google

According to hhavensteincw over at Slashdot, there’s a new Google Bomb campaign to get liberal bloggers to associate John McCain with a number of posts and articles that highlight “ugly” things about the Republican Presidential candidate:

My buddy Phillip collects Google Trends... you can explore them here -- up to the minute trend-surfing -- but you can also see the big list of trends as well:

Let me first reveal that Abraham Harrison LLC, my employer and my company, is an online reputation management company -- online reputation protection, promotion, defensive SEO, domain name strategy, and crisis management. That said, I could not be happier because online reputation management is apparently the new black, at least according to Techdirt, Forget Publicists, All The Cool Kids Have Online Reputation Managers

It's been well-documented that Google has become something of the mythical permanent record teachers warned you about as kids. There are plenty of stories about people losing jobs or discovering dubious information about dates using Google. A few years back, services popped up claiming that they could scrub your online record clean -- though, how successful such services could be was certainly called into question. However, it appears that those services have morphed into a new, somewhat scary, category called online reputation management. While it's to be expected that corporations might have people monitoring online reputations, it's quite another thing to have individuals hire firms to do the same thing.

[Via Weird Facts]
BEIJING (Reuters)—The names of three banks and the word "stocks" beat
"sex" to become four of the most Googled words in China last year,
according to a Google China list seen on Thursday.

China
Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China
Construction Bank ranked second, third and sixth, according to a list
supplied by Google China on its website (www.google.cn).

The reason why we now have ads to the right is not really for money, because we have no traffic, but because I love to see what ads pop up. Ads about memes, memetics, reptilians, and all sorts of wonderful stuff.  Let me know if you're way too offended.