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It will become even more important than today to be able to influence what people find when they google your name. Eventually, they will find out everything you publicly wrote or said and many things you did in public places. Search engines will not only turn up the stupid questions you posted on forums 20 years ago, but also recognize you in pictures of frat parties 30 years ago.

But then again, it's only the top 10 finds that really matter. Most people never click through to page 2, let alone page 30. So what do you want to have on top? Google just announced that using your Google Profile, you will be allowed some influence in what appears on top for your name search. Also, you can place your blog as a validated link on the profile page. As this link has no rel=nofollow attribute, I would think that it will boost the page rank.

I also kind of like the way they make your Google Reader shared items appear.

A colleague pointed out that my iGoogle gadget for looking at the live search behavior on funda.nl, while cool, would be better implemented as a mapplet. I guess that this it true for most gadgets that have a map as their main UI. So this morning, while sick in bed, I looked over the docs for mapplets. Turns out to be really easy to convert a gadget to a mapplet: they basically are gadgets with a shared map to interact with. So with half an hour of playing around, I have a working mapplet version. It seems to be OK, but the title bar keeps blinking and the performance of the map seems less than in the gadget version. If anyone has any tips to improve this, please comment.