I once had a prof teaching old Greek. Lot's of students had to take the Greek course - very few liked it. He was the only Greek-prof, so his seminars were always full. He used to greet students in the very first class of the term: "I will never wish you a good day, because I don't want to start the day with a lie. So get used to it." After that he would never greet anybody, but enter class and start teaching immediately. His assistant told me he did that every term. He was famous for this sentence and his greetless way. It set the stage for the atmosphere in class.

I'd call that personal branding. It was his tool to express "don't mess with me, don't expect any help from my side nor pedagogical knick knacks: you are here because you are forced to - so am I. But I'm the one in charge here."

So a personal brand can be a weapon as well as a source of income. But if you loose yourself in it, well, you loose your self.

The crossroads is a mythical place of strange powers. My grandfather told me a story about the devil sitting at the crossroads waiting for someone to sell his soul in exchange for earthly goods. If you were lucky suddenly, rumor was you went to the crossroads. Similar stories seem to exist in Africa and America.

Just popped into my mind - not a valuation of these positioning concepts.

In order not to appear in Google, publishers only would have to upload a simple robots.txt file. Google respects those. But who really does not want to be in Google?
But this is not only a publisher's problem, but the writer's, too: You have to brand every single bit you write to stand out of the crowd and you have to monetize every single bit you write. Can it be done?
There are not only the search engines displaying your content: there is RSS, Facebook, clippings on Twitter, you name it.
Content is king?