Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Many people see a site with high pagerank (PR) and assume that the site also has high traffic.

They’re wrong to make that assumption: there is little correlation between PR and traffic.

Take a simple example: I registered a domain just over a month ago. It acquired PR2 a couple of days ago yet the only traffic that it has had has been from the google spider! There have been no real people visiting the site at all.

That applies all the way up too. Many blogs taking sponsored posts are finding that their high PR doesn’t equate to a high RealRank (RR) as calculated by PPP. The reason is really obvious when you look at some of the blogs: they may well have thousands of links to their site (hence the high PR) but have no content that would interest anyone so the traffic that they get is minimal and so too is their RR.

Ironically, advertisers are only starting to realise this and change how they allocate sponsored opportunities to use RR (ie actual traffic) instead of PR. They may not get as much PR passed to them from a low PR site but many such sites have very significant traffic indeed. A lot of those low-ish PR sites are written by people who want to be read; they’ve not promoted their site in the conventional way through massive link building programmes but rather just kept writing interesting stuff that slowly but surely builds a readership.

If nothing else, google’s crackdown on sponsored posts has highlighted just how useless PR was as a measure of the “importance” of a blog.

Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s worthwhile even attempting to learn another language if you’re a native English speaker.

After all, around Europe it’s commonplace to find that companies choose their working language as English. That doesn’t mean that they suddenly revert to some other language when chatting over lunch: it’s English all of the time in many of these companies.

In the European administration there is little option but to choose English as it’s the one language that can be counted on to be known by everyone as, outside the UK and Ireland, it’s almost always the first second language that people learn.

So in many cases you can get away with only English.

The other problem though is that as a native speaker of English it’s often difficult to get the chance to try out any other languages that you speak as throughout the world people tend to go to English straight away unless you speak their language at a very proficient level. That, of course, means that many English speakers just give up.

One big misunderstanding that many people have is that global warming means that everywhere will get warmer.

Let’s face it, if it were the case that everywhere would get a couple of degrees warmer then many people would be OK about some low lying areas of the world disappearing under water.

Except, of course, it isn’t quite like that. That couple of extra degrees not only raises sea levels but it also changes weather patterns. Areas that might formally have been great spots for growing crops could easily become deserts and vice versa. Plus there’s the not insignificant matter that weather could also become more extreme: perhaps the flooding that we’ve seen in several world regions in recent years is a forerunner of that.

Everyone stretches the truth to some extent on job applications and, of course, the employers know that and allow for it.

But, what if you stretched it so much that you started writing that you could do X when in reality you couldn’t quite do it?

Obviously, it’s one of those situations where “it depends” is the only possible answer. Clearly it’s going to be a problem if X is absolutely key to doing the job but probably it’s a pretty minor thing if X falls into the category of “we thought we’d ask for somebody that could do X but don’t really expect to get someone who can”.

Naturally too the requirements of some jobs aren’t possible. I’ve seen the equivalent of “must have 40 years Unix experience” when Unix wasn’t around 40 years ago so nobody can fulfil that. Actually, it’s surprisingly common to see that kind of requirement in technical jobs (see http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080229.html and http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080301.html).

It has taken AGES but finally Foreign Perspectives is over onto the new hosting service. Well, I hope so anyway as the last attempt a month or so back didn’t work out due to several technical hitches which I think I’ve resolved this time.

One big problem I find is that the blog has been on the go so long long (just into it’s fourth year!) that it’s very big and the photos that I’ve collected over that time amount to megabytes. Combine that and you end up with all kinds of time-outs when you try to use the normal (read: easy) ways of moving it.

Anyway, fingers crossed it’s operational now.