Wisdom from Doug Engelbart

Live, on tape and on the Net from Stanford University: the Doug Engelbart Colloquium. Do not miss this.

At Davos, Power was Somewhat Relative

The activist groups that upended the Seattle World Trade Organization meetings were at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. But they weren’t just the people protesting on the street, I note in Friday’s column.

McCain’s Web Site Breaks a Rule

Karl Auerbach, a reader of this eJournal, writes that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is using some slightly slippery Web techniques. Here’s his scoop, which I’ve edited slightly.

In the McCain web pages, one will find, if one views the underlying HTML source, the attached embedded meta tags.

In commercial contexts it is usually considered at least “bad form” and perhaps even more to use the name of a competitor or competing brand in Meta tags with the clear purpose of faking out search engines into creating a reference to “you” when somebody searches for “them.”

Anyway, notice the references to Bush, Dole, and Quayle —

=”Keywords”
President,McCain 2000,Senator McCain,Senator John
McCain,President,Republican,Presidential Campaign,John McCain Exploratory
Committee,McCain Exploratory Committee,Bush for President,George Bush for
President,Bush 2000,Dole for President,Elizabeth Dole for President,Quayle
2000″>

McCain undoubtedly knows nothing of the way his campaign staff is handling the Web site. But this kind of thing damages the senator’s up-front reputation. He should put a stop to it.

UPDATE

Lawrence Lee, editor of the Tomalak’s Realm weblog, writes:

The questionable meta tags on McCain 2000 seem to be having the desired effect on AltaVista at least (not all search engines use the meta tags due to the practice of “spamming” unrelated words).

McCain’s Ranking on AltaVista

“George Bush for President”: #1 Site

“George Bush for President”: #3 Site

“bush 2000”: #5 Site

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