Monthly Archives: March 2009

Add One Line To Your Blog or Twitter Could Become Your Primary Identity

OpenID community leader Scott Kveton noticed this morning that his Twitter profile page is now the #1 search result in Google for his last name, not his blog. This is something TechCrunch reported on earlier this month, but people are just starting to wrap their heads around it. I know I want this blog to remain the #1 search result for my name, not my Twitter profile.

In a conversation on FriendFeed, Ben Hedrington pointed out that in addition to the page title change that TechCrunch reported on – Twitter also uses the rel=”me” markup and Kveton’s blog does not. I looked and realized that my blog here doesn’t either!

So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel=”me” to a relevant link on your blog. I’ve added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that’s a good page for me. It’s as simple as making the link text read a href=”http://marshallk.com/feedback” rel=”me”.

That may not solve the entire problem but it should help and it’s good form. Machine readable microformats like rel=”me” are likely to be an increasingly important part of the web in the future. Would readers here suggest otherwise? If I’m reading too much into this, let me know.

My 500th Headline on Techmeme

Pride is rarely something appropriate to show in public, but tonight in particular and here on my personal blog – I think it’s ok. Yesterday I wrote a blog post that became the 500th story I’ve written over the last 3 years to be featured as a headline on Techmeme. I’m quite proud of that.

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

Responses to an Email Interview

I’m speaking to a Mensa gathering this Spring about the internet and was just sent some interview questions for the local chapter’s newsletter. Pretty strange, huh? After I took the time to reply to the questions, I thought I’d take a page from Dave Winer and post my replies here. Perhaps you, dear readers, can let me know if you think I am wrong, too obnoxious, or otherwise in need of different replies to such questions.
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