HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

The blogging resource web site Blogging Pro has been put up for sale by its owner, John Hesch. The asking price starts at US$2,000.

Quoted are the reasons for his actions:

I have another project that will soon be taking up most of my time and unfortunately I will not be able to continue managing Blogging Pro. I’ve had a lot of fun and have met a lot of people from around the world while reporting on blogging resources.

I’m going showcase some of the interesting links I’ve visited for the past week, and I’m going to start now

First off, I checked out PostSecret. What’s it about? Here’s how the site describes itself:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Some of the postcards are really funny, while on the other side of the spectrum, quite a few are somewhat disturbing. All in all, a very worthy web site to visit.

For those of you who are more business minded, check out The CEO Refresher archives. There are tons of useful and interesting articles to read ranging from Education to Strategic Planning.

Remember my posting on Google ranking secrets? I manage to find the paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, describing the PageRank™ algorithm.

While on the topic of search engines, have you ever wondered how one would sound like? Yes? Well, try Speegle, the search engine that not only display your search results, but speak it as well

For those who are interested in SEO, or are just plain curious on how Google calculates the PageRank™ for web sites, you should read its recent patent application for the ranking process.

If the patent application appears overly legalese for your tastes, you might want to read this article on Buzzle.com instead. It uses a more “normal” tone to basically analyse the more important details to pay attention to.

Reading through the patent application, it gives me the impression that many of the ranking weights are not really rocket science anyway. However, I’m very impressed that somehow, the good people at Google can actually come up with an algorythm to calculate some of the seemingly unmeasurable criterias. I’m happy to know that lots of “weights”, are measured just to identify spam sites and lower their rankings.

If you are serious about getting high ranks in Google search results, you should read the patent application thoroughly. There are priceless gems of information in it. Thanks to Ookami Snow for the link to the Buzzle.com article.

…at least, they’re admitting to purposely doing so on their new joint-venture Chinese MSN portal according to this article on MSN Money, and linked from Slashdot.

Other banned words and phrases include; freedom, demonstration, “democratic movement” and “Taiwan independence”. The clincher here is that, officially, according to existing Chinese law, it isn’t illegal to use these words.

Found this cool test on the BBC web site, thanks to Lainie’s post. I took the test and here are the results in all its glory:

Therefore, this means that I am a Leader. What are your results?