When It’s Time To Change…Again

Hello friends.

Today is the first anniversary of this blog. I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve ignored it, I’ve used and abused it. I thank you for the interaction, and the support. Now…I will be making some changes around here very shortly, and if you’ve been reading regularly or have subscribed, you may want to stop now.

After the surprising increase in traffic during my most recent Google Garbage™ experiment, I’ve decided for the time being to spend some of this blog’s precious PageRank on more such specious pursuits.

The fact is, posting a bunch of nonsense is good for business. I supposed the television networks figured this out decades ago, didn’t they?

Putting up posts on hot topics and/or “long-tail” niche keywords has made me a pretty nice little chunk of change over the past few months, here and elsewhere. Apparently this is how kids can make money these days. Since I don’t particularly have the time to do much else, that’s what I’ll be using this blog for, at least for the foreseeable future.

This is just to announce the change to the handful of readers who have stuck around through the garbage posts. If I have anything interesting to say or show, I’ll probably post it at my Tumblr blog.

Again, I suggest you unsubscribe and stop reading now, or you’ll find yourself reading about car radiator repair, rapid drug detox, natural snoring remedies, home surveillance cameras and Bowling Green State University.

Thanks all!

Facebook Makes You Stupid, Twitter Makes You Dead Inside

…or so say researchers, according to this article from The Register:

Fresh research from America confirms that online social networks are in fact playthings of the devil. Ohio profs say that use of Facebook leads to lower college grades, and others in California have found that Twitter gradually renders its users’ moral compasses untrustworthy.

First up comes Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State Uni, with the news that Facebook users (at least those in her survey) are lazy, self-deluding thickies.

“There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying,” says Karpinski.

The PhD candidate collaborated with Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican Uni, surveying 219 students at Ohio State. These included 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account. Some 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.

The Facebook users had grade point averages (GPAs) between 3.0 and 3.5 (in other words getting more Bs than As), while non-users averaged between 3.5 and 4.0 (more As than Bs)*.

Also, “students who spent more time working at paid jobs were less likely to use Facebook,” according to Ohio State.

“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” adds Karpinski, who doesn’t have a Facebook account herself.

“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have suggested that too much use “rapid-fire media” – specifically, Twitter – “may confuse your moral compass”.

“Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention,” says Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC.

It seems that USC neuro-boffins hooked people up to brain monitoring gear and measured their responses to stories told in different ways about different subjects.

According to the USC statement:

The study raises questions about the emotional cost — particularly for the developing brain — of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, prof at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

The USC researchers seem to suggest that learning things mainly through a constant stream of short, depersonalised info-nuggs will restrict a person’s ability to empathise with the people in the stories being told – to admire them, feel their pain or whatever.

Essentially, over-heavy Twitter use will make you cold, cynical and facile – ultimately leaving you heartless and dead inside.

“Indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in,” says Castells.

There’s more from Ohio on Facebook making you thick/appealing primarily to lazy thickies here, and from California on Twitter making you dead inside/appealing primarily to the facile and amoral here.

How I Gained Traffic and Lost My Soul: Google Garbage™ Post-mortem

Last Thursday I detailed a rather questionable technique for achieving a quick increase in web traffic through the use of Google Trends. In a nutshell it involves using Google Trends to find rapidly-rising search topic with little competition, getting up a quick and keyword-heavy post, and pinging Google to get indexed.

On Friday I executed a crude proof-of-concept experiment, sacrificing this blog (and my own integrity) at the altar of scientific research. I made a total of 10 posts in the course of this experiment, which covered two updates of Google Trends (about four hours apart). I used different formats for each, ranging from all pictures to all text, from well-formatted for human eyes to pure data dump, intended only for Google’s robotic eyes.

I also posted on a wide variety of hot topics, from the death of painter Andrew Wyeth, to the Presidential Oath of Office, to some things I still have no clue about. Who is the “Numbers Lady”? Why were people seeking information about her on Friday? I have no idea, but I simply dumped the first page of Google results about that phrase into a post.

So what were the results? 

The Good

Google BlogSearch was easy to dominate. These posts had the number one position for most of these topics within a few minutes. However, Google web search was another matter. Since this blog is only three weeks old, has no PageRank yet, and few incoming links, these pages were buried deep in the web results.

Traffic tripled compared to normal. This will artificially pump up the numbers for the month – something I could use if I was negotiating with advertisers. Also, virtually all of these visitors were “uniques“, making the numbers look even better. And if I had CPM (pay-per-impression) ads on the pages, that would have made me some easy money. 

The Bad

On the other side of that coin: these unique visitors are people who will not return, so there is no long-term benefit.

Also, some of the pages had few hits. In retrospect I can see that they simply had too much competition – for example, a bio of the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River. Every major news outlet had this covered, so almost no one found this little corner of the web.

The Ugly

Because all that traffic was hit-and-run, there were no comments and zero interaction. Because I was posting on topics I knew nothing about, the experience was completely clinical, and in the end somewhat soul-crushing.

Worst of all, the most popular post by far was one entitled “Amanda Knox pics“. I had no idea when I posted this that Amanda Knox is apparently an attractive 21-year-old alleged murderer and sex criminal. I only knew that she was a hot search topic, and probably some new starlet – not far from the truth, as it turns out. So I did a Google image search for pictures of her, and dumped the results into a post. 

It was hugely popular; by far the most-visited of the day.

The lessons of this experiment are not pretty. What do the people want? Sex and death. How do they want it? In color.

So there it is: I did what I had to do; I visited the Dark Side, and I don’t care how much it pays – I’m not going back.