Is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the Second Counselor to the President of the Church of Latter Day Saints is named Faust. That’s right: James E. Faust. I have nothing against the church or Mr. Faust. I just thought this to be an odd coincidence.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
A little tidbit for the SEO community slipped out on Matt Cutts’ blog yesterday:
“Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; Iâm guessing within the next few days.”Even though he goes on to say that this will result in a bit of flux afterwards, I certainly hope that the Google results will be consistent after this is over. I have two laptops on the table in front of me right now. When I enter certain searches that I have been monitoring on Google, I see completely different results from the two machines. On one machine, I see that my site has some 40,000 pages in Google’s index. On the other machine, there are around 15 pages. This is not good. Hopefully they will fix this soon.
For quite some time, O’Reilly has been the trusted source for technical books in my household. I have a rainbow of O’Reilly books on my bookshelf. And while it is not as large as this library, the O’Reilly books still make up for over 50% of the books that I own. I have recently been shopping for books to add to my Amazon wishlist, and, feeling already overwhelmed with O’Reilly books and tech books in general, I’m needing some new ideas.
Has anyone read any good books lately? Amazon’s Best-Seller List has been dominated by Mr. Potter lately, so that’s not much help. And the New York Times Best-Seller Lists are full of authors I have never heard of.
I suppose I must call upon the powers of the great LazyWeb. Oh LazyWeb, help me! I need an authoritative site that lists good, modern books along with coherent reviews. Any takers?
I received a nice surprise in my inbox this morning:
Thank you for applying to participate in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program. We’re excited to let you know that your application has been accepted.Naturally, I signed up as quickly as possible and pasted some ad code into my site. This process was very straightforward, much like AdSense. But after I pasted the ad code into my site, I realized that YPN is nowhere near as refined as AdSense. According to the YPN FAQ, I should have seen public service ads while waiting for the context-targeted ads to appear.
Your Yahoo! Publisher Network ads will usually begin appearing within seconds of pasting the ad code into your web pages. If no ads are available, public service announcements will be displayed. If you prefer, you may select a Substitute Color that matches your web page background so that a solid color block appears in the meantime instead.But I didn’t seeing anything. All that the YPN code provided was an empty iframe. Sure, it had the CSS for the ads in place, but there was no content inside the body of the html document. The “substitute color” option worked, but I got no PSAs. This really looked bad on my sites, so I thought that I might not get to try out YPN.
Fortunately, however, the matter was resolved within a couple of hours. I went back to my test page after doing some other work, and the ads were there. When I have some solid data on the earnings, I will write up a summary of my experiences. I’ll leave you with this for now, though: Yahoo has a long way to go to catch up with AdSense.
Google has serious problems. It seems that they have given away a pr10 (Google cache). And Google employee Matt Cutts has been GoogleWashed—his site has had its content and PR stolen. The event has also been referred to as The Great Bacon Polenta Conspiracy, a name derived from a recent post on Matt Cutts’ blog.
