Foreign Perspectives

As regular readers will know, I’ve been getting going on my direct mail campaign aimed at increasing the number of entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites.

The second use of the mailing list for Scotland pulled in quite a considerable number of properties over the last two weeks. So much so that I’m going to have to implement the planned restructuring of the site well ahead of schedule.

For reasons which escape me, the England mailing hasn’t pulled in anything like the number that Scotland did. Something to explore the reasons for before I do the next one in 2008.

However, for the first time, I’ve targetted Northern Ireland. Early days yet of course, but it looks like the takeup will be relatively low. The size of the mailing was pretty much similar to that for Scotland but, so far, I’ve only received about 1/4 of the response. Still, perhaps some more will come in over the course of the weekend.

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.

When we kicked off with the French taxation system we were constantly getting letters saying that we hadn’t paid this or that in time. Most of the time the initial demand for the money arrived in the same post that the reminder did and frequently the initial demand arrived a week after the reminder.

So, we started moving some things onto direct debit. Major mistake.

Even if you tell the authorities that their calculations are in error, they just collect on the direct debit. So, this year when they have calculated that we made EUR 155,000 the direct debits are a major joke. You’d think that the bank wouldn’t pay out on a direct debit that was going to put you thousands into the red but that’s not the case.

Anyway, we’re off to the bank tomorrow to attempt to cancel several of them. At least with the cheques we knew that they couldn’t take the money out.

Of course, that’ll no doubt require an appointment with our “banking counsellor” which might mean a delay of some weeks.