Information is everything. The difference between a high performance multi-billion dollar hedge fund and an investment fund that just collapsed and lost everything is information. Unfortunately we all suffer from an information overload.

The keyphrase for today is — “Actionable Data.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines actionable as — “Relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken.”

Consider all of the information that you take in on a given day. Friends, news, gossip, today’s revenue, web site stats, and so on. What information matters and what does not?

Here is a challenge/expirement for you to try out. Focus on the information that is actionable. Ignore everything that has no relevence to your business (ok, if you are married that might not work out very well!)

Next filter out unimportant sources. If there is a source that has routinely given you good information, keep watching it. If it is a blog that has never given you a single piece of actionable information, delete it from your RSS subscriptions. If watching CNBC never helped you make more money, turn it off.

Now when you see something that you can take action on — do it. Don’t wait. Specifically, things you can do right now to benefit your web sites. Be moderate. This doesn’t mean start a new business on every single idea. However, it could mean quickly launching a web site for a hot new niche market.

Try that out for a day and let me know the results.

The first time I saw Google Maps I was amazed. Between the fancy AJAX interface and high resolution satellite imagery hours vanished toward what felt like minutes.

Last night I took a look at Microsoft’s Live.com Maps. It seems they’ve been doing some updating.

The pictures below speak for themselves, and I’m not even including the in-browser 3D maps (yes I know Google Earth does the same.)

Google Maps (Click text for external link, images for zoomed jpg)

Microsoft Maps, Ariel view 1

Microsoft Maps, Ariel view 2

…

Still not impressed?

What if you want to see what the other side of the building looks like? Not a problem — Microsoft offers north, south, east, and west views.

To be fair, Live.com maps does not have footage for the entire United States. Some areas stink, still stuck with grainy B&W ariel images. However, this is hardly limited to major US cities. I was able to see my old small hometown in Wisconsin, the garden behind the house I grew up in clearly visible. Perhaps the demise of Bill Gates and his company has been exagerated.

For nearly a year True.com had one of the most lucrative dating affiliate programs on the internet. Around two months ago they made some changes, dramatically cutting payouts and shutting down several offers. I know nothing about the companies profitability, but the results to their overall traffic standing have been pretty dramatic.

Case number two, Wikipedia verse About.com. Wikipedia has been dominating Google’s natural listings. About.com, once the “omni” site of information has seen their listings slide, both due to Wikipedia as well as from large volumes of niche competitor sites drawn in through easy advertising revenues.

Whether you are about to spend $1 billion or $100,000 it is critical to understand both traffic sources and trends. With some homework and free traffic data sites you can correlate growth and contraction to specific events. Although one can provide 100% accurate traffic numbers, the following sites are great for identifying trends:

Here are a few I use: Compete.com, Alexa, WebSearch WebRanking, Google Trends (people type .com’s into Google search)

Anyone seeing signs of the summer slow down? This time of year usually results in lower revenue both from less users and fewer advertisers (possibly, they certainly crank up the spending as Christmas approaches.)

It can be a little demotivating to see numbers on established sites drop. I think its a good time to build and test sites to launch when things begin to pick back up again near September.

Right now there are between 190 and 191 days left in 2007 (191 for those west of London to the international dateline.) We are rapidly approaching the halfway mark for 2007. If your yearly goal checklist is needs more marks, now is crunch time.

Relying on organic search engine traffic sucks, especially if your business has large fixed expenses. Google’s recent shakeup of Adwords has now done a pretty good job of wiping long term search engine confidence from many.

The projects I am putting my money in to right now share these traits:

As long as the internet advertising market continues to see double digit growth internet publishing should look very healthy. The “monetize it with advertising money” business model will work very well if you have little overhead.

Recently Google banned essay writing companies from advertising on Adwords. College students struggling to complete term papers on their own pay hundreds of dollars to these internet companies for completed work.

I was suprised to find that Google still allows illegal ponzi schemes to advertise with them. HYIPs, an acronym for High Yield Investment Program, is actually a simple ponzi scheme where older members are paid out on the pay ins of newer members. Its kind of like the US’s social security program except one is illegal and the other is not!

Next I checked Yahoo, they too allow these cons to perpetrate. To Microsoft’s credit, when searching HYIP ads were displayed however they directed to sites like ebay and less harmful paid surveys.

It does not take a genius to understand these web sites are scams. Some may first appear “legit” but all you have to do is take a look at their claimed returns. This is easy, common sense stuff. 22% a day? Yeah, I don’t think so.

Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry on HYIPs — “As a comparison with a typical 1% per day claim, Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful investors, made around 30% per year during his most successful period; that is on average, less than 0.1% per day. As the claimed returns of 1% per day are extremely unlikely to be produced legitimately, all HYIPs are therefore likely to be Ponzi schemes, and so most investors will in due course lose their money.”

Still don’t believe me? Do this search on Google — hyip site:*.gov This will give you a list of all of the documents US government web sites have concerning HYIP scams — and thats exactly what they consider them. You’ve got some reading to do.

The Evidence:

I decided to take some screenshots to show you exactly is going on. The first is from Google.com, searching “hyip.” Click to enlarge it to full size.

The first ad is a little wierd. It includes GE’s logo on the page and only claims a 10% return. Perhaps legit? What really throughs me off is the ad copy “Tired of 3-4% Physicians go to work and I get Paid. I like that!” I don’t know about you, but that should send up the scam red flag — oh, and the domain is registered to some Jason Lavin at Golden State Communications through GoDaddy.

Below is a screenshot from another site that showed up on Google when searching “hyip.” The site is hyip-multiply.com and is listed as registered to Elizabeth Tyler at 5426 Rosecrans Lawndale, CA (could be fake whois, no clue.)

(run the numbers on these, I find it pretty hard to believe anyone can deliver me $22 million tommorow if I pay them $90,000 today)

Yahoo’s results were even more obvious that they were scams.

The #1 result was “E-Gold Investment Programs” claiming a 22%-49% daily profit. It mentioned forex investments so I wanted to make sure that it just wasn’t some forex program entrepreneur cashing in on a hot search term.

It didn’t look like it. A screen capture posted below, from their FAQ — http://www.egoldinvestment.org/faq.php — specifically says “you will earn a total of 220% divided into 10 payments of 22% daily” That is definately a claim, not an alleged possible return that top FOREX investors make.

HYIPs are very, very profitable for their owners. Many of their users do understand its a pyramid scheme. The attitude is that as long as I get in early enough, and re-invest my “earnings” I really don’t have much to lose. Thus, HYIPs continue to thrive. But, being a pyramid scheme eventually the smart users pull all their money out and move on. Then the party ends for every on left inside.

This is not a questionable or legal grey area — it is illegal! By allowing these sites to operate on their networks Google and Yahoo are hurting their own reputations and damaging their brands. This carries through to others who choose to advertise on the sites.

One of the screenshots above is from a site asking users to deposit up to $90,000 at once. If someone did that, and lost all of the money, how do you think that would change their opinion of Google or their trust perception of other companies advertising on Google?

Has either Yahoo or Google been too busy to notice the HYIP advertisers? For Google, certainly they spent some time and thought before purging essay writers from the system. Considering that Google and Yahoo will delete your Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing ads for something as silly as a typo I consider it outrageous that they will allow ads to run claiming to deliver 22% daily returns.

I’m sure I’ll get plenty of comments about you guys already having heard about this.. but as of 11:00pm its news to me. Both eBay and Google are starting to behave like they run blogs and are in desperate need of linkbait.

LATimes - “EBay Inc. didn’t take kindly to Google Inc. crashing its conference. The online auction house pulled its ads from Google’s U.S. search engine this week because it was mad about Google’s encroaching on its turf — both literally and figuratively.”

Apparently Google was running a party to promote Google Checkout along the same time that eBay had their eBay Live yearly conference in Boston (this I heard about.) eBay decided to be a big baby about it and have pulled all of their ads off Adwords. As of right now I still see ads from eBay, but this is getting reporting in big newspapers including the New York Times so we will see.

Despite no longer being an ICANN acredited reseller Registerfly is still sending out renewal notices. I have recieved comments in older posts from people complaining about renewing names and nothing happening. I recieved a Registerfly domain renewal notice by e-mail earlier this month along with a handful back in May.

GoDaddy has now taken over Registerfly’s registrations. My names with whois protection were transfered over successfully. I am not a huge fan of GoDaddy, but they definately get the job done. As an added plus, they aren’t owned by a company who wants to steal your domains (more on this later in the week.)

Your website’s domain name your site’s identity and property. Losing a domain name is like trying to haul your home around in the back of a pick up truck. I suggest using the utmost care when selecting a domain name registrar.

(hmm, maybe I need a new category — BS)

For non-US residents a slide in the dollar is painfully obvious. You see it every time you get paid by an American company be it Adsense checks from Google or affiliate commissions from CJ.

US citizens who get paid in dollars often miss this decline. Other events are blamed even after taking notice of the double-digit inflation around us (sorry, I don’t care what the official numbers are, my “basket of goods” doesn’t substitute a McDonalds hamburger for a New York Strip Steak.)

So what is the future? Does the dollar continue to devalue against nearly all other currencies? Perhaps. There are countless factors in play right now that don’t look very good.

This is a market. Things adjust. Just like rising oil prices, some will lose while others will profit. Its all about how you position yourself. The dollar slide hurts most for those who continue to pretend its not happening.

There is no shortage of complaints about hired workers. Whether from elance, craigslist, offshore, or domestic, the the margins on good to bad labor seem to be around 1:50.

I recently hired 4 artists for a project. One delivered great work. Two got about 15% of the assignment finished. One has not sent me anything over a month later.

Focus on the worker who gets the jobs done on time instead of chasing down the non-performers.

Before you even hire someone, test them. Give them a job to perform. See how promptly the project is finished. Be reasonable. Just like yourself, the worker will have areas they are great at and others that they blow at. The good workers will let you know when project requirements are over their heads.

The less time you waste with outsourced labor the more time you have to do more profitable (or enjoyable) things. A dime saved today could cost you $10,000 tommorow.