Financial & Travel Musings

Oh, you thought that you had some personal privacy? Sorry, it seems that you’re wrong and that you ARE being watched.

For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

Popularity: 61% [?]

Much as we might laugh at the Trabants that East Germany used to turn out as being unreliable and prone to break down, sadly that’s what many blogs seem to look like these days.

Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I run a series of interlinked holiday accommodation listings sites which started as something of a sideline for me but which is slowly becoming a significant income generator for me.

Now, in the early days it was quite clearly a straight listing service. I typed up the entries as they came in and they were displayed on the site as a great big list. Nice and simple if somewhat time-consuming.

As it grew, I figured that a database was the way to go and in the second year that went live. By then the original 20 properties had grown to over 100. Mark 1 of that simply replicated the original hand-produced site and a version of that is still around to this day because the hand-produced format is much more effective in SEO terms than a written for database site is for various reasons.

With the dramatic reduction in the work required from me to actually add the information, I broadened the amount and variety of information that the property owners could add. That increased so much that I figured after a while that I should write a new-generation version of the original site to run alongside the original version but targeted at a different market. The increase in information meant that properties now had a little website each with several pages on it.

Interestingly though, I’ve recently come across a free accommodation property site that has come at the problem from the opposite direction. What they do is get the property owners to add a whole lot of information and they produce a little website for them which gets listed by them.

What’s clear is that we’ll both likely meet in the middle several years down the line as I’m in the process of souping up the mini website that my listing service generates and already some people are quoting that address as “their” website address which presumably will become more common as time goes on. In fact, it’ll become more and more of a website generation facility over the months to come as that’s my main area for development this year.

The question next year though will be: how do I promote it to the owners? The listing service aspect will clearly remain but there’ll also be the aspect of building almost custom websites for the owners (surprisingly easy to do). In fact, thanks to the recent change of hosting service I’ll even be able to let each owner use their own domain to point to their “mini” website (which will potentially be larger than many “proper” websites).

Popularity: 9% [?]