Oh my! Google Thinks I Hate Lotus Domino!

A thread on the Lotus BP Forum that discussed the many misperceptions about Lotus Notes and Domino caused me to try a few Google searches. First I tried "Hate Lotus Notes" and found some sites where users listed their gripes (a few legitimate, many either misinformed and/or signs of poorly supported user communities). Then I tried "Hate Lotus Domino", and I found.... an article that I wrote! How can that be? For goodness sake, I won Lotus Beacon Award back in 1995 ago for being the products' number one promoter on the Internet! But no... for some reason the article I wrote for Advisor several years ago, with the title "Workarounds, A Love-Hate Relationship" is what comes up if you tell Google that you "Hate Lotus Domino". I can't figure out why that page is number one, because my Google toolbar shows that it has a page rank of zero. Strange. Perverse. Amusing.

It's even stranger, actually, because I was just thinking about that article yesterday. One of the workarounds that I talked about in the article was using the drafts folder of my mail file as a place for holding all sorts of miscellaneous documents that I had no actual intentiion of mailing. That's a workaround for the fact that Domino doesn't provide a personal document library for evey user, which I've believed for years that it should. The reason this came to mind recently was that corporate blogs seem to me to be something close to the personal doc library that I have wanted Domino to provide for all users. I'm starting to think about what the ramifications of using blog templates and aggregator databases to build ad hocconnections between users and workgroups might be, and whether there's a potential market for a well-integrated solution that builds on this idea.

But then again, why would I build such a thing with Domino? After all, Google says I Hate Lotus Domino, so it must be true, right? ;-)