For somebody who has a personal net worth of nearly $6.6 billion, the majority derived from his work as an “Internet strategist”, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt certainly has a low opinion of the medium that has made him a billionaire. In a recent article at Advertising age, Mr. Schmidt calls the internet a “cesspool” yet fails to acknowledge that his company has any responsibility for the rapid degredation of the internet.
Has Schmidt even taken the time to look at the splog spam farms known as Blogger and Blogspot, both owned by the company he heads up? Blogger and Blogspot have become a scourge for legitimate, domain owning and self hosted bloggers and webmasters alike. Both free blogging comunities are full of scraped and stolen content, useless garbage blogs and spyware/malware.
Then there’s Google’s free email service, Gmail, which has rapidly become the anonymous email service of choice for spammers, surpassing Yahoo mail and Hotmail which used to be the most commonly used free email services for exploitation by spammers. My company spends at minimum 1-3 hours per day policing spammers on our numerous forums and blogs, the majority of which are using Gmail as their email provider because they can easily setup new accounts without any checks or boundaries set by Google. This adds up to thousands of dollars in lost hours per year for just my small internet publishing alone.
Here’s a bit of what Mr. Schmidt had to say when speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus…
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The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. |
Schmidt went on to say that “magazines” and “professional content creators” are essential for Google search to help people find desirable and relevant content. In my opinion, that statement is a 100% turnaround from Google’s “algorithm” which was designed to give authority to sites or articles that are voted upon by their peers through linking. Google’s original use of the university research paper model, where one paper cites another, never encompassed a “commercial” medium where content is professionaly created in order to ascertain relevance.
A commentor on the Advertising Age article also agrees with this sentiment…
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Talk about double talk. Googles algorithms do not determine relevancy by quality of content. Quality content is actually buried in the cesspool that Google itself has created by ranking blogs, etc. As for Schimdt suggesting that journalism be a not for profit vocation…you get what you pay for. –Ft Lauderdale, FL |
Is Eric Schmidt full of what his name rhymes with or is he just brown nosing a bunch of magazine execs into lucrative advertising contracts with Google? Maybe Schmidt is just crying foul because his company has lost over 50% of their market value in the last year? Generally speaking, a CEO who leads his/her company to a 50% loss of value would mean shareholders calling for his/her head. Considering Schmidt has banked $6.6 billion, I’m certain he is entirely “out of touch” with reality and his recent comments have clearly shown he is “out of touch” with the webmaster community at large.
Chris Crum over at WebProNews agrees with Schmidt in his assesment that the internet requires branding for relevance. Crum cites John Wu (founder of Bankaholic.com, which recently sold for $15mil to Bankrate) as an example of how branding increases authority.
hmm.. If you’re familiar with WebProNews, which is owned by iEntry Network, you know that trying to opt-out your email address from iEntry’s spam farm is more difficult than cancelling an AOL account was back in the 1990’s. Not to mention, most of us who operate blogs or websites in the financial niche are well aware of John Wu and Bankaholic’s incessant spamming to fellow finance webmasters to gain readership and/or backlinks.
That aside, Chris Crum is essentially backing Schmidt’s dangerous philosophy that the internet should be branded by big corporations who employ professional content writers and that small, independent publishers should be relgated to the netherworlds of the internet if they do not have a “brand” to make them appear as relevant to potential readers.
Good God man !!! What are these people thinking? Most of us have grown attached to the internet because it has been the last bastion of free enterprise, free speech and a place where everyone can voice their opinon in a collective conscious. Commercialization of the internet has generally been met with opposition from the community where personalization is the defacto of the medium. Many websites thrive on a “grass roots” level where “word of mouth” is still one of the most essential means for community growth. Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Crum seem to think the internet should become another closed media such as television or radio where only the voices of the rich and powerful are heard.
What do you think? Should “branding” increase relevance or should the internt not put emphasis on content because it is “professionally” generated?
It appears Google has been rolling out their pagerank updates with a frequency not seen since 2004/2005. Last year, pagerank updates were few and far between but this year we’ve been seeing them every few months. For the most part, these updates have been downgrades for the vast majority of bloggers and webmasters as seen 
In a very clever, somewhat clandestine publicity stunt, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed he has a genetic mutation which makes him pre-disposed to Parkinson’s disease. While you may be wondering how an announcement about a potentially life threatening genetic trait could be perceived as a cunning stunt and how Sergy’s public statement is essentially a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you must understand the connection between Google, Sergy Brin, Anne Wojcicki and the biotechnology company 23andMe.
