Category: Weblogs and CMS

WordPress.org engaged in some weird gaming of search engines

2 Apr 2005: Matt has posted a very nice response to the concerns and taken all the weird stuff down. That still leaves him/them with the questions of how to pay the bills, but it seems clear that future steps will be more community involved, which is a good thing.

As reported on Waxy.org (with some corrections by jluster), WordPress.org has been doing this weird deal with Hot Nacho where they’re hosting a nearly 200K “hidden” articles whose sole purpose is to pull in search engines and generate advertising revenue for other folks. WordPress.org (clearly a most worthy cause) gets a cut, which helps defray web site and development costs.

Now I’m all for supporting WordPress. I think it’s a great tool, and we’re using it for our family blogs and for a community group working to support our schools. I’d gladly contribute to a pot that helps keep these folks cranking this thing out. I’ve made sure that it’s quite clear that we’re using WordPress and that the links to WordPress.org are front and center. If having those links to WordPress.org help keep the project alive, then they can count on us.

But gaming search engines is frankly pretty icky, and I’m not so keen. I’d much rather put a ten spot in the hat as it goes by than indirectly support deliberate attempts at manipulating the perceived value of web sites. (I realize that this will happen regardless, but I don’t have to be an active part of it.) I would also much rather have something like Google AdSense ads on WordPress.org which our links would help (in a very small way) increase in value than be part of this strange backdoor game. If WordPress.org has value, and that value can be used to help fund a worthwhile project in a way that the involved parties can agree on, let’s be explicit and up front about it.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Currently listenting to: “Long black veil” from Charming Hostess’s truly spiffy album Punch. This is a quite splendid new release from ReR and is probably my favoritestest album at the moment. Even Sub-Evil Boy likes it!

No tag for this post.

Related posts

  • No related posts.

MusicMobs works for me now!

As I reported earlier, MusicMobs is this potentially cool way for people to share preferences about music, but it didn’t work for me. (Presumably my iTunes library was just too big for it to handle.)

Those crazy people keep slogging away, however, and a new re-write of the system that takes people’s library info has recently gone live. My library now loads successfully, and almost instantaneously – huuuzzaaaaah!

There’s a great quote from the news item announcing the update:

There is a 20,000 song limit to processing, so if you have a super massive library export your top played 20k songs to get it to work.

I have about 5,400 songs in my library at the office, so I’m well away from that. I suspect if we ripped every single CD we owned, we might get close to (or even slightly exceed) 20K songs, but that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I think I’m safe for a while :-).

They also have a “Top Listeners” list on the front page, and I’m not even close to making the top 200 or so that they list. The highest is over 135K listens, and the bottom of their top 200 list is over 22K songs listened to. I’m at a bit over 18K, and I’m guessing that the list is pretty dense between 18K and 22K. That really surprised me, as I listen at the office pretty much all day every day, which suggests that there must be people who’s iTunes history goes way back without interruption, and who leave their computers playing music pretty close to 24/7.

Anyway, I’m quite glad that it works. Any system that can connect Charming Hostess (and here) with both The Science Group and Bob Wills is worth having in this world.

Currently listening to: The title track from Chris Cutler’s Twice around the Earth (again, still, etc.).

No tag for this post.

Related posts

  • No related posts.