Treasury investors are frequently described as being smarter than equity investors because treasuries and generally good leading indicators i.e. the price or yield on treasuries can sometimes be used to predict future economic activity, or at least the trend thereof.
When the economic outlook appears to be bleak or risky, some investors "flee" to treasuries, which are essentially guaranteed loans to the government. This is called a "flight to safety", because the risk of losing money (in nominal terms, at least) is lower in treasuries than in equities or other investments.
However, one must be reminded of the "chicken and the egg" problem. As there is a flight of capital to "safe" treasuries, less investment and venture capital is then available to functioning business and those wanting to start new business. More businesses will therefore fail, and many new businesses will never get started.
So, at least some of the weakened economy must due to this flight to capital.
If you ask me, the US government should not be allowed to issue treasuries... With over $14.5 Trillion current outstanding debt, the government have borrowed enough (on our behalf) and has absolutely no business borrowing any more!
Eliminate treasuries and free up some capital for those that will use it more wisely!
As I was looking at the Google cache of a page, I noticed that the layout was a bit weird. The issue was that the cache date was Nov. 1 and the site had undergone updates on the 3rd or so. The updated external CSS files weren't playing well with the old cache page.
So I hit refresh and noticed that the cache date was now Nov. 4th, and the page looked fine, as the page from Nov. 4th was designed for the updated external CSS files. So I hit refresh a few more times and noticed I was able to randomly toggle between two different versions; The cached page from Nov. 1st and the page from Nov 4th. So, Google obviously stores cache in various different places. This gave me an idea.
It has been said before that Google has kept copies of all of the different indices it has ever created. If this means what I think it means, then they should have all of the different cached copies for every URL that Google has every crawled. OK, so maybe you know where I'm going with this, but keep reading anyway...
I'd like to introduce you to... Google "Versions" (or possibly Google "Timeport"). I'm going to use Google as the example search engine in this case. I'm sorry Bing - This could equally apply to you, but I spend most of my day worrying about Google.
Imagine this:
BUT... each result has an extra link called "Versions" beside the standard "Cached" and "Similar" links.
When you click on this "Versions" link, you are presented with a list of the dates for which Google has a cached version of the page. You click on a date and get the cached version of the page on that date.
Yes, this is basically the concept of archive.org aka the "Wayback Machine", except that archive.org does a relatively bad job of crawling pages often enough for it to be useful. I say "relatively" because they obviously don't have the resources of a company such as Google or Microsoft. So perhaps archive.org does a fantastic job given their resources, but they're terrible when compared to either of the aforementioned companies.
There's a couple of problems with the idea of Google Versions. First, Google right now caches only the HTML. All of the inline/embedded elements in the cached code, such as CSS, JavaScript, Images, etc., are relative to the original URI of the page. So, if you were to view an old cache version of a page and some object that is referenced from within that page has since been removed from the server - or even just modified on the server - then the page will likely be broken to some degree or another.
To workaround this problem, Google would have to synchronously cache the page itself and all of the objects referenced therein. To my knowledge, the Google cache system simply does not work this way at this time and it would probably require a rewrite. We know that Google crawl images and also CSS and JavaScript files, but I don't know the extent to which any of these are cached, or whether they are cached synchronously with their parent pages.
But, archive.org has synchronously cached pages and their associated objects for years, so presumably Google could do it also if they were so inclined.
Another problem is the potential copyright issues, but I don't see this really being a hurdle - especially in the US. The robots.txt is the defacto standard for exclusion from search engines. A separate User Agent string could be used for Google Versions e.g. "VersionsBot". Also, the meta robots noarchive tag should also prevent a page from being indexed in the Versions archive.
It's an interesting idea that I would like to see Google or Bing introduce. It's certainly in line with Google's mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
What are your thoughts?
I use a BlackBerry 8820. I've got an iPhone, used to have a Sony Experia X1 (Windows Mobile) and I have tried a plethora of other phones (including other BlackBerry's), but the BlackBerry 8820 is the one for me.
However, one thing that used to irritate me about the phone was that it wasn't very easy to sync my iTunes music podcasts and some business documents from my Mac to the SD card in my BlackBerry. So I wrote a simple shell script that takes care of those things for me. The script I show here should also work with other BlackBerry's.
The script uses rsync to overwrite folders on my BlackBerry with folders on my Mac (like my iTunes folder). I saved the following code into a file named bb-sync.sh in my ~/ folder:
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Podcasts/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Desktop/WalkMusic/" "/Volumes/BB/iTunes/Music/" &&
rsync -u -v -I -r --delete "/Users/DWard/Documents/Passwords.kdb" "/Volumes/BB/Documents/Passwords.kdb"
The formatting of the above code may look weird owing to linebreaks, so you can also Download bb-sync.sh.
This is 3 separate rsync commands because I am syncing 3 folders. On each line, the first reference to a file or folder is local on my mac and overwrites the second stated file/folder, which is on my BlackBerry SD card (they all start with "/Volumes/BB/").
My blackberry SD card mounts as a volume named "BB". Yours will probably mount as something else, but you can check by using "cd /Volumes/" in Terminal when your device is connected to see what name it uses when it mounts. You may need to plug it in and out to see the differences between mounted/unmounted states. The Volume name will probably also show up on the OS X Desktop as a drive when your BlackBerry SD card mounts. Substitute BB for the name of your BlackBerry SD card volume and change the directories that you want to sync.
When my BlackBerry SD card mounts, I sync by opening up terminal and typing "sh bb-sync.sh" and it prints out a report of the files it's deleting and new files it's uploading.
There are two last things that I will say: 1) That this technique will work for any mounted volume; it's not specific to BlackBerry, and; 2) You can fiddle with the rsync flags and options to get a two way sync, or some other functionality. But I'm not going to bother with that. See the man page for rsync if you want to do something other than what I have described here.
Now if you'll excuse me... I am going to listen to some recently synced podcasts on my BlackBerry while I go for my evening walk. :)
I absolutely loathe flying. I'm not scared of flying (in fact I find takeoff and landing to be quite exciting), but rather I just find the whole experience of public air travel to be utterly deplorable, and frankly, disgusting! Airports are congested, people on planes have zero personal hygiene, getting the shakedown at airport security, etc. is just an invasion of my personal space that I rather not endure, which is why I only fly when it's absolutely essential.
However, there are a couple of upcoming projects for which I may have to travel, so I was recently looking at some airfares, which is why I was very interested to see that the bing travel blog has an interesting recent post about airfares rising faster on the west coast vs. east coast. Cross-country fares have also risen by a whopping 23% over a 4 week period.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting enough to share. Personally, I think I'm just going to line up as many conference calls as I can over a 2 day period and drive where I need to go rather than fly. That way I can still get work done and I don't have to fly. Unfortunately, I was hoping to make an international trip and I may just have to concede and fly, because I can't drive and I can't afford to charter a large yacht (though I would if I could before flying).
Many analytics programs allow you to see referring search engine "keywords" and "keyphrases" as two separate reports, and it's important to understand what the difference between these for SEO or PPC. ("Keyphrase" is probably more correctly written as "key-phrase", but my spelling has never been perfect, so why start now!)
A "keyphrase" report will show you the exact referring search phrases, usually sorted by volume/hits. A "keyword" report will show you the hit count for each unique keyword across all of the referring keyphrases.
Keyphrases are pretty simple. The analytics program will track each exact referring phrase from each search engine, and each time it sees a new hit for a keyphrase, it will increment the count. For example, if 10 different people find your site by searching for "download music", then that keyphrase will have 10 hits. If another 10 people find your site for "music download" (the same words reversed), then this phase will also have 10 hits, and the keyphrase report will be:
A keyword report will separate each individual keyword from it's keyphrase and find the hit count for that keyword across all search keyphrases. So, given the same 20 referring search keyphrase hits from the example above (10 for "download music" and 10 for "music download"), a keyword report would show the following:
This is because the words "download" and "music" appear a total of 20 times each.
First and foremost, the keyword report does not give you a clear idea of exactly how people are finding your site. Instead, it gives you a very broad overview of the main keywords that are being used to find your site, but not the exact keywords. These keywords may have a "long tail". In our example above, none of the traffic came directly from searches for "download" or "music", yet both of these show 20 hits. Looking at the keyphrase report will tell you the exact keyphrases that drove traffic.
The total hit count for a keyword report will also be inaccurate. In our example, the total traffic was 20 (10+10), yet our keyword report gives the impression that we received 40 (20+20) hits.
All-in-all, both keyword and keyphrase reports have their place in SEO and PPC, but you need to know what you are looking for. Most often you'll really want a keyphrase report rather than the keyword report.
It's interesting to note that Google Analytics has a keyword report, but it's actually a keyphrase report. Google Analytics doesn't have a true keyword report.