MemeBridge

Web Sites for the New Economy

It’s no secret that the economy is tanking, and will not be recovering for many years.  Taxes are rising, which takes money directly out of the pockets of consumers.  The War on Global Warming will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and the cost of compliance with new government regulations will be dwarf even that.  The cost of servicing the national debt and other non-discretionary federal spending will soon leave little money for anything else.

However, as with all changes, this also brings opportunity.  Web publishers are quickly adapting to the new economy by creating web sites and web pages on how to receive government funds, how to deal with unemployment, and how to adjust to a lower standard of living than the one to which we have become accustomed.

Our own entries into this rapidly growing niche include Live Dirt Cheap and Homemade Guides.  These sites contain useful information to help people live better on the percentage of their money which the government allows them to keep.

I believe that this information will be useful even when the economy does eventually recover.  Financial conservatism is seldom a bad idea.  It helped our grandparents weather the last depression and it will help us weather the current one.

Google’s Lack of Political Humor

I am very tired of Google penalizing my political sites.  I have web sites in dozens of niches, but it’s only the political sites which get penalized by Google.  Google will probably penalize my other sites just for mentioning this.  <sigh>

Oddly, it’s not only serious political sites which Google censors.  Many years ago I built a site called Political Humor.  Well, Google apparently has no sense of humor when it involves making jokes about their influential friends in Washington.  Google penalized the site by dropping it to PR0 and removing it almost completely from the search results.

The site has been penalized so long that I didn’t bother to update it for the last presidential election.  Effectively, I allowed Google to silence my voice.  I feel terrible about this.  Yahoo and Bing have such tiny shares of the search market that they are almost irrelevant.

Instead, I must expand beyond search to route around Google’s secret censorship of the ‘net.  I will rebuild and update the site later this year — possibly on a new domain.  Then I will promote the site via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  I will not let Google silence my voice.

Easy Cooking Guide

My wife loves to cook.  She makes seven course meals that require more planning than D-Day and use more different little pieces of “stuff” than the battleship Missouri. Half of the ingredients, I would not recognize if they were not labeled. The results are great, but the amount of time she invests into each creation is almost unbelievable.

Most people don’t have time for such luxuries, but they still want to eat well.  That’s why we’re creating the Easy Cooking Guide.  The purpose of the Easy Cooking Guide is to help people create dishes that taste good, but don’t require a significant investment in time and effort.

I believe that this is what most people are looking for.  Few of us want to become Martha Stewart, but most of us want to eat good meals without constantly going out to eat.  Eating out is nice, at times, but it is also expensive and time consuming.  With the governments new economic policies causing businesses to shut down and unemployment to skyrocket, Americans are not going to be able to afford to eat our nearly as frequently as they did in the past.  Home cooking is a great way to eat better — and usually healthier — on a limited budget.