nothing to see here (please move along)

Wow, I got a ton of email over that last post, particularly for only a few hundred hits a day.  Sorry, I had to remove it, as that info was not common knowledge.  However, I learned a few things…

From a technical point of view, Google indexes your site incredibly fast. Seriously, like 2 hours after my post, it was indexed and ready for their Google alerts blast.

Also, Google’s Webmastering tools rock. Enter in your domain, put a file on your website to verify that you do indeed own that domain, and then you can do all sorts of cool stuff, like ask that URLs not be cached/indexed, analyze and generate robots.txt files, etc. I am not a web programmer, so most of it is new to me, but I find it cool how they have made otherwise difficult things easy for the lay person.

More importantly, from a business point of view, I learned the following:

• Some customers are anal about not letting you mention that they use your product.
• If the customer asks you not to talk, sales people can do so as much as you want, as long as the customer does not catch wind of them doing it.
• Sales people are good about creating plausible deniability, just in case they ever get caught talking.
• Sales people are better than technical people at not getting in trouble for talking.
• If something is not yet common knowledge, slip out just enough info to make it common knowledge, then reference other people that talk about it.
• When you cannot officially release a press release on something, link to someone else’s URL that says basically the same thing.

Now, please move along.  There is nothing to see here…