I chose today as my first day to post something on my blog because I registered for Typepad nearly one year ago and never made a single post. I know, what an insane waste of money. So this post is actually going to cost me $34.65. Hopefully my posts will get cheaper as time goes on.
What will you talk about?
The two topics that interest me most at the moment are Internet services and economics. I work on MSN Search, the search engine you think of after Google and Yahoo -- we are going to change that soon enough, so hence the interest in Internet services. As for economics it has long been a hobby of mine. While I do not have any brilliant economic theories in the pipeline I hope to produce some thoughts on things I read that may be of interest to fellow hobby economists.
Why is your blog called Supertramp? Is it really a porn site?
No, my blog is not a porn site. In the book "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer, the main character Christopher McCandless reinvents himself as Alexander Supertramp. That is where the idea for the domain comes from and the inspiration for the blog.
What are your goals with this blog?
Geez, that is an annoying question. I live in a world of not only goals, but "Big Hairy Audacious Goals" (BHAGS) and you are asking me for goals on my blog. Ok, fine. My goal is simple. If I can produce one post a week for the next six months that at least one person on this planet gets some value out of then I will have succeeded. I figure that with six billion people in this world that should be achievable. Although given that I am writing in English and I do not plan on translating my posts that probably cuts my marketable audience to about three billion people, but that still seems like it is achievable.
Search engine ramble of the week
About a week ago I caught some posts about the fact that MSN.com has as a PageRank of 2. First off, I was actually a bit flattered that people were willing to call this out and help us out. Thank You to Danny and others for catching it!
We worked with some folks on the homepage team and others and fixed the redirect issue. Redirects from msn.com to www.msn.com are now 301 redirects. I do agree with Danny Sullivan that we need a better way to handle this, however, it has to be a system that does not lend itself to absue. In any event we fixed the issue on our end surprise the rank of MSN.com is back to up 9. I am not sure if GoogleGuy went in there and fixed it himself or if the algorithm actually worked, however it looks like things worked out to what seems to be the correct value.
eytan
