Remember Blogchalking?

It appears that Daypop has disabled the "blogchalk" keyword. All blogchalk searches now come up empty.

I rather suspected the search engine sites might not take kindly to this sort of direct manipulation of their engines, however well-meaning. It still works on Google, but we'll see how long that lasts.

07-16-2002 UPDATE: The blogchalk keyword appears to be back in action over at Daypop, so maybe it was just a bug, or maybe they have reversed their position and taken a sunnier view of the blogchalking phenomenon. We'll see.

I still think this practice will eventually be rejected by most search engines, though, or if not, it will eventually become useless, for the reasons so succinctly expressed by Kenan in the comments on this post.

I just like having the cute little wild-haired icon. It looks like a lemming.

Alas, I learned of this too late to participate, but check out the fruits of Photo Day, a collaborative documentary photo-blogging project taking place today.

I haven't put in any political commentary for a while, and I really have little to say about the federal government's new Operation TIPS program that Tom Tomorrow hasn't already said better, so go pay his site a visit.

I will say this: I predict that some 90% of their calls will be bogus tips from truckers or truckers' spouses/partners who are angry at their other half for cheating on them while one of them is on the road. Nine of the remaining ten percent will be needlessly alarmist calls about some very mild case of constitutionally-protected dissent.

The upshot being that more than anything this program will waste taxpayer money while creating a needlessly intrusive and ill-foreboding system of citizen informants.

Who needs that? Definitely not me.