YouPorn - New YouTube Paid Subscriptions

YouTube announced that they are now allowing their publishers to charge subscription fees. This means if you upload videos to YouTube, you can charge people to access them.

Pay to see my cat on YouTube?

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it too. I would rather watch a 15 second commercial than spend $5 a month to see most videos. In fact, I would probably stop watching a channel altogether rather than pay a subscription fee for their service. No video on YouTube is that important to me.

So what's the benefit?

I suspect that many channels will setup a seperate, commerrcial free, paid channel and beef up the length of commercials on the main channel. That way you can have the free version with longer commercials or the paid version with no commercials. That I can handle. I spent my youth (pre-DVR) watching commercial supported TV and I still will watch a commercial from time to time if it catches my attention, asterisks & all.

Who will do it?

That is a good question. The news agencies talked about National Geographic, Jim Henson & UFC, but I think they've missed the mark on coverage. There is one industry that Google doesn't have enough share in: Porn. Since they cater to the full range of people they fight, very hard, every day to prevent pornographic results from showing up in their standard search tools. On YouTube publishers can be banned for not properly marking their content as adult.

Sounds like Google doesn't want porn.

It depends. There's a lot of money in porn, which is why it's still around and so successful on the internet. Google has spent so much time fighting it they haven't been able to properly monetize it. Now that they have investors to please, money has become a priority. So, how do you make money from one of the largest industries on the internet? Let them run their business on your servers.

Isn't there already...

Pornographic videos on YouTube? Yes, but there were a lot of problems associated with them. YouTubers complain, videos are mislabeled not adult, and worst of all: the porn publishers are always trying to lead people off YouTube. YouTube does not want this. Keep people on YouTube and you make more money. If you cannot access porn videos without paying subscription fees there are almost no complaints. If you don't have to leave YouTube to access their paid content, Google investors are happy.

YouTube will now be YouPorn?

YouTube is the best option for online video on the internet. They have the most users, video upload options, promotion options and the lowest cost of video hosting. This is the biggest change in the porn industry since PayPal and I suspect over the next year the millions of porn sites on the internet will be moving a good portion of their content to YouTube. Now we can look forward to even more suggestive ads and messages asking us to come to their YouTube channel. So, there's that.

No Excuses

When I was a kid teachers would often ask me my reasoning for whatever mistake I had made that day. I would then give them the reason asked for only to be cut off by the statement "I don't want to hear excuses!" Over the course of my life I have heard this statement over and over in various iterations down to the most basic "no excuses" and I want it to stop.

Excuse me?

I guess it boils down to understanding what the meaning of the word excuse is: A reason or explanation put forward to defend or justify a fault or offense. So, if I buy a burger and you ask me why, my response of "I was hungry" is an excuse.

Wouldn't that be an explanation?

Well, the definition for explanation is almost the same: a reason or justification given for an action or belief. I guess the similarities arise when someone asks you "what's your excuse?" The answer could be considered both an explanation or an excuse. The confusion comes from how general society has reengineered the meaning of excuse to mean: an attempt to lessen the blame attaching to (a fault or offense); seek to defend or justify.

That sounds reasonable.

Until someone decides to demote your explanation without evidence or providing a reason. For example:

"Why were you late?"
"I was in a fender bender."
"I'm tired of your excuses."

The accuser has now changed the explanation into an excuse implying that the explanation was a complete fabrication. Nevermind the fact that the second person could probably show the damage on the car or the record on their cell phone showing a 911 call.

Maybe they always give excuses.

And that may be true, but it does not merit the dismissing of an explanation out of hand. And this is where my annoyance stems. I am not habitually late, nor do I provide a plethora of excuses, but I have too often been the recipient of the No Excuses beratement. If my explanation is lame and should have not caused the problem, I will say so. There is no need to declare me a liar.

Calling you a liar is mean.

And that is why they say No Excuses. That is a perfectly acceptable statement in society that does not convey the meaning that the person is necessarilly a liar. So they use it instead of what they really mean, which is: "I don't really care why things went wrong, I'm just mad that they did and I want you to take the blame and apologize."

Sorry.

No need to be. We all get frustrated when things don't go our way, but we don't want to say it in fear that someone might think us a 5 year old. You're not 5 and your feelings are valid. I hate it when things go wrong too, but calling me a liar isn't the solution. Saying "I'm frustrated that you're late" will still prompt an apology from me without exasperating the situation. We should all try to be nicer.

No Excuses

You got that right.

HTCPCP and Error 418

I was snooping around the internet back in 1998 looking at all the cool stuff and learning about the technology when I read a memo from the IETF. They were introducing a new online protocol: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. Being that it was dated April 1st, I guessed it was a prank.

Whoop dee do...

It was a really good prank. At the time we didn't have the volume of weirdness that we do on the internet today. It was rather novel and somewhat before the rise of geek culture, back when Starbucks had less than 2000 locations (~17,000 today). It also worked.

How?

Well, servers can return any error they want and your browser will display it. Web servers tend to stick to the same list of codes and these have been grandfathered in. You can use it with coffee pots:

• BREW or POST - Tells the HTCPCP server to brew some coffee. It includes an Accept-Additions HTTP Request header field to request Cream, Whole-milk, Sugar, etc.
• GET - Retrieves coffee from the HTCPCP server.
• PROPFIND - Aquires metadata about the coffee: is it ready, how hot is it, etc.
• WHEN  - Causes the HTCPCP server to stop pouring milk or cream into the coffee (if requested with the brew function).

Of course these don't always work. If you have a Teapot server, for example, you cannot BREW coffee in it.

So it returns 404: Coffee Pot not found?

Nope: 418 I'm a Teapot. This has been the best relic of this prank. People over the years have created teapot servers just so they can return this entirely valid error.

There was a post on SEOMoz about error codes and how they apply to SEO. The author missed the 418 error, so I created the image to the right.

Now I want Tea.

Well, this server is a teapot, but your browser only knows how to ask for coffee. Internet geeks never thought you would need a HTTPCP. For now you can learn how to make your own Teapot server.

Dr. Sholl's Custom Orthotics is a Scam

Over the years I've worked a lot with importers, wholesalers and manufacturers. Most of these are in the shoe business and I hear some interesting stories.

Like what?

Have you heard about Dr. Scholl's? They produce low end insoles and orthotics. Despite the extremely low quality they are some of the most popular insoles on the market. I'm not surprised since they spend a boatload of money on commercial marketing.

What's TV.

Funny. Well, they're the company to beat and a lot of companies try. I was talking to an importer today and he mentioned one of these companies was trying to knock off the Dr. Scholl's product line. They had purchased the entire Dr. Scholl's line of Custom Fit Orthotics and sent them to a manufacturer in China to copy.

Sneaky.

Not so much. My importer friend was talking with the same manufacturer. They had pulled apart the orthotics to figure out how to copy them. Imagine their surprise when they found that the CF110, CF220, CF330 & the CF440 had no differences between them.

Identical insoles?

Yes, the Custom Fit Orthotics are all identical. I had to see this for myself. I drove over to the nearest Walgreens and went to the Dr. Scholls kiosk to examine the merchandise. Lucky for me all the boxes are transparent and they had a sample insole for me to check out.

Well?

I looked them over, I checked the foam density through the cutout in the packaging and I looked for something, anything that would show they were different from product to product. I found one: The color. The only difference between the CF110, CF220, CF330 & CF440 is the color. Otherwise they are all identical.

Well, if it works...

I suspect that they don't work. The foam was so soft that they would feel nice, but they will provide no benefit. There was no arch support, no heel posting, and no metatarsal support. These are important things since the problems they claim to fix would require these features. Here's why:

• Excessive pressure on the front of the foot. Fixed by a metatarsal pad that distributes the pressure.
• Fallen arches (often caused by age & wearing shoes). Fixed by a firm arch support.
• Collapsed arches causing ankle to turn inward (pronation). Fixed by a firm wedge under the inner heel (posting).

The pressure sensors on the Dr. Scholl's kiosk are there to detect these issues and recommend an insole that will fix them. If all the insoles are identical and do not have any of the above features, none of the detected problems will be fixed.

Dr. Scholl's Custom Fit Orthotics are a scam!

You're annoyed, as well you should be. They're preying on the ignorance of most footcare shoppers and implying they are providing the proper remedies and are not. They don't actually say that they provide any of the specific items I listed above, they're only implied. The packaging does not actually say the insoles are different, only different product numbers and colors.

Is it dishonest.

In my opinion? Yes. People are not podiatrists or pedorthists and have no idea what's going on with their feet or how to fix it if there was. A $10 insole with a heel cup & arch support would accomplish the same thing these $45 insoles do.

What should I do?

Educate yourself. Go to a boutique that has these pressure sensitive systems (like FootSolutions) and find out what's up with your feet and how to fix the problems. 90% of problems in adult feet can be fixed with arch support, metatarsal pads or heel posting. You can be sure, though, that Dr. Scholl's Custom Fit Orthotics will not be part of that solution.

Small Business Schema & Microformatting

If you are a small to medium business and you want to rank on Google one of the things you will need is a website. It doesn't need much on it: Who you are, what you do and where are you at. You can use microformatting from schema.org to mark up your vital statistics on your website.

NAP

No I'm not suggesting you sleep for a short period of time. NAP stands for Name Address and Phone number. These are the best indicators for your business online.

Consistent Business Data

Sit down and figure yourself out. If your business is Warren Peace, located at 1234 W That Pl in Suite 6, in This Town, ST 00000 and can be contacted at (123) 456-7890 you need to specify how it will be displayed:

Would it be: Warren Peace 1234 W That Pl, Suite 6 This Town, ST 00000 (123) 456-7890

Or will it be: Warren Peace 1234 West That Place, # 6 This Town, ST 00000-0000 (123) 456-7890

Same location, many different ways of saying it. Figure it out, make a decision and make sure you always use that format everywhere on the internet. Google is looking for consistency. Sometimes a businesses will have similar addresses or names. The more consistent you are everywhere the easier it is for Google to say "yep that's them."

Business Microformatting

Ok, let's get down to brass tacks and mark up some NAPs. Using Schema.org I've grabbed the LocalBusiness and PostalAddress microformatting to create the listing below

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
    <p><span itemprop="name">Warren Peace</span><br />
    <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
        <span itemprop="streetAddress">1234 W That Pl, Suite 6</span>
        <span itemprop="addressLocality">This Town</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">ST</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">0000</span>
    </div>
    Phone: <span itemprop="telephone">(123) 456-7890</span><br />
    Email: a href="mailto:thisguy@thatplace.com>Email Us</a><meta itemprop="email" content="office@simonsendental.com" /></p>

    <p>Office Hours<br />
    Monday - Thursday: 7am - 4pm <meta itemprop="openingHours" content="Mo-Th 8:00-17:00" /><br />
    Friday - Saturday: 8am - 4pm <meta itemprop="openingHours" content="Th 8:00-22:00" /></p>
</div>

This is a standard block of information you might find on a business' Contact Us page. You can copy and paste this into your own website's html. If you want to know more about it, read on.

Reading Microformatting?

Yes, it's not as hard as it sounds.Put all the data in a container called <div>. I then said this container defines the itemscope of the containter and referenced LocalBusiness. I then put each piece of data in it's own span container and defined the items property with the itemprop="" attribute. If you are wondering how I know what itemprops are available visit the URL in the itemtype. That will take you to the page where the item is defined.

At Schema.org

Yup. Now you will notice the address is a sub item that I put in it's own container with it's own itemscope and itemtype. I made sure it's part of the LocalBusiness by adding the itemprop="address" to it.

Other Microdata

I also wanted to put in the email and hours. They might not be formatted right to use as the actual data. Their email is not Email Us. So I dropped these in <meta> tags. The hours use universal time codes, but they should be pretty easy to understand as it.

Done!

Now go mark up your site.

Dentist Tree

While doing keyword reasearch I have come accross odd key phrases that don't seem to belong. Most often I discount them as the user searching for something unrelated. While working on a dentit's site I came accross "dentist tree" as a relevant keyphrase. It seems there are new ways people are searching and they are producing interesting trends.

So, what is a dentist tree?

Does it grow dentists? Is it the wood used for dental tools? Does it have teeth? Though this probably doesn't need saying, dentist trees do not exist and the searcher was probably searching for dentistry.

Wow, that IS bad spelling.

I wondered about that. If you've heard of dentistry, you're probably not searching for dentist tree. If you havent heard of dentistry you would probably search for dentist. Still the result returns an estimated 480 searches per month.

That's pretty common.

Common enough that it had to be another medium and the answer was in my phone. I have an iPhone 4S which has Siri. If I said dentistry into it the result might be dentist tree because they sound the same which is why I had trouble finding Bob Loblaw.

Blah Blah Blah.

There must be other odd mistakes being made in search and it made me wonder what they are. I will probably write a blog about this later.

Google's Monopolistic Practices

It's been a while since I said Google is a monopoly and after the changes I've seen in the last six months I think it needs to be said again: Google is a Monopoly.

Monopoly? Gasp!

I know. You've all been saying it for years, ever since Google passed the 50% market share at the end of 2004. They took over the search world and captured the all-powerful search advertizing dollar which has killed Yahoo!, Altavista and other search engines that couldn't keep up. Though it seems, only recently, they are receiving any backlash for their success.

Why is that?

If Microsoft even looks at their operating system funny we slap them with a lawsuit so big they need to come out with a whole new operating system. Even then they have to pay massive dollars before they can get away with it. Google has only had larger lawsuits in the last 2 years or so, what about the previous six? What change in the market or Google's behavior in the last 2 years is killing their reputation?

Google+

What? They just want to compete in the social sphere, what's wrong with that? It's not the dabbling in a new field that has messed them up. They've owned social networks many years before this. No, it's how they shifted their focus.

Don't be Evil

They used to be those guys. The ones who took the "with great power comes great responsibility" mantra we've been beat over the head with seriously. They seemed to say "yeah, we've got mad money, but we're just gonna make cool stuff with it." And they did. We got Android (a free operating system), docs (a free way to share documents), books (a free way search books), shopping (a free way to compare products), etc. (you get the point). The seemed content to just get the money from the ads they put everywhere.

Blood From a Stone

Ever since Google+ has come out they have changed their tactics. They now want to squeeze every last monetary drop out of every project in their portfolio. This involves standard corporate tactics to wrangle customers:

1. How to get them here.
2. How to keep them here.
3. How to squeeze every dollar out of them..

Google had already answered question #1 when they took over the market. They added to this by creating Gmail, Docs, buying YouTube and making many different language versions of their search.

Keeping Customers

Deep search. Google's monopoly allows them the resources to index like nobody's business. Bing might have better search algorithms, but they will never have the obscure search capabilities that Google does. The first Bing search for something really obscure and you'll be back to Google. Then they added more and more functions and services to their company to keep our attention.

Walking Bags of Money

This is where Google went wrong. People might be dumb, but we're not stupid. Dumb enough to search for Natural Remedies for Cancer, but not stupid enough to miss self promotion. If you call yourself an italian restaurant and only serve pasta with white or red sauce, people are going to notice. Where's the seafood? Where's the regional flavor?

Now I'm hungry.

Sorry. Here's a recent example of what I'm talking about: Google's nav bar 8 months ago:

Nothing strange there. Just a bunch of ways to search for stuff that you might find interesting. Ok, how about now:

Completely different. The more general items relegated to the "more" box (right) and the only items that are not Google products are Images & News. I guess they haven't figured out how to brand that, yet. This is typical of all Google products these days. All Google products must be a gateway into other Google products. This wasn't a problem when it was Google's non-search products selling Google. When they push it all through their search portal it seems dirty and wrong for some reason.

There's the Rub

Been looking for it, eh? Monopolies are not inherently bad. Do you want 5 different water companies plugged into your house? How about multiple Police departments vying for your tax dollar? It's only when those monopolies use their control to force other actions. Windows was cool, until they said "this is the browser you will use."

Now it's Google saying "This is the social media platform, email client, web browser, video website, data storage and online calendar you will use." And we all feel a little cheapened by it.

Google Alternatives

More and more I'm hearing people looking for some other way to do the same stuff they do with Google. Here are some suggestions:

• Opera - Oldest browser still being updated.
• Bing - Try it out. The searches are better.
• DuckDuckGo - Another search engine, but private.
• Lycos - Yup, they're still there. And they have email.
• Skydrive - Store your files with Microsoft for free.

Is Google a Monopoly?

Yes. Does that mean they are bad? No. My advice to Google? Pull self promotion off your search pages and don't be evil.

Google Search - 12/26/2012
Notice the Chrome Ad