It took a long, long time but YouTube finally announced additions to their API that actually make it useful. With the release of the features listed below we’re about to see the floodgate open on third-party YouTube applications.

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

I hope someone combines this with the new iPhone SDK and makes a YouTube application for my iPod Touch that’s actually worth a damn.

I’ve never really written a post specifically about this blog. I thought I’d write a bit tonight about how things are going and about the upcoming changes I’m planning on making here.

The Stats

There are some good and some bad things to report about this blog’s statistics. For starters, the Alexa Rank has dropped to 135,680. Getting that score below 150,000 was one of my goals when I began a concerted effort to post more regularly here back in December. Mission accomplished.

I’m seeing around 150+ unique visitors come to this blog each day and the majority of those are from search engines. I think that has a lot to do with writing keyword rich posts and content on long tail topics. This site sees a lot of traffic to my posts on tech support problems and my programming examples. I have no opinion one way or the other if this is a good or bad thing in the long run so I’ll take a wait and see approach.

One disappointment here would have to be my stagnant RSS subscriber count. I won’t bother giving you the exact figures because they’re pathetically small and, quite frankly, I just don’t put a lot of stock in RSS counts to begin with. The actual number itself doesn’t bother me. What does bum me out a bit is how there doesn’t seem to be much growth from week to week.

Upcoming Changes: Subtractions

I’m going to be dropping my regular features on interesting links and the WordPress plugin of the week. This actually started this week as some of you may have noticed. My original intention with those posts was to make writing here easier but they ended up being more of a mental burden than I had planned.

Also getting the axe here is the Entrecard widget. In the last few weeks I’m seeing traffic from the Entrecard site dwindle into nothing as I’ve stopped actively dropping cards and buying my own advertising. I’ve also been noticing a pretty big difference between the Entrecard-related numbers I see on Google Analytics and the numbers Entrecard is reporting. It’s enough of a problem to cause me to decide to take the widget down.

Upcoming Changes: Additions

I’m going to definitely be posting more interviews with other web developers and freelancers who are doing interesting work. The interviews are personally some of the favorite posts that I do.

I’m going to write longer but less frequent posts as well. I like to ramble on (subscribers to Jack’s Newsletter should be painfully aware of that by now) about whatever topic is obsessively on my mind at the time and the traditional short-post format just isn’t well suited to that kind of writing.

I’m also tossing around the idea of adding some advertising options. I have the 125×125 banners on the sidebar but they currently go to sites I recommend or own myself. I might be offering those to the public sometime soon. The idea of doing paid reviews has crossed my mind as well but I’m not totally sold on that idea just yet.

Tighter Integration

The last thing I want to try to do applies to more than just the blog. I really want to make more of an attempt at unifying this blog, my newsletter and my WordPress themes site. I think the closer together I can tie all three of those sites the better chances of success they’ll all have.

With the recent PageRank update, the auction forums have exploded with activity as people try to sell their domains and sites that have fresh PR.

This is all fine and good and is pretty typical of how the webmaster marketplace cycles each update. The danger during these times is with people selling sites that have a fake PageRank.

What is fake PageRank?

A site has a fake PageRank when the PR returned from the Google servers is actually the PR of a different site. A site with fake PageRank has basically “tricked” Google into thinking it’s actually another site on the web and then Google assigns both sites a matching PageRank score.

How does this work?

I’m not going to get into the technical specifics but here’s a very general overview of the means to “steal” another site’s PageRank.

A script is written on the stealing site that automatically redirects any incoming requests from Google’s webcrawler to another site with PageRank. This effectively confuses the Google spider into thinking the site’s are the same and the stealing site eventually, with enough redirects, inherits the other site’s PageRank.

What’s the problem? This sounds great.

The problem is that as soon as Google figures out what’s happening or the redirection described above is stopped (say, when the new owner takes control of the domain) then the PageRank will be removed and you’ll have a penalized site in Google’s index. And a penalized site in Google’s index is practically worthless.

How do I protect myself?

There are literally hundreds of sites on the web that will tell you what PageRank a site has. The problem is that very few of them will tell you if that PageRank is actually valid.

My personal preference is to run any sites I’m curious about through the service provided at Check Page Rank as they give you a really thorough breakdown of not only a site’s PR (whether it’s valid or not) but also information on the site’s indexed pages in various search engines.

If you want to see it in action, check out the stats for iamjacksdesign.com

The Bottom Line

Whenever you’re thinking about purchasing a site or a domain (particularly if you mainly are interested/concerned with its PageRank) be sure to do your own research.

That’s really the best advice I can give. Every single day someone gets ripped off by a fake PageRank scam because they don’t do their own fact finding and instead get lazy and trust someone’s word.

There’s absolutely no reason that the same thing should happen to you after reading this post.

SHAMELESS PLUG: This Monday’s edition of Jack’s Newsletter is going to be exclusively about PageRank and the issues/benefits surrounding it. If that sounds interesting to you then you might want to subscribe now.

There appears to be a new PageRank update this weekend or possibly this morning. I bet this comes a little sooner than most people expected.

PageRank Update Day is always fun for me. Anyone who tells you that PageRank is dead is fooling themselves or just hasn’t learned how to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the newest scores for the sites throughout Jack’s Empire:

This update was full of surprises. Here’s some quick analysis:

• As usual, each update comes with some sacrificial lambs and this time around it was the Michigan Sports Report and New York City Sports Report. And, as usual, the reason for their drop should be more than obvious to anyone who visits the sites.
• The biggest leaper in the bunch was the Northwest Sports Report going from 0 to 4. I have no logical explanation for that except that it was well linked between all the sites in the empire. Conventional wisdom from SEO experts says that inter-linking like that doesn’t pass much Google juice so believe what you want.
• It’s nice to see my free WordPress themes site get a small bump. I’ve been trying to do a bit more recently to get the word out and it seems to be paying off both in the number of theme downloads and this small PR boost.

I’m actually focusing next week’s newsletter on my thoughts and approaches concerning PageRank and utilizing it to your advantage. If you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in that kind of information sign up when you get a chance. There’s a form in the upper right hand corner right now to make it easier on you.

Alex King is responsible for a lot of great WordPress plugins but one of my favorites is his simple 404 Notifier.

404 Notifier is an admin-side plugin that logs any 404 errors your visitors encounter while visiting your blog.

The neat part of 404 Notifier is that you can subscribe to a special RSS feed that will automatically notify you of any new 404 errors.