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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: May 2014

Brent Simmons on the history of UserLand

Brent Simmons posted a really nice recollection of his days at UserLand back in the late nineties. I was a Mac user at the time, and I was building sites using Frontier. It really was something completely new. The idea of having “Edit This Page” buttons on sites was pretty radical at the time, and eventually became a compulsory part of any decent content management system.

One slight correction — I think amphetaDesk was the first desktop RSS aggregator. Its creator, Morbus Iff, is still around, tweeting.

Danny Sullivan on Google and MetaFilter

Search engine analyst Danny Sullivan applies his expertise to analyzing the penalties MetaFilter that might have cost the site a huge chunk of its Google search traffic. It’s a really interesting look at how Google penalizes sites that try to game the system.

The section on how Google penalizes publishers for inbound “unnatural links” is really interesting:

It’s insane because it has allowed the same sites that charged people to get links to now charge for them to be removed. Or for the rise of an entire link debuilding industry. Or for publishers who have long suffered terrible link requests to now get messages from people asking for links to be removed.

The article has some really good advice for Google in how it manages its relationship with publishers. I also liked this bit:

Earn respect. That’s your best defense if things go south with Google. It’s also your best offense for doing well in Google.

As Sullivan points out, people cheered when Google lit Demand Media on fire and set them adrift.

Maybe you should be afraid of Google

One of the big stories in my small world over the past week or so has been the layoffs at MetaFilter. Matt Haughey broke the news in a MetaTalk post on the state of the site. Here’s the bottom line:

While MetaFilter approaches 15 years of being alive and kicking, the overall website saw steady growth for the first 13 of those years. A year and a half ago, we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates. We scoured the web and took advice of reducing ads in the hopes traffic would improve but it never really did, staying steady for several months and then periodically decreasing by smaller amounts over time.

The long-story-short is that the site’s revenue peaked in 2012, back when we hired additional moderators and brought our total staff up to eight people. Revenue has dropped considerably over the past 18 months, down to levels we last saw in 2007, back when there were only three staffers.

Today, he posted more details on Medium, both about the drop in revenue and Google’s recent classification of MetaFilter as a content farm. This has been happening to other reputable blogs as well. I haven’t gotten any of these requests, or if I have, they have gone unread.

I don’t really think of Google as a monopolist, but it is true that Google holds the fate of any number of Internet businesses in their hands. This is true whether they rely on Google-served ads for revenue, or they rely on organic search traffic from Google to grow their visitor base. I oftentimes tell people that Google is to Internet businesses what weather is to farmers. You can have fertile soil, plant the right crops, and run your farm incredibly well, but if it doesn’t rain, you’re not going to have anything to harvest in the end. By the same token, if Google makes a change that directs traffic away from your site, you’ll find yourself in the same situation as MetaFilter.

That’s scary. I don’t really have any solutions to propose, but the degree to which the Web publishing industry has become almost wholly dependent on Google demands more attention.

Comparative risk

Walking on a high wire is inherently dangerous, but you’ve said that you prepare so much that death is not a risk.

No, it’s not. I think this is very wrong to put your life in danger or to gamble with your life. I cannot do the first step not being absolutely sure that I will successfully perform the last.

That’s from a Jessica Gross interview with Philippe Petit, the tight rope walker who was the subject of Man on Wire.

Relatively speaking, the risk assumed by Petit isn’t any greater than the risk you or I assume when crossing a busy street. The thrill is in the fact that for regular people, doing what Petit does would be impossibly risky. Preparation is everything.

I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be.

Tyler Cowen in Are home pages dying? And what is the value of a shadow reader?

But something else has happened over the past ten years; browsers got better. Their support for standards improved, and now there are evergreen browsers: automatically updating browsers, each version more capable and standards compliant than the last. With newer standards like HTML Imports, Object.observe, Promises, and HTML Templates I think it’s time to rethink the model of JS frameworks. There’s no need to invent yet another way to do something, just use HTML+CSS+JS.

Joe Gregorio argues that we should stop writing and adopting JavaScript frameworks and rely on the modern Web instead. This article is a great big picture view of the Web front-end as it exists today. If you do Web development, it’s a must-read.

Update: Read this excellent follow-up from Sam Ruby as well.

Tim Bray’s Piketty roundup

On Piketty on Capital

Tim Bray reviews the book of the year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and more importantly, rounds up the key reactions from around the Web. I’m very interested on the book, and I’m sure it will be on my “to read” list for a long time.

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