Egosurfing

My column today in Mediapost used a real-life example to demonstrate the extent to which the blogosphere can influence natural search results. I gave the example of how my cousin Susan has overtaken this site in the listings for search term "Hespos." A lot of that has to do with some papers she's written that have gotten a lot of play on certain blogs. The main idea for that column was basically "Hey - here's another reason your business might want to invest in a blog. It can improve your natural search results." Of course, I've taken some good-natured ribbing from a few folks in the industry, both in posts on the Spin Board and in private e-mail. Just some half-joking suggestions that perhaps I wrote the column to boost my own Google juice for this site.

Not a bad idea. I guess if I wanted a flurry of traffic here, I could have seeded the article with a bunch of links back here. I wish I had thought of it at the time.