Chief Prognosticator

..is the Amazon Kimble. Amazon’s new eReader, is another electronic book device, but the best part is you get free wireless access to Wikipedia! No seriously — once you pay the $299 device price, you get unlimited wireless access to read Wikipedia. That’s the truly amazing part as I see it — a real pocket encyclopedia. That’s a nice leap into the future… now why wasn’t Google on board?

Who hasn’t suffered from the latest Google PageRank fallout? Blogs, especially those which accept paid advertising, have suffered a huge hit in PageRank in the latest update. In some cases, blogs have fallen from PR 7 ro PR 3 in a matter of days. I even know of one blog, Hoto’s Business Spot, which went from PR 0 to PR 4 only to go back to PR 2 and PR 0 in a matter of weeks! What’s up with that? All my blogs, including this one, fell down to PR 1 with the last update, even though I have up to 4000 inbound links. That’s just plain wrong. Good thing Google PageRank is becoming less and less important.

Ted Murphy is the CEO of Izea.com and PayPerPost. He is *the* visionary in the blog advertising market and runs the biggest company in the industry. I met him at the Varsity in the ATL tonight and got a sneak preview of the new Izea.com properties better known as Project ARGUS.

Come on, you may ask, how can Google come to an end? Well here’s a scenario which might make dry up Google’s revenues and send the stock crashing back to Earth. There is a movement underway to create a National Do Not Track list. Similar to the National Do Not Call list which prevents telemarketers from calling your home phone, this list would prevent Internet Service Providers and the sites which are accessed through them to place Cookies on their users machines or track them in any other sort of way. What would this do to Google’s ability to place targeted ads in search results and AdSense page views? Well on the surface it seems that Google would be safe since it serves ads based on search queries. This way Google doesn’t need to place any Cookies because the “targeted term” is physically submitted by the web visitor. You type in “Chinese Restaurants Atlanta” and Google knows to show ads for those companies who paid for those search terms. But the trouble comes in when we look deeper. Nobody knows exactly how much data Google tracks of it’s users over time. It has been made public in the past that Google compiles search data over time and perhaps this involves examining particular IP addresses or users. If the National Do Not Track list comes into existence, then Google will be severely limited to mine this valuable advertising data. In return Google’s entire advertising model could be compromised, send earnings way down and opening themselves up for class action lawsuits from anyone still tracked. So could it be the end of Google? Only time will tell but at least you stock holder have been warned.