Unfortunately, Google’s changes have been affecting legit blogs. One noteworthy example is Cult of Mac, a blog that aims to provide “timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest product reviews about Apple and Apple-related products.”

Cult of Mac has experienced the opposite of Google’s goal: their content has largely disappeared from Google’s SERPs, while content farms and spam-blogs scraping Cult of Mac posts have been pushed to the top.

A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.

I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.

Indeed, Cult of Mac does break a lot of stories. Along with the Boy Genius Report, Mac Rumors and 9 to 5 Mac, they together are the source of the lion’s share of Apple-related reporting. It’s strange that Google’s algorithm would red-flag them as a content farm. Perhaps it is a result of “splogs” scraping their content; maybe a glitch in Google’s secret algorithm is causing one of the spam blogs to be marked as the original source for some reason or another?

Many people commenting on the subject, whether in editorials, podcasts or discussion forums, would bring up the subject of how strong the users’ cracked passwords were. There were a large percentage of users with weak passwords like qwerty, password, 123456, or monkey. Yes, they are obviously weak passwords. However, I think it’s wrong to use them as an example of bad user-end security practices.

I, for one, would never use one of my more secure passwords for an account on a blog or discussion forum. I would be likely to come up with a throwaway that I would never use on a site where I would care if it were compromised. Considering that Gawker’s readers are probably a little more tech-savvy than your grandparents, why assume that they wouldn’t take the same approach? Given Gawker’s security breach, I think it’s a well-justified method to use.

Also, the AppStorm main page has received a redesign. It’s simple, matches the rest of the site, and I like the icons along the top.

It’s certainly an interesting idea, though I wonder if it might take away from the blogs a little bit? The Tuts+ blogs pay a lot of money upfront to their regular authors, but infrequent contributors could be more attracted to the promise of recurring sales.

Google Becomes “Topeka”

Referencing Topeka, Kansas’ changing of their name to “Google, Kansas” for a month, Google changed their name to “Topeka” for April Fools’ Day.

Envato Launches GIFtuts+

Envato, famous for their TUTS+ network of blog, announced their newest site: GIFtuts+. Complete with several horrid animated GIFs, Comic Sans and Papyrus, the announcement links to an actual gif.tutsplus.com domain.

HootSuite Goes 3D

To my knowledge, the joke didn’t go beyond an announcement and a retweet campaign promising “early beta access,” but the idea was pretty good. And bonus points for the Owl logo with 3D glasses.

YouTube Text-Only Mode

It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. Help them save money by using the new text-only mode. YouTube saves $1 per second in bandwidth when you view videos as text.

The Secrets of the Universe by Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D

BookAdvice.net reviews Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s new book. Be sure to click the “REVIEW” link for the full review…

UniXKCD

The popular web comic XKCD changed their homepage to a Unix command line, including many of the expected commands, but with humorous responses. You may still be able to see it here, and the Reddit thread has a cheat sheet of available commands.

Clicky Twitter Updates

You like Foursquare. You like Clicky. Why not combine the two? Exactly what we were thinking! Every time you visit a site with the Clicky tracking code installed, we’ll automatically tweet out from your Twitter account which web site you are viewing. Combined with Foursquare, not only will all your followers know WHERE you are every second of every day, but also what you’re doing on the internet – every second of every day!

Clicky Blog: Check in at your favorite web sites – automatically!

Reddit: Everyone’s an Admin!

Reddit’s elaborate April Fools’ Day event was to throw a bit of chaos into the community…by giving everyone admin privileges! For 24 hours you could actually ban users, vote stories up or down multiple times, edit other users’ headlines, etc.. (I think they kept a separate database of the edits, and used some JavaScript magic to dynamically apply them after the original content loaded.)

World of WarCraft Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number

Blizzard posted a series of fake announcements, including the “Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number,” which tells everyone just how awesome your armor and other gear is.

As part of the upcoming stat-system revamp, we plan to introduce a new tool that will let World of Warcraft players know exactly where they stand in comparison to other players: the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number. With this new system, you’ll no longer have to wonder about your perceived or actual worth as a player. Your Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number, automatically derived from the quality of the gear you currently possess, will be placed on your character sheet and in the Armory, and also displayed over your character’s head in-game as an easy-to-read bar-like object that steadily grows as you acquire loot.

Google Maps Australia – Aussie Directions

Google Australia updated their Maps service to give more…interesting driving instructions.

MOO: Double sided Business Cards: Reinvented!

MOO.com, famous for their double-sided business cards with a different image on each card, announced their latest offering: double-sided cards with the image on the back instead of the front!

Kodak: Aromatography

Imagine seeing an image of a field of wildflowers and the experiencing all the delicate and complex aromas that accompany the visual experience.

It’s no longer just a dream, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense Imaging*

GMail: Today’s Vowel Outage

The official GMail blog has been updated with news of a vowel server failure that affected the web front-end of the email service for most of the day.

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter ‘y’ is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Ben and Jerry’s Ice Screen™

Ben and Jerry’s brings you the amazing new “Ice Screen” technology that lets you sample ice cream online by licking your screen.

• 30 Websites That Make A Lot Of Money Online
• 30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

Can you guess which website has the highest annual revenue? Google! They make $21,800,000,000 a year…or $691.27 per second. Amazing, isn’t it? Amazon is second on the list, followed by Yahoo, then eBay, MSN, PayPal, and then iTunes. NYTimes.com comes in thirtieth, with a whopping $175,000,000, which is nothing to sneeze at.

On the blogging side, TechCrunch is leading with $200,000 in monthly earnings. Mashable comes in second with a comparative value. Envato’s Tuts+ Network comes in at #8, with Smashing Magazine right behind. Quite a few recognizable names on the list.

If you’ve wondered what your favorite blogs and businesses make, these lists should give you a rough idea. Quite fun to look at.

Today across the Tuts+ network we’re rolling out some changes to our brand and how our sites work together. These changes include a rebrand of our logos, a shift from multiple domain names to a single top level domain, a universal Plus membership, a Plus Affiliate Program, updated Plus interface, a Twitter Tuts+ news stream and a new tutsplus.com site complete with a rearrangeable dashboard. In other words, a whole bunch of stuff!

You can read the full announcement here, with all of the big changes they’ve been making.

Overall the changes seem pretty good. I’ve always been a fan of the Ta’eed’s sites, the TUTS ones especially. However, a couple of the changes bug me a little…

1. The new logos and naming scheme don’t seem quite right. Net.tuts+ just seems kind of awkward. It doesn’t read as well as NETTUTS. I’ve always wondered whether I should say “Net tutts” or “Net toots,” but now I have to say “Net tutts plus,” and write it with that awkward period and plus sign.
2. The move to subdomains of tutsplus.com seems silly. You have the domains, they’re well established, they’re easier to type why change them? They may still get you there, but you’re jsut dilluting your existing brand. There’s already Tuts+ and Envato branding plastered all over the TUTS (sorry, “Tuts+”) sites. I can see not wanting to drop thousands of dollars for new *tuts.com domains, but it seems silly to change the other ones as well. I think it would be better to make the subdomains be the secondary, redirect URL for the sites that have their own domains.

I can understand the changes, but those two just don’t sit well with me… I suppose I will get used to them in time.

Now that looks like a lot of something. Too bad it’s spam. Yes, this graph is generated from Akismet’s log of the spam comments it has caught over time.

Amazing isn’t it? In one day, such as September second last year, this very blog would have been slammed with 848 spam comments if not for the aid of the Akismet spam filters? Imagine if we didn’t have such defenses; the internet would be an unbearable, and running a blog would be a nightmare. We may complain to no end about the spam messages that slip through, but I think we all know that it could be a lot worse.

I don’t like spam messages of any kind, but at least emails aren’t public. Comment and forum spammers earn the most of my contempt. To me, leaving spam comments is far worse than sending a few spam emails.

Thank you, Akismet developers, for helping to keep the nasty stuff to a tolerable level. Turning your plugin off for even a week would be suicide.

I think I can speak for everybody (who isn’t a bloodsucking scoundrel) when I say spam is a plague. Note that when I say I don’t like spam, I refer to the digital kind and not the tasty, canned lunch meat.

(Spam sketch by Monty Python)

I have to say that the “ordinary people” have come up with some very different results than the bloggers.

Here are some highlights from the winners:

• Netlog (Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks)
• Google (Start Pages)
• Noisetrade (Music)
• Evernote (Mobile Applications)
• Encyclopedia Dramatica (Wiki)
• Playfish (Online Games)
• ShareThis (Blog Plugins)
• Help a Reporter Out (Social News)

For the full list, as well as the runner-ups, check out Mashable’s announcement.

Also note that the Peoples’ Choice voting is still ongoing, and will end midnight on Sunday.

The Bloggers’ Choice are

• Twitter (Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks)
• Clearspring (Embeddable Widgets)
• ShareThis (Blog Plugins)
• Digg (Social News)
• Ping.fm (Social Networking Applications)
• Delicious (Social Bookmarking)
• Google (Search & Social Search)
• Flickr (Photo Sharing)
• YouTube (Video Sharing)
• Last.fm (Music)
• Evernote (Mobile Applications)
• Wikipedia (Wiki)
• eHow (How-to)

For the full list, which includes more categories and the runner-ups, see Mashable’s announcement.

Also, be sure to vote in the Peoples’ Choice if you haven’t already! (Voting widget in the sidebar.)