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.

Just before we launched profiles, I decided to put everything in place so they'd work on the newly renovated Joystiq. It seemed logical to make the default avatar a Mario, so there he was – Paper Mario to be accurate. Once the resourceful Joystiq readers were given the ability to make their own user images, a lot of creative stuff happened

Be sure to check out that linked post for some more great Marios, including Patrick McGoohan as a Mario Number Six or Optimus Mario.

Celly sent this lovely link out last week. It's called Top blogs fail W3C markup validation. It got 800-something Diggs. The first comment on Digg was "What's W3C markup validation?" I LOLed.

Here are my thoughts, in my all-time-favorite format, bullets.

• Browsers must fully support standards before developers should be expected to. I write for the browsers, not the validator.
  
• The W3C validator tool will report the number of errors based on a domino effect. It will take an unencoded URL (for instance), turn that into an unclosed tag, and from there on all other tags are improperly nested. I have seen this plenty of times. If that initial error is in the beginning of the site code, and isn't easily rectifiable, you could end up with hundreds of errors on a site the size of Engadget.
• We do have traffic code that is outside the closing HTML tag. Our bad, yes. Go yell at Gavin if you think it's that big of a deal (you're welcome, Gavin).
  
• Our WYSIWYG is not fully compliant. Why? Mostly because it's easier to align images using the ALIGN attribute, at least as long as browsers support it. Yes, I understand that WordPress and now Blogger use floats, and the result is pretty much the same, but upgrading a WYSIWYG on the scale of Blogsmith is a pretty big deal – and standards compliance is low on the giant list of requirements. Higher on that list are blogger acceptance and the "does it work" factor. It works. In all browsers, in fact. It's also the big reason why we don't use a strict doctype. You want to see validation errors, let me switch that out.
  
• Here's the big kicker: External factors beyond our control, usually Javascript ones. As WIN has been criticized for in the past, our pages have a shit ton of ads (this is a royal shit ton, not metric), and every last one of them throws at least one validation error.
  
• I hate to make excuses for myself or any of our other people, but the fact is if you're sitting around counting others' validation errors, you aren't spending as much time actually making high-traffic sites on a quick turnaround time as we are.

I could probably make up more, but that's five big things right there. But in the blog post itself, I think the answer rears its undeniable little head, right after the completely laughable assumption that "they have all the money and all the resources to hire someone just to take care of this matter."

I guess what matters most is that all these blogs can be accessed and viewed correctly (whatever that means) with the most popular browsers.

If that doesn't say it, I don't know what would. Our readers don't have any idea what the validator is, but they will certainly know it if the site is broken in X/Y browser. If anyone disagrees, I'd love to debate the subject so feel free to leave a comment.

While Gavin's been linking people's names to their profiles in his comments for a long time, Blogsmith profiles really haven't done much. Until now! Fun and exciting options like profile pictures, website links, and comment history are all there. Check it out on Joystiq for now, but Engadget, Autoblog, and of course this site will follow soon.



Some notable profiles include:

• Brian (not bothering to link because he's set it to private)
• Gavin (huh.. also private)
• Celly (spotting a trend here)
• Hard Gay (um, not the real one)
• Me!

I would love to do a big writeup on its features and niftiness, but for now, we're still tweaking and fixing, so no time to bask in the glory yet. But stop on by to Joystiq 2.0!

Some of you might be wondering... what's going on with that Mike character? Most of you likely are not, but I'll clue you in, in the form of an overdue and overlong blog post.

Toronto. It's a fine town, maybe a bit hip for me (does anyone over 40 even live in that town?). Erika has an office there, and occasionally goes for meetings. I go for a change of pace. Normally that means changing my office to the Soho Metropolitan for a few days, but this time it was the Drake, a "boutique" hotel in the art district. We were in the suite, which somehow managed to have nearly 400 square feet and almost no space to work. Still, I got a lot done while there. The restaurant is great, and they don't correct you when you correctly pronounce the name of your Scotch. A notable feature of the Drake: a unique room service menu from which you can order doohickeys. Dirty doohickeys. I washed my hands immediately after touching it, and of course sent a photo to Gavin. I missed the name of the band that played at dinner, but they did jazz-lounge versions of Metallica, Doors, Selecter, and Michael Jackson hits. Entertaining!



New Mexico. I took Friday off for travel, and didn't immediately make the connection that Matt, WIN's designer, was off as well on the launch day of the iPhone. Well... we managed, between Celly (I'd say I owe him a beer, but really Matt owes him a beer ;) ), smartphone email (which worked less and less over the course of the weekend, thanks to the AT&T Edge network clogging with Apple hordes), and the occasional airport wi-fi hotspot. So what's in New Mexico? Sand. A lot of it. Also, our friend Megan, a lot of clean air, and that infamous dry heat. We ate a lot of tacos, soaked in some hot mineral springs in the mountains outside Santa Fe, and visited Albuquerque's swell aquarium.



Detroit's Tastefest/Cityfest/whatever. They change the name every year. Free shows (so far I've seen Spoon and Weird Al Yankovic), demos from Erika and her Roller Derby crew, and overpriced beer and food from area restaurants, all in a closed-off couple of blocks in the New Center area. This is still going on, but my next trip down will be Sunday to see Cheap Trick! Woot!



Transformers. Those who see the twitter know... I paid to see my first ever Michael Bay special-effects blowout flick. Why? Because they invaded my childhood. You know, the part of my childhood that loved a blatantly commercial cartoon made to sell toys (that I also loved). It's not a bad flick. Pure popcorn, plenty of don't-think-about-that-too-much plot moments, and the voice of the original Optimus Prime. I didn't feel ripped off in the movie sense, the "stuff from childhood" sense, or most importantly, the Giant Robot sense.

The earthquake. This just happened. It wasn't really an earthquake, but I wondered for a second. So I stepped outside to find a backhoe thingy tearing down the house next door. It's sort of a half-house built parallel to my backyard instead of the rest of the houses on the street. It took forever to sell this weird anomoly but apparently the developer who bought it is finally getting down to business. Next steps: dig a hole and cut down some massive trees that hang precariously over my roof.



And now? Preparations are being made for something neat that's been a long time coming and that I can't wait to blog about next week.

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.

No April Fools jokes or hints and allusions, this time it's for real: Brian's out like a Detroit streetlight. Looks like Gavin will take over, so we're not breaking up the band yet just because David Lee Roth is gone. That makes parallel #2 for Gavin and Sammy Hagar. Number one? He can't drive 55.

Thankfully it's on to something Brian seems really pumped about: bringing comic books to web 2.0. If that doesn't pan out, though, I know of a pretty good place to host a resume. I mean, I heard about one.

Anyone should be so lucky to work for someone like Brian. From the first trip to the Trump-hole, to the nail-biting evening waiting for this post to come true (and wondering if there were still jobs on the other end of it), to Bowling Incident 2007, it's been a blast. I know I did a lot of things in this job I wouldn't have if I'd worked for someone I didn't trust as much (Did that make any sense?). Thus ends two years of working with Brian, hopefully the future might hold a couple more of those years sometime. Good luck!

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.

Brian marks the date today — two years since I saw this ad and said Hey, that looks like me. Well... me with mail server administration. Anyway, you can see that post was from late '04 and it took a while to actually hear from Brian, in fact I forgot about it entirely by the time he called (he was busy then too).

Been a crazy ride since then, since the halcyon days of ASP 3 and imprisonment in stark White Plains hotel rooms on a startup budget. Thanks a million Brian — I wouldn't trade the past two years for any job. But I could really go for one of those Buffalo chicken sandwiches from Candlelight.

I'll admit, that quote from Futurama is totally unrelated to anything, excepting what I had for lunch. But it does not have to to with the two things this post is about:

1. I went to see Grindhouse.
2. Matt redesigned TV Squad.

In both cases, mostly awesome. As far as Grindhouse goes, it's pretty long and has no intermission. Technically both of the films comprising this double-feature are full length, with fake movie trailers (by Tarantino/Rodriguez buddies Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie) between. The trailers, I have to say, might be the best part. But Rodriguez's flick, "Planet Terror," was a hoot and a half. Rose McGowan, Michael Biehn, Lost's Naveen Andrews, and some unadvertised guest stars (usual suspects for the territory) in a gross-out zombie extravaganza. Hard to beat. Tarantino went for a 70s chick-revenge flick pastiche that was cool mostly for Kurt Russell. Great car chase too, if you're willing to sit through days of useless Tarantino "I'm so awesome because I saw movie X" dialog to get there. The overall story is, if you feel that your love of 70s shlock horror is sacred and these guys are jerks for mainstreaming it, you probably won't feel any better when you see it. But if you just want to enjoy a true tribute, you'll have plenty of fun.

And as for TV Squad, well I don't have a whole lot to say. The design should speak for itself. TV Squad was one of the earliest sites to have a design at all (by Brian), which in those days meant taking the standard green WIN design (The CSS weblog is an example) and attaching colors and a logo to it. Nowadays, establishing individual blog branding is more on the forefront than before, when every site layout was part of the Weblogs, Inc. branding. So it's an exciting time, and you're going to see a few more very individual-looking sites out of us very soon.

For those of you enjoying a Dead Milkmen reference about now, congrats. For the rest of you, that's really just about how media impersonation of yours truly has come to an undeniable head. First it was underage British wizards, now tech video blog anchors. Specifically, Randall Bennett of Tech Check Daily in a story involving people lying about their identities on the web. Ah, yes.

Word to Randall for using one of the most incriminating pictures on the Internet to demonstrate my visage. But if some karaoke with my Weblogs, Inc. brethren is as bad as it gets for pics (and trust me, that is as bad as it gets), then I'm not doing too bad. And these pictures aren't his fault anyway. They're Barb's.

Between bottles of cough medicine, I've managed to get some work done. One of those projects has been expanding my knowledge of Blogsmith's galleries features. They were created almost especially for TMZ, but have since been rolled out to popular Weblogs, Inc. sites like Engadget, Autoblog, and WoW Insider. Current galleries are fairly simple, so I'm trying to see where we can go with them. Have a look at my portfolio and witness me pimping while simultaneously witnessing Blogsmith galleries.

So aside from a brief (and not at all sickness-free) trip to Toronto, I've spent just about the entirety of 2007 on the couch. Too much more of this and I'm going to be ready to just skip it. But Mike, you ask... what's the good news?

• I made a resolution to stick with a David Allen GTD system for a while this time. The last time I did it was a couple years ago (pre Weblogs) and it lasted for barely a month, but it was great. My tools (thanks, Kinkless) are better this time, but I just can't seem to stay well enough for a day to start the process in earnest. I do have a great picture of Erika with David Allen... that count for anything?
  
• I cut my hair. Yep. Donated a 13" ponytail to Locks of Love. I did it for Erika's birthday since she never liked the long thing that much. Come to think, that was shortly before the new year and my never-ending sickness. Maybe I've got some kind of Samson thing going on.
• We're rolling out a great new search feature on Weblogs, Inc. sites. Engadget has one now, Autoblog should be up soon after you read this.
• Emurse has some great new things around the corner as well, at least they will if they can pull me out from in front of my Doctor Who, NyQuil, and dachshund (all good things for sickness -- your mileage may vary).

Incidentally, we were at a local restaurant that I love for their chicken soup (another great thing, trust your mother on this one), and a lady behind me was haphazardly describing the 24 season premiere to her tablemate. And for some bizarre reason, it sounded to us like she was describing a sex dream. About Jack Bauer. That's not related to anything, but there you have it.