Google, the benevolent dictator of the interwebs, has undertaken a massive project to digitize and index all the world’s printed material under the Google Books platform. So far they’ve scanned over 10 million books, including those in the public domain and those still protected by copyright.
The cost of the scanning, an estimated $50 million so [...]
Thankfully I was unaffected this time, but Google is again showing just how loosely they interpret their own “don’t be evil” mantra.
A Timeline
April 2007 – Google acquires DoubleClick, and all it’s subsidiary businesses including Performics, the affiliate marketing network. Conflict of interest, anyone?
June 2008 – Google rebrands Performics as the Google Affiliate Network (GAN).
October 2009 [...]
What Every Google User, Advertiser, and Shareholder Needs to Know
Last summer was kind of stressful. After careful consideration, and 2 years of Internet-business income history, I decided to quit my job (salary, benefits, company car, all gone). The very next day, Google decided my site was “poor quality” and “irrelevant” — and would no longer [...]
I wish I’d taken a picture of this mailer I got last week from the hometown Ford dealer. It was so awesomely scammy I’m afraid my description won’t do it justice. Full color, quality card stock, they really went all out. One side was designed to look like the cover of USA Today, and had [...]
Location, location, location.
On the Internet, a good domain name is the online equivalent of that corner lot in the neighborhood with good schools. The problem is, all the good names are taken and only “fixer-uppers” are left. That’s why you have companies called Flickr, Rowdii, Weebly, and Sedo — which auctions off domain names [...]
It’s pretty exciting to have made it a full year on my own without having to look for another job. Still, with the Internet and the economy changing so fast, nothing is certain.
Last summer for example, I fell victim to the “Google Slap” and lost 75%+ of my traffic and revenue for three months. Stressful. [...]
This week I had the opportunity to join deucejing in Mountain View for lunch and a tour of Google’s world headquarters. The Googleplex is a pretty amazing place, and a lot has already been written about it so I’ll stick with the highlights of what I thought was interesting/cool/funny.
When I first pulled up, I passed [...]
I got an official-looking notice in the mail yesterday from the “Annual Review Board” of California, asking me to send them my LLC Statement of Information along with a $228 processing fee. There was a very tight deadline for sending it in, with a steep penalty for being late.
I was thinking I better put this [...]
I’m in the middle of my monthly inventory evaluation, which involves taking stock of all my existing shoe ads, and creating new ones for new products. This takes roughly 100 hours and I just like to get it done so I basically work non-stop trying to get through it.
Yesterday I learned the hard way the [...]
The “crowds” (Amazon reviewers) liked James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, so I checked it out and read it poolside in Cabo. I wasn’t a huge fan.
While the book had a few interesting tidbits, it was mostly filled with less-than-insightful passages explaining why our collective intelligence can actually be pretty smart. For example, it doesn’t [...]
