TechCrunch reports today that Google finally decided they had to hit a bitch when it comes to the kind of pseudo-link-farming that Weblogs, Inc. popularized and is now fairly common practice among blog networks. Engadget's PageRank of 7 (unheard of for a blog until they reached it) has been walloped down to a 5. Hopefully this is just a penalty that will lose impact when the offending items are removed.

It certainly lessens the impact of the "network factor" of WIN, but at the same time their sites are gaining more individual identities and tend to live in their own AOL channels rather than falling under the big old WIN banner.

It's also true that those sites don't really need the traffic and search boosts that were gained by having a global blogroll and big cross-linking grids. Those formerly controversial, now apparently frowned-upon practices served their purpose back in the day, and allowed sites like Download Squad (now a PageRank 4) to grow on the backs of bigger brothers like Engadget. So I can't say I'm surprised, or totally disappointed: we did our best with those old methods, now it's time to move on. WIN is playing with the big boys now anyway.

I'm familiar with the name Boy Genius Report because Engadget gets some (apparently very good) phone scoops from them/him/whatever. Turns out they returned the favor by ripping my Engadget layout. Just because I'm in a crotchety mood, I'll call out their "designers," who are called Solo Stream. Now, I know that Boy Genius and Engadget have a great relationship, and I wouldn't want to jeopardize that. But really. I didn't make this happen, I'm just pointing it out. Everybody reads these sites in RSS, so maybe it doesn't even matter. But regardless of what I think of the Boy Genius Report, I can't say as I'll ever recommend Solo Stream to anyone looking for a blog design.

UPDATE: they did a writeup of their "design." Oh wow, what a challenge it must have been to convert the fixed width to a fluid one with a max-width. If anyone wants to know how difficult it was for them, I'll be fielding questions in the lobby.

UPDATE 2: Solostream response and my response to that. At least, after the comments clear cache here.

I don't know Pete too well, but he's a smart guy and (more importantly) a decent guy. Stop by Engadget and read his heartfelt tribute to his father to hear about the source.

The reference is for Gavin, but the feature is for everyone. If you're not someone who lives entirely in a feed reader, you may have noticed something neat on Gavin's site or, more significantly, on Engadget. Instead of a list of recent posts after the post content (and ad), you'll see a list of related posts.



A lot of people have mused that other blogging systems have had this feature for a while, but we were just holding out for one worthy of our blogging system. Not just based on tags, categories, or titles, these links combine tag frequency, post date, and a slew of other criteria into a complex algorithm that I can't begin to understand. But it works. And hopefully, it'll drive traffic around different parts of Engadget and other sites. So... go check it out and enjoy the wanton surfing that's bound to ensue.

Engadget has relaunched. It's been a long time coming. We made a lot of changes, and I hope we've made an improvement to the way people leave comments on blogs. Somewhere between a digg-esque forum hybrid and a normal flat model of blog comments. I'm also taking advantage of wide screens that doubtless a lot of early adopter types who read Engadget have.

I'm using a lot of "tomorrow's CSS" today, thanks to some javascript that lets IE6 do its thing with max-width. This post breaks it down for you.