So, the other night I was searching on Google and let’s just say that I could have been searching for dentists in Champaign, Illinois. And since I misspelled the state, I got some very, very curious SERPS such as the ones below.

Live Google Search and an image of the Google SERP I saw.

Being curious about the results from the .info domains, I went ahead and clicked on one and there was a page that sorta kinda looked like a Google results page without the Google logo.

Even better, I took a minute and scrolled down to the bottom of this particular .info page which had apparently mirrored Google results page for “Champaign Illinois dentist”. It was this mirroring which made the bogus .info pages appear high in Google searches.

(more…)

According to the Saudi Arabian version of Google, check out who is number 2 for the phrase cute women.

A houseful of cats rescued from animal shelters from all across the United States, living it up Survivor style. No, this isn’t a Fark headline. Only one will be named Feline Vice President for Research and Development…and all will be found loving adoptive homes. I’m rooting for Belle.

Bonus: Check out the computer in the Meow Theater. Looks like the kitties are blogging on the house iMac.

Finally, don’t blog frequently because, you’ll, uh clutter up the Internet (and clutter my marketing message) so please go spend time with your family…please? Pretty please? This from a Web site that flogs blogging for marketers elsewhere on their properties.

Technorati Tags: Stupid Google Results, Google, Meowmixhouse, marketing, everybody loves kittens, blogging, reasons why marketers shouldn’t blog

One very amused 8 year old wanted me to blog about the sound that adults can’t seem to hear. I tried to, but I could only hear it if I had a pair of headphones on with the sound at full volume.

However, I suspect that if I were younger, having that sound as a ringtone would be mighty annoying.

Technorati Tags: ringtone, kids, sound

I was looking through my site logs recently and noticed a curious referrer from Google. Namely, it was a referrer from a Google Finance page. Being intrigued that I would see such a referrer, I went looking for the page in question and noticed something of interest…Google Finance now has a section showing recent blog posts about a company.

This new blog section is all well and good, except that blog post of mine which mentioned “optical cables” generically was being shown in the Blog Posts section of the Optical Cable Corporation’s Google Finance page. Whoops.

As of this writing, 06/11/2006, my blog post isn’t showing, but a forum post from MacNN which mentions “optical cables” in a generic format is. Double whoops.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Finance, blog posts

Introducing the second cleverhack podcast, now with more interruptions and better volume.

Topics covered include 2005 Sofia Rose wine, updating my PowerBook’s RAM, cleverhack site news, blog updates via email, Google bashing, moblogging thoughts and ramblings about music, missing Postal Service singles and cruddy XM radio reception.

Technorati Tags: podcast, podcasting, tech podcast

Listen Now:

 Second cleverhack podcast - "screw it" [17:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A Friday evening linkpost

• Mac Dei, which I admittedly, found amusing.
• As close as you’re going to get to a hagiography of the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg.
• Ooh, the old adage of “do things you enjoy and you’ll find someone that enjoys it with you” finally applies: online gamers find love (subscription required) shockingly enough, online. (There’s a WoW joke here, but that would be too easy.)

Technorati Tags: Friday, Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal, gamers

There’s this little known company in Canada that apparently offers “brand management services” by presumably crawling the Web for specific content relating to their search engine challenged customers. Here’s a news release. The name of this company is Brandimensions.

I mention this company because I saw this wonderful referrer in my logs, and even better, the referrer log didn’t record what pages they were reviewing.

http://customers.brandimensions.com/CatSysWebApp/NextContent.aspx?contentid=2647773442

The customers.brandimensions.com URL brings one to a customer login page, where, I’m guessing, a customer could go and look up where their brand is being mentioned on the Web. In my case, apparently my blog was linked in their system in some context - I can’t see what context though, and that bothers me.
I’m not the only one who feels this way, take a look at this thread which explains what is going on.

Update: Oh, I see. Their crawler is starting to hit my site.

Host: 204.92.59.12
/robots.txt
Http Code: 200 Date: Jun 08 23:43:14Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 6629
Referer:www.brandimensions.com
Agent: BDFetch

Update 2: I’ve banned the brandimensions IP addresses from my site.

Technorati Tags: Web, Internet, Web Marketing, Web Marketing done wrong

I was caught a bit surprised when I started seeing the iTunes user agent in my logs. Apparently a few of you downloaded via iTunes. Which is cool.
Agent: iTunes/6.0.4 (Macintosh; N; PPC)

Like an RSS reader, when you open iTunes, the program will go and fetch the feeds for any podcast subscriptions you may have. From my experience using iTunes, you don’t have to go and actively search for the podcast feed. This fetching seems to occur when the program is merely opened - for example, I hadn’t actively “updated” my podcast feeds in iTunes.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, podcasting, podcast, podcast feeds

This table from Webmonkey breaks down the popular community based collaborative filtering Web sites. You know, they’re supposed to collaboratively help you find stuff on the Web 2.0.

Speaking about Web 2.0, it seems that Technorati has straightened out the crawling issues with this blog. I appreciate their willingness to help.

Hey, apparently there’s nothing else to innovate on the Web, so why not a collaborative filtering site just for gossip blogs?

And finally, in case your technology induced ADD isn’t distracting enough, a link to popurls.com, which is not only an aggregator of top links on some popular collaborative filtering sites and other Web 2.0 properties, but which also allows you to submit links to their “your pops” section.

Technorati Tags: collaborative filtering sites, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 meme needs to go away, Technorati, popurls.com

It’s official, the first (of many more to come) cleverhack podcast is now on iTunes. I should probably think of some cover art.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, podcasting, cleverhack

1) I was linked to by macsurfer.com over the weekend. Now, I’ve been both slashdotted and instapundited a few times, but let me tell you that macsurfer can throw comparable traffic.

2) At least half of my readers are using a Mac, but I had not seen the following user agent until this weekend. I can’t think of any of my regular readers who would have such a setup.
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.3 Mac OS X [Tiger PPC]

3) “There were tears, there was laughter, there was my G5.” How sweet. ;-)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Cult of Mac, User Agents, Macsurfer, Uschi Lang Said Yes

I am pleased to announce (with not that much background noise) the first cleverhack podcast.

clever podcast 1 (17:58 4.3MB)

Topics include: Background noise, cleverhack site info, Technorati, tech news, my LG VX9800 phone saga, thoughts about current music and more.

Technorati Tags: Podcast, podcasting, my first podcast

Update: I’m trying to get the Mighty Seek Podpress plugin working- as you can see the flash podplayer doesn’t work. But the old school direct link to the mp3 file does. It’s something with the .htaccess file apparently and I’m a tad bit frustrated that the install docs failed to mention this.

Update 2: The flash player is working now. The whole mention of the .htaccess in the install FAQ led me on a snipe hunt, but all is well now and the only part of the plugin that doesn’t work is the stats, and at this point, they aren’t really that important.  Also, the flash player has a bug in which it requires the mp3 file to be encoded at 11.025 kHz, 22.050 kHz or 44.100 kHz.

Listen Now:

 first clever podcast [17:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download