Wednesday, April 9, 2003

Pax Americana

We've won in Iraq. The citizens of Bagdad are elated. Nothing like a toppled statue to make a conclusive point. Best warblog gloatage so far is this balllon-juice photo essay and commentary:

The difference between Baghdad and San Francisco?

Baghdad was liberated from 30 years of an oppressive regime, and now they hope and pray to live in blissful peace.

The residents of San Francisco were liberated from their senses 30 years ago, and continue to reside in blissful ignorance.

(Ah, but how many warbloggers would rather live in Bagdad?)

The sounds I heard coming from Cheney this morning were very encouraging. If we do what he says we're doing, maybe we can restore some level of trust in an Arab world that's still very skeptical.

Later I'll get around to blogging more about what the Mayor of Hiroshima has to say about our successful new National Security policy. And the fine time Mike Hawash is having, enjoying his protected American freedom in jail.

Right now I'm just looking forward to the day when some Las Vegas theme hotel has a headless statue of Saddam outside one of its bars.

Lucky

I was about to look up something O'Reilly- related on Google, but hit Return by mistake after typing just the letter O and got there anyway.

Amazing what you can do without a PR department

David Sifry basks in the glow of excellent Technorati press.

The clues keep on coming

When I go to John Porcaro's blog, the first thing I notice is the pair of little ads in the BlogSpot banner: Visual Editing for Blogs and Graymatter Blog Hosting. Copy for the first goes, "Blogweaver adds a full visual HTML editor to Blogger.com. Under $10."

So now I'm curious: Does Google's AdWords engine give me these ads because it thinks they're appropriate to John's blog, or because it knows I'm the one visiting? I suspect the former, but I don't know. And I think knowing would make a difference.

On his 4/7 post (the permalink is broken for now), John says this:

The Internet is allowing us to connect in a one-on-one way we've been missing since the days of the general store: I can talk to someone inside the company I'm buying from more easily than I can someone next door. Word of mouth (or word of "mouse") is fundamentally changing how we communicate, and what we communicate about. And without a strong connection to our customers, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Borland, Ashton-Tate, Migent (where I began my high-tech career), and WordPerfect.

John works for Microsoft (a partial list of whose bloggers are here). So does Chris Anderson, who blogs well, yet humbly confesses: I don't understand blogging. A pointer to that one comes from Scoble, who responds to John as a former "top five" user of FrontPage. Scoble also points to a Jeremy Zawodny post about Inktomi:

Wow. I spent much of the day without phone, computer, network, etc. I was up at Inktomi (now "Yahoo! WebSearch" I think) headquarters learning about lots of cool stuff I cannot repeat with out being killed.

However, I did learn that Inktomi's search system knows, uhm... "stuff" about blogs. And I got the chance to see what some of their tools told me about my blog. Neat stuff.

And speakng of search, Andrew Orlowski nails Google News for treating press releases as legitimate news:

Tonight we found a Monsanto Company press release. and one from Exxon-Mobil corporation entitled "Avial Selects Exxon Elite Engine Oil for Use in its Husky and Pitts Aircraft") - how is this news? It's even more boring than CNET, whose distinctive headline style it attempts to emulate. But wait - guess who scooped the top lead in the business section? Phillip Morris!

Andrew will be taking his concerns to a meeting with Google, and invites reader input. My advice to Google: simply stop publishing press releases. Trust me (and every other professional journalist): They're junk mail. Alternatively, put up a separate section that's nothing but press releases. That way none of them would masquerade as The Real Deal.

Bonus Link #1: Dan Gillmor's Dear PR People. A subject line that says "Press Release" is a strong candidate for deletion.

Bonus Link #2: Yahoo News' press release page. (Note that Yahoo also mixes press release results in with their news searches.)

Bonus Links #s 3 & 4: Steve Mallett on Google News results that miss-post the time by months or years, and an example that lists an ancient Slashdot item as "7 hours ago."

Well, there's a reason they call it "beta."