Happy BirthDay Blogger!

Blogger has turned 8 years old today. It was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren't exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people's free beer.)

Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.

On behalf of MobileRide, i want to wish Blogger a very Happy Birthday and may it complete thousands of years of great success.

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No more interested in Google Page Rank?

According to the latest discussion on Google Page ranks, Toolbar PR is not just a harmless toy or an entertainment.

Toolbar PageRank numbers can be 3 months out of date or more. Some "PR Updates" have been buggy enough to seriously misrepresent a page's real PR. But despite these openly discussed flaws, the toolbar "report" affects the web culture in many ways - and most of them are negative.

Matt Cutts has blogged that PR Updates are considered pretty much a non-event around Google. But when that "non-event" is also buggy (because Google sees it as unimportant?), then some advertisers will not pay fair value to a website for hosting their ads. That's not entertaining at all, and it's no longer a non-event.

Bones says:

"The PR indicator is probably the only reason why many SEO folks have the Googlebar installed. Remove the TBPR and lose a big Googlebar user base also. "

Google has been upfront about that. Their engineers constantly tell us the toolbar is not for webmasters to make business decisions off of or for ranking better, or for unraveling what the secret sauce is. The fault belongs squarely with webmasters for being lazy by doing what everybody else is doing and ignorant for not researching it for themselves and seeing the answer coming straight from Google engineers. Yeah they're going to backpedal enough to keep you using it, but we all know it's not useful for SEO purposes.

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Diggs, Stumble Upon, Visit 4 Visit Removal

BlogCatalog Admins will remove Digg requests, SU and V4V requests UNLESS they provide some sort of substantive value to the discussion.

This means, if your post says, visit my blog & ill visit yours, or digg my post without any additional information about the post and why someone should visit or digg it then the post will be removed.

Read full discussion with public comments.

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