dive into mark

Paul Boutin: Google Degraded? Geeks Aghast. Paul called me yesterday afternoon to talk about this article and get some quotes. (I like the quote he chose to end the article: I was beating out Mark Twain before — that’s probably not fair. Although on second examination, I’m still beating out Mark Twain. I’m behind Mark of the Unicorn, Mark Harden, Mark Monciardini, Mark Ryden, and Mark Rosenstein.)

Paul and I ended up talking for almost an hour, which was a lot of fun. He’s a very cool guy, although he doesn’t think of himself that way, which makes him even cooler. Trust me, Paul, you write for Wired — that’s cool. The actual work may not be that much fun, but it’s a cool job. I train for Apple, which is also cool. Actually doing it is not always fun (five hour drive up to Reston, or a plane trip to California and an overnight flight home over Friday night/Saturday morning), but being in the classroom teaching is loads of fun, and when people ask me what I do, I get to say I train for Apple, even though I’m just a subcontractor and I do lots of other stuff in between class weeks.

Anyway, Paul is cool, and we talked about lots of stuff. Like about how Wired articles are always showing up on Daypop, but they get a lot of their ideas by watching Daypop too. It’s like the pulse of the here and now, tomorrow’s news today. You know that scene at the end of Men In Black, where Will Smith picks up the tabloids and sees the distorted reflections of the news he’s just lived? It’s like that. Webloggers were the second to notice Google’s algorithm changes (the Search Engine Optimization experts on WebMasterWorld.com were first, which is just as well, since they get paid for this stuff). I wasn’t even one of the first webloggers to talk about it, although I believe I was the first to go read all the WebMasterWorld forums and summarize them. Then Paul picks up the story and puts it in Wired, then it hits Slashdot, then it’ll spread to more mainstream tech news sources from there.

By which time, Google will have fixed the problems that led to the article in the first place. (They’ve already fixed the news observer nc search and Eminem search that I mentioned two days ago.)

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