I had a post about… well, a grant fund that I wanted to investigate further. I posted it on the 2nd of December, 2003.
I just received this comment on that post:
| I am intersted in MSC Conservation at UCL. kindly tell me that can am I eligible for this funding/grant. Moreover wahta is the amount of this funding. thanks in anticipation |
Now, Mawra isn’t going to have any luck obtaining funding if he (she?) posts comments on my weblog like this. I certainly don’t have money to spare to support other graduate students doing their degree courses. And I don’t attend UCL, so I can’t even begin to help them contact the right people. Perhaps Mawra needs to learn to read.
In the name of helping Google (as my weblog currently comes up first when you search for this particular grant fund), I’m removing the old post. This is just to help others in the future, so they don’t think I’m the new patron saint of graduate students hoping to study in England.
Interesting choice, to delete the old post rather than have other grad students directed to it by Google. Somewhere in here there is a worthwhile further discussion to be had on the impact of weblogs on Google and of Google on weblogs, but my thoughts aren’t fully formed enough to be the one to go there today.
It seems “unfair” to the historical context of a weblog to simply discard old content because Google isn’t entirely smart enough to rank it correctly and its users aren’t entirely smart enough to self-filter its results. But it’s also very kind of you to consider the sanity of misguided grad students to be more important than this little bit of blog trivia.
Well, it wasn’t much of a grant fund, to start. Second, the post wasn’t very informational—it was a pointer for me more than anything else. I didn’t expect that Googling for the name of the grant would turn up this weblog as the first hit, though.
This is the first time I’ve discarded something from the weblog, and because it wasn’t a … well, a post that was “authored,” but instead it was “just a link,” I figured I could get away with just nuking it.
Weblogs are an interesting problem w.r.t. Google; for some things, my weblog is very revelant. For others, it is not. The semantic issues in differentiating between those things are probably intractable for a piece of software. Ah well.
You wonder… will the student ever get into UCL if they can’t even find the correct webpage?
Dear sir, I am a goodly studunt in cumputer science and want to study with you for my digree. Please informate me how to do this.
I’m glad you’re so interested! To start, send me lots of money. Then, we’ll send you a packet of materials that will explain how much more money you need to send me. Once you’ve sent me a whole lot of money—oodles, even—we’ll send you a genuine diploma from the Matt Jadud University. You may choose from a bachelors degree, MA, PhD, MPhil, MD/PhD, or a host of other degrees you might find interesting.
When I did international student admissions at SLU, they’d periodically drop off on my desk a foot-high pile of hand-written application-request letters from various African countries. The first three were funny in their baroque English and requests for admission to every program from aardvark engineering to zoophagy, preferably with scholarship and airfare. After that they got reeeeeeeeeeeeeally depressing.
Anyway, I’m glad they’re getting to do that sort of thing from inside a cybercafe now. (I have a friend who just got back from Cameroon, and she speaks very highly of Cameroonian cybercafes.) The worst part about those African letters was wondering what portion of their budget went into the eighty or ninety stamps that covered every envelope.
trey