Starting Your Own Social Media Site

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 22, 2007

So, you want to follow the social media wave and start your own social media site? There are a lot of factors to look at when thinking of starting your own site. Go inside the the world of Epitunes.com with founder and CEO Toren Ajk. We talk about the struggles of starting your own social media site. We also touch on Facebook, Myspace, Digg, and more.

Tune in to this episode of the PalatnikFactor Podcast Now: Starting Your Own Social Media Website

The PalatnikFactorPlex - Where Blogging Magic Happens

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 19, 2007

So, here is what the home office set-up looks like with a view of the place.

Whenever I have time, Tiger calls me up and we’ll do a game of 18 holes. Just nice to look at.

This is the home Set-Up:

Breaking Google’s TrustRank Algorithm

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 18, 2007

I stumbled upon Jon from WickedFire’s blog just browsing around and started came upon an interesting blog title and kept reading past post. So, he claims to have figured out Google’s TrustRank algo.

Google’s TR basically comes down to linking. I’m not an SEO expert nor claim be to, but some of the TrustRank issues seem to be somewhat obvious by now with so many people blogging and writing about SEO but if you read down John’s post, it’s not obvious at all. Now, if it holds true, that he can rank you for any keyword in Google (and I’m thinking rank well?) then that’s impressive but shouldn’t every SEO EXPERT be able to somewhat get you rankings? I mean, for the THOUSANDS of dollars (agencies can charge up to 20k+) to SEO, you better get me up there.

Anyway, he gave a good example of one of his findings:

“So let’s say the following domains are offering links for sale on their websites. We’ll use the niche they both target as “web hosting” and “web hosting reviews/ratings”. Fine.

Domain 1: hostingreview.com - PageRank 1/10 - 1 sitewide link $5/mo

Domain 2: webhostingratings.com - PageRank 9/10 - 1 sitewide link $750/mo

Which would you choose?

I’ll bet without even thinking, you’d choose the PR9 domain, because you were basically taught to and “brought up” on the myth of PageRank and that it matters. Well, guess what. Domain 1 has a higher TrustRank score than Domain 2. Even though Domain 1 is a PR1 and Domain 2 is a PR9. How can this be? Easy. Google said so. You can go and do allllllll the backlinks, IBL, content, age, keyword checks your heart desires, and you will never find out WHY Google gives a higher TrustRank score to the shabby PR1 than the PR9 who seems to follow every rule every SEO will tell you matters. That’s because Google is brilliant. But brilliantly evil. Their link: command, doesn’t work the way you think it does. In fact, linking is just ONE of over 300+ variables on how a domain gains trust from Google.”
You can visit his post here. He also states, “So again, linking is just ONE part. Yes, a major aspect, but not the defining part of it. I can assure you there are so many unreal variables that some of you would probably crap yourself if you knew just how evil Google really is, but how brilliant they are at making everyone hang on to every word and rumor they think up to keep us as sheep. Well, not anymore Google.”

2005 Illustration by Aaron Wall:

So, we’ll see how this progresses and what people who purchase his service say about what he is offering which seems pretty cheap if he delivers…sounds good…hopefully it will work for those who are going for it.
In 2005, Aaron Wall defined Google TrustRank as having these key factors:

• automatically boost pages that have a high probablility of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad.
• help search engines identify what pages should be good canidates for quality review
Some common ideas that TrustRank is based upon:
• Good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.
• The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page.
• Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.

America Online: The Decline of an Empire

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 16, 2007

Back in the early 90’s or mid 90’s I should say, my life changed. My friends turned me on to this thing called the internet which connected through a phone line. As I always used it at friends’ house, I got my own CD, installed it, and happily paid the $29.95 membership monthly it cost to join.

AOL became the hottest thing around because of its chatting instant messaging features, email, search, and more all in one program. Few people I knew didn’t have AOL if any. The company was on top of the world by mid to late 90’s with MILLIONS of registered users. MarketingVox reports AOL hit its peak in September 2002 with 26.7 million registered users but I think it was more personally, unless it’s been a service where its always had people sign up and sign out. I also remember AOL being the one internet stock that was a craze kind of like Google is now but never reached that price of course. The merger with Time Warner was as big of deal as it got with AOL (and may have been the decline.)

AOL was know for its instant messaging system that came with the software but MSN, Yahoo, and others all came out with its own chatting platforms. AOL also decides to make its instant messaging system a stand alone platform with AIM being a downloadable program on the computer and guess what? It was free and you didn’t need AOL to use it. Bellsouth and other companies came out with dial-up services and then making the big move to DSL, high-speed broadband.

AOL has drastically fallen in the past few years. It now has about 10 million registered users left and laying off thousands. It has been on its way down for several years now and may not be considered an empire, but I thought it was. It is now resolving to be a global ad network which should do well on its own. It does own Advertising.com and several others. AOL is also rumored to buy ValueClick, but that won’t happen until VC gets legal issues taken care of.

The world of the internet moves at such a fast pace now with new and upcoming companies on a daily basis, it’s not easy to survive and maintain a following. AOL did rough it out through some tough times…could this happen to Google?