I sabotaged my blog!

I think Google might have banned my blog! I had become master (the #1 return) of one of my search terms "UW Bothell Blog", but now I am not even listed at all. In an effort to increase my page rank, I had made three dummy sites from free webhosting services that contained links to my blog. I was doing some research with Google (go figure) about how the page rank system works and I found out that they will ban sites if they think people are making pages just to increase their page rank. OOPS! Anyways, I've been trying to get more people to traffic my blog and post on it. I haven't had very much luck, although one of my professors was kind enough to set up a link to my blog from his personal page. I've decided to make another blog, one that will have a greater number of possible visitors. I figure that only so many people are interested in UW Bothell, so my new blog will be something that people from all over might be interested in. My ideas so far are the Middle East conflict and drink recipes. Maybe I'll combine the two, because who doesn't want a few cocktails after reading about how messed up things are in the Middle East? Another blog idea I have is a financial blog, it would primarily focus on the stock market and stocks that I think will perform well in the near future. My original idea was a stock blog, but there are so many competitors out there for search optimization. Although now that Google appears to have banned my other blog from their search results, what have I got to lose?

I was looking around the internet last night for information about what the hot trends are in the internet. I came across the page http://www.webtalkradio.com/news/000024.shtml which lists the “ten hottest internet trends for 2005”. Although we’re half way through 2006, I found the page very interesting. Here are the trends that they listed:

1. MOBILE DIGITAL MEDIA EXPLODES
2. WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY GROWS FASTER
3. MOST NETIZENS BECOME DIGITAL CONTENT CREATORS
4. MOBLOGS BECOME ALL THE RAGE
5. MEDIA SEARCH & ELECTRONIC IPTV PROGRAM GUIDES CONVERGE
6. LOCAL / GEOGRAPHICAL WEB SEARCH
7. WEBLOGS BECOME SPONSOR SUPPORTED MAJOR MEDIA SOURCES
8. EMAIL MAINTAINS "KILLER APPLICATION" STATUS AGAINST INSTANT MESSENGER FOR NOW
9. MOBILE WEB AND MOBILE STREAMING MEDIA GROWS
10. EMERGENCE OF UNLIKELY GEEK MEDIA STARS ONLINE

I also found a cnet article that seems a little dated, it lists the top ten internet fads. Blogger is on there at number nine! They were pretty funny, I recognized 8 of the 10 fads. How many do you remember? All your base are belong to us! hahaha
http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6268155-1.html