Did some housekeeping that should make a difference. Thanks to Ryan, I’ve fixed perton.net, which was dead; it now resolves to this site. I also fixed a Wordpress template glitch that was causing some sidebar links to my RSS feed to go 404. They now all correctly point to the Perton Feed at Feed Demon.

After a week of work, I’m back where I started: 7th place. But, hey, at least someone’s benefiting from my hard work: my blogger pages from both Engadget and Download Squad are now in the Top 10. Maybe I should be doing their SEO!

Earlier today, my two positions were riding high, at spots 5 and 6. Now, I’m back down to 9 and 10. The Goog certainly works in mysterious ways.

I was going to post something about the now-infamous New York Times “death by blogging” article, but at this point, I think ZDNet’s Larry Dignan really has the last word:

Let’s put a little perspective on this blogging thing. You could be getting shot at in Iraq. You could be a single mom working three jobs to stay afloat (Happy Birthday mom). You could work in a coal mine. You could be in a life and death battle with Leukemia. You could be doing any one of thousands of high-stress jobs. Sure, the Web has a lot of stress but let’s get real: If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose.

If anything, the Times article really just highlights a growing problem in America, of which over-stressed bloggers is one symptom: our work-obsessed culture. Back in the late 80s, there were a lot of reports out of Japan that stressed salarymen were dying in droves from karoshi, literally “death from overwork.” At the time, I was working for Business Tokyo, a magazine that covered the trans-Pacific business culture, and I travelled frequently between the U.S. and Japan. And Japanese culture at the time did indeed put such an emphasis on work—and work-related activities such as marathon after-work drinking bouts—that it placed a lot of stress on workers. In some individuals, such stress inevitably lead to heart attacks and other sometimes-fatal ailments, hence karoshi. Fast-forward 20 years, and Americans, on average, now work longer hours than anyone else in the world, including the Japanese. That isn’t a good thing, for bloggers, coal miners or anyone else. Many of Today’s young Japanese workers have rebelled against the salaryman ethos of the past, and have embraced a slacker culture that keeps them ensconced in their parents’ homes and part-time jobs well into their 20s. That may not be the best solution to karoshi, but it beats America’s current workaholic mindset. And if any of those Japanese slackers ever get bored, they can always start blogging. It’s not like it’ll kill them or anything.

(Note: The above is not meant to disrespect the memories of Marc Orchant or Russell Shaw, both of whom were acquaintances of mine from Weblogs Inc. While I know little about the details of their passings, I find it hard to believe that their choice of profession played little more than a peripheral role in their fates. Indeed, my brief conversations with Marc were always extremely positive, and I really think he loved his career. Both Marc and Russell died well before their times, and they should be remembered as individuals—not as harbingers of a hyped up “crisis.”)

Many SEOs will tell you it’s a waste of time to use Wikipedia as part of a link-building campaign; after all, the site nofollows all outbound links specifically to avoid being used as a tool by link spammers. However, I’ve long been of the belief that Wikipedia links still have intrinsic value, simply because so many people read Wikipedia; getting (and keeping) a link from Wikipedia can be its own reward in clickthroughs. There’s also the secondary link-building effect; visitors who follow links from Wikipedia may link to your content on their own after having read it on Wikipedia. With this in mind, I’m pleased to see that at least one external link to my content from Wikipedia appears to have paid off; I now have a secondary listing on the perton SERP for my entry on ASCII art, which was recently linked from the Wikipedia page on that topic. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned it here, the Wikipedia police will probably remove the link—unless, that is, they decide to click through and actually read my post, which is relevant to the topic, and seems fair to keep on the page.

I’ve dropped form 7th yesterday to 9th today, and from the Perton SERP, the reason seems clear: according to my listing, the title of this site is “Marc Perton,” and the snippet refers to this as “Marc Perton’s personal blog.” Yesterday, I appeared with more highly optimized title “Perton” and a snippet that explained the purpose of “Perton dot com.” The strange thing is, I haven’t changed my title or meta description since yesterday. That means, for some reason, Google is apparently referencing data from an older crawl, and penalizing me for it. That would jibe with Google Webmaster Tools, which claims that the site was last crawled on March 25th. Except that I know it has been crawled at least once since then, because the new title and meta description did appear in Google earlier this week. Truly strange.

One fascinating thing about this exercise is the window it opens onto the inner workings of Google. Because the Perton SERP is largely fixed—most of the top sites are rarely updated, and rarely get any new inbound links—the slightest change shifts the balance dramatically. Yesterday, for example, my blogger page on Engadget—which hasn’t been updated in two years—briefly surged from its current #10 spot to #5. Why? Apparently, because Engadget received a new perton-related inbound link, from this entry earlier this week. So, if my efforts here have helped Engadget, why haven’t they helped me? Largely because sites like Engadget (and Wikipedia, which remains ensconced above me) have massive credibility, and need very little to nudge them up in the rankings. This site, on the other hand, has limited cred, and is really only in the top 10 at all because it has a branded domain and longevity on its side. What all this comes down to is the need for a massive link-building campaign, which will probably be the focus of the remainder of this project. Stay tuned!

Late yesterday, I was up to #5, but as of this morning, I was down to #8 again. I’m not sure what’s influencing the rankings, since nothing has changed in the last 12 hours, on any of the sites listed in the top 10. No new inbound links, and no new content on any of the sites. The mighty G certainly works in mysterious ways.

Today I made my LinkedIn profile public; an easy way to get an extra inbound link, and LinkedIn’s authority seems to be on the upswing. There are also an increasing number of Pertons on the site. Looks like I’ll have to update ther Pertonverse links in my sidebar soon!

It’s become something of a mantra among the digerati that having multiple displays improves productivity. However, for those of us who can’t afford to deck out our desks like mission control—or who work for employers who are just too shortighted to spring for all those extra screens—there might be another solution: a portrait-based display. I switched my screen at work to portrait mode a few weeks ago (using the freeware iRotate utility), and now, when I go back to landscape on my laptop, I feel like I’m missing half my screen. The portrait orientation works for me mainly because I work with words most of the time, so it helps to have a display that allows me to see as much text as possible without having to scroll. I suspect that anyone working with images or video wouldn’t benefit a whole lot from this, especially given the toolboxes and palette that take up much of the screen in programs like Photoshop. As far as I know, there haven’t been any independent studies about portrait orientation and productivity, but at least one report —from Pivot Software, which makes commercial screen-rotation software, and therefore has a vested interest in the subject—points out that "an average user who spends as much as 6 hours at a computer each day spends approximately 20% to 25% of the time scrolling or other similar tasks." A portrait display, according to the company improves productivity "significantly" (though they offer no specific figures to back this up). The first time I saw a portrait display was on a Xerox Alto (pictured above), a good 25 years ago (the machine was already past its prime, having come onto the market in 1973). In that pre-Mac era, I was wowed by the machine’s GUI, but as someone who was doing word processing to pay my way through college (working on a Wang VS), I was also awed by that orientation. It’s taken me this long to duplicate that cutting-edge technology on my own desktop, but it’s been worth the wait.

This is definitely one of the more bizarre trademark-protection efforts by a major corporation: T-Mobile is going after my old alma mater, Engadget (or, more specifically, Engadget Mobile), for using the color magenta in its logo. Apparently, the wireless giant is worried about “possible confusion with the consumer regarding the origin or sponsorship of your blog” and, of course, about “trademark dilution.” Engadget, not surprisingly, has responded as I’d expect them to: they’ve added magenta highlights across-the-board. And in an act of solidarity rare among hyper-competitive tech bloggers, competitors Phone Scoop, Phone Arena and GearBits are in on the action (or at least were as of yesterday; as usual, I’m a few hours late to the party). Somehow, I suspect this isn’t the reaction T-Mobile hoped for. But it’s the one they should have expected. Respecting trademarks is important, and Engadget has always been respectful. However, it’s one thing to trademark the use of a color in very specific context of selling a good or service, and quite another to issue a blanket statement that prohibits media organizations form using a similar color in their work. It sort of reminds me of the fiasco a few years back when Sun went after coffee sites for using Java in their names. We all know how that turned out; this time around, instead of continuing the fight, I have a feeling T-Mob’s magenta-faced execs will quietly let this one die, and avoid inflaming things further by dragging it out.