Wordpress Tip: How to Show a Complete Post in Category Archive View

On a another blog I run in which I use the PlainTxt Wordpress theme, I noticed that often Google would link to a category of my site, but when you navigated to that part of my blog, all that would appear were partial posts with no graphics. It looked crappy, like the searcher accidentally clicked on a spam blog or something. I wanted to fix it. Unfortunately, it took me a couple hours to figure it out.

The answer lies deep in the bowels of the Wordpress code in the archives.php file. In the code there is a call for something called "the_excerpt," which strips down each post to the barebones and removes any graphics. To get your Wordpress blog to show the full post, graphics and all, simply replace the_except with the_content. Check it out, the full posts.

Now hopefully people who navigate to your categories view will stick around a little longer after thinking they have the full site available to them and not a bunch of spam.

YouTube HD - Better YouTube for Firefox Users

Just another reason to use Firefox: the Better YouTube Firefox extension, which gives you better quality of YouTube video (and consequently, bigger video files to download). I suggest going into the settings of the extension and turning on theater view and YouTube HD. Not every video has an alternate higher quality version, but many do. Really cool.

Google Fantasy Sports

Now that the courts have ruled that baseball statistics are not copyrighted, how about Google getting in on that fantasy sports action? It's one of the last things that keeps going back to my old Yahoo account.

Is Google's Growth Rate In Trouble?

The New York Times' Steve Lohr has an article on the risks Google faces in continuing its growth. The author's main concerns are employee bloat, search technology competition, and government intervention.

While each of those is indeed worrisome for Google stockholders, the real threat is competition to its Adsense technology. Google makes a big chunk of its revenue from supplying ads to other websites. Lohr mentions the threat.

"Google’s ad revenue comes mainly from two sources: text ads from its own search results and ads it places on the Web sites of other companies. On the latter, it pays 80 cents or so of each dollar to the Web site and keeps the rest. Increased competition in ad networks, especially from Microsoft, will drive the payouts higher, nibbling away at Google’s profits.

This ad-supply market is quickly becoming crowded with competition. Glancing at any search engine optimization blog reveals tales of making good, in some cases better, money from Google's competitors. One recent example is Digg.com inking a lucrative deal with Microsoft to use its ad-supply tech. Digg had been using Adsense. There also have been complaints about the relevancy of Google's Adsense ads. What good is it if you have a blog about flowers and the ad engine is not supplying relevant advertising? However, webmasters can complain until they're blue in the face, ultimately, it's the advertiser's, not the webmaster's, opinion which matters. The money starts with the advertiser, and they are the ones who see the click rates and their effect on sales. If advertisers feel they get better click-through at cheaper rates from someone else, they will move. Google's advantage is that they can offer their dominant search engine in combination with possible Adsense results as well, something that no other competition can offer. This, in turn, encourages webmasters to use Adsense. If you have a blog about some weird fetish but no advertiser is buying the keywords for your fetish from your ad supplier, you're not making any money from blogging. But, Google might have advertisers for those keywords via their search engine, where else you gonna find links to your obscure fetish? Thus, Google has the snowball rolling down the hill effect--more users, more searches, more keywords, more advertisers.

Another advantage Google has for the future is the size of the market (not market share, but simply the market) is growing. We hear a lot about Google's market share versus its competitors, but we hear little about whether the number of actual searches is growing. It's very likely that every year, more and more people type keywords into Google's search engine. More and more people rely on technology to supplement their memory. More and more are turning to the computer for entertainment, communication, and all around information. And they turn to Google to find it. Financial people know about increase in same-store sales, but they don't know about increase in same-person search.

Why Mahalo Sucks

Take a look at Mahalo.com's search return for the iPhone. The page is dominated by outdated information, the most prominent is an ancient YouTube video of a CBS news report from prior to the phone's release. The most-asked question about Mahalo's user-generated search results was how they would keep the information up-to-date. I've heard Mahalo's creators promise that it would not be a problem, citing Wikipedia as an example. They have obviously failed in the near term. If they can't even keep information on a hot topic like the iPhone relevant, Mahalo may have to find other ways to survive.

Toward that end, it's interesting to note that the the Mahalo iPhone page came up on the second page of Google results for the iPhone. So, it seems that Mahalo is becoming an SEO rather than a search engine.

NY Times' Miguel Helft: Google's Pacific Cable No Big Deal

In a recent blog post titled "Google's Cables Make Unnecessary Waves," The New York Times' Miguel Helft makes the case that news of Google's involvement in laying new cable across the Pacific Ocean is no big deal.

"But my sources told me that Google has long considered becoming part owner of undersea cables, not as part of some new telecom venture, but rather because it needs the bandwidth to move massive amounts of digital information between its data centers around the world. The company already leases capacity in underwater cables, and owning some of the cables outright might prove cheaper than paying rents."

First off, Google isn't trying to start a "new telecom venture," they already have one. Google is currently using their own routers and dark fiber to send their data across the country, which is what a telecom does. Google is cutting out the cost of using other middlemen (other telecoms). Telecoms also own fiber and routers and make money by charging companies like Google to use their hardware. If Helft is talking about Google becoming an ISP, then yes, this news isn't of much interest. But if we're talking about Google expanding its ownership of the hardware backbone that is the Internet, then it is big news. A basic understanding of how the Internet works and what the definition of telecom is could have helped Helft out. His sources tipped him in the right direction, but he failed to connect the dots.