image courtesy Tantek
Techcrunch lead on a $100m investment by Google in Zynga the social network gaming company. It’s the latest in a long line of Google failures in a vital area of capturing web traffic – or, “organising the world’s information” as Google diplomatically puts it.
Canny move or desperation?
Continue reading ‘Google & It’s Search For a Social Graph’
Perhaps, when attempting to convince users your browser is rock solid haxor-proof, it’d be advisable to demonstrate to them that your sites can detect which browser they’re currently running?
I get asked quite a bit if sites can use their facebook page to create inbound links to their homepage for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.
First off I point out that although FB Pages are public, Facebook adds rel=”nofollow” to all external links posted on users & pages walls, meaning no benefit for seo.
However I have seen a number of SEO-sites claim that adding one of the many RSS feed apps to their fb page and configuring it to auto publish their target site feed will result in the fb link juice flowing back to them.
not so.
Continue reading ‘SEO No Go’
Or An Analysis for Those with Just The Two Hands.
I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important
Continue reading ‘Netbook Vs iPad: Hands Free Vs Pain in the Arse’
I got held up recently by a particularly nasty Trojan infection that seemed to come from a flash vulnerability – or at least it installed itself in a Macromedia directory at a time when embedded flash would have been running on one of the web pages I had open.
No ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser – Chrome – coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy – attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains – initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net – each time resolving to an address in China).
Continue reading ‘Trojans. Not Stupid.’
I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.
Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.
Continue reading ‘The StackOverflow Rant’
I posted about Google’s inhouse deadpool a couple of weeks back. Strangely though although I use one of the wordpress sitemap plugins to update mine accordingly Google stubbornly refused to index it. The reason?
Google appears not to add pages that include the rel=”nofollow” meta attribute by default.
Continue reading ‘Nofollow Stops Google Indexing Your Site’
Mobile, Music, Real-time and er, that watery thing – make no mistake about it, Google is the new borg. But they don’t always succeed. Like the finely tuned crack team of elite geeks they are, they bury their mistakes. For this piece I’ve taken on the role of chronological gravedigger (well it’ll fill my CV out won’t it?) and scooped out the bodies; not pretty viewing:
Dodgeball
This is what happens when the big G ventures outside of it’s tech stronghold: Tech invents something better and Google is left wondering why it got itself into some arcane mysticism it never really understood in the first place. Dodgeball, social networking on mobile before smartphone-based GPS services went nuclear – it even used SMS. Bless.
Google Answers
Two for the price of one here, as Google Q&A was a forerunner to Answers, and whose comedy value is far more interesting. Not today’s Q&A app that very few of you may be aware of, but an old web0.1 version whereby users emailed Googlers who responded for a fee, presumably with some answers. We never found out for sure though, as the service only lasted 24 hours. Nothing like fail fast, fail often eh Google?
Continue reading ‘The Google Deadpool’
Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.
This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP
On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.
It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.
First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…
Free wifi is good. Lots of places do it. McDonalds is the big one, providing wifi in it’s outlets all over the country.
But.
Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.
Here is my attempt to map them out – everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.
You’ll find FreeMap here.
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