Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Actually, this post is about none of those at all. They’re just some of the keywords that have been picked up recently by various news aggregation services that scan this blog so I can be fairly confident that this particular post will do well in terms of collecting inbound links for me.

The growth in news aggregators has led to a steady growth in the number of inbound links that I’ll collect for particular posts. Some are obvious: mention “Ireland” and I get picked up by the Irish blogs, “travel”, “credit” or “loans” and you get picked up by loads of financial aggregators. “Travel” is more hit and miss though as the travel aggregators tend to target particular destinations rather than “travel” in general.

“People search” is a peculiar one. Apparently it’s a very popular search term though I only came across it by chance.

I’m actually only throwing “sex” in for curiosity value. Rumour has it that it’s one of the most popular search terms on the Internet but, so far, I’ve never had a single inbound link from it!

Surprisingly, there are quite a number of blog aggregators which collect immigration information and it’s a topic that I touch on quite regularly.

Last, but not least, this particular post will mess with google’s algorithm in respect of this blog. Their algorithm relies on “natural” incoming links and this particular post will create quite a lot of them for me over the next few days. None will be paid for so on google’s argument they are legit incoming links which’ll boost my pagerank a little bit. Will any of them be  truly legitimate incoming links? Somehow, I doubt it.

I think that the underlying problem is that the origins of google’s algorithm are effectively an automated way to rank things similar to academic articles. There you never had the problem of people paying for references (ie links), or at least not quite so openly (the final couple of authors on papers are often there just so that they can get a “publication”).

Move on 10 years and, yes, money does come into it. Just ignoring paid links isn’t sensible in an Internet which is, these days, largely commercial.

Adding “nofollow” in attempt to effectively negate advertising does not seem to be a sensible way to go. This action on their part is just going to push it “underground”. Chances are that you’ll see more blogs put out by companies with very subliminal type advertising. It’s still advertising though and it’s still going to distort the results in google’s algorithm.

What they really need to do is to allow for advertising in terms of paid links. Just putting their head in the sand isn’t going to be a long term solution to this yet that’s exactly what they appear to be doing at the moment.

Come on guys: update the algorithm to allow for a commercial Internet.

It’s been six years since I started off on what subsequently became a modern languages degree and from the original 25 of us there are only two left in the “race” at this point.

It’s not so much that people have failed but rather that they’ve reached the point where they have achieved their intended objectives and therefore dropped out of the running towards the degree. The first three years saw a surprising number of us making it to the finishing post of a Diploma in French which, of course, was enough for quite a lot of people. In fact, I was the only one who continued on with languages at that point although one of the original cast has subsequently started down the path of a Diploma in Spanish and another has continued on in step with me but towards a different a different degree.

So, some six years on, two of us will be starting the final course of our respective degrees next February and, hopefully, will both be graduating in Versailles in September 2009.

It seems like ages since I’ve knocked airport security…

I bought a bunch of electronic gadjets whilst I was over in Belfast so figured that the best plan was to put all of it in a single case on the basis that it was sure to require some additional searching. What I’d not allowed for was that they’d want to search the other case too, hence almost 30 minutes in airport security resulting in me nearly missing the plane.

I should have went earlier I hear you say. Ah, but they wouldn’t let me into the security area any earlier. I went through as soon as I was allowed to as I knew that they need to do some additional searching of the case.

It really is getting qute crazy these days. Everyone is carrying more and more electonic bits & bobs but the airport security people just don’t seem to have moved on in being able to deal with it nor in their training as to what they should really be looking for. Despite the lady and gentleman making a slow and methodical search, they still missed checking two items which they should have checked (and, no, they weren’t small items either).

How come they missed them? Well, both items would have turned up on the scanner but the guy running the scanner doesn’t do the searching and so things are missed when they shouldn’t be.

After promising people for ages that I was going to upgrade the maps on the listings sites, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper start on it as you can see from the first edition of the new map of Europe that appeared on the site this afternoon.

That European map is long overdue as I’ve been adding a couple of countries each year as I’ve gone along which had made the original format less and less viable. I say that it’s the first edition because I’ll need to add a couple of countries further east than those on the map here and, of course, there’s the entries in China and Thailand.

So, in practice, that map is merely stage one of the sites going global with the maps but that’ll need a bit of restructuring of the database so it’ll be a “while” before all of the planned changes come online.

Still, a good start with the graphics pad I think. Next up is France which needs some tidying up and then Spain which needs a lot of tidying up.