I’m seeing strange AdSense ads in the right column here today. Kyoto hotels, debt relief and folk art? Has AdWords’ algorithm for selecting contextual ads gone crazy?
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At least, I hope they are paying good money per click.
Archive for the 'web' Category
… mature artists steal, as someone said. How would you classify this page then?
I’m sure you’ve already seen the original:
A few days ago I got an email asking me to link GoodSearch. Nowadays, with the sort of things you get in the mail, you can never be certain, but I did a bit of research and they seem legit, so even if I don’t like unsolicited email, if it’s for a good cause, why not send some traffic their way?
Hey there,
I’ve been to your site a bunch, and was wondering if you could help me out. My name is ****** ******, and I’m working on a great project called GoodSearch: http://www.goodsearch.com. It’s a site powered by Yahoo!, is just like any other search engine except that each time you use http:///www.goodsearch.com to search on the web, a donation is made to various charities, foundations, and schools.
Done.
Technorati Tags: goodsearch, search, charity.
Zoli Erdos: “AOL, in blatant violation of its users privacy just released the log of 3 month’s worth of searches by 650,000 users. Not to the DOJ, but for open download by anyone.”
Luckily, I’ve never used AOL for search. Almost always used Google and it seems at least they take their users’ privacy a bit more seriously. Still, this makes me shudder at the prospect that the US DoJ could one day force them to release the same kind of information.
While I ponder at the implications of this, my first move is to immediately unsubscribe from AIM, which I used as my primary IM network. I wouldn’t want to wake up one day and find my chat logs “anonymized” and downloadable on the net.
So, starting from today, I’m not reachable on AIM anymore. You can still reach me on Google Talk as ugo.cei__AT__gmail__DOT__com.
Technorati Tags: aol, aim, privacy, search, logs, doj, anonymity.
Dave Winer: “Google reports 16,200 hits for ‘Joanne Colan.’ Let’s measure that again in a week and a month.”
That’s not completely true: in order to correctly compute the so-called “Google Number” for a person, you should put her name in quotes, otherwise all sorts of spurious results will come up, like for instance:
Peter lives with his wife Joanne and their family in Lyme, New Hampshire. … Neil Colan is a psychologist with over 20 years of experience providing …
If you search for “Joanne Colan” (in quotes), Google gives you just 513 hits as of today, many of which are related to the recent news about her, so they were probably even less a few days ago. Quite strange for someone who is, after all, already a public figure.
Even curiouser, for one who has such pretty looks, is the small amount of pictures of her you can find online. I guess this also is going to change a lot from tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: joanne colan, rocketboom.
I’d really like to use the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox, to keep all my bookmarks, cookies and passwords between my laptop and my desktop, but I cannot get it to work. After it authenticates me and it asks for a PIN, it fails when generating the security key with the following, unhelpful message:
Has anyone else got the same problem? This is on OS X Tiger, using the very latest Firefox (1.5.0.4).
Technorati Tags: firefox, browser sync, error.
Mike Arrington: When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives? For me, it was (and is) their core search engine. I grant that Google Maps pushed the envelope and forced the other big Internet guys to improve their own offerings (but today Microsoft and Yahoo are both significantly better than Google). And I do appreciate the POP access to Gmail (this was the one thing that converted me from hotmail for personal email). Everything since has been, well, somewhat underwhelming.
Hmm, yes. I’d give a bit more importance to Gmail, not so much for POP (I would vastly prefer IMAP) but mostly for SMTP: Between it and the web interface, I am pretty sure I can send email wherever I am, no matter what account I am sending mails from. I am also confident that I can go to a single place when I need to find an old message, whether sent or received by me.
Google Maps is cool too, especially now that they are covering Europe, but I have to admit other services are better when it comes to finding addresses and routes.
As for Spreadsheets, it’s probably the right service for me, since I seldom use Excel and only at the most basic level. What I find very interesting about it is the sharing of spreadsheets online. Much more effective, privacy concerns aside, than sending Excel files around attached to emails.
Technorati Tags: gmail, google maps, google spreadsheets, excel, techcrunch, arrington.
Looks like the whole blogosphere is abuzz over O’Reilly’s cease-and-desist letter that was sent to the organizers of a Web 2.0 Half Day Conference. O’Reilly and CMP, organizers of the “real” Web 2.0 Conference, demanded that IT@Cork, organizers of the “other” Web 2.0 conference, stop using the term “Web 2.0″ in conjunction with conferences, seminars and other such events.
Most comments are bashing O’Reilly, mainly because they always tried to sell the “Web 2.0″ moniker as synonymous with open collaboration, free stuff, universal love and the end to world hunger. So hypocritical of them to unleash a bunch of sharks lawyers on the poor, unsuspecting irishmen.
Well, I must say I do not agree with those comments. What do you think would Sun, Apple, IDG do if someone announced a “JavaOne and a Half Conference”, a “MacWorld Two Days Conference” or a “LinuxWorldWide Conference”? I think that O’Reilly and CMP, holders of a (pending) registration for “Web 2.0 as a service mark for arranging and conducting live events, namely trade shows, exposition, business conferences and educational conferences in various fields of computers and information technology” can and should use any reasonable means to protect their trademark against dilution, even though the organizers of the “Web 2.0 Half Day Conference” are well-meaning and even tried to invite Tim O’Reilly to their event.
Now, one might argue that one shouldn’t try to register the “Web 2.0″ term as a trademark. One could also feel tempted to side for the small guy confronted by the greedy corporate types who profit from overpriced conferences. Being a speaker at the upcoming OSCON who has to pay all his travel and lodging expenses, I might be inclined to agree ;).
But I won’t. O’Reilly and friends were the first ones who did a Web 2.0 conference and this should mean something. People coming later are free to use “Web 3.14″ if they like… hmmm, now that I think of it, I might organize the Web π Conference and trademark it: The first trascendental version of the Web, try to copy that!
Update: I happen to agree 100% with Nick Carr here: “Even if you believe that O’Reilly made a mistake in trying to trademark “Web 2.0,” or that he made a mistake in trying to enforce that copyright - and reasonable people can certainly come to either or both of those conclusions - the gang mentality that’s playing out right now has to turn your stomach. What we’re seeing is a mob using reputational blackmail to impose its will on somebody else. Everyone seems to feel a need to put his or her boot in, often yelling out personal insults in the process.” How long before we see someone calling for a boycott of O’Reilly books or conferences?
Technorati Tags: web-2.0, oreilly, conference, cmp, it@cork, trademark, cease-and-desist, oscon.
So Google Notebook is alive. The Firefox extension is nice and even nicer is the integration in Google’s search results, but I’m left wondering: Where are the tags? We’ve just learned that folksonomies are better than taxonomies, that the organization of information provided by del.icio.us, Flickr et.al. is vastly superior to fixed categories, and now we should do without that again? What’s the point?
Technorati Tags: tagging, google notebook, folksonomies, notebook, del.icio.us, flickr.
I just finished the last puzzle in the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google (not that it was particularly hard) only to discover that prizes are for US, UK and AU residents only. Hmmm, I guess I should have read the rules before. Oh well, it was fun anyway.
Technorati Tags: da vinci code.
Reuters.com: “SAN FRANCISCO, March 18 (Reuters) - A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.
[…] KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a “cataclysmic” 70 percent fall in its audience — and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
[…] KinderStart contends that once a company has been penalized, it is difficult to contact Google to regain good standing and impossible to get a report on whether or why the search leader took such action.”
Given my recent problems with Google rankings, I might be tempted to sue them too. Let’s sue the bastards ;).
Update: I checked the KinderStart website and it seems quite obvious that it is a very bad website, with no original content, very few backlinks and (according to Alexa, at least) nowhere near the “10 million pageviews per month” they are claiming. This lawsuit seems to be no more than a very bad publicity stunt but it’s apparently working, at least in the short term.
Technorati Tags: google lawsuit, KinderStart.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but Megite has a brand new look&feel and actually looks and feels much better than before. I just saw it because Matthew Chen invited me to send him my OPML file. You can see the results of it here. I still don’t understand the algorithm behind the selection of news items, but it sure gives me a nice dose of serendipity, i.e. I’m actually able to find interesting items from sources I wasn’t aware of. I am thinking of putting a Megite widget on the sidebar here, after having removed the Memeorandum one because it was having problems and slowing down the loading of these pages.
For those who don’t know better, Megite is another one of the so-called memetrackers, like Memeorandum, Newsvine, and Tailrank. With the last one, Megite shares the personalization aspect, which I find quite useful.
Technorati Tags: tailrank, megite, newsvine, memeorandum, memetrackers.
Tris Hussey: “While web-based apps are stable, if you accidentally close your browser window, you’re still hooped. At lest Word, Excel, etc prompt me if I’m sure that I was to close without saving.”
Word, Excel, and most other apps out there are dumb. As I wrote before, applications should provide transparent save with versioning and not bother users with useless questions.
Connectivity is still a problem for web office apps, though.
I had this very unpleasant surprise yesterday. I started noticing a considerable decrease in traffic coming here via “organic” (i.e. search-originated) referrals from Google. A brief check confirmed that my rankings for several terms for which I was among the first results went south by a long range. One phrase which showed one of my URLs as the first or second hit is now ranking 214th! Other ones are nowhere to be found, even after 50 pages of results.
Still, the number of indexed pages and backlinks stayed about the same as before.
As aboout 80% of my traffic was coming from Google, you can imagine how much of hit I took. This is all very annoying, especially considering that I never engaged in any “black hat SEO” tactics, like hidden text, doorway pages, cloaking, and buying or selling links.
I followed Matt Cutts’ advice, submitted a reinclusion request, got an automated reply, and followed up via email. Let’s hope they examine my request soon.
Technorati Tags: google, serp, seo, rankings, reinclusion.
In the last few hours I noticed something strange with the AdSense ads that appear on this site. While before most ads were about blogging and RSS, recently I’ve seen a bunch of ads that seem to be triggered by keywords like “speed reading”, “memory improvement”, “online surveys”, “IQ testing” and stuff like that. The point is: I never used those keywords here (now I have, so I have just probably perturbed the phenomenon by talking about it, in a sort of feedback loop).
I had the suspect those ads were paying more per click than the previous ones, but the first results don’t seem to confirm my suspicion. My sample, however, is still very small, so it might just be that nobody is clicking those ads yet (and please don’t, unless you’re really interested in the products advertised).
Just saw this while doing a Google search (and being logged in to Google):
I hadn’t noticed this before and saw no mention of it while browsing the usual suspects, so I thought it useful to post about it here. There’s also a page about this on Google’s Help Center:
Personalized Search orders your search results based on your past searches, as well as the search results and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can view all these items in your Search History and remove any items you’d like.
I wonder what effect this is going to have on SEO practices.
Technorati Tags: personalized search, google.
Today, yet another memetracker, but this time with more than a twist, launched: Newsvine. They promise to be “the fastest wire news on the web”. I wanted to look around a bit and evaluate if I could use it as another news source for Evil or Not? or maybe as the news source for it, leaving behind me all the hassles of dealing with the idiosyncrasies of each source’s feed format, minor or major RSS/Atom screwups and, what is most important, having to measure the relevance of every single item.
Unfortunately, the site seems to be running very slowly at the moment. Probably they’re having too much traffic right now, with every blogger and tech news site pointing at them, but still I wonder if they haven’t undersized the infrastructure just a bit. Hope it’s just a temporary problem that can be fixed with a little tuning and maybe some more resources, because the service looks really interesting.
Technorati Tags: newsvine, evil, memtrackers
You might have noticed that since a few days ago, I’ve been sporting a new button in the right column:
While Technorati Favorites looks like a nice feature, it will probably end up with A-listers favoring other fellow A-listers and us poor Z-listers getting no traffic at all :(. So, if you want to help this Z-lister become more of a Y-lister or X-lister, could you click on the button and add this blog to your favorites, pretty please? I promise I will reciprocate. We need to be more helpful towards each other, if we want to overthrow the top-100 cabal ;).
One problem with this schema is that it’s not currently possible to know if you’ve been put on someone else’s favorites list, unless he tells you.
Update: It is now possible to see the 100 “most favorited” blogs on Technorati. As of now, #100 is Gawker, which has been “favorited” (is this even a word?) by just 11 people, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get into this special A-list. Since anyone can nominate at most 50 favorites, we can make a posse of 50 bloggers who favor each other and get everyone near the top of the list very quickly. If you want to join, just add my blog and all the others on my favorites list to your favorites and let me know.
Technorati Tags: technorati, favorites, a-list
Today edgeio finally launched. I was thinking of putting my PowerBook up for sale, but I have it on lease and the contract hasn’t expired already. I think it will in March, then I’ll be able to redeem it and sell it. At the moment, I only see one listing for a PowerBook, at $800. Mine is actuallly much better, at 1.25GHz, running OS X 10.4, no missing keys and an almost-new battery. I wonder if I’ll be able to sell it for $1000, but somehow I doubt it.
Technorati Tags: edgeio
