SeoLogs.com Multiple Data Centre Rank tool is excellent and I use it now and then to see how well or badly I’m doing. I’m only an amateur seologist (and nothing to do with the company of that name) but have achieved minor successes with David Bolton and Mensa Blog.

Now the big project, Home Parking is underway and for a site that hasn’t launched yet has achieved a Google Page rank of 4. But interestingly, if I run it on the SeoLog.com rank checker for the phrase Home Parking there are just two results. Number 1 (Good!) in 12 data centres or not in the top 100 on the rest! (Perhaps not so good… ). Curious!

I’d always assumed that the results were spread evenly. The Mensa blog search for instance is 3 on every data centre.

It’s not much comfort if you are one of the dead or disabled in a terrorist attack but the odds on it happening to you are so remote, compared to being run over or involved in a car crash that it is just not worth worrying about.

I was affected last year on this date inasmuch as I travel on the tube to work and had to walk 9 miles across London to get home- a great way to see London! And the day after I was back on the tube, and it was a lot quieter than usual.

Why so unaffected by terrorism? From the age of 10 until 27 I lived in Northern Ireland- right through the “troubles”, just ten miles outside Belfast in Carrickfergus. In the 70s we could hear the Belfast bomb explosions in Carrickfergus. And I spent three years at Queen’s University in Belfast, living in the Halls of Residence on Malone road. A lovely city- with an innovative approach to urban regeneration. A policy implemented in part by the Innercity Regeneration Association or IRA for short…

Its a curious fact that a search on the Google Adwords tool for the word charity reveals that the current top selling related phrase is Marks and Spender at £27.07 per click. I think whoever puts in their google adwords got it wrong! They have over 200 Adword phrases ranging from 4p/click to over £25. Thats an advertising budget!

Here are the top PPC M & S Keywords.

marks and spencer wedding insurance £25.42
marks and spencer co uk £24.43
marks ans spencer £22.42 marks and spencer com £21.70
www marks and spencer co uk £20.84
marks and spencer clothes £19.52
marks and spencer on line shopping £19.08
marks and spencer uk £17.73
marks and spencer online shopping £17.22
marks and spencer flowers £16.94
marks and spencer shoes £16.30
www marks and spencer £14.87

Of course I prefer the spoonerism of Sparks and Mensa… but then I would!

For the way life seems to be getting faster. There seems to be new versions of software coming out more often – e.g. Flash 9 is upon us. I’m learning the new stuff in C# 2005 as well as a certain Document Managememt System but more about that (I hope!) in the future.

Or it could be that I’m getting older – so maybe my brain is slowing down and consequently time appears to pass by quicker. Something that Einstein never postulated- Bolton’s Corrollorary to the Special Theory- the age of the Observer affects the perceived velocity of light/time etc.

As I was waiting to get off the tube tonight my eyes strayed to an advert. I only glanced at it, didn’t even read it. But my brain obviously picked up something because the though popped into my mind “Legoland General”. Thats a bit odd I thought- some kind of game perhaps and looked back at the poster. ‘Legal and General”. D’oh!

Is there any difference between a religion and a cult? Back in the good old 20th century, the future was bright and shiny with promises of hovercars, a lifestyle like the Jetsons and yet now we’re here it seems we seem to have a surfeit of religion with religious nutters in the USA, Middle East and even the East end of London.

Christianity in this country seems ashamed of itself. They don’t dare mention God but try and get new converts through courses on spirituality like the Alpha course or hold events like Signsevent.com which has been popping up on the tube. 18,000 people on July 2nd at Upton Park. That would be a big turnout for a West Ham match! It’s only in the small print (well FAQ) that the word Christianity popus up out of the woodwork. But the adverts give it away with the F word. Faith = Irrational belief. Superstition.

I commend Richard Dawkins for his all guns blazing assault on religion. Let’s Praise the man! If you haven’t seen it, The root of all evil Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.

This is a man who knows what he’s talking about. Oh and while we’re at it, lets free Xenu.

Every programmer in the world takes an interest in their favourite language or languages and how popular or unpopular it is. People have flame wars about the virtues of “their” programming language’s strengths and weaknesses. My favourites are C++, Delphi and PHP, but I go by the “Horses for Courses” adage- use the best tool for the job.

Just recently I came across the Tiobe survey, a monthly look at the popularity of Computer Languages by results for several search engines. It makes interesting reading and its surprising just how far ahead Java is from C#. Its good to see that C++ is increasing in popularity though long term (see the charts on Tiobe’s page it too is in a long term decline). I wonder how closely the survey relates to the job market. All the legacy code must have a big lag effect.

Sadly Delphi’s decline appears to be terminal. Borland’s decision to sell their IDE development part of the company off was the last nail in the coffin but many of the other nails there could be attributed back a few years to the Inprise episode when Borland changed name and not a little to Microsoft’s staff recruitment policies which saw them pinch Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C#.

I did an “Programming Language by Jobs” survey a year ago and its probably time to do another so in a few days. This is done by counting the number of job vacancies for a given language in a country and dividing by 5 to get the true number of jobs. Watch this space!

London has become a bit warm- its that time of year thhough thasnkfully there seems to be more of a breeze the last couple of night, so overall not as muggy and sticky as previos years. My new PC has just started throwing hissy fits. Machine Check Exceptions to be precise. One of those and it resets. No clue as to the exact cause- its a munfacturer’s supplied box, AMD 4400 running Windows XP, SP2 plus the usual collection of stuff- firewall, Anti-virus etc etc. I even run Sys Internals Rootkit Revealer now and then. You just can’t be too paranoid.

But its clean, patched and the only difference is that I added a 300Gb IDE disk just after I bought it. Its been running fine until the warmer weather. Very annoying. I used to get this with my old PC but it was hand built and was running a lot of stuff so the 12V line might have been a bit overstressed. But a box thats only 3 months old. Very annoying. How do PC owners in much warmer climes manage? Do I need air conditioning for 4 months a year?

This is the subject of the internet mega blog boingboing.net

But its not just Podcasts. The British Metro newspaper’s site has terms of use at http://www.metro.co.uk/terms (its not a link chaps honest!) says “You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated’s prior written consent.” Yet, if you search via Google or Msn you’ll find them pretty easily. Want to bet that Google etc wrote asking them for permission?

So maybe we should write to all search engines that have the Metro site in their search index and ask those search engines to comply with the terms and remove the Metro’s links? Wouldn’t that be a great idea!

I like the Metro BTW but think they should be a bit better informed about the nature of the web and what links do for websites.

As well as this blog I look after the Mensan.eu blog. I am the main blogger but we have a few other bloggers signed up, so I remain hopeful that as the site gets better known, a few more will sign up.

I’ve also been promoting, marketing the site if you like and have set myself a challenge. To see how high I can take the site for these three phrases. No tricks- just making sure relevant content is added every day or two.

• Mensan Blog – 1st out of 930 results (on Google)
• Mensa Blog – 3rd out of 1.4 million results
• Mensa – No Idea out of 9.8 Million results!

I managed the 1st place exactly 31 days after the domain was registered. No black hat methods either! All legitimate. PR BTW is 0. Webserver logs indicate 190 MB of traffic so far but thats probably me! (True story- On another site I’m working on, I mucked up a sql query- each run output between 30 and 70 megabytes. Do’h! 1.85 Gb in all.

I’ve extended the Mensan.eu site this week, not just with more blog entries but with a Google map of events and bloggers, bios of bloggers and a live feed from Google News on Mensa stories.