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03/02/2006: "Morning Thoughts - From Drudge to Microsoft and Back to Starbucks and Sun Tzu."

I get up at 4:00 every morning. I drink strong Starbucks coffee and read the news on the laptop. The Wall Street Journal doesn't arrive until 6:00. I read a chapter in Sun Tzu's The Art of War before lifting weights and doing the treadmill. During all this I'm getting ideas. I'm thinking. Plotting. Planning. My mother used to ask, "What trouble are you thinking up this morning?" I've always been a morning person. Perhaps it's because I was born in the morning. Or perhaps it's just the way nature made me. But I like it. I have a full day in by noon.

This morning I was thinking about the Drudge Report. I'm not sure why I was thinking about Drudge but my mind is like that. It leads and I follow. I was thinking why exactly Drudge has a Google pagerank of 7 last time I looked and yet when you do a google or yahoo on Bush or Clinton or something else that's always newsworthy the Drudge Report never comes up.

Oh The New York Times and The Washington Post comes up. And some popular blogs come up. So what does pagerank really mean? Nothing. No Thing.

And why exactly doesn't Drudge ever come up in search? All it is is a page of links, that's why. Once and awhile he'll have an original article. He's credited, for example, with breaking the Monica Lewinsky - Bubba story. And I'll admit that lots of people hit the Drudge page daily --- myself included. But only because you want to see if Drudge has another exclusive and also because he has all the good news links in one neat place.

Bottom line? Pagerank doesn't mean much at all. Lots of low page rank sites get lots of high search engine placement. What really matters is original content. Lots of it. You gotta' keep those presses running.

And then on to . . .

And so I read this morning that Microsoft claims it will soon unveil a better search engine than Google. Well that shouldn't be hard. The results one gets with Google leave much to be desired and Microsoft is already a superior search tool. I personally hope Microsoft pulls it off. Google has gotten a bit big headed. Too many people put too much importance in it.

I guess that's what this post today is all about. Many times things seem much more important than they really are. We start paying too much attention to one or two things and before you know it, what's really important hits us in the head like a blackjack.

I wonder what Sun Tzu would say about that?