2010

App Inventor for Android
Reading up on a visual mobile app builder from Google and MIT. You can make an app for almost any task you'd like to accomplish.

2010

What is Foursquare?
Primarily a "location-based social networking service" for smartphones and mobile users. Users "check in" to places they're at so that their friends know where they are. The most frequent visitor of a place (bar, restaurant, venue) can become the "mayor", and users can also earn badges for completing special tasks.

The point of all this? The service posits that the world will really care about knowing the most popular, "hottest" places to be right now, a la twitter. Companies of course will hope their venue is just such a place and can advertise.

One new service aggregates a group of services: http://socialgreat.com/
It gives a gestalt view from: from Foursquare, Twitter, Brightkite, and graffitiGeo.

2010

Beware Tabnabbing, a New Type of Phishing Attack
Wow. The number of ways you can be fooled into giving up your private logins through a web browser keeps growing. Adam Engst at Tidbits.com describes the attack using your browser history (you do purge it often, right)? See a demo at StartPanic.com and read more at Krebson Security.

The lesson: keep your browser history clean, do not sign into any secure site from a tab left open, and block as many 3rd-party ads as you can with AdBlock for FireFox. And wait for Firefox to fix this bug in accessing global history.

2010

When "Wisdom of the Crowds " gets manipulated

YELP!, you're in deep trouble. There's growing momentum for a class-action lawsuit against the review website. And Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman is dismissive of complaints. It adds up to a major blow for hubris.

The lawsuit alleges that Yelp runs an extortion scheme in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments, in the guise of “advertising contracts,” in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews appearing on the website. The plaintiff, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California, asked that Yelp remove a false and defamatory review from the website. In response, as set forth in the lawsuit, Yelp refused to take down the review. Instead, the company’s sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital and demanded a roughly $300 per-month payment in exchange for hiding or removing the negative review. Similar examples of Yelp’s unscrupulous sales practices have been widely documented in the press, including in The Wall Street Journal, The San Jose Mercury, and a series of articles recently appearing in The East Bay Express.

Source: http://yelpclassaction.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/yelplawsuit/

and read more at BusinessWeek. The article quotes how "Yelp's revenue comes from restaurants, hotels, and other businesses that typically pay $300 a month to advertise on the site, which 25 million people visit each month, according to research service Compete. It's a promising model."

This is why our GrapeMojo.com will never sell ads on its website — if the subjects of your content (wine lovers, makers and sellers, in our case) are also its primary source of advertising, the conflicts of interest are bound to appear.

2010

Interesting if not obvious-in-hindsight complaint about Sun Microsystems by Oracle head:

More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold equipment at a loss because it was more focused on boosting revenue than generating profits. The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. "The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case," he said.

See Reuters article.

2010

2010

iPad Mania!
Interest what a blog at Fortune says about the new iAd's potential:

Jobs pitch: Apple will provide the tools, sell and host the ads, give developers 60% of the revenue and by the time the service debuts this summer, offer a billion impressions a day to one of the world's most valuable demographics.

2010

Ebooks:

Scribd is a document-sharing social network. Scribd and Lulu support multiple devices including PC, smartphones and e-readers, and a variety of formats like ePub and PDF. You can upload a file in any format and convert it to all other formats. So, your ebook reader and Kindle can both display your digital content.

2010

HTML 5 vs Flash — the Shoot-out

Readwriteweb talks about how Flash and HTML5 both have performance issues in browsers (mobile and desktop); so why then is Apple so deadset against Flash on the iphone? It frankly annoys us to death here.

Jan Ozer is an expert in video encoding technologies, has worked in digital video since 1990 and is the author of 13 books related to the subject. Recently, he put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two technologies against each other on both the Mac and PC and in different web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

2010

2010

Why HTML 5 is not a Flash Killer... or, said another way, why Flash is not going to die.
If you've been wondering if Adobe's multimedia format Flash is in jeopardy (more importantly, whether you should still use it on your website) because of the lack of support from Apple (on the iPhone and iPad), read this good Wired article. HTML 5's video embed capability is not ready to replace the Flash swf format. More reading here.

2009

Our favorite hosting company

2009

Caution about your WIFI Router:

From a recent article at computerworld.com, researchers discover that a common WIFI security setting is easily hackable.

To quote: "Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. Users can change from TKIP to AES encryption using the administrative interface on many WPA routers." Go do this now on your office router!

2009

Quote of the week:

Objects can be designed to low price, but they cannot be crafted to low price.... Craftsmanship cements a relationship between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not. — "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" by Ellen Ruppel Shell

2009

Comparison of JQuery and MooTools

Hands down the best review of these two Javascript resources. This is why I say that both frameworks are excellent choices. My effort here has been to highlight the differences in philosophies between the two codebases and highlight their advantages and disadvantages. Read the article.

2009

Best CSS advice

Write Your Base for Gecko, Then Tweak for Webkit and IE. Save yourself troubleshooting headaches and write CSS first for Gecko browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Flock, Camino). If your CSS works properly with Gecko, it’s much more likely to be problem free in Webkit (Safari, Chrome) and Internet Explorer. From: Web Designer Depot.

2009

It's that time of year – Browser share statistics!

2009

Customer Service, Google style

Now, this is not a typical rant against Google; I generally like Google's products. But we have been reading more about how difficult it is to actually get real customer service from the giant company. Read this business owner's account of Google's stonewalling and bureaucratic black hole that is customer service: Why I Sued Google (and Won). That's scary... reminiscent of once asking to speak to a supervisor at Delta Airlines when baggage was lost, and being told, "you can't, we don't allow that."

2008

Modern Media Strategy - Take it from Obama

How to use the internet for promotion like the Obama campaign: Post 2000+ videos to YouTube. Then, use a cross-posting video publishing site like TubeMogul to publish everywhere, then Live Broadcast on UStream, and archive them in high def on Hulu.

2008

What is Grandcentral?

We here at PDG use Grandcentral for some of our voicemail-to-email capabilities. After Google bought the company, it instituted a freeze on new signups. That's too bad... this article explains why it is so great. It will be called Google Voice.

2008

DNS Cache Poisoning Issue!

The Internet is facing a severe vulnerability in the global DNS system. Check to see if your ISP is still using an unpatched nameserver.

Click "Check my DNS" at Doxpara Research. Curious about the gritty, fascinating details? Read here.

2008

Google lifts the curtain a bit

This blog post from Google describes their search and ranking improvements and secrets. Read more at Google's blog.

Browser Marketshare - 2008

Microsoft Internet Explorer 	 74.88% 
 Firefox 	 17.27% 
 Safari 	 5.70% 
 Opera 	 0.69% 
 Netscape 	 0.68% 

Top Operating Systems on the web:

  Month 	 Windows 	 Mac 	 Linux 	 iPhone
  Feb 2008 	 91.58% 	 7.46% 	 0.65% 	 0.14% 	
  

Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com

Looking for a domain name? Beware!

We've been reading about the practices of certain unscrupulous domain registrars who "steal" domain names after you search for them using their search tools. Verify that the registrar you're using does not do this! Read more on registrars who practice front running, and allow domain kiting or tasting.

We've had trouble recently with Network Solutions. They actively prevent an owner from switching away from them when it comes time for renewal. See more here and here. Beware of them.

While trying to transfer our website name to a better registrar, domaindirect.com, NetSol locked our name for 60 days because we updated our email address. This is done supposedly in the name of "security". Conveniently, however, it causes us to miss the renewal date, and to avoid losing paulgurney.com, we'd need to renew it with them! Basically, they are holding us hostage. We've complained to them, and are awaiting response on 1/28/08.

Update I: after multiple calls, disconnects and debates, they have lifted the "lock" and allowed us to transfer our name away. They absolutely irritate us with their tactics. More info on various practices here and some history.

It is unclear as to who the most ethical registrars are, but Domaindirect.com (which uses the openSRS registry) has served us and our clients well for years, and when we requested a statement from them about this topic, they pledged that they do not condone or do any of these things. Kudos to them.

Update II. The registrar GoDaddy has a reputation of being quick to censor its customers, with little or no warning. We reommend staying away from them as well. More.

Flash Player 9, Update 3

Adobe has released the final version of Flash Player 9 Update 3, which adds the HD video support announced earlier this year. Update 3 is the first public version of Flash Player 9 to include support for H.264 HD video playback, which means HD video on YouTube is now within the realm of possibilities.

It takes around a year for a Flash Player update to reach the magical 80+ percent saturation that sites of YouTube's scope want before unveiling new features, but there's plenty of other video sharing sites that have already made the HD leap, which puts some extra pressure on YouTube. And with a subset of YouTube content already encoded in H.264 for iPhone and AppleTV users, YouTube may offer web-based H.264 support sooner rather than later.

The updated Flash Player 9 also has better full screen support, Leopard compatibility for Mac users, and support for Microsoft Active Accessibility. Source: Wired blog.

SEO and Meta tags

"Why does Google care about meta descriptions? We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results."

Read for yourself what Google has to say about meta tags. Source from Google. And search results from a meta keyword tag search at google's blog.

Despite their lack of importance for ranking, Yahoo calls them important and offers advice for meta tags: Direct Yahoo link.

Internet website attacks

Some firms saw attacks from over 100,000 unique IP addresses, and in May 2007 have recorded over 250,000 IP addresses involved in "botnet" attacks. The largest such attack involved over 300,000 computers and was difficult to stop, as new IP addresses would keep attacking faster than the company could block them. There is a general solution to defend against the attack, but the solution needs to be applied to each web site individually. Source

Do you buy music online from iTunes? Stop! Read this:

The better solution is to buy your MP3s from Amazon or eMusic.

The corporate toll on the Internet (4-06)
Telecom giant AT&T plans to charge online businesses to speed their services through its DSL lines. Critics say the scheme violates every principle of the Internet, favors deep-pocketed companies, and is bound to limit what we see and hear online. By Farhad Manjoo. Weblink (needs account) | PDF download (free).

As usual, the telecoms are spreading disinformation. In addition to lobbying, broadband firms have "launched a campaign aimed at urging Americans to "join their fight". Large telecom firms back a "coalition" called Hands Off the Internet, which argues that instituting network neutrality amounts to government "regulation" of the Internet. On its Web site, the group -- which is funded by, among other companies, AT&T, beseeches, "Join us and say NO to government regulation of the Internet!" "

Opponents say that regulation is the only way to save the Internet from the likes of AT&T. "They would have the pipe split between the public Internet -- which might get 1 Mbps speeds -- and a toll lane on the rest of the 100 Mbps pipe they're laying…

Browser Market Share – April 06: (from http://marketshare.hitslink.com)

Microsoft Internet Explorer -- 84.70%
Firefox -- 10.05%
Safari -- 3.19%
Netscape -- 1.05%