The nature of meaning in the age of Google

Some choice quotes

The nature of meaning in the age of Google. Google, Indexing, Web, Meaning: "Pity the poor Web author! Condemned to a culture of ignorance and denied any direct assertion of meaning of her content! She is encouraged to act naturally, constructing her Web content and linking to Web pages of interest. Acting naturally, however, is not without hazard in a rapidly changing, technologically complex environment where it is easy to do something 'neat' that inadvertently makes your content unpalatable to the visiting Googlebot. There is a fine line between using technology to jazz up your Web page and using technology that unintentionally limits the aggregation of your content...

The irony of constructing content for the open Web is not knowing how aggregators will use it. Any trick you employ to reduce your ignorance (i.e., you successfully spam the Googlebot) will be ultimately neutralized, throwing you back to the position of total ignorance:

Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts. (Google Information for Webmasters).

Google has always disdained structured metadata in the open Web as bad faith:Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have largely failed with Web search engines, because any text on the page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to manipulate search engines. There are even numerous companies which specialize in manipulating search engines for profit. (Brin & Page, 1998)...

In its latest makeover, Google also tweaked the closely guarded formula that determines which Websites are most relevant to a search request. Google has made five significant changes to its algorithmic formulas in the past two weeks, Brin said. (Liedtke, 2004, February 18).
I argue the need for a survival guide for Web authors (without attempting to provide one here). A survival guide helps someone survive, largely by avoiding hazards, as opposed to being a bag of tricks for besting someone else...

The need for a survival guide becomes compelling when you witness someone writing for the Web, but doing it in a manner that offends the Googlebot. Google has a list of technological hazards to avoid such as Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML and Flash. The penalty of inhibiting the Googlebot is limiting the exposure of your work. One would think that poets would be anxious to place their work before a large public, but consider the submission guidelines of Poems That Go:

Poems that Go publishes Web-specific new media, hypermedia, and electronic poetry, prose, and short narrative. We are open to all forms of multimedia, computer-generated, and interactive work that include (but are not limited to) HTML, Shockwave, Quicktime, streaming media, Flash, Java, and DHTML content. Because Poems that Go focuses on how sound, image, motion, and interactivity intersect with literary uses of the Web, we regretfully do not accept text-based poetry or written work in the traditional sense. (Submission guidelines).
Such is the gulf that exists between creating cool stuff for the Web and preparing something appetizing for the Googlebot."