marypcbuk

Google now lets you search the Google News results by author. How well does it do?

For me it finds recent IT Pro posts, and a story on The H in the current results; in the archives it says it goes back to 1998, though the first story is from 2007 and the second, though marked as 2008 is actually from 2004 (the disclaimer at the bottom says 'Dates associated with search results are estimated and are determined automatically by a computer program'). 1998 marks my time at AOL, when I was quoted in press releases as well as writing about them; 2002/3 has me in Computing, reviewing on Amazon UK and writing for the Taipei Times (it's actually a reprint from the Guardian) about the first flood of spyware. By 2006/2007 Google has a lot more of my writing - for some reason November 2007 was a very quiet month. For 2008/2009 it includes my annual company report (who thought that Experian would be a news publisher rather than a primary source) and it doesn't find any of my articles on TechRadar or Tom's Guide. I'd say maybe 60% of the articles that I write that go online are being picked up as written by me, so I'd give it 6/10.

It did find a few stories that turn out to be about me, at least peripherally; http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1032699/british-hacks-urge-intel-to-raise-chip-prices made me chuckle...

I like innocent smoothies, for the flavour and for the jokes on the bottle (over the years they've claimed as ingredients everything from a small church to half a ham sandwich, TM usually stands for Tasty Mangos and the new carton promises '12 more strawberries'). But the faux-friend marketing bandwagon is rumbling along; the pomegranate apple juice I got yesterday said it was yummy, promised to fight back against heart muggers, claimed to have 'teh pwoer' and asked me to tell Jeremy what I think of it. And the chicken sandwiches from M&S proclaim that not only do their ingredients come from suppliers and farms with high standards of animal welfare, they come from suppliers and farms with "really high" standards. It's warm, it's cuddly and it smacks of naive start-ups hoping to change the world one smoothie at a time. Fuzzy is the new sleek. It says 'we're human, just like you, we're not a faceless company; trust us'. But at least for a larger company, it may sometimes be pretty calculating. There's so much of it now that must be a term for it; I asked sbisson and he suggested mateketing.