Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Welcome, Allan Wan!

I hope that title doesn’t cripple your quest for #1 :)  Friend and entrepreneur-at-heart Allan Wan is getting back in the game with a weblog redesign and host of new projects to mark his territory on this vast web we weave daily.  His early start for 10 month old daughter Ima should make her a star when she finally joins the online world :)

Allan’s quest for #1 has inspired me to do the same.  How many people with a name like Matthew Romaine could there possibly be?  Turns out there’s at least one in Florida with a blogspot url.  A few years ago Googling for “Matthew Romaine” pulled up numerous articles about a Wyoming murder; now the top hit is to an archive of scientific papers because I co-wrote a SIGCHI paper during my days at Xerox PARC (now PARC, Inc.).  But this was 5 years ago – a century in Internet time.  Must. Produce. More.

Even the shortened “Matt Romaine” doesn’t put me at #1 – instead, the top link is to another project I worked on in grad school (and the second link is to my Friendster profile, which I haven’t updated in ages!).  I say, the weighting for these other sites is way too high; distinguishing these differences should be a trivial problem for the Goog.  I’ve got meta tags, the url, and my name peppered throughout this site.  How else to optimize?  Ooh, looks like matthewromaine.com is available!  Not anymore.

Should I redirect, or mirror?  How does Google handle redirects for rank weightings?