Notes In The Margin

According to Jeremy, Google is making some sort of concerted effort to de-value blogs in the determination of what matters on the web. This raises an interesting question - what matters on the web? Since the web was created ab initio to enable us to link from information to more useful information, sure, the stuff that we link to is, in fact, what matters? The fact that Google results change every day is a good thing, not a flaw. What matters changes every day also. That's why folks watch the news every day, not just once. It will indeed be a great disappointment if he is correct in his assessment. While I don't particularly care what algorithm they use, the concept itself - stuff that lots of people link to is stuff that matters - makes a great deal of sense.

The perceived danger is very understandable - momentary blips in interest in a particular thingy may cause search results to get skewed that direction for short periods of time, and the semi-permanence of blog archives may make that skew permanent. So then one has to figure out if there is a "correct" answer to a particular search term. That is, is Google an encyclopedia index, or a web search tool? With my loathing of folks letting Google be their research assistant (must elaborate on *that* some day), it seems to me that it should stick to what it's good at -- being a web search tool. And since linking is what the web is all about, if Google drops this aspect, they will quickly lose their top dog status to someone else who will give us what we want.

Thanks mostly to a large gift that *someone* gave me early on, I have just cleared my first million in the blogshares game. And, in the spirit of his generosity, I've been spreading the wealth a little bit also. It is indeed a lot more fun to play the game when you have a ton of cash to sling around. But, then, I suppose that's true in the real world also. ;-)

We went strawberry picking today. The farm is out on Handy's Bend, but the signs for strawberry picking started over at Frankfort Road, over by R.J.Corman. From there, you go all the way to Figg's Lane, and the whole length of Figg's Lane, until you get to Handy's Bend, and then another mile to the farm. If I had known to start with where the strawberry field was, I would have cut about 6 miles off of the trip, but then we would have missed a beautiful drive through the back roads of Jessamine County. This area that used to be all cow farms and tobacco now has some lovely new homes - not the ugly rows and rows of cracker boxes, but some gorgeous wood farm houses and log cabins.

We picked about 4 pounds of strawberries - me, and my mom, and Sarah - and paid just $4 for the lot. Actually, it was a lot closer to 5 pounds, but the farmer rounded down, as they have a tendency to do. He said that they lost a lot of the first crop in the hail and rain last week, but that the second crop was coming up nicely. Hopefully there will still be some left when Zanna gets here next week.

So, if I understand Chris correctly, the main complaint with Trackback, compared to Pingback, is a complaint with a particular implementation of it, not necessarily with the concept itself. As far as I can tell, MT does the two things that Chris says that Trackback does not do. Viz, ping URLs which are just mentioned (linked to) in the body of the article, and be able to ping more than one URL with a single article. At least, that's certainly the way that I understood it when I was setting configuration variables.

What I find irritating is that there are two incompatible ways to do this VERY simple thing, ensuring that no matter which one I choose, I can never be sure that my pings will be acknowledged.

Then again, that's the nice thing about standards ...

Because the BlogShares thing has become rather fun of late (now that I suddenly made $100K over the last 24 hours!) I started looking for wine blogs too. There's not very many of them, but some of them are *really* good.

Here's a few:

TiZWine Daily Tipple
Meg's Food and Wine Page
Dandelion Wine (not actually about wine, but the title of one of my favorite books, so worth mentioning
Alien Wine Connoisseur (also seems not to be actually wine-related)
Wine Blog
New wine for new wineskins (OK, not wine-related at all)
A pure haze of wine and cocaine (huh?)
Ken's Wine Blog
Wine, Women, and Song
Wine Trends

And, finally, as I mentioned before, Alec Saunders appears to make occasional wine-based posts.

So, having done all that, perhaps I should actually add the wine-based ones to some kind of blogroll so that I can actually read them occasionally.

Somehow, I feel like I'm avoiding work ...