I used to blog a lot more than I do now and if I do say so myself, I was not too shabby at it. Somewhere in the bowels of one of my computers lies a back up of the old site’s posts that I keep threatening the ether with resurrecting - so low have I sunk and so deep is my vanity. What’s held me back is that I can’t exactly lay hands on it (the backup). I’m sure i have it, I just don’t know where it is. Well, one of those nerdly pursuits that make the web such a wonderful place for half-stepping geeks like me has re-reared its head in my awareness - archive.org and its tasty Way Back Machine. In addition to letting me see what Google looked like in 1999 (hint - not much different than it does now), it’s given me access to all my old posts, after a fashion. Makes me misty just thinking about it. Eeh. Not really, but a fun little diversion nonetheless.

(I was going to Twitter this, but I run into that 140 character limit awful quick. D’ya think?)

Sure, they took the original, gave him a budget, buffed it up and turned it into a gum commercial, but this is one of those videos I can’t help smiling when I watch. Sap alert? Hey! Don’t make me drag out the laughing baby.

A few favourite moments:
0:52 transition to the dancing
1:40 His reaction to trying to dance in room full of kids
1:53 DMZ in N Korea
2:24 Doused by a wave in Tonga
2:37 Joining the dance
3:50 Montreal in the rain (there’s a few memories)
3:53 Vomit Comet

Assuming that hasn’t sufficiently offended any post-modern sense of irony you may possess, check out the outtakes. Actually, depending on your particular bent, you may like them better. The editorial comments are great, but I especially like the “bad dancing, big shark” comment at 1:48. That and the one about dancing at the Parthenon at 3:46. Oh, and the 1000 m drop at the end.

During the primaries for the Democratic nomination, I followed the coverage with a bit of interest. The sentiment I had heard expressed elsewhere that resonated with me was that, cripes, we have two historic candidates, so of course the Dems are going to do their level best to dismantle both of them, just in time for the general in November. Essentially, the main beneficiary of the protracted primary fight would be John McCain. I would have to say I was conflicted about whether Hillary should have dropped sooner. Of the two, my preference leaned somewhat toward her, but I can’t say I was terribly pleased the almost comical gyrations she was going through toward the end to justify prolonging the race. “Tough campaigner who never quits” would be the charitable way of putting it. “Cynical, manipulative and opportunistic” would be a less flattering description. Love her or hate her, you can’t say she’s an unknown quantity.

Now, of course, with the nomination sown up, lots of Dems are hoping for things to heal up in a hurry. I know a lot of Hillary supporters are pretty miffed about the treatment she got during the campaign, and probably with a good bit of reason. Like I said, though, we’ve seen her in the public spotlight for years. The treatment, for the most part, could have been predicted. The righties love to bash her, almost as much as lefties love to bash W. In both cases, they tend not to help themselves in that regard, which I suppose is what endears them to their respective constituencies.

And now of course, the focus is on Barack Obama, and oh yes, let the shenanigans begin. I’m only aware of some of the BS that’s going around about him, like he’s a closet Muslim - crime of crimes these days, apparently. I’m sure there’s a lot more nasty stuff floating about, but BS is BS and it’s a lot like spam; if we’d stop paying attention to it, it would go away. But a lot folks are invested in torpedoing the guy, so integrity be damned, full speed ahead.

Which of course brings me to FightTheSmears.com, a site apparently meant to counter some of the more popular rumours (or rumors for the AmEnglish speaking search engine spiders out there) that are out and about on the guy. Probably the best comment about the site I’ve heard came, no surprise, from John Stewart of the Daily Show. Per John, apparently the Obama campaign wanted the domain icantbelieveihavetoputupwiththis<beeeeep>.com but it was already taken.

And so, with an old trick in the SEO game, I’ll toss my grain of sand into the pile. In case you’re unfamiliar with this play, search engines crawl sites and note the words and links to build up statistical data about which sites are linked to on pages with particular terms. It’s a clever method, probably the most signficant advance in the development of the web. SEO is the art and science of gaming the system, essentially. Years ago, there was a campaign, which I was a small part of, to alter the search engine results for the search term Jew. At the time, when you put that word into Google, the first site in the results was a hate-speech site. I don’t remember which one it was and even if I did, there’s no way I’d mention it. It’s for that same reason that I don’t mention by name a certain Baptist minister in Topeka who’s got some kind of weird thing for protesting gay anything. Anyway, everyone involved posted something to their blog using the word Jew and then linking to the page in Wikipedia on Jew. Within days, the hate-speech site was knocked out of the top spot and replaced by the Wikipedia article. I’m gratified to see that doing a search on that term still returns it as the top result, although Google has wised up and noted the potentially offensive nature of the search results.

Similarly, by putting “Barack Obama” in close proximity to juicy terms like “rumor” and “Muslim” and then a link to Fight The Smears the idea is that as the page gets spidered and thrown into the algorithm, it will contribute to that site getting near the top of the search results for when someone searches on Obama and rumors or something like that. I see that as of this morning, FTS is at least on the first page when I google Barack Obama rumor.

Democracy in the digital age. Ain’t it grand?