One of the strangest posts in the tech blogosphere is yesterday’s rant at TechCrunch, suggesting that blog owner AOL may shake up things and remove TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington:
techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/the-end/
TechCrunch has arguably been the most influential technology blog for some time, especially for startup news and inside information. Spawned by Silicon Valley insider Mike Arrington, TechCrunch has been a key source of news, inside information, and gossip about the Silicon Valley Startup scene.
The AOL dispute appears to have come from concerns over potential conflicts of interest by Arrington as he launches a new venture capital fund that will support companies covered by TechCrunch.
Data from Wikipedia’s entry on “Domain Name Speculation”
* The number of registrations of .com domain names grew from 23,662,001 in January 2003 to 80,759,835 in January 2009.
Wiki goes on to note that a quirk in the registration rules led to a surge in the practice of “Domaintasting” where a huge bulk order of domain names would be registered for a short time. Only the names that created click revenue from pay per click ads would be kept. This led to new domain hosting companies set up simply to filter for marginally valuable names that could be set up to get click revenue, and then to a new rule in June 2008 from ICANN, the body that oversees domain registrations. ICANN started to limit the number of domains that a registrar could delete in the ICANN “grace period” where no fees were charged. These grace period deletions fell by 99.7% the following year as the practice of “domain tasting” became less profitable.
Verisign Domain Brief in June 2009 identified 92 million COM and NET domain names, 24 percent with one page websites, 64% have multipage websites and 12% have no associated websites.
These last numbers suggest to me that the speculation is not as rampant as most seem to think – ie most sites are multiple page implying content and not speculation. Of course systems like the one I’m testing now at Godaddy that auto-generate several pages of content make it even harder to distinguish between sites that are driven speculatively vs those that are driven more by a passion to communicate or quality initiatives. As the quality, sharable content online increases and systems become smarter I think we may see that it will be impossible to distinguish between sites created by humans and those made automatically.
Technology Report will be live blogging the Twitter 140 Conference in Mountain View California and WordCamp San Francisco on Saturday May 30th.
*The two day Twitter event starts Tuesday May 26th*
This is only the second WordCamp San Francisco and promises excellent insider insights from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Google’s top blogger Matt Cutts who has been using the WordPress blogging format for several years.
This is the first major Twitter conference *ever* and is sure to bring a lot of interesting people and companies to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View.
Hope to see you there in person or here at Technology Report’s live coverage of these events.
Blogging CES 2009:
I’m reposting Lyn’s excellent blogroll from the official CES blog at blog.ce.org. For a complete pictures you’ll need to check a lot of blogs because even the companies like Engadget and Gizmodo, each I think with 10+ people reporting here, will feature only a small fraction of all the conference action here at CES, which is really almost too massive to imagine in terms of the number of exhibits across the two convention centers.
Update: Don’t miss our upcoming CES 2011 live coverage here at Technology Report
Techmeme is a favorite of many in technology for pulling together technology stories and the conversations that often swirl around them. Unlike a simple “ranking” system, TechMeme surfaces the top stories and then links out to blogs and sites that are discussing those “hot topics”. Thus a quick review of TechMeme can give you a very fast orientation to the stories that are making their rounds in the blogs. That does not always correspond to stories that actually *matter* to real folks, but it’s a great start.
TechMeme’s new story editor Megan has a list here of the top 10 for 2008. Number one was the Microsoft – Yahoo aquisition saga, number two was Apple quitting MacWorld, and number three was Google Chrome.
Disclosure: Long on YHOO
Categories: blogs, internet, search, SEO, Social Networks, Uncategorized, Websites Tags: blog rankings, blogs, internet ranking, links, tech, Top Tech Stories
Here in Southern Oregon, Applegate is the charming valley and river that was named after early settlers. For Silicon Valley the new term “AppleGate” refers to the top tech blog Engadget’s posting of a fake email suggesting that Apple’s iPhone would be delayed. The report led to an almost immediate sell off of Apple stock and a 4 billion dollar decline in Apple’s market capitalization, though the stock rebounded quickly when it became clear the email was a fake.
This appears to be a *superb* example of how information is reflected by the stock market and how quickly. I get the idea the (bogus) iPhone delay rumor affected the price of APPL almost immediately but have not checked the timing.
Mike at TechCrunch has a nice play by play and graph of AppleGate, and the Engadget post AppleGate post is here.
Interesting. My Chico the Wonder Dog SEO experiment is yielding some unexpected results. A tweet about this is now higher in the ranks than the original blog post page.
Chico the Wonder Dog has been trading places with another Chico the Wonder Dog. That post is much older and may have more incoming links since that guy seems to spend more time posting about his dog than I do, though based on my quick analysis of this and a few other cases I think it indicates that Google looks carefully at the rate of link growth, and if it slows they tend to put back the “old, tried and true” page in favor of the newcomer. This makes sense from an anti-spam perspective although in Chicos particular case it probably does not yield the top dog.
However, the Twitter reference rising to high seems really surprising because Twitter posts are generally small and insignificant (as it is here). I’m surprised Google ranks these at all, let alone makes them competitive with meaty postings. Perhaps Google has elevated “social media” in some algorithmic fashion though my guess is this is a defect that will be corrected – ie Twitter is structured in a way that links to these posts from many Twitter people and this is messing up the Algo’s handing of this insignificant material. If I’m searching for “Tesla Coil”, let along pretty much anything of any relevance, I hardly want a bunch of Twitter posts!
I’m back at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View at Startup Camp, another great UNconference event from David Berlind and Doug Gold and hosted by several nice sponsor companies.
The focus here is broader than the Mashup Camps which were more relevant to my travel experience and where we need to go with Online Highways, but I’ve enjoyed excellent “open” presentations by Jeff Barr from Amazon and Venture Capitalists Jeff Clavier with Rick Segal who are generously offering some really key insights into the startup funding process.
Matt Mullenweg is here and it was fun to meet the creator of the superb WordPress environment.
