Blog Archive for August 2006
Blogging and "Google Juice"
A book I recently read, Naked Conversations, talks all about the benefits of blogging, and specifically blogging in the corporate world. It was a great read, and maybe someday I'll review the book. But the point I wanted to mention is that the book says blogs get "Google Juice". This "Google Juice" seems to be some brand of magic that makes blogs much more visible on the next and highly ranked by search engines. And, my, do I have an example.
For the past eight years, I've been running cMusicWeb.com, a music review site that I was doing the old-fashioned way. It was just a static site that just looked a lot nicer and more organized than when it was on GeoCities, but technically it wasn't that much better. The site has built a pretty good reputation over those eight years, gathering links from around the web and listed several times on DMOZ. It's gotten pretty well and some artist pages rank well for their respective artists.
In the past four months we've started our transition to inReview.net, our new name and new brand. The site isn't really complete yet, but already its Drupal software and blog-style format have been making waves. A quick look at Yahoo!'s results finds already more links than cMusicWeb.com ever had. Of course, they're not all quality links like cMusicWeb.com had, but links from blog aggregating sites like Technorati and the like are nto bad. I attribute most of it to the pervasiveness of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.
Of course, hopefully soon it will get us listed in Google. I don't know if this is what people refer to as the "sandbox," but it seems we have to get mroe quality links to gain any ranking in Google. Or maybe we just have to be out there for a while. We'll see.
A Terrible Commute
Tonight it took me over two hours to get home.
As most know, I usually take the MetroTransit Hiawatha Light Rail line to and from work. Today was no exception, although I was very disconcerted when no trains showed up between 5:20 and 5:40 at my stop (not even going in the other direction).
Finally, about then, they said that the trains were not travelling down the middle section of the line. I've seen trains be shutdown before, and usually they are fairly quick to bring buses in to reroute people, but for some reason the official word on the platform is terribly slow to get out. I mean, whenever there is a problem, I always have to wait at least 20 minutes before they even tell me why a train isn't coming.
After a train finally came and took us northbound, we got to the part where the buses were to come. And sure enough, there were three buses there within 10 minutes, which was a great response. The MetroTransit employee who was there told us that someone had been killed while trying to cross in front of a train. That's too bad. Twenty minutes later, the bus drove by the scene of the accident, and there was certainly a ton of emergency vehicles. If i could see better, I would tell you about the scene, and although I couldn't see anything terribly wrong (just all blocked off), most of the other passengers could.
Now that I'm home, I now read that a 30-something man on a bike was hit by the train while trying to cross the intersection. As the MetroTransit employee said to us a Fort Snelling, it's another reminder not to try to race the train. This is the third fatal accident on MetroTransit's only light rail line, the first one not involving a motor vehicle, I believe.