The Substantially Similar Weblog

I recently received an email from a “free local reuse” list offering a free bassinet.

I had no idea what a bassinet was, or whether I wanted one, so I did a quick Google search, only to find that Fischer-Price has recalled its portable Bassinets:

Fisher-Price has received 24 reports of fingers getting caught or pinched in the bassinet frame, including 10 children with cut fingertips, one infection and one broken finger.

Apparently it’s a sort of baby seat. The recall notice was quite scary. Does “cut fingertips” mean a cut on the fingertip, or that it cut the fingertip entirely off?

So my first impulse was to think of ways to spread the word about these deadly bassinets. Even though I have nothing personally to do with them, if it’s going to cut off babies’ fingers, then we should all know.

But then I remembered how I had come across the notice in the first place: it’s the top result from google. Apparently enough other people also felt that this was the most important thing to know about bassinets and had linked similarly back to the recall notice.

I think this is an example of google doing it’s job well: emulating and amplifying “word of mouth” communication. If the CPSC posts recall notices on its site and no one linked there, I doubt anyone would have ever come across the notice. I mean, how often do you check to see if any of the thousands of household items you own have been recalled? But the weight of enough people coming across this has pushed it up to the top result.

I also noticed another bassinet recall, which seemed to apply to a slightly different product: “Although the drop leaf shelf is not intended as a support shelf for infants, when used in this manner, the drop leaf shelf support mechanism will fail to support the infant. The infant could fall causing head or other bodily injury.” In fact, a search for bassinet recall reveals an extraordinary number of problems! One of them says “infants can become entrapped in an opening between the bassinet’s side and mattress platform and suffocate.” Who would have guessed?

So my advice to prospective parents: stay away from bassinets entirely. I think a traditional crib is probably the safest way to go.

My “Popular Search Strings” section has been entirely invaded by Paris Hilton. At the moment, I see “paris hilton video”—251 referers since Sunday. That is to say, 251 people searching on msn.com for “paris hilton video” came to my weblog. And were sorely disappointed.

I’ve noticed also that I do much better in MSN’s search engine for Paris Hilton-related searches than in google. Google, as it turns out, only returns results for my site when the person is actually looking for what I have to provide: e.g., my super popular fix for the CUPS client-error-forbidden error. MSN, on the other hand, is completely content to keep referring entirely irrelevant searches to my site, perhaps solely on the basis of the words “Paris Hilton” appearing here.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.