Or, alternately, you're now the proud user of a proper 'blog' with your own unique (sub)domain. LJ are giving some bollux due to a vulnerability in, um, FireFox, but that's not relevent. Why is this really important? Pagerank and Google.

As of now, when you type <lj user="username"> you are linking to http://username.livejournal.com This applies not to all users, regardless of whether they have a paid account. Before now, paid account users could type username.livejournal.com, but it was implemented as an imperfect redirect to livejournal.com/users/username. This meant that Google didn't 'rate' outgoing links from a free livejournal as much as they did other free blog services such as blogger (technical reason to do with how Google reads domain addresses).

Implication? Well, us LJers have a tendency to link to each other a lot, which means that when we do from now on, the person we link to has their pagerank with Google go up. It's a perpetuating circle over time.

So, anyone want to propose our first Google Bomb? For an example, try jelly bellied flag flapper; that one was set up less than a week ago, they can filter through in 2 or 3 days.

Update:

OK, Google is a pretty smart search engine; that's why we use it, right? It has its faults and detractors (daweaver can tell you all about it, or, um, google for google watch), but, having looked at referral strings for the blog, Google does a much better job of filtering, overall, than Yapoo¦ and M$N at filtering stuff. There's hope, eventually, that a decent competitor will break into the market, I definately hope this project gets somewhere. The thing is though, where does your search string come up in the results?

Google counts page rank. Page rank is determined by how many people link to you, and those links also count to what search queries will show up. The higher your rank and relevence to the query, the higher you get in the search. Pages containing the test will get you on the page somewhere. At the bottom. Lots of links to you are good. Lots of links to you containing the relevent text are even better. Googling for it gets you lots of answers, the Wiki article is quite good.

Now, you've read my journal. You may have read the blog I also admin. Notice the link entitled traitor on both.

Search in Google for Traitor. You get Rebekah Wade's Wiki entry near the top, right? google.co.uk for liar. Tony Blair's biography. Google is less interested than in what you say about your content than what others say about your content. Why?

Because the old style search engines were interested in what you say, but it's easy to disguise content and hide text. Hence some porn sites, apparently, used to put 'disney' in their headers and hidden in the text. Seriously, look at a free gallery porn site using a text browser; it's full of crap, right? That's to try and fool search engines. Google can be fooled, but not as easily as older engines, and it requires multiple sites working together to fool it.

Hence Google Bombs

French military victories, failure, weapons of mass destruction. The less likely the search term, the more likely you are to be able to win. The Campaign for an English Parliament is trying to google bomb 'england'. Doomed to failure; and I've told them so. Too many sites link to england stuff. Football fans, for a start.

Hence regular contests based on googlewhack results. Or other silly things. rho has an LJ related one.

Tim at Bloggerheads is quite open about all of this, getting good Google results is how he makes his living. But he's also fun, takes civil liberties seriously, got Boris blogging and has regularly tried to get himself arrested in the name of his latest cause. Haven't met him, but I like him.

He's also the coordinator of several very effective googlebombs. Liar being one of them. here are some amusing worked examples. I especially like the property one.

So, do me a favour, exercise in silliness. Copy this into a post or onto any web pages you may have access to:

<a href="http://matgb.livejournal.com/77989.html" title="Google bomb">Google Bomb</a>

and, if you've got some spare links in your links list, put the link (http://matgb.livejournal.com/77989.html) in there titled 'google bomb'?

Just a thought exercise, there are some pretty weighty sites up the top there...