Starting a passive income stream with data science and programming

My website is fresh. But how do I monetize it?

Creating a passive-income website is difficult. Advertise first. But what useful are ads without traffic?

Let’s Generate Traffic And Put Our Programming Skills To Use

SEO boosts traffic (Search Engine Optimisation). Traffic generation is complex. Keywords matter more than text, URL, photos, etc.

My Python skills helped here. I wanted to find relevant, Google-trending keywords (tags) for my topic.

First The Code

I wrote the script below here.

import re
from string import punctuation

import nltk
from nltk import TreebankWordTokenizer, sent_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords


class KeywordsGenerator:
    def __init__(self, pytrends):
        self._pytrends = pytrends

    def generate_tags(self, file_path, top_words=30):
        file_text = self._get_file_contents(file_path)
        clean_text = self._remove_noise(file_text)
        top_words = self._get_top_words(clean_text, top_words)
        suggestions = []
        for top_word in top_words:
            suggestions.extend(self.get_suggestions(top_word))
        suggestions.extend(top_words)
        tags = self._clean_tokens(suggestions)
        return ",".join(list(set(tags)))

    def _remove_noise(self, text):
        #1. Convert Text To Lowercase and remove numbers
        lower_case_text = str.lower(text)
        just_text = re.sub(r'\d+', '', lower_case_text)
        #2. Tokenise Paragraphs To words
        list = sent_tokenize(just_text)
        tokenizer = TreebankWordTokenizer()
        tokens = tokenizer.tokenize(just_text)
        #3. Clean text
        clean = self._clean_tokens(tokens)
        return clean

    def _clean_tokens(self, tokens):
        clean_words = [w for w in tokens if w not in punctuation]
        stopwords_to_remove = stopwords.words('english')
        clean = [w for w in clean_words if w not in stopwords_to_remove and not w.isnumeric()]
        return clean

    def get_suggestions(self, keyword):
        print(f'Searching pytrends for {keyword}')
        result = []
        self._pytrends.build_payload([keyword], cat=0, timeframe='today 12-m')
        data = self._pytrends.related_queries()[keyword]['top']
        if data is None or data.values is None:
            return result
        result.extend([x[0] for x in data.values.tolist()][:2])
        return result

    def _get_file_contents(self, file_path):
        return open(file_path, "r", encoding='utf-8',errors='ignore').read()

    def _get_top_words(self, words, top):
        counts = dict()

        for word in words:
            if word in counts:
                counts[word] += 1
            else:
                counts[word] = 1

        return list({k: v for k, v in sorted(counts.items(), key=lambda item: item[1])}.keys())[:top]


if __name__ == "1__main__":
    from pytrends.request import TrendReq

    nltk.download('punkt')
    nltk.download('stopwords')
    pytrends = TrendReq(hl='en-GB', tz=360)
    tags = KeywordsGenerator(pytrends)\
              .generate_tags('text_file.txt')
    print(tags)

Then The Dependencies

This script requires:

nltk==3.7
pytrends==4.8.0

Analysis of the Script

I copy and paste my article into text file.txt, and the code returns the keywords as a comma-separated string.

To achieve this:

1. A class I made is called KeywordsGenerator.

2. This class has a function: generate_tags

3. The function generate_tags performs the following tasks:

• retrieves text file contents

• uses NLP to clean the text by tokenizing sentences into words, removing punctuation, and other elements.

• identifies the most frequent words that are relevant.

• The pytrends API is then used to retrieve related phrases that are trending for each word from Google.

• finally adds a comma to the end of the word list.

4. I then use the keywords and paste them into the SEO area of my website.

These terms are trending on Google and relevant to my topic. My site's rankings and traffic have improved since I added new keywords. This little script puts our knowledge to work. I shared the script in case anyone faces similar issues.

I hope it helps readers sell their work.

Few sentences can have global significance.

Ethan Zuckerman invented the pop-up commercial in 1997.

He was working for Tripod.com, an online service that let people make little web pages for free. Tripod offered advertising to make money. Advertisers didn't enjoy seeing their advertising next to filthy content, like a user's anal sex website.

Zuckerman's boss wanted a solution. Wasn't there a way to move the ads away from user-generated content?

When you visited a Tripod page, a pop-up ad page appeared. So, the ad isn't officially tied to any user page. It'd float onscreen.

Here’s the thing, though: Zuckerman’s bit of Javascript, that created the popup ad? It was incredibly short — a single line of code:

window.open('http://tripod.com/navbar.html'
"width=200, height=400, toolbar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no, target=_top");

Javascript tells the browser to open a 200-by-400-pixel window on top of any other open web pages, without a scrollbar or toolbar.

Simple yet harmful! Soon, commercial websites mimicked Zuckerman's concept, infesting the Internet with pop-up advertising. In the early 2000s, a coder for a download site told me that most of their revenue came from porn pop-up ads.

Pop-up advertising are everywhere. You despise them. Hopefully, your browser blocks them.

Zuckerman wrote a single line of code that made the world worse.

I read Zuckerman's story in How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World. Torie Bosch compiled a humorous anthology of short writings about code that tipped the world.

Most of these samples are quite short. Pop-cultural preconceptions about coding say that important code is vast and expansive. Hollywood depicts programmers as blurs spouting out Niagaras of code. Google's success was formerly attributed to its 2 billion lines of code.

It's usually not true. Google's original breakthrough, the piece of code that propelled Google above its search-engine counterparts, was its PageRank algorithm, which determined a web page's value based on how many other pages connected to it and the quality of those connecting pages. People have written their own Python versions; it's only a few dozen lines.

Google's operations, like any large tech company's, comprise thousands of procedures. So their code base grows. The most impactful code can be brief.

The examples are fascinating and wide-ranging, so read the whole book (or give it to nerds as a present). Charlton McIlwain wrote a chapter on the police beat algorithm developed in the late 1960s to anticipate crime hotspots so law enforcement could dispatch more officers there. It created a racial feedback loop. Since poor Black neighborhoods were already overpoliced compared to white ones, the algorithm directed more policing there, resulting in more arrests, which convinced it to send more police; rinse and repeat.

Kelly Chudler's You Are Not Expected To Understand This depicts the police-beat algorithm.

Even shorter code changed the world: the tracking pixel.

Lily Hay Newman's chapter on monitoring pixels says you probably interact with this code every day. It's a snippet of HTML that embeds a single tiny pixel in an email. Getting an email with a tracking code spies on me. As follows: My browser requests the single-pixel image as soon as I open the mail. My email sender checks to see if Clives browser has requested that pixel. My email sender can tell when I open it.

Adding a tracking pixel to an email is easy:

<img src="URL LINKING TO THE PIXEL ONLINE" width="0" height="0">

An older example: Ellen R. Stofan and Nick Partridge wrote a chapter on Apollo 11's lunar module bailout code. This bailout code operated on the lunar module's tiny on-board computer and was designed to prioritize: If the computer grew overloaded, it would discard all but the most vital work.

When the lunar module approached the moon, the computer became overloaded. The bailout code shut down anything non-essential to landing the module. It shut down certain lunar module display systems, scaring the astronauts. Module landed safely.

22-line code

POODOO    INHINT
    CA  Q
    TS  ALMCADR

    TC  BANKCALL
    CADR  VAC5STOR  # STORE ERASABLES FOR DEBUGGING PURPOSES.

    INDEX  ALMCADR
    CAF  0
ABORT2    TC  BORTENT

OCT77770  OCT  77770    # DONT MOVE
    CA  V37FLBIT  # IS AVERAGE G ON
    MASK  FLAGWRD7
    CCS  A
    TC  WHIMPER -1  # YES.  DONT DO POODOO.  DO BAILOUT.

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  STATEFLG

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  REINTFLG

    TC  DOWNFLAG
    ADRES  NODOFLAG

    TC  BANKCALL
    CADR  MR.KLEAN
    TC  WHIMPER

This fun book is worth reading.

I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Mother Jones. I've also written Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds. Twitter and Instagram: @pomeranian99; Mastodon: @clive@saturation.social.

I analyze the top 200 DeFi crypto projects in this article.

This isn't a study. The findings benefit crypto investors.

Let’s go!

A set of data

I analyzed data from defillama.com. In my analysis, I used the top 200 DeFis by TVL in October 2022.

Total Locked Value

The chart below shows platform-specific locked value.

14 platforms had $1B+ TVL. 65 platforms have $100M-$1B TVL. The remaining 121 platforms had TVLs below $100 million, with the lowest being $23 million.

TVLs are distributed Pareto. Top 40% of DeFis account for 80% of TVLs.

Compliant Blockchains

Ethereum's blockchain leads DeFi. 96 of the examined projects offer services on Ethereum. Behind BSC, Polygon, and Avalanche.

Five platforms used 10+ blockchains. 36 between 2-10 159 used 1 blockchain.

Use Cases for DeFi

The chart below shows platform use cases. Each platform has decentralized exchanges, liquid staking, yield farming, and lending.

These use cases are DefiLlama's main platform features.

Which use case costs the most? Chart explains. Collateralized debt, liquid staking, dexes, and lending have high TVLs.

The DeFi Industry

I compared three high-TVL platforms (Maker DAO, Balancer, AAVE). The columns show monthly TVL and token price changes. The graph shows monthly Bitcoin price changes.

Each platform's market moves similarly.

Probably because most DeFi deposits are cryptocurrencies. Since individual currencies are highly correlated with Bitcoin, it's not surprising that they move in unison.

Takeaways

This analysis shows that the most common DeFi services (decentralized exchanges, liquid staking, yield farming, and lending) also have the highest average locked value.

Some projects run on one or two blockchains, while others use 15 or 20. Our analysis shows that a project's blockchain count has no correlation with its success.

It's hard to tell if certain use cases are rising. Bitcoin's price heavily affects the entire DeFi market.

TVL seems to be a good indicator of a DeFi platform's success and quality. Higher TVL platforms are cheaper. They're a better long-term investment because they gain or lose less value than DeFis with lower TVLs.

Japan's startup challenge: 7 reasons

Every day, another Silicon Valley business is bought for a billion dollars, making its founders rich while growing the economy and improving consumers' lives.

Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Medium dominate our daily lives. Tesla automobiles and Moderna Covid vaccinations.

The startup movement started in Silicon Valley, California, but the rest of the world is catching up. Global startup buzz is rising. Except Japan.

644 of CB Insights' 1170 unicorns—successful firms valued at over $1 billion—are US-based. China follows with 302 and India third with 108.

Japan? 6!

1% of US startups succeed. The third-largest economy is tied with small Switzerland for startup success.

Mexico (8), Indonesia (12), and Brazil (12) have more successful startups than Japan (16). South Korea has 16. Yikes! Problem?

Why Don't Startups Exist in Japan More?

Not about money. Japanese firms invest in startups. To invest in startups, big Japanese firms create Silicon Valley offices instead of Tokyo.

Startups aren't the issue either. Local governments are competing to be Japan's Shirikon Tani, providing entrepreneurs financing, office space, and founder visas.

Startup accelerators like Plug and Play in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, the Startup Hub in Kobe, and Google for Startups are many.

Most of the companies I've encountered in Japan are either local offices of foreign firms aiming to expand into the Japanese market or small businesses offering local services rather than disrupting a staid industry with new ideas.

There must be a reason Japan can develop world-beating giant corporations like Toyota, Nintendo, Shiseido, and Suntory but not inventive startups.

Culture, obviously. Japanese culture excels in teamwork, craftsmanship, and quality, but it hates moving fast, making mistakes, and breaking things.

If you have a brilliant idea in Silicon Valley, quit your job, get money from friends and family, and build a prototype. To fund the business, you approach angel investors and VCs.

Most non-startup folks don't aware that venture capitalists don't want good, profitable enterprises. That's wonderful if you're developing a solid small business to consult, open shops, or make a specialty product. However, you must pay for it or borrow money. Venture capitalists want moon rockets. Silicon Valley is big or bust. Almost 90% will explode and crash. The few successes are remarkable enough to make up for the failures.

Silicon Valley's high-risk, high-reward attitude contrasts with Japan's incrementalism. Japan makes the best automobiles and cleanrooms, but it fails to produce new items that grow the economy.

Changeable? Absolutely. But, what makes huge manufacturing enterprises successful and what makes Japan a safe and comfortable place to live are inextricably connected with the lack of startups.

Barriers to Startup Development in Japan

These are the 7 biggest obstacles to Japanese startup success.

1. Unresponsive Employment Market

While the lifelong employment system in Japan is evolving, the average employee stays at their firm for 12 years (15 years for men at large organizations) compared to 4.3 years in the US. Seniority, not experience or aptitude, determines career routes, making it tough to quit a job to join a startup and then return to corporate work if it fails.

1. Conservative Buyers

Even if your product is buggy and undocumented, US customers will migrate to a cheaper, superior one. Japanese corporations demand perfection from their trusted suppliers and keep with them forever. Startups need income fast, yet product evaluation takes forever.

1. Failure intolerance

Japanese business failures harm lives. Failed forever. It hinders risk-taking. Silicon Valley embraces failure. Build another startup if your first fails. Build a third if that fails. Every setback is viewed as a learning opportunity for success.

4. No Corporate Purchases

Silicon Valley industrial giants will buy fast-growing startups for a lot of money. Many huge firms have stopped developing new goods and instead buy startups after the product is validated.

Japanese companies prefer in-house product development over startup acquisitions. No acquisitions mean no startup investment and no investor reward.

Startup investments can also be monetized through stock market listings. Public stock listings in Japan are risky because the Nikkei was stagnant for 35 years while the S&P rose 14x.

5. Social Unity Above Wealth

In Silicon Valley, everyone wants to be rich. That creates a competitive environment where everyone wants to succeed, but it also promotes fraud and societal problems.

Japan values communal harmony above individual success. Wealthy folks and overachievers are avoided. In Japan, renegades are nearly impossible.

6. Rote Learning Education System

Japanese high school graduates outperform most Americans. Nonetheless, Japanese education is known for its rote memorization. The American system, which fails too many kids, emphasizes creativity to create new products.

1. Immigration.

Immigrants start 55% of successful Silicon Valley firms. Some come for university, some to escape poverty and war, and some are recruited by Silicon Valley startups and stay to start their own.

Japan is difficult for immigrants to start a business due to language barriers, visa restrictions, and social isolation.

How Japan Can Promote Innovation

Patchwork solutions to deep-rooted cultural issues will not work. If customers don't buy things, immigration visas won't aid startups. Startups must have a chance of being acquired for a huge sum to attract investors. If risky startups fail, employees won't join.

Will Japan never have a startup culture?

Once a consensus is reached, Japan changes rapidly. A dwindling population and standard of living may lead to such consensus.

Toyota and Sony were firms with renowned founders who used technology to transform the world. Repeatable.

Silicon Valley is flawed too. Many people struggle due to wealth disparities, job churn and layoffs, and the tremendous ups and downs of the economy caused by stock market fluctuations.

The founders of the 10% successful startups are heroes. The 90% that fail and return to good-paying jobs with benefits are never mentioned.

Silicon Valley startup culture and Japanese corporate culture are opposites. Each have pros and cons. Big Japanese corporations make the most reliable, dependable, high-quality products yet move too slowly. That's good for creating cars, not social networking apps.

Can innovation and success be encouraged without eroding social cohesion? That can motivate software firms to move fast and break things while recognizing the beauty and precision of expert craftsmen? A hybrid culture where Japan can make the world's best and most original items. Hopefully.

Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, the 'Twitter Files,' and Hunter Biden's laptop: what gives?

Explaining Twitter Files

Matt Taibbi released "The Twitter Files," a batch of emails sent by Twitter executives discussing the company's decision to stop an October 2020 New York Post story online.

What's on Twitter? New York Post and Fox News call them "bombshell" documents. Or, as a Post columnist admitted, are they "not the smoking gun"? Onward!

What started this?

The New York Post published an exclusive, potentially explosive story in October 2020: Biden's Secret Emails: Ukrainian executive thanks Hunter Biden for'meeting' veep dad. The story purported to report the contents of a laptop brought to the tabloid by a Delaware computer repair shop owner who said it belonged to President Biden's second son, Hunter Biden. Emails and files on the laptop allegedly showed how Hunter peddled influence with Ukranian businessmen and included a "raunchy 12-minute video" of Hunter smoking crack and having sex.

Twitter banned links to the Post story after it was published, calling it "hacked material." The Post's Twitter account was suspended for multiple days.

Why? Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, said the company couldn't verify the story, implying they didn't trust the Post.

Twitter's stated purpose rarely includes verifying news stories. This seemed like intentional political interference. This story was hard to verify because the people who claimed to have found the laptop wouldn't give it to other newspapers. (Much of the story, including Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine and China, was later confirmed.)

Roth: "It looked like a hack and leak."

So what are the “Twitter Files?”

Twitter's decision to bury the story became a political scandal, and new CEO Elon Musk promised an explanation. The Twitter Files, named after Facebook leaks.

Musk promised exclusive details of "what really happened" with Hunter Biden late Friday afternoon. The tweet was punctuated with a popcorn emoji.

Explaining Twitter Files

Three hours later, journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted more than three dozen tweets based on internal Twitter documents that revealed "a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out of its designer's control."

Musk sees this release as a way to shape Twitter's public perception and internal culture in his image. We don't know if the CEO gave Taibbi the documents. Musk hyped the document dump before and during publication, but Taibbi cited "internal sources."

Taibbi shares email screenshots showing Twitter execs discussing the Post story and blocking its distribution. Taibbi says the emails show Twitter's "extraordinary steps" to bury the story.

Twitter communications chief Brandon Borrman has the most damning quote in the Files. Can we say this is policy? The story seemed unbelievable. It seemed like a hack... or not? Could Twitter, which ex-CEO Dick Costolo called "the free speech wing of the free speech party," censor a news story?

Many on the right say the Twitter Files prove the company acted at the behest of Democrats. Both parties had these tools, writes Taibbi. In 2020, both the Trump White House and Biden campaign made requests. He says the system for reporting tweets for deletion is unbalanced because Twitter employees' political donations favor Democrats. Perhaps. These donations may have helped Democrats connect with Twitter staff, but it's also possible they didn't. No emails in Taibbi's cache show these alleged illicit relations or any actions Twitter employees took as a result.

Even Musk's supporters were surprised by the drop. Miranda Devine of the New York Post told Tucker Carlson the documents weren't "the smoking gun we'd hoped for." Sebastian Gorka said on Truth Social, "So far, I'm deeply underwhelmed." DC Democrats collude with Palo Alto Democrats. Whoop!” The Washington Free Beacon's Joe Simonson said the Twitter files are "underwhelming." Twitter was staffed by Democrats who did their bidding. (Why?)

If "The Twitter Files" matter, why?

These emails led Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story has real news value. It's rare for a large and valuable company like Twitter to address wrongdoing so thoroughly. Emails resemble FOIA documents. They describe internal drama at a company with government-level power. Katie Notopoulos tweeted, "Any news outlet would've loved this scoop!" It's not a'scandal' as teased."

Twitter's new owner calls it "the de facto public town square," implying public accountability. Like a government agency. Though it's exciting to receive once-hidden documents in response to a FOIA, they may be boring and tell you nothing new. Like Twitter files. We learned how Twitter blocked the Post's story, but not why. Before these documents were released, we knew Twitter had suppressed the story and who was involved.

These people were disciplined and left Twitter. Musk fired Vijaya Gadde, the former CLO who reportedly played a "key role" in the decision. Roth quit over Musk's "dictatorship." Musk arrived after Borrman left. Jack Dorsey, then-CEO, has left. Did those who digitally quarantined the Post's story favor Joe Biden and the Democrats? Republican Party opposition and Trump hatred? New York Post distaste? According to our documents, no. Was there political and press interference? True. We knew.

Taibbi interviewed anonymous ex-Twitter employees about the decision; all expressed shock and outrage. One source said, "Everyone knew this was fucked." Since Taibbi doesn't quote that expletive, we can assume the leaked emails contained few or no sensational quotes. These executives said little to support nefarious claims.

Outlets more invested in the Hunter Biden story than Gizmodo seem vexed by the release and muted headlines. The New York Post, which has never shied away from a blaring headline in its 221-year history, owns the story of Hunter Biden's laptop. Two Friday-night Post alerts about Musk's actions were restrained. Elon Musk will drop Twitter files on NY Post-Hunter Biden laptop censorship today. Elon Musk's Twitter dropped Post censorship details from Biden's laptop. Fox News' Apple News push alert read, "Elon Musk drops Twitter censorship documents."

Bombshell, bombshell, bombshell… what, exactly, is the bombshell? Maybe we've heard this story too much and are missing the big picture. Maybe these documents detail a well-documented decision.

The Post explains why on its website. "Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post's reporting," its headline says.

Twitter's ad hoc decision to moderate a tabloid's content is not surprising. The social network had done this for years as it battled toxic users—violent white nationalists, virulent transphobes, harassers and bullies of all political stripes, etc. No matter how much Musk crows, the company never had content moderation under control. Buzzfeed's 2016 investigation showed how Twitter has struggled with abusive posters since 2006. Jack Dorsey and his executives improvised, like Musk.

Did the US government interfere with the ex-social VP's media company? That's shocking, a bombshell. Musk said Friday, "Twitter suppressing free speech by itself is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under government orders with no judicial review is." Indeed! Taibbi believed this. August 2022: "The laptop is secondary." Zeynep Tufecki, a Columbia professor and New York Times columnist, says the FBI is cutting true story distribution. Taibbi retracted the claim Friday night: "I've seen no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story."

What’s the bottom line?

I'm still not sure what's at stake in the Hunter Biden scandal after dozens of New York Post articles, hundreds of hours of Fox News airtime, and thousands of tweets. Briefly: Joe Biden's son left his laptop with a questionable repairman. FBI confiscated it? The repairman made a copy and gave it to Rudy Giuliani's lawyer. The Post got it from Steve Bannon. On that laptop were videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack, cavorting with prostitutes, and emails about introducing his father to a Ukrainian businessman for $50,000 a month. Joe Biden urged Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. What? The story seems to be about Biden family business dealings, right?

The discussion has moved past that point anyway. Now, the story is the censorship of it. Adrienne Rich wrote in "Diving Into the Wreck" that she came for "the wreck and not the story of the wreck" No matter how far we go, Hunter Biden's laptop is done. Now, the crash's story matters.

I'm dizzy. Katherine Miller of BuzzFeed wrote, "I know who I believe, and you probably do, too. To believe one is to disbelieve the other, which implicates us in the decision; we're stuck." I'm stuck. Hunter Biden's laptop is a political fabrication. You choose. I've decided.

This could change. Twitter Files drama continues. Taibbi said, "Much more to come." I'm dizzy.