Steiner, also an engineer, focuses his book chapter-by-chapter by breaking down his theory on what will happen at various price points for gasoline.  He does bring up some interesting facts: we rely on petroleum for a large variety of products, from plastic grocery bags to vehicle gasoline to the cost buried in what we buy from the expense to distribute it to local stores.

I find the book offers no real insight into a future where gasoline will obviously jump to $20 a gallon.  The historical increase of the price of oil from the early 1900s surely didn’t happen because oil was less plentiful, or because oil’s demand exceeded supply.  The #1 reason oil became expensive is due to the world’s governments and their central banks creating inflationary pressures on the supply of money: they printed new money.

When this happens, prices tend to rise because there is more money in circulation chasing a nominally fixed supply of goods.  More money, same goods = higher prices.

Steiner gets into what “good” might happen if oil prices went too high: maybe people will walk more or take the train more.  When you break down the actual costs of riding a train, per rider, including all of our governments’ waste and bureaucracies (and cushy air-conditioned offices), you see that trains can use the same, or more, oil per head.  It’s a no-win situation, with the balance of the cost of trains passed on to those who are driving cars.  How much of that $20 per gallon will be government’s tax on the drivers, subsidizing those who take the train?

Walking?  Really?  What is the cost to someone in time who has to walk to the grocery store rather than drive.  Do we consider  how much time costs us?  Time, for me, is far less plentiful that gasoline, even at $20 per gallon.  If I have to walk 2 hours per day to replace the 10 minute round-trip to my local grocery, I am out 12% of my awake-life, considering I do grocery shopping almost daily.  No thank you.

Steiner talks about how Wal*Mart exists due to cheap fuel costs that allow them to distribute their goods cheaply to their retail centers locally conveniently near most Americans.  But is gasoline a huge cost of overhead for Wal*Mart?  Only Wal*Mart knows this answer, and if gasoline accounts for 5% of the cost of items we buy (that’s my guess, based on my history of owning retail stores), then a 10-fold increase in the price of gas would give “journalists” like Steiner the belief that gas would cause food and retail prices to increase 50%.  That’s only if you ignore the rampant pilfering of money’s value by the central banks, which may be a much larger reason for gasoline, and retail goods, price increase.

Another issue that Steiner ignores is how capitalism works: when there is an item that is in high demand and the price is rising due to decreased supply, capitalist entrepreneurs numbering in the millions will look for solutions.  Is the solution a more efficient engine?  Maybe, but the solution may be completely outside of the little hole that Steiner and his comrades exist in.  Instead of transporting fresh fruit that is 90% water, maybe freeze-drying will become the new defacto way to transport fruit to stores.  Freeze-drying leaves many of the fruit’s nutrients intact and the fruit can be restored for cooking by adding locally-harvested water.  A 90% reduction in the weight of food products through this method could mean 90% less gas is needed to transport it.

It’s ridiculous to force a market theory on readers if you aren’t an economist, and preferably one with an Austrian School outlook on how the market is self-preserving, self-changing, self-dictating.  Gasoline is important, yes, but the items that gasoline fulfill are more important, and we don’ t know what entrepreneurs have waiting for us.

To the opposite of Steiner’s assumption that the ex-burbs will fall apart due to high transportation costs, I believe that higher fuel costs as a percentage of our income will create more remote jobs (telecommuting, etc), create more locally grown and manufactured products if the price to distribute really does move higher outside of the relationship to government monetary inflation, and may even create new methods to how we manufacture products, consume products and distribute them.

I still would bet that most of fuel’s price increase will be due to government’s tyranny on that market.  They’ll make more regulations that restrict fuel competition (such as fuel refinery requirements), they’ll add more taxes to subsidize the bureaucratic and wasteful nature of public transportation, they’ll mandate manufacturers to keep creating new car features that consumers don’t want, at a huge cost (billions) to auto-manufacturers that have to find new ways to shove those features in while still meeting EPA standards.

In the long run, government will keep printing new money, which makes the old money worth less.  This is the real cause of prices going up in almost every market: from housing to college to airline travel to food, and even gasoline.

Steiner’s book is a major thumbs down, another wasted effort by a journalist associated with the paleomedia.  I’d stay away from purchasing it new.

When I reviewed my advertising and affiliate income for 2008, I was shocked to find that almost 15% of my income was based on a handful of reviews I placed over the years I’ve edited this site.  It’s not a huge amount of income, but it more than offset the cost of purchasing every single item or service or business I reviewed.  The advertising for the steakhouse I reviewed in 2007 has paid almost 5 times the cost of that dinner.  A cell phone I reviewed in 2006 has paid for itself 32 times over!

Now there’s news that Belkin had an online sales manager who paid shills to leave positive reviews at Amazon.  Even worse, the blogger who revealed this mess also helped discover that the same sales manager, Mike Bayard, also created false profiles on Amazon to leave his own reviews.  The comments at Arlen Parsa’s blog speak volumes about why I don’t leave reviews on other sites, and why I don’t believe reviews I read.

Mitur Binesderti left the following comment there:

The shocking thing is anyone actually believes online reviews. I always ignore the positive ones, no real person that isn’t a fan boy or employee will think something is perfect so why waste your time with 5 star reviews. Look for 1 to 3 star reviews, just make sure you don’t get suckered into believing the bad reviews are all honest either.

The other day, I just told a friend who was out on a job hunt that the best reviews, to me, are those that leave 3 stars out of 5 and then back it up.  VERY FEW people leave 5 stars, other than employees, friends, and family, it seems.  I rarely do.  When a business gets a solid 3 - 3.5 stars, I’ll tend to believe it is well suited for a visit.  If a business gets 5 stars with very few reviews, I’ll know the place is likely terrible.  Some review sites let you see how many reviews a reviewer has left in total, and this CAN help gauge the quality of that review.  I’d love the option to filter reviews based on how many reviews were left by each reviewer, but so far no one has managed to add this feature.

Now, when I want to let others know what I’m thinking about a service, product or business, I leave the review here.  Google picks it up, and the traffic that comes in can help pay for the review I posted.  Those who read this site regularly know I have a reputation for a certain level of quality.  People who visit the site searching for that item, service or business can poke around the site (and usually do) to see what I’m about.  The income is nice, and the visitors get a real point of view.

My two most recent reviews, for the Bosch Tassimo single-serve coffee machine and the Shark Duo EP661 stick vacuum are already receiving traffic from Google — within HOURS of me posting the reviews.  How can you beat that?  I’m helping people form buying decisions, and I’m increasing my reputation online.  Win, win, I’d say.

Of course, there are “pay for review” affiliate programs, like ReviewMe.com which I tried a few years ago.  They REQUIRE that you say you are paid for the review, though, so the reader can take your review with a grain of salt.  Otherwise, putting your reviews on your own site has many benefits and no downsides: you can increase traffic to your site, you can increase your income through advertising or affiliate links, and you can create a stronger reputation amongst your readers and casual visitors.

I see NO reason to continue to leave reviews at the big sites like Amazon.com and Yelp.com.  In 2009, I plan on reviewing 1-2 items, services or businesses PER DAY, just to build a cache of good reviews for me, and to help those who are actually interested in a real heartfelt review.  If you’re not reviewing things you witness in your life on your site, you’re missing out on some major benefits.

The desperate bid to rack up sales over the holiday season helped turn out a decent enough fourth quarter of 2008 for online advertising. Sure ads were down drastically from 2007, but it wasn’t quite as bad compared to the first three quarter of 2008, reports PubMatic, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that sells ad-optimization products.

The trillion-dollar question is: Was this a bottom or was it a momentary lull in hostilities brought on by a widening credit crunch? Some analysts think that this might be a blip and that most large Internet companies — such as Amazon, Yahoo, EBAY — are going to see big declines in their revenue, though no such problems are being predicted for Google.

I looked over the free PubMatic report, and have come to a few conclusions myself over what some in the publishing industry see as quite worrying:

1. PubMatic looks at 5500 sites, out of millions that are ad sponsored.  If you’re a large scale site, it would not surprise me that advertising income is down.  Large sites have a harder time dealing with ad blindness than do smaller sites.  Also, large sites have more specifically-sponsored ads than do smaller sites that use contextual targeting.  If a site like About.com has advertisers buying ads at a higher rate than their contextual ads, what is the likelihood of someone visiting an advertisement for weight loss if they’re on a page dealing with raising bunny rabbits?  Slim.
2. PubMatic listed a markable fall in the Finance advertising submarket, but an increase in the Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming, and Music submarkets.  With people losing money hand over fist in financials, the advertisers are probably cutting back on ads.  That’s a given.  With people desiring more entertainment in their lives, it makes sense that markets dealing with entertainment would see an increase.
3. PubMatic seems to not delve into the rapid growth of ad sponsored small scale sites, notably the bloggers and those with sites with very niche information.  These sites generally grab very little income individually, but based on the “long-tail” theories, they’re likely snagging SOME percentage of traffic and advertising income from the bigger sites.  This site, in particular, has some decent traffic from Google and Yahoo for search terms that would normally go to very large news sites.  I’m always surprised at how quickly the Global Unanimocracy Network gets listed in Google (sometimes within 15 minutes of a post, straight to Google’s first search page for a certain term).  That’s income we’re getting that isn’t going to CNN or Yahoo News or About.com.  My hope is to breach the top 50,000 site list again by February, but that still puts me 90% further down than the general types of sites that PubMatic is reaching.

I don’t think there is a fall in advertising revenue.  I speak regularly with other bloggers who are earning 5 figures a year from their sites (as does the Global Unanimocracy Network).  Their income is up.  Our income is up 50% year-over-year, even though I took a hiatus through 2007.  The key is to write not just quality articles, but to also target the search engines with proper optimization of your pages, titles, header, and other SEO processes.  Also, it is important to reduce ad blindness to one’s visitors by mixing up advertising placement and ad types (images, texts, varying sizes).  Advertising should not be blended so much that one tricks the reader to visiting, but prominent enough that applicable and interesting ads drive them to advertisers when they’re done with your site.

Another interesting effect of this so-called “decline” in advertising is that, over time, those who aren’t seeing a profit for their time spent developing a site will leave the market, opening up those same revenue streams to sites that wait out any possible slow down.

If you’re considering running a website with advertising sponsorship, or already do, I will be posting a series of short articles that will freely tell you how to maximize your income while increasing your traffic.  There are 5 simple steps that all online publishers should take — and many don’t.  I am shocked at how many HUGE sites ignore some basic principles of getting search engine traffic, the very traffic that accounts for 90% of the income to this site.

If you run a small scale website, feel free to comment below with your thoughts on your income over the past 6 months to a year.  I’d love to compare details.