to celebrate their ten year birthday Google has put their oldest available search index online. Now for a limited time you can search their database that was active in 2001 [g01] as well as my hilariously ugly Matthew Good Band fansite and various student paper stuff [g01]. What will you find if you do? Well for starters you’ll find one of my first blogs [g01] as well as the fact that that other Jeffrey Simpson (a senior writer at The Globe and Mail) had a slightly larger web presence than I did, even though I kind of figure that he had no idea what the internet was at that point.

Give the search a try, and see what comes up. In 2001 for example there was no iPod. What a backwards age that must have been.

Vancouver comes up with not one of the very popular blogs that dot our digital landscape now, at least not on the first page. Who does show up? Well the Vancouver Grizzlies [g01]. The closest thing to the social networking sort of sites that we all laud now [mbv] is a now defunct page for the local chapter of IndyMedia.

These days you can’t throw a rock into the air without hitting someone trying to sell their SEO (search engine optimization) skills or a blogger fretting about Page Rank. 2001 seems so quaint and unspoiled, like an episode of Road to Avonlea.

Maybe I shouldn’t be sarcastic with the title, maybe they do know the internet. I mean they at least know the fundamental fact that the best way to get traffic is to mention people by name. It’s the same thing we used to do in the student press, a front page picture of a rock band would only get picked up by fans of that band but a front page picture of a bunch of students would get picked up by the students, their friends and anyone who wanted to sleep with any of the students pictured.

It was circulation gold.

So when NowPublic, the people who don’t seem to understand Creative Commons licenses so spam you four times a week on Flickr asking to use your photos, the Vancouver Sun must have thought “Hey NowPublic is already repurposing all of our content as large block quotes and calling it ‘Citizen Journalism’ we might as well get involved in a link baiting scheme with them.”

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As Travis noted there’s still a few things going a bit wonky around here following the move from Moveable Type to WordPress.  Add to that the fact that we did a minor redesign and things are going a bit sideways at the moment.  After the jump I’ll talk a bit about the issues we know about, and what the status on them is. If you’re not interested in the nuts and bolts of how a blog runs then feel free to not read any further.   (more…)

Now that we’ve made the move from Moveable Type to WordPress we’re looking to bring in some new bloggers.  If you’re a Vancouver based blogger and want to reach a whole new audiance consider writing for Vancouver Metblogs.  There’s no editorial mandate, beyond what you blog about needing to be about Vancouver and our request that you post at least two to three times a week.

So post two to three times a week about Vancouver and you get an automatic audiance well above a lot of regional newspapers in B.C.  Imagine the power that would give you, or the click through traffic to your own site as loyal readers fall in love with your prose and follow you to your own blog. 

Whatever your motivation come and join one of Vancouver’s best read blogs. 

For more information email me at jefferysimpson at macdotcom or post your questions in the comments.