The Google 2005 year-end Zeitgeist is out. My favorite is the graph for Rosa Parks. Interest in her peaks around her death and funeral, but you can also see the interest in Rosa Parks early in the year. Why? Probably because February is Black History Month. Check it out:
I’m not always great about leaving work at work, but I’ve never had SEO dreams before. A few days ago, I dreamt that I was surveying the landscape of domains in our index. There was hardly any spam at all, except for one blip on the landscape, so I zoomed in on it and saw that one lone dental plan site had gotten through our algorithms; all the other spam was down in the noise. For some reason, Oilman was working on a computer to my right. He looked happy.
“What are you so happy about?” I asked.
“My spammy dental plan site is doing really well!” Oilman replied.
“Ah.” I sat for a few seconds and stared at the dental plan domain name that I saw on my screen. Then I turned to him and asked “Is your site named www.get-some-cheap-dental-plans-online-here.ca?”
Oilman got a perplexed look on his face. “Yeah, how did you know the name of the site?”
I smiled as I turned back to my computer and hit the delete key. A second later, a loud wail started from just to my right.
Weird dream, huh? Here’s what I think it means: I shouldn’t eat pepperoni pizza and then go to bed after listening to SEO podcasts on Webmaster Radio.
Has anyone else here had search engine or SEO-related dreams?
In a previous post I said “I have to bounce,” and a good friend told me that I’m not quite hip enough to pull that phrase off, and that in fact no one has tried to pull off that phrase since, like, the 90s.
It’s okay. I realize that I’m not hip, and I embrace my geekhood. I’m at peace with it. For example, a hip person would not take a picture of me with Dax, the blackhat spammer hammer, and then photoshop it to look like I’m using a traction beam to suck blackhat secrets out of his brain:
A cool person just would not do that. But I would.
My only hope is that I can plow on past hip, into geeky, and then just keep going until I wrap back around to hip again. Please don’t tell me if I get snagged on geeky and never quite wrap around. 
In an earlier post I mentioned how interviews are interesting, original content and thus naturally attract links. Here’s a couple more interviews you may want to read:
Brett Tabke does a WebmasterWorld interview (free registration required) of Stephanie Leffler, the CEO MonsterCommerce, and at the same time gets to reveal the news that MonsterCommerce has been acquired by Network Solutions. Congrats, Steph and company!
And Aaron Pratt continues his streak by interviewing Greg Boser. My favorite quote:
... there will obviously be times where Matt and I disagree. He’s the gate keeper and I’m the guy trying to scale the wall so I can show everyone a poster with my client’s 1-800 number on it. That fact creates two distinctively different viewpoints on many issues.
If you want Greg’s different viewpoint on things, his blog is here. I have to bounce, so I’m going to save my Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom picture of Greg for later.
What, you want it now? Oh, alright.
Do you remember in the Temple of Doom movie where the priest reaches into some dude’s chest and pulls out their still-beating heart? Well, a few months ago, a Hungarian cloaker taught me how to do that. So I’m at Pubcon, and Greg Boser is standing right next to me, unaware. So I go for his heart!!
I reach into Greg’s torso and root around in there for like 30 seconds before I realize that Greg has no heart!! After a few more seconds, Greg notices and says “Hey, what are you doing?” And I say, “Um, nothing.” And Greg says “Oh, my heart. You’re trying to pull my heart out like in Temple of Doom, right? AltaVista tried to do that once, so I leave my heart at home when I’m going to be around search engine reps.”
Foiled! Just wait till next time, Greg. (BTW, thanks to Tim? Dax? whoever took the picture.)
Someday you will google your Google to the Google to pick up some more google
-- Some random person on Slashdot, I think
Just another quiet week for Google. Let’s see what happened:
And I’m sure I missed a couple things. Is that too dang much Googley Goodness for one week? Well, it is close to Chrismukkah, after all. Happy holidays from Google!
I think the most under-reported things will be the Pittsburgh office and the personalized homepage API. The Pittsburgh office will no doubt have a large impact on Google over time as we work with smart people there. As for the homepage API: there are only five widgets listed there right now. The API documentation is readily available. If I were a netizen looking for attention or viral buzz, one way is to be the first to develop an AdSense status widget, a scratchpad, or a Flickr photo of the day. If you need ideas, check out the widgets that the Google Desktop supports.
Update: Sure enough, I missed Jingle and Jingle Audio, which are two proposed extensions to XMPP that will improve interoperability with Google Talk’s voice features. Open protocols make me go woof.
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