Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I think that this will be an interesting story. That’s all I’m going to say about this subject right now.

When your day job is trying to help Google organize the world’s information, you need as much sleep as you can get. If you get started on some book that you can’t put down, you’ll be bleary the next day. That has led me to seek out “put-down-able” books. I’m not talking about bad books, but tomes that you can stop reading at any time.

Without further ado, here is my list of put-down-able books, in case other webmasters or search engine reps need their sleep:

• The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards. I normally don’t care for celebrity stuff, but a friend was reading this and I nicked it from them. 400+ pages and you can read the chapters in any order.
• The Other Hollywood : The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. A great record of the history of pornographic films, and another Hollywood-ish book I enjoyed. You can literally hop anywhere into this book and just start reading. (By the way, does anyone have recommendations to learn more about the online porn industry? Ynot? Netpond? Luke Ford? Where should I be reading to improve my understanding?)
• The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. I love Stephenson’s early work, and his In the Beginning was the Command Line was fantastic. Cryptonomicon was good reading, but it was pretty dense and intricate. The Baroque Cycle consist of three books: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, making for 960+832+912 = 2704 pages that you can pick up and put down at will.
• Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. A fun little read with no tension or drama, so it’s easy to interrupt at any point.
• Anything by Amy Tan. I’ve read most of her books and I’m about to start Saving Fish from Drowning. I love Tan’s deliberate pacing.
• The “Stealing the Network” series (How to Own the Box, How to Own a Continent, and How to Own an Identity). I love fiction that teaches me something. For example, I had no idea how to use Nmap until I watched The Matrix ;). This series of computer security books is steeped in real-world facts. The books are easy to put down because each chapter is an independent little story that stands on its own, but the chapters still form a larger story.

Those are the ones that I can think of right now. What non-stressy or put-down-able books have you read recently?

(Yes, yes, comment approval will start again tomorrow. Or maybe Friday.)

Argh! Firefox 1.5 is making talk like a pirate: it crashes and I go ARGH! I installed Firefox 1.5 on a less important machine over the weekend, and the browser has been crashing regularly. It could be one of the extensions crashing (SessionSaver?) instead of the core browser, but the net effect is still that Talk Like a Pirate Day arrives early and several times a day.

ARGH! Is Firefox 1.5 stable for you?

Wading through my email backlog, this is my favorite one so far:

From: “xxxxx xxxxxxxxx”
To: “Mattcutts.com”
Subject: your domain: Mattcutts.com
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:15:00 +0200

Dear WebMaster/Administrator,

I have noticed that your domain: Mattcutts.com is about to expire
and would like to know whether or not you intend to sell it.
If you are, what price would you like to receive for it?

I can be most easily reached at this email, xxxxx@xxxxxxxx-xxxxxx.net
I look forward to hearing from you,
xxxxx xxxxxxxxx

Has anybody else gotten one of these? Just for fun, I replied “Can you give me a couple of examples where you bought a domain from someone else?” I’ll let you know if they reply.

Related reading: 419 Eater.

Update: I heard back from the fellow. He didn’t mention any of his other domains, but he did quote me a price:

Hi,

Thank you for you prompt reply.
My budget for your domain stands at about $350.
Please let me know if this is the price you would expect to receive.

Best regards,
James

After due consideration of the proposal, I think I’ll pass.

I’ve recently switched to Gmail from mutt. It’s not perfect, but it’s still faster than my older way of doing things. Now that I’m back from San Diego, I’ve been reflecting on time management and where my time goes. Before I left, I started adding the label “outside” to emails from outside Google. Here’s what the most recent two-thirds of my inbox look like:

Yikes. I didn’t realize what a huge fraction of my email is trying to help people from outside Google. How do you try to maintain a balance between getting work done and keeping up with email? I’m going to have to do some deep thinking about how to scale.

P.S. If you’re not at Google and you’re waiting on an email reply from me, please be patient.