Letters by Burk #166: Does It Hold Up?

Hi friends,

All three posts this week check something people like to repeat. A curse at 27. A cloud with "sovereign" in the name. And the SEO rule that cross-posting gets you punished.

None of them held up. Not completely, at least.

Here's my week.

The 27 Club: Is It Real?

Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, Winehouse. All dead at 27, and it looks like a curse. Two studies checked it and found no spike at 27. How the "club" got its name is a bit dark, though.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Is Microsoft's Sovereign Cloud Sovereign?

Microsoft's legal director in France was asked under oath if he could guarantee French data stays out of US hands. He said no. That's the whole problem with the label, and why the EU's own cloud tender went to four European providers.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Does Cross-Posting to Medium and Substack Hurt Your SEO?

I publish almost everything twice, so I checked my own Search Console numbers. Only about 8 percent of the queries overlap. And for 26 of them, both versions sit on page one.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

⚡ AI Bytes

The EU Commission's AI adviser Jim Hagemann Snabe wants Europe to stop chasing the US and China on frontier models and put AI to work in industry and the public sector instead, according to heise, citing internal documents reported by Politico.

Anthropic is extending its invisible text watermark to more Claude models from September 30; heavy rewriting can remove it, and the detector is still in private preview.

And Google is turning Gemini's Gems into "skills" on November 17, migrated automatically.

📎 From the Archive

Almost a year old, and the reason I trust Search Console numbers at all: how I set it up on Substack, and how search became my biggest traffic source.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

💡 Fun Facts

Google said it back in 2008: "There's no such thing as a 'duplicate content penalty.'" Their words, not mine. Unless you copy on purpose.

The CLOUD Act didn't come as its own big law. It rode along inside a huge spending bill, signed in March 2018.

Long before Hendrix, bluesman Robert Johnson died at 27, in 1938. His whole fame rests on 29 songs, recorded in 1936 and 1937.

That's #166. Back next Tuesday. ✌️

Get The Medium + Substack Dual