As you may have noticed, Google is now employing social search. It’s what you might say a “hot button issue” in the online community. Why? Too many reasons to list here. Essentially, those that trusted Google’s rules for making “great natural search content” are now stuck with the reality that a significant chunk of Google’s search audience no longer receive natural results.

I won’t judge the merits of social search versus natural search here. My personal preference is for natural search though, as I want my results to not be biased towards what my peers, friends, and frenemies like to read. Others may be better off with those enhancements and biases to their results.

Regardless, as a publisher, you are either doing really great, or really bad at this point from Google’s perpetual shuffles over the past 12 to 16 months. Few I’ve run into are doing “okay” or “same as before”.

The advantage to WordPress Multisite though is that it benefits both the people that are doing “great” and the people that have been… excuse me for a second. Christopher is searching on Google for a synonym for the word screwed… Under the weather. Eh, close enough.

If you don’t know what Multisite is, it originally began its life as WordPress MU, or Multiuser. It was a synchronized fork of WordPress. As of version 3.0, it’s a tightly-integrated part of the WordPress core.

Multisite lets you create a lot of sites at once, what would have taken hours previously can be done in 30 minutes or less per site. You no longer have to deploy plugins, themes, configuration settings, etc. A quick DNS redirection, few tweaks to your WP-Admin panel, and you have another new WordPress site. And, you can now share user-bases between sites.

If you’re a WordPress zealot, you might be saying “gee, that’s great Chris… welcome to three major versions ago.” Well, that is true. However, version 3.0 and 3.1 really were migratory versions for WMPU users. If you had a WPMU install, Multisite worked great. If you weren’t a WPMU veteran, problems ensued. Remmeber how a lot of plugins needed to be compatible with WordPress MU before installing them? Issues were everywhere.

At version 3.2 however, it started to make sense, and by WordPress 3.3, I had Multisite up and running in my labs. And, it’s now live and running on sites like PhoneNews.com. Now some of those downtime tweets and apologies make more sense… you may not see any differences, but it’s all about planning for the future.

Now that you know what Multisite is, and how Multisite evolved, I haven’t yet answered why it helps you with Social Search.

Obviously having speed in creating more sites will help with search; natural and social alike. You can branch out with more content, and not need to tackle hosting and logistical issues as often. And, Multisite’s ability to let you quickly roll out all the WordPress social-networking integrations easily helps too.

The real benefit though is in the ability to take your flock of followers from your first site, and carry them over to your next site. By creating related sites, you can now keep people logged in, and interacting across related topics. With BuddyPress and bbPress, you can now keep them blogging, discussing, and talking in a community that you own and control.

Part of social search, in my opinion, is the need to create your own community that has its own followers. You basically have to act like search engines don’t exist, and depend on your own community for traffic and viewers. In turn, your community will share that with their friends online… strengthening your position in social search, naturally.

Bottom line, if you have WordPress up and running, and you’re serious about publishing, it’s time to give Multisite a try. One suggestion though, don’t deploy Multisite on your production site. You can always enable it after you’ve tested with another WordPress install on the same server. Much of the downtime I encountered was due to a server move, which was needed to handle the traffic increase.

And that leaves one footnote to this primer. WordPress is not the most memory-friendly, CPU friendly Content Management System out there. Multisite does not really do much to help this, as your hosting account is now driving multiple sites on one account. Be prepared, especially if you are on shared hosting, to have a growth plan in place for a quick move to more-powerful hosting solutions.

Seriously, go oppose SOPA & PIPA. As you may know, I typically don’t echo what was just written on PhoneNews.com over here. But today’s an important exception, as I chronicled exactly why SOPA and PIPA need to die a loud, voracious death. The tech community must take its stand, right here, and right now.

Please, help everyone out here, and take just a few minutes to call your local Congressperson. Call your Senators. Even if they support SOPA & PIPA. Heck, even if they have lunch with Chris Dodd (ex-Senator magically turned MPAA lobbyist… erm, chairman) on a daily basis.

Writing is nice, but a phone call works best. It’s easy to hit delete, it’s easy to crash inboxes. I’m sure it will happen. But making someone actually jot down what you had to say in the legislative process goes longer. No, you probably won’t reach your local representative (hey, you might, it happens all the time). However, some aide in that office does have to write down notes on what you said. If enough people does it, the aides aggregate. If every voicemail and memo they have to take down today is on SOPA and PIPA, it will help.

The White House will likely veto SOPA and PIPA if it comes to the President’s desk. However, it shouldn’t get that far to begin with. Congress needs to realize that the tech-savvy millions are now the majority. The average joe speaks iPad as fluently as Republican vs Democrat. This is one issue that thankfully crosses party lines. Free speech should not be trumped by corporate interests, and this isn’t a left-corporate or right-corporate issue. It’s about everyone, small businesses and civil rights advocates… not to mention big businesses and organizations standing up to the media conglomerates.

Let’s make stopping SOPA and PIPA one issue where we can actually unite in this country, and who knows? Maybe some day we can keep this movement going to the point that it isn’t illegal anymore to copy a DVD movie that you own, that you purchased, to store on your own devices.

We still have a long way to go, after all, it’s legal to copy a CD-ROM to your hard drive, but not a DVD-ROM. That’s the country we live in today, but SOPA and PIPA would take it to, as they say, a whole ‘nother level.

The nice thing about KGO was that there was radio for all audiences. Yes, it was meant to be the liberal answer to their sister station, KSFO, but it gave a local perspective with fresh content.

I do feel a bit for Cumulus Media. When ratings systems and metrics change, advertisers can run away faster than the blink of an eye. It’s happened to my operations more than once in my career thus far. Ratings in radio change even more than they have on the Internet in the past few years, and are now based around portable monitors… these clunky devices that look like original iPods… that you have to constantly wear. I think it’s a poor metric, and I can see how it has caused KGO’s ratings to tank.

Sure, you can say that liberalism is on the outs in the new “new” economy, but I think this is a matter of lies, damn lies, and statistics.

KGO is basically dead to me at this point, I have no interest in any of the lingering programming on the station. A few personalities were kept, mostly I suspect to keep the schedule from reading “news” all 24 hours long. Advertisers don’t like that, either.

Did Internet kill the local radio star? Probably, I mean, podcasting is still in its infancy, but people are reading their news on smartphones, tablets, and other devices. I think podcasting has a long way to go before it replaces radio, but cars are going to be the lynchpin in that as they embrace tethering to phone apps for radio/podcast consumption. I suspect a lot of the content that made KGO unique will eventually emerge onto that platform in a national manner.

Do I support people planning an “Occupy KGO” movement? No. I don’t think protesting and demanding KGO reverse-course is warranted, or even necessary. I think most of the on-air personalities will be fine, and if KGO wants to make stupid decisions… there are plenty of other options in this industry. Between TuneIn Radio, the retention deals on XM/Sirius, and the rest of the AM band, I won’t have any problem keeping KGO off my dial.

If your feed URL is http://www.christopherprice.net/feed/ then you’re all set. If not, you need to update to that URL.

I’ll keep the old FeedBurner setup working, but you may be delayed by as much as several hours to get news. Yeah, it’s my personal blog, but still, I’m someone that always likes to have the fastest path to a news feed.

When I signed onto FeedBurner, it was hailed as a rocketing startup that promised faster, more reliable feeds… with monetization that the blogosphere didn’t offer at the time.

Since then, Google has gobbled up the company, and I have to say… it’s not one of Google’s finest hours. The transition to AdSense in-RSS ads has been a dismal failure, and the product has languished under Google’s monolithic oversight.

Hopefully Larry Page’s “cutting the fat” campaign will give Google some added attention to products like FeedBurner. I really do hope that will happen, but this is long in the making. I noted quite awhile ago my intent to disable Google services that have been languishing… this is merely making good on that commitment.

CBS News made a big blunder by hiding a key rule of the debate; people who were tanking in the polls, were going to be given less time on center stage. Ron Paul only got 89 seconds to speak. Michelle Bachman didn’t do much better. The top three candidates (at this point) all got the most speaking time; Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain.

Now, if CBS had been open about these rules, at least with the candidates, and best with the public… this would not have been a bad thing, in my opinion. Granted, 89 seconds for Ron Paul was an understatement. But, it’s certainly not something I would consider underhanded… there are several candidates in the Republican race right now, and some are able to maintain a national presence simply by traveling from one debate to the next.

Where CBS stepped in it, was by keeping quiet.

To the candidates, it immediately smacks of bias. To the viewers, it leaves unanswered questions. In both camps, animosity now is directly aimed at CBS.

Would it have been a good idea for CBS to announce this at the debate? No, but a blog post would have been a sufficient way to burn-off the format shift. It would have addressed concerns from the outset, rather than have to handle the fire in hindsight.

Was there a cover-up of this? No, I don’t think so. I think CBS was making a conscious decision that they realized was best for the debate, but wouldn’t be best to publicize without facing some backlash. Now, the backlash for having unspoken rules is larger than what the backlash for the hidden rule would have been, in the first place.

At the end of the day, will this blow over? Probably, CBS won’t be running any other debates.

If I were running CBS News right now though, I’d make up for the offset by highlighting each candidate during the CBS Evening News, and extend the profile to compensate for the difference in time. Wait, that’s how the new media would handle something, so I can be certain it won’t happen over at CBS. Oh well, that’s what I get for trying to make everyone happy.

There are even posts out on the web dating back to when I was in the 4th Grade… over fifteen years ago! Yes, I am a firm believer in that practice.

That’s why it’s so sad when I’ve been encouraged, by Google web search employees no less, to delete old content. What’s the reason? The search world has changed.

Search engines are now reflecting that the Internet is, well, getting older. Search engines now are starting to take into account the age of sites… not just the relevance of their content, but the caliber of their content. Articles that are too small, take long to load, and deliver what Google calls a “poor web experience” are better off not existing.

Generally, today, everyone has determined that inside one of Google’s major updates this year (which many call Panda, though that is a very broad term applied to way too much), that article content must increase. Simply, the size of articles needs to span a couple of full pages of text, if it were printed out. Generally, people have settled at between 300 and 400 words being the bare-bones minimum.

While I don’t agree with this, it’s the reality of web search today. And, as such, I’ll begin issuing the edicts to delete, modify, and redirect old articles… just about everywhere. From this blog, to PhoneNews.com, to elsewhere. It’s just what needs to be done to stay competitive in web search today. Old articles will be 301 redirected when possible to relevant content, and I’ll be making it a requirement that all old articles are documented for being updated/revised, in many cases years after they were first penned.

Granted, this opens a lot of new questions, such as what we do with old web content? Should it still exist somewhere, other than the web archives? In an ideal world, yes, people should set up separate domains for old content that sites like Google deem “poor”, and the give people the ability to still access them.

For now, what I’m doing is creating a backup of everything pre-realignment, and then pulling up my sleeves and getting to work. Having penned thousands of articles, I definitely have my hands full. Maybe you do as well, what’s your thoughts on this?

And, as you may have noted, PhoneNews.com will be suspending the display of advertisements from Google AdSense.

We took a careful look at CTIA this year, and it wasn’t an easy decision to not send anyone. However, short of a few 3D Android phones, the news will be pretty mild this year. It may be the least newsworthy CTIA in terms of proportions since we started covering CTIA expos.

Based on those factors, we decided it wasn’t the best idea to attend CTIA over on PhoneNews.com. So, I won’t be there and nobody else from the team will be either. You can bet safely that coverage will continue of anything that develops of note at the show.

My point to this post is that, like elections, Google changes have consequences to small publishers and large alike. PhoneNews.com is intentionally sitting this one out to shift our resources to overcoming inequalities in the new PageRank system, and to better realign towards direct advertising.

There are a lot of angles to the debate of the last Google shuffle, but I’m avoiding that fray in this post. Clearly, those who ignore those changes and continue with business as usual, are the businesses that are most likely to fail.

In the end, taking a step back this year will help us be better than our competition, despite unfair bonus points that some search engines may be giving them. And, it will allow us to continue doing what we do best; give people into phone news, the best phone news possible.

Like many, I like how Twitter allows for acceptably-compressed postings. Posting 140 characters as a blog post is too small for most people to find adequate. This is largely because of how long it takes to pull up a blog, versus scanning your Twitter feed. I don’t know about you, but the Great Recession has done a terrific job of making sure I don’t have as much time to blog throughly.

However, Twitter made a promise long ago that they would take an agnostic stance to their API-based applications. Their PR blunders of blocking UberTwitter UberSocial and twidroyd seriously call that into question.

To keep this post short, I won’t re-hash those blunders. To make a long story short, Twitter, sent out massive emails suggesting people use Twitter’s mobile apps… in direct contradiction to their commitment to treat other app providers as equals.

This is on top of Twitter’s end-of-year TOS changes, which added alarming terms (such as, any picture you “post” on Twitter, becomes the property of Twitter, Inc.). They have yet to fully explain what they consider to be a “posting” of a photo on Twitter, or if even linking to a photo hosted elsewhere constitutes grounds for Twitter ownership.

So, I’m going to do what I feared I would have to eventually… and move back to the “old way” of blogging. The good news is, if you don’t like Twitter, you’re going to see a lot more posts.

I’ll still use Twitter, but it’s long-term viability is something I am much more concerned about than before. Twitter is not like AOL Instant Messenger, it is not becoming an open standard. It instead has become something that I am afraid will become more and more controlled, with desperate attempts to monetize added in for effect and flare.

No, I have news that’s a bit more exciting than a security update. Starting right after New Year’s, I’m starting a new job.

On Tuesday, I’ll be joining the team at BeyondSoft Consulting, helping BeyondSoft enter the American marketplace. I’ll be wearing a couple of hats over there, primarily I’ll be a business development manager behind the scenes, and a mobile evangelist to viewers like you.

First, I’m sure you’ll be asking what is going to happen at all the other stuff I’m doing. 2011 is going to bring a bit of a change. Originally, my plan was to step down as editor-in-chief of PhoneNews.com fully by last year. Well, that didn’t happen. The good news is, it is happening now. I’ll still be around as founder and CEO at PhoneNews.com, Newsroom Network, and MechaWorks. These will be more of guiding roles, I’ll be stepping out of day to day involvement.

What all that means is, more people are onboard already to take the load off of me at those operations. Two new writers are coming onboard at PhoneNews.com over the next week, and iConsole will finally start to make some headway in a fiercer marketplace.

But, with any shuffle, it’s going to take some time to resonate. You won’t see sweeping changes probably for a month or two. You will however see me hosting more events in the Bay Area, plugging new stuff, and being able to help continue expansion at everything on the table already.

I’d spill more details, but I’ve already said quite a bit for one post. In sum total I’m really excited about the new year. To put it mathematically, 2011 > (2009 + 2010), and I’m really hopeful that equation holds for all of you as well. Happy new year!

This security update was on a tight turnaround, so be sure to go to your Plugins or Updates tab and re-update Akismet to 2.5.0 if it winds up back at 2.4.0.

Oh, and one final thing. Due to how WordPress upgrades, you’ll have to manually click over to Updates and Plugins to have it re-pickup that Akismet needs to be upgraded. The badge next to Updates and Plugins won’t appear until after you leave the update confirmation page. It’s not a huge deal since Akismet 2.4 still works, but it’s never good to run old code.