Sootle Weblog

That’s right. People keep on saying “Content is King”. Sure, Mac, sure. Content has a shelf life of 36 hours as news, and maybe even less in a search engine. Pundits will constantly tell you to produce more content, but that’s just not enough. You need to have a plan for your content.

A book is not just a collection of pages. A book is a lot more than just “pages of content”. It becomes more than the sum of the parts. Books can explain complex ideas, and the supporting pages are compiled in a format that’s both pleasing to the eye and to the sensibilities. The idea that you’ll sit down every day and compose one page of content and at the end of the year you’ll have a 365 page book is just crazy. But people adopt that approach all day in the SEO circles.

Check out this amazing statement in a recent post by David Sifry concerning the blogosphere for an idea of just what content means:

First off, the total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second. This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

That’s right! Nearly 600 million blog posts will be made this year. That’s 600,000,000 posts in blogs alone. That isn’t even taking into account forum posts, static websites, auto-generated crapola and the like. Content has a very short lifespan indeed.

Knowing this, you need to consider what to do to get the most value out of content. You still need it, surely, but is content everything you think it is?

Often in life, we hear of people who are legends in their own time. In the case of Shoemoney, we may have that, but we have something even dearer: a legend in his own mind! And let’s face facts, if loving yourself were a crime, Jeremy Schoemaker would get a life sentence. I’ve researched this character all I could, and I can honestly say, I’d enjoy spending his money as much as my own.

I’ll be honest folks, it’s the money that draws me to this post about Shoemoney. Jeremy loves spending it, and I love receiving it. In fact, Shoemoney is known for living large. I think I actually caught a post once by Jeremy where he stated he made $10,000,000 monthly from Azoogle Ads, so you better believe the lap dances aren’t free when he’s around.

Homey’s car is so large it won’t fit into his garage. Rumor has it, his head won’t fit in his hat, either.

So that’s it for today’s Shoemoney report. His money for Google might be safe, but MSN and Yahoo are probably already pushing this page to number one. I can’t wait for my “hummer” from Shoemoney. I hope it feels great

P.S. help make me number one for the term Shoemoney. I would really love to get some of that Azoogle fortune.

Mess with the “Shoe” and you get the Screw.

I happened an article about Dennis Hayes and unkept telco promises. I found this quite interesting because of my ISP background. For a long time, Hayes modems were considered the de-facto standard.

The biggest problem in the ISP business: telcos. Being forced to team up with telcos as unwilling and not particularly honest phone companies left little room for growth. You have to wonder why the broadband rollout in the US has been molasses-slow. I’m sure not trusting a Bell company is as good of advice now as it was 30 years ago, when there was only one of them afoot.

Google is at it again: another atrocious update that has the webmaster community up in arms. The so-called Bacon Polenta Update (named by Reseller at WMW) has shown a number of twisted knobs and overly sensitive spam filters that have left many webmaster’s spirits broken, if not completely shattered.

For all of the time Google spends “fighting spam”, they never really seem to get ahead of the battle. You can quickly look up any popular and competitive term and you will find tons of low quality results. The year 2005 has been characterized by disastrous update after update. Not to mention the huge amounts of sites that have received complete de-indexing and you really have to start to wonder what the point is.

Yahoo and MSN continue to build their engines, and they appear to be doing so on a few points that Google has forgotten about: relevance and comprehensiveness. To say the Google Directory is not fresh is a complete understatement.

I haven’t lost faith in Google just yet, but clearly the Bacon Polenta Update (not named by any of the supposed Techno-Elite), is a curious concoction that appears to be having many unintended consequences.