If you are a user of the internet (which you are) then you have to be really careful what you publish on it. Even if you think you can’t delete something, you can’t. While on the screen it looks like it’s disappeared, in reality there is a huge probability that all of the data will remain somewhere.

The most well-known example is Google Cache, which is the copy of each document on the web that Google uses to assess whether or not it is helpful to your search. This can also be used by anyone who wants to see what used to be on a page that has since been deleted or changed, if Google’s bot visited the page at the right time.

Another example is the Wayback Machine which literally visits web pages and archives them. Forever. Internet users can — to a point — browse the web as it was even in the mid-1990s. For example, here is the Microsoft website as it was in 1996.

But it is not just huge central databases like Google that can thwart self-censors. Everyday internet users are doing it all the time. Thanks to the popularity of RSS, there is now little chance that anyone who publishes an RSS feed will ever be able to hide their content. Anyone who is subscribed to your RSS feed has access to that content for as long as they want.

If you use a desktop-based RSS reader the files will actually be on your computer. But I use Google Reader, and I have access to every single blog post written by Gavin Yates since the 29^th of May 2007. It looks like the Sunday Herald have as well, and possibly more.

Gavin Yates is Wendy Alexander’s new head of communications, a job which seems to be somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Brian Lironi left the post just a few days after Wendy Alexander took office, seemingly because he was fed up with the new Scottish Labour leader.

Then last week Matthew Marr was given the heave-ho after a drunken performance at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards (a bit oxymoronic if you ask me). Particular attention was given to the fact that Mr Marr called Alex Salmond a cunt. While a lot of bloggers pointed out that he was probably right, it’s not very good conduct and you would expect much better behaviour from such an important Labour official.

And while Mr Marr was keen to point out that the incident was “entirely out of character”, bloggers lined up to say that it was in character. Mr Eugenides was “reliably informed”, while Osama Saeed and Mark McDonald have both been at the receiving end of one of Marr’s verbal outbursts.

Now Gavin Yates has run into difficulties before he’s even started. Some of what he wrote on his blog has been less than flattering about Labour and Wendy Alexander, as the Sunday Herald story points out.

The thing is, this needn’t be a problem. Surely a bit of reality, a bit of honesty, is what Wendy Alexander and Scottish Labour really need. I do wonder, though, if the culture within the party means that only yes-men are tolerated. This is presumably what drove Gavin Yates to delete his blog. Yet, as usual, it is the cover-up rather than the original ‘crime’ which makes this an embarrassing episode for Labour.

As Will P points out, Gavin Yates’s excuse does not make sense.

My comments have been taken out of context. I wrote them as a journalist in July and they do not reflect my own views. I think Wendy Alexander is a winner as is Andy Kerr.

A blog that doesn’t reflect your own views? Whose views do they reflect then? Nor was this just a few posts in July as he tries to make out. He was critical of Labour as recently as September.

But as I say, there really is nothing particularly damning about the blog posts themselves. Skimming through the archives of his blog, the criticisms he made of Labour were mostly sensible and constructive. He didn’t say anything that is truly embarrassing.

Like I say, it could have been seen as a much-needed dose of reality for the Scottish Labour elite. In fact, his blog posts demonstrate that he has a pretty good idea of the SNP’s strengths as well as Labour’s weaknesses. This ought to bode well for him in his new post.

It is the fact that Gavin Yates felt the need to delete his blog that makes it the story. It has become the forbidden fruit. But in this day and age, once you publish something on the web, there is no going back. I alone have access to 48 of his posts, just by making a few clicks in Google Reader. By deleting his blog, Gavin Yates has created a lot of interest in what he wrote — and access to it is by no means impossible.

Another blogger, Kezia Dugdale, filled the post on an temporary basis. She made the very wise decision of keeping her blog going (although there is seemingly never any danger of her going off-message). Gavin Yates should have taken note. Keeping your blog up there will do less harm than trying to remove it — because actually removing it is impossible.

It is amusing to think that for all the hype about bloggers and their ability to scrutinise, it could be your own blog, rather than other people’s, that is the most dangerous.

Some bloggers are in a flap at the moment because Google has seemingly manually downgraded the PageRank of some websites. The reason appears to be that the websites in question sell paid links.

Some of the websites in question are pretty big. Washington Post, Engadget, Weblog Tools Collection, Joystiq, Problogger.

This blog also sells text links, although I don’t think I’ve been hit by Google’s bitch-slapper. My PageRank at the moment is 5, which I think is what it was before. I don’t actually know, because I don’t really care about my PageRank as much as, say, my Technorati authority or the number of visitors.

Anyway. There are text link adverts on this blog. I was aware that the people who were buying the links were almost certainly more concerned about “buying” a better ranking on Google than something such as click through rates or trying to reach out to the readers of this blog.

But I hate to see junk results on Google, for sure. But do I feel guilty about selling links that contribute to this? No. It is individually rational for me to sell these links, despite the fact that I detest the method.

Why? Because if I am selling the links, I make money from them. If I am not selling the links, Google results are still equally junky because so many other people are doing the same thing. So I have two choices. Either I live with junky Google results and make no money, or I live with junky Google results and make some money. It’s a no-brainer.

Funny, though, how the changes leave Google AdSense completely unaffected! What a coincidence. When you look at how Text Link Ads (probably AdSense’s only real competitor) has been penalised to hell by Google, it begins to look like hypocrisy at best and a powerful Google using its might for “evil” means at worst.

However, it is understandable if Google takes a hard-line stance. They strive to have the best search engine on the internet, so of course they will do everything in their power to stop the “sale of PageRank”.

Their latest moves probably change the landscape a bit. It might put some advertisers off, but I doubt it will put any webmasters off. For as long as the webmasters make one penny more by selling adverts than by not, they will continue to sell adverts.

Of course, the reduction in PageRank could mean fewer people visiting via Google’s search engine. But I doubt many webmasters will be licking their wounds over that. From my point of view, for sure Google accounts for about two thirds of visitors to this website. But that is the least valuable two thirds (I don’t mean ‘valuable’ in monetary terms here, I mean in terms of their contribution to the website).

People who visit this website via Google view fewer pages than an average visitor. They are more likely to take one look at one page and then swiftly leave, never to be seen again. They spend an astonishing 30% less time on this blog than the average visitor. According to Rhys, he gets hardly any visitors from Google in the first place.

So if my PageRank takes a battering, I won’t be too bothered about it. Because Google provides none of the things that I value about blogging. Regular visitors are more likely to come via a link on another blog. And the best comments come from regular readers rather than the flash-in-the-pan visitors who might leave personal abuse then exit and forget all about this blog.

Come to think of it, I am the same when I use Google. I never expect to find the best websites by going to Google. If something is worth reading, I am likely to hear of it by word of mouth, either by reading other blogs or via links from my friends on Delicious, or whatever.

Meanwhile, if I want specific information, I am much more likely to search for it on Wikipedia rather than Google. Wikipedia might not be 100% reliable, but Google’s reliability is surely even worse. If I want a primer on any topic, Wikipedia usually gives me what I want.

What’s more, the links on Wikipedia are usually more relevant. Spam links are swiftly removed by the community of users. How many times has Wikipedia led you to a link farm compared to Google?

If I want information on a band I go to either Last.fm or Discogs. If I want to look up a word I use either Dictionary.com, Chambers of Urban Dictionary. Etc, etc. I know I still sometimes use Google, but what for? I can’t remember the last time I used Google search as anything except a last resort.

Yesterday I looked at the dilemma facing a blogging job hunter (ie. me). Should I put my blog on my CV?

Rhys Wynne and Rich Minx think that blogging gives you lots of skills that employers find desirable. The Devil’s Kitchen has added his thoughts here and asks if there are any more skills that anyone can think of.

I can think of plenty. Not all of these are necessarily skills that employers may be looking for. Some of the items show how I have improved as a person as well. Warning: I have removed my modesty cloak.

Here is the list.

Twenty reasons why I will put my blogs on my CV

1. Blogging has improved my writing skills

   When I started blogging at the age of 16, my writing was awful. Over time, I have learned how to better communicate my opinions. Not all of that is just down to me becoming smarter as I get older. While I like to think that I am now a fairly good writer, I am still not a very good speaker (in fact, I may have become a worse speaker — my speaking grades were always my best in English). My recent appearance on the radio shows this.

   Clearly, I have had a lot of practice at writing by now. But I have also learned from other bloggers’ bad writing. It is true that a lot of blogs are not very well written. As such, I have read a lot of bad writing. This has taught me the value of good writing. Reading bad writing teaches you how to write well much more than good writing does. So I have learned from the mistakes of others as well as my own.

2. It has taught me to be less narcissistic

   Contrary to the stereotype of self-obsessed bloggers typing away to themselves in their LiveJournals, blogging has actually taught me to be less narcissistic. Over the years I have learned that if I write obsessively about myself, it is a massive turn-off for readers.

   If you were to trawl through the archives of this blog stretching back almost five years (I do not recommend doing this), you would find plenty of terrible, self-obsessed, introspective blog posts that are unreadably embarrassing. You don’t find me writing as much about my personal life these days because these posts were almost always ignored by my readers.

   This does not mean that writing about myself is a no-go area. This post, for instance, is all me me me. Writing about your personal life is necessarily bad. A lot of the time it can be really good; rewarding for both the reader and the writer. But this only happens if you have got an interesting story to tell and a deft way of telling it. I usually don’t have an interesting story to tell, and I have learned to accept this.

3. It has taught me to think about my audience

   Related to the above point, blogging has taught me how to take others into account. Rather than using my blog as a place to let off steam, I now think to myself, “Will this be interesting to anyone else?” This is because my moody emotional rants were ignored by readers, and they usually looked embarrassing to me by the next day.

4. It has helped me build relationships and “network”

   The blogosphere is essentially the world’s biggest social network. When I link to or leave a comment on another blog, and they do the same to my blog in return, essentially a relationship is being formed. As such, blogging has taught me how to cultivate important relationships better. (More on this below.)

5. It has made me become tolerant of other people’s views

   While online communities are usually famous for their trolls, I think blogging has actually made me a more reasoned and civil debater. Reading blogs has also taught me much more about political ideologies and philosophy than three years of studying economics and politics at university. I now have a much better understanding and appreciation of political views that I do not agree with.

6. It has made me more thick-skinned

   Even if I have become more civil, that doesn’t mean that others have. Anonymous trolls can say incredibly spiteful things, and even those who are not anonymous can be startlingly robust. Being the recipient of blunt comments and emails over the years has taught me how to deal with angry people when I am in the right and how to take it on the chin when I am in the wrong.

7. It has made me a better researcher

   On a blog, if you are making a point you have to back it up with evidence for it to hold any sway. Over the years I have learned how to find what I am looking for. This might sound trivial. After all, anyone can use Google. But there is a knack to it. Plus, I have learned how to use various tools to keep track of interesting information. The number of long-lost articles that I have retrieved from my del.icio.us account is astonishing. In fact, I have done that very thing in the process of writing this post.

8. It has made me knowledgeable on an eclectic range of subjects

   My blog covers a range of subjects. This can work against the blog, as it does not have a coherent purpose or unifying theme. But it has worked in my favour personally. Thinking about ways to blog about a day’s events or news or little random thoughts that pop into your head can get you thinking about a wide variety of topics in ways that you may otherwise not have.

9. It shows commitment

   Despite the amazingly low barriers to entry, the blogosphere is still a tough place to thrive. Anyone who has started blogging knows this. In my first year or two of blogging, I was very close to completely giving up several times. It is a tough commitment for all kinds of reasons. Reading and responding to other blogs as well as promoting your blog are time consuming. Dealing with blogger’s block and those early days when nobody is reading can be demoralising. But I stuck at it and learned how to make blogging a routine activity.

10. It shows that I am good at time management

    Again, blogging is difficult if you have several activities on the go at once. As my life has become busier in the past couple of years, I have also learned how to juggle activities and prioritise. If this means having to let go of the blog for a bit, then so be it.

    Sadly, being busier than I used to be means that I do not blog as much as I used to. Hopefully I make up for this by going more in-depth when I do post.

    I still aim to write at least a few posts per week. During busy periods of your life, it can be difficult to dedicate enough time to your blog to stop it from going dormant. Keeping this in mind has improved my time management skills.

11. It has improved my self-discipline

    I don’t like to have draft posts sitting unpublished. If I have an idea, I want to get it out there. In essence, the deadline is now. This can mean blogging when I am not in the mood.

12. It shows that I can meet deadlines

    This point does not apply so much to this blog, which has no strict deadlines (only deadlines in the vague sense of the two points above). But Scottish Roundup is a different matter.

    At Scottish Roundup, a post is due to appear every Sunday. When it is my turn to write the roundup, I like to stick to this deadline strictly. The only way to do this is to spend Saturday night writing the post. It’s not the most fun way to spend a Saturday night. But I have a deadline to meet, so I’ll meet it.

13. It shows organisational skills

    Admittedly, I do not write every post at Scottish Roundup. I have brought on board other regular and guest writers. This means getting in contact with people and arranging who will be writing when, as well as discussing suggestions for improvements to the website.

14. It shows enterprise

    I can hardly take full credit for the idea of Scottish Roundup. I took inspiration from the Britblog Roundup and the Scottish Political Blogs Review. But I took the initiative to tweak those previous ideas to create a new website. I also had to work to promote the blog and encourage other bloggers to participate.

    Also, it is one thing to write for a publication (be it physical, online or whatever else). But it is quite another to set up your own publication and for it to be moderately successful.

15. $$$

    I have also learned how to make money from blogging. It is not a great deal of money, and nowhere near enough to even begin to dream of becoming a professional blogger. But it is surprising how much you can earn from doing something that you enjoy.

16. Attention from the mainstream media

    As a direct result of this blog, I have appeared on Radio Scotland three times and this week Radio 5 Live was added to the list. (There have been a few other missed opportunities too due to me not checking my email often enough and not having reception on my phone.) This blog has also been mentioned on BBC News Online, The Guardian, Telegraph.co.uk, Slate and The Herald. (Details on the Best of page.)

17. It has made me learn HTML and CSS

    I also had to design the theme for Scottish Roundup. I have designed several other themes and templates for my blogs over the years. The design of this page, as well as the writing on it, is all my own work.

18. It demonstrates computer literacy

    For obvious reasons.

19. It has taught me about search engine optimisation

    Search is mega important these days, and every company in the world wants to come at the top of relevant Google results. Over the years I have learned the various techniques that can help achieve this and I have gained a feel for the sort of things that Google likes about certain websites.

20. It has improved my problem-solving skills

    Because when something (in the template, with a plugin, etc) goes wrong, I need to take a long hard look at it, work out what has gone wrong, why it has gone wrong and how I can fix it.

It is not all good news though. Obviously the good outweighs the bad, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. But I have to recognise the downsides.

Three reasons why I might not put my blogs on my CV

Besides the ones I wrote about in the previous post.

1. For me, blogging hasn’t been social

   I mentioned above that blogging has helped me forge relationships. But these are all online relationships. Of all the great bloggers that I communicate with, I have not yet physically met a single one of them. The closest I have come is a few times when I was spotted by other people, but I didn’t realise until a comment was left on my blog! Also, I have never attended a blogmeet.

   On the bright side, this is not the case for everyone. Otherwise, blogmeets would not exist. Perhaps this is more a reflection of my personality rather than the fact that I am a blogger. I am a natural introvert. Plus, it is surely only a matter of time before I meet another blogger.

2. Am I getting enough fresh air?

   Okay, this is another unfair stereotype about bloggers. But I do mean this half-seriously. I mentioned above how difficult it can be to juggle various activities when you have a blog. So say you enter a busy period of your life. You have a number of extracurricular activities, but because you are busier one of them has to go.

   Maybe you like going on walks, occasionally visiting the pub with your friends and reading books. You also like blogging, and you are keeping in mind that readers may desert a dormant blog. So, which of these spare-time activities will get dropped? Sadly, it is natural that other mind-expanding and important activities get squeezed because you are prioritising your blog.

3. It only shows how I operate on my own terms

   Okay, so I can meet my own deadlines. But what about a deadline that someone else sets me? I can write about my own opinions. But would this necessarily make me good at, say, copy writing or journalism?

   In essence, being a good blogger demonstrates that I am a good blogger. But does it necessarily demonstrate that I would be good at doing similar work for other people? Possibly not.

So, what do you think about all of this? Is some of it a bit pie-in-the-sky? Are there any other pros and cons of putting blogging on your CV?

I should point out that several suggestions have already been posted on my previous post on this issue.

Here is something that I’ve been pondering about quite a bit recently. A few years ago it was all bad news for bloggers who have jobs. Getting sacked because of your blog stuck fear into so many that it the concept even spawned its own word: dooce.

People who have been dooced are not in short supply. There was Joe Gordon who wrote unflattering things about his employers. Rather more unfairly there was Petite Anglaise, who was seemingly sacked for merely existing. Or something. And of course there is Heather Armstrong.

Because of all this, there is a bit of a fear about employers discovering your blog. I guess that is a bit old-fashioned now. More salient is the issue of MySpace and Facebook accounts being discovered. Blogs must seem relatively benign compared to some MySpace profiles.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a dilemma. What do you do if you are a blogger who is hunting for a job? I am getting to the stage where I am starting to think seriously about this issue. By this time next year I am supposed to have graduated and be doing a proper job. I now have to contend with the fact that large swathes of my personal life and opinions are out there in the open.

I’m not upset or angry about that. I was always aware that it would be the case. But it’s an interesting problem to tackle. It is pretty much accepted that nowadays employers will Google job candidates as a basic check.

True, you could blog anonymously. But I let that cat out of the bag years ago. Anyone searching for my name will find my website, this blog and my accounts for Bebo, Jaiku and Twitter — all on the first page of results.

Thankfully, while the general advice to blogging workers a few years ago was to keep it under your hat, nowadays I am seeing more and more people saying that having a blog is actually a boost to your career prospects. I am still not entirely convinced. Sitting in a Web 2.0 bubble, it is easy to say that blogging is great. But in my day-to-day life I still feel as though blogging is something that many people scoff at.

I mean, it is probably fair to say that blogging is a hobby for me. And hobbies are generally spoddy, right? Trainspotting, stamp collecting, fishing. It’s okay to be a nerd if it’s a hobby. Yet I would probably still be more comfortable listing ‘philately’ as a hobby than ‘blogging’. If somebody asks me what I did last night I will usually say, “Oh, nothing really. Just relaxed a bit.” But in reality I probably spent three hours blogging.

That is not because I am ashamed of my blog. Far from it. But the fact is that if I was to say to somebody that one of my biggest achievements was my blog, people would think I was the most utterly lame person alive. “Oh, you’ve got a blog? I had one of them once. So, who reads your blog? Your mum?”

The unfortunate fact is that for most people out there, a blogger is at best a wannabe writer who is not talented enough to be a professional. At worst, a blogger is a rambling, incoherent, narcissistic teenager.

The crux of the matter is this. You and I know that blogging can be a pretty worthwhile activity. But what does the person reading my CV think?

It could go either way I guess. I am in a hairy situation because my CV is rather bare. And as excellent as my current workplace is, I am guessing that it will take a bit more than filling shelves to impress potential employers.

The truth is that blogging probably is one of my better achievements. It has certainly been my main extracurricular activity over the past few years. So I think I will throw caution to the wind and stick it on my CV. After all, chances are that they will find it via Google anyway. I am also convinced that my years of blogging has given me lots of skills. That is actual skills, not M4D 5K1LL5.

Rhys Wynne has blogged about the skills that he has gained from blogging. And, via Rhys Wynne, I have also found this list of useful skills that bloggers have.

I mostly agree with them. I will explain why tomorrow.

Update: I have now posted the list here.

After an astonishingly tinker-free summer, I have made a few changes on the blog.

Perhaps the most important is the reintroduction of the Best of page, which I hinted at a couple of months ago. This is just to attract attention to some of the notable posts I have written in the past. There is a huge number of archived posts here, so it is impossible for people to find the really good ones. Hopefully the Best of page will make it a bit easier.

The first section of the Best of page is what was there before I took it down. These are not posts that I have chosen, but posts that have attracted some kind of attention beyond what is normal. They have either been mentioned in the mainstream media, the Britblog Roundup (or a similarly prestigious blogging showcase) or used as a citation in Wikipedia. So if you’re a relatively new reader, why not check out some of these older posts?

If you scroll beyond that list, you will see something absolutely brand spanking new. After years of dithering about it, I have finally installed a post ratings plugin (WP-PostRatings).

I was looking for something a bit more like a thumbs-up / thumbs-down system, but I couldn’t find one, so we have a star ratings system (although I’m using squares because the stars look crap against the dark background). So please feel free to rate my posts as you read them — it only takes a click.

To encourage people, I have rated the posts on the front page, but I will probably step back from rating my own posts in the long term. If this system gives good results, I might place the list on the sidebar rather than in the middle of the Best of page.

The only problem with the ratings plugin is that it adds substantially to the clutter at the bottom of the post. I do make efforts to keep the clutter to a minimum in general, but I can’t think how else I can add the ratings system without cluttering it up.

I needed something better than what I had before, which was the ‘most popular posts’ list. This is calculated mostly on page views (but also things like comments and trackbacks). Unfortunately, this means that far from highlighting the best posts, it actually merely shows the posts that Google likes the most. This means that some of the posts on the list are not only not-good, but they are actually actively bad. I will keep the feature there, but it’s not a very good list.

The same goes for the ‘most commented on’ posts. Comments are great, but any threads that get more than about 15 or 20 soon descend into crazy flame wars, loon magnetism, and generally generate more heat than light. It’s probably not the side of this blog that I should be putting out there.

I have also finally got round to redesigning the 404 page. Unfortunately it is cluttered with adverts, which I’m not sure about. I can’t really be bothered getting rid of them yet, so I might just leave it as it is. But at least now it actually matches with the rest of the pages on the blog!

I still have not got round to designing a theme for people who do not like the current one (I plan to let visitors choose which they prefer between two). I might not get round to it in the end.

I probably have not stopped tinkering, because tinkering is like eating Pringles and the itch that gets worse the more you scratch it. But I thought I would just point out what I have done so far because [moment of honesty coming up] I can’t be arsed writing about anything else at the moment.

Update: I knew there was something I forgot! A few weeks back I changed the links page so that it automatically contains every blog that I read in Google Reader. So if I’m reading your blog, it’s on the links page. It’s quite good to not have to worry about updating the links manually now. The internet truly is making us a bunch of lazy bastards.

If you’re wondering how it works and want to add it to your own blog, all of the information is here.

(Incidentally, if you are wondering about Scottish political blogs, I keep most of them in a separate folder for me to concentrate on for the roundup. So many of these blogs will not appear on my links page yet, even if I read them.)