Since all Media players I’ve tested so far lack the feature of an efficient indexing tool I stick to the Google Desktop search to find certain titles. It is limited to an only text based search and the result’s appearance is kind of limited (viewed like a standard Google search result set) but it does the trick. Since I’ve got a browser window open at all times, anyway it is just damn fast. Ctrl-Ctrl to pop up the search mask and sometimes an additional “filetype:mp3” after the search terms gets my a result set onto the monitor within a second! Searching for an unambiguous term you won’t even need the browser window, but can send the file directly to your media player. Well, sometimes a nice graphical user interface would be preferable, but the waiting times which come with those are unjustifiable.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch at 00:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Recently Google update its pagerank database. The page rank is a Google intern measure to judge the relevance of a homepage. Until recently the page rank of maljaysia.de was “4” which is quite good for a private website, and might have been a result of many blogger friends linking to maljaysia.de. After the last update my page rank was reduced by 50% to “2”. I didn’t have a clue why this happened and thought it would be an arbitrary thing, Google would just do from time to time, like that episode, where my friend Jan was thrown out of the Google index. But it appears that there was another reason. From time to time, I’m doing paid reviews for the Swiss service Trigami, which I consider a decent and interesting option for bloggers to gain some revenue from there hobby. But reviews for Trigami also include links to the reviewed website/company/product. Google obviously considers those links as “paid links” and has policies which forbid those links. So my Weblog was punished and my pagerank reduced. I could have added an attribute (rel=’nofollow’) to those links, preventing search engines to follow those links, but in my opinion – if I willingly (even paid) create such links, the relations should also be recognized by search engines!

Anyway, although the pagerank of maljaysia.de can be neglected now, it seems to rank higher on search engines. Since two weeks the average number of visits to my page climbed from 75 to over 100 at the moment.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 20:37 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

The last weeks I got almost bombed by people reaching my site after doing a google search on "jay’s curiosity". I got curios about the origin of those search requests. I found, that there is some online computer game called MapleStory. This game has a quest called “Jay’s Curiosity”.

All people seeking for help with this quest should see the StrategyWiki on this issue. But as far as I could understand the information there, the quest can’t be completed, yet. Mapletip offers a walkthrough how to finish the quest.

Edit 29.10.: Since there is a continuous stream of people seeking for this information in my page, I've marked it sticky. I also want to encourage people to comment on this post about where to find further info on jay's quest!

Edit 07.11.: I'm tired of having this Maple Story picture on the top of my blog, so I'm canceling the sticky markup.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 19:48 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

Talking with other students in higher semesters about blogging, there is one question that I get asked quite often: Don’t you think that blogging might endanger your job chances? Lately the German business magazine “Wirtschaftswoche” titles “Karrierekiller Google” (Career-killer Google) and talks about a few examples were a search on Google unveiled unwanted Details about persons, who then didn’t get certain jobs they applied for. Martin Röll discusses the article in his blog and criticizes that the “problem” with Google unveiling information is not approached dialectical. Many careers might be initiated just because of information Google unveiled! Jochen Mai, the author of the article also made a posting on the article in his blog.

My personal approach to this topic is very optimistic – searching for my name on Google will get you quite interesting information on me, but so far there is nothing I’d have problems to justify. Most of the links you will get will lead you to sources, which I can influence. So I think blogging keeps me in control of information that is available on the net (I doubt that someone will really "stalk on me" beyond those many many informations given there) – but if you discover a potential problem feel free to inform me.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 13:11 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)