Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Chirstmas Was a Bust

Income wise, Christmas 2012 was a total bust. The total income was $6.47.

October and November were pathetic as well.

Of course such was to be expected. Google removed me from their index because I (gasp) ask people who add sites to my directory to pay a listing fee.

I started charging the listing fee because it is pain to maintain local directories.

I am still getting several thousand visitors a day ... but they are all looking for local brick and mortar stores. So no commissions there.

Since the Community Color sites no longer make enough to pay hosting fees, I need to figure out what to do with them.

IMHO, they provide a community service by providing listings for the small local sites that no one else will list.

On the bright side. I now no longer have to worry about the effects of the fiscal cliff. I won't have to pay taxes because I have no income.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Linking is Fundamental

The World Wide Web is written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

The defining characteristic of HTML is the hyperlink. The HyperLink is what differentiates the web from other forms of writing.

For that matter, the links to and from a web site matter almost as much as the content. There are massive new fields in which people study the topology of the hyperlink.

For example, Social Media is all about people linking with other people.

In many ways, linking is more important than content. Twitter is a program that uses 140 character posts and is primarily about linking.

Needless to say, there is an economic component to linking.

Good links on popular sites makes your site popular.

Google is a massive fortune 100 company that has made billions selling paid links.

Google is the dominant search engine. In October, Google announced that they will punish anyone who buys paid links.

I repeat. Google is a company that makes billions selling paid links. In October, Google announced that they will punish any company that engages in business with a competitor.

The hypocrisy aside. Google's direct attack on engaging in link development is attack on the fundamentals of the Internet.

Anyway, I was developing a collection of community directories under the brand "Community Color." It costs about $150 to host the collection of sites. To help offset the cost, I asked people who submit to the directory to pay a listing fee of $12.00.

Needless to say, after Google's announcement that they will punish anyone who does business with competitor, and the directories are now effectively insolvent.

I had started building community directories in 1999. I started up north with a collection of directories I gave away (Missoula.ws is the only site left from the original experiment.)  The idea behind the project was that linking is fundamental and that, for small independent web sites to survive they have to engage in active link development.

The best place to start is the local community.

If people do not link with each other, then large evil companies like Google will dominate and we will lose the independent web.