Thanks to Dean for including this tidbit from one of my favorite sources: Search Engine Watch.

Apparently, nearly all significant search engines ignore the <META  NAME="keywords"> tag.  It's a "spam magnet" and has been largely dismissed since the 1997-1998 time frame with regard to its importance in search engine relevance.  I was once badgered by so-called expert when building a site (in mid 2001) because I didn't include the META keywords tag.  The site won't be promoted properly, blah, blah, blah.  Well, I think the most important factors are keyword usage in page titles and content, search engine submission, and external links leading to your site.  Except for Inktomi, the major search engines don't use the META keywords tag.  So it's virtually dead, unless you have some other purpose for your own Million Dollar Markup.

If you're interested, here's a few other things you can do with a META tag.  The article taught me something new today.  Some META tags (the ones that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute) correspond to headers found in HTTP messages (see IETF RFC 1945, section 4.2).  Some web servers translate the values stored in the META tags (the HTTP-EQUIV kind) into the HTTP headers when they deliver content to the browser.

Dean also noted the arrival of an open source, Windows-based desktop news aggregator called Syndirella by Dmitry Jemerov.  Excellent!  I like the idea of the ability (more research required here) to scrape regular web pages for news.  This means that I might be able to digest the Search Day newsletter from Search Engine Watch without visiting the page directly.  Maybe.

I was using email subscriptions to get most of my news in the past, and I possess many dedicated mail folders for particular sources that fill up with unread messages.  Pretty useless.

So, as I move along in my blogging adventure, RSS collected by a news aggregator seems to be a much be better solution.  If I miss six months worth of news, I don't have six months worth of news staring me in the face during my next session--only recent, relevant stuff.

Now, Syndirella goes one step better.  Instead of having an extremely long web page to read, Syndirella carves up the news into each feed and allows in-client reading without bouncing all over to other windows.  It still feels a little clumsy and basic, but my hat is off to Dmitry for creating such a useful tool and releasing it as a free, open source product.

Not only that, but it's written in C# running on the .NET framework.  I was wondering what the most effective way to distribute a .NET desktop application over the web would be.  The Framework is a 20MB+ download for those that don't already have it.  That's a long wait for a lot of users.  But Dmitry is doing it.  He warns the user about the size of the download and gives instructions about where to acquire it.  This seems to be the best way I've seen so far, short of mailing out a CD.  No, I don't want to do that.