Since the creation of the math blog castillejosmath.blogspot.com , strange things have been happening on the Internet. I initially started firstyearnewyork as a means to process New York life for family and friends, but it’s getting a bit too public for my taste. This is of course all thanks to my friend and yours Google.
As best I understand it, the Google algorithm takes into account such statistics as site popularity, links to and from, and a whole host of other Googley metrics. Well, as both blogs have developed, they have been crawling up the Google search Charts and brought with them some unwanted traffic. In its first week alone, the math blog had about 500 hits, which might not be much for a real website but was much more than I had ever expected. I was left wondering whether I would be able to keep firstyearnewyork from my students and why no one had clicked on my ads.
Well, the Chinese firewall is no more.
If you look a few posts back, Alone is about a school fight I broke up. Check out the comments and you will find one from a student whose mom found this blog on Google. I would have been ok with that if she had been searching for “Michael Castillejos” or “Blog, Castillejos,” but she was searching for “Williamsburg Prep,” the name of my school. Yikes! Do it yourself…Google: “Williamsburg Prep”…firstyearnewyork is on the first page! I’m not sure if I’m OK with this. So much for journalistic integrity.
I write this to tell you that I might have to be a bit more guarded about what I write. I would not be surprised if my superiors are reading these very words, in which case, I enjoy my job very much, especially the breaking up of fights. I suddenly feel like I am writing some East German resistance newspaper, or maybe I just like The Lives Of Others too much. In any case, don’t worry I’ll keep the good stuff comin’.