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It's 5.30am as I write this on a very cold winter's morning ... remember I live down in Australia and right now we're in the middle of winter ... and no one should have to be out of bed this early in winter. But here I am getting the regular tasks for today done before a jump into a whole heap of other jobs that need to be done before dinner tonight.

So what do we talk about today? Well over on the official Google Blog there is an interesting post from the head of the Core Ranking Team at Google. That's the team that's in charge of what you see in the search engine results pages (SERPS). While he doesn't reveal any basic information about Google that we don't already there's definitely something in there that raised my curiosity.

The wording in the second-last paragraph is interesting because it seems to put a new slant on how Google sees itself. Maybe it's not all that new to you but the phrase '... websites recommended by Google' suggests to me that there might have been a shift in the way Google sees its place in the world.

To my way of thinking Google has always been a search engine ... something that you type a query into and get a result based on the relevancy of words and terms that appear in the websites that Google lists in the SERPS compared to what you were searching for. But now there's a word in that second-last paragraph that could imply a whole new approach from Google.

The way I see it a search engine doesn't 'recommend' anything ... it simply delivers an impersonal result based on it's collection of algorithms and there is no real or implied recommendation in what it delivers. But now the head of the Core Ranking Team is talking in very personal terms of '... websites recommended by Google.'

I know I'm probably not explaining this very well but I hope that you can see what I'm driving at because there is a vast difference between an impersonal Google SERP and something that's a personal recommendation. Not only is there a difference but there could be a huge impact for us Webmasters if Google really is beginning to change the way it sees itself in the chain between webmasters/marketers and our target audience.

As I said, it could be nothing more than just the erratic workings of my brain at this ungodly hour of the morning ... but then again it could be something that we should be thinking about and taking some time to explore because the change really could be profound. After all, what do we do if Google suddenly decides that it doesn't want to 'recommend' any adult sites?

The new iPhone hits the shops here in Australia tomorrow morning and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of interest in it if pre-orders are any indication. I have one on order but I'm going to be canceling that today because the plans offered by my carrier are nothing like what you guys get in the US ... and this carrier's plans are nothing like the plans I can get from other carriers here in Australia either. In fact I would never have chosen them if they had released the details of their plans when they announced that they would be releasing the phone.

Regardless of that though - the new iPhone and the mad level of interest that has been shown in it here in Australia is a sure indication that we need to be looking at taking our business onto the mobile web. As I've said before ... probably many times ... don't think that your normal website is going to be very user-friendly on a mobile web browser because it won't be.

Even your domain may not be very user-friendly and that's something that makes me wonder about the TLD for mobile. Entering a URL on a mobile phone can be a very tedious affair when compared to entering it with a keyboard on a laptop or PC. The fewer the characters you have to enter the better so why did they choose a four letter TLD instead of something much shorter?

That sure beats me.

While I've been writing about the iPhone I wandered over to Google Trends just to see if the iPhone listed in the top 100 searches for today and I was surprised to see that it's not anywhere to be seen. What I did see though was that you can now export each day's current trends as a CSV file so if you're into targeting the most popular search terms each day now you have the option to download them as a handy data file.

If you haven't had a look at Google Trends then you should because targeting some of those search terms in your blogs can bring in some great search engine traffic if you do it right.

And that's where I've got to leave you for today. I've got a list of things to do that's as long as my arm but the first thing I've got to do is find out why a town's entire police force has quit ... that's evidently a hot topic according to Google Trends.