SLAMBOARD

Jeeves was a fictional character created by what has become an ‘also ran’ in the cut throat business of search. He served a vital purpose to search because he encouraged participation by people who didn’t quite get the concept of search query. His influence is still felt today even though he retired years ago.

When I was checking stats on my environmental blog this morning I saw evidence of this phenomenon. Somebody asked Google what is the best choice for a toilet seat molded wood or plastic? I know that ranking number one for that query is not going to bring me much traffic, but it’s kinda cool that the person posing the question can get a relevant answer. I have to wonder if they got a more relevant answer than they would have if they had used conventional search query logic.

Last Monday, I was on a train reading a newly purchased copy of Death of a Salesman. I can only vaguely remember reading it in school and I was surprised and a bit creeped out at its relevance.

There have been many of Pop Culture References made to this award winning play. I spotted one that hasn’t been cataloged in Wikipedia. One of my least favorite bands, Nickelback, has a song called Leader of Men. One line of lyrics echoes Biff Lomans rebuke of his father’s American Dream.

I am Not a Leader of Men

If Biff and Willy Loman were real, they would probably be a bit disheartened to find that Nickelback has pushed them all the way to the 4th page of a Google query for this line. I know I am.

Death isn’t current enough to be effectively used a metaphor for the American political scene or the present economic crisis but I hope that somebody close to GWB makes some kind of Biff remark that he won’t get.

I have ratcheted down my blogging frequency quite a bit as other aspects of my life and work demand more of my time and energy. I was surprised to see that my blog still ranks quite highly for the search term ‘Kimkins‘ after I have been mostly out of the loop for months.

I guess Google algorithms don’t discount you for being out of the loop.

I am considering outsourcing some of my blogs to my children for the summer, but I will probably hold on to this one because of its relative seriousness. Are there any other bloggers out there who are trying to get their kids into blogging? I have a vague memory of the Family Circus guy getting his kid to draw his daily comic. I don’t know if he really did that or if it was just a creative device design to conceal the fact that he had the shakes.

If you are like me, you don’t use the salad crisper in your refrigerator. The advanced operators on Google are kinda like that. I remember using similar commands when I was doing abstract searches on a cd-rom database at school back in the 80s. I am just mentioning them on here because I figure that there might be a few people like me who didn’t even realize that they were there. I think I might start using the allintitle: operator from time to time.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

The Blogger’s Choice Awards was a success for its creator. It was a small ego boost for the winners. I nominated myself for a handful of categories hoping that it would attract a few readers. I didn’t get very many votes.

A big part of the success of the site is owed to the celebrity bloggers that took notice.

There was a fraught competition between supporters of Rosie O’Donnell and Will Wheaton. Will was initially flattered, but he became very critical of the site when he found out that it was affiliated with PayPurrPost. Rosie was more positive about the nomination and expressed the desire to win. Rosie has her detractors as well as her supporters and her page on the BCA site has over 8000 comments. Rosie won.

A very bad man initially had a huge lead in the Worst Blog of All Time category. When he tipped everyone off to the fact that he was happy about all the attention and traffic, things tailed off for him. Unfortunately for him all the attention was ultimately bad for business because his more questionable practices came under the scrutiny of people that were in a position to dam up some of his revenue streams. In the end Perez Hilton was proclaimed the worst. I think that is inaccurate, he is simply the most popular bad blogger.

The BCA’s were not a good traffic generation tool for the everyday blogger, in my opinion. If you were one of the few that got in before the unmoderated nominee lists became huge, you may have gotten a few clicks from people who were not already familiar with your blog. I did not see any sustained traffic benefit from participating in this silly exercise in self promotion and ego fluffing.

SEO tends to focus extensively on Google for the most part. MSN and Yahoo each have a piece of the search engine pie and everyone else gets crumbs. I was very surprised to see how many small players are on this decidedly unlevel playing field. One particular search engine appeared up on my radar today. It is called StrategicBoard and it is based in Israel. It is focused on blogs and has a human editorial element that is designed to exclude spam. If any of you readers are attempting to operate Google-free for ethical and/or spiteful reasons, you should check it out.

Everyone in Web Business and the Blogosphere have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for Google to run and update. Now that it has happened, there is a lot of emotional outpouring and ill-informed post game analysis going on. There is not really anything informative coming from the Google.

Truly important sites like Forbes.com and Washingtonpost.com suffered a drop in Page Rank.

Techcrunch.com is listed in an article on Forbes as one of the fallen. An early post on Techcrunch itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge any drop. The Techcrunch post used the word Jihad in its title and received many, many comments from people who were offended or pretended to be offended. I am offended by the Washington Redskins (or maybe I am just pretending).

If you are an outsider reading about all the Page Rank related anxiety and frustration, I will sum it up for you…It’s all about the money.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

Even New York’s Largest Real Estate Company has to continually advertise and promote themselves in order to maintain their exposure and their standing. Prudential Douglas Elliman is the big one and they are putting in the effort to be at the top of the list which puts your property up there along with them should you choose to sell through their agency.

Say you have a valuable Park Slope real estate property…you want your Realtor to be on the first page for that search query. Prudential Douglas Elliman provides their service to a huge number of communities in the New York area ranging from Manhattan all the way out to Montauk. They have sixty offices.

The main page of PrudentialElliman.com features an excellent flash display of panoramic views of some really stunning properties. The prices are included in the display. The featured homes range from quaint to absolutely imposing. The site is certainly well designed to be enticing to potential buyers.