Google update "Buffy"

Well, a Google update is in progress and this one has been christened "Buffy" by thew WMW mods. Updates, of course, are a time when many bad sites get spanked by Google. Unfortunately, so do a few good ones.

Its too early to see what this update will do and, quite frankly, I'm just not up for watching the threads on this one. In all candor, knock on wood, I've never been affected in a fundamental way by any of them, and that includes "Big Daddy" and "Florida". And, on that subject (which sites blow in the winds of an update and which don't) I'll do a future post.

The only thing I've noticed so far about this update is that universal search seems to be rolling out a bit more. In one serps, I've noticed that google news results are being injected into the middle of page 1 (which I find very freaking irritating as it has the potential to divert organic traffic and also due to the fact that the news results just aren't that useful to searchers).

However, this could simply amount to testing. A few weeks ago, I had a minor freakout when google maps results were being slammed onto the top of certain geo-targeted serps. But that turned out to be testing as well, as least in my niches (of course, who knows how its going in other content niches).

I'm betting that the news crap will be gone in a few days. Till then, it will simply be a matter of watching to see how traffic levels are affected.

Is it good to run over your Cat?

No, don't think. In fact, I know someone who actually did this (wasn't her fault: she's over 60, the cat was about twenty, nearly deaf and blind, and had gone to sleep under the rear wheel of her car---not hard to guess what happened). And she suffered emotionally for several months over the horrific demise of "Big Kitty".

A couple nights ago, my own Karma almost went bad. I was pulling off my street onto a secondary road and there goes my cat, not-quite-sprinting, not-quite-jogging in front of my jeep grand cherokee. Elephant versus ant would be the proper comparison, in terms of relative weight and survivability.

This was at night and lucky for Cleo (cleo is the cat and chloe is the ferret), I was pulling ahead from a dead stop and just happened to be looking down at the road. Otherwise, it could have been sppplllattt!

You know, I really think they need to do some gene manipulation on domestic cats, to get them to stop "lazily loping" in front of cars because its a stupid behavior and, too often, the feline doesn't come out the winner in the age-old battle of car versus cat.

Here are a couple of pictures of Cleo the cat. They're both of her sleeping. In the first one, she's apparently dreaming of stalking prey and in the second she's in hot pursuit.

Tech Crunch and other things Crunchy

Tech Crunch?

According to Michael Kessler of USA Today, Tech Crunch, a blog that chronicles the rise and fall of Web 2.0 startups and has a readership of about a million, is the fourth most-linked-to blog on the net.

I'd never heard of it until today and I'll bet that if I asked a friend of mine who's been in the computer industry for 20 years, he'll never have heard of it, either. Likely, no one at webmasterworld will have heard of it, as well (well, probably a few will have, but I'm sure most will go "tech what?").

In fact, I think webmasterworld itself is one of the top 1000 sites on the web. Yet, aside from site operators and SEO types, the vast vast majority of Joe Websurfers (I'm thinking 99.7%)have never heard of even that celebrated site. Certainly none of the people occupying this bagel shop I'm now sitting in (but, fair is fair: they've probably all watched American Idol and Dancing with the Stars and I've never seen an installment of either...thank the gods.)

That's the thing about blogs, websites, and the web in general. Even for the biggest sites, most are completely unknown to the general public and somewhat unknown by the majority of techies--loosely defined as computer people, web people, and internet entrepeneurs.

Early this summer, an AP article revealed that, even in the U.S., a third of the adult population does not have internet access of any kind, and sees no need to "get with the times".

So, where am I going with this post? Nowhere, really. It's just interesting that you can be one of the top ten blogs on the web, with an audience of a million visitors, and still be fairly unknown...kind of puts things in perspective. Don't get me wrong, though. I'd take that kind of traffic in a heartbeat. That guy (Michael Arrington) must be making some serious bank.

What would life be like without more sequels?

I like a good sequel as much as anyone else (Pirates of the Caribbean 3 for example) and I hate it when a good movie series is flubbed by a bad sequel (just my opinion, but Spiderman 3 didn't cut it, nor did Shrek the third, though, in all honesty, that series collapsed with the second movie).

In each of the examples I just cited, the sequels were spawned from an innovative, original, and excellent film (The first Shrek is an absolute classic). However, it doesn't always work that way.

I think if you're going to make a sequel, do it for a movie that was decent to begin with. Again, just my opinion, but the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was pretty rank. Of course, I never read the book and, considering the possibility that it was, in fact, a faithful adaption, I've resolved never to read it.

Howevever, I have read and loved most of Tolkiens' stuff (The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Unfinished tales of Middle Earth) and I also read the first and second chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever (which, obviously, is conceptually drawn from Tolkien, but which distinguishes itself by both its fine writing and its use of an "anti-hero" as the protagonist). Both are stellar works in the "coming great battle against an ancient and unspeakable evil" genre of writing (this theme was also borrowed by the Babylon 5 series, if you recall).

Narnia, Prince Caspian, by the way is due out in May of 2009, coincidentally around the same time as the new Chevy Camaro. So that year won't be a total loss at least.