While my partners, Perry and Adriana, are wowing the crowds over in America, I am left holding the Big Blog Fort. So while they press the flesh and kiss babies on their whistle-stop tour I am sweating away in the engine-room greasing the mighty wheels of the whole operation. Which is to say, the banking bureaucracy, the VAT returns, the accounts and the invoicing.

Next year, it's my turn. But being as they are out in that part of the world, maybe they should spare some time to drop in to California and see if they can help Google out of a fix:

The original blog then sprouts a list of "trackback" entries from other webloggers who have read, and linked to the original article. Kinda neat, huh? Except for one unforeseen technical consequence: the Trackback generates an empty page, and Google - being too dumb to tell an empty page from the context that surrounds it - gives it a very high value when it calculates its search results. So Google's search results are littered with empty pages.

Google 'too dumb'? Surely not. As the article (courtesy of The Register) points out, the problem is due to the fact that 'trackback' is a hack and not a feature of the blogging software as originally designed. How can the Google people be expected to take every hack into account?

Having said that, I cannot believe that Google-meisters will not find a way to adapt. After all it's Blogs and Google, Google and Blogs. They go together like salt and pepper, like ham and pickle, like Samson and Delilah, like love and marriage. It isn't a divorce, it's just a bump in the long road they will travel down together.

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