Google Sets Up Easy Way to Donate to Japan Disaster Relief

Hats off to Google for setting up a very simple way to help out the many thousands of men, women and children who desperately need assistance after the big earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Won't you help out?  

Donate to Japan Disaster Relief here: 

For more information: http://www.google.com/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html


Thanks to Steve Trautlein

Google Censors Search Results

This is the beginning of a very bad trend. Google has now announced that humans will begin to subjectively alter search results. This is bad for a very many number of reasons, first and foremost is that it opens the door for censorship of a political nature.

GENERATION X - GIMME SOME TRUTH

This, of course, is not good for a flow of information for a free society. It reeks of information control such as was written in George Orwell's 1984. This means that Google will now become our own Ministry of Truth.


The Register.co.uk reports:   


Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.


Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm "relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. "

That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.



It wasn't surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google's search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.

But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google's active participation.

This is a terrible result. This means that Google will empower a few people to oversee editorial decisions as to what article get high search results and the rest? The rest head down the black hole.


Well, I guess most people will shrug their shoulders and say, "It's okay with me. I'm doing nothing wrong so I don't care. After all, we've always been at war with Eastasia."


This is a sad day in the history of information and what could be the darkest hour of the Internet and our right to freedom of speech. 


I register my protest and will stop using Google search (you'll also need to stop using Yahoo! Search engine too.) I urge you to do the same. From this very second on, I will set my default search engine page to Bing. 


But you don't need to use Bing. There are many others. Just please join us in our peaceful protest against Internet censorship by switching from Google search. If you don't protect your freedom of information and freedom of speech, no one is going to do it for you. 

Bloggers Unite! High Quality, Original Content is King!

Writing a blog can be a very tiresome, worrisome, frustrating and exhausting experience... It can also be hugely rewarding. Recently, the Net has taken down governments with Bloggers, Tweeters and Facebooker's taking the lead role. 


Shouldn't you start to stake your claim by starting a blog?


It might be the most rewarding thing you undertaken in years! It is for me.

XTC - King for a Day 

Currently, I am spending my time coaching two wonderful people on the virtues of blogging and how it will help them and their business grow. Coaching is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I sometimes am asked to blog or teach blogging to people, but, with these two, it is the very first time I've ever said, "Yes!" I said "Yes!" to these folks because I believe they have some great insights and I know they have some experiences and expertise that no one else has.  


My "students" are incredible people. They can add a world of knowledge and information to help us bloggers build, as Google describes it, "a healthy web-ecosystem." I think I understand what Google means by this. They mean that they want various sites that have original content rather than sites that collate information from various blogs.


I mean, news sites are needed and designed to aggregate various news sources, but there seems to be an increase of blog aggregation sites that offer no new, original information but simply list up a bunch of articles from various blogs around the world and copy and paste those on their site.

If those blog's purpose is to spread the word on a particular position concerning politics or social issues, then I understand that. If their purpose is to use other original content to gain hits on their websites so that they can get higher Google Search rankings so that they can sell more affiliate stuff when people click on links on their pages, well, I can't fault someone for trying to make a living, but I can see how Google would want to help support the independent original thinkers.


Now, Google has gone one step further. They've made a major tweak to their algorithm so that these "content farms" get lower search result rankings.


Yahoo! reports:   
Google tweaks search to punish 'low-quality' sites

Google says it has tweaked the formulas steering its Internet search engine to take the rubbish out of its results. The overhaul is designed to lower the rankings of what Google deems "low-quality" sites.

That could be a veiled reference to such sites as Demand Media's eHow.com, which critics call online "content farms" -- that is, sites producing cheap, abundant, mostly useless content that ranks high in search results.

Sites that produce original content or information that Google considers valuable are supposed to rank higher under the new system.

The change announced late Thursday affects about 12 percent, or nearly one in every eight, search requests in the U.S. Google Inc. 

Wow! This affects one in eight!? So, the point is, once again, original content is king on the Internet. 

Sure, Mr. and Ms. Blogger, we are not "journalists" in the traditional sense of the word, but we never claimed to be. Nevertheless, our opinion matters more and more everyday.

People listen to what bloggers have to say! Take, for example, you see a full page color ad in the newspaper for a new steak-house. The steak-house spends $20,000 for that ad. The ad says the restaurant is great! Do you go to that restaurant? If it were me, I wouldn't pay any attention to the ad at all. It wouldn't motivate me to go there.

But! If a blogger I like says that the restaurant is good, I probably would go and try it once. Why? I know the blogger is telling me the truth. I read this blogger's writing often. I know s/he didn't receive a bunch of money to write that recommendation. That means I have a relationship with this blogger and know who s/he is. I trust this person. 

Now, Google has saluted us with giving us more power on the web by rewarding us original content makers with this Search Engine tweak.

Thanks to Google Search Engine for recognizing us as the force to be reckoned with that we have become.


More concrete details on Google's new search engine algorithm here.

PS: I've written recommendations for cheap eats in Tokyo. There's cheap and good tasting sushi in Yoga; Raw Fish & drinks in Futagotamagawa; Delicious soba in Daimon; Wine & Dine in Omotesando; Fantastic Udon in Kamiyacho; Tokyo's best coffee and meeting place in Hanzomon; Tokyo's best hamburgers at Tsubame Grill; Out of this world Croatian food in Kyobashi at Dobro - Now, who you gonna trust? Me or some full page ad in the newspaper?

Think about it. Let's start blogging! The world wants to know you!