Foreign Perspectives

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.

Normally people move from savings to investment but draw the line at risky investments and don’t consider gambling as being in the same continum.

But it is. Certainly savings and gambling are very much at the extreme ends of that continum but some high risk investments aren’t nearly so far from gambling as the investment community in general would have you believe.

Is it any more risky to put £1 on a horse or to put £1 on a penny share? Well, sure, it’s usually riskier to put it on a horse BUT remember that whilst you might put £1 on a horse, chances are it would be more like £1000 that you’d be putting on that penny share which is a whole lot more to lose.

Of course, that difference in the amount of money involved is critical in how you should rate a gamble as compared to a very high risk investment. However, don’t forget that even the safest investments are also gambles as any investor in Northern Rock will tell you now or for that matter policy holders in what was the even more solid Equitable Life.

Although the big names are always present, there seems to be an almost constant launching of new sites offering sponsored post opportunities these days.

This is brilliant in the sense that nearly all of them give you one post to do about themselves for an above average sum. Typically you’ll get $10 to write a post of a few hundred words about the sponsored listings site but I’ve had as high as $55.

In several cases, that has been the only post that I’ve written for a site. That’s not because I’m totally mercenary and take only the payment to write about them and then ignore them, but because several of the sites have never had another opportunity available for me to write about. OK, eventually perhaps some of them might do, but realistically I’m not going to continue to look at a site that never has anything for me when I can spend that time looking at other sites which do provide a stream of opportunities.

The e-mail sites are very hard to judge on this score. They tend not to ask you to write about them but offer you a trial post to do. In one case, I picked up $75 from such a site and I’ve never heard from them again. I can live with that in that I have $75 in my bank account which wouldn’t otherwise have been there but I wonder what happened to them.

Are there getting to be just too many such sites around for the amount of advertising that they can collectively deliver?

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.