Greg Vandagriff

So I’m going to confess something silly: I keep an eye on my number of facebook friends. I know it really doesn’t mean anything, but I think it’s fun to monitor (just like your credit score). That is, it’s fun to monitor except when one encounters the phenomenon of what I refer to as “friendrot”.

What is friendrot? Friendrot is when you notice a gradual decline in your number of facebook friends. Now for many people, this isn’t a big deal, but I freely admit that I get paranoid and wonder WHO removed me from their friendlist. I typically will search my list of friends frantically to see if I can catch who’s missing, but I never seem to be able to figure out who it is. You’d think it’d be the people that you don’t really know and wonder why you have on your friend list, but NooOOoOo… that useless trash is content to remain, cluttering the view of the rest of your social network (until you delete them).

While I am aware that my glittering social commentary and magnetic personality will go largely unnoticed by the public as a whole, I was never aware that people would actually REMOVE me as a friend!

Many aspects of life are disturbing; being able to visibly observe a decline in your social influence is one of them.

The answer, of course, is to work like a madman to find more people that you know and add them to your friendlist in a frenzied attempt to counteract the diabolic decaying influence of friendrot.

Which is exactly what I’m doing.

It’s truly fascinating how being deprived of a functioning computer for a few weeks substantially impacts how I spend my time and how regularly I update my blog! Nevertheless, I am slowly trying to return to my regular technology-injected lifestyle as evidenced by my finally deciding to post again on here.

It’s an interesting time to be me… between outrageous traffic tickets, the approaching launch of the book I co-authored with my parents, and the return to classes at BYU on the horizon (with the associated hassle of financial aid); it is safe to say that I am a little anxious.

Perhaps in part to my depression, my traditional response to anxiety has been to shut down and avoid thinking about it much. While I admit I’ve been doing a little of that lately, I think I’m doing a pretty good job at keeping a handle on things right now.

That’s all for now.

After a lengthy series of events which culminated in the replacement of my laptop’s motherboard, I am happy to report that I once again have my laptop back and therefore you can expect to see a return to regular posting on this blog, for better or for worse.

As the internet grows increasingly pervasive, it’s influence being felt in most every industry in this day and age, what will happen to the author of old times? The one who writes books in hopes that a publisher picks it up and supplies it to bookstores and other distributors.

After discussing this briefly with my boss and fellow search engine marketer, In my opinion the changes of the internet are good for the talented author, as you can in theory remove the middleman (the publisher) from the equation.

There are different approaches to how a talented author could make money without a publisher:

1.) Writing free content which is backed by ads, in which case the primary revenue source would be advertising.

2.) Writing premium content which you charge users to buy, such as ebooks, site membership, and so forth.

3.) A combination of the above two, “freemium” content.

I don’t know what the future of traditional books is, but the enterprising author can, with a little creativity and ingenuity, conceivably make more money from the internet than they could through conventional book sales.

For those who are curious, my posting has slowed down in part because the Vostro’s keyboard went crazy on me and so I sent it off to the Dell factory yesterday to get it fixed. I was plagued with a curious issue wherein the computer thought that the “Fn” key was being constantly held down. And yes, I tried the shift + f11, fn + scroll lock, and all the other key combinations to no avail. Pressing the key itself does nothing, it just treats it as though it’s constantly pressed down. When I use an external USB keyboard, it’s fine, but that sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop.

I’m waiting until I get the computer back before passing final judgment on the matter. If they can fix the keyboard and get it back to me in a speedy fashion, then it will be an accolade for Dell’s service. If the problem continues after I get it back…

Anyhow. That’s your update from the life of Greg Vandagriff for now.

So I got my new laptop last week, the Dell Vostro 1400, and I’ve had some time to get acquainted with it since then. I know that most of you have been awaiting my verdict regarding this particular piece of technology with much anticipation, and so I will favor you with a brief review.

In a nutshell: I love it. The only complaint I have is the time that it took for me to get it!

While I admit that I am fairly easy to please, I must say that I couldn’t have been happier with my purchase. It’s fast, quiet, and runs all of my applications easily. The cooling is more than adequate, I am able to go for long periods of time with the Vostro sitting comfortably on my lap and I have no complaint.

It’s only available in black, which may be a turnoff to some, but I happen to be quite fond of the color, so it’s a non-issue; after all, true excellence does not draw attention to itself.

I definitely got my money’s worth from this purchase; I can find nothing else in the current laptop market that would match the sheer value that I got from my hard-earned cash.

In short: Two thumbs up.

So I recently finished “reading” the book Freakonomics, as purchased for my by my father. I use the term “reading” loosely, as I mostly skimmed through a lot of the book and only seriously delved into a few chapters, as is characteristic of my ADD. That being said, I give the book two enthusiastic thumbs up.

By far the most interesting portion of the book was delving into the economics of a Chicago crack gang; from the payroll to the board of directors to the ramifications of gang warfare, the entire chapter was one interesting read. Other interesting sections regarded debunking the numerous pseudo-explanations for the drop in crime in the mid-90’s, contrary to what experts were predicting

Overall, I’d say that this is a book worth reading.

So after observing a nosedive in traffic for one of my newer websites I was understandably concerned. I had grown rather accustomed to the small trickle of traffic I was pulling in from the search engines on longtail terms. Initially I chalked up the sudden fall in traffic to the Google Sandbox, although this conclusion didn’t exactly sit well with me, as the Sandbox generally shouldn’t come into play with SERPS on longtail traffic.

I did take into account, however, the fact that my traffic started falling shortly after I changed the layout on my website. It turns out that this might have been, from the perspective of pure profits, a bad move. Not that changing the layout itself was a poor decision, I think everyone involved would find the new layout more usable than the old one, it was a combination of changing the layout without changing the sitemap that Google was accessing. After checking in with Google’s webmaster tools, I think I found the problem: Google was trying to crawl my page based on the old sitemap and as a result was finding hundreds of imaginary dead links. It generated over 1,000 crawl errors before I was able to submit a more up-to-date sitemap.

I think these crawl errors are the culprit for why my site suddenly is performing so poorly; Google must think that my site is one big puddle of linkrot! I can only hope that the damage to my site’s SERPs isn’t irreversible and that it will return to its former position in a few days. This assumes that the hit to my site’s traffic is, in fact, due to the sitemap crawl errors and that the two weren’t just coincidentally occurring at the same time.

Some time ago, Google took a hard stance against link sales; after all, such behavior was diluting the quality of their search results by favoring those who could afford the often high price of renting/buying links.

By penalizing sites which sold links while simultaneously pocketing cash from their own link sales via Adwords, Google attracted a lot of criticism from SEOs for their hypocritical behavior. That being said, in the eyes of some, Google’s move was a good one… as now the playing field no longer favored the wealthy, right?

Wrong.

Enter the “content creation specialist”, either a cheap freelancer or script-kiddie aided by content scrapers and automated article rewriters. Both specialize in creating large volumes of “original” content plastered with strategically-worded links. End result? Crappy, but unpenalized, content that links to… you guessed it, the rich guy’s website who can afford to hire these cheap hacks in large volume.

And people wonder why there are so many “spam” sites on the internet… by directly penalizing the direct sale of backlinks, Google did not solve “the problem”. They merely obfuscated the process of turning money into linkjuice by inserting a middleman: the content creation specialist. From an economic perspective, I honestly don’t think that the cost of link juice has changed all that much…

Yet more evidence of the fact that the denizens of an economy will innovate and substitute their way around the crude barriers imposed by governments or absurdly powerful entities (such as Google). As is often the case with such events, ultimately nothing has changed, we’ve just exchanged one set of “problems” for another.

Well, I discovered today that my personal elasticity of demand for a macbook was too high to see it through.

It’s not that I don’t want a Mac. I do. Really. It’s just that they’re so very expensive when priced next to a Dell Vostro. As a student in my current financial situation, I’ve decided that I honestly can’t afford a mac, as I would have to essentially cut myself off from all expenses for the remainder of the summer in order to finance the purchase.

For those who are curious, I purchased a Dell Vostro 1400; core 2 duo processor (2ghz), 3gigs of Ram along with some wussy little video card to power Vista’s Aero effects. 120gig hard drive, dvd burner, bluetooth, vista home premium, etc. The pricetag clocked in at just under $800.

The moral of the story is one that you probably already knew: college students are more price-sensitive than the average consumer. Go figure.

Someday when I’m fabulously wealthy I might get a Mac… but not today.