don’t sell our domain !!

Friday 14 december:
On a blog from Google published an article which reported that Google was working on Knol. This is a kind of combination of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia personal paginabouwer Squidoo. Advertising revenue goes to the Internet to share with the authors.

Knol is an abbreviation for “knowledge”, speaking of “nol”
Now you will think what that has to do with Tuberous Stoomreinigings Systemen?

Well, from that Friday there is immediately a true run in areas that had the word “Knol” in itself, as also the domain knol.com.

This has resulted in tens of thousands of visitors who came to take a look at the website of Knol.com! In a short time we had received visitors from more than 130 countries from around the world.

Fortunately, the website was able to be able strongholds and the site remained in the air.
But that was not in, we were also alleman by Jan and asked if we wanted to sell the domain. Unfortunately, we have to disappoint everyone, how beautiful their offerings sometimes has been.

In short, it was a special experience …

So imagine that. You sell steam cleaning products in the Netherlands operating under your last name, then one of the world’s wealthiest companies comes along and chooses your name to run one of its future products under. Would you sell? Or would you remain as is and constantly have huge bandwidth bills due to Googler’s constantly hitting the wrong site?

I checked to see what trademarks there were listed at the USPTO.gov and the only thing that came up with Google’s registration in December of 2007. I dealt with a trademark dispute many years ago in another business and can see where the original Knol owner wouldn’t have much of a dispute, other than keeping Google out of the geographic region where Knol products are sold. But how likely is that!

There are also a couple of previous owners of knol dot com that might be kicking themselves in the rears for letting the name go. Looking on Archive.org for knol dot com, it would appear a company named Knoll and Company, Inc had ownership back in 1999 & 2000, then another company called the KnollGroup ran the domain for 2001 and most of 2002. Think they wish they had a do-over? There are also 72 Whois changes for the domain, so I’m sure there are probably more.

Just a little further insight into Google’s new Knol.

For some reason, the name reminds me of the old “Gary Gnu Show”. “No Gnews is Good Gnews!”

TechCrunch is definitely a site to keep up with since they seem to get all of the news related to new businesses, funding, mergers & acquisitions, along with anything else. They’re definitely one of the feeds I pay attention to. Where else can you find out about startups and new videos by Radiohead!

Today a headline caught my attention about executives in Silicon Valley hopped up on Provigil. I was familiar with the prescription drug name, but I was unfamiliar with what it is prescribed for.

Luckily, Arrington did a great job, as always, explaining everything about it. Or did he? It’s a drug used to keep you awake. Maybe like speed, but without apparent side effects that come with most other drugs. At least this is how Arrington is selling it on his website, Tennessee suboxone doctors can help you recovering from drug addiction.

I thought I would do a little digging around to see if this really had ‘no side effects’ and this is what I found:

The most commonly observed adverse events ( ≥ 5%) associated with the use of PROVIGIL more frequently than placebo-treated patients in the placebo-controlled clinical studies in primary disorders of sleep and wakefulness were headache, nausea, nervousness, rhinitis, diarrhea, back pain, anxiety, insomnia, dizziness, and dyspepsia. (Source)

While these aren’t really that bad, it does show there “ARE” side effects. Of course, I wanted to get the information directly from the Provigil site to see what they say. I was a bit shocked at what I read:

PROVIGIL may cause you to have a serious rash or a serious allergic reaction that may result in hospitalization or be life-threatening. If you develop a rash, hives, sores, swelling, or trouble swallowing or breathing, stop taking PROVIGIL and call your doctor right away or get emergency treatment.

PROVIGIL is not approved for use in children.

If you experience chest pain, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, psychosis, mania, thoughts of suicide, aggression, or other mental problems, stop taking PROVIGIL and call your doctor right away or get emergency treatment.

PROVIGIL does not replace sleep and may not stop your ES completely. Do not drive or do other dangerous activities until you know how PROVIGIL affects you. Avoid drinking alcohol while taking PROVIGIL.

PROVIGIL has the potential to be abused or lead to dependence. Please use only as directed.

Tell your doctor if you have: history of mental health problems (including psychosis), heart problems or had a heart attack, high blood pressure, liver or kidney problems, a history of drug or alcohol abuse or addiction, or are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or breastfeeding.

Women who use hormonal birth control may have a higher chance of getting pregnant, while taking PROVIGIL, and for one month after stopping. Talk to your doctor about other birth control methods while taking PROVIGIL.

Common side effects of PROVIGIL are headache, nausea, nervousness, stuffy nose, diarrhea, back pain, anxiety, trouble sleeping, dizziness, and upset stomach. (Source)

WHAT!! There should be a large spike in Silicon Valley children in around 9 months! Seems Arrington should have put a little more research into a post about drugs. This quote from his site shows he gives the complete opposite facts about it being habit forming:

There are few side effects to Provigil compared to stimulants and it is supposedly not habit forming. That, of course, doesn’t mean it’s safe to take it just to be able to stay awake for 20 hours a day.

I doubt he meant to peddle drugs, but after I read it, I was like “Hmm, maybe I should check it out.” I’m sure I’m not the only one. The people who think Arrington walks on water will probably have a script in hand by the end of the day.

Google does own all of your information in some way or fashion, but just how safe is your information with the monster? Tonight I happened on a couple screens that suggest our information isn’t all that safe. Maybe it’s a glitch, but the fact remains, I got these screens thrown at me. All hackers need is a split second to get in and grab what they need.

Being a company that ‘loves links’, I thought having the nofollow tag on our comments just didn’t make much sense. I removed the nofollow some time ago and found people kept trying to abuse it, so I took that plugin out.

Thanks to Megadawg for referring me to Lucias Linky Love dofollow plugin. It basically allows you to apply a minimum post count on our readers who comment. Once you hit that number, the nofollow attribute is removed and we’re happy to pass along some link love to our contributors. In other words, it weeds out the good posters from the fake posters.

We’ll be watching and making any necessary tweaks. If you have any suggestions or notice something weird, give us a reply here.

We can all agree that the past year of link building, well SEO in general, has been quite the hot topic. Damn near ‘everyone’ participated in link building in some form or fashion. If you read someone that says they have never participated in link building, you can bet most of your money that they’re not telling you the whole truth. It was just part of the landscape and you had to do it to compete. A good analogy is like trying to compete in a marathon but not working out, you can still participate but you probably won’t finish.

All this rambling leads me to my point. Since the ‘so called’ hammer was thrown down, a lot of people have either turned their heads towards link building or have continued on as under the table as possible. Those that have turned their heads have found it impossible to compete, once again. Why? It’s because linking is still alive and well. The truth of the matter is it will always be alive and well unless the engines change the way they rank websites, a point that I’ve said over and over. Sure, they can try and slap people’s wrists, but if you knock 10 down, there’s 10 more waiting to take their place.

A great example of how well the text linking business still works, I bring to you exhibit A. If you look at the page source, you’ll find that it is nothing more than a frameset page with absolutely zero content. Only a title and meta description. It is currently ranked #1 for the term “Text Link Ads“, which is pretty competitive. I first thought our pals over at TLA were back on track but then realized it was just an affiliate page. Either way, I was thrilled to see what I was looking at. That gives even more proof that you can rank a page with nothing but a pure linking campaign. All you have to do is look at the back links listed and you’ll find their text links. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you have become a non-believer, what more proof do you need that we can help!

For those of you that follow the search engines and their cockiness that flies first class wherever they go, you should be very familiar with Google and their ‘unbeatable search algorithm’. The Google algo has probably been one of the most talked about, targeted, studied, tested, learned and contested of any other search algo in the history of search engines. Here are a few points that would put them in this position:

1. They own between 60%–70% of the search market/queries, so why not target the big dawg?
2. They proclaim to have the most detailed and steel proof equations of any out there.
3. They claim to know of all webspam and can stop most of it with their algorithms.
4. They have attracted some of the smartest people in the world to work for them.

With this knowledge at hand, how would you feel to know the ‘smartest algorithm’ in the world has had to resort to human editing to better their search engine results?

Well it is happening and the once untainted results will now be at the mercy of a Wikipedia type editor, which is paid by the hour and will undoubtedly be in bed with the market they govern, somehow. If not when they sign up, definitely once they have the power. Google is offering to pay $25/hr and that is great money, but who wouldn’t take side payments for doing whatever? “Hey Joe Blow, I’ll give you $50k to make site A vital and site’s B, C, D, E, F and so on non-relevant.” Would you take the bribe? I think most people that will be doing this would.

Here is the posting on Craigslist found recently:

Search engine results rating:

We need individuals who can work from home to perform search engine results ratings. The work is straight-forward; you log into a Website and then look at predetermined web pages or other similar material and rank them based on how relevant they appear for a given search query. The workload could be anywhere from a few hours a month to a few hours a week. You will need to have a PayPal account as that is how you will be paid.

When you perform this testing you must have the ability to sit down at a computer uninterrupted for 1 hour periods. Also, we will check the data. If the data is inconsistent or done with little regard for quality, you will lose your opportunity to do this in the future.

If you’re interested, here are a few more details:
-You must be willing to be interviewed for approximately 15 minutes on the phone.
-You must be totally and completely fluent in English.
-Please have a college degree, or an AA degree at a minimum.
-Please send your resume along with a brief paragraph about yourself, and also tell us how long you have been using the Internet, how many hours a day/week you use the Internet, and what you typically do on the Internet.

The pay is approximately $25 per hour.

It may take us up to a week to get back to you so please be patient.

Thanks!

And here are the guidelines handed out.

Maybe the business of the future will be to load up a building full of employees, who all apply for the ‘human search project’, and then they become the online service who can apply spam, Non Relevant or Off-Topic tags on the competition listings and then tag the customer sites with the vital mark. Google will basically pay for your entire workforce salaries, maybe you make money off of the newer employees, then give the veterans the full $25/hr plus a little compensation from sales you earn for the service provided to individual companies, seo agencies and other search related marketing firms. The great part is getting off the ground would require very minimal costs, since salaries are usually the biggest cost.

The underlying point here is after all that we’ve heard from Google about having the smartest search algorithms out there, no matter what they do, people will always be smarter than machines. However, once you start inserting humans into the mix, the chances of corruption goes through the roof, as my example company above illustrates.

Google, don’t become Mahalo! They suck for a reason.

PS. (If someone takes my business model idea, at least give me a thank you!)

While thinking of the clever April Fool’s post, I realized that everyone has already beaten this whole bit up before it even turned midnight in our part of the world. So instead of throwing any curve balls here, I figured I would list the jokes I’ve already come across.

• One great thing about being in Australia is you get everything before the rest of the world thanks to the International Date line. Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net announced their launch of PayPerTweet, a service that pays Twitter users for tweeting about products and services. He then issues a further explanation of the joke which is pretty interesting.
• Over at Techcrunch.com, I learned of a new phenomenon called RickRolling. Basically, you click a link you think is interesting, but it actually takes you to a youtube video of Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up“. Horrible song, but I think I liked it back in the day. Anyhow, Youtube is RickRolling everyone who clicks the Featured Videos from their home page.
• Of course, the reason I was at Techcrunch is because I noticed Arrington had a ridiculous claim of suing Facebook, so I had to read. He claims users were using his picture to advertise products and services through Facebook and he was suing them for $25 million. I guess knowing the whole April 1st bit I knew it was a joke with the headline, but when I started reading how he was claiming to be so important, it was tough to read. Like reading a joke of why the chicken crossed the road or a knock knock joke, too predictable.
• Google Australia announced the release of a new service that searches ‘tomorrow’s web, today’. It’s called gDay™ and the core technology that powers it is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

**Updated List after day is over**

• BBC definitely has my vote for the most creative of the day. They released this video:
  
• CNET announced that Techcrunch acquired Tigerbeat and will rename it to CrunchKids.
• Google and Virgin partnered to create “Virgle”. This is called the ‘interplanetary Noah’s Ark’ where it will create a Mars expedition and eventual colonization of Mars.

Here are a list of sites that breakdown all of the internet pranks:

• Lifehacker Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks
• SearchEngineLand has a recap of April Fool’s Day
• CNET Fool’s Day Lineup

***UPDATE ENDS***

This is just a few. I’ll post more tomorrow as April Fool’s hits this side of the world. Plus I think we might have our own fun to show.

Happened across this video and thought it would be fun to show since it involves a set of questions, a smart human and Google. The goal is, one person uses Google to answer the questions and the smart Human uses only his brain. I think this goes to show us the human brain is more powerful than we realize:

Working with clients who need reputation management can really help open your eyes on what and what not to do. There are a lot of things that can fall into this list, but here’s a quick list of a few simple guidelines to keep your reputation in check online:

• Answer customer support quickly, promptly and friendly. You can have a sub-par product but if you treat your customers with the respect you would expect, it will take you a long way.
• Invest in managed it support. A reliable it support can help with your business since this will lessen the time that your website goes down. Having an it support team means that you can always be there for your customers.
• Don’t piss off customers no matter how strongly you feel about your side. Make it your goal to do everything you can to make that customer happy. All it takes is one pissed off customer ripping you on a blog or site and it’s never going away.
• Don’t engage in discussions about your company and/or product on message forums or blogs if you plan on saying something you’ll regret later. Once you publish it, it’s published and there’s no taking it back.
• Intended or unintended deception is like digging your own grave. The worst thing a company could possibly do is deceive customers in any possible way. The feeling of “being had” is one that people like to talk about the most. Sometimes this can be an honest mistake, which is where quick and friendly customer support would fly in and handle the situation before it blows up, so keep up with what your customers are saying.

With these things in mind, let’s now take a look at what Network Solutions has been doing. I’ve always wondered why people are still paying more than triple the price for a domain name at Network Solutions and Register.com when you can buy the same name over at Godaddy for less than $10! Evidently registrars are participating in a tactic called Front Running, which lets registrars snatch up domain names people search for making them only available through their own service and allowing them to charge higher prices.

Network Solutions has forced millions of people to buy Internet domain names from them instead of cheaper competitors through a scheme that’s netted the firm millions of dollars, a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP states. ICANN, whose policies facilitate the scheme, is also named in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

“Imagine if you asked a car dealer if they had a black convertible and were then forced to buy the car from them. Would you get a good deal? Each time someone asks Network Solutions about a domain name, the firm creates a monopoly for itself, forcing consumers to pay the price they demand,” said Brian Kabateck, lead counsel in the class action and Kabateck Brown Kellner’s Managing Partner.

The lawsuit also targets ICANN due to them allowing it to continue. Granted, ICANN will be fine after this is all over, but Network Solutions is going to need a strong reputation management campaign once this is said and done. This example might put it into perspective; a domain portfolio of 750 names would cost $20,000 MORE using Netsol.com versus Godaddy.com. Same product, same yearly charge, just $20k more each year. Keep them for 10 years and it’ll cost you $200k more.

Let this serve as our official letter to Network Solutions. If you decide you want to start knocking down the bad sites replacing them with the good, we can help you!

This is one of those cost of living calculators that make me so happy that I live in Dallas. The cost of living in Dallas is so minimal compared to most cities in the U.S., especially Manhattan (New York City) . . . take a typical $50k salary and plug it in and this is what you’ll see:

Go check out how your cost of living stacks up to another city.