Friday, February 17, 2006

brrreeeport

Yeah, well. Just wanted to jump on that bandwagon.


The brrreeeport search engine test (in which lesser known bloggers use the invented word brrreeeport to have their blogs turn up in search engines in response to "the supposed Blog Club, where A-list bloggers only link to each other and thereby keeping lesser-known bloggers out of the loop of recognition" (Jason Miller)) is not unlike some of the informal google search tests I have been running on my blog. The "Corn pops and Pickles" heading used to bring one immediately to my blog, but no longer -- instead it takes you to Naked Bootleg unless you click on the "include excluded entries" button. I suspect that the lack of activity in my blog of late has decreased its search engine ranking to the point where it has simply fallen off the charts.

I haven't been posting much lately because this is my busy season in my day job... which is ironic because I am running two courses using blogs, and it would be nice if students could watch me role model the behaviors I am trying for...but my teaching/research/service load this semester is just too hectic, though things should settle down more in March, when my student teachers go out to their practicums, for which I have no responsibility this term.

I did, however, get up a fake webpage yesterday in the cyberculture course to illustrate (1) how anyone can post anything on the web of whatever degree of accuracy and (2) to see if we could move it up in the search engine listings by utilizing various search enging optimization tricks. So if you would like to play along, feel free to link to the page, since every link raises the sites rankings in google, etc. The site is fake Grammar page.

Incidentally, my favorite hoax site is the Dihyrogen Monoxide Research Division