dangerousmeta!, the original new mexican miscellany, offering eclectic linkage since 1999.

SER: WordPress Theme Links Is Google’s Next Target.

Kind of anti-business, isn’t it? A bit unreasonable to chase down every person who’s purchased your theme.

CNet: Who owns your files on Google Drive?

“The fact is, according to its terms, Google may own any code or product you ultimately upload to its new Google Drive service, whether you realise it or not.” Scratch that, then.

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Webmaster Tools Drops Features.

Schmoes can stop critiqueing sites for not having robots.txt files now. Interesting, in light of the ‘site speed’ articles of late, Google’s also dropping Site Performance.

Bruce Clay: SEO - Why Is Google Allowing Rich Snippet Spam?

“The bottom line is that Google should stop showing starred reviews on the SERPs, at least until it comes up with some sort of verification system.” Amen.

Small Business Search Marketing: Doing SEO? Do It Gently.

Nice, but even so, concentrate on doing great stuff. Not doing great SEO.

Search Engine Roundtable: Burberry US Dropped By Google: Duplicate Content Issue.

“In fact, Google has currently delisted the us.burberry.com page. Why? Well, it was not a penalty, it was because Google felt the page was redundant to the uk.burberry.com web page.” Whoopsie.

GigaOm: Google Drive, Finally coming this April.

It needs features that beat Dropbox. Otherwise, it’ll settle in as a Google Apps add-on, and not be competitive.

Techi.com: The Google crackdown on SEO has begun.

“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.” The sooner they cap off the profession of ‘gaming the system’, the better. Here’s to GREAT content, not ridiculous keyword-stuffed olive-loaf content.

Search Engine Roundtable:  Don’t Block GoogleBot From Accessing JavaScript + CSS Files.

FYI, programmerinos. Google asks us.

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Crawler Does Nothing Special For HTML5.

Hmmm. The sites I’ve created with HTML5 have — and I’ll admit this is an unscientific observation — been indexed faster and better by Google and Bing.

CR4: Porting Your Landline Number to Google Voice.

Handy tip, if your landline is landlocked.

DigitalTrends: Why are companies defecting from Google Maps?

Google’s recent pricing structure for 25,000 uses or more, of course. “For businesses put off by the new costs of Google Maps, the main alternative seems to be OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a UK-based, volunteer-driven non-profit dedicated to creating and offering free geographic data to anyone who wants it. OpenStreetMap (or OSM) boasts more than 400,000 registered volunteers who supply mapping data and updates to the project. It’s an oversimplification, but think of OSM as a loose equivalent to Wikipedia for mapping data: anyone can contribute, and the content is available to anyone. Of course, this also means some of the content may be …questionable.”

The Consumerist: When You Pay Google For A Service, Don’t Expect Any Actual Help.

“We haven’t been able to solve the mystery of how to extract customer service from the impenetrable Googleplex.”

TopRankBlog: SEO is Just Marketing. Deal With It.

“For web developers that treat SEO as a one-time task during web design and only focus on marketing content (vs. ALL of the website content), and no ongoing content promotion, you’re only touching the surface and may be causing your clients to lose revenue in the long run. For bottom feeding SEOs that continue to over-promise and under-deliver with sensationalized accounts of traffic boosts, rankings and links, you’re short sightedness is hurting companies and our industry. Touchy subject. Yes, it’s marketing. And clients will span the gamut from “just give me a website” to “I want the full-on, 24/7 experience.”

SEOChat: Is Google Plus an Empty Hangout?

“Since these new users may be signing up for some other Google service, and might not be the least bit interested in Google+, this forced sign-up policy could be skewing the figures. While it’s possible, even easy, to delete your own Google+ profile by going to the accounts setting page, it’s likely that many users simply don’t bother doing this. Instead, they just forget the have a Google+ account, or simply ignore the social service completely. You might want to keep this in mind the next time you’re trying to decide how much time to spend on any particular social site networking for your company.” Analyze your audience, divvy time accordingly.

Graywolf’s SEO Blog: The Epic Failure of Google+.

“… for now, thanks to SPYW being integrated into Google’s SERPS, if you sell anything on the web, you have to play with social media to remain competitive. However, you should never put all your eggs in one basket, especially one you are going to let Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ carry around for you. You’ll never know when they will decide to change or phase out your mission critical business functions or take your data and keep it to themselves, leaving you to swing from the gallows.” My emphasis; read that and UNDERSTAND it.

Jon Rafman: The 9 eyes of Google.

Shots from the Google truck ...

SearchEngineRoundtable: Googler Claims SEO Is Bad For The Internet.

“I thought SEOs helped Google find great content, make it more indexable and provide rich snippets for the markup all over Google’s results today?” Only white-hat.

The Atlantic: The Gmail Logo Was Designed the Night Before Gmail Launched.

If ad-agencies barred last-minute creative sessions, there’d be many fewer logos around.

Gizmodo: Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine.

Hate to admit it, but I’ve been using Bing for over a month now. Major annoyance - how they present videos. Takes two clicks to get into Youtube. Other than that, my experience has been good.

More Intelligent Life: In search of serendipity.

I’m not worried. As a committed eclecticist, search engine accuracy has never impacted my rovings. A bookstore is dandy, but slow. With the internet, I can follow a thread of interest by starting at politics and end up in pre-dynastic Hittite footwear. More than the tool, it’s the individual. If schools are not fostering curiousity - God help us in the future.

Bruce Clay: SEO/Google Caught Buying Links.

Gaming their own system? I think it’s time for me to blog on postcards.

CNet: Android, iOS activations hit record on Christmas. Again.

Here, also. I often get grief from my clients for pulling out iPad, iPod Touch, Macbook ... and a (as clients characterize it) ‘4,000 year old’ cellphone with no smart features.

I chose Android over iOS for two reasons:

One, most of my clients are running Android and I need to know it better than I do.

Two, the majority of my information is in Google apps rather than MobileMe or iCloud.

After 48 hours with the HTC Sensation, I have to say I really like it.

Better than iPhone? It’s early days yet. The iPod Touch gives me most of the functionality of iPhone, and I run an iPad ... so I know the ‘lay of the land’ on iOS very well.

The Sensation is very fast compared to my late model iPod Touch and iPad 1.

Android’s interface is non-intuitive if you’ve been using iOS. Took me a while to figure things out (if I actually have). Setting up apps and widgets on the home screen is particularly confusing at first. They need to include a link to an extensive Android tips and tricks page or similar in their user guide.

Battery could use more legs, but I doubt it’ll leave me stranded on any given day. With moderate ‘setup new apps’ use, I got a day and a half out of it. There seem to be higher capacity replacement batteries out there. I may pick up a second just to have around.

The screen is quite bright, colorful, and I have not even given a thought to the lack of a Retinal Display.

I wish some iOS apps would move over to Android (Flipboard, Instagram, etc.), but there are plenty of alternatives. I’m surprised that many apps are free on Android, whereas you will always be pulling out your Apple account to pay for apps on iOS. So far I’ve spent less than $10 on apps and am covered about equally compared to my iOS devices.

Compared to the portrait and landscape keyboards on iOS, the Sensation’s keyboards are actually usable for my big fingers. That doesn’t really communicate the feel ... it’s a much more responsive keyboard. If for no other reason, this is a huge dealmaker for me.

The GMail app is superlative, much better than the iOS experience. Once you get the hang of the interface, one can zip through email, label and archive much much faster than in iOS.

Camper app works well for Basecamp. I have yet to fully kick the tires on this, but just accessing it with one click without having to use a little browser, is a plus.

The phone calling features actually work (some of my clients who have iPhones complain of call quality). Call quality’s not as good as my old phone, but I hear all smartphones have call quality handicaps.

Those last three items (email, Basecamp and phone quality) are vital to me ... and for once I feel I can be connected to my business in a small form-factor.

In sum, I had expected much, much less out of an Android phone. So don’t believe the nay-sayers - the experience for an iOS person who uses Google products, is a good one. Fun, even.

Search Engine Roundtable: Google says, XML Sitemaps Not Necessary For Small Web Sites.

Of course, there’ll be a brief brouhaha that will settle on sitemaps as a ‘best practices’ move, whether Google uses them or not.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Google Goggles.

“Have you ever seen a work of art—on a poster, in a book, on a billboard, or even in one of the Met’s galleries—and simply had to know more about it? Now you can. I’m pleased to announce a new collaboration with Google that lets you take a picture of a work of art with your mobile device and link straight to more information on metmuseum.org.” I suppose it’s futile to remind folks that some museums were doing this with the Apple Newton (at least a *form* of this) twenty years ago. Welcome back to the future, improved.