The desire to read minds. And the moment it does, everyone will be screaming about the privacy implications.

The idea that folks think they can blog and nobody is listening is ludicrous. It can cost you your job and cost you your home. And if you have committed a crime, and you admit it on your blog, it can cost you your freedom.

People writing in weblogs need to understand that their content is being syndicated (via RSS) and archived (via search engine) with incredible speed. If you want to remain obscure (for whatever reason) you should turn off your feed and learn a little bit about a file on your server call “.htaccess.”

Otherwise, don’t write at all.

Silicon Valley Watcher has highlighted what many are already talking about - the gaming of search engine results for fun and profit. As I mentioned yesterday, there seems to be alot of funky search results popping up on engines all over, and I suspected this was happening on an unprecedented scale.

In the post, entitled The purity of search results challenges Google and offers an opening to rivals, SVW points out the wish that SEOs would just die. I think it is up to the search engines to kill them - there is just too much money at play for them to just walk away (hence the term “wish”).

But the article does point out a new engine for shopping services started by the former MySimon folks. Become.com claims to have a “game proof” algorithm, and seem to be taking hacking seriously, by doing it themselves and patenting the technology results. Very interesting indeed.

I think I will have to root for Become.com just because they are an obvious late-coming, underdog in the party. The confidence they present and the proactive approach (at least in theory) is deserving of, at minimum, a preliminary thumbs up.