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Have you ever had a day when you feel like picking up your computer and throwing it through the window? I must admit that it's been a long time since I felt like that but I got pretty close to it yesterday.

It wasn't the work I was doing for clients; it wasn't the clients who were coming into the office; it was the competition we have here in this town. I've always thought that, compared to the average adult webmaster, most of the competition was clueless but when one of them came into the office yesterday and asked me what they should be charging their clients for designing sites loaded with Javascript I realized that here was somebody who was taking clueless to a whole new level.

Oh well ... I politely sent them on their way without bursting their Javascript bubble or telling them what we charged for the quality work we provide. Fortunately today has been a much better day and my monitors haven't been in danger of disappearing through the window ... at least not yet.

The latest Google patent
Are you keeping up with Google's patent applications? I hope you are because there's a lot of interesting information tucked away in those patents and if some of the things in those patents can be turned into reality life will be interesting for webmasters.

The latest Google patent to be published was actually lodged back in June and it deals with developing the ability for a search engine spider to read text that is part of a graphic. I guess in many ways that's just optical character recognition that was developed for use with things like scanners but it's certainly never been used by search engine spiders before.

If Google can develop it successfully just think of what might be possible with search engine optimisation then. All those juicy keywords that graphic designers like to drop into their headers, banners and buttons would suddenly become readable and sites that contained no keywords - because a webmaster had forgotten to include them - might suddenly begin to rank for those keywords because the clever designer had turned his brain on before he sat down to do the graphic work for the site.

There's certainly no sign of Google's spiders being able to read text in graphics just yet but you never know ... it could be closer than we think.

Interesting Google SERPS
While we're talking about Google take a few moments to type 'ocr' into a Google search box and see what the first page shows. At the moment when I do that at the top of the page I see a link for OCR (Omnicare Inc) - but it's not a link to that company's website. Where the link points is to Google Finance's current report on stock trade for that company and there's a nice little graph showing that currently - in fact just 20 minutes ago - the company's stock is going down.

Now apart from that not being of much help to the company think about what I'm seeing there. Right at the top of Google's SERP I'm seeing data that's just 20 minutes old. For some reason I'm beginning to find that just a little scary.

Domain Kiting
Remember the days when you could wander around domain name registrars having a look to see what domain names were available and then think about if for a while before you went back to actually buy the domain name?

Well it seems that those days are definitely on the way out. Recently I was searching for a domain name for client and found a very good one that suited his business perfectly. Instead of buying it there and then I went back to the client to clear the purchase with him first. Five minutes later I was back at the Registrar's site to make the purchase only to find that the domain was gone.

At the time I thought it had only been a matter of bad luck but now, if you do a search for the term 'domain kiting' you'll find that it happens quite frequently and it's not just a matter of bad luck at all. In fact some registrars are making a nice little profit from domain kiting and there are others who are active in domain kiting too.

So if you want to be sure that you're not going to miss out when you go searching for a new domain name make a list before you go shopping, prioritize it and grab the first name on your list that is available because it probably won't be if you step away to see what else is available before you make a purchase.

This business just goes on getting more and more interesting every single day ... maybe that's why I like it so much.