1. If Google don’t know the rules, how can they expect the general public to know them?
2. Why is the penalty applied to Google.co.jp different to other penalties?
3. How might this affect Google.co.jp?

Google are still being eerily quiet about it – I know Matt Cutts has been busy at SMX, but I still would’ve expected some formal announcement from the guys in the US.

While I’m talking SEO, it’s good to see that the the major search engines are taking action to resolve canonical URL issues.  This makes all the useragent detection, robots exclusion, and 301 redirecting to deal with duplicate content a thing of the past.  I’m going to try to find some time to have a think about all the ways you could use this for better or worse.  Will knock up a post as soon as I’ve done that.

UPDATE
Canonical presentation from Matt Cutts.

And finally, I’m just putting some final touches to my SES London presentation.  I’m talking on Wednesday, on the Link Building Basics panel and  I’m feeling strangely excited about it.  I’ve been to a few SES’s before – London and San Jose, both in 2007, so I’ve got a good idea as to what to expect, but I’ve never been there from a speakers point of view.  Come and say hello if you see me – I look forward to meeting you on Wednesday!

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Sleep
Anyone who’s ever spent any time with me knows that I love sleep. This has become especially apparent when I’ve gone on holiday with friends – I love to sleep at any given opportunity. If we’re flying somewhere I’ll sleep. If we’re on a bus somewhere, I’ll sleep. But I’ll never fall asleep at work. I’m not narcoleptic – I just love a good snooze every now and again. The only time it’s ever a pain in the ass is when I watch movies. If I put a good film on at home, chances are I’ll be asleep within 20-30 minutes. The worst occasion was when I went to watch Quantum of Solace in the cinema – I think I saw about 10 minutes of it. So on Sunday, I sat down to watch a film – my girlfriend was visiting friends in London, and she’s not a big fan of horror, so I decided to attempt to watch Saw. About 15 minutes into it, I was fast asleep – I just couldn’t stay awake. When I did wake, I decided to change the film to Top Gear on BBC 2, and I was fine. Why is that? Why do films make me fall asleep, but TV doesn’t? I have some bizarre theories, like perhaps films emit different audio frequencies that make me feel sleepy. Perhaps it’s frame rate related – I don’t know. Let’s park this issue for the moment.

Memory Loss
When I’m at work, at any given time I may be working on 10 to 20 different things at the same time. This makes life difficult. Anyone who’s seen my desk knows that I’ve got a crazy way of working that involves an extreme Post-It note solution – essentially I write everything I need to do on lots and lots of Post-Its, and then rearrange throughout the day as priorities change. I’ve tried various different solutions, but I always tend to find it’s the old fashioned methods that work best for me. Recently I’ve been having problems though – I’m not sure if it’s sheer information overload, but quite often something will pop into my mind – by the time I’ve found a pen to scrawl on the nearest Post-It, I’ll have forgotten that thought. Sometimes I think that if it’s really that important it’ll come back to me, but recently I’ve become aware that even the most important thoughts are being lost forever. And finally…

Information Addiction
In the old days, we didn’t have things such as the Internets, Twitter, or Facebook. Nowadays we do, and I reckon people are spending too much time on them. From the group of people that I work with, the best people are those that live and sleep online. During our dinner party, it got us thinking that perhaps today’s youth won’t turn out to be drug or alcohol addicts – they’ll be information addicts – people who just can’t stop reading, learning, and watching. The best way to treat this addiction, is, upon entering the Priory, to throw away iPhone / Blackberry / Mobile Web Device, and then lock said addict in a room without TV or internet, and just let them get on with life – perhaps introduce them to a spot of gardening and see how they get on with things.

So to conclude, and the general consensus from the blokes sitting around the table with me that regularly fell asleep, couldn’t remember things, and spent far too much time consuming information, is that we’re all information addicts. Watching a film just doesn’t provide enough information to keep me awake – it’s dull. I don’t want to sit and watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet acting out a marriage breaking down – there’s just not enough information there – of course I’m going to fall asleep. Similarly, of course I’m going to forget a few things every now and again when I’ve got so much to think about and remember. If anyone’s got a good cure, please get in touch and let me know – especially regarding the sleep issue – I really would like to see the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey one day!

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A couple of years later the likes of Youtube and Digg were getting big, and I started to feel like I was just regurgitating content that could be found elsewhere on the web. I decided at that point that I’d try to monetize my website – I started doing fairly well until Google started rolling out Big Daddy, and I ended up with a Google bitch-slap, and lost a lot of my traffic. Anyone who’s ever run a blog will tell you it’s a pretty time consuming affair, and I guess these 3 things

• Content regurgitation
• Google bitch-slap
• Blog taking over my life

made me reconsider my reasons for writing my blog.

So my blog just sat around, gathering dust.  However, I was still blogging.  We have an internal blog at iCrossing which is fantastic for knowledge sharing, and we have an external digital marketing blog, both of which I contribute to. And I guess I kinda liked doing it, which is why I’m here now, doing this.  I’ve been given a second wind, and hope to try and get this attempt off the ground, and keep it running.

At the moment I don’t know what I’m going to be writing about, but hopefully it’ll be a bit about everything – random stuff from the web, my views on SEO, what I’m up to in my spare time etc…  Looking forward to talking to y’all!  And just a forewarning – I’ll be tinkering with it lots in the immediate future, so advanced apologies for all kinds of problems / layout issues (yes, I noticed the homepage issue already!) you’ll be seeing.  Bear with me, we’ll get there in the end

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