Steve Rubel has some pertinent views on the whole Web 2.0 bubble and the crazy valuations and hype being bandied around right now.

Last week’s Google strike on the company’s advertising competitors — which may have put a lot of small internet operators out of business — illustrates how quickly the weather can change.

Rubel doesn’t beat about the bush, “This is a sad time for the web. It’s as almost somber as the time just before the last bubble burst in 2000. I was working in PR with dot-com startups at the time and the way I feel now is how I did back then.”

Regular readers of Syntagma will recognize the sentiments he expresses, especially in this passage, “… over the last year my thinking has evolved dramatically. I have become less interested in every new shiny object and more engrossed in the social changes it, slowly, effects. This is in part a byproduct of the tech blogosphere getting drunk on its own Kool-Aid.”

No more first fine careless rapture then.

The picture of the internet I see right now is of steady progress, both in the underlying technologies and also the growing professionalism of many quietly working away under its wing.

Overarching all that is the froth and hyperactivity of a new bubble-in-the-making. From the outside, however, only the nonsense is visible. People are being sucked in with promises, only to be swept aside as technical parameters are changed without notice and the marshals overwhelmed by the cowboys and injuns. It really is a Wild West out there.

That the fundamentals are gradually being put in place is great news for those of us who retain our enthusiasm for the web and will continue to use it as the base for professional and commercial activities.

Are we then approaching another collapse in internet values? We are not immune from the wider economy :

* Oil is nearly $100 a barrel
* Gold is approaching $1000 an ounce
* Housing markets in the US, Britain and Europe are heading south
* Stockmarkets are wobbling tortuously
* The credit crunch has yet to peak
* Inter-bank lending is at a standstill
* Inflation is ominously poised for a comeback.

These are all strong indicators of trouble ahead for everyone.

I’ve long believed that it’s a mistake to follow the crowd. The herd will always produce a glut in the end and the subsequent fall in values will put most out of business.

It’s only those who dig their own distinctive furrows and apply basic cash-flow techniques in the time-honoured manner who will survive the deluge.

And “deluge” seems the only appropriate term for the time ahead.

I’ve just noticed that Techmeme has got a PR4. The site probably has hundreds of thousands of links in its archives. Its business is to link readers to the most relevant and authoritative technology news around the world.

Why doesn’t the new Google algorithm distinguish between that model and paid linkage? So far as I’m aware inclusion in the body of Techmeme is not based on any monetary transfer. Syntagma is often included and no payment is asked.

The only exceptions are the webclips from posts of Techmeme’s sponsor sites. Do they count as text link ads too? If so, Google is now attacking the basis of the citation system it set up in its early years and is ominously beginning to confirm a suspected lack of tolerance of any online monetizing scheme other than its own.

We sometimes forget that Google is a business like any other. To own both the largest search engine and the most extensive advertising program on the internet must offer great temptations for muscle flexing to its management.

However, the use of monopoly powers is always counter-productive in the end. Without keen competition a company quickly loses force in the marketplace and the respect of its customers.

One wonders how far this downgrading process will go. There are hints that the company miscalculated this move and is having to put back rankings to many sites. Not here yet though.

So what is the new gold standard? What now counts as a penalizable link in the Google dispensation? In the age of information, the facts of this case are not easy to come by.

I’m looking for anyone who can bring a little vorsprung durch technik to a “simple” Wordpress problem.

We have a site with 23,000 spam comments in the moderation panel. Wordpress only allows zapping 20 at a time, or a huge process of downloading the whole mess bucket, which invariably hangs the computer.

I’m seeking a quick way to zap the lot, maybe serverside using the MySQL panel. Has any bright spark got a handle on this?

Reward in Heaven.

We have fielded a lot of emails in the past three days about the still developing situation between internet giant Google and text-link buying agents, like TextLinkAds.com.

To recap, Google has conducted a manual search of mainly networked sites to penalize commercial publishers who sell links via the agencies, or who have hand-rolled ads without rel=”nofollow” in the code. The code stops Google’s robot from following the link to its source, thus avoiding clocking up a backlink for the buying site.

The more ranked backlinks a site has, the higher its PageRank. Google has been progressively lowering the rankings of sites on which perceived mal-dispositions are found.

For example, Syntagma — which we expected to rank 6 by now — has dropped to 3 in the latest round of carnage. Our site Fifty-Something Women — which has around 20 text links of various sorts — has fallen from 5 to 2. This gives the artificial impression that the site has low traffic and puts off some ad buyers who respect Google’s approval.

Google claims the ads are skewing the results of its search engine, replacing relevancy and authority with the ability to purchase links, i.e. buy authority and relevancy rather than earn them through merit.

There is some force in that argument, although the contrarian view is that Google itself is now skewing its own results by retreating from its pure search criteria.

Also, many observers believe Google is attempting to crush the businesses of the astonishingly successful agencies that sell the links. Its own text-based system Adsense, has undoubtedly taken a knock from TLAs in recent months, especially on low-to-medium trafficked sites, which do poorly on the Google system.

Whatever the facts in this case, Google has created the monster from which it is now suffering.

Background
A mere 15 years ago, at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, founder Larry Page saw literary citations as a software opportunity for the web. Nowadays, it’s hard to see beyond the system he produced, first BackRub, a way of measuring backlinks to articles and sites, and then PageRank, the most addictive element in web oneupmanship. Has that system really served us well?

To generate Googlejuice you have to cite and cite regularly and relevantly. The blogosphere, in particular, is a madhouse of clickability. The genius of Google is that it didn’t just transfer the bane of academic publishing, the citation system, onto the web, but that it discovered how it could profit enormously from the process.
/Background

Is it now pulling the rug from under other companies who are using its innovative scheme to build businesses on the web?

The link, or citation, system is behind the present controversy in the search business. The wonder is that Google tolerated the SEO — or Google gaming — system for so long. The sudden rush to penalize publishers has a rather thuggish feel about it, particularly as the broken bit in this chain lies within the software of the companies that broker the ads.

Jason Calacanis, formerly chief of Weblogs, Inc, which sold to AOL for a reported $30m, has put up a good piece in which he explains how he created the interlinking system between blogs and also hosted the first text link ads.

Where are we now?
We are now at the point where we have to decide. Do we take the ads down, or leave them up and suffer the consequences, the extent of which is not yet clear?

At Syntagma, we have sites which are 90 percent plus dependent on text links. We are therefore going to sit this out and observe what happens. We will keep faith with our advertisers. Business as usual.

However, we strongly urge the brokerage companies of text links to do deals with Google on this matter. Not only is their business model in grave danger of being blown out of the water, but it may be that small tweaks in their software will be enough to allow Google room to compromise.

After all, there are a lot of enraged publishers out there, who feel they have been badly let down by the giant of the internet. Uncle Google has suddenly turned into the wicked stepfather.