• Embarrassing stuff about anybody can be found.
• Deal with it.
• If there’s embarrassing stuff about EVERYBODY out there, maybe our societal norms will loosen up and get more tolerant.

If anything, Arrington understated the case, by focusing on two kinds of disclosure:

• Specific pieces of information such as photographs, which were originally gathered in a well-intentioned way.
• Anonymous “reviews” — e.g., like those on Yelp, but soon about specific people as well.

That overlooks two other threats:

• Data aggregration or other technologically-advanced snooping used against one.
• Amateur, private-eye-like stakeouts, as cameras and other surveillance equipment get cheaper, and online publication becomes bone-simple.

I.e., Arrington was even more correct than he seemed to realize.

Fred Wilson responded by suggesting that the key issue is making sure that enough good things are said about you to more than compensate for the bad ones. I emphatically agree with that too, as per my 2008 online reputation dictum:

The internet WILL tell stories about you, true or otherwise. Make sure your own version is out there too.

Where Wilson fell down a bit is in suggesting that you should get so many good things said about you they should completely crowd the bad ones off the top page of search engine results. First, this is difficult. Second and more important, if somebody is checking you out for a job or whatever, there’s a good chance they’ll click through to the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But otherwise his thoughts are spot-on.

To paraphrase Andy Warhol, everybody is a celebrity for 15 minutes, or to an audience of 15 other people. And for many of us, you can tack a few 0s onto those figures. So there’s no reason to expect any more privacy than celebrities have — but there’s also no reason to expect any less tolerance for our failings than is shown to them.

Related links

• People are very confused about privacy

The weakness of Andy’s argument is illustrated by the one and only scenario he posits in support of his crusade:

The result is that a blog post added to a brand new site may well have just broken the story about the capture of Bin Laden (we wish!)–and a link to said post may have been Tweeted and re-tweeted–but Google won’t discover or index that post until it finds a “followed” link. Likely from a trusted site in Google’s index and likely hours, if not days, after it was first shared on Twitter.

Helloooo — if I post something here, it is indexed at least in Google blog search immediately. (As in, within a minute or so.) Ping, crawl, pop — there it is.  The only remotely valid version of Andy’s complaint is that It might take some hours for Google’s main index to update — but even there there’s a News listing at the top.  This simply is not a problem.

Now, I think it would be personally great for me if all the links to my sites from Wikipedia and Twitter and the comment threads of major blogs pointed back with “link juice.” On the other hand, even with NoFollow out there, my sites come up high in Google’s rankings for all sorts of keywords, driving a lot of their readership.  I imagine the same is true for most other sites containing fairly unique content that people find interesting enough to link to.

So other than making it harder to engage in deceptive SEO, I fail to see what problems NoFollow is causing.

It’s just the early days, but this sort of thing is bound to create backlash. I don’t think there’s going to be a resolution until people can create profiles so detailed that, for example, they contain the fact that you disapprove of ads about weight-loss aids.

In the short term, e-commerce software vendors should be thinking about how to create UIs that offer most of the benefit of this kind of targeting, but without giving offense.

Sigh. I guess today’s my day for writing about offensive marketing.

Today, one JLove victim emailed me to say JLove had taken down the offending pages. That looks to indeed be accurate! (At least for now.) If you click on http://jlove.com/names/m/monash/curt/, you no longer see what I described in a prior post; rather, you are redirected to the generic http://jlove.com/

Those pages seem to already be completely gone from Google, as well as Microsoft’s Live.com. Yahoo, however, still has them. To see that, search on each engine for jlove.com curt monash. Yahoo’s cache, at least for now, will also show you what the original page looked like.

For the record, the offending text in its entirety was:

With a huge number of members at JLove, you can easily mingle with curt monash, and a myriad of Jewish singles who are interested in meeting new people. People like curt monash and so many others are getting the most out of Jewish dating at JLove, considering it is entirely FREE to chat with and email other Jewish singles. See why curt monash has had so much success with Jewish dating by signing up for a FREE membership at JLove today!

• George Bush 1,830,000
• White House 1,220,000
• George Bush sucks 1,300
• Hillary Clinton sucks 1,600
• Bill Clinton sucks 140
• Ron Paul sucks 1,000
• Microsoft sucks 2,900
• White House black market 135,000
• Hotel 185,000,000
• Britney Spears 6,120,000
• Brittney Spears 368,000
• Britney Spears naked 165,000
• Hillary Clinton naked 2,400
• Search 45,500,000
• Search engine 2,240,000
• Search engine placement 60,000
• Enterprise search 12,100
• Attivio 390
• Text mining 9,900
• Attensity 1,000
• Foobar 65,500
• asdf 110,000
• Free ringtones 4,090,000
• Free pizza 40,500

And that’s as far as I got before getting the message

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. Please note that using your browser’s back button in AdWords can increase the likelihood of errors. If you think this was the cause of your error, please try again without using the back button.

A few notes on using the Google External Keyword Tool:

• Like many Google offerings, it’s down a lot.
• It hasn’t worked for weeks in my Firefox 2, except when I switch the rendering engine to IE emulation via the indispensable IE Tab plug-in.
• When I copied a results screen and pasted it into an OpenOffice document, I saw actual dollar amounts. These surely were bid amounts associated with advertising for those particular keywords.
• Keyword listings like this always have anomalies, as can be seen by oddly high numbers for weird word combinations. Notwithstanding the figures above, I don’t really think 135,000 searches per month are done on white house black market, any more than I believe Google Analytics when it tells me I got 19 different visitors to DBMS2 last month via the search phrase abadi column-store compression.

Related link

• Fun and profit with the Google External Keyword Tool

Refine your objectives

• Figure out who you’re trying to reach, and what they’re likely to be looking for.
• Figure out which keywords you want to and can rank for.

Participate in the web

• Figure out who’ll gladly link to you, and get those links.
• Start and promote satellite websites.
• Provide SEO help to your business partners.

Clean up your website

• Make sure your listing looks attractive in the search engine results
• Use static URLs, with keywords
• Have a clean linking structure
  • No forced Flash intros
  • No frames
  • Limited tables (<div> is better)
  • Sitemap
• Pluck the HTML low-hanging fruit
  • Use your <ALT> tags
  • Use <nofollow> tags

I’ve spelled this out in a couple of posts on my new Network World blog, A World of Bytes. That’s right, folks. The five blogs I own — and the two others I’ve set up just for SEO purposes — aren’t enough. When Network World pinged and asked me to do yet another, I couldn’t resist.

Related links:

• Basic search engine optimization (SEO) steps EVERY enterprise should take (Part 1 — overview)
• Basic search engine optimization (SEO) steps EVERY enterprise should take (Part2 — technical details)
• Some good SEO advice that boils down to “be realistic”

The online dating service industry has a penchant for deceptive ads, as is evidenced by the large number of scantily-clad women in the small town of Acton, MA who are alleged to desire sex with me, not a single one of whom I’ve ever seen in a checkout line at our supermarket.

But I just discovered a new twist, courtesy of a scammy dating service called JLove. While ego surfing — i.e., googling on my own name — I found a page with the URL http://jlove.com/names/m/monash/curt/ It contains text such as

• With a huge number of members at JLove, you can easily mingle with curt monash
• People like curt monash and so many others are getting the most out of Jewish dating at JLove
• The only way to discover wonderful Jewish singles like curt monash is with JLove

I have a good idea of how many Monashes there are in the world (few), and how many Curt Monashes (VERY few, perhaps just one). And so, since I’m not a member of the JLove dating service, and I’m confident that no other Curt Monashes are members of the JLove dating service, and the same goes for most or all of the hundreds of other Monash names on http://jlove.com/names/m/monash/, and also because of the odd punctuation used in the false implication that curt monash is a member of the JLove dating service, I hereby conclude that JLove is even scummier than most online dating services. Simply put, JLove is causing false impressions to be given to people looking at search engine results pages.

Now, I don’t think I’m at a stage in my life where eager young women are googling my name and trying to figure out how to snare me. But if there were, then this might seem like an inducement to join JLove’s dishonest service.

Related links:

• Here’s an example of a woman who seems to have lost interest in a guy due to JLove’s dishonesty.
• Here’s a report on another (milder) form of JLove dishonesty, namely misusing the word “free”.

History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities

and

History of the software industry by Curt Monash, who’s been in the middle of it since 1981

respectively.

Well, the answer turns out to be a resounding “Yes and no.” To wit, the query string softwarememories.com turns up both, as in

History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities

History of the software industry by Curt Monash, who’s been in the middle of it since 1981.

Software Memories yields the description but not the title, as in

Software Memories
History of the software industry by Curt Monash, who’s been in the middle of it since 1981.

And the first one I tried, Cullinet wikipedia, yields the title but not the description, as in

History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities
Wikipedia’s current article on Cullinet is long, detail-laden, and slanted. The difficulties are not of the sort to be fixed with my usual pinpoint …

(OK, I really was hoping the post and category page would come up on that one, and it is to be hoped they will very soon. But apparently Googlebot didn’t go that deep on its most recent visit, so all that was showing up in the SERPs was the blog home page.)

As usual, it seems SEO doesn’t come with any iron-clad guarantees.

Many thanks to @status_girl for helping me figure this out.