SEO

May 15, 2011

Letter Sweep

I’d typed the first let­ter of some URL into the ad­dress win­dow when I was in­ter­rupted. Look­ing back a mo­ment later, I was star­tled at what the browser had as­sumed I wanted to visit.

So here are my A,B,C browser guesses, which I sus­pect say some­thing about me. What are yours?

[A]ndroid De­vel­op­ers Blog. Not sur­pris­ing, I edit it.

[B]eilby Fine Arts; one of my PDML col­leagues re­cently posted a “PESO” (see PDML + Twit­ter) here that I checked out.

[C]IBC, my bank; it used to stand for “Cana­dian Im­pe­r­ial Bank of Com­merce”. How quaint.

[D]aring Fire­ball. Yeah, I dis­agree with John’s find­ings reg­u­larly, and he’s mean-spir­ited about An­droid when he gets a chance. But he tracks our pri­mary com­peti­tor as well as any­one and is fun­nier than most, which is an im­por­tant virtue.

Al-Jazeera [E]ng­lish. The fresh­est cov­er­age, by far, of a part of the world I care deeply about.

[F]ace­book. Un­avoid­able.

[G]oogle. Even more un­avoid­able.

[H]itcric.​info. Re­cently I asked on­line if there were any­where to watch a live stream of the Cricket World Cup, and was di­rected here. I’m sure they pay care­ful at­ten­tion to all the re­quired li­cens­ing for­mal­i­ties, or they wouldn’t be al­lowed on the In­ter­net, would they?

[I]CNA Re­lief USA. Some sort of Mus­lim char­i­ta­ble or­ga­ni­za­tion, of which I know al­most noth­ing ex­cept that they were fea­tured in this hor­ri­fy­ing video of a protest at one of their events so I went there for a look.

[J]ohn’s Phone. Gotta love it.

[K]ikiriki. ¡Los Mejores Pol­los a la Brasa! Ac­tu­ally, I’d been search­ing for a nice restau­rant of the same name we’d eaten at in Barcelona.

[l]ocal­host. Hey, I’m a Web geek. I bet that so are a lot of my read­ers, and some­thing in­ter­est­ing will hap­pen when they click on that link. But don’t feel bad if you do and it doesn’t.

An­droid [M]arket. So much bet­ter than it was at the be­gin­ning of the year.

[N]ew York Times. Main­stream but hang­ing in there.

[O]ffi­cial Royal Wed­ding. Be­cause it was Buzzed around in­side Google as an ex­am­ple of what you can do with App En­gine.

Google [P]ro­files. A way to own part of what turns up when peo­ple search for you. They just launched an up­date I was look­ing at. I have one and you can too.

[Q]54WO.​png. This is a bench­mark I guess I must have been read­ing about, in which some­thing or other is es­tab­lished about a Nexus One run­ning Froyo.

[R]ui Carmo Uses This. I al­ways read The Setup, al­though the litany of Mac­in­toshes has begun to pall a bit. I was there once.

[S]ock Sum­mit 2011. It’ll be at the Ore­gon Con­ven­tion cen­ter in par­al­lel with OSCON this year, and it’s big. You might want to book your hotel early.

[t]bray.​org. Where you now are.

[U]nis­erve. The ISP we use at home. It’s prob­a­bly not a good sign when your ISP’s home page is in your browser mem­ory, be­cause you’re gen­er­ally not in touch with them when things are work­ing just fine.

The [V]an­cou­ver Sun. Our local paper; it’s not ter­ri­ble.

[W]arren Ellis’ joint. It broke my heart that I missed Grin­der­man’s re­cent Van­cou­ver gig, but I to­tally rec­om­mend Mr Ellis’ re­cent out­ing with Mr Cave, White Lunar. Also, his tweet­stream turns up some eye-open­ing links.

[X]KCD. Well, of course.

[Y]ouT­ube. No apolo­gies, it’s a won­der­ful thing on bal­ance.

[Z]ero Hedge. Don’t know much about this and am not a reg­u­lar; a re­cent highly-en­ter­tain­ing piece about egre­gious fi­nan­cial chi­canery linked over here.

I’d typed the first let­ter of some URL into the ad­dress win­dow when I was in­ter­rupted. Look­ing back a mo­ment later, I was star­tled at what the browser had as­sumed I wanted to visit. So here are my A,B,C browser guesses, which I sus­pect say some­thing about me. What are yours? [A]ndroid De­ ...»See Ya