figby.com

I’m trying to make more use of my PalmOS smartphone, so I’ve been looking at Palm software again. My favorite discovery at the moment is Bonsai from Natara software. Bonsai is an outliner, planner, and to-do list. I like to use outlines to manage projects, tasks, and for brainstorming, and until recently used Microsoft OneNote for the purpose.

Bonsai is a bit limited compared to OneNote–your outline can contain only text, and no formatting like boldface or fancy fonts–but it does what I need it to do. More importantly, Bonsai includes nearly-identical versions for Windows and PalmOS that synchronize perfectly. I’ve moved most of my project planning to Bonsai and it’s really nice to be able to glance at my outlines right on my phone, or add to them.

I’m always a bit reluctant to use software from a small company–it might not be supported in the future. But the desktop version of Bonsai can export outlines in text, CSV, HTML, and even XML formats, so if I ever need to change outline programs, it will be a simple transition.

Douglas Bowman at Stopdesign describes a situation in which his entry called Starting Over showed up near the top of a Google search for the phrase, and he received a few messages from people who thought they were reaching the Starting Over reality TV show. Matt Haughey and Pariah S. Burke report similar cases.

This phenomenon isn’t new, nor is it unique to weblogs. At the Quotations Page I’ve been getting email addressed to celebrities for years. Due to high page ranks, I routinely receive email intended for Andy Rooney, George Carlin, and David Letterman. I even get mail for Malcolm Forbes, who died in 1990. Every time Google updates, I wait to see which new celebrity I’ll get fan mail or hate mail for.

Notice that when you search for Starting Over, Stopdesign is the #2 result. The official site is #1. My site isn’t #1 for any of the above celebrity names either. So why do we get the email? We have an easy-to-find contact form. Corporate sites tend to avoid "email us" links, because someone would have to answer the mail, so their audience keeps clicking until they find a site that lets them speak their mind.

Much of the discussion at Stopdesign revolves around what webloggers can do to avoid this–choosing titles carefully, avoiding certain words in text, or even deliberately un-optimizing pages for Google. I think this is all unnecessary and silly. There are two main reasons these situations occur:

1. Some people are stupid.
2. Google is imperfect.

Neither of these is your fault. Write whatever you want, call it whatever you want, and when you inadvertently discover a flaw in Google’s algorithms, sit back and enjoy the show.