Archive for January, 2007
Just a quick note. I have a funeral to attend tomorrow, and then I’ll be catching a plane that night to Dallas for the weekend. I’ll be catching a Robert Earl Keen concert while I’m there, so that should be fun.
If you’re trying to contact me about something for FreeText.biz, or Feedbutton.com, or NoSlang.com etc, it’s going to take a few days for me to get back to you. It also makes me wish Outlook had an auto responder function.
I always dread going on mini vacations because it just means I’ll have about 2500 emails waiting for me on Monday. Owell.
January 31st, 2007
Looking for a romantic candlelit dinner this valentines day? Look no further than your local White Castle. On February 14th (That’s valentines day guys, you’re running out of time) select White Castles will be offering hostess seating, candlelit dining, and your own server from 5-8pm.
This isn’t just a normal even though, you’ll need to make a reservation – so call your local White Castle now.
If you don’t want to splurge this year, there’s always the take home option of a “Cupid’s Crave Kit” that includes 8 burgers, fries, drinks, coupons, and special keepsake items.
“Go ahead honey…. get anything you want off of the value menu. It’s your special day.”
January 31st, 2007
How come Google hasn’t bought Wikipedia yet? Google usually buys technology over traffic (although with youtube that’s changing), and Wikipedia fits well being the first to do wiki.
Not only that, but Google heavily favors wikipedia results at the top of their own search results, and references it often. Even some internal documents and contract employee instructions reference wikipedia in some cases.
With a significant portion of their rankings based on Wikipedia, would it make sense for Google to just purchase it? Or does having it remain an independant 3rd party help Google remain unbiased* and credible?
* – some would argue that automatically ranking Wikipedia results high introduces another type of bias.
January 30th, 2007
Ever wonder what the news would read like if the people who wrote stock spam emails were in charge of it? Looking at my inbox from this morning, it’d sound something like this:
Idyllwild, Missouri: Several thousand GOP supporters cheered Bush Friday for blowing a small airplane carrying Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle off course which forced a ballot measure that would resolve bankrupt smallpox in the trial of former Iraqi leader Pablo Cerda, 23, of Fountain Valley.
The National Transportation Safety firefighters who were overrun by flames said the full board will likely vote on a ruling October 26 in Southern California’s San Jacinto Mountains.
January 29th, 2007
Way back in the day, SEO was easy. Search engines looked at something called META tags for keywords to determine what a website was about. This made it easy for webmasters to tell the search engines what their site dealt with. Unfortunately, it also made it easy for people to rank highly for any term they desired.
Those of you who searched the web in the 90′s will remeber porn sites showing up for stuff like “new car” – it was common.
Then came Google. Google revolutionized the industry by looking at links. Larry and Sergey theorized that if academic papers get more clout based on how many papers reference them, the web can work the same way too. After all, back then the web was just like a series of academic papers.
The SEO paradigm had shifted from on page optimization to off page factors – specifically links.
But now things are changing. Wikipedia is nofollowing links, big time bloggers like Robert Scoble are debating if they have a responsibility to link to others, and companies are selling links like crazy.
All of this makes me ask: will there come a time when it won’t be worth it to rank websites based on links? Are links going the way of the META tag? Has this point already happened? Are we close?
If so, what’s the next big discovery going to be? People say that Google is unbeatable; so much so that the term “Google Killer” is becoming a mock cliche. One of the easiest ways to make your business fail is to label it a “Google Killer”. But is that true?
Google came to power because they were the first to realize the paradigm shift – and they took advantage of it by building a useful product. The paradigm will undoubtedly shift again, but what to? Whoever figures that out stands to make a lot of money.
January 29th, 2007
Continuing in the typical blogger tradition of posting cat pictures, here’s some more pictures of my cat Whodey.
Whodey is a 14 week old bengal kitten. That means she’s like a regular cat, but longer (and will grow bigger), and a little smarter. She’s not afraid of water, plays fetch, hide and seek, and is pretty smart. In fact, she can jump pretty high too:
I bought her a scratching post the other day (I still haven’t decided if she gets to keep her claws. That’s up to how she acts.
After about 4 hours she pulled all the yarn out of that toy. When she was finished pulling out the yarn she bit off the string, brought it to me and started crying “Hey, I broke my toy.”
Compared to my mom’s cat, whodey is a handfull. She recently decided she likes to swim in her water bowl, and proceeds to make a flood in my kitchen every day. She also likes to sleep under the covers with me. She crawls underneath and curls up against my stomach. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem, but I toss and turn a lot so I constantly get woken up with a claw to the ribs and meow that says “hey, get off of me.”
Here’s a couple more pictures.
January 27th, 2007
From the schools don’t over-react to things file comes this story on CNN claiming that 6 girls (ages 14-15) have been charged with homicide consipiracy for planning to kill a list of people including the Energizer Bunny, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey.
While none of the girls had any weapons, it would seem one of them had a MySpace account that had the word kill on it somewhere. (of course we don’t know where because the page has been removed.)
Using the word kill is clearly a very serious attempt on a person’s life, and I’m sure it will be revealed shortly that MySpace is to blame for this.
January 26th, 2007
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