Today – 31st October 2011 – is a day for the diary as it marked the day when the world population officially hit 7Billion.
The next 25 years will see the world surpass 9Billion, and that is a conservative number, barring any major world epidemic (war is unlikely to have a material impact where as an epedemic could, just look at the past) so the world population could even hit 10Billion in our lifetime.
When you consider the current world consumption on resources, with the limited % of people in the First world (sic) compared with the Third world; there is a very serious problem ahead for the human race. Take, for example, the size of India with over 1Billion people. Just one province – Delhi, has over 200m people. Compare that with the whole of the USA of some 375m people (approx).
Just imagine the impact on the world economy and environment when large countries like India develops fully (as they will in time) and the resources they will consume in the process. When you factor in Brasil, China and Russia the future looks promising economically but pretty worrying from a population-over-consumption perspective.
As a race, we have no option. We have to work out a more sustainable way to live and as importantly, to grow. Nature has proven in the past that when any population of any specicies becomes too prevalent, it [nature] finds ways to deal with that to redress “the balance”. Look at any population explosion, regardless of how big or microscopic the species, Nature always finds a way to deal with it and although the human race is not there yet, if we continue to over populate and over consume; a tipping point will be reached where it will then be out of our control.
The good news is we are making progress. The major developments in all areas from food production, car engine technology to energy production etc are all steps in the right direction, they may not all be correct (such as the production of fuel from crops which take up valuable food-crop land) but they are all part of the journey to find the right solution. 100 years from now our current technology and methods may be laughed at. Just as some of the technology used in Victorian times seem laughable, they were often important steps to get us where we are today. We are at the dawn of our own eco movement and in years to come we will (hopefully) have innovated our way out of the impending problem we have. The world needs more innovators.
The car gets a fair chunk of blame when it comes to over consumption of materials and causing polution. It is said that all cars should be Hydrogen cell based as this is by far the cleanest and possibly the most sustainable technology we have produced to date – the problem is that it is just too expensive at this time, but so too were the first commercial computers (The Ferranti Mark 1) they were the size of a small van and cost several annual salaries of the average person.
It is a sad day. As a late comer to all things mac, I am fully converted and no other person has made the computing experience so simple, intuitive and sophisticated. Not to mention the advances in music playing and storage.
When Pixar is only your 4th greatest achievement, you can hold your hand up to having a very special life.
What other innovations have we lost with the passing of Steve Jobs? Thank you Steve, you will be sadly missed.
So yet again a big brand gets caught trying to game Google, what JCPenny did (or rather their SEO agency did – allegedly) is, in Google’s eyes wrong but is it uncommon practise? On this occasion they got caught out but in the modern world of ranking; I would hazard a guess that most big sites (by that I mean sites with over 5m UU per month) have, at some stage engaged in a little link purchasing. I am lucky to have got to know a number of people who have successfully grown some big sites and only a couple of them can honestly say they have never had link purchasing as a major part of their SEO strategy at one point or another.
So, on to the subject of this post. Clearly and proven beyond all doubt, Google (by their own admission) cannot keep on top of “illegal” link activity. It must sap a huge amount of resources and effort to try to keep up to date with known illegal activity and also dealing with spam reports. Sometimes it pays to think the unthinkable when trying to work out how the whole business of linking may change in the future to combat issues and find a genuine way to rank sites importance. Below are some random thoughts: (and boy do I mean RANDOM!)
Conspiracy One – “nofollow” links carry more weight than “dofollow”: like all the suggestions below, this sounds crazy but let’s think about this a second. Anyone who sets a link as a nofollow is likely to be either engaged in PageRank sculpting, a tight-arse who does not want to pass link love or more likely a site that is simply referencing another site for genuine reasons.
Now herein lies the clue. The fact of the matter is that very few SEO’ers are going to spend cash on “nofollow” links. So therefore it stands to reason that more of the nofollow links are likely to be much more relevant and created for the true intention of why we are supposed to create a link: to reference a useful page, not pass PageRank. A crazy idea? woud it really surprise you to find out that TrustRank has a major component that upweights nofollow links. One to test at some point soon – comment if you know 
Conspiracy Two - Outbound links are as valuable as Inbound links: Many of us have suspected and even proved that outbound links can be critical, it is why you see so any pages linking to authority sites like wikipedia. What intrigues me and makes me think that we are all underestimating the true value of outbound links is a little line hidden somewhere in the Google Webmaster Guidelines (I can’t locate the actual line so I think I may have seen in the the Q&A section on the link provided) but it states to the effect that “you are responsible for sites that you link to so if you link to poor quality or irrelevant sites, your ranking could be
The writing has been on the wall for a long time about data charging – I commented on it recently about the effect negative effect Twitter would have on the small but growing social media industry by charging huge amounts for its content.
Well things have just changed up a gear or two…. I just got off the phone with a leading social media monitoring firm (Vocus) to hear that Facebook have stated they will be charging over $1m per year for
That may seem a controversial question but let us ask ourselves this: If Google do not make any sizeable acquisitions that provide them new sources of traffic they do not get from their owned and operated properties, where will the growth come from?
It is very possible that this years
