Fun with Google Sidewiki

I don’t know if I am thrilled or disappointed yet with Google Sidewiki. Google’s new public “slambook.” I like the disruptive, democratic aspects of being able to “tag” anyone’s web page but I’m not thrilled about having yet another thing to check on all my pages. I did discover a little twink too that I’ll share with you. When I first discovered Sidewiki, I went to the site and claimed our primary site so I could put a permalink at the top of the page. You do that with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done it yet I recommend doing it now. By putting a meta tag you can write the always topmost sidewiki entry.

The hiccup I ran into is I originally added www.netfishbowl.com so when I accessed it at netfishbowl.com the comments weren’t there. A little quirky, I can’t check if deleting the www still covers the subdomain just yet. It takes 24 hours to kick in.

I also went to other pages, I’m NOT the webmaster of and tried to add the first sidewiki entry there too. Just in case some clever chap wanted to bash me secretly. This brings up my other “scary” moment with Google sidewiki. On my Xackr twitter page I wrote a banal “hi there” entry. And when I went back I got this…

I hadn’t seen this before on the other posts I made. The yellow block suggesting my entry “may be less useful” was new. I would guess because it is short and maybe at some algorithmic lower reading level, it doesn’t meet up to their standards maybe?

Which leads to the bigger question. Someday in the near future will I be adapting what I say and do to please the robots at Google? I know we already do to get our pages ranked higher but me on my own twitter page? Seems a tad F’dUp.

On pages that are “mine” but I’m not the webmaster on – like http://www.twitter.com/xackr. This could be source of concern. You can’t really choose to opt out because you have to manage your “brand”. And technically they could say they are not modifying the page. The only recourse I can imagine at this point is that Xackr is my copyright and they must be using it to tag their sidewikis but I can’t imagine how I could (or even if I would want to) pursue that.

Again, I’m not opposed to sidewiki. I’m not even down on Google yet. I love and use a lot of their stuff. Xackr.com is a Google app. I do pause at the idea of being so into it, that I don’t step back and keep perspective on it.

Finally, if you really want to help me, are a Firefox user, have the Google Toolbar and have sidewiki – go to http://www.twitter.com/xackr and rank my comment useful. It will really help my sagging self esteem.