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Eine Liebeserklärung an das Fischbrötchen

Fischbrötchen sind ein Stück nordische Lebensart. Erst mit dem Genuss eines solchen beginnt der Urlaub an Nord- oder Ostsee wirklich. Was ein gutes Fischbrötchen ausmacht, ist aber Geschmackssache.




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Server move and downtime

In order to move MetaFilter to a new server*, the site will be offline between 22:00 and 01:00 PDT Thursday evening.

The moderator e-mail (via admin@mefi.us) will still be working during this time.

In other time zones:


EDT: 01:00-04:00
BST: 05:00-09:00
CEDT: 07:00-10:00
IST: 10:00-13:30
CST: 13:00-16:00
AEDT: 16:00-19:00

* More specifically, a new AWS account. (closed)




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Server move and downtime, take 2

In a second attempt at moving MetaFilter to a new AWS account, the site will be offline between 22:00 and 01:00 PDT Sunday evening.

The moderator e-mail (via admin@mefi.us) will still be working during this time.

In other time zones:


GMT: 05:00-08:00
EDT: 01:00-04:00
BST: 06:00-09:00
CEDT: 07:00-10:00
IST: 10:30-13:30
CST: 13:00-16:00
AET: 15:00-18:00

(hopefully these are all correct this time)




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Andy Serkis Reads Aloud The Entirety Of 'The Hobbit' For Charity

Updated at 6:12 p.m. ET Andy Serkis, the physically nimble actor largely known for his CGI-assisted roles, did some quarantine reading, performing the entirety of The Hobbit in a livestream on Friday. On a Gofundme page established for the event, Serkis wrote that he would conduct the 12-hour marathon reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved fantasy novel to raise funds for COVID-19 relief efforts. Depending on his copy, that's some 300 pages of Bilbo Baggins' adventure from his humble hobbit hole in the Shire to the mountain lair of the fearsome dragon Smaug – and back again, read and performed by Serkis. The actor began reading the novel at around 10 a.m. in the United Kingdom (that's 5 a.m. ET). "Together we'll face the might of the trolls, journey to the magical Rivendell, encounter the giant spiders in the labyrinths of Mirkwood, and the evil goblins living among the roots of the Misty Mountains, until we meet the dragon Smaug, and see the Battle of the Five Armies," Serkis wrote on




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„Unsere Vorstellung von der Welt gilt nicht mehr“

Sorgen, Ängste, Einsamkeit: Die Einschränkungen während der Corona-Pandemie belasten fast alle Menschen psychisch. Forscher untersuchen die Auswirkungen – und haben einen Rat, wie man weniger Stress bei Mitmenschen auslöst.




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Serato Announces Free Laptop DJing For All With Serato Play

Serato has announced that its Serato Play Expansion Pack, which turns any laptop into a simple DJ controller allowing users to play sets without the need of extra hardware, will be available completely free for the next month. When combined with either the company’s Serato DJ Lite or Serato DJ Pro DJing software, both of … Continued The post Serato Announces Free Laptop DJing For All...

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Tutorial: How To DJ With Just Your Laptop For Free With Serato!

A really great skill to learn that all DJs should know is how to mix with just a laptop – and with Serato making its laptop DJing software Serato Play free to everyone for the month of May 2020, now is a great time to start. In this lesson and video, I show you how. … Continued The post Tutorial: How To DJ With Just Your Laptop For Free With Serato! appeared first on Digital DJ Tips.

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Erboste Lehrer, frustrierte Eltern – dieser Streit offenbart eine tiefe Kluft

Das Echo auf die Wutrede zweier WELT-Autoren gegen die Lehrer war riesig. Während andere Eltern die harsche und subjektive Kritik fast ausnahmslos bestätigen, wehren sich die Lehrer vehement. Der Streit ist unerbittlich, hat aber eine wichtige Wirkung.




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Liebe Eltern, nach dieser Geschichte haben Ihre Lehrer keine Ausreden mehr

Mit einer Wutrede haben zwei WELT-Autoren den Zorn der Lehrer auf sich gezogen. Doch eine Recherche hat offenbart, dass schlechter Fernunterricht kein Naturgesetz ist. Reden Sie mit den Lehrern Ihrer Kinder über diese sechs Fälle – dann muss die Schule reagieren.




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„Eine gläserne Decke – wie aus Titan“

Gemeinsam gegen Mini-Me: Victoria Wagner will mit einem hochkarätig besetzten Netzwerk Deutschlands allzu homogene Wirtschaftselite aufmischen. Warum ein kultureller Wandel nicht nur in den Chefetagen nötig ist, erklärt die Agenturchefin im Interview.




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Dieser OLED-Fernseher sorgt für einen Farbenrausch

Mit dem OLED GX ist LG ein echter Hingucker gelungen. Im Test beeindruckte vor allem das Design des nur daumendicken Fernsehers. Auch die Bildschirmtechnik spielt dabei eine wichtige Rolle.



  • Webwelt & Technik

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Dieser Online-Supermarkt bricht das Sonntags-Tabu

Der Online-Supermarkt Picnic bricht die Regeln und fordert damit auch Kirchen und Gewerkschaften heraus. Erstmals werden Kunden am Sonntag mit Lebensmitteln beliefert. Der Neuling will mit dem Vorstoß auch ein peinliches Problem lösen.




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Dieser Stripclub ist systemrelevant

Um die Geschäfte weiter am laufen zu halten, werden viele Unternehmer in den USA kreativ. Etwa in Oregon, wo ein Stripclub für Furore sorgt.




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Service Ribbons in CSS

Service ribbons commemorate a soldier's participation in war, campaign or battle starting with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Ribbons are made of cloth and steel. This project is about creating them with HTML & CSS.

[Link]




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Seniors In Isolation / Sheltering In Place In India / Pianist, Composer, And MC Kev Choice

How are seniors are coping in this time of isolation? We'll hear how non-profits and an army of volunteers in the Bay Area are working to relieve the anxiety. Then, we continue checking in with reporters around the globe on the coronavirus. Today, we're going to India. And, Oakland pianist and MC, Kev Choice shares the spiritual dimension of his music.




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Sheltering Homeless Residents / Coronavirus Measures In Europe / Religious Services Go Virtual

We'll hear from San Francisco supervisors on the challenges the city is facing moving some unhoused residents into hotels to shelter from the pandemic. Then, we go to Europe and get the latest on the coronavirus situation there. And, religious communities can’t gather in person, but they’re still meeting up online.




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DOJ Will Drop Case Against Ex-Trump Adviser Michael Flynn

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit DAVID GREENE, HOST: Yesterday, the Department of Justice reversed one of the most high-profile cases in the Mueller investigation. Michael Flynn served as President Trump's first national security adviser. He pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Now, the DOJ is dropping its case against him, and let's talk this through with NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Hi, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: Feel like a lot has happened in the world since we last talked about Michael Flynn. Can you just remind us what his story is? LUCAS: Right. The FBI began investigating Flynn back in 2016 as part of the broader Russia investigation. FBI interview - FBI agents interviewed him at the White House in January of 2017, and in that interview, Flynn lied to them about conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. A few weeks later, Flynn left the administration for allegedly lying to




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Beatroot Music Presents The Beatroot Suite Live Performance + Q&A Series

Welcomes Grammy Award-Winning Superstar Lyrica Anderson For Latest Edition

Invites Viewers To Donate Live To Historic Memphis Community Orange Mound

April 30th 2020 (Memphis, TN) – Triple threat Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer, Lyrica Anderson will appear on Beatroot Musics The Beatroot Suite for a live performance of her new single “Marriott” and Q&A on Thursday April 30, 2020 at 9:30pm ET/6:30pm PT. 

In addition to this fan experience, Lyrica invites viewers to donate live to support COVID-19 relief efforts in Orange Mound—the oldest African-American community in Memphis, TN. Beginning May 2nd, the team will supply residents of the community affected by the pandemic with care packages comprised of food and hygiene items as part of the Zone 6 CAReavan. All residents in Zone 6 are eligible to the generosity of those who donated across the country. 

Tune in and watch on Instagram Live HERE

The Beatroot Suite is a new music initiative launched by artist-centric label services platform Beatroot Music. In addition to empowering artists with tools and resources to succeed independently, the company hosts this innovative online venue as a stage for its talent roster to showcase and discuss new material. Last week, The Beatroot Suite welcomed award-winning, multi-platinum selling songwriter and artist Elijah Blake.

The post Beatroot Music Presents The Beatroot Suite Live Performance + Q&A Series appeared first on Singersroom.com.




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How One Georgia Farmer Turned The Coronavirus Crisis Into An Opportunity For Service

The closure of schools, restaurants and hotels has wreaked havoc on the nation’s food supply. Dairy farmers are pouring out milk, hog prices are plummeting, and unhatched eggs are being crushed. Jon Jackson is executive director of StagVets and founder of Comfort Farms in Milledgeville. He relies on veterans to help raise heritage breeds of animals and produce — specialty items that were once in big demand from some of Georgia’s top restaurants. Now, Jackson is making them available to hungry families through a virtual farmers market.




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158: Keep Them Scrollwheels Scrollin', Though The Browser's Slowin'

It's me! It's jessamyn! It's episode 158 of us podcasting about about the sort of MetaFiltery things we're wont to podcast about! It's about ninety minutes!

Helpful Links

Podcast Feed
Subscribe with iTunes
Direct mp3 download

Misc
- turns out there's no Dunkins Donuts in Portland anymore
- Jessamyn has some cables
- and a plow neighbor
- and a daylight lamp
- and a newsletter
- Tom West, clock synchronizer
- a few years ago I made a Snake game called Shai Hulud

Jobs
- Hey, somebody helped out btfreek with their job thing!
- Purchase a ticket for a show in Osaka by btfreek
- MeFites italiani per favore aiutatemi! by mattdidthat
- Full-Time (Salaried) Retail Associate at the Crow Museum of Asian Art by macrowave
- Photoshop an 80s style double exposure for my family holiday card by tatiana wishbone
- Social media freelance help by arnicae
- Looking for someone to pick up a small heavy table on long island ny and take it to greyhound by arnicae

Projects
- The Drag Kings of Taipei by storytam (MeFi Post)
- AI Dictionary (Twitter bot) by you (MeFi Post)
- Niche Museums by simonw
- NYRB discussion group by The Ted
- Absolute Bleeding Edge by maxsparber

MetaFilter
- Gimme some money by mandolin conspiracy
- A Deepfake Nixon Delivers Eulogy for the Apollo 11 Astronauts by Etrigan
- what on earth is this: '⋮'? by jessamyn
- Imaging, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etc. - IRENE finds words by jessamyn
- Right now, the official U. S. Time is: by Going To Maine
- What time is it? by silusGROK
- The search for the Enormous Pippin continues by web-goddess
- Failure is Inevitable. What Matters is How You Deal With It. by thatwhichfalls
- Florida Dog takes Florida Man's car for a heckin' fun ride! by Lizard

Ask MetaFilter
- Strategies for leaving a note for myself in a library book for 20 years by rileyray3000
- Mustache Pageant Colour Commentary by nathaole
- An ice-cold glass of blood?? by catcafe
- What are your top Oboe jams to displease my roommate? by Krawczak
- Are small scratches in new stainless steel appliances normal? by rouftop
- a comment by rouftop
- Looking for affordable, quality clothes in Toronto by jb
- E-ink ereader with a strong screen - or a strong case by jb
- How many books are printed in one edition of a book? by plant or animal
- How to clean ears before ear mold? by madonna of the unloved
- a comment by Lutoslawski
- National Geographic was wrong!! by Melismata
- a comment by Ashwagandha
- Another question about telephones in 1991 by swheatie
- What is your chill vibe? by Phyltre

MeFi Music
Featured in this episode:
- Skeleton Dance by usonian
- Magic Show by AppleSeed
- Stones/Water/Time/Breath by youarenothere
- Fire Over The Deep by Devils Rancher

MetaTalk
- Secret Quonsar 2019 THANK YOU! by pjsky
- 'Guess My Word' by bq
- Mefi Mall 2019 by frimble

FanFare
- Watchmen!
- The Mandalorian!
- The Good Place!
- Till Death Do Us Blart!




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Episode: 0x0A: Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 Series Application Store

Bradley and Karen discussed the Windows Phone 7 Application Store terms and conditions which prohibit GPL'd and other copylefted software in the application store.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:35)

After the show was recorded, there was an announcement that Microsoft would allow employees to build their own companies writing Windows 7 Series Windows Mobile applications.


Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).




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0x2A: Conservancy's Compliance Project

Karen and Bradley discuss Software Freedom Conservancy's announcement regarding its coordinated license compliance program.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:36)

Karen and Bradley discuss Software Freedom Conservancy's announcement regarding its coordinated license compliance program.


Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).




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0x57: Support Conservancy Now!

Free as in Freedom host Christopher Allan Webber interviews Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn about their work on copyleft and at Software Freedom Conservancy. You can become a Supporter of this work!

Show Notes:


Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).




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0x5E: Conservancy's ContractPatch Initiative

Bradley and Karen discuss Conservancy's ContractPatch Initiative that will help Free Software developers negotiate their agreements with employers.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:38)


Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).




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COVID-19 Series: Rob Wallace

The Secret Ingredient with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, Raj Patel author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott welcome back Rob Wallace an evolutionary biologist for his take on the link between global outbreaks of infectious disease and global agriculture. Rob Wallace is...




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This Song: Hamilton Leithauser

Hamilton Leithauser is the former lead singer of the Walkmen and as well as a talented solo artist. Last year, he teamed up with former Vampire Weekend member Rostam for I Had A Dream That You Were Mine, and he also just released a duet with Angel Olsen called "Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)." Listen as Leithauser talks about how Fleet Foxes' "Ragged Wood" helped shake him out of a creative rut.




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This Song: Ghostland Observatory

Thomas Ross Turner from Ghostland Observatory explains how hearing "White Horse" by Laid Back piqued his interest in electronic music and started him on his journey as a musician.




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Michael Pack: Trump Pushes for Senate to Confirm Conservative to Run Voice of America

A key Senate committee has scheduled a vote on the long-stalled nomination of Michael Pack, an ally of Stephen K. Bannon, to run the agency in charge of the Voice of America. Employees are worried.




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Hospital Services Performed Overseas

A movement toward greater use of telemedicine is widening the spectrum of care doctors can provide from afar and enabling more outsourcing of services overseas.
-The Washington Post




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Hospital Services Performed Overseas

A movement toward greater use of telemedicine is widening the spectrum of care doctors can provide from afar and enabling more outsourcing of services overseas.
-The Washington Post




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IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - WebSphere Customization Toolkit

IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - WebSphere Customization Toolkit




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IBM Db2 Server 11.5 for Linux on AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems (x64) Multilingual

IBM Db2 Server 11.5 for Linux on AMD64 and Intel EM64T systems (x64) Multilingual




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IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - Web Server Plugins

IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - Web Server Plugins




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IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - IBM HTTP Server

IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0 Supplements - IBM HTTP Server




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IBM Cognos Analytics Server 11.1.5 Microsoft Windows Multilingual

IBM Cognos Analytics Server 11.1.5 Microsoft Windows Multilingual




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IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0

IBM WebSphere Application Server V9.0




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IBM DB2 Advanced Workgroup Server Edition Restricted Use Activation V11.1 for Linux, UNIX and Windows Multilingual

IBM DB2 Advanced Workgroup Server Edition Restricted Use Activation V11.1 for Linux, UNIX and Windows Multilingual




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IBM Cognos Analytics Server 11.1.6 Microsoft Windows Multilingual

IBM Cognos Analytics Server 11.1.6 Microsoft Windows Multilingual




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FESTIVAL: Live From Our Living Rooms: An Online Music Festival and Fundraiser Runs April 1st through April 7th

All proceeds will provide emergency relief to New York City musicians whose freelance careers have been impacted by COVID-19. Presented by Sirintip, Thana Alexa, Owen Broder and nonprofit partner, MusicTalks...




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WEBSITE: All About Jazz to Broadcast Live From Our Living Rooms: An Online Music Festival and Fundraiser

Thanks, in part, to our own fund drive, All About Jazz and Jazz Near You have pivoted to support livestream jazz events. The transformation, which started ten days ago, has a singular purpose: to raise awareness of livestream jazz events worldwide and help boost ticket sales or tip jar donations...




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COR Preservation Board Hearing

No description available.

This item belongs to: movies/rocny.

This item has files of the following types: Metadata




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La nueva emergencia económica y sanitaria sería inconstitucional




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Hospitals Services Performed Overseas

A movement toward greater use of telemedicine is widening the spectrum of care doctors can provide from afar and enabling more outsourcing of services overseas.




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Analysis: Pac-12 winners, losers, trends and takeaways from the 2020 NFL draft


Here's a look at how the Pac-12 stacked up against other conferences during the NFL draft.




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Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior "quality" updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” - Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse - a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google's algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don't add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don't either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

  • the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites
  • the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work
  • higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)
  • the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs
  • the rise of ad blockers
  • increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site's revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else - like Facebook in its time - this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they've pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They've recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. ... When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries."

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

And while Amazon is destroying brand equity, AWS is doing investor relations matchmaking for startups. Anything to keep the current bubble going ahead of the Uber IPO that will likely mark the top in the stock market.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing strike price.

They've created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

"It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. ... Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm."

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. ... Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. ... Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. ... As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can't really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

  • If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.
  • If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can't change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was benign rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. ... The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there'll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there'll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Update: It appears a major reverberation of this update occurred on April 7th. From early analysis, Google is mixing in showing results for related midtail concepts on a core industry search term & they are also in some cases pushing more aggressively on doing internal site-level searches to rank a more relevant internal page for a query where they homepage might have ranked in the past.




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