JoeDuck's World has moved CLICK HERE

Moving to http://joeduck.wordpress.com

2006-03-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

Time to move my posting to the superior WordPress environment. Given how simple and easy it was to set up and that it's free I'm not clear why Yahoo and/or Google have not scarfed them up or copied that format. I think Yahoo *supports* wordpress but why don't they just buy it and then they'd be better than blogger.

I'm wondering how indexing will be affected as I have copied stuff over to WordPress so now it's running at both Blog spaces. If I were Google I'd favor Blogger over other formats and favor Google's new free pages over others because they are easier to keep track of and therefore harder to spam. Also this would be more stabilizing for the company than simply treating all pages equally. However, much to Google's credit, I think they really tend to favor equal treatment.

Edgeio is brilliant ... and will fail.

2006-02-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

Please CLICK here for the JoeDuck blog, which has MOVED

Edgeio is a brilliant technical idea with brilliant backers and exceptional buzz and it will ... fail.

This is a company made in Silicon Valley by Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley and it simply won't play in Peoria or even NYC.

"Ma and Pa to sell that kitchenware all you have to do is tag your blogs!"

I had a personal demo of Edgeio at the recent MashupCamp from its creator. He's clever and passionate about this very good theoretical concept of using simple blog tagging to develop alternatives to traditional listings/classifieds systems like EBAY or Craigslist. He's also got master VC dude Jeff Clavier behind him.

So how can this fail? Easy. People don't see the small fees at EBAY as a barrier to listing. It's the technology that is the barrier and unless Edgeio can build a MUCH better than current site that consolidates *existing* listings into a free format I don't see this lasting more than a year or so. I actually hope I'm wrong, because Mashups like Edgeio are a nice innovative way to restructure the web.

WordPress vs Blogger & thank you Todd

2006-02-28T12:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the advice of Todd over at his blog suggesting I change formats, and the fact that Uber Blogger Scoble switched to it I'm going to switch to WordPress blogging very soon. The biggest challenge with blogger is that you can't categorize the posts which is VERY helpful even as the author looking back to see what you already wrote.

Todd by the way, has one of the best SEO blogs out there. This is because he's one of the top SEO guys anywhere. He often speaks at conferences about "link building" and is always insightful about complex SEO topics.

Content is ... Pawn

2006-02-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Not only is content's role as KING becoming questionable, I think we may be entering an era where content has effectively very few "rights" attached to it, and instead it'll all be about the aquisition, distribution and organization of data rather than it's creation. I have mixed feelings about this as we spent a LOT of money assembling a LOT of data at Online Highways and it's clear a lot of it got nabbed by other sites and scraped into "made for adsense" sites that use legal snips of information to displace more legitimate and better sites in search rankings.

I think Mashups may become king very soon and that's probably .... OK with me.

Myspace perspectives from Danah Boyd

2006-02-26T17:31:00.000-08:00

Danah Boyd is a social networking researcher who also works at Yahoo. Easily one of the brightest observers in this space though I'm not yet convinced that she is a *wise* observer of these things. I'd read her blog and realized she'd have valuable perspectives on Myspace. Here is a great summary of her perspective, though I'm concerned that there may be a generational issue of "parents have the RIGHT and OBLIGATION to know about those tracking and marketing to their kids (e.g. Myspace.com)" that she can't see cuz....she's young and has not yet had the shot 'o wisdom and insight that comes from having children running around in potentially dangerous environments.

Is Myspace.com a safespace?

2006-02-26T14:52:00.000-08:00

On CNN a child psychologist warned that NO child should have a "web page", and that Myspace.com, a social networking site popular mostly among teens, was a dangerous environment that could be used by predators to "profile" potential victims.

It sure seemed to be an exaggeration, and since I actively encourage my own 16 year old to develop websites I thought I better find out a bit more. The buzz in the industry is that Myspace and friendster are getting replaced by facebook, which I understand is more popular for college students looking for dates. Partly for this reason I hadn't been paying ... enough ... attention to myspace.

But indeed my son had a page and so did many of his friends. Nothing too provocative from that group, but the psychologists concerns were justified in other respects as I learned browsing the listings and content and by signing up for my own Myspace account. Here are the interesting features that I guarantee few parents are aware of and would concern many greatly:

* Extensive personal information, often including pictures and names of friends, crushes, school and city specifics.
* Discription of sexual orientation. This includes the term "swinger".
* Easy picture upload.
* Crappy age verification. Easy to make up things to "get in", so many of the age listings are almost certainly false. This fact or ALONE raises many serious legal issues as minors are posting volumes of suggestive material with no oversight.
* Advertising for adult sites. I didn't see any ads (yet) for x rated material, but prominent were ads for "intimate dating" which is euphemistic for sex match services. I don't object to these ads in the adult space, but actively advertising sex dating to teens and preteens should be of concern to any clear thinking parent.

There's more but I'd urge any parent to browse the site. An upside to the detail is that you can learn about your own kid's friends and other aspects of their life they might not share at the dinner table. I'd argue that the most important factor is whether this environment is getting abused rather than whether it *could* be abused. For that I'll need to research a bit.

Moderation in all things

2006-02-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

Provocative thought for the day:

Change is coming from the WRONG set of ideas. It's coming from both the positive and negative "exciting" stuff like wars and conflict, concerts and rich people. Change SHOULD be coming from a careful examination of what is working the middle class mundane lives that most people in the developed world lead - the tried and true stuff. How do we bring this boring but workable stuff to the rest of the world?

*Bringing mediocrity to the world* is going to require great thinking and great innovation - wild and speculative innovation included. I sure like projects like Dean Kamen's power/water devices which are a great way to make boring mundane but ESSENTIAL change happen in the 3rd world.

.... jeez, he introduced it at the TED conference a few years back... maybe I'm WRONG about TED. If it's spreading this kind of innovation I'm....WRONG.

FOCUS defines a LOT of the world. What we as people, nations, groups, businesses choose to focus on defines a lot about us.

It's much easier to focus on big controversies or big positive events than it is to focus on the mundane, daily grind events. YET, it's our own mundane daily grinds where the stuff is happening that we need to pass along to those for whom the daily grind is .... life threatening.

2006-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Have I been *a bit* too hard on the TED Conference? I've been reading more. It's certainly great to see discussion of the project to document human rights abuses with digital cameras (Peter Gabriel), see the history of TED includes awards to luminaries in smart, scalable development like Bono, and much much more. TED conference blog

But there's still a HUGE problem with such events which provide economic barriers to entry that are so great they insulate the TED community from....the real community. Sure these guys have mechanisms to hear from and about AIDS children in the Congo, poor Chinese factory workers and Indian farmers, but the voices of these folks are absent as conferences like TED set the agenda for what some would call progressive change. (yes they have some free spots but they appear to be tightly controlled and very limited. This is a choir who likes to hear themselves preach).

I'm always amazed how well intentioned wealthly people often create microclimates of compassion that miss the big picture. TED is better than that, but certainly we need to find ways to have the most influential discussions about critical global issues take place on the global stage, not the 1000- at-$4400-per-person-half-caf-cappucino crowd.
(no offense to the full caf cappucino folks)

You say Bobsleigh tomato, I say Bobsled

2006-02-25T09:13:00.000-08:00

Bobsleigh vs Bobsled

You learn something every day. As with Soccer vs Football, we Americans like to name things differently from the rest of the world. Olympic Bobsledding is, for most in the world, Olympic Bobsleigh".

TED conference? Get out your wallet.....

2006-02-23T22:34:00.000-08:00

What a contrast between the hyper energized Mashup Camp with college students, internet legends, and free admission (hey, I did donate some cash!) and the fancy pants Technology Entertainment Design Conference which I ... had to miss because I 1) had never heard of it and 2) didn't care to pony up $4400, by INVITATION ONLY, to hear a bunch of very rich people talking about ... something. With a barrier to admission like that you've got to wonder what these folks take away from the experience.

If your request is accepted you will be entitled to purchase a TED pass for $4,400. We welcome to TED a wide variety of leading thinkers and doers from all fields of endeavor.

... who are rich/gullible enough to pony up $100 per hour 24/7 for the duration of the conference. ... thanks but....I'll pass.

Top 100 blogs

2006-02-23T17:56:00.000-08:00

OK, for the benefit of the few who read THIS blog I thought I'd throw out a list of the "A list blogs" that are read by .... more people than you can shake a stick at.

Interestingly I'm thinking Blogs are quite DEficient as a conversational medium because you've got the blog OWNER in control and the commenters in a very weak position. Tim Berners Lee, who invented the internet even before Al Gore, wanted a "two way conversation". We are NOT there yet and I think a sort of wikified blogging niche mashup forum environment, where people with similar interest sets will come together in unstructured but highly motivating and unstructured but facilitating and enabling ways, will eventually rule the internet.

I hope so and in fact will work towards this goal in the travel space.

From TECHNORATI: Top 100 blogs

SONY Brain Blast ....

2006-02-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

Wow - how did I miss this news from last April? SONY has patented a process by which impulses would be shot into the brain to enhance or even CREATE sensations including tasting and emotion. The idea is that this will jazz up the game experience. Cool.

The extension of this type of technology is taking us out of control of our own senses and placing machines in charge of that department. I think it's neat, but if I were one of those worried about Orwellian developments in technology I'd be worried....

Worried until until SONY blasted my brain with "calm down, don't worry about this, BUY SONY" impulse into my brain and I'd live happily ever after on my couch with a game console and watching SONY TV sets.

Sony's Sensory blast o matic
article in New Scientist

What to make when you CAN make ANYTHING

2006-02-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

Still reeling from the mashup vibe. The game has changed from what type of web environment can we AFFORD to build to what type of web environment do we WANT to make? With only minor exaggeration it's now possible to create pretty much any website application you can imagine online very cheaply using existing APIs and existing data, and only a modest level of programming skill or support.

In the travel space this has huge implications because there are no great sites out there. Expedia and Travelocity are busy pitching vacations to people rather than building a rich interactive travel experience. Better sites like TripAdvisor and Virtual Tourist remain kind of clunky and lack the comprehensive approach though I still think VT is tops due to it's community focus, though they appear to have too few people (of the 600,000 members they claim to have) actively participating to be robust enough to compete on a global scale for traffic. Comprehensive sites like our Online Highways are too dull and closed and lack community.

So, what will we do now that we can do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in travel?

Stay tuned!

Safe at Home after Mashup Camp

2006-02-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

Wow.... my overstuffed brain is still smoking from MashupCamp down in sunny Silicon Valley. As much as I enjoy trips down to the closest thing to a home the internet will ever have via a scenic 6 hour drive, it sure is nice to come home to small town Oregon where mashing is done with potatoes and not computer applications.

At the event Venture capitalist Peter Rip observed that many of the mashup concepts were probably too dependent on other programs and platforms to be viable business models. I think he'd agree that the strongest use of the mashups is to add value to an existing model, allowing it to do VERY complex things with data sources and serve users in powerful new ways that are no longer expensive - in most cases free. All this through the APIs that Yahoo, Google, and MSN are stumbling over each other to get out into the developer community.

I'm loving this aspect of the new web because we already have a viable travel website with tons of data but it still sucks in terms of providing the user with a richly interactive, map and information intense experience. Mashups may allow us to do much, much better.

THIS cost to benefit advantage is, for me, the very profound and destabilizing aspect of mashups, and I think this advantage has yet to sink in outside the development community, where people are really getting .... excited.

Bubble web, aka web 1.0, placed spectacular and foolish values on the *implementation of the idea* behind a website. It assumed, somewhat correctly back then, that it cost a lot in time and money to develop even modest web applications that crunched a lot of information in complex ways. Few of those companies attracted enough user attention to work as the "if you build a clever site they will come" model died in spectacular and well-deserved fashion.

The great thing about 2.0 / Mashup Web is that we are approaching a model where the cost to crunch and publish massive amounts of data is approaching zero, and the number of applications to do this in clever new ways is exploding. A9 search, for example, is adding a new "vertical search engine" every day or so. Ironically A9 still shows Google search results yet Amazon, which completely owns A9, is releasing APIs and the ENTIRE hugely massively gigantic Alexa crawl upon which you can build a true global search engine. Still a confusing world changing at dizzying pace.

Not always FUN but always EDUCATIONAL!

GooglePlex Party? Sure!

2006-02-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

Mashup Party ... at the GooglePlex. MashupCamp ended on a high note with an invite from Google's Adam Sah (who works on the Google Home page API) to head over to Google for a party. I'd been there in July for the Google Dance but this time enjoyed a tour of the main building. I'm always so impressed by the dedication of the Google engineers to quality, their company, and innovation on the internet, and tasty snacks.

I'm still digesting the overwhelming amount of information at MashupCamp. Congratulations to PodBop.org the winner and chicagocrime.org the runner up. Clear is this - Mashups are going to fuel a LOT of innovation and it's happening VERY fast.

Speed Geeking Session

2006-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

Here at Mashup Camp part of the open conference concept is the upcoming "speed geeking" session which will showcase about 23+ mashups that are competing here for the "best mashup" award - a niagra server from Sun, delivered by.... the president of Sun.

If you want NEWS and VIEWS about this event I'm not a good source - go to the project Wiki which is HERE and Programmable Web, John Musser's superb site about Web 2.0 and such things. John is here and very dedicated to providing a great 2.0 resource, though I think he's got a tiger by the tail and may need to choose between that and his day job (consulting) soon.

SpeedGeeks / Mashup Contest entries:
#1 Dave - StrikeIron.com
Dave Brooks - Bungee Labs
Robert - FlySpy - Airfare Search
Yogi Benjamin - GoodStorm.com.
? Mobido.com - mobile phone communities
Taylor - popbop.org - mp3 podcasts, concert info.
Edgeio.com
David - Rrove - social bookmarking with locations. Google maps.
Masterbeta ?
Mapbuilder.net - Google maps.
Universal submit - events data mashup with competitors to add events to eventful and OTHER sites....
Itunes + Ical Calendar - where and when for performers.
Bart and Frank - TrainCheck.com - Mobile phone application sends train times by phone. DC and SF.
CommerceNet Labs - MIFFY micro formats editor. Suckup vs Mashup.
Computer disposal mapping mashup.
#16 Brian - Online Training blogs? for runners, weight training, etc. Mashing with map/topography.
#17 Adrian - www.chicagocrime.org Created BEFORE the Google API. This guy is *good*.
Mosez - mobile ap for ?
Weatherbonk and Skibonk. Weather and maps and satellite stuff.
?
Jeff Marshall, FrozenBear Attendr for MashupCamp. Social interaction at gatherings.
Yoz? NING.com - fast social networking mashup maker
Yoz - UK Govt Data Mashups.
DudeWheresMyUsedCar.com - ebay and maps

Mashed

2006-02-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

Day ONE of Mashup Camp has ended with Yahoo Martinis at the Computer Museum. They were great but I'd have to give Microsoft the kudo of the day for hosting an espresso coffee bar for the duration of the conference - outstanding and the only way I could prepare my brain to absorb the number of companies, mashups, ideas, and APIs flooding this infospace.

This open conference format is very nice. It only took about 30 minutes for the group to pull together an excellent agenda that certainly was comparable to what I've seen at other conferences, and tended to involved the audience to a much greater degree. As organizers Gold and Berlin indicated (and we all have noted) the coffee breaks and bar time are often the most productive part of a conference, so why not build the conference around this and the participants rather than hope to anticipate what they'll need/want/listen to.

I'd have pix if my Treo was synching, which it's NOT....

For details on the sessions go HERE

Are Mashups Napsterization....backwards?

2006-02-20T16:43:00.000-08:00

I can't get over how hard the big guys are working to feed handy APIs to developers at no charge and with little obligation. In the session I'm sitting in right now, led by A9 search which has basically turned over the search key to the vault to developers. Good for them. Disruptive and destabilizing = more fun, opportunity, and innovation.

I get the feeling from developers that people are tired of the current broad, scattered search model. A9's suggesting, I think very correctly, that the future is in vertical search where specialists in various niches use open search models.

Mashup Camp is rocking..

2006-02-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

Kudos to all associated with Mashup Camp here in (chilly) Mountain View CA. This "unconference" has a lot of the normal conference perks but has brought a lot more attendee input to the table by using the "open conference" format. This morning attendees proposed sessions and there was no shortage of great ideas and themes. I'm sitting in the "Monetization" session now enjoying a spirited discussion of how/what/when can you monetize the mashups and how this may impact your relationship to the API providers, many of whom are represented in this session.

Mashups

2006-02-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

Programmable Web is a great resource for more information about Mashups and at the link has a GREAT summary of APIs available to mashup developers.

I'm very anxious to get going on my own mashup which is fairly simple but I think will be helpful and popular as part of my growing Highways.TV / Highways.com project. I'm taking the camera images from Caltrans and some other sources and mapping them to CA roadways along with weather information. Caltrans does this for some districts but not others, and confusingly Caltrans cams are sorted by district rather than roads. Districts may have some bureaucratic logic but travelers are not necessarily going to confine their interest in that fashion. Oregon's TripCheck system is a much stronger presentation of cam info than Caltrans'. Weatherbonk is doing a nice job integrating weather, maps, and some cam info but they are really short on traffic cams and the site seems to be clunky and slow in the display - though I'm not clear if they are simply suffering from popularity and can upgrade to speed things up or if the mashup itself is burdened by too many calls out to the data sources. I'm noting that Caltrans real time TV cams are hard to get to display and the lag time is so great even on a fast connection that it's not a very useful feature even when it does display.

Mashup Camp

2006-02-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you bring together in Silicon Valley:
* A bunch of API, food, and party providers like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Amazon
* Hundreds of people interested in Mashup technologies, and wazzup with web 2.0
* Yahoo and MSN's top blogging dudes Scoble and Zawodny ?

The first Mashup Camp "The unconference for the uncomputer"

Thanks to what must have been a somewhat tireless effort over the past several months by David Berlind and Doug Gold with help from the Friends of Mashup Camp, the event will showcase many new enabling technologies like mapbuilder and ning
along with many mashups to be unveiled at the conference in competion for the first prize - a supercharged Sun Microsystems server delivered to the winners by no less than the president of Sun.

I'll try to post some pictures on Monday of the event.

Brrrreeeport

2006-02-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

When Scoble suggested the Brrreeeport experiment I really thought he'd just made up the term, but Brrreeeport Maine really looks like a happening place!

Leyte

2006-02-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

The news is just coming in about a mudslide on the Phillippines island of "Leyte" that appears to have killed almost everybody in a village of over 1700 people. Only a handful have been rescued as of this morning with 1718 still missing.

Unfortunately there's very little to do in a case like this in terms of "helping". Money and volunteers are not a key issue here. Contrast this with the Tsunami where the world rose to the occasion in spectacular form and donated enough funds to completely rebuild the devastated areas (this according to the Charlie Rose interveiew with the the UN guy in charge). However he noted in that interview that the Pakistan Earthquake, which potentially may affect comparable numbers of people, has only a fraction (I think he said 20%) of the relief money needed.

I think the single most profound contribution to humankind would/will be to find a way to successfully "market" and spread the word in a huge way the simple notion that raising the standard of living for the world's poor is 1) fun, educational, empowering and 2) in the best interest of even the most selfish rich person. Ironically it's becoming the wealthy and powerful who often articulate this case the best. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Pierre Omidyar are among the wealthiest and most influential voices of the American business elite and they'd all agree.

Unfortunately most mainstream media is now mired in the commercialization and monetization of the news and is no longer a friend to clear thinkers, preferring to discuss Scott Peterson's case more than the fact that thousands die *daily* from easily preventable diseases. Major networks largely ignore much of this incredible story - a story which may lead to the most dramatic changes ever seen by humankind as globalization and human rights start to shine in even the darkest corners of a challenged world.

You busy?

2006-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've almost become obsessed with the implications of almost everybody saying how busy they are and *really thinking* they *really are* busy.

But they aren't . YOU ARE NOT BUSY! Sure, you are OCCUPIED with activities and sure a FEW people out there really are busy, but most folks should more honestly report "I'm prioritizing stupid assed things that I hold dear" than complain about how little time they have to get things done.

There are 24 hours in a day and only about 10 of them are taken up by "necessary" things like sleep, dressing, making meals, and errands required for life (groceries). Conventional workers will have another 8-9 hours for work and commute M-F. If you have KIDS then you have more things that are reasonably considered "necessary", but most kid related errands do NOT stem from necessity, rather from choices and preferences and .... stupid assed priorities that are generally not strategically designed to save time. Also, in many families the caregiver for the kids does NOT work full time and/or things like daycare provide some relief from errands.

I'm looking for time and motion studies to see what it is we do during all that extra time we have on our hands. I suspect TV is the big "time eater" for many and for onliners silly things like blogging or news searches.

I'm NOT saying doing things you hold dear is a bad thing - I just wish people would stop acting like they are "prisoners" of their terribly busy life rather than prisoners to their silly assed priorities.

Buying text links - Jill Whalen's excellent summary of the topic

2006-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

I'm reprinting, with her permission, Jill Whalen's excellent summary of what's up with purchasing text links because it's one of the best pieces I've seen on this very important SEO topic. My view is that it's no longer a good idea to purchase links due to the risks often articulated by Matt at Google.

Jill Whalen: Buying text links. It's all the rage.

Buying text links. It's all the rage.

Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?

These are the questions on webmasters' and search marketers' minds. What follows is my take on buying text links. There's nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people's sites are none of the search engines' business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don't need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads. So what's the big deal?

Here's where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I'm sure, and no big news to the search
engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site's popularity for years.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do -- but so do search engines.

To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site
useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true
at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean
something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between
webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for
a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really
gotten complicated for them.

Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today's text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you're going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That's more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.

Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it's not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites -- especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

The good news for search engines (and I guess the bad news for link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them tend to leave noticeable "footprints" behind in the code. It would be no trouble at all for a search engine to do a little digging into what the latest footprints
are, seek out all pages that have them, and simply not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty, mind you. It would just be a way for the search engines to count only votes and not ads. Your ads would still be worthwhile for the exposure and direct traffic they bring, but not for providing you with link popularity. So although your site wouldn't technically be penalized, its rankings could drop if it was dependent upon the link popularity of paid links.

For those of you who don't believe the search engines can or would do this, you obviously haven't been paying attention over the years. What do you think every major update at Google has been about? They haven't been specifically about purchased link ads, but they have been about finding a subset of pages that all have similar characteristics and no longer allowing
them to count the way they used to count towards rankings. Which means every page using the technique in question suddenly finds their rankings have dropped like a rock.

It's not a matter of *if* this will happen with paid text link ads, but *when*. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we're going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you're buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn't really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time. It's no big deal if you're getting real traffic from your ads, or if you're simply using them to jumpstart your SEO campaign. It's going to be a problem only if your livelihood depends on buying or selling text link ads to boost link popularity.
Jill
Reprinted with permission

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company, Search Creative, LLC.