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.”

(more…)

Ah blog wars.

We’re all tough behind our keyboard and everyone is brave when they can say things using a fake name.  I’ve been pulled into a few cross blog arguments, and I generally end up feeling dirty afterwards.  Typically they’re boring, the internet equivalent of watching the kids in the special class in grade four fight over who stole whose Muscle Men toys.  However like the playground dust-ups they most closely resemble its hard not to stand around chanting “Fight, fight, fight” when one is going on.

Goodness knows how this one started.  Possibly when Sean Orr of Beyond Robson, whose life goal is to defeat poverty with sarcasm, called the people at new local blog Vancity Buzz cocks [br].  The two sites have been going back and forth from there, mostly arguing over the fact that Orr is left wing and the pseudonomous bloggers at Vancity Buzz are right wing.  Or bar stars.  Or both.

Whatever they are they’re active, like a bunch of rabbits given Viagra in a completely irresponsibly run science experiment they’re posting at a rate that threatens to fill up all available internet storage by 2009.  Sadly nobody alive will ever be able to read all of their posts, because the layout looks a lot like someone vomited onto a scanner bed and just uploaded that as a .tiff file.  How can a default Blogger template look so ugly?

Eventually everyone will get tired of yelling at each other, and go back to their business of posting about clubbing, or making snotty comments about things on the internet and the rest of us can go back to kickball or whatever normal kids did during recess.

Me?  Well I spent most of my recesses online arguing about Star Trek.  Now that’s a blog war I can get interested in.