Google penalised many sites for selling paid text links in October 2007. Their belief was that such text links interfered with their search engine, but it is possible that they had other motives (see AdSense, one of their main sources of income). The decision to penalise these sites was still extraordinary; if Google could detect these links, could Google not just have ignored these links?

Google claimed paid text links damaged the reliability of results to the searcher, and it is easily argued that they do. What Google fail to realise is through making an example of websites, they are making their results less useful.

Is it not ridiculous that in a search for ‘Text Link Ads’, the first result is not the very popular site of the same name but instead a post about Google penalising the site? TLA in fact only appear on the fifth page of results; which is stupid when I expect many users searching for ‘Text Link Ads’ will be primarily looking for that site.

Another example is Everyclick, the search engine which raises money for charity. A search for Everyclick fails to bring the search engine up until the seventh page. Even on the sevent, the result is not to their homepage. As it so happens, my review of Everyclick is actually on the second page.

That is what is completely stupid; reviews of the website, and press releases involving it, rank higher than the website itself. Is that good for the user? No. It’s not just me who finds this a bit odd; Will Critchlow did an entire post on the matter last year.

Will speculated that ‘the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out… got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like… lightly rehashed press release content’. So Google penalised a useful site on the sole basis of the type of marketing they utilised.

Google must stop penalising advertising. They must stop penalising both the advertiser and publisher. If Google wants to ‘beat’ such forms of advertising, the way in which to do it is not to destroy their index but to simply teach their bots to ignore such advertisements.

User participation on Web 1.0 websites is not instantaneously published. User participation on Web 2.0 websites is instantaneous. Therefore, the next generation of websites will have to be quicker than instantaneous; Web 3.0 will preempt user’s participation.

Lots of the Web is already preemptive. Google suggests what the user will be searching for, but a preemptive web has to go further.

Users have to geotag their images on Flickr. A preemptive web would compare images taken with others and calculate its location. It’d judge videos content and tag them automatically. This is clearly beyond what current technology, but it should be a key part of Web 3.0 . Photos from the same event would also automatically be grouped together (through analysing geotags, comments, timestamps and other information, such as invites recorded on the system).

Encyclopedias would automatically grab news and update themselves accordingly, instead of relying on users to do so as Wikipedia does.

Twitter would automatically follow people, through analysing connections with businesses and other followers. Same goes with most other social network sites.

It’s quite simple. Web 3.0 will automate monotonous tasks, like tagging, which Web 2.0 requires to be done manually. Perhaps this automation won’t be recognised as Web 3.0, but just another aspect of Web 2.0.

Invite-only friendbinder is a website which allows you to keep track of your friends on several social networking sites. Unlike FriendFeed, these friends do not have to be members of friendbinder in order to follow them.

The site allows you to organise your friends into 5 different ‘interest levels’, so you can separate your actual friends from contacts. Friends can be added from Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, last.fm, YouTube and Facebook and their RSS feeds can also be added; but contacts from these sites are not automatically grouped together on friendbinder (eg, I must manually tell friendbinder ‘bloggs55′ on Twitter is the same as ‘bloggs55′ on Digg).

friendbinder can be used to update Twitter and Facebook status, which is a nice addition which in essence means you do not have to go on Twitter.

I still find myself questioning the need for friendbinder when we have services like FriendFeed, Ziki and Profilactic. I guess what makes friendbinder unique is the fact you can rank friends in terms of interest. I do, however, find it annoying that so much has to be done manually on the site; whilst all contacts can be imported, accounts on different sites must be manually associated. Sadly, as our partner The Last Podcast pointed out, there are also no RSS feeds from the site itself.

friendbinder is definitely just a binder. It allows all your friends’ social activity to be collated in a central location, whilst having little social networking in itself. The one main feature is that this social activity can be filtered, which I’m sure is essential if, like me, you are following 100s of people but only frequently talk with a dozen of them.

The site, with its last.fm-like design, needs polishing and should become increasingly automated. Social networking junkies will have their uses for the site, but it unfortunately lacks support for several essential networks (such as Friendfeed).

I have recently been accepted as an editor, for a small category, in the Open Directory Project, a project which was/is important but has become increasingly obscure.

The project was established in 1998 listing and categorising websites in a taxonomy, whilst making data relatively freely available. The project might seem dull, but it is very useful and separates spam websites from genuine websites. Many search engines use the descriptions of websites given by DMOZ editors, as they are much better and less biased than those the websites themselves provide.

In 1998, Netscape acquired the site (so it now belongs to Time Warner) but all data is (currently) freely available and can be hosted anywhere. Google maintain a mirror of the project.

The website is pretty hard to get to grips with and really isn’t very Web 2.0 at all, in fact is is one of the few remnants of Web 1.0 which hasn’t tried to change. I still find it an amazing project, perhaps because it feels as though it was designed for the Netscape Navigator-era of Internet history.

The site currently has 4,581,316 sites, 81,586 editors and nearly 600,000 categories. The project lists more websites than Wikipedia has articles.

It is a fascinating site. You should submit your site if you haven’t (good for SEO) and volunteer to edit if you’re interested in a category.

As a blogger, I must admit I sometimes become envious of those bloggers who make 6-figure incomes for content, which in my opinion, is no better than any of the decent blogs which I read but earn much less.

Why do we see some blogs, like TechCrunch, rise to such heights whilst other blogs, which definitely had the same potential, fail to? TechCrunch started at roughly the same time as mine, and whilst I doubt my blog even compares to TechCrunch, I do find it amazing how they progressed to such heights.

When a blog becomes as big as TechCrunch, the blog’s content does not matter and its audience has changed. No longer does TechCrunch appeal to the average fan of technology, in fact it only appeals to the masses of start-ups who aspire to be covered by TechCrunch. Even I, a Web 2.0 blogger, unsubscribed from TechCrunch years ago, because they seemed to have lost any interesting insight or coverage of non-highly funded start-ups.

Smaller blogs are more authentic. Smaller blogs, whilst their English might be subpar, provide more genuine opinions and cover more genuine topics, whether that be gadgets, politics or websites. Larger blogs have a tendency to only report high profile topics, like Apple and Google releases. Bloggers like me, on the other hand, will happily blog about any start-up or product we feel to be interesting, whether their capital be £0 or £9,000,000.

How on Earth does TechCrunch maintain 1253K readers? Frequent, ‘high quality’ content? Perhaps. But most blogs can achieve that with resources. And that’s why TechCrunch succeed: money. If a blog, like TechCrunch, gets lucky within its first few months and secures advertising, it continues to grow and can begin to employ other bloggers. Then it keeps growing.

Blogging has a lot to do with skill, but in my opinion a lot more to do with luck. Had I not got dugg a few years ago, I doubt I would still be blogging. My post was not fantastic; I was just fortunate that someone stumbled across it and liked it.

(And, by the way, congratulations to Robin Wauters of Plugg for getting a job at TechCrunch. Despite my criticism, it is still quite an honour to be able to write for such a big blog!)