Asbestos in the news....

Sort of. The company I work for has many clients, one of whom is a local real estate management company. One of their buildings, where I've spent a bit of time both for that client, for another client in the same building, and for my physician, is dealing with a small problem: asbestos. The asbestos is in the ceiling, and normally wouldn't be disturbed, but they got money to install a new fire detection system, so of course they wanted to use it - and therein is the problem. Apparently none of the current residents knew about it, and the management company didn't know about it, but the installers found it. Now that they know it's there, they have to be careful, and it of course makes things a lot harder to do, and on and on and on. The residents, of course, are not happy.

At one point, they started a newsletter and even a website to give the building management and the board of trustees a hard time about it and to share what little info they had on the issue. The problem was that the discussion boards weren't monitored by anyone, and things went from bad to worse - including some slanderous and libelous statements. Not surprisingly, the management companies lawyers quickly went to work and had the site shut down - and now, of course the website people are complaining about their first amendment rights being trampled. You can see that on their site here.

In other interesting news..... An experiment by Michael Buffington that is a blog based on the keyword of asbestos. He's got a tool that checks Google's news alerts for stuff about asbestos, then posts it to the blog. He writes:

The subject matter, while weighty and all that, is of little importance to me. It's not that I don't have opinions on asbestos and asbestos reform, because I do. The whole point of the site is to experiment with an idea. I built a tool that helps me aggregate topical news with the help of Google's Alert system. So far it works wonderfully.

But there's a second motive as well. Right now asbestos reform and asbestos related litigation is on fire. Lawyers are paying anywhere from $15-100 per click through on Google ads. The second part of this big experiment is to see if I can capture some of that click through revenue while still providing a somewhat valid service to people who might arrive by search results.

What an interesting concept he's got going. I don't know how Google will feel about him discussing stuff about the Adsense program - they take a dim view of that - but it's not like he's cheating - it's a blog about asbestos, and it could help people find info they're looking for.

Apparently another hot keyword is Mesothelioma. It's closely linked to asbestos, since one causes the other, and it's popular with the lawyers - I see ads about mesothelioma in the paper, local lawyers pay for ads on the local tv channels (or in the deep-waters of the cable offerings) - it's everywhere, apparently. And yet, until today, I had no idea what mesothelioma was. Interesting.