Google’s tweaked their backend and says Google Bombing is now a thing of the past:

That’s right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work.

Is that so?

So why haven’t bloggers stopped trying to game the system? Work-arounds may be one reason. So might the increasingly sophisticated nature of today’s Google bombs — what Open Left’s Chris Bowers calls a “2.0 version of the Googlebomb” — where the goal is to influence the search rank of a slew of negative news articles about a politician rather than tie his name to a keyword.

Klau said that he’s “not aware of any [successful] Google bombs or equivalents over the past year” — but the new efforts aren’t Google bombs, per se.

The web will adapt faster than Google so someone will always be out there gaming the system.

What can you buy for five dollars? takes you on a world wide tour of $5 items.

Last week I posted my brief thoughts on a Slate article that said the Long Tail might be all for nothing.

As a follow up a few links have been shared through a mailing list I’m subscribed to and I figured I’d share them here:

The Slate article was based on a study by Anita Elberse who’s article can be found here in Harvard Business Review.  Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail”, replied here and Anita responded to him here.

Seth Godin spoke up in defense of the Long Tail with this point:

A lot of people don’t seem to understand a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it’s better to make a hit.

If you have a choice of cutting a top 10 record or making a track of Jamaican polka music for iTunes, go for the hit.

Style Weekly’s Power List is out and rounding out the 75 are a couple familiar names among the RVA blogosphere:

75. Ross Catrow and John Murden

Richmond’s online community has a streak of serious civic engagement because of the infrastructure provided by John Murden and Ross Catrow. Murden built, modeled and then shared his template for neighborhood blogs. Now a dozen outlets across the city keep tabs on micropolitical issues and neighborhood meetings. Catrow’s aggregator, RVAblogs.com, serves as a central clearinghouse for each new post from more than 300 local writers on a myriad of topics, and a rash of play-by-play pregnancy stories. Their innovations have quickly built a new forum, nurtured a fresh pantheon of pundits and welcomed scorekeepers in the arena of public accountability.

Congrats to the gents.

Wikipedia: List of problems solved by MacGyver

It seems SWACGirl has had her blog labeled as spam by Google and a few folks are speculating on the hows and the whys.  Having seen what Obama supporters have done to Clinton blogs, I lean toward the flagged as spam by others option.

Google’s policy is bad, but considering how widely used and abuse Blogger is by spammers, it’s their quick fix until they can do something about it from the registration and use end.  It’s cheap enough to buy webhosting and set up your own site so you’re not bound by Blogger and BlogSpot or even WordPress regulations.

Sean Tevis on running for office xkcd style.  And the rest of his site is pretty well designed too.  Simple, slick, to the point.  But it may be too slick.  Who knows.  Nice to see something other than typical political templates.  Even if he is on the other side of the aisle, I give him a tip of the hat.

UPDATE: His weblog on the site is interesting as well, a nice insider look on running for office.  Not sure if that hurts or helps him, but it’s interesting reading from the outside.

7/18 9:30am UPDATE: Seems he’s already broken the 3,000 donor barrier.  (Scroll down to see more.)

Kurt Vonnegut on writing with style:

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

As Politico puts it, “Surge meets Purge” at Barack Obama’s website:

The Daily News report by James Gordon Meek says: “Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop ‘surge’ in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.”

Has the situation changed?  Certainly.  But Obama came out against the surge before it even had a chance to work, an uninformed and way too quick reaction that leads to lots of “regret”.  I thought Democrats were tired of knee jerk reactions to issues facing America.  I guess I was wrong…

UPDATE: How this came to light may be the long term story, though.  McCain’s campaign used a service called Versionista to track changes to Obama’s website:

The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon.

“I’m an avid reader of blogs, so I thought this would be a good tool for campaigns and activists,” he says. “This could be a good tool in their arsenal. ”

Bray says that he got the idea from Wikipedia, which shows people the changes made to its entries. Versionista is a subscription service and allows people to track minute, detailed changes on web sites.

From Measuring Worth, the “real” price of gasoline:

Gasoline cost 27 cents a gallon in 1949 compared to around $4.00 today.* How has the relative cost of buying gas changed over the last 59 years? Presented here are two tables computing the annual “real” cost using our five indicators, one in 2007 dollars, the current number used for real GDP, and the other in 1949 dollars. While the two tables show the same trends, they do give a different perspective.

Using the 2007 table and the CPI and the GDP deflator, we see that gasoline was quite expensive in 1980 and 1981 and the cheapest in 1998 and 1999. Today, the real price using these two measures is higher than the period at the beginning of the 1980s.

By looking at the share of the Consumer Bundle and GDP per capita, the story is a bit different. In 1981, a gallon of gas took as much out of what the average consumer spent as $4.00 does in 2007. And as a share of GDP per capita, gas was even more expensive in those earlier days with it at over $4.50 in 1980 and more expensive in the earlier years.

The other table tells the story in a different way. Let us look at relative cost to an unskilled worker to fill up using 1949 dollars. That year the 27 cents it cost for a gallon of gas, took a certain share of the worker’s wage. The interesting question is, has the cost as a share or percent of the worker’s wage increased or decreased over time? The table shows that for the wage rate and price of gasoline in other years, this cost has fallen. Since wages have increased faster than the price of gasoline, by 2007 an unskilled worker spends only two-thirds as much, as a percent of wage, for a gallon of gasoline than the 1949 worker. The table shows that the $2.85 a worker paid in 2007 would be comparable to only 20 cents (in 1949 prices “share” of the wage.

When we use the GDP per capita, the cost has fallen faster. Looking at the table shows that a gallon of gasoline costs around 11 cents a gallon (in 1949 prices) if measured as a “share” of the GDP per capita. This is because in 1949, 27 cents was .015% of per capita GDP, while in 2007, $2.85 was .006%.

Finally, comparing its cost as a share of GDP, we see that in 1949 prices, it is about 6 cents. This means that a gallon gasoline was a four and a half times larger share of output in 1949 than it is today.

* The nominal price of gasoline can be found at found at http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/petro.html and http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_dcus_nus_a.htm For the tables used here, I used the price of a gallon of leaded regular from 1949 to 1976, the average of the price of leaded regular and unleaded regular from 1977 to 1990 and the price of unleaded regular from 1991 to 2007.

Luke Boggs notes how regretful Obama is about so many things, but allow me to spoil the ending:

… a lot of Americans understand that you don’t get a bunch of easy do-overs in the Oval Office. You have to make tough calls, even when they may be politically costly.

I can’t help wondering what Obama might regret in four years as president. What might he regret doing —- or not doing —- on the world stage? What might he regret saying —- or not saying —- to Putin or Kim Jong-il or Ahmadinejad?

Say what you will about the man, but no one can argue that Jesse Jackson isn’t passionate.

10:15am UPDATE: Extreme Mortman has a roundup of how different networks discussed the offending statement.

Obama’s plane had to make an emergency landing in St. Louis yesterday after the plane developed difficulty with its pitch.  Thankfully they landed fine and everyone is OK.  But interesting to note is where the plane came from:

This was not Obama’s regular campaign plane, which is being overhauled. It was a loaner, having previously been used by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY.

Hmmmm…..

Congress’s excellet/good rating is at 9%.  With approval ratings like these who knows what can happen this November.

Vivian Paige takes The Virginian Pilot to task for excusing their long march into irrelevance and taking a few swipes at the blogs while they’re at it.