I still hear from people who get confused by solicitations in the mail. Here’s an example one:At first glance, this semi-official looking letter seems to require bill payment for some sort of “annual website search engine listing.” But if you read the fine print at the bottom, you’ll see:This is not a bill. This is [...]

  I’ve been following a case in Denmark where a cloaking company has been making a couple interesting claims. First, they claim that if a “brand-name” company cloaks, Google won’t remove the brand-name domain. That’s simply not true; if we believe that a company is abusing Google’s index by cloaking, we certainly do reserve the right [...]

  Several weeks ago I flew up to Google’s Kirkland office to visit with the wonderful webmaster tools team. While I was visiting, someone said “Hey, why don’t you grab a video camera, find an empty office, and record as many videos as you can in an hour?” That sounded good to me, and the first [...]

  I won’t be doing many (any?) posts over Thanksgiving — my grandfather’s birthday is this weekend, and I’m spending the time visiting with family. On the bright side, I wrapped up my logistical project today, and I’m looking forward to blogging a little more after Thanksgiving. I also taped three videos when I visited the [...]

  The first computer I bought with my own money was a 486 from Gateway, and I paid about $2500 for it. I used that computer for years and years. So it blows my mind a little bit that computers have gotten so cheap.How cheap are they? Well, that Linux-based computer I bought from Wal-Mart was [...]

  I’m booking my trip to Vegas for PubCon, which starts in a couple weeks. Does anyone know what hotels will have lots of webmasters hanging out late? Which hotel are you staying in?

  Let’s lighten things up with a gadget post. You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way.Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version [...]

  Last week, Aaron Wall had a guest post on Search Engine Land that originally had the headline “How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google.” Then today I was reading Aaron Wall’s guest post on Google Blogoscoped where he makes a couple unusual claims, such as that “SEO = spam” in Google’s opinion [...]

  One of my favorite computer science papers is a 1990 paper titled “An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities”. The authors discovered that if they piped random junk into UNIX command-line programs, a remarkable number of them crashed. Why? The random input triggered bugs, some of which had probably hidden for years. Up [...]

  This picture pretty much says it all:The T-shirt is hand-made with an iron-on. The only thing you’re not seeing is my tail in the back, and the back of the shirt says “K THX BYE.” If you don’t spend all your time on the internet, you can find out more about LOLCats here.