Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm

I like the way that sounds like Noam Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'.

It's taken from Nicholas Carr's article yesterday for the Guardian's tech section, which talks about Google's introduction of an algorithm to its search engine that will stop Googlebombing - the practice that lead to that exciting-at-the-time phenomena where you could type 'miserable failure' into Google and get sent to George Bush's White House site.

Read me first - Guardian website

In his article, Carr notes that Google has done this not to make the web a better world, but to protect its image:

"One of the company's top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: 'Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.'"

An interesting thread of comments on the article has started on Slashdot

Defused Googlebombs may backfire- Slashdot

The long and the short of it

In a post on Monday, Tim O'Reilly wrote about the way that web publishing - and particularly the growth of blogging - is changing the way we create and deliver information.

In particular, O'Reilly notes the prevalence of short-form content, which suits the way we scan and skip through web content, and also lends itself to social production, or the collaborative creation of content.

The connection between short, modular and open - O'Reilly Radar

On Rough Type, Nicholas Carr responds to O'Reilly's piece, noting the danger posed by the short-form to the long-form (movies compared to Youtube clips):

"The new medium doesn't just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn't even make room for big, extended works. It's actively biased against them, technologically and economically. More than that, though, it both reflects and reinforces our own increasing bias against anything that requires sustained attention or contemplation."

Honey, I shrunk the culture - Rough Type

Seven rules for corporate blogging

As I noted a few posts ago, my organisation has been thinking a lot this year about going all Web 2.0 and starting blogging.

Over on Rough Type, Nicholas Carr has reposted (as part of his own Christmas top 10 most-read posts) his 'Seven rules for corporate blogging'. Full of sensible advice (or dampening advice, if you're a less cautious person than me) and definitely worth revisiting:

Nicholas Carr - Seven rules of corporate blogging

Zeitgeist take 2

Nicholas Carr, on Rough Type, has posted the top 10 2006 searches for Google, Yahoo and AOL. His conclusion?

"There's only a single overlap: "American Idol" appears on both Yahoo and AOL. That's it. I would have thought that, given the sheer number of searches done through each engine, there'd be a lot more similarity in the results. I guess it means that very different types of people use each of the three engines.

Looking back over the results, I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL users are geezers."

Dweebs and horndogs - Nicholas Carr