This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like Starting up … Loading, please wait… kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b) = sda5(8,5) kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b kinit: No [...]

(In the webmaster chat last week, someone asked about my cats, so I thought I’d throw out a cat post.) A little while ago someone mentioned the Kitt-In Box. It’s like an inbox for your desk, except that it holds cats. My cat Emmy likes to hang out in box-like objects, e.g. So I decided to [...]

Jefferson Graham of USA Today stopped by the Googleplex a little while ago and we talked about SEO tips for business owners that want to run their business, not live and breathe search 24 hours a day. The result is an article of search engine optimization (SEO) advice that you could hand to any friend [...]

By the way, we had our second webmaster live chat yesterday. I think almost everyone had a good time. It was free for anyone to dial in, and hundreds of people showed up. Thanks to the Google presenters and everyone that asked questions or talked in the chat. I got a chance to answer lots [...]

If you’re a site owner, webmaster, SEO, or otherwise have an interest in website metrics, I think you’re going to like Google Trends for Websites. It’s almost as addictive to me as Google Maps is for, you know, normal people. You’re probably familiar with regular Google Trends, which lets you see trends in how [...]

We’ll be doing a webmaster chat tomorrow at 2 p.m. Pacific time. You need to register in advance for the chat, which you can do with this link. Last quarter we did a webmaster chat and it was a ton of fun. I spent the entire time responding to people in the live chat. This time [...]

I really like the Furminator cat brush. My cat Emmy loves it, and it pulls a ton of hair off of her. How much hair? Well, not to be gross, but a lot: Good stuff, at least with my cat.

Most people that read my blog know that I really, really like Firefox. I put on a temporary Firefox tattoo a few months ago: Firefox 3 just came out today, and they’re trying to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. So now is the time to get it! Tell your friends, [...]

At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want to read through it. We discuss some of the ways to get links that are likely to stand the test of time: Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an [...]

Just a quick reminder that websites should check for XSS holes on their site, especially freeform text input such as search boxes. Even big sites can have these issues with XSS and escaping user input. (Note: don’t click on these search results.) If you’ve noticed that your rankings in Google seem to be affected, you might [...]

Sometimes at a conference people will ask me “Does it matter what extension I use for my pages? Does Google prefer .php over .asp, or .html over .htm?” And my answer is “We’re happy to crawl all of these file extensions. It doesn’t matter what you choose between any of those.” Usually I also try to [...]

Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo!. That’s pretty huge news. Wihle Jeremy and I have playfully jousted in the past, I have nothing but respect for Jeremy — to the point where we joked for April Fool’s Day a couple years ago about switching blogs. I’ve enjoyed being on search panels with him before, and he’s been [...]

I wanted to do a few short blog posts about products that I really like and that work well. First up is a stud finder that I found. It’s called the Stud4Sure stud finder (not an affiliate link). It’s more accurate than fancy electronic studfinders and much more accurate than knocking on the wall. This little [...]

Last week I was in Seattle for the SMX Advanced 2008 conference. I’ll run down a few thoughts on the trip. What was good? It’s always nice to visit Seattle. I had never been to Seattle until last year. Now I’ve been four times, and I’ve managed to get macaroni and cheese from West 5 for three [...]

One of the wonderful things about a search conference like SMX Advanced is that it gives us a chance to finish a lot of things we’d been meaning to do. Google just added a bunch of nice documentation in various places. We even did it in official places — much better than doing it on [...]

Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo I decided to walk the exhibition floor. Niall Kennedy and I checked out the inflatable Google booth, we gave feedback to the WordPress folks, and we came to rest in the Yahoo booth, where it was nice to see Jeremy Zawodny and catch up a little bit. After a [...]

Read about WordPress 2.5.1 and download the new version here. It includes a security fix, so you’re going to want to upgrade. It’s well-known that older versions of WordPress get attacked by malicious bad guys, so I absolutely recommend upgrading as soon as you can to be safe. By the way, if you subscribed to the [...]

This link was cool, but it generates a graph like this: With a little modification, I made this graph: I like my picture a little better. It was quite simple to make this diagram, and Google provides a free graph-drawing tool that you can use on your own site with a single url — no account or [...]

This weekend I did a Q&A session at the Domain Roundtable Conference. It was an hour and a half of answering various questions. Rand Fishkin and John Andrews both did write-ups of the session. Rand and John were both on an SEO panel after me, which I enjoyed. This was my first domain-related conference, and the [...]

There are a ton of Interney Relay Chat (IRC) clients for Linux/Ubuntu, e.g. Gaim (now called Pidgin). One IRC client that makes recording an IRC conversation pretty easy is Irssi. Install Irssi on Ubuntu with a simple command: sudo apt-get install irssi Then run the program “irssi” from the command line. Now suppose you want to record what’s [...]

Google just announced a cool addition to Google News. If you search for a person’s name on Google News, you can see statements where that person has been quoted by a news source. For example, search on Google News for [Arnold Schwarzenegger] and you’ll see It’s like how smart the feature is. It can correctly [...]

I communicate with people in lots of ways: face-to-face, email, via my blog, leaving comments in the blogosphere, conferences, etc. At SMX West a couple people asked “I sent you a friend invite on service X but you haven’t responded. Do you not like me?” Please don’t feel bad, because it’s not that. I’m letting [...]

Popular Mechanics asks 20 questions of Udi Manber, who is a VP of Engineering at Google on core search quality. My favorite: There have been a lot of fads in search of late, such as Human Assisted Search and contextual search. Do those get folded into search as a whole? What are real trends in search [...]

Sometimes I feel like the technology space moves slowly. Cool new devices appear every few months, but I want neat new things every day! When I feel like this, it’s tough to remember that technology moves quite quickly compared to most industries. I was recently at a book sale and picked up a techno-thriller from [...]

The title pretty much says it all. A while ago, someone saw my call for good summer vacation reading and the resulting pile of Amazon books that I bought, and they sent me a couple free books, maybe to get a review or a mention. I appreciate the creativity, but please don’t send me any [...]

Okay, go read this post on the Google webmaster blog. In fact, if you read my site, you really should add the Official Google webmaster blog feed to your list of subscriptions, because that blog is almost 100% SEO/webmaster-related posts, and it is official. Done reading? Okay, I’ll give you my personal take on why [...]

Honest. I wanted to write a big, in-depth blog post about X (pick whatever X you want), but then Emmy came and sat down beside the keyboard with a forlorn face. This is what she looked like: Emmy was just waiting patiently for me to get off the computer so that we could play or hang [...]

This is pretty cool. Google launched App Engine, which lets you write code for a web application, then Google takes care of the scaling/failover/logistics-type issues. You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System (GFS). There’s a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching [...]

You never know when your brain is going to flash on an idea, a great gift, or something you need from the store. That’s why I carry a small notebook around with me most of the time. Here are some productivity tips on how to use a “hipster PDA” effectively. Get one. I got mine for [...]

I’m crunching on a bunch of work stuff today, but I wanted to point out this official Google blog post briefly: Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and [...]

Update: This post was an April Fool’s joke as well. I was hoping to catch people off-guard by doing a late-night post after all the other pranks were out there. Clicking on the video link just gets you rickrolled in a creative way. Okay, I admit that my “I’m tired of April Fool’s” post was just [...]

Update: This was an April Fool’s day joke. I recently discovered something really wild: the iPhone has a secret SATA interface. Using the SATA interface, the iPhone is much easier to hack because it looks just like a hard drive to a computer, so you can replace individual executables and symlinks with no effort. Readers know [...]

Update: This was an April Fool’s Day joke. As I mentioned in my last post, I got a tattoo this past weekend. Several people have asked about it by email, so I’ll go ahead and post a couple shots of it. I decided to get a Firefox tattoo because it’s a cool design and I really [...]

Update: This was part of an April Fool’s Day joke. I did this post so that people might believe my other jokes on April Fool’s. I’ve decided to skip April Fool’s Day this year, and I’ll tell you why: I’m April Fools’ed out. I’ve done a bunch of April Fools jokes in the past, and this [...]

It looks like Verisign is increasing fees to $6.86 for a .com domain and $4.23 for a .net domain. Around this time last year the fee went from $6.00 to $6.42 for a .com domain and from $3.50 to $3.85 for a .net domain. The new fees become effective October 1st.

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.

Earlier this year, I was reading about 100 feeds in Google Reader. When I went on vacation for a few weeks, I cut back to about 30 feeds. But I thought I’d be smart about the 70 feeds that I stopped reading. Instead of unsubscribing from those 70 feeds completely, I made an “unread” folder [...]

If you want to donate money for the people affected by wildfires in Southern California, Google has a page up. The Associated Press collected a good list of other organizations as well.

Every few weeks I like to call for Google bugs. I’ve got a joint meeting tomorrow with several people to talk about potential bugs, so if you know of any, feel free to mention them in the comments. To remind people of what I’m looking for, here’s the guidelines: Just to be clear, pruning will be [...]

I’m trying to decide what to be for Halloween this year. At various times, I have been Google’s original chef Charlie, a punk rocker with blue hair, and Inigo Montoya. Last year, I thought about going as Silent Bob from the movie Clerks, but Ask.com had killed Jeeves that year, so instead I dressed as [...]

Google engineer Bharat Mediratta discussed some Google engineering customs in the New York Times yesterday. Bharat goes beyond 20% time to talk about some different aspects of being an engineer at Google: Grouplets bring together like-minded engineers who care about things like documentation, improving our build system, or testing. It’s an informal process lets engineers contribute [...]

On Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team about this, but it looks like this [...]

Don’t forget that it’s “Talk Like a Pirate” day! Arrr!

I was reading all the TechCrunch40 coverage and I asked myself: “If I had five minutes to come up with a startup idea completely outside of search, what would it be?” This is more of a fun exercise, but feel free to pull apart the idea — or propose a better startup idea in the [...]

Quite a busy day today: - Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million dollars. - AOL decided to move their headquarters to New York. - Microsoft got a decision in Europe. - Lots of TechCrunch 40 coverage is up on techcrunch.com. - The New York Times is opening up large quantities of its premium content for free. - Apple is hosting a [...]

I know someone that got a hand-written letter in blue ink that says: Dear (name) My name is David, my wife is Jennifer. We would like to buy your house at (address). Please call me @ 408-772-0507. Sincerely, David Jan My friend thought this was strange and did a Google search for 408-772-0507 and came across this page [...]

If you didn’t see this post about better date-based searching by Ionut Alex Chitu, I highly recommend that you check it out. As Google has gotten fresher, our advanced search page started showing more useful options for restricting searches by date. The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can [...]

I was out of town this weekend for my brother’s wedding. All went well and he’s now a happily married man. It ended up as a big family reunion, with the added bonus of cool, new relatives from the bride’s side of the family. I’m trying to catch up, but apologies for not posting [...]

Google Reader just added search! Yay! Suppose you remembered that someone did a cool post comparing PageRank to Play-Doh. Just do a search and you’ll remember that it was Rhea writing on Search Engine Journal: I’m going to be using Google Reader’s new search a lot. What are some of the things you’ll do with [...]

The iPhone can run “web apps” very easily. These web apps are really just specially-crafted web pages that take advantage of the iPhone’s built-in web browser. Such web apps can be very cool, but they don’t provide the full functionality that you can get from an actual executable program running on the iPhone. A “native [...]

(By the way, when I talk about “hacking” your iPhone, I mean closer to “modding”. I’m interested in running third-party native applications on my iPhone, and don’t care as much about unlocking the iPhone to work with other carriers.) I’m amazed at the pace of iPhone hacking. Even a week ago, you’d see multi-step guides to [...]

If you want to hack your iPhone, be prepared for the notion that you can lose all your data or (worst case) turn your iPhone into a useless brick — thus the origin of the word “bricking” a device. Normally if things go awry, the worst that will happen is that you have to restore [...]

After that big post about SES San Jose 2007, I’ve got a hankering to do some gadget posts, especially about the iPhone. Expect, um, quite a few. If you only want to read my posts about Google or SEO, here’s a reminder of how to subscribe to only my search-related posts. Okay, ready?

I’m really late giving thoughts on SES San Jose 2007, but better late than never! For much of 2007, we’ve been working to get more Googlers doing different types of communication. I really saw that effort bear fruit in San Jose. From the webspam team, Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur were first-time SES speakers [...]

I always end up with a ton of open tabs in my browser. Here’s some of the things I’ve enjoyed, but won’t do a full-scale blog post about. You might have missed these the first time around: - Mike Grehan noticed a Google experiment to let users suggest urls to Google for specific searches. If you [...]

I always end up with a ton of open tabs in my browser. Here’s some of the things I’ve enjoyed, but won’t do a full-scale blog post about. You might have missed these the first time around: - Mike Grehan noticed a Google experiment to let users suggest urls to Google for specific searches. If you [...]

I am writing this blog post looking out onto the Googleplex courtyard where webmasters are dancing and talking. We just finished the “Meet the Engineers” Q&A. Lots of people came inside building 43 to ask about crawling, duplicate content, and more. I wish I could easily summarize it, but it was just straight questions for [...]

Whether you call it blended search, 3D search (Ask’s name), or universal search, it has the potential to surface as many relevant results as other hot search topics such as personalization. At SES yesterday, I sat in the back of the Universal Search session. There are good write-ups on the PowerPoint and presentations, but not [...]

I just flew back from Kentucky, and boy are my arms tired. My brother is getting married in early September — woohoo!! — so on Friday my wife and I flew to Kentucky for a wedding shower. We flew back today. It was really nice to see lots of family and friends and wear [...]

Let’s dissect the parts of a URL (uniform resource locator). I’ll tell you how we typically refer to different parts of a URL at Google. Here’s a valid URL which has lots of components: http://video.google.co.uk:80/videoplay?docid=-7246927612831078230&hl=en#00h02m30s Here are some of the components of the url: The protocol is http. Other protocols include https, ftp, etc. The host or hostname is [...]

Suppose you worked at a search engine and someone dropped a high-accuracy way to detect malware on the web in your lap (see this USENIX paper [PDF] for some of the details)? Is it better to start protecting users immediately, or to wait until your solution is perfectly polished for both users and site owners? [...]

Okay, I’ve got a bunch of pointers to summarize my WordCamp 2007 talk. First off, here’s the PowerPoint deck that I presented. Google’s PR team was kind enough to verify that it was okay to release. I made the slides from scratch (not even a Google template), so there shouldn’t be any problems with notes in [...]

When I joined Google in early 2000, we had a stretch where we didn’t update our index for 3-4 months or more. At the time, that wasn’t bad for a search engine; I remember one search engine around then that wasn’t updated for over a year. Starting in mid-2000, Google updated our index pretty much [...]

Sorry for the lack o’ blogging for the last few days. Here’s what I’ve been up to. - Early last week, I was at an all-day offsite with my team. It was fun, but meant that I had to catch up on work/email. - Later in the week, in-laws came into town to visit for the next [...]

First, a non-spoiler review of Harry Potter: I liked it a lot. If you enjoyed the other books, you’ll really like the final Harry Potter. But you know you’ve been concentrating on search too much when you look at the book spine of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the first thing you notice is [...]

- This one’s kinda fun. Rand Fishkin was in town, so we invited him over to the Googleplex. We arranged on a simple trade: we’d feed him if he’d give a talk about search/SEO from his perspective. I think everyone benefited. You can read his trip write-up. - Mitchell Baker is asking for suggestions on [...]

Alex Chiu claims to have invented an immortality device: Wow, who wouldn’t want to stay young forever? But there’s a snag. Alex claims that Google doesn’t include alexchiu.com in its index because, you know, Google is trying to suppress the immortality device. Here’s part of what one of his pages says: I wonder if there could be [...]

What do you want to see the Webmaster Central team do next? About 10 months ago, Google Blogoscoped asked what people wanted next. It’s time to ask that question again, because the team has made great progress. From the original thread: - See the backlinks for my site: DONE. Site owners can now see their own [...]

This past week was pretty hectic: - On Monday, I flew up to Kirkland and back to catch up with the Webmaster Central team. - On Tuesday, I drove up into San Francisco for a Web 2.0 dinner - On Thursday, I hosted a visitor from Italy. - On Friday, I ate Buck’s in Woodside for the first time. - [...]

I’ll be speaking at WordCamp 2007 at 5 p.m. today. My presentation is still pretty rough right now (I have a lots to say, but it’s not at all organized), so I may be mildly distracted for a while during the day. But if you see me there, please introduce yourself and say hello. [...]

Today, I deleted all the previous comments (more than 200) that someone has made on my blog. I welcome on-topic, constructive comments, but please remember my comment policy. I just added an addendum to it: Update, 7/20/2007: It should go without saying, but I also reserve the right to prune comments or delete all comments by [...]

Remember when we had to pause emailing webmasters because someone was trying to spoof emails and pretending to be emailing from Google? I’m really happy that the Webmaster Central team has come up with a great way to address the problem: they’ve added a webmaster message center to the webmaster console. Now there’s an authenticated [...]

I’m in a bug meeting tomorrow, so I thought I’d do a follow-up to this bug post from a while ago. The same rules of thumb apply: Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain [...]

What is Synergy? It’s a program that lets you share a virtual desktop between two different computers. With one mouse and keyboard, you can control two computers, and even move your mouse from one desktop to the other. It’s almost like the computers are welded together. I’ll demonstrate. This is what my desk at home [...]

I got an unusual email from Amazon today: I’m sure that Domino is a fine magazine, but I told Amazon not to send me anything promotional. So I checked my communication preferences on Amazon. Yup, they’re not supposed to send me any emails like this: What’s up, Amazon? Ian, tell Amazon folks that they burnt a teeny [...]

If you’ve read my brief tutorial on screen and want to know more, here are some power user tips: screen -ls will list the current screen sessions running on a machine. Control-a Control-a will toggle between your current shell and your previous shell. Control-a d will detach a session. Control-a ” will show all the current shells. Use the [...]

Suppose you want to run a program persistently (even if a terminal window closes, for example). For that, you might use the nohup command. But what if you want to start a command-line session on one computer and then go home and resume that session? For something like that, you’ll want to use screen. Screen [...]

Eric Enge posted an interesting interview with Udi Manber of Google (Udi is a VP of Engineering at Google). Udi mentions that the goal of personalization is to improve overall search relevance (not to make SEO harder). Udi also talked about trying to make Google’s search algorithms more elegant: [W]e have projects that their sole purpose [...]

The iPhone launched with this user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 Here’s a tip to find out the user agent for any browser or device that you’re on (e.g. a kiosk at a mall, a different cell phone, or something else that you tinker with): - [...]

My wife got an iPhone the day it came out. Robert Scoble got there the day before and slept in line at the Palo Alto store. We stopped by the Palo Alto store around 10 p.m. on iDay, waited less than five minutes, and got one of the last 8GB iPhones before they sold out. [...]

Hey, I hope everyone had a good Independence Day if you live in the United States, and a perfectly normal July 4th otherwise. My wife and I went to see fireworks at Shoreline in Mountain View, and I took my camera along: My fireworks pictures turned out 10x better than they ever have before. It’s true [...]

Thomas Claburn over at InformationWeek just wrote an article entitled “Is Google’s Spam Fight a Sham?” I had a bunch of spam-related work to do this morning, so I just dashed out a 15 minute reply. Of course, InformationWeek’s comment system wouldn’t let me post the comment, saying The comment was rejected by the system. Please [...]

Earlier this year I posted my rough plans for the first half of 2007. This is what the schedule is looking like for the second half: June 4-5: SMX Seattle. Already did this (duh!), but part of the reason for this post is so that down the road I can remember what I did. [...]

Here’s a short summary of the recent Google blogging brouhaha: - Google has a new health advertising blog. This weekend Lauren Turner, a Google employee, did a relatively negative post about the movie Sicko. She also mentioned that health care companies that disagreed with Sicko could use advertising to get their viewpoint out. - Philipp Lenssen at [...]

Google recently beefed up our webmaster quality guidelines with more info, examples, etc. Normally I’d start the conversation and highlight important points. Let’s turn it around this time. Check out the additional info in the webmaster guidelines — what do you see that is unclear? Are there places where you think the wording is poor [...]

I’m back from Foo Camp 2007 but omigod, I’m so sleepy that I’m seeing double. I stayed up until ~4 a.m. Friday night and 5:30 a.m. last night, and breakfast started at 8 a.m. Some of the late night time was chatting with people and some of it was the Werewolf game. No way around [...]

Randy Stross wrote an interesting article for the New York Times about search with a human touch, and I wanted to talk about the role of people in Google search. On this post, you get not one but *two* disclaimers. It’s all part of my read-one-disclaimer, get-a-free-disclaimer program! My disclaimers are: - This particular post is [...]

I’m shamelessly stealing the title of one of Stephen Colbert’s segments. Some consider Colbert the greatest living American. See, I can joke around. First, a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble. Scoble did a great interview about the paid search side of search marketing with Jeff Figueiredo of Point It. If you spend [...]

Wow. Terry Semel is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo!: Yahoo!, the world’s second-largest search engine firm, announced Monday that Terry Semel would no longer be the company’s chief executive officer. He is being replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. I’ll have to ponder on the implications for a while..

Here’s a power-searcher tip that didn’t get much attention the first time around, so I wanted to mention it. Tara Calashain recently wrote about changes to Google’s date search features. Previously, I believe Google estimated the age of a url as the last time that we fetched that page. Given how quickly Google refreshes its main [...]

Gah. I’ll never catch up on email; might as well blog a little bit. I had a really good time in Seattle. I got to meet many more members of the Google Kirkland office, go up in the Space Needle, visit the Science Fiction Museum, walk around Pike Place Market, and even see a [...]

In case you haven’t seen it, Vanessa Fox has decided to leave Google. I’m really sad to see her go, but the work she’s done has really helped webmasters and Google. In the years that Vanessa has been at Google, she’s helped to launch and improve the webmaster console, communicate policy and get feedback with [...]

Two or three weeks ago, the European Union Article 29 Working Party sent Google a letter asking about some of Google’s privacy practices. Google responded to the letter in a blog post today and made its entire response letter available (PDF link). The two pieces of news I see are: - Google previously committed to anonymize its [...]

Sigh. Google as a company takes privacy very seriously. I personally feel strongly about protecting our users’ privacy. So I’m frustrated by a recent study that Privacy International did, and I want to know if I’m off-base in my reaction. I got back home from SMX and I’m surfing the web when I see this [...]

I’m back from SMX Seattle. It was wonderful to visit with familiar folks. I met a lot of neat new people too. I plan to spend the next week or so talking with folks at Google and seeing just how much email stacked up while I was on vacation. Catching up with my team [...]

(This is all my personal opinion.) To be completely honest, I was a little worried about Saul Hansell, a journalist for the New York Times, sitting in on some of our confidential quality meetings at Google. Even though everything was off-the-record, you can’t help but be slightly nervous talking about evaluation methodologies and confidential projects with [...]

I’m in town for SMX Seattle. I’ve never been to Seattle before. Here are some of the things I’ve found myself thinking so far: - Wow, that car rental person was nice. I’ve never had someone joke with me while renting a car before. - Aaaahh! A gigantic mountain is about to fall on me!!! Jeez, what [...]