Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

Just a quick note. I have a funeral to attend tomorrow, and then I’ll be catching a plane that night to Dallas for the weekend. I’ll be catching a Robert Earl Keen concert while I’m there, so that should be fun.

If you’re trying to contact me about something for FreeText.biz, or Feedbutton.com, or NoSlang.com etc, it’s going to take a few days for me to get back to you. It also makes me wish Outlook had an auto responder function.

I always dread going on mini vacations because it just means I’ll have about 2500 emails waiting for me on Monday. Owell.

Looking for a romantic candlelit dinner this valentines day? Look no further than your local White Castle. On February 14th (That’s valentines day guys, you’re running out of time) select White Castles will be offering hostess seating, candlelit dining, and your own server from 5-8pm.

This isn’t just a normal even though, you’ll need to make a reservation – so call your local White Castle now.

If you don’t want to splurge this year, there’s always the take home option of a “Cupid’s Crave Kit” that includes 8 burgers, fries, drinks, coupons, and special keepsake items.

“Go ahead honey…. get anything you want off of the value menu. It’s your special day.”

How come Google hasn’t bought Wikipedia yet? Google usually buys technology over traffic (although with youtube that’s changing), and Wikipedia fits well being the first to do wiki.

Not only that, but Google heavily favors wikipedia results at the top of their own search results, and references it often. Even some internal documents and contract employee instructions reference wikipedia in some cases.

With a significant portion of their rankings based on Wikipedia, would it make sense for Google to just purchase it? Or does having it remain an independant 3rd party help Google remain unbiased* and credible?

* – some would argue that automatically ranking Wikipedia results high introduces another type of bias.

Ever wonder what the news would read like if the people who wrote stock spam emails were in charge of it? Looking at my inbox from this morning, it’d sound something like this:

Idyllwild, Missouri: Several thousand GOP supporters cheered Bush Friday for blowing a small airplane carrying Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle off course which forced a ballot measure that would resolve bankrupt smallpox in the trial of former Iraqi leader Pablo Cerda, 23, of Fountain Valley.

The National Transportation Safety firefighters who were overrun by flames said the full board will likely vote on a ruling October 26 in Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains.

Way back in the day, SEO was easy. Search engines looked at something called META tags for keywords to determine what a website was about. This made it easy for webmasters to tell the search engines what their site dealt with. Unfortunately, it also made it easy for people to rank highly for any term they desired.

Those of you who searched the web in the 90’s will remeber porn sites showing up for stuff like “new car” – it was common.

Then came Google. Google revolutionized the industry by looking at links. Larry and Sergey theorized that if academic papers get more clout based on how many papers reference them, the web can work the same way too. After all, back then the web was just like a series of academic papers.

The SEO paradigm had shifted from on page optimization to off page factors – specifically links.

But now things are changing. Wikipedia is nofollowing links, big time bloggers like Robert Scoble are debating if they have a responsibility to link to others, and companies are selling links like crazy.

All of this makes me ask: will there come a time when it won’t be worth it to rank websites based on links? Are links going the way of the META tag? Has this point already happened? Are we close?

If so, what’s the next big discovery going to be? People say that Google is unbeatable; so much so that the term “Google Killer” is becoming a mock cliche. One of the easiest ways to make your business fail is to label it a “Google Killer”. But is that true?

Google came to power because they were the first to realize the paradigm shift – and they took advantage of it by building a useful product. The paradigm will undoubtedly shift again, but what to? Whoever figures that out stands to make a lot of money.

Continuing in the typical blogger tradition of posting cat pictures, here’s some more pictures of my cat Whodey.

Whodey is a 14 week old bengal kitten. That means she’s like a regular cat, but longer (and will grow bigger), and a little smarter. She’s not afraid of water, plays fetch, hide and seek, and is pretty smart. In fact, she can jump pretty high too:

I bought her a scratching post the other day (I still haven’t decided if she gets to keep her claws. That’s up to how she acts.

After about 4 hours she pulled all the yarn out of that toy. When she was finished pulling out the yarn she bit off the string, brought it to me and started crying “Hey, I broke my toy.”

Compared to my mom’s cat, whodey is a handfull. She recently decided she likes to swim in her water bowl, and proceeds to make a flood in my kitchen every day. She also likes to sleep under the covers with me. She crawls underneath and curls up against my stomach. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem, but I toss and turn a lot so I constantly get woken up with a claw to the ribs and meow that says “hey, get off of me.”

Here’s a couple more pictures.

From the schools don’t over-react to things file comes this story on CNN claiming that 6 girls (ages 14-15) have been charged with homicide consipiracy for planning to kill a list of people including the Energizer Bunny, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey.

While none of the girls had any weapons, it would seem one of them had a MySpace account that had the word kill on it somewhere. (of course we don’t know where because the page has been removed.)

Using the word kill is clearly a very serious attempt on a person’s life, and I’m sure it will be revealed shortly that MySpace is to blame for this.

USA Today reports that there seems to be an alcohol jihad occuring amongst the taxi drivers in Minnesota.

To sum up the story, muslim taxi drivers from somolia are refusing to fare airport passengers carrying alcohol due to religious beliefs. Since many of the airports flights are international, a lot of tourists have duty free acohol with them. Some people have reported waiting hours just to get a cab ride.

They can’t call another cab company because of the airport’s strict contract, and the cab company is afraid to fire the cabbies since they’re claiming religious beliefs.

It seems to me like this should be a non issue. It’s perfectly legal to carry unopened alcohol in a cab, and the cabbie’s job is to fare passengers. I think the cab company would be completely justified in firing these employes. After all, I’d surely be fired if I refused to do my job.

If they let this go, where will it stop? What would happen if this worked the other way and some cabbie refused to fare anybody carring the Koran, or refused to fare passengers to or from abortion clinics?

Freedom of religion doesn’t just give you the right to practice what you want; it also means that you can’t impose your religion upon others. If you don’t want to be around alcohol, such as when working as a taxi driver, it’s important to consider your job responsibilities. Nobody forced you to take this job, and if you’re uncomfortable performing all of its duties, like handling premature job dismissal, , then it might be wise to explore other career options that align better with your beliefs and values.

There’s a battle going on in the UK trying to extend music copyrights longer than the 50 year term originally imposed. Musicians argue that they need the money that copyrights create for them, and that without longer copyrights they’ll have no incentive to create new music.

It seems to me though, that the opposite is more likely. These musicians created songs knowing that they’d continue to recieve royalties for 50 years – so it was enough incentive for them originally. In addition to that, it seems to me like having your income run out would be a great motivator to create new songs that you could earn money from.

Copyright isn’t intended to be a system of making sure musicians continue to recieve royalties for stuff they did 50 years ago. It was designed to encourage innovation, and discourage copying and ripping off.

LiveScience (via Yahoo.com) has an article stating that children in homes full of books and educational games are less likely to be spanked than their counterparts.

The article goes on to imply that if you give your kids books and games they won’t cause as much trouble as kids that don’t have such luxuries. While their may be some truth to that, it’s more likely that these two are simply correlated to another event: parents who care.

Research will also show that the more active, caring, and envolved parents have more well behaved children. Buying books and games is something a caring parent does.

I guess there’s 2 lessons to learn from this article:

1.) Just because 2 things are related doesn’t mean one causes the other.
2.) Merely buying your kid books and games won’t make him well behaved. You have to spend time with him too!