Nomenlocation
Charles Anders may have coined the term nomenlocation for his story at SH "Not to Mention Jack"; I'm not sure. But I like the word a lot and have appropriated it for my own use.
Y'see, when someone makes a link to SH, and someone else follows that link, the referring page shows up on a referrers list at NedStat. And I go through that referrers list fairly obsessively, often glancing at it once or twice a day, and I follow links back to places that link to us. Which means that if anyone mentions SH and provides a link in a public forum, chances are reasonably good that I'll see it; and there's been more than once that I've then posted a comment to such a forum.
So it's somewhere between nomenlocation and James "Kibo" Parry's technique of reading Usenet by grepping for his name. (Apparently Kibo pronounces the i like eye rather than like ee. Weird.) Mention us, and we appear. I commented on that in a posting to one forum after Marsha Sisolak posted a link to us; she then posted another link in her journal with a comment to the effect that she knew I'd be stopping by. I was very amused.
(And it wasn't 'til just now, Googling for that entry of Marsha's, that I discovered that Charlie reads my journal. Hi, Charlie!)
Anyway, I was thinking about this stuff tonight partly because I followed a link back to John Teehan's ReaderCon 14 con report, which must've just gone up sometime in the past 24 hours or so, and which includes a picture of Mary Anne at the con, with a link to SH. And, I dunno, there's nothing really unusual about that sort of thing these days, but (perhaps because I just finished reading Vernor Vinge's Hugo-nominated novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" (now available for free download from those fine folks at Fictionwise!) and have connectivity on the brain) everything's seeming particularly intertwingled and high-tech tonight. Like, Mary Anne attended a convention this past weekend 3000 miles away from here, and already there's not only a picture of her from the con on the Web, but I found it without having to search for it. Is that cool, or am I just being atavistic tonight?
All of which reminds me of something I've been meaning to mention for a while: Google Bombing. The idea is that Google considers the text of links as part of its ranking of page relevance. So if you link to, say, the Exploratorium Web page, and your link text is cool stuff, then Google (after scanning the page where you have that link) will raise the Exploratorium page's ranking in a search for the phrase "cool stuff." If a whole bunch of people provide such links using the same phrase, it can have a clear effect on Google rankings.
So, here's a question: is Google Bombing a legitimate advertising technique?
If you Google (and I'm amused that the word's become a verb recently) for the phrase "speculative fiction magazine" (with or without quotes), Strange Horizons comes up in the top four listings, which I find immensely gratifying. (In fact, SH and Deep Outside are the only two currently extant prozines that appear on the first page of results.) But if you search for "online speculative fiction magazine" (with or without quotes), SH doesn't appear anywhere in the first few pages of results. (Though if you search with quotes, the first page does include pages of both mine and Mary Anne's in which we mention SH.) And if you search for "speculative fiction" (with or without quotes), we appear on page 3 of the results.
Now, clearly there are many links to SH on the Web. (In fact, quite a few of the pages that come up with the abovementioned searches contain links to us.) But presumably most people are following good linking practices and using the magazine's title as the text of a link.
Would it be unethical to suggest that people instead use the phrase "online speculative fiction magazine" as the link text?
I'm not really comfortable with that; feels too much like subverting Google, which is an excellent resource, for selfish ends. But what about suggesting that people add the word "online" if they're already using the phrase "speculative fiction magazine"? I'm less sure about that one. (Note: this is all a thought experiment; I'm not actually advocating that anyone go out and provide such links to us.)
Of course, all of this is probably silly; I have no idea whether anyone would search for the phrase "online speculative fiction magazine" at Google. I suspect that's less likely than searching on "speculative fiction magazine," where we already rank high; and I suspect that there are enough links to us at this point that anyone who's actively seeking out online sf magazines will find us pretty quickly.
But still, the urge to tinker runs strong in this one.
A long and babbling entry. Time for me to go do other stuff.