Bill Watkins is CEO of Seagate, maker of hard drives “that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn.” The interview with him that’s online at CNNMoney.com is a must-read and an absolute breath of fresh air when compared to what usually comes out of the notoriously paranoid tech industry.

You’ll never see Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt talk this freely. Shame, that.

Via Valleywag, their recently dismissed master of mayhem, Nick Douglas, has finally had his new gig revealed, and it’s a step into a much broader blogospotlight than he had with Gawker Media.

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Keeping track of your web server stats is an important responsibility for webmasters and SEOers alike. They can provide a lot of valuable marketing information as well as the knowledge concerning which search engines crawlers have hit your site and which ones haven’t. One thing they don’t show is whether or not the inspecting bot is legitimate or not.

Malicious programmers have been known to try and disguise the true intentions of their bots, often making them appear friendly. Because of this, the Live.com (MSN Search) blog posted a guide to help webmasters identify which visitors are actual MSN Search bots. The first part of the post reveals the bot names used MSN, as well as what each is responsible for:

MSNBot - Main web crawler
MSNBot-Media - Images & all other media
MSNBot-NewsBlogs - News and blogs
MSNBot-Products - Products & shopping
MSNBot-Academic Academic search

Not only does the blog entry supply the MSN bot name, they also provide an additional method of identification using the IP address and a reverse DNS lookup. Once the unknown bot is identified, you can tell whether or not MSN is responsible for it. The blog entry reveals more:

Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ’search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.

Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.

Once you compile a list of the fake bots hammering your site, you can use your site’s robot.txt file to try and keep them out.

If YouTube doesn’t get their copyright-violation-finding-thingee running at 110 percent soon, Chad Hurley may be in for a visit from the scariest people outside of the local IRS field office: Disney lawyers.

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If you’ve followed the happenings of the search engine industry during the past year, you probably heard the rumblings about Danny Sullivan leaving SearchEngineWatch and the SES tour. Well, that day is now upon us - today is Sullivan’s last day at the SEW properties.

To “celebrate” the momentous day, Sullivan wrote a good-bye post informing his readers about what’s next on his to do list. If you haven’t heard, Sullivan’s Internet interaction will now be done at Search Engine Land, a new blog covering - of all things - the search engine industry (because the name didn’t give it away).

Over at SEW; Elisabeth Osmeloski will take over continue as the managing editor and Chris Sherman will be joining Sullivan at his new blog. A post detailing her thoughts and ideas about what’s to come for SEW is expected sometime today.

Update: Elisabeth’s follow-up has been posted. In it we learn the upcoming schedule for Search Engine Watch while the turnover completes itself.  Chris Sherman will be with SEW until the New Year and Osmeloski also reveals there will be a couple of announcements to watch out for, perhaps during the Chicago SES, which takes place next week.  Stay tuned.

The shutdown of Google Answers stands in stark contrast to the heavy traffic Yahoo has been enjoying for its Answers product. And they’re pretty gleeful in Sunnyvale about this.

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From rock star Googler Matt Cutts:

“One of Google’s biggest strengths is the same as Soylent Green: it’s the people.”

Ok, make a note, skip the curried chicken in Google’s cafeterias.

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Google Answers Crashes Out

AdSense Has A Yahoo Killing Secret

Coincidence? I think not.

David Utter, Staff Writer, WebProNews

Andy Beal knows… (courtesy of Donna Bogatin). The process Google plans on using to serve contextually relevant radio ads is explained in a series of images that first appeared on the ZDNet blog. The three images explain how Google brings radio stations and advertisers together; how they deliver these ads; and their current radio footprint.

Concerning this post, the ads are delivered in the following method:

1. Station inventory management system and studio log.

2. Google links electronically with stations to search for inventory that fits advertiser criteria.

3. Inventory is paired with advertiser requests.

4. Google delivers automated order to radio station and reserves inventory.

Are you planning on taking part in Google’s new ad distribution system or will you stick with search engine text ads?

Everybody’s got their fetish*, and having one for shoes seems popular. But combine that soul’s penchant for flashy footwear with PlayStation, Nike Air, affluence, auctions and charitable causes, and you have a real rubber meets the road situation.

Okay, that was a little melodramatic…wanted to get in as many puns, alliterations, and phrase-turns as possible.

Over at BlueSoul.com BlueSole.com, a shoe auction site (thank you for joining us in surprise), a rare pair of Nike Air sneakers, PS3 edition moon units (sorry Frank) with the console launch date on the back and a special hologram swoosh have a current bid of over $5000.

That’s five grand for shiny PS3 Nikes. And as JoyStiq points out, it ain’t like they actually work as a portable PS3.

But if you think these are some opulent bidders who’d rather be the only one they know with 21st Century geniusly marketed space-gaming shoes than buy the poor kid down the street a T-bone or two, then think again. This auction’s for charity, baby.

*I dislike the word “fetish” now. It has two very different definitions, one gross and one very cool. The pervs ruined it. But in this sense, the magical definition may be more appropriate – we all remember Spike Lee and his Nike tagline, “It’s gotta be the shoes.”