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... well at least for this week

Yep that can only mean one thing ... IT'S FRIDAY!! And that means the weekend is here and it's time to kick back and unwind and maybe even party a little.

Not that we'll be doing much partying, Steve had a big chunk cut out of his ear yesterday and right now he's not a happy camper. The doctor assures him that the swelling will go down but for now if you were approaching Steve from around a corner you would see his right ear well before you saw the rest of him. Something tells me that we might be shopping for a hat this weekend.

But seriously Steve has spent much of his life outdoors and now he's paying the price for not looking after himself. If you get out in the sun during summer then wear a hat and use sunscreen; a great tan may look sexy but I can tell you there's nothing sexy about having a potentially cancerous growth removed from your ear or any other part of your body for that matter.

Link insanity
Early this week I talked about the way Google is really going all out to take control of the Web through its dictatorial approach to links. The fact that it may be encountering some resistance to its ultimate goal and might be becoming a little desperate is perhaps shown by a recent comment by a well-known Googler. He said:

'... we want to bring a bit of authenticity back to the linking structure of the web. And, Nofollow is one way in which that can be properly accomplished'

As one commenter said, 'How delusional can one Googler get?' But sadly it's a delusion that they can probably sell to the masses and the only people that really know the truth are professional webmaster.

But perhaps even some of the professional webmasters are getting high on the Google bullshit because I saw one site the other day, designed by a ‘professional' designer here in town that had every internal link marked as no follow. Here was a site that some business had paid lots of money to have built and, theoretically, the only page that Google was ever going to index was the index page.

Yep Google is really bringing authenticity back to the link structure of the web.

Paying big bucks to know what you're doing
Have you been following the latest rush by the big players - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and a few others - to buy up smaller companies? If you have you will have noticed that some big bucks have been thrown around in an effort to buy up smaller companies that, on the surface, may not appear to be worth anything like what was paid for them.

Perhaps those small companies are probably not anything that you've paid particular attention to. You might have thought that there wasn't much relevance in them for us over here on the adult side of the web. However, take a closer look and you'll see that those small companies the big guys were buying up are almost priceless when it comes to the future of advertising on the Net.

One of the companies, Hitwise, really went for a song even though Hyperion paid around $680 million for it. If you haven't come across Hitwise before then I suggest you subscribe to weblogs.hitwise.com . If you don't want to subscribe via your RSS reader at the very least go over and have a look at some of the entries in their blog and see just what a goldmine Hitwise is going to be for Hyperion.

Hitwise can tell you the demographics of the people who are searching for any term you like, they can compare terms and tell you where surfers will go after they've searched for a particular term. For example today Hitwise is talking about 'global warming' and 'climate change' and analysing where the traffic flows to from those search terms. It's also offering some suggestions about the way people are thinking when they search for those terms.

Imagine what you could do if you had that information about your search terms. And it's the power that Hitwise, and all the other small companies that have been bought up in the last few weeks, give to the big guys that have bought them that make them so valuable.

The future of advertising and marketing on the Net is definitely about showing the surfer more of what he's looking for. In the past that was all very hit and miss but today, with the power to analyse traffic in the way Hitwise does, advertising and marketing can focus that advertising right down to the level of the individual surfer and that's powerful.

Think of how much easier it would be here in adult if we could 'speak' to every individual surfer that hit our sites and show him advertising that was completely relevant to his needs and wants.

It's enough to make every affiliate marketer horny :)