Subjects:
The Curse of the Social Networks
Nobody really knows, how many people will curse the social networks in future. Or at least the information, people so freely put there.
Thou shallst not be a Hypocrite
Especially not, if you're sitting in the glass house. Doesn't stop some people though, if the french source cited about Sony BMG's use of pirated software is right.
Google does Video Ads
Google is currently testing video ads on the right hand side of its result pages in between Adwords. Pleasant surprise: they're only visible after klicking a link saying "watch testimonial" or some such. And that link is only there if you tolerate JavaScript.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-tests-video-ads-alongside-search.html
Google apparently still knows that instant result pages are as important as very good search results.
Google realigns Market Forces
Some Marketing-People are miffed at Google's site search function available when the first search result refers to a large or well known brand. They're miffed, because for some reason this doesn't correspond to their expectations. Probably, because the marketing folk have never seen site search, although it's been part of Google almost for ever, and admittedly there is a difference between offering a site search via mouse click and via adding the site:domainname parameter to the query. The former can be exercised by anyone, including marketing people. The latter only by those able to read help pages. That is, after they've found them.
Browser Updates
Firefox and SeaMonkey have been updated again.
http://www.mozilla.com/
Enlightenment
Some people apparently have to demonstrate publicly that they really do not understand what they're talking about.
How not to deal with Spam
Yet another demonstration why you can't delegate some things in life.
Mass Attack
During the last few days a remotely controlled "modification" made possible by some flaws in phpBB affected about 200,000 pages. If you use phpBB maybe you should have a look at your server?
Semantic Flaws
Yahoo obviously has some problems with semantics. As some users seem to have with common sense. Or lack thereof.
Google goes SEO
As part of Doubleclick's baggage Google aquired Performics, a company specialising in SEO. Yes, there's a conflict of interest Google should have seen right away and should have been doing away with immediately. The official statement rather shows that not everyone at Google is an adult. And there's a very long page about the issue on by a seemingly worked up Danny Sullivan.
Yahoo goes Semantic
Yahoo describes their new "Search Open Ecosystem", its support for a number of semantic standards and the desire to have more sites supporting RDF or microformats in order to discover meaning. Meaning that people will now lie in their RDF or microformat files in addition to their meta tags. I don't really see why whatever site owners stuff into a new file format should be more trusted than what is lied hitherto into meta tags.
BBC: Users are Hackers
In a farce that's as embarrasing as the interview of a cab driver in place of an "Internet Expert" the BBC now denounces people who see behind their smoke screen as hackers. Why? The BBC Iplayer delivers content to Windows PCs using DRM'd content, whereas in their bid to be cool they supply the same stuff to Iphone users unencumbered.
People were very quick to discover that all it needed was the Iphone User-agent string, something Opera and other browsers allow to be set in their configuration, to get the BBC servers to remove the DRM restrictions before handing out the movie streams. The BBC yesterday released a fix for iPlayer hack", using the word "hackers" multiple times in their announcement instead of simply admitting ignorance.
Boing Boing reports this morning, that the new bluff is based on checking the order of the HTTP request elements to "verify" that requests come from genuine Iphones. Maybe it's time to say Good Bye to the old TV altogether - I seem to watch no more than half an hour a month on average anyway.
How to get People to blog about you
Almost all but the last few of the 17 tips for getting bloggers to write about you are essential. Most are also obvious to those who live the web. Still, I found one more reason to discourage the use of Flash.
Browser Trick
Remote controlled FTP commands through a bug in Internet Explorer is what I call really creative.
Use Sparingly
On the left is all the water. On the right is all the air. That's all there is.
The Magical Mystery Tour
This must be the most convoluted way of saying "sanitise user input before use" without mentioning anything even remotely hinting at the issue. And because the matter is urgent, this guy reports in a manner leaving you breathless.
Google Positioning
You do know that Google bought Postini, don't you. They're now positioning it as another band aid to patch up enterprise buck passing: "Companies can lower the cost of deploying anti-spam and anti-malware software to offload the burden and cost of keeping the defenses updated, Swidler said. He also wrote that all applications launched from a Web browser must be updated to current patch levels."
In this day and age I believe it would be a lot safer not to launch any applications from within the browser. What happens on your desktop should be controlled by people in the wild.
Photoshop Disasters
People in the media must be pressed for time. That's why some people have too many hands or fingers, miss a belly button or lack a crack. Photoshop Disasters has a nice collection of mutants.
Language at Work
Even though a lot of verbiage tends to the vulgar these days, sometimes one stumbles across some heartwarming gems: "That's the difference bewteen SMTP actually working and a sock puppet raising venture capital." rs79 in a ./ discussion about why the web risks self inflicted shutdown if it's left in the hands of those shaping it now.
The Gecko Problem
The biggest disappointment in working on a design using Gecko as a rendering engine [as built into Seamonkey, Firefox, Camino etc] is the never ending stream of yet one more thing where other browsers fail. It's well known that IE doesn't do generated content. But even Safari and Konqueror don't do it always by the book.
Gmail Abuse
Yet another reason why I don't believe in online applications and more so online data.
Ask moves Goal Posts
Ask is abandoning efforts to catch up with Google at last, instead focussing on a somewhat narrower market segment of married women. Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li calls the decision a "smart move". That's alright then.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080305/ap_on_hi_te/ask_makeover
IE 8.0 U Turn
After threatening that the sometime in the future to be released IE 8.0 would require yet another mechanism to render standards compliant Microsoft now proclaim to do without. Zeldman gives praise for Microsoft's change of direction. I'm not sure if they didn't think they could get away with it one more time.
Time Machine
I like Apple Kit. Although I use Linux almost all of the time, except for static and moving pixels [graphics and video], I use an Apple Laptop just visible on the photo. I don't use all the stuff that comes with a Mac these days, such as Iphoto, as I don't use proprietary file formats on principle. Everything I do is stored in open and documented file formats. Because the data is mine.
http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2008/03/x5_time_machine
Instant Repair
On Feb 11th I mentioned that two and a half years after I ceased publishing my rss feed there are still news readers requesting it many times a day, because a lot of modern software is bolted together really shoddy, ignoring status and error codes. Google's Feedfetcher stopped its requests a few hours later. So far so good.
Maybe whoever listens in here can fix another problem at Google. I noticed yesterday, that the filetype: qualifier is broken, if it is supposed to do what I think it is supposed to do [maybe it's supposed to do something else, but then I'd not have it named filetype:].
Google specifically says: " If you prefer to see a particular set of results with a specific file type (for example, PDF links), simply type filetype:[extension] (for example, filetype:pdf) within the search box along with your search term(s)."
It fails, however, to deliver on said promise, if a URL doesn't end in whatever type is requested, because it has additional so called name=value parameters, such as site.tld/file.pdf?sessioncode=string after the file type.
It also fails if I invert the query. Asking for all file types that are not HTML should not include documents which are HTML, even for those URLs which do not end with .html, which is often the case for the start page of a site.
If, on the other hand, file type is assumed simply by looking at the URL ending rather than at file contents it should have been named urlending or so instead of filetype.
Blogs in Education
Slashdot this morning: "At Hunter College, professors are debating the ethics of a course in which an industry group paid for a class to develop a fake student who would write a fake blog to discourage other students from buying knockoff products."
Or as one poster comments: "Cooperate sponsored fraud in order to deter legal purchases of questionable knock-off products."
How to Cloak Legally
Sometimes cloaking seems to be the only way to trick users onto a site, and Google seems to either fall for it or tolerate it, when sites such as the Experts Exchange have answers in Google's search results that are not there when clicked.
Experienced users call up Google's Cache to see why the snippets appears in Google's result list when the browser shows a page containing boiler plate ["All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only"].
Thos who know that Google doesn't tolerate substitution of content on a massive scale analyse the page in the browser a little bit more, and hey Presto! There are all the answers which are found in the cached result page right after a massive block of insertion with all the crap claiming that the stuff is available only to premium service members. Not anymore they are.
Splitting Hairs
Some people care. For every little detail. Such as apostropes. Or as the lower case letter l.
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.