[Note: This post was written in December 2005 (!). I’m going through some of my old draft posts and publishing the ones that aren’t too awful. Some of these “Leftovers” will be rough.]

Okay, here are some ways to get high-quality links without emailing, paying, or even paying attention to search engines:

Provide a useful one-time service. It really doesn’t take very much. Here are some examples:

• Check out http://www.stclaire.com/go/industrial_signage/sb2/html in Internet Explorer. You have to sign up for a free account, but then this site provides an online interface to create ANSI-compliant warning signs, and you get PDF files ready to print. This site is great for making gag signs. Here’s one I made in just a few minutes:
  
• Is that too much trouble? You don’t know how to create PDFs, or you don’t have safety clip art lying around? Okay, here’s a simpler example: everyone hates getting spam email. If you leave your email address lying out on the web, you’ll get more email spam. Here’s a site that lets you make a graphical badge instead: http://gsig.brightdev.com/index.php. That url is for Gmail, but http://esigs.brightdev.com/ lets you make sigs for Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL and others.
• Is that too much trouble? Graphics mojo leave you cold? Well, you can also encode email addresses using JavaScript or character entities. For example, http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html can turn a normal email address like user@example.com into something like
  daven@spammer.com
  that email harvesters won’t bother with.
• Make a robots.txt validator.

Provide an ongoing service:

• Web-based services like Bloglines are a great example.

Become a resource:

• You can do this with a personal or company blog. Blogs are a great way to get link love or just to get your word out.
• If blogs sound scary, start out with newsletters. Or studies. Or surveys. Or white papers.
• Once a company (I’ll call them site A) that does language translations asked me why they didn’t rank as highly as another website (I’ll call them site B). When I checked it out, site A had very little content, just 5-6 pages with contact info and a short description of what they did. It was like an online brochure. So what did site B have? They offered a tutorial about the difference between Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji, plus they showed how to write a few characters. Who would you link to, the empty brochure site or the site with tutorial pages?

Provide valuable information.

Be the first. Be the first means coming up with a creative idea that catches the fancy of the web.

Who appointed Loren Baker the judge of the best search blogs? No one at all: he just saw a creative opportunity and took it.

Get an article written about you. Be aware that controversy gets attention, but can also affect how people perceive you. If you bait people too often, that affects your reputation.

Open up your product:

• I bought a TiVo because I could hack it. I chose XM Radio because they offered they offered a device (the XM PCR) that allowed your computer to get analog satellite radio. And this sexy device has an open-source server so that you can stream RSS or almost any other info to the device in addition to playing music. Help people tinker and hack with your product. When I found out that a local computer store had a 160GB external hard drive that could be hacked to run Linux, I ran out and got one. I installed Linux on it (because I could, dammit!), and made it into a streaming MP3 jukebox. What did I do after that? I went down to the computer store and bought a spare! Buffalo LinkStation, you rule! And because I could hack around with the 160GB hard drive, now I’m eyeing their 1.6 terabyte TeraStation. [Editor’s note: I did get the TeraStation and it served me well for years.] All this because I was able to tinker/hack/mod a product.

[There you go. I think most of these ideas have aged pretty well.]

I should explain that I love prediction posts. Back at the end of 2007 I wrote a few predictions, and somehow never got around to posting them. Better late than never, although if I waited a few more months I could just recycle them as 2009 predictions. Some of these predictions are more far-fetched and aspirational (as in, “I really wish someone would do this”), but I’ll still throw them out here.

One tricky bit is that I didn’t make any big predictions about Google below — some people still don’t get that this is my personal blog, and they might take my (sometimes wishful) predictions as statements as fact, or assume that I have some inside knowledge when I don’t. With that disclaimer, here are my three-month-late predictions.

• Around February, people will start saying “Holy moly! Apple is grabbing a lot of desktop operating system market share!” In some markets by the end of 2008, Apple’s market share will approach 20%. (By the way, I’m no Apple fanboy; I’m typing this on Windows XP.)
• 2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.
• The most exciting product/start-up of 2008 will not be a Web 2.0 company. Instead, it will concentrate on improving email productivity. For users, as you receive email, it will suggest canned replies and show previous related emails. It will also suggest experts or mailing lists that you could route incoming emails to.
• Someone will write a book or ebook about how to run a small start-up or internet business on a shoestring budget. The book will discuss how to squeeze the most value out of Google’s products and will also touch on Amazon’s web services.
• Someone will launch a “baby startup” that gives advice on baby names, then offers to register a domain named for the baby. For $100, the start-up will power the baby’s domain for several years and will host baby pictures and baby videos. The baby’s domain will be protected by a password, but can be shared with family members.
• An RSS startup will add the ability to take a normal RSS blog feed and produce a “best of” feed that picks only the most popular/controversial/interesting items. You will be able to say (for example) “I want only about three Valleywag posts per day. Pick the best ones for me.” This new offering will cause some controversy across the blogosphere about fair use and copyright. But most bloggers will ultimately decide that they’d rather have the extra “lazy readers” than not have them at all.
• Someone will write a “Google Backup” tool that backs up all your data from Google by saving data from Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Reader, websearch, and Blogger.
• A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.
• Over 1000 people will begin recording the audio of their daily life, every day, all day.
• The 2008 presidential election will capture much more interest in the U.S. than in recent elections. Most election drama will play out on TV and the campaign trail. We’ll see a few tie-ins with search, but internet-related issues won’t play the vital role in the election that the blogosphere would like it to.

Check back in 2009 to see how I did! Do you have 2008 predictions for the tech industry?

Have you ever wanted to add a new feature to Google’s search results? There’s a really nice way to do it right now. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, it’s called a Subscribed Link, and it lets you “create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more.” That page has a whole list of different ways to add new features to Google’s search results:

* Create search results specific to your product, service, or expertise.
* Design a basic version in minutes to see how it works.
* Build a dynamic version using XML, TSV, or RSS files or feeds.
* Include images in your Subscribed Links.
* Include Google Gadgets in your Subscribed Links.
* Test your Subscribed Links interactively and get debugging messages.
* Define query patterns using lists of keywords or regular expressions.
* Invoke the calculator to help construct your results.