There is surprisingly little information on how to move back from hosted to free WordPress on Google, so hopefully this will provide some guidance for those of us who are less technical.

Pros summary

- It’s free
- WordPress’ reliable hosting to manage traffic spikes (thorn in my side on a cheap hosting deal)
- Many of the more popular widgets are still available (many aren’t…)
- Less hassle, just focus on the content

Cons summary

- No advertising. In fact, WordPress reserve the right to include ads on your own content (update: see my second comment. Ouch)
- Reduced number of extensions for those of us who like to test. The default stats in particular are basic.
- Reduced number of themes
- Reduced control of code
- WordPress have the final say over your blog

Moving back to WordPress.com summary

- Register with WordPress.com (if you didn’t originally)
- Check that you have a recent version of the WordPress software. Older versions do not include an ‘export’ option under manage. Instructions on this are here. Make sure you backup properly!
- Follow the instructions at ‘Manage’; ‘Export’
- Log into WordPress.com and follow instructions at ‘Manage’; ‘Import’.
- Go to ‘Upgrades’; ‘Domains’. Either purchase your domain or follow instructions to map it to WordPress.
- One common problem is confusion over how you purchase credits for the domain mapping. That’s because you can’t purchase credits, UNTIL you’ve mapped your domain. You are then prompted to purchase the 10 credits. Could be explained much more clearly. I was presented with the option to purchase the credits almost immediately after mapping my domain.
- Wait for the domain to propagate.
- The only problem to date has been that I’ve had to re-upload images.

Disclaimer: this is my personal experience and may not work for you. Do your research and always backup.

(The hosting service will remain nameless for now as they have been responsive in fixing the problems, if only they’d prevent them happening…).

As you’ll see on the sidebar (update: have moved back to free version so ads are gone), I have been carrying out an advertising experiment first using Pubmatic and now just with Google Adsense which means that for the first time this blog features a strip of (hopefully discreet) ads.

I may want to keep the experiment going for a short while on the free WordPress.com service, but reading the WordPress.com FAQs it seems that Google Adsense/Adwords are not permitted. Indeed if you try and put the code into a blog post under HTML, WordPress automatically removes it.

There is an exception – those using the VIP service are allowed to include ads. They do of course pay $500/month for the privilege and only if they are deemed famous enough to be accepted into the VIP club. WordPress themselves do also occassionally use their own Google Adsense on your blog.

My advice would be to those looking to make money via WordPress blogging is to build up your audience using the free WordPress blog, while forking out the c.$15 a year for the domain and $10 a year for the domain mapping service. Once your blog reaches sufficient scale to justify using an Adsense or equivalent service, then upgrade to a hosting package. The cheaper hosting packages do run the risk of going down should your blog get Slashdotted or Dugg, so it pays to do your research into your bandwidth allocations.

The mind-boggling figure illustrates the challenge for search engines in trying to judge value among so many competitive sources of information and in an environment where there are both fair (white hat SEO) and foul (black hat SEO) means to present content.

Understandable is the emergence of social software to facilitate peer-review of content sources to better identify value. After all, value is in the eyes of the beholder, with part of that value derived from one’s own community.

The likes of Delicious and Friendfeed offer forms of community search both allowing you to apply search filters through your own network. From my experiments, I find these useful in finding quality content, but not for providing the comprehensive reach that the major search engines offer.

While Google uses your own search history data to improve search results, it does of course use the wider community through apportioning value to inbound links (what’s of value to the community is of value to you). That community is narrowed by attaching more value to links from related topic websites to better idenfity the kind of niche communities that you benefit from on social software.

As yet, neither offer the best combination of the personal and the comprehensive to find the ideal search mix for the individual. There remain challenges in key areas, such as privacy, simplicity, data portability and applying the right filters at the right times. Then we can start talking about finding that trillion-in-one URL.

Note to Google: wait for a sunnier day, as it looks like there’s a stage in England after all…

Although the coverage is far from universal, they have taken the inspired decision to start withthe Tour de France route, including sections of Paris, Saint-Étienne and Brest. It certainly opens up the possibility of some excellent mashups of live Tour data to enhance coverage.

Fortunately, the route allows me to take my own tour down memory lane to re-enact my old walk to work down the Champs-Elysées and revisit an old holiday destination by taking a tour inside the city walls of Saint-Malo. Picture quality is perfectly adequate. To protect privacy, but not perhaps vanity, faces and number plates are obscured.

You can view it here (make sure the Street View button is selected). It’s also available in Google Earth.

Understandably the move has provoked a huge reaction in the blogosphere given the background of the failed Microsoft deal. It is sure to attract the attention of the regulators given the two company’s positions as the top two in search, even if it is non-exclusive.

For Google this gives them access to Yahoo’s massive traffic and for Yahoo a big potential revenue stream and a clear strategic move after the failed Microsoft takeover.

So, if you don’t want to know what it’s marketing (there might be a little clue further up though…), then watch the embedded video below, then read the rest of the post.

The viral stands out on several counts: although personally I hate musicals I have to admire the quality of the acting and singing; the hidden cameras capture the surprise of the unsuspecting public perfectly; it plays on the lack of human interaction in large public spaces like airports; and it’s a great fit for promoting a theatre booking service and doesn’t damage the brand by trying to stand out by being too edgy.

Best of all it works, it’s had me thinking I should go to the theatre more often, just not to any musicals…

The full details are available here.

Similar to Google’s guidelines for Webmasters, it would be helpful to have a set of consistent standards for the basics of search engine optimisation across the search engines. Obviously each search engine has its own closely-guarded algorithm that determines rankings, but with consistent guidelines on sitemaps, use/abuse of keywords and clear do’s/don’ts would be a big help in putting the emphasis firmly on supporting white hat practices.

As an update, Wired claimed in March 2008 that MySpace had an average growth rate of 513%, moving from 20m users (2005) to 225m (2008), with Facebook’s equivalent figure 550%.

For me though, the interesting question is less the size of the overall market – we already know it’s big – but the next challenge of monetising those audiences. It’s somewhat ironic that in a sector where there is such richness of personal data, that ad targeting remains in its infancy and the low value network ad dominates.

So why is that and what’s holding back the full potential of the social networking ad market? Let’s summarise some of the key reasons:

• Concerns from advertisers about associating themselves with the uncertainties of user generated content.
• The shear size of the inventory available.
• Lack of relevancy of ads. It’s partly a technical challenge, but rightly, there are legal and privacy issues with processing user data as Facebook Beacon found out to their cost in having to scale back their ambitions.
• Mindset – are those surfing social networks in the right mindset to respond to advertising? Google Adsense works because it’s contextual and the better ads help task-orientated users solve a problem.
• Lack of innovative creative tailored to those environments.
• Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

These challenges can be at least partially addressed through ad targeting technology, informed consent from users and better data about what users respond to and what they don’t. Also the emergence of niche social networks offers more potential to provide advertisers with a targeted audience focused on a particular activity and in theory more receptive to relevant ads within that niche.

Get close to solving these problems and the really interesting statistics will be the financial ones…

I used it for the first month, but what prevented me from keeping it up was the lack of integration with other products. Despite the plethora of social bookmarking services and Google Reader’s sharing functionality, I still use delicious. I’m so used to its design and functionality that although other pretenders may come along with more functionality, it acts as a hard drive extension for my brain!

The problem was that I’d read a post of interest, but wasn’t able to bookmark it to delicious as that is not offline-enabled. The result was an awkward process of keeping the post unread and going back to bookmark later when web access was restored.

Now that Gears is focused on spreading its open source technology to other services hopefully that will change and I may start using it again. For now, though Gears remains ‘offline’…

Update: delicious offline access may indeed be coming through Yahoo’s BrowserPlus branded as desktop capability for web applications…