Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

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.)

Ah, happiness is a day without meetings. This was a good day. If you’re looking for an interesting read this holiday season, I highly recommend Spam Kings. It’s about email spam, not webspam, but if you are an SEO you’ll probably like this book. There’s even a blog for the book.

If you’re an SEO, you’ll get an extra dimension of fun out of this book. When it mentions nonsense domains, you’ll be curious and check them out. When they mention XBL, you’ll be interested to hear more about blacklisted proxies. It’s a completely different but equally fascinating subculture.

I’ve often wondered what the overlap between SEO and email spam is. I don’t think I’ve ever met an SEO who copped to doing email spam. Then again, I’ve never met an SEO who admitted to trying to rank porn pages for innocent phrases like [disney cartoons] or peoples’ names, but I know that some folks try to do that because we see the attempts. Anyway, I hope no one recognizes a friend or even themselves in this book.

“Remind me to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.” - Jubal Harshaw, Stranger in a Strange Land

Lately I’ve been playing with magazine subscriptions. There’s stuff like Maximum PC, CPU, and Wired, and I’ve also enjoyed Make, the new magazine/book from O’Reilly. But the most fun to read lately are Linux magazines. For some reason, I don’t enjoy the U.S. magazines (Linux Journal and Linux Magazine) quite as much, although they’re quite good. My favorite are the magazines from Europe, which often come with a DVD or CD. They’re just a lot of fun. They range from sassy to opinionated as all hell, and have great features like “software projects on the move” or descriptions of Linux kernel controversies. I’ve subscribed to Linux Pro magazine, Linux Format, and just recently I added Linux User and Developer. Highly recommended.

One magazine has an article on building your own Linux distro. You want to get links? Making your own Linux distribution is a great way to get links.

P.S. I’m up to 473 comments that I need to approve. Apologies for getting snowed under on that..

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

• Starving to Death on $200 Million (about the Industry Standard)
• Dumb Money (about daytrading)
• The Big Red Fez: How to Make any Web Site Better (I needed to try a Seth Godin book)
• Slack (Tom DeMarco’s book Peopleware is awesome)
• The Microsoft Edge (a light read, but fun)

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?

Back when I was getting my domain hosted, I wanted to try outsourcing my site blogginess to typepad.com; they offer a way to host their centralized blog service on your domain name. So I bought a copy of DNS for Dummies. My recommendation: look for a different book. How can you have entire book about DNS and mention CNAME exactly one time? Frankly, that was all I wanted to know about. Oh well; you live you learn, you restart named a few times.