Foreign Perspectives

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.

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.

I see that the Information Commissioner would like breaches of the magnitude seen this week made a criminal offense.

But if it were so right now, who would be the person being arrested by the police? Would it be the “junior official” who appears to have made an error in using a courier firm rather than the Royal Mail. Yet, at the time he would have been told NOT to use the Royal Mail as they were planning to go on strike that week.

In such instances, the instructions are to use courier services instead and that’s just what he did.

Many people have said that such a junior official should never have been responsible for so many records yet that’s the reality of day to day operations in large government departments. Quite junior people need to be able to work with all the records in that way. Surely no-one is expecting the head of HMRC to run the programs that process the various benefits himself?

Short of getting in the car and driving down to London with the CDs, just how could he have gotten the information to London? Yes, there is encrypted e-mail between government departments but it’s just not up to e-mailing two CDs full of information. After all, normal e-mail systems usually can’t even e-mail a single digital photograph these days.

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?