Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Lance Knobel on blogging at Davos. I think we both knew, five years ago, there would come a day when the WEF would at least semi-embrace blogging. That's what their weblog is, I am told, only half an embrace. They're concerned with what a free blogger might say. Luckily when Lance and I did our blogging at Davos in Y2K, we were flying under the radar, and got some good stuff that might not pass the censors this year. 

Accordion Guy: "Far be it for me to flog a dead meme." LOL! 

KSG article on last week's conference. 

Another reason to think twice before centralizing RSS. 

Last year on this day: "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant. You can get anything you want. At Alice's Restaurant. Walk right in it's around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track. And you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant." 

Talking with Rogers Cadenhead last night, he told me that the SEO community is abuzz over the rel="nofollow" attribute. It's going to make a bunch of people some money, it turns out, due to a quirk in how Google page-rank works. Here's the deal. If a page on my site has 100 pointers, every pointer gives a certain amount of juice to the things it points at. However if the same page has only 3 pointers, then each pointer gives considerably more. Same if I change all but 3 of the 100 pointers to rel="nofollow" (or so the SEOers assume). Naturally they will change every pointer but the ones that point to their own pages to rel="nofollow". Certainly an unintended consequence, if that's actually the way the SEs work.  

Tim Jarrett on driving the snow-clogged streets of Boston. 

Jon Udell: "One of the ironies of desktop search may prove to be that, by the time it went mainstream, the personal hard drive was about to become an endangered species." 

BBC: Google launches TV search service. 

The President of the Ukraine has a blog, and a feed. 

Dawn & Drew left a voicemail. Looks like I'll have to head west soon! 

You too can leave me a message, or a song, at 206-338-3143.  

Rick Heller documents an apparent new low in blogosphere politics. 

Washington Post piece on Google's Tahoe ski trip. 

Microsoft has some cheesy little Subscribe To Me Here buttons. Welcome to the RSS Wars ladies and gentlemen. No doubt Google is next. Users, you'll have to be satisfied with what the Big Three give you (considerably less than you were getting just two years ago). Developers, welcome to 3rd Party Land. Here's your trunk. Enjoy the ride.