Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Things were trundling along quite nicely with the business of sponsored posts until a couple of weeks ago when google decided to pull the rug from under a promising cottage industry and downgrade the pagerank of thousands of blogs to zero.

Ordinarily, pagerank (the little green bar you see if you have the google toolbar loaded) for a particular site would typically go up or down by one each time google loaded the revised pageranks ie usually about once a quarter. However, this time around they decided to target bloggers who wrote paid posts and dropped those targetted down to PR0.

The effect of that to those bloggers hit by such a downgrade can be quite devastating. For example, a typical PR2 domain would be able to make around $20/day vs $5/day for a PR0 domain and that’s just the bottom end of blogs. A PR4 domain can pull in $40, PR5 perhaps $100 per day and remember that some blogs went from PR7 to PR0 overnight. Remember too that many bloggers run multiple blogs. Say they were pulling in $500/month per blog with four blogs running that would equate to a reasonable wage of $2000/month which may have dropped to more like $200/month if all their blogs were targetted by google.

The biggest player in this market is PayPerPost with over 100, 000 bloggers signed up for their service and they’ve hit the panic button of course. Ironically, they were about to roll out a new blog ranking scheme just as google struck and that’s been speeded up somewhat. Unfortunately, the other players in the market probably won’t be able to access the stats from that ranking system directly and certainly wouldn’t be keen to use a competitors ranking.

Google’s answer? Add nofollow to your links. I did that a few days ago and now find that already one other blogging service won’t accept my posts anymore. Shame really as their posts were almost always interesting to do. I suspect that effect will roll out across a number of other sites too which’ll just serve to concentrate the power with PPP. Surely that can’t be a good effect from googles actions?

One dilemma that the business about sponsored reviews poses is that of the money on offer influencing what’s written but it isn’t like that in the vast majority of cases, at least for me.

Yes, it’s true that I’ve written things for money on specific topics that I’d not otherwise have covered here but in a lot of cases I might well have written about those things had I come across them via some other means. Take, for example, the previous post on the villas in Costa Rica. Would I have written anything about Costa Rica had I not been asked to write that article? Well, yes, I would have eventually. After all, I’m working my way around the world on Whole Earth which will eventually cover Costa Rica.

Would I have written about those villas though? Hard to say. I run accommodation listings sites and I mention properties on them now and again so if those villas were listed there then chances are that I would write about them in due course. After all, they’re quite unique so it’s fairly easy to run up something about them.

Did the money influence what was written? Sort-of to the extent that the advertiser asked that one or two specific pages be mentioned but it didn’t affect the content of what was written as such.

What if it’s about a travel site that I don’t like though? Well, you’re about to find out that doesn’t influence me either!

My parents are missing James and John so we’re thinking of taking a short trip over to coincide with my Dad’s birthday next week.

Ordinarly, such a short time before booking the flights would mean crazy prices but, of course, we’re in the lull before Christmas and in fact the return tickets are a very reasonable £50 each including taxes for a flight from Barcelona direct to Belfast.

The snag is that James is now at school so we’ll have to have a think about that as Santa’s coming to the school sometime fairly soon and they’re in the midst of preparations for the film that they’re producing of the kids.

In common with all Spanish holidays, we’re completely full with Spanish guests this evening thanks to the Spanish holidays on December 6th (Constitution Day) and December 8th (Immaculate Conception).

Or, rather, we’re full of people from Spain but going by those that arrived last night not all of them will be Spanish. Thanks to the rising nationalism in Catalonia, the Spanish language isn’t actually taught in the schools just south of the border and it’s becoming increasingly common to have “Spanish” guests arrive who can’t speak Spanish. Unfortunately, the emphasis on Catalan means that it’s the only language that they can speak truly fluently and we’ve been reduced to hand signals on a couple of occasions in the recent past.

In fact, the introduction of Catalan only schools from around 1983 looks like it will have the effect of cutting off Catalona not only from Spain but from the rest of the world too. That date of introduction means that the first generation of workers who only speak Catalan have been coming into the workforce over the last couple of years and with that it’s becoming more and more difficult to deal with shop assistants who are, of course, at the younger end of the workforce.

Although, it’s nice to see that a local language is on the rise, the concentration on Catalán to the exclusion of other languages seems likely merely to alienate all the non-Catalans. Whereas elsewhere in Spain it’s expected that the locals will speak English, in fact most of the younger guests that we’ve had over recent months couldn’t speak English well and for that matter couldn’t speak French well and Spanish not at all.

It’s always interesting to look at statistics on the websites. They never fail to turn up surprises.

For one thing, if you strip out ourselves, the majority of the visitors to this site are from America with the UK coming in second place. Or at least that’s what google says. For alexa on the other hand, it’s abot 35% from America and under 5% for the UK which reflects the greater use of the alexa toolbar in America as compared to the UK.

But that’s not too accurate either as the number of readers that arrive via Reuters dwarfs everything else yet isn’t counted by either of the above systems.

In theory, that means that I should be targetting the articles towards the Reuters audience but I’ve not worked out how to do that just yet (suggestions welcome!).