I've put up Chapter 7 of the Golden Calf translation, 'The Sweet Yoke Of Fame', in which the protagonists buy some sharp new clothes, meet a pair of Chicago gangsters, and enjoy the best night of their lives while plundering their way south through the Soviet countryside.

With apologies for using the blog as a job board, my four-month contract in Beijing has just ended and I'm looking for work again. There are three things I can do fairly well:

I'm legal to work in the United States, United Kingdom, Poland and (for unfathomable reasons) Sweden. I can work full-time starting in mid-November, and I'm available for freelance jobs starting now. My full resume is here and any email inquiries are welcome.

A couple of people have inquired as to whether I have stopped reporting on GoogleGuy's comments altogether. I have not stopped, and I do intend to report any significant comments made by GoogleGuy.

The reason I have reported anything recently is because GoogleGuy has gone quiet. Though I may have missed some, I have only seen one comment from GoogleGuy during the month of May, and that was to tell a member that the best way to contact Google was to email support (though he did mention that he would pass the particular issue on to others internally). If anyone has seen any other GoogleGuy comments this month, let me know.

With the Google IPO annoucement, Google is now in the 'Quiet Period'. And it appears that GoogleGuy is also in the quiet period. Many, including myself, expected this to happen (especially after GoogleGuy asked me to be quite).

Just one year after this site was launched, GoogleGuy isn't saying anything (at least for now).

Responding to a post stating that Google makes use of forbidden cloaking techniques itself, googleguy admits it and promises an 'exemplar punishement': banning its own pages from its own search engine for cloaking.

Cloaking, also know as stealth, is a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else.
This is clearly forbidden by Google and many other search engines guidelines and it sounds really odd (but does not really surprise me) that Google itself went against its own policy.
The funny thing, in my opinion, is the action that they are going to take against themselves, in order to fix the matter.

Googleguy says:

To be consistent with our guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers–a search like [site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion request” to explain the situation)

I say it is funny because in many cases like this one, Google would ban an entire website from its search engine, but banning Google from Google i guess it wouldn't work really nicely: Internet has already had is 'big Bang' a few years ago ;-) and quite a bunch of supernovas...but the time for a blackhole still has to come...

While giving more clues about the latest Google 'Bourbon' update, GoogleGuy has also talked about a few important things that should be done or not done, when optimizing your website for Google (but not only for Google).

I've been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn't use '&id=' as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use '&id=' with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter
And then

I've never heard the suggestion that Google would penalize for iframes before reading it in the thread. Plenty of legit sites use iframes, so it wouldn't make sense to penalize for it. Powdork gave the right response in message 337 of the first Bourbon thread. Now I can easily believe that some search engine spiders would have trouble with iframes just like some spiders have trouble with frames. But I wouldn't expect iframes to cause any penalties.
And finally

My rule of thumb is to pick a root page and be as consistent as possible. I lean toward choosing http://www.yourdomain.com/ but that's just me; http://yourdomain.com/ would work as well. Then I recommend that you make things as simple as possible for spiders. I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused. In the same fashion, I would try to be consistent on your internal linking. Once you've picked a root page and decided on www vs. non-www, make sure that all your links follow the same convention and point to the root page that you picked. Also, I would use a 301 redirect or rewrite so that your root page doesn't appear twice. For example, if you select http://www.yourdomain.com/ as your root page, then if a spider tries to fetch http://yourdomain.com/ (without the www), your web server should do a permanent (301) redirect to your root page at http://www.yourdomain.com/

So the high-order bits to bear in mind are
- make it as easy as possible for search engines and spiders; save calculation by giving absolute instead of relative links.
- be consistent. Make a decision on www vs. non-www and follow the same convention consistently for all the links on your site. Use permanent redirects to keep spiders fetching the correct page.

Given that GoogleGuy is quite talkative, in this period, we should probably expect more revelations soon.

This air disaster occurs in a sudden. Only after about one minute from its taking off, the aircraft began to behave 'in a very abnormal manner', and the witness substantiated that 'It seemed that the driver had once tried to roll back to the airport but resulted in a complete failure, only several seconds after that the aircraft has been driven to the direction of Nanhai Park, explosions follow just meanwhile'. 55 victims are proved and announced, including 6 members of aircrew, 47 members of passengers, and 2 on the ground. The witness and the members from the breakdown gang also pointed it out that 'It is the most dreadful image that I have ever run into throughout my life, the concussion and blare from the explosions will never die away from my heart', 'Can you imagine that? None of the victims is having a complete body. Heads, arms, fingers, lungs, legs, any kind of organs can be found at the accident site', 'God forgive all that, I went to have a look of the wreckage of the aircraft, but all that cauterized in my heart is death, death, death'.

Who is to blame? Let it be. The insurance company began to pay for the victim's beneficiaries , mostly their poor parents, children, their loved and beloved, who are crying in despair. But what can money count for? To be or not to be, the answer is very different. Once such accidents happen, we the livings always feel a kind of meaninglessness of pursuing the material desires. What is the meaning of the life itself? Among the victims, there is a student, there are businessmen, there are officials, there are policemen, there are workers, there are common citizens, almost a tiny society. But only all in a minute, all these men and women were turned to very equality, 'to which you will return'. He is passionate; she is ambitious. He has a plan to gain an order; she has a plan to give a birth. However, the abruptly elbowed fate stopped all the running hopes, plans, futures.

Similar disasters happened around me, not only this. One of my colleagues, Mike Lin, passed away because of abdomen cancer, on 2004 October 15th. One of my parents' colleagues and the mother of one of high school classmates, left us because of leukemia last week. And one of my school fellows, died less than 23 because of sudden heart attack. Terror of death starts to threat the people of my age. On thinking of that, nobody will feel comfortable. Who knows when will the very thing happen to himself or herself? Human beings tend to think they are knowledgeable enough to predicate everything but how ridiculous it is they turn a blind eye to so great a support for the agnostics that nobody knows when one can die.

From the time I was just a very small child I began to feel such kind of ultimate concern, so I prevent myself from running the risk of taking any kind of dangerous entertainment, Ferris wheel for instance. I know it very clearly I have never been a lucky guy and I am always turning up to be with very bad situations once I am not behaving in extremely great care. Each time I left my home, my heart is always very nervous and once I get back home I am always feeling a true relax. Thank God, He postpones my death second by second and helps me to avoid traffic accidents, earthquakes or other disasters. The dead is always reminding the livings, being alive itself is so splendid, and we should always cherish what we have and try our best to be happy and make others happy, so as to be smiling, till the moment that the real death is facing ourselves.

Earlier tonight I was parked on my butt in the Gallery space at Toronto's Spoke Club, listening to the splendid Mathew Ingram, Globe & Mail columnist and blogger of note. This is not anything like a structured discussion of what was a well-attended and most enjoyable event, more a stream of some of the thoughts and notes that came to me during the evening...

Particularly interesting to hear Mathew chastise the Globe for its policy on shoving columns behind a paywall. His traffic per column dropped from 10,000 readers per column online to only 300 readers per column after they shoved him behind the cluewall. Ouch. OK - so those 300 are now "valuable paying subscribers" but, as Mathew points out, he was almost driven into the blogosphere by the actions of his employer - an author in search of a better audience.

I still can't fathom why the Globe and others continue to do things like this. Sure, I understand the economics of the newspaper game, but still. As I pointed out tonight - I've been a six-day subscriber to the dead tree version of the Globe for a long time now - yet if I wanted to actually go online to read some of the same stuff I've already paid for (including Mathew's columns, for example), I'd have to pay more to become an "Insider Edition" subscriber to the Globe's site. Bollocks.

Later... Joe Thornley asks Mathew to describe the relationship between the blogs he runs and the work he does for the Globe's print and online editions - and whether there's any overspill.  Mathew comments that he has on occasion found that the stuff he's blogging about starts to seed ideas for business columns. I asked him if the influence and overspill ever ran the other direction - has he ever written for the Globe and then blogged: "now, here's what I really think".  After a pause to reflect, Mathew responds "I don't think so". I can believe that, in his case. He's a columnist rather than a reporter, so (as he pointed out) he's paid to express his opinions anyway.

There was some interesting discussion about the GooTube deal - what's fueling these huge acquistions (with Skype cited as another, earlier example).  This discussion sparked Mathew to talk about the remarks he's had from one of his readers who confessed to being "addicted" to following the comments at Mathew's blog.

I had a half-formed thought here.  There's a line of connection between YouTube, MySpace, blogging in general - and the older social media forms of Usenet, IRC, CompuServe, and their ilk.  It's all part of David Weinberger's thread on "The Longing". Mathew's point in linking the GooTube deal to blog comment addiction (I think) was that it's just human nature to have this kind of vicarious interest in what other people are saying, thinking, doing - hence the success of YouTube (where we get to watch regular punters do stupid things) and blogging before it (where we get to read regular punters saying stupid things, and then add our own stupid thoughts into the lovely, mutually-assured-stupidity huggyfest of the whole thang). It's why we love flamewars; why trolls moved from Usenet to listservs to IRC and to blogging with ease and enthusiasm.

We all just love to talk, to debate, to read others' thoughts, to hear what people have to say, pick fights, pick nits, pick bones, etc. Now, of course,  the technology barriers of adoption have just come down low enough to make your medium of choice a whole lot more accessible, visible, and just much, much easier for the man on the Clapham omnibus (or the 501 streetcar, for that matter) to jump in. We can all be famous for 15 people.

In the conversation tonight, this thought also got tied into Second Life - with the point being that the idea of location is ceasing to matter. It's also true that the platform and the technology (while still mattering, to a point) is ceasing to matter, at least in the sense that it's becoming irrelevant and wrong to think of the technology as in any way a hindrance to discussion - it's all about removing boundaries. So the GooTube deal ends up being about conversation and audience as much as it is about disruption of the TV model. Or something like that...

Sorry - I think I did a good job of listening, but a poor job of taking notes. This is even more than usually waffly. Either way, if you're in Toronto, interested in where PR is headed, and you're not marking your calendar with these Third Tuesday events - you're missing some interesting and - yes - even important stuff. Kudos again to the teams at Thornley Fallis and Fleishman Hillard for pulling tonight's session together - and thanks to Mathew Ingram for much good thought fodder. (Oh, and apologies to Chris Clarke that you got saddled with the tab for the room).

Tags: Third Tuesday, Mathew Ingram, Thornley Fallis, Fleishman Hillard

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