Just about two weeks ago, I posted the first part of this column. If you have not yet read the first part of this column yet, then I suggest giving it a quick read through before reading the end of the story in this column. Go ahead, click over – we’ll wait.
Back? Have you started following @IWHeadlines on Twitter yet? Good!
As I ended the last column, I was enraged over the fact that the “headlines” posted on some other professional websites led to incredibly short stories and, most of the time, were not actually “news” stories. In fact, some of those “stories” would be shorter than the amount of words from the beginning of this column to the end of this sentence! Really! Other stories posted on Google News would simply be advertisements for upcoming podcasts on a website. How is that news?! And yet, the quality entries being posted on TNAStars.com in as fair a journalistic manner as anywhere on the internet were being noted as “disproportionately short.” Disproportionately short? WHAT?!
And, believe it or not, that’s only the second most annoying aspect about working within the Google News system. In other words, the lack of a fair, level-headed system that puts content from one website against content from one website and says, “Website A has shorter entries than Website B, so we’re going with Website B,” is something that Google News should be ashamed of in their program.
Still, though, the single-most annoying part of Google’s unfair, robotic classification system is that there are nearly no humans involved. Imagine this: tens of thousands of websites (it’s probably hundreds of thousands of websites, but who knows?) all having their headlines indexed and pushed out to the masses and yet still at the whims of a script running on some server in God knows where. It sounds more like something out of The Matrix than what one might expect to encounter on the internet wrestling scene!
Yet if truth be told, I am grateful to the few humans who work at Google News because since I wrote the first part of this column those humans have finally started to respond to my frequent requests for assistance. According to their responses to my many calls for help, Google News should be properly cataloging the new entries on this website. I suppose that time will best test that suggestion, but for the last two weeks most of our news entries have been picked up by Google News. That’s a very, very good thing for the future of this website’s traffic as the steady increase in our hits over the last two weeks proves beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Still – this situation begs the question: how long can any website last when it requires proper administration by Google News in order to increase its total overall number of visitors? That question might be better answered in a future column on a different website, but I think that part of the total solution for IWHeadlines.com is to continue building its social media presence as discussed during the first column.
So if you have a Twitter account please follow @IWHeadlines. Or if you know of some wrestling fans with Twitter accounts, then please ask them to follow @IWHeadlines. We’re going to start a Facebook group, but not yet. There are other things being planned that will ultimately impact our future Facebook group, so I want to hold back on creating one of them at this point. Which brings me to the end of this column and a veiled announcement on the future.
Last week, I brought together some of the best internet wrestling minds that never sullied themselves by getting bogged down in any of those crappy copy-and-paste, make-money-by-lying websites. During that varied e-mail exchange, I asked them about an idea that I’ve been mulling over on how to give you – the readers – the best access to all of the content in my internet wrestling website portfolio. In short, the idea is to consolidate a variety of my internet holdings into one online destination that combines everything my accumulated portfolio has to offer (the online and offline content of TNAStars.com, TBLWrestling.com, XHeadlines.com, WOWRevolution.com, TheBalrogsLair.com, and more).
The idea was generally well received, though these minds are asking some great questions and the conversation continues. What I can tell you all is this – that even if a larger consolidation lies somewhere in the future, there are no plans to make any changes to TNAStars.com for a long, long time. In fact, in any future plan TNAStars.com is going to be the centerpiece of how the new website would look, feel, and operate. In many ways (including technically speaking), a consolidated website would actually start at TNAStars.com. So the many loyal readers of TNAStars.com do not need to worry about jumping to a new website or seeing something that looks totally different – not happening any time soon. However, you may have access to a great deal more content to browse through when you’re not enjoying our top-level headlines!
Again, there is nothing in the immediate plans that would interrupt any of the great experiences that TNAStars.com has to offer. However, if anything can break TNAStars.com (and me as a Webmaster) free from the tyranny of robotic, humanless interaction with the “Powers that Be” online, it has to be the accumulated content of my nearly 16 years playing in the internet wrestling world combined with the power of social media.
And one of these days – we’re going to test that theory and see who wins. The gigantic, robotic computer scripts or 16 years of quality, fact-based journalism pushed directly to the end users. I think I know who I’m going to put my money on!
– Joe
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