Nevermind. I'm back.

It's official. Google hates me.

First came the rejection of my AdSense application for ClickPyramid.com. This I can almost understand, since ClickPyramid, while being totally legitimate in every way, is not unlike several other sites of more dubious distinction. The quoted reason for why it was rejected is that they have a ban on sites that either give dollars or "points" to people for visiting certain other websites. My website did neither of these two things but it skirted a fine line; as Google was both the jury and the arbitrator, I decided it didn't make much sense to make a stink with the poor customer service guy and let it go.

Then today a new bombshell dropped: ClickPyramid.com itself, which had been the first result when you searched for "clickpyramid", is no longer returned. If you type in "clickpyramid.com" you can still see the little stub entry that just links to the domain, but it no longer displays the title of the homepage or the meta description like it used to. Its identity has been erased.

My guess as to why this is the case is that somebody at Google decided I was trying to game their system. Obviously, ClickPyramid.com is meant to get people linking to it, much like every other of the thousands of directory sites on the net. And just like the other legitimate directories, I have implemented an editorial policy where I don't allow affiliate linking sites or adult sites to utilize the system. Even a cursory visit to ClickPyramid.com should demonstrate to users that I am not trying to scam anyone; I explicitly don't promise riches, don't use bold text or hyperbole, and don't ask for money or force reciprocal links on people. It is exactly what it is advertised as, a system for bloggers, small businesses, and organizations to advertise themselves for free on the Internet.

I think it's pretty dangerous that one company has so much control over the Internet. They can make or break websites at their discretion, and that is unfair to the thousands of little guys out there trying to eek out an online living. But this is not a simple rant about the rich getting richer and the grass suffering when elephants fight. I have a proposal to make.

One of the huge problems Google faces is that the sheer size of their index means that they must rely on automated methods for much of its upkeep; this means PageRank, link counts, and the like. When humans do get involved with their process it is only to do the pruning of supposed charlatans like me. They hide behind obscurity of their algorythms to deflect criticism, which leaves the have-nots in the unenviable position of having to argue with a computer if their site isn't listed where they think it should be, such as a search of its domain name. On the other hand, there are a lot of genuine scammers out there using automated methods to try to take advantage of Google's generosity in offering traffic to relevant pages. Google must have a weapon at their disposal to punish these people, and delisting is an obvious solution.

So how can we reconcile Google's need to protect its index from scammers with its responsibility (moral, not legal) to let small guys at least be listed? I think that they should introduce a system whereby sites that they have flagged as being potential scams recieve an automated email to a special address, such as googlecomplaint@domain.tld. This email should then ask the site to register with Google and give relevant information about their business, country of origin, name of the owner, etc. Then every month the site owner will be required to go to that form and fill out a captcha (those little things where you need to type in the word that appears in a picture) from a specific IP address or something like that to make sure the site continues to be listed. It would be somewhat onerous on the site owner, but that is okay, since for many of us it would be easier to do that than to be delisted. Once the site has a sufficient footprint online to no longer be in the delisting margins, this process would end and the site would occur in the search results just like any other regular site.

If Google can set this up, it would involve no more human intervention on their end than their present system. The PageRank system wouldn't be messed up, since the sites would still be of marginal importance. It isn't as if Google doesn't know these sites exist, it just chooses to not display them in a meaningful way.

Hopefully someone in Mountain View will read this an put it together as their personal project.

Any takers? :)

Hi everyone,

Good meeting yesterday with Ian; we're planning a relaunch of SneakyFeelings.com in January with a renewed focus on events and singles nights. Right now he's laying the groundwork for this, and I'm busting my butt getting StevesLeads.com finished so I can get a new source of working capital. It's nice to have a partner! Things happen and I'm not the one doing them. :)

Speaking of SL, that's coming along nicely. It's implemented using that "hot" new programming framework, Ruby On Rails. As much as I love the goodness of the code, I know I would be much faster sticking with PHP rather than learning a new language and framework for the purposes of a single project. I'm a little conflicted about it.

Programmers are funny people. Much like physicists, I think most of us (at least the ones who care about more than earning a paycheck) harbor the belief that there can be a single formula for describing anything. The problem is in finding that formula. There are always new languages popping up, and vendors often hail them as the one that fixes all problems. It gets really humorous when someone changes their tune and says, "No wait. We specialize. We don't solve all problems, just the one of making websites." This specialization is bogus, since websites are merely a presentation layer for an arbitrarily complex software system. Sure, maybe your framework makes submitting a form look pretty, and maybe it can map a database table to a language object. What makes an application valuable, however, is all the hard stuff which can't be easily adapted into a paradigm. If a developer doesn't push technology in a new direction and use the language/framework for something other than what the original creator thought it could be used for, she isn't really contributing anything to the world. There, I said it.

It is in this category that Rails fits. I have to say that the guys behind it do not brag and hail themselves as the be-all-end-all of development frameworks. The computer press has done that for them. What they have created as a very good system that makes simple sites simple to make, and harder sites moderately easier to make. I can only say moderately since the sheer elegance of the Ruby language is offset by the fact that it is only now getting a third-party community, and many of the constructs people are used to having in an API are still being created. In addition, most problems in the Java and PHP worlds can be solved by Googling an error message. Ruby, as I found out this weekend, isn't there yet. Scripting languages are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot (since so much stuff is created on the fly, and types are fluid, etc) and this lack of a web presence is challenging. As I become more familiar with the tools available it will get easier, but still.

After StevesLeads, I will jump back to PHP to knock out my next few projects. Since my sites are all maintanence-free, the syntactic ugliness shouldn't be an issue. Perhaps I will jump back to Ruby once 18th Street has some more mouths to feed; it seems an ideal system for a team environment.

Til next time.

We launched a new online service yesterday, ClickPyramid.com.

It's a system for small site owners (like us!) to generate traffic through network marketing. Basically, users of the service view 5 sites and grab codes from each page that comes up. They then enter these codes in a form, along with information about a site they would like to link to. Then they get a URL to advertise that has a list with their site at the top position and the top 4 sites on the prior list under it. Anyone following their link will go through the same process, moving the original person's ad to position 2.

Theoretically, your ad can go through 5 generations of linking (one for each position on the list) growing exponentially in reach with each iteration. Of course this type of growth is unlikely in the long term, but you should still see a decent traffic increase for a relatively modest amount of effort.

I have no intention of making money with ClickPyramid.com, especially since Google declined my AdSense application. :) I do hope it provides a useful tool for small developers like myself and gives small sites without an established audience their 10 seconds in the sun.

My article last week about operating systems made it to Slashdot.org after I submitted it in another shameless act of self promotion. (hey, if you don't promote yourself, who will? :) Unfortunately, I don't think many people read it. The article itself generated a ton of comments, but most of them substituted the word "Linux" for "Open Source" in the title and then went on to say why Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I agree with this assessment, but my goal was to move the argument away from Unix and towards free-as-in-speech Windows clones. I do appreciate all of the comments on the blog and the thoughtful emails I received.

Not too much is going on in the computer press that I can comment on right now. Apparently CA is selling off their Ingres unit and some people are (again) questioning the viability of open source as a business model. This is a little wierd, since Ingres wasn't an open source project before CA made it so, and this was only after it had lost all of its market share and most of its visibility. It isn't at all surprising that "yet another open source database" had a hard time establishing a market for itself in a very crowded space, but I think characterizing that as a failure of open source is similar to saying that Sybase declining in market share is a failure for capitalism. Products come and go, that's the way the world works.

Til next time.

Hi everybody,

Things are going well over at 18th Street. I had a chance to meet with my good friend and soon-to-be business partner Steve Williams last night, and ate way too much Italian food. (hmm. pizza :) We're working on that networking site project together and everything is proceeding according to schedule. The public launch will be sometime between mid-December and the 1st of next year, and more details will follow as that gets closer.

Now for some advocacy:

I was reading an article online the other day about the Linux desktop, a big area of interest for me. For those who don't know, there are alternatives to the Microsoft platform (ie. Windows) that are available for free and include all of the software you are ever likely to need. It's true. Click here, here, or here for some of the possibilities.

Anyhow, the article was saying how the Linux desktop needs to innovate rather than simply copy whatever the current market leader (Windows) does. You hear this complaint a lot. Linux is part of a broader "open source" movement, and these projects are often derided for not breaking any new ground relative to commercial, "closed source" projects. Basically, the closed source programs establish a market for a particular type of software or set of functionality, and then the open source folks come in and attempt to commoditize it through copying that functionality. While this pattern is correct, it isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, and a similar thing happens in almost any sphere in life. Once the first insurance agent proved you could get people to give you money upfront for potentially disasterous events that may come along in the future, you better believe that 25 million other folks started lining up around the block looking to "protect" people from all sorts of things.

The problem I see is that like most developers, the author of this article has an "if we build it they will come" mentality. This happens a lot with us programmers, since we always like hot and sexy new technologies that change the world. The thing is that this isn't really true. People don't choose operating systems because they are sexy. Just ask Apple, who have had a consumer coup with their iPods and yet only modest success in getting the Mac accepted as a mainstream platform afterwards.

Instead, the problem with Linux is that not enough people are getting it preinstalled on their computers. There are many reasons for this, but I'll highlight the two I think are the most important.

One, most of the top OEMs (like Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, etc) are scared of Microsoft, and in fact would go out of business if Microsoft got testy and took away their OEM licenses for Windows. OEM licenses let those companies distribute Windows on new PCs for (I've heard) about $90 per copy, versus the $249 or so price it ships for. (The numbers might be wrong, but you get the point) In an age where PCs sell for $500, there isn't a lot of wiggle room to make up a $150 price increase, and vendors with that increase simply wouldn't be able to compete. While it is no doubt illegal for Microsoft to explicitly say "if you ship PCs with Linux, we will yank your OEM license," the implicit threat is enough to keep Linux out of the circulars and catalogs. A vendor could survive without Windows, but they are all profitable businesses right now and it is unlikely that they would leave that for an uncertain future. In the rare cases that top OEMs will give you Linux on a PC, it is very often only on limited hardware choices and at a cost higher than Windows on the same machine. Since you can get Linux for free, there is obviously something else making this so.

Two, Microsoft has done an excellent job in promoting their platform and has created an entire generation of corporate IT folks who can't see any other way of computing, and see any incursion by non-Windows systems as a threat to their job security. This is absolutely killing Linux in the corporate desktop space. Programmers, system administrators, and other IT staff have fairly straightforward career trajectories; most learn some languages and platforms, get some certifications, and work for many happy years with those skills. In such an environment, every IT vendor wants to be "the" platform on which technicians establish their career. Hence all of the vendor certification programs, developer conferences, free software, and other enticements they use to lock in people to their platform. Microsoft is a master at this, and all of these locked in techies do more to perpetuate their dominance than any advertising campaign ever could.

I laud the Linux community and actually use the product myself, but I've become convinced recently that it will never be able to have a significant impact on Microsoft desktop hegemony since it can't provide a real answer to the two problems above. I think the open source community as a whole would be well served to start supporting projects like ReactOS, which is aiming to create a free implementation of Windows built entirely on open source technologies. If that project reaches maturity, OEM vendors can have a retort to any threat Microsoft might make, and Windows platform devotees will still be able to utilize their hard-earned skills at work. Given the reverence the community has for Unix and the Unix way of doing things, though, I'm dismayed at the likelihood of this happening.

We shall see...