I run another blog, although it’s hosted on wordpress.com rather than my domain, here.

The blog is about my boat, ‘Kudu’. It’s a 21ft Corribee - a sailing yacht - and we are planning some substantial voyages toghether. Anyway, the other evening I got an excited facebook message from a friend saying my blog was listed on the wordpress.com’s Blog Of The Day stat’s page. I had the 7th fastest growing blog on all of wordpress. I was ecstatic about it. The 7th fastest growing blog on all of wordpress!

I awoke in the morning to find I was no longer 7th, but 1st. I was shocked. I had THE fastest growing blog on all of wordpress, which means I had one of the fastest growing blogs on the entire internet at that point in time. Sadly it was short lived, I’ve since dropped off the list, but to sustain the sort of growth I was seeing was never going to happen.

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Firstly I must apologise for this blog post, it’s perhaps a little spammy but I fancied owning the arses of the Dev team in ego searches, it’s a social experiment you see

My theory is that being skilled (or at least semi skilled in my case) at SEO brings a whole host of power to your social life that is as yet untapped. I mean, what if I were the top result for Olaf Spinkel? I’d pretty much own the worlds opinion on the guy. Or Parminder Matharu for that matter, or even Daniele Sangalli. They all members of the dev team at work and fortunately for them they are both good chaps and very talented developers. Also, I’m too nice to do anything nasty, but I’m not nice enough to not carry out the experiement. :p

So, if I were number one for Olaf I could change the worlds opinion of him. I could tell you he likes to kick dogs or eat raw snails, and Google would believe me. This, as I’m sure you can see would work very well in the pub.

“Spinkel, another beer please”

“I bought the last one”

“Another beer, or I’ll tell Google you have all the Gary Glitter Albums and listen to them everyday!”

Ah, life will be grand, but I may get bored, give in, and 301 this page to a site of their choice eventually (after the law suit)… but not yet.

So not to make this too pointless, and to give me some tasty keywordey content, I’ll write something useful, and indeed genuinely deserved about these guys.

Who are Olaf Spinkel, Parminder Matharu and Daniele Sangalli?

Well, they are currently PHP developers at TradeDoubler. They work on Searchware 4 and are genuinely a very talented bunch of people. Olaf knows more about search engine APIs than anybody I know (apart from myself, of course :p ), he has after all spent over 18 months solid on a project involving nothing but tinkering with Google reports, Yahoo reports and the other one that everybody has forgotten about.

Parminder Matharu is our resident Business Objects guru and equally good at what he does. In fact he is so good I think he deserves some extra Google love so I’m going to put write his name again, but more bold, like Parminder Matharu. Then there’s Daniele, or Don Sangalli as we call him, is one of those rare creatures who can both write proper OO code (and that’s a big compliment given my standards of proper OO code!) and also produce well designed websites. He’s like a development unicorn, and unless you work here at TD, then the only chance you might get of spotting him is quietly sat in the back of the pub with a red wine on a Thursday night, surrounded by girls pining after his Italian dress sense and impecably mild nature.

Mr Olaf Spinkel is German, which was a rather pointless thing to say expect for it will help make this page number for for his name. That kind of power has got to be worth something in the pub I think. I should also compliment him to, not for any other reason than he also deserves it (and it get’s me top for ‘Olaf’). He wrote a data caching system that’s rather impressive and he also knows a consierable amount about search and the internet, although I would argue not enough to out rank me for “Nathan Whitworth”

Oh, he has a website, a very good one too if you can read German and like rock music, http://www.musik.terrorverlag.de/

Well, if you read this and would care to help me in this very valiant and slightly childish cause, then please either digg the page, or even better, give this page a link from your own site. In return, I promise to think of something entertaining to do with their fame.