Okay, I’m still reading How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack, but this much is clear:
PageRank is complicated.
My motivation for posting this is entirely selfish. Next time someone asks “can you tell Google to put my page at the top?” I can reply “that all depends on your eigenvalues, here’s a link.”
I don’t know about you, but in my experience, using the word eigenvalue usually puts an end to any conversation. 
From great comments and questions comes great fodder for blog posts.
The first question comes from yesterday’s post on search engines. Chris asks:
But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?
Why do I need a blog? Aren’t they just a tool for armchair politicos and people who want to post pictures of their cat?
While there are plenty of those sorts of blogs, there are plenty of reasons to blog in the corporate world. Heck, you’re reading one right now! In Why business blogs are important, you can read all about the reasons to blog.
Some of the reasons include knowledge transfer among employees (best practices and the like), to develop stronger customer relationships (with, oh I don’t know, alumni and prospective students), and to attract the best employees (hey, these folks are experts, I want to work for them!).
It’s a good read. Another good read is The Artful Manager, a blog by the Bolz Center’s own Andrew Taylor. If you were wondering, “what kind of blog should I have?” then you should read Andrew’s blog and see a master at work.
