Perhaps you've already heard, that if you search for miserable failure at Google, that the first hit points to George W. Bush's biography.

How did this happen? Well, one word Blogsphere... apparently enough bloggers thought it would be funny to link to the biography using said term which then boosted the ranking.

Now funny as that may be, it's still not exactly a statement and doesn't do justice to the principle, as my esteemed friend Erdgeist thinks.

His idea is quite compelling in my opinion. Basically it amounts to (ab)using Google as a demographic instrument. Case in point: what if enough website owners / bloggers would link to ole George's biography using the term war criminal? In essence it's saying 'In my opinion George W. Bush is a war criminal' and using Google to register that opinion on a public forum.

Surely this has interesting consequences, alas I'm too tired now to think about them ;-) see below...