dissurion

A lot of time has passed since I wrote my last blog post. I do mean to post again but it will be a bit more focused on a special theme.

I didn’t meant to make this blog one with an abundance of readers. It was more aimed at trying things out and see what I could do in the blogosphere with what results on certain topics that interest me. And the results were interesting, at least for me. I have been throwing sites on the internet just to see what effect they would generate. All sorts of sites. But now I am going to concentrate on what I think is the most promising for me.

Of all the things I’ve tried, the one approach I feel most comfortable with and is most likely to give me some success, is writing content, content, content. Quality content, on topics that interest me. That may differ for others. I’m not confident about complex PHP programs, creating flashy web 2.0 designs, marketing social websites or managing hundreds of small affiliate sites. I feel better and more in control when focusing on a very small number of websites with good content on a topic that genuinely interests me.

I settled upon managing three websites that should generate an income (over time), and maintaining two blogs. The two blogs (one of them is this one) record more personal experiences and are not intended to be revenue generating sites but more for fun. There’s no pressure to do anything substantial with them. They’re a writing exercise, my complaining and celebration space, or no-meaning in nothingness zen meditation. Whatever.

The other three websites are different. My hope is in them. My hope for a self-employed future, free from corporate slavery, fully able to live life on my own terms when it comes to work. This is where I’ll spend my free time. This is where I’ll sweat. And I’m bound to succeed.

Not that I won’t be happy if I don’t make it. But I will be disappointed. I know it’s dangerous if all of your happiness rests on one expectation that doesn’t come true. I made sure to avoid that. If things don’t work out, I’ll review my options and some alternatives. But I give myself a couple of years. How much depends on how it goes.

What does this all mean for dissurion.com? I’ll be focusing here on how things go with these websites. Starting from scratch with designing to getting sand-boxed (this will happen for sure) to having my first money transferred to my bank account. I’ll post the difficulties, the hurdles I’m taking, how I deal with them, the (small) successes, the disappointments and hopes. But anything that has something to do with the whole process is a candidate for a post. So after all, not that much will be different.

I wish myself luck in my enterprise. ;-)

Suppose you need to evaluate a person. Not just for a job or something like that, but you have to see whether he would make a good friend. One that is reliable and subscribes to the same high values you do: honesty, integrity, friendliness, caring, etc. Now the only problem is that you can’t see nor hear the person. The only clue you have is what other people he visits or what people visit his house. Take a moment and think about this problem.

I think most of you would agree that the only way we could guess whether the person would be a good friend or not is to look at what the people he visits and receives are like, and the quantity of those. If every week a drugs dealer comes by, that would be better than having one to visit him every day. On the other hand, it would still be worse than seeing one of your best friends visit him two times a year. But if your best friend visits him almost every day, that would be far better. Or if all of you friends pay a regular visit, you would think there’s a reasonably good chance the guy/girl would make a nice friend. And if noone would visit this guy, and the guy would visit noone himself, you would be able to tell very little about him.

I think this must be somewhat like the task of a search engine. Part of it is determining whether the page is a reliable candidate to deliver good info for the user. They need to do this without being able to actually read the page. They know what words are on them. I can fill an entire page with the search phrase and this would not be your best friend. Most probably this page would have not many other links to it. It wouldn’t have a lot of friends. Or if it has a lot of links to it, they are most likely to be spam links, the drugs dealers of the not-so-best friend.

If you are that guy who needs to be evaluated, you best avoid visiting drugs dealers or letting them into your house. If you have a website, you best avoid linking to pages with dubious intentions or avoid you become the target of them.

The problem is, a search engine has to see at least some people initially to determine whether they are good people or bad people, and go on from there, inferring about other people who visit them or get a visit by them. What pages could a search engine take as a starting point? What pages are most likely to be informative and not to contain spam? If I were to choose those would be government sites and education sites. Some people think links from these domains get you more points (in Google) than links from other sites. I think that from my perspective this makes sense.

In my previous post I noted that traffic had gone up although I didn’t write anything for some time. After that short post I wrote nothing for quite a few days and I looked at my traffic stats again this morning. The funny thing is that the increased traffic did not stay but instead diminished to about half of what it was before my previous post. It is now even less than what it was before when I posted more regularily. A lot less people now find my posts through google. Why? It’s a mystery to me.

I have been very busy lately and didn’t find the time to ramble here. But I just checked my stats and the funny thing is that my visitor count got a modest boost from that. I don’t know what the reason can be. There are rumours though that Google doesn’t like change that much (compared to a relative stable site).

A couple of years ago someone suggested we should see google as a black box. We don’t have access to the inner part of google, but we can feed it input and examine the output. I still think that is a valid way of looking at it, and far more people should experimenting and reporting the results instead of guesstelling what they think will be the result.

If we go further back, to 1994, there was this movie with the now famous quote “Google is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get.” I believe it was about a google employee who changed his algorithm every few months or so. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do remember the quote. Google is like a box of chocolates.

I really think that this still holds today. If you get a box of chocolates with forms you have never seen before, you don’t know what you will get when you put them into your mouth. I like praliné, so I always hope that’s what I will pick. I absolutely hate any with liquir in it, so I try to avoid them if I can. But how can I know? You never know what you gonna get!

Sometimes there are hints. My great secret discovery is that the ones wrapped in paper are often the ones with liquid in it. And often the ones with white chocolate on the outside have a very soft taste one the inside. And that’s true for google too. If you feed an empty page in it, don’t expect to get number one for a given search phrase. But what about the other chocolates in the box? Well, they are a surprise. There’s only one thing you can do, and that’s try them.

I don’t believe that’s the end of the story though. When the google employee in the movie said “a box of chocolates”, he didn’t just mean that every time you get another completely different box. You just get the same chocolates every time for about several months. The ones you eat every day, the ones whose forms and colors tell you what’s inside them. And after those months some things may have changed. But if you aren’t doing anything weird and following the webmaster guidelines, whatever is inside your favourite chocolate should taste more or less the same. Every few months google may put a new chocolate in the box, but you still know which one to grab and which one to avoid, right?

So for me, google is a box of chocolates. I didn’t know what I would get first time, but I do know. And I like to taste the new chocolate in the box. I never know what I’m gonna get.