I read with fascination as Ben Metcalfe wanders the world deep in thought, pondering his next step. Should he move to his favourite city, San Francisco? Or should he put his family and his girl-friend first? The best sort of blog is an unfolding story.

I met Ben once, for about two minutes, and he struck me as a rather big-headed young whipper-snapper, but I’ve definitely felt an affinity with him since he left the BBC. I’ve almost always left a job without knowing what I’m going to do next. It’s taken me to strange places, as far apart as Vladivostok and Blog Relations. I can’t say it’s always been the greatest career move. People who just stick at their desks usually get near the top after 30 or 40 years or so, but they always seem to leave their personalities at the bottom of the greasy pole. I don’t think Ben’s going to do that.

I’m better late than never on this one, but do sign up to the petition against an extension of copyright that would hugely muddy the waters for podcasters. It’s a confused and silly idea that would make life complicated for all, and help none but the rich and powerful.

There was a meeting in Barcelona on June 21 to discuss ‘The Proposed WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations: From the Rome Convention to Podcasting.’ WIPO, by the way, is the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

The results of the meeting seem a little shrouded to say the least, but the general idea is to give Broadcasters and Internet Service Providers the rights to anything that goes out through their auspices. This could mean that your ISP, not you, owns the rights to your podcast. The least worst thing that one can say about this, is that enormous confusion would ensue. Presumably most people would move to ISPs that give you contractual rights to your own material in their terms of service. But what a waste of time.

It’s a general rule that busy-bodies should stay clear of the internet. It’s thriving very well without the rules and regulations thank you.

The Senate votes today on an amendment to the Telecomes Act that would enshrine ‘net neutrality’ into law. This would mean that the big US telecom companies couldn’t speed up the internet for some, while dumping on others.

A nice introduction to OPML here as a screencast by Alex Barnett. Among other things, he points to OPML Manager which makes creating an outline easy.

This isn’t just another moan about Google, it might serve as a useful SEO tip. Unless you are ultra-trusted by Google - i.e. a .gov .edu or a BBC or listed in the hand-picked Google Directory or of similar stature - be very wary of making big changes to your site.

After many months of being consigned to the Google dustbin, our Storynory podcast started to turn up well on searches about a month ago. For instance, we were often number one search for “audio free kids” and so forth. New visitors to our site started to grow steadily. This only seemed fair, as lots of people were linking to us, including some quite big sites.

I noticed from the web hosting log that some people coming in on relevant searches were sticking around for “0″ seconds. I concluded that the pages weren’t loading fast enough for them to actually hit the page after clicking. I also felt that not many people scroll down our Storynory pages, but hunt for audio stories instead in the archive. So I dropped the number of entries per page from 8 to 4. The pages across the site were much shorter and loaded up much more quickly. But a few days later Google put us back in the dustbin.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to see the sites that link to us come up in searches, but own site all but invisible. Even blogs that don’t normally have much to do with kids audio came up but not us. So I gave in. I restored the number of entries per page back to 8, and now we seem to be allowed back into Google’s land of the living again.

Why did this happen? My only guess is that if you make a change that radically alters the number of times a key word appears on your pages, then Google gets suspicious. It thinks you were pretending to be clean, only to reinvent yourself as a spam site. Most of the entries on Storynory mention words like “audio” “story” “Kids” “children” - though free does not come up much. By halving the number of entries per page, I also halved the number of times those words appear.

It pisses me off that we can’t make useful changes to our own site without being kicked in the Googlies, but is my SEO tip for moody, temperamental Google: Don’t go making changes.

Try putting “search engine” into Google, and you are hard-pressed to come up with a decent one, like Ask.com. Even Google itself is down the page.

Is it just us, or do other people agree with Matthew and me that Google is getting more and more useless? A friend pointed out the other day that if he put the name of a hotel into Google, he got back anything but the hotel’s own webpage, even though that would be the most useful for checking out the rooms and getting a feel for what it was like. It’s harder and harder to find what you are really after.

Google still relies a fair bit on the hand-vetted sites in Open Directory Project, upon which it bases its own directory. After all the technological progress since 1999 or thereabouts, it still takes human eyes to sort out the spam sites and convince Google that you are completely legit. You can submit a site to the directory and NEVER hear back from them. You will never know if they have even looked at your submission. It’s worse that sending a book to publisher. Your whole livelihood depends on the whim of one person, and whether they can be bothered to look at your site. If they don’t like it, that’s it. Getting to the top of Google will be that much harder, no matter how good or relevant your site is.

Google, I think, has got some problems. They won’t come home to roost for some time yet, but they need to work harder at being the best search engine, and perhaps put some other projects on hold.

Problogger has an excellent interview with Graham Holliday of Noodlepie about Scoopt Words. Cruise across the blogosphere to Noodlepie in Vietnam and you will see a little icon in Graham’s sidebar saying “buy this content.” The idea is that a magazine or newspaper editor can buy straight off the website. It’s an excellent idea. My apologies for allowing Problogger to scoop me on Scoopt. Graham did let me know, but I let it slip, as I was deep in podcasting and other business. We will be signing up, and will post some longer length articles in the hope that an editor with good taste drops buy and takes one to the cash-out.

Download the interview with Molly.

If I say so myself, this is a truly fascinating audio interview with Molly E. Holzschlag of Molly.com

Molly, who is one of the top speakers on web design and development - confessed on her blog last week that she was sitting in her London hotel room with “a minibar full of alcohol, and 80 Lorazepam tablets (2 milligrams each) and 100 friends within a mile radius,” and that she was suffering from a deep depression. She went on to write frankly about series of personal problems.(Counting the Coup Telling True)

She was inundated with responses on her blog, as well as emails and phone calls from friends who were truly worried about her. The very next day she appeared at the @media and gave one of the best presentations of her career.

In the interview, she says of the decision to blog about her problems:

“It was a turning point in my whole process. That night I didn’t know that I had the courage to live another day.”

I think this goes to the heart of what blogging is all about. Here we have a leading professional in her field who has used her blog to enhance her reputation for expertise. At the same time, she writes on a deeply personal level, and has an amazingly close relationship with readers around the world, many of whom she has never met before.

It’s worth a listen, and makes up for my first disasterous attempt to interview Molly last Christmas. The duration is around 10 minutes.

Many thanks to Ian Forrester for organising the @Media social event where I met Molly.

Thought you might find this an interesting demo of what opml can do. Thanks to Tom whom I met at a @media get-together today. Tom is an OPML enthusiast and a philosophy student. You can browse the folders…then dig deeper… See what happens… It’s not entirely obvious,but the arrows on the left sidebar are for going back. Top right to get an expandable pop-up.

Please don’t take offence if you are my best friend and your blog is not here. It’s just a demo of what OPML can do when it comes to organising stuff. Hope you are as impressed as I am.

Dear Bill,

We read that you have a vacancy for a blogger. We would be willing to consider filling this position as a job share, provided that you can afford Blog Relations daily rate, details of which are available on application.

Yours

Hugh and Matthew

P.S. We hope you do not hold us responsible for Robert Scoble’s departure from your employment. We asked him last December if he would ever consider leaving Microsoft. The audio of what he said is here.

Until now, I don’t think I have heard of a well-known business getting a blog relations campaign just right, let alone one aimed at kids. The pitfalls for non-blogging adults are numerous, especially when it comes to tone. But this is a first.

Penguin’s top title in their Puffin range for children is Artemis Fowl. I haven’t read any of the Artemis books (yet) but the hero is high tech and supernatural all at the same time. When Penguin wanted to tell Artemis’s numerous fans about his new website, they needed to do it on budget. They employed a graduate to spend a few days researching the top Artemis bloggers on Technorati. The first idea was to write to the young fans under the guise of Artemis, but then they realised that this would hit a false note. So they sent out some plain honest emails. So you see, the art of Blog Relations, isn’t so hard. Still, most corporations can’t accept that it’s that simple.

Anna Rafferty, head of Penguin.co.uk tells the story in this 6 minute audio interview. It’s my last from the online marketing show.

Download the interview with Anna Rafferty