Believe it or not, you can actually read just about any major news website that has an online subscription fee, for free! No, I am not referring to downloading the User-Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox (which does work sometimes) and pretending to be Googlebot. I mean actually acting as yourself and viewing the page you want to read.

Why is this useful? Let us say a friend sends you a link to a good Washington Post article (those are rare, but known to happen), but you unfortunately did not get to read it until about a month later. When you click on the link, instead of actually seeing the news article that used to be there to everyone, it is now behind a subscription wall that you are being asked to pay for. Very annoying, correct?

How can you read the online news article for free? Well, the beauty of today’s world is that if you know the title of the article, you can search for the exact phrase in Google, click on the link, and actually read the article without the annoying subscription wall. Don’t know the article title? Put the URL in the search box and you will be able to access this for free as well.

Why is this possible? Essentially the news websites want to rank in Google in order to get a lot of visitors and make money off of the advertisements been shown to you. Google, unfortunately for the news websites, “mandates” that if you want organic search traffic, you must let the first click be free. Otherwise, Google will consider the whole website to be spam and not relevant to what searchers want thereby hurting Google’s brand.

What does this mean? If you are running a news website, Google believes that anything content-based should free and viewable to anyone, a very anti-publishing “establishment” view. Put another way, anything and everything that can be shown online is and will be considered “must see for free” (with advertisements of course). It is another way of saying “If I can turn something into 0s and 1s, then it should be free.”

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The bootlegged version of Star Trek XI (Star Trek Under Construction) is making rounds on the Internet and Youtube with a rather exciting teaser of a clip below:

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The Blackhats have finally caught on (publically at least) to the fact that Google is not doing a very good job with scraping sites, much less authority sites that copy and paste content from your own site. Interestingly enough, Quadzilla has noted that Yahoo is doing a relatively good job on the other hand with its search results:

In the meantime, while Google (and in fact all the Search engines) continues to serve up scraper after scraper - Scrape away! It’s the blackhat technique that just won’t die and continues to drive traffic and make money.

What’s even worse about the scraping aspect is that this is nearly considered to be an acceptable thing to do since according to Google, they cannot determine whether or not you permitted those sites (say the Associated Press) to re-post your content.

It’s the same concept when you see Aaron Wall posting his own same content around the web nearly verbatim and having them rank quite well. This tolerance for duplicate content is rather ridiculous from a user perspective, but from Google’s perspective it lessens their burden from trying to determine what is “truth” and what is a good search result.

But the question remains, what happens when the two need to be the one and the same?

Update (11/13/2008):

SEO ROI has found a site in particular already taking advantage of this nasty aspect on Aimclear:

Trademark Productions steal other people’s content, edit it for the sake of passing through search engine duplicate content filters, and try to pass themselves off as experts you should trust? They’re stealing from Aimclear, Clickz and others.

Here’s the fun kicker from the Sphinn post comment by sockmoney to highlight the problem still going on today:

I battled a site last year that had copied over 10,000 pages of content from my site.  It was brought to my attention by a competitor who was also being scraped.

I wrote a program that would crawl their site, pull the dup URL, and report on it against the matching page on my site.

Now keep in mind, my site is 10 years old, the scraper site was less than one year old.

I filed my report as a DMCA violation with Google (my crawler was only able to match 6,000+ pages copied, so that is what I sent to Google in the format they required).

Google contacted the site owners, they countered and said they have broken no copyright laws.  Google said we cannot do anything else, sorry.  In my mind, Google should be able to see my content was there first, and they do in most cases, so why can’t they assign a scraper penalty to the site(s)?  Instead, they choose in this case to let their site continue to grow “acting” like a legit site with legit content, but all along they were simply existing off our content.

My only option was to hire an attorney.  I was advised that copyright law is a Federal law, and that it would require going to Federal court, which would cost me a minimum of 30-50k in legal fees.

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Two hundred thirty-two years after the Declaration of Independence with the phrase:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”

Enshrined into our imperfect US Constitution was an imperfect union that limited the right of those truths to white land-holding men, delegating blacks to 3/5 of a person to count only for taxes and representatives for those white land-holding men in order to deal with the dichotomy of slavery between the northern and southern states.

A brutal civil war and pain-staking Civil Rights Movement removed many of those imperfections, but feelings lingered for many affecting the cultures of race, politics, and communities. Lives were lost, cultural heritages destroyed, families split apart, and politics of fear used to strike terror in the unknown or differences within America.

Yet, the brilliant gems in the American ideals that has stood its time is and will always be that anyone, anywhere around the world could come to America, strike a living, become a citizen of the United States of America, and potentially see their own naturally born son or daughter become the President of the United States. That no matter your race, culture, creed, and so forth, you have the opportunity to become a part of the United States unlike nearly every other nation on the Earth.

The United States has stumbled through many periods of its short history, but continues to learn from its mistakes and come back to the core ideals of the American dream that has made it stand strong. We may not always do as we preach, but when we do, we shine greater than any star save Sol. When we hold to our ideals, it shines through, whether as the shining beacon on the hill or through the change that we bring to the world.

It is in our ever-changing US Constitution that the American people believe that change positively can affect our lives without destroying the essentials of who we are as Americans or as human beings. We are a country of odd beliefs, proposing grand ideas such as the League of Nations, then refusing to join it, only to finally bring it to fruition with the United Nations. A country that loves new words and new cultures, mix it around, and call it our own. We are a country that soon will be a majority of minorities.

And now we are a country that has elected the first black President in the Western world into the world’s most powerful and most influential nation. The United States of America’s 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama.

Two hundred and thirty-two years after our declaration of independence, the United States is now ruled (okay, technically not until 2009) by a face that is not of Anglo-Saxon origin. When he travels around the world, he now embodies the change, the uniqueness, and the ideals of America. He brings disonance to the propaganda that the US only talks about its ideals, but never acts on it. He proves that a son of a man from Africa can become the leader of the free world. He proves that having a unique name, even an Arabic name of a dictator we just overthrew, does not disqualify him to the American people in choosing him to lead our nation from the White House.

The transformation for the US and the world has only just begun for a better way. The change that we all can believe in has only just started. Yet, President Barack Obama has only finished the easy part–hope can only go so far. His expectations by many far and wide are very high and the challenges that the US and world face are numerous. Nonetheless, for this night the toast goes to President Barack Obama and his transformational win to the world, to the US, and to the American people.

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This is the kind of kitty my wife wants (Persian cat)–”Mine” reminds me of what my wife says on everything I own too…

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People often believe that when something is free, it means two things: 1) Not very good, 2) No competition or a need to update.

As I have previously mentioned about the Golden Age of Analytics with Google Analytics, point one is entirely false as Google has recently been able to really up its game within the web analytics arena by providing some really spectacular online marketing features that will benefit many agencies that take advantage of it. I finally now have access with it for some of my clients and will be salivating through it for probably the next month until I can squeeze just about everything I can from it (my poor GA representative will get to know me over the next month as I call with lots of questions, lol). Go install it after you read this post.

This post tackles the second part with Nuconomy coming out with something that no other qualifiable web analytics package has to date–the ability to track social media traffic and the correlation with them. Now, I know what you should be thinking: Social media does not convert! There is no direct ROI in it. But the counter-argument would be that there is a branding effect, a talking effect, customer interactions, etc. that cannot be measured. Yet, what Nuconomy has done is put their money where their mouth is, tracking those exact effects. Now you can find out whether or not there is an indirect impact for your company and if not, leave the social media fanatics with only this:

So, what do I think is the most important factor in a social media strategy?  Social Media

When competing against a free product or service, you have to be able to market yourself for niche areas, innovate to stay ahead of the pack, and listen to what your customers want. This is where Omniture SiteCatalyst has seriously failed as a Web Analytics provider–it fails to listen to customer complaints (slow load time) and it fails to stay ahead of the pack by not placing in basic SEO tracking that Google Analytics offers for free.

So please, check them out, but do not join the beta–I’m trying to get into that, do not want more competition than there already is to get on that list.

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Slashdot humor:

“From the Download.com article: “It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn’t even offer you any xiao long bao or pu’er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there.”

Okay, so it’s some plugin that uses a China IP proxy on download.com, humorous, but I recall you could get around it with *shudders* AOL five years ago…

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The announcement of Google Analytics’s new features provided for free will radically shake up the web analytics field for any agency seriously considering or working in the online advertising arena. In my opinion, what used to be a very niche and expensive area will be suddenly available at a far lower cost and to a far larger amount of people leading to a kind of golden age in web data analysis.

The older data analysis through log servers or bulky web analytics packages force companies to spend thousands or millions of dollars every year that often required a programming level of skill such as Sql (sp?) or at the least RegEx (something I had to learn originally for Google Analytics). Google Analytics new features removes the need for such a skill level and brings the ability to provide detailed analyses to a larger amount of people who can quickly and effectively test many kinds of problems, solutions, or findings.

Yes, there will still be a need for the higher level of deep data analysis, but in terms of needing to run an online marketing campaign as efficiently and profitably as possible, Google has opened the floodgates to make this a reality without having to either have a programmer do everything for you or sit and wait on the incredibly slow bulky analytics packages.

I can now run analyses across multiple accounts by the same client in an effort to see if there is an on-going relationship between multiple online marketing channels without having to download the data and do a large amount of data merging with data crunching. In need of an ad hoc report or a hopefully brilliant idea came to mind to test? Google Analytics allows the ability to quickly test the idea without having to get someone else to run it for you or to wait on the data to be collected. The speed at which web analytics data can be analyzed has been reduced dramatically, which in turn should make data analysis as interesting as someone doing analysis within Microsoft Excel. In fact, if you know how to do custom filters in Microsoft Excel, you will find the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics very familiar.

All this analysis brings higher level analysis down to a simpler level—those that quickly jump on this wagon of web data analysis will be the first out of the gate—particularly if a culture is set up—and will win the day in the web’s hyper-competitive environment.

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Word has already spread around about the upcoming seven new features for Google Analytics that is sending the web analytics and online advertising world abuzz. The seven new features to be added are:

1. User Interface refresh for easier dashboard control
2. AdSense integration into GA
3. Advanced visualizations: Motion Charts in five dimensions
4. Custom reports that can cut across multiple accounts
5. Advanced segmentation for simpler and deeper data analysis
6. The Google Analytics API for large data pulls
7. Automatic importing of AdWords cost data into Urchin

Rather than rehash each aspect, I will consolidate the best around the web about what Google has produced with these remarkable new features below:

User Interface Refresh:

[The] tabular layout of accounts is new, and very helpful. If you’re an agency, or a large company, you probably have access to multiple GA accounts. This layout makes it easy to identify performance at the account level.

Key to the new layout is the addition of metrics. Available metrics in are:

• Visits
• Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• Completed Goals

One column actually does a date comparison. Choose one of the above metrics using the drop down at the top of the column and a simple date range using the buttons at the top right corner of the screen to determine how said metric has changed over the past day, week, month or year.

AdSense Integration (in private beta):

More detailed reports and opportunities to enhance performance and continue with on-going optimization.

Motion Charts:

Part-cool, part-crazy, this amazing tool allows you to see data in 5 dimensions! Data can now be visually displayed on the traditional X and Y axes but there’s also additional time, color, and size dimensions! The Motion chart is extremely useful for spotting peaks and valleys in data and identifying areas which should be analyzed deeper. While it comes with a slight learning curve or adjustment to get yourself familiar with the interface and how to best use the 5 dimensions, there’s no other tool that will give you this type of insight.

Custom Reports:

Many of us would like to create their own reports with their own key metrics and don’t want to be limited to the default reports in GA. This feature is quite user-friendly and allows you to drag-and-drop to create all kinds of reports!

Advanced Segmentation:

Advanced segmentation is a new feature in Google Analytics that lets you segment all data in a profile. […] We now have an incredibly powerful segmentation tool that we can use to identify which segments of our traffic are performing and which are not. This leads to more analysis on the under performing segments and (hopefully) increased site performance.

Google Analytics API (in private beta):

According to Google, the API is in private beta. […] Once the API is rolled out, expect some very creative custom reporting and very useful third-party data integration.

Automatic Adwords Integration with Urchin:

No need to have to rely on another team member or client to bring all the data together; now it should be integrated automatically.

If you’re looking for tips or ideas, I would normally provide that here, but will instead strongly suggest you literally read each and every line over at Avinash’s analytics blog to jumpstart the creative juices. The downside is that I’m going to have to redo a lot of my setups now that I’ve put a lot of time and energy into, but at least the advanced segmentation is retroactive!

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Want this ability:

This would make my job more interesting:

The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG…

Just remember to stay sober, ok?

Mind-writing, would make a lot of lives easier when it comes to trying to write out the ideas or phrases in my head when I try to [poorly] blog.

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