How to Spot a Psychopath

My very good friend Peter at BlueTomorrow has, in our little tiff, adopted the any-publicity-is-good-publicity, bring-it-on-you-little-wusses attitude.

UPDATE: And now he's un-adopted it again. A cynic might suggest that this is because it really, really didn't work. A starry-eyed believer in the fundamental goodness of the human nature, like me, would take him at his word when he says that he was only asking, not demanding, when he talked about lawyers and Ceasing and Desisting.

Anyhoo, on with the post as it was a few hours ago. Don't feel obliged to actually do any Googlebombing now.

It strikes me that this is not entirely wise, when your online identity is tenuous enough that the first Google hit for your name is a link farm and the fourth hit for your site name is a PageRank 0 site.

(And yes, that's a wiki, but don't be lame and vandalise it.)

When you're in this situation, you're a large and soft target for Google bombing. That snarky letters page of mine is going to bubble up the search rankings well enough all by itself, but it won't take many other people putting the strings "BlueTomorrow" and "Peter Manzella" on their sites for those sites, and the other sites they link to, to swamp the feebly ranked current results.

With any luck Sad to say, but people searching for Peter's name will, quite soon, have a hard time finding any information about him except the fact that he once alleged a chunk of rampant suckery to be fine journalism, and pissed off some guy in Australia.

[As I write this, a few days after this post first went up, my letters column is Google's #2 hit in a search for "bluetomorrow", and I am now officially the Internet's number one authority on Peter Manzella!]

I've never done this kind of Google experiment before. It's nice to have a deserving target.

(Well, it is until they sue you, anyway. Peter made a vague legal threat, then very rapidly changed his mind, apologised nicely, and now we're all friendly-like again. It was by far the fastest such cycle I've ever encountered, and I've done this sort of thing a few times now.)