United Airlines stock temporarily dropped a *billion* in value, apparently on the basis of a Google news routine that surfaced an OLD bankruptcy filing story that made it to Bloomberg which then created a stir in investment circles.

Still reading the details of this story,but it looks to me like support for the idea that the stock market incorporates news in ways that can be dysfunctional.    A common misconception is that insiders are making all the money when in fact many insiders actually *cannot* trade as easily as outsiders thanks to SEC rules.  However you’d have to be naive to think that there are not many abuses in the system – mostly I think from complex, quasi-legal arbitraging of huge positions by the big players.

KFC, Beijing Style
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

My travel buddy and were talking about how much we were missing the China food even though at the time we were only moderately impressed.

I sure miss the amazing diversity of Chinese restaurants in China….

OK, we didn’t eat here but we did eat ….. Mc Here

Oregon’s Coast

Oregon Coast
Originally uploaded by anneh632

Oregon!   It’s about time to do a website and blog dedicated to my favorite state, Oregon, and there is no better place to start than with a series of posts about the Oregon Coast.    The blog will have some of the most frequently updated insider travel content in the state, and I’m hoping to get some of the photographers and fellow Oregonians (or other travel friends) to add posts and comments.

I’ll start with my profile of the Oregon Coast, Oregon’s most globally recognized feature and arguably the USA’s most beautiful coastline.   Although the Washington Coastline is pretty, in my pretty well informed travel opinion only the California Coast compares to Oregon’s.   In fact geologically the California and Oregon Coast are similar in structure and scenery from about Santa Cruz to Astoria (disagreements are welcome in the comments!).    Oregon however lacks the warmth of the long sandy beaches you’ll find around places like Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego.    Still, for pure coastal scenery I’d vote for Oregon over California, though I’d have to admit that the Big Sur area around Carmel, California might tip the hat over our great Oregon Coast in a tiebreaker for some people.

I should also note that part of this Oregon Experience adventure, especially the Oregon Coast part, is an attempt to better understand how Google will rank my Oregon website and blog.    Theoretically Google is interested in ranking the “best resources” at the top of the listings and for terms like “Oregon Coast” they have done a fairly good job to date, though as with most geographical references Google omits a lot of websites and pages that a person would likely want to see if search provided user optimal results.   The algorithm continues to heavily weight the appearance of the keyword in the content combined with an increasing number of incoming links (known as IBLs or “In Bound Links” in search optimizing circles)  that have the query term e.g. “Oregon Coast”.   A major challenge for Google is that a few years ago a huge industry sprung up buying and selling links as webmasters realized that the fastest way to optimize a website was to buy links at pages with high “pagerank” values.    This led to a very severe crackdown by Google and many changes to the algorithm in an attempt to ferret out paid links that were bought for ranking rather than traffic purposes (yes, the definition of “paid link” remains contentious), penalize sites that were ranked well due to paid links, and use of the “nofollow” tag which is a webmaster’s signal to Google that the link with that tag is not to send “authority” to the linked website.

Although buying links for pagerank will work in some cases to improve site rankings, it is such a risky strategy that almost anybody reading this post should NOT do this.   Rather I’d recommend you focus your attention on creating blogs related to your topic with highly relevant content and participating in the massive shift to online social networking which, when it stablizes in a few years, will lead to ranking algorithms that work much better than the current ones, based on real online voting patterns rather than Google’s initial brilliancy-that-no-longer-works-well which was to count links as “votes” for a website.

CNN’s Global Public Square is featuring the crisis in Georgia, where Russian troops continue to occupy parts of Georgia despite international concerns about the situation.

President Shaakashvili is a very appealing figure who took over leadership of Georgian in the non-violent “rose rebellion” which was spawned by the corruption during the Shevardnadzi Presidency, the first after Georgia’s independence from Russia.     He speaks five languages and attended US universities.  These western sensibilities make Shaakasvilli a powerful advocate for western intervention to stop Russia’s aggression even as Russia continues to maintain that they are responding to the desires of oppressed peopel in South Ossetia.

Russia’s justification for their invasion and desire to annex the Georgia provinces known as “South Ossetia” appears to be ongoing conflict there between Georgia loyalists and those who want South Ossetia to break away from Georgia  (not clear if those insurgents want to be part of Russia or just want Russian help to break away).

I’ve not studied this issue enough but it appears to me that Russia is doing a complicated dance here, trying to take over these provinces before Georgia becomes part of NATO next year  (which would make the Russian invasion almost equivalent to an act of war against the west) and testing Western resolve to intercede on behalf of Georgia early in the process and while the US remains entangled in other interventions around the globe.    It’s a high stakes game that Russia appears to be “winning” so far.

Here in America our attention seems to be focused mostly on the Presidential Election and the Iraq War, even as many other parts of the world fall into greater instability than we’ve seen in some time.    Georgia is reviving the cold war tensions many thought were behind us while Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of very unstable and hostile forces.    Even Afghanistan is reeling under renewed violence from a Taliban insurgency strengthened over the past few years as international attention has focused elsewhere.

Obama?   McCain?    Are you sure you want the big job?

Interesting set of blog posts by Nadja1, a contractor on the oil pipeline