Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

They’re just as disorganised as they were last year, at least as far as the non-rally administration goes.

The race officials arrived early this morning before we received details of who is to stay in which room and indeed how many rooms are required. Anyway, they’re all in the wrong rooms but then two of them aren’t on the list so shouldn’t be here anyway.

We’re off to see about fitting a new toilet seat in one of the rooms that we’ve not used for a while before everyone turns up (they weren’t here ’til getting on for midnight when they came last year!).

The run of peculiar incoming links to this blog continue.

Every time I mention something finance related, a whole raft of blog aggregation blogs pick up the post and republish it. The theory is that they’ll make money on the ads on their site and, of course, they don’t have any nasty work to do once they set up the aggregator.

I write a fair bit on various finance topics so I can understand them monitoring this blog for any appropriate key words and then picking up on them. Or is it simply the category “banking & finance” that they are picking up on? Well, this entry is tagged with that as an experiment so I’ll know better tomorrow.

Other places are a bit more unusual. For example, my piece on The Color Purple was picked up by a literature aggregator and the one on building your own house by a home aggregator. I’m very tempted to play games with them to see just what they’ll pick up 🙂

Still, it does help the incoming links which is all to the good.

Googles pagerank review was due in the Summer but didn’t arrive with us until a few weeks ago and it still seems to be in progress.

I suspect that this is one review that they may end up wishing they’d thought some more about as so much money has been lost as a consequence of it that law suits are sure to follow in its wake.

What did they do though?

Well, it would appear that in addition to the normal juggling of sites up and down as their popularity changes over time, they have added a downgrade to sites that accept paid posts. They haven’t hit all such sites though as many are sailing on unaffected, at least for now, whilst others have dropped as many as five points in some cases (PR5 to PR0).

So great are the drops seen that one wonders if they’ve screwed it up completely this time. After all, the majority of the paid posting sites insist that their blogs aren’t 100% paid ie that there is some “normal” content as well. In fact, the advice is that your blog should be able to stand alone should all the paid posts be stripped out. So, blogs that accept paid posts have substantial non-paid for content.

The impact on the income of the pro-bloggers is quite substantial in many cases. For example, take that PR5 blog which is now PR0. The author could have clocked up around $100 to $150 per day easily ie something around $3000 per month. That’s a large enough sum to live on and that particular author is now effectively out of work as at best he can now manage around $15 per day. That’s an extreme case, of course, but many other blogs have gone from PR3 or PR2 down to PR0. Even that equates to a drop from perhaps $30/day to $15.

Google would argue that paid links devalues the worth of their index. Perhaps it does, but does that mean that they will similarly be downgrading the pagerank of all paid directories too? There certainly are a great many of these around and none of the links that they provide are in context as the links within paid posts are.

Of course, none of these changes affect the worlds largest paid for link business. Yes, of course, googles adwords programme isn’t affected by this downgrade.

We received a reservation a week or so back for two rooms for today. Not unusual really but it was from one of the many places that don’t tell us when people might be arriving.

Now, November is a fairly quiet month for us and they were the only people due in today.

It’s Wednesday so no school trip which meant that we were in right up to 5pm. That’s when we’d to nip out to the shop for some things but we were back by around 5.20pm.

Guess what? Yup, that’s when they arrived, wrote a note to say there were here and left!

Naturally, they couldn’t understand why we weren’t there to greet them but then we’d no idea of when they were coming nor how they were getting to us as they didn’t reply to the e-mail we sent them asking that.

The category cloud on the blog is probably the best indicator of the direction which the blog is taking.

I tidied it up a little this morning and it’s interesting to observe the difference in emphasis that it has now as compared to what it was like even as recently as six months ago.

France is still way up there as a topic but primarily for historical reasons and it’s quite striking how fast both America and the UK have started to catch up on it in terms of sheer number of posts. Six months ago neither were even in there as categories!

Holidays seem to be really important and may soon topple France from its perch. Of course, most of the early topics have dropped out of the running. There’s no sign of Buying a House in France anymore of course and French Administration is only just holding onto its position.

Web development has overtaken Working in France and indeed Blogging is quite a major topic as you’d expect given the amount of it that I seem to do these days.

I wonder what it’ll look like in six months time?