Out of the way

On the one hand there is the personal. I have written this blog for about 22 months, at a rate of about 4 entries a week. More and more, I find that I either make several or no entries on a given day. At least that means I am trying to break topics apart for you, dear reader.

And who are you? My blog and associated photo album have been visited about 85000 times. Assuming that most people read everything only once (allowing for some latecomers adn some who lost interest and some general statistical error) it seems that is an audience of somthing less than 500 people for each entry. But the range of error in statistics like this is huge - does it count the times I come back to look over my own entries, or the comments people leave? What about search robots?

I hve been wondering about this stuff for a while. In a meeting in january, I went as far as finding a site to check page rank - 7/10. Unfortunately, I have no idea what this really means. The closest I got to understanding it was that Anne was surprised, and said it probably means he has too many links here. I guess that means it is high. (Anne's is 8. But unlike me, he is known as a blogger. I have been to talks where other people are introduced as a blogger, but it has never happened to me. I wonder if i really want it to, apart from wanting to think people like to read my blog. Probably not, actually).

An Irish mate (today was St Patrick's day when I started thinking about writing) came up with an idea a while ago for as far as I could tell, about increasing pagerank by getting people to link to a viral blog game. (Sorry dear reader, but I never got around to it in time to put you in the running. Then again, as far as I can tell if you want an iPod you have one already).

And another friend asked me about how to popularise the podcasts of the Conversation Hour with Jon Faine, a segment in a daily radio show he produces in Melbourne. It's good stuff - Jon is mellifluous and articulate, the guests are generally very interesting, and the format makes for a nice bit of listening. The drawback is that they are an hour of audio, which weighs in at 20 to 25 MB. I can only listen to them if I find myself at someone else's place with real bandwidth.

I know people who are or have been experts in Search Engine Optimisation. I even know that there is a lot of money in it. But it never directly interested me, except the kind done by people like UBAccess, who tried to make a search engine that would find things which are not only what you want, but also accessible. They did it years ago, based on other engines, and got choked off because search engines don't seem to like other people making mileage out of their results. More recently Segala does something similar, and Google themselves released a test search for things that are accessible to visually impaired people. (When I tried it the idea and the fact they released it were more impressive than the actual results, although I hope they are still working on it and tweaking it).

My efforts in this direction are linked to the accident of having two fairly rare names. Google tells me that chaals is me or a system that

provides the targeting capability required to support the Division Commander's requirements to locate and kill the enemy by providing for precise location of High Value Targets (HVTs)

(Scary stuff. I trust nobody confuses the two of us, or tries to use us together). McCathieNevile is uncommon enough that googling for mccathyneville or maccathie-neville leads to me. And yet, one of the few things I am convinced about is that having a unique name is not a very scalable strategy for being noticed online.

But in the case of a radio show, I had one idea. I remembered that Andrew Denton's TV Interview show "Enough Rope" is something I rarely see, but for which I often read the transcripts (the ABC is good enough to publish them). And radio for the Deaf is something there isn't enough of. besides which, transcripts get indexed by search engines.

So I suggested that he approach the problem thus - which would give it some exposure in other fields, and increase the "word of mouth". It would be something that would help meet the moral and legal obligation of the ABC to make its services available to all Australians regardless of disability. It wouldn't help all deaf people (there are lots of people, deaf or otherwise, who really can't come at reading that much stuff, although lots can. And there are probably some who just aren't interested in Jon Faine and his guests) but it would help some. And it would help people who are not deaf. Like me. And that's a characteristic of a good accessibility solution...