I don’t get bloggers sometimes. They get all huffy about their Page Rank going down as if it’s something that they are entitled to.

Now, normally I’d be front and center on all these ego games but here the real truth is that Page Rank has been dead for years. That’s why I never even looked at it anymore.

Here’s why: back when Google started Page Rank was a pretty global thing. If you had a PR of 6 or 7, it’d apply equally to everything. That’s why, back in 2004, if you did a search for “offshoring” you’d find my blog in #3 position because I had a lot of inbound links so Google just assumed I was relevant for offshoring too.

Not true.

In the past few years Page Rank has gone from something that’s global to something that applies to each keyword differently.

So, while I am very highly relevant if you do a search for “tech blogger” you won’t find me any longer on offshoring.

The problem is that Google can’t really show you your real Page Rank anyway. How would it? It would need to ship you a spreadsheet to explain how you rank for each keyword.

Now, since we’re all talking about this, two other issues. First, bloggers were showing up too high in searches anyway. In comparing to my friends we got lots of traffic from Google that we didn’t deserve. The problem is that traffic isn’t good anyway. Put it this way, let’s say I showed up high in a search for Saturn Cars (since I’ve written about them). Most people wouldn’t have found much value in that post and even if they did they wouldn’t have stuck around to be a regular reader.

I’d rather show up for when you’re searching for tech or geek stuff. That’s the audience I want to be in front of.

Oh, and if you sell links to try to game Google you deserve to be knocked down the list a few pegs.

Last night I was hanging around at the Ritz near my house. That’s where Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo spoke yesterday, and where the Right Media conference is going on right now.

I talked with several people who didn’t want to go on the record, but who are executives at Microsoft’s competitors. They told me to “watch out for Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive.”

That’s the company that sold recently to Microsoft for a very large sum of money (around $6 billion).

They say he now is working for Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft and is expected to make major moves on Microsoft’s behalf to get Microsoft a major position into the advertising industry.

So, what’s the rumor this morning? Microsoft wins the Facebook bid.

If this is all true, then Steve Ballmer’s promise to buy 50 companies in the advertising and Web 2.0 spaces in the next year is off to a roaring start.

Since I don’t think Steve Ballmer understands the advertising world, it sure looks like someone else is behind this move. I’d love to interview Brian McAndrews.

UPDATE: if this rumor is true, it means big revenues for Facebook. Microsoft has a world-class advertising sales team. I bet they could promise more revenues than Google could, particularly because Microsoft’s sales team is much more focused on banner advertising than Google’s team is.

UPDATE2: Microsoft’s Hank Vigil was in Palo Alto yesterday, so maybe he’s behind this. Me?

Looking at the number of views on my Flickr photos this morning you can clearly see that photos of my baby son greatly outpulls photos of geniuses like Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, or Vice Presidents of Yahoo or Double Click.

What does it all mean? Just reminds me of my journalism schooling at San Jose State University. They always told us to put as many kids and animal photos in the paper as we could. Why? They sell newspapers. One teacher, I remember, told me “at least that kid’s family is gonna buy a copy that day.” Heh.

If you watch my link blog you’ll see me drop in a few photos here and there from Thomas Hawk and other photographers. Why? Cause I love great photography and it helps break up the more serious stuff.

Speaking of which, looks like there’s going to be a Photowalking on Sunday at the Rosie the Riveter National Park in Richmond, CA. I’ll try to be there with Patrick for a few hours.