It’s Halloween, which means a chance to dress as something else. After my Earl experience went pretty well, I decided to have fun for Halloween. This time, my name is Inigo. Hallo! My name is Inigo Montoya. You spam my index. Prepare to die!
And of course some Inigo grooming of the moustache was in order. A perfectly good mullet wig had to die for this outfit:
Will any spammers feel the blade of Inigo today?
Anybody care to post their Halloween pictures? 
I wish I could have gone to Internet Librarian down in Monterey this week, but it was not to be. But a sensational blog report makes me feel like I was there. If you’re a power searcher, you’ll want to read through the coverage.
P.S. I’ll be mostly (entirely?) out-of-touch of email/blog this weekend.
Alas and alack, Martha Stewart and David Karandish (one of her apprentice candidates who is also a search engine marketer) have parted ways. David made a heart-felt case in the boardroom though by pointing out that Martha wasn’t in the top 10 results for the search [recipe]. And when he had to leave, he did the best job I’ve seen of keeping the communication lines open for potential future collaboration. Well done, David, you acquitted yourself honorably. May all your mortgage sites be white hat.
It looks like Jagger2 is starting to be visible. GoogleGuy posted over on WebmasterWorld with what SEOs should expect:
McMohan, good eyes in spotting some changes at 66.102.9.104. I expect Jagger2 to start at 66.102.9.x. It will probably stay at 1-2 data centers for the next several days rather than spreading quickly. But that data center shows the direction that things will be moving in (bear in mind that things are fluxing, and Jagger3 will cause flux as well).
Matt Cutts posted how to send feedback on Jagger1 at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/
If you’re looking at 66.102.9.x and have new feedback on what you see there (whether it be spam or just indexing related), please use the same mechanism as before, except use the keyword Jagger2. I believe that our webspam team has taken a first pass through the Jagger1 feedback and acted on a majority of the spam reports. The quality team may wait until Jagger3 is visible somewhere before delving into the non-spam index feedback.
If things stay on the same schedule (which I can’t promise, but I’ll keep you posted if I learn more), Jagger3 might be visible at one data center next week. Folks should have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3 as it gradually becomes more visible at more data centers.
Not much more I can add to that. Even on 66.102.9.104, it will still take a day or so for the changes to be fully visible at that data center. Just to re-emphasize, if you send new feedback on a data center such as 66.102.9.104, be sure to use the keyword jagger2 in spam reports or index feedback so that we can tell this is newer feedback. Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3 are mostly independent changes, but they’re occurring closely enough in time (plus they interact to some degree) that it’s clearer just to act as if they were one update for feedback purposes.
I was in Valley Fair mall last week and a store had gone out of business. A discount bookstore was filling up 2/3rds of the empty space. Book sales are a long-standing weakness of mine; I love Book Sale Finder. The notion of paying $3-4 for a bag full of books is just hot. I have a hard time not forking over whatever’s in my wallet and walking away with as much as I can carry (”Utopia? Sure. Erewhon? Why not. Victor Hugo? Hey, maybe I’ll read it someday”).
The Valley Fair bookstore wasn’t bag-sale cheap, but it was pretty cheap. I couldn’t resist picking up
I used to read the Industry Standard back in the day, so it’s neat to get a peek behind the curtain (and to hear more about John Battelle from before The Search). If you want a view of Bubble craziness, I’d go with Dot.con. If you just want the gestalt without as much excess, it’s hard to go wrong with Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift or eBoys by Randall Stross about the venture capital firm Benchmark.
If you like this genre, you’ll like Starving to Death. The author James Ledbetter has experience commenting on the media, so you can feel him trying to be measured, but the value of a book like this is the dish. The book isn’t gossipy, but it’s neat to hear about the rooftop parties and some of the situations that happened (e.g. when a public relations firm was representing a company and the Industry Standard, the magazine sometimes suffered from the conflict of interest: the author suspected that the PR firm tipped off the client company about impending stories).
It was also fun to read about the importance of getting scoops. A couple times during the book, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be a journalist, and what questions would be interesting to ask. For example, Several folks have noted that MSN announced a plan to scan books. The wannabe reporter in me wants to ask other companies questions like “If the Google Print lawsuit ends up going in Google’s direction, would you also scan books that aren’t out of copyright?” I think it’s probably a lot more difficult to be a journalist than most people give credit for.
My overall recommendation would be to pick up Starving to Death on $200 Million, especially if you enjoy and have read most other books about Silicon Valley business/tech/media. Or of course if you find a good deal at a book sale. What Silicon Valley-ish books have you enjoyed?