Paul Gurney, website development design programming

What's New? Paul D. Gurney's Internet Tech Blog

What's so special about a "blog", you wonder? Simply put, it's a content management system (cms) built for posting articles on the web in a structured way. Like us, you may have been "blogging" on your site before the word existed (circa 1999), but nowadays there's a new urgency to creating interesting content on your site to enhance "stickiness", customer loyalty and SEO. So check out some of the latest news we find interesting; you can let us know a thing or two as well.

2011	Paul Gurney's partnership in BobDonPaul.com has been rewarding for many years. Just this month we were recognized in Mashable for "5 Smart Social PR Campaigns"
March 2011	Twitter users, fyi: the Libyan government has "shut off" the internet in their country. All websites hosted there are inaccessible. However, domain names like http://bit.ly (a URL shortening service used for Twitter) still function because they are not hosted inside the country. Hopefully some citizens of the country can use international dial-up services to access the global internet and keep getting the word out.
2011	A reader posed this challenge: did we know what "pentalobular" was without using a search engine. Latin tells us it's a 5-sided something. If you have an iphone, then you have several pentalobular screws. Go to ifixit to work with them.
2011	New Hampshire network firm Renesys reveals their research (pdf) on how Egypt's government choked off the country's internet access via its state-owned data centers. Meanwhile, a Columbia law professor named Eben Moglen (of the Free Software Foundation) launches the FreedomBox Foundation, to ensure one day that people fighting for their freedom do not have their voices silenced by corporate/state-controlled businesses. The Plug computer was built to distribute the hardware infrastructure of the internet to everyone.
2011	"Kill switch" on the internet real in most countries; there's only a few choke-points. What we've learned from the censorshp in Egypt.
2011	Google acts to clean up low-quality "content farms" -- sites which scrape other people's content and manage to rank higher in search engine results. Two known biggies affected: Demand Media and the Big Board.
2010	Quick Tip: On a computer that is running Windows Vista, if you receive an error message that resembles the following when you try to rename or to move a file or a folder: The file or folder does not exist — here's a Microsoft Tech Note describing its fix.
2010	Being bad to your customers is bad for SEO Were you following the saga of the latest SEO-hacking creep? Google has announced it changed its algorithms to detect bad actors. However, Search Engine Land explains how this man did not really benefit from link equity from bad reviews... it was through several SEO tricks. Two different stories going on. You can study how a site obtained its google ranking via Yahoo! Site Explorer. By the way, the seller did get arrested. Justice to be served, finally, thanks to media exposure.
2010	To keep the google theme going: Google has a page describing its advertising cookies. You can permanently opt-out from double-click and adsense.
2010	Google has a helpful tool to visualize what different visitors to your site see in their particular choice of browser. From Google's project About page: Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger. This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page's user interface are visible by a wide audience. Check it out! http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
2010	Here is a very useful article by Steven Whitney devoted to helping you protect your website from being hacked. This link came my way via a commenter on a LinkedIn discussion board, Caroline Bogart, from Massachusetts.
2010	HTML 5 can do what Flash does thanks to this Javascript code library. See what a Google employee built with it -- asteroids!
2010	Uh oh — Google and Verizon to undermine public interest? Visit the website to save net neutrality. Or, is this a tactic by Google and Verizon to bring Google's data closer to users and reduce both of their network delivery costs? Cringely makes a good point here.
2010	Are you aware of how large the site tracking industry is growing? WSJ reports about intrusive consumer-tracking technologies: The 50 [sample] sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal's test. The companies that placed the most tracking tools were Google Inc., Microsoft. and Quantcast Corp. Some of our clients need analytical tracking tools, which are not about building consumer profiles so much as determining effectiveness of Adword Campaigns and referral sources. They have not joined networks like Quantcast to track all of your activities!
2010	DoNanza, a freelance jobs search engine that aggregates project postings from job markets like Elance and oDesk, reports that PHP skills are the most sought after, even before iPhone, iPad and Android developers. Read the full report at DoNanza.
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	The Real Story behind the iPhone signal problem Anandtech gives a great investigative analysis. In short, there's nothing wrong per se; all smartphones will suffer from various hand grip positions. But Apple needs to add insulation to the antenna band, and subsidize a "bumper".
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	Twitter Tips: 5 Ways to Get Retweeted Helpful article by the author of The Social Media Marketing Book, Dan Zarrella. #1 - Time and day matter. Read more at CIO.
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	We had reason to look up the email-to-sms addresses for the major carriers; here they are: T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
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	The best analysis for why HTML5 can't replace Flash – Apple is being "disruptive" in the worst way. HTML5 Vs. Flash. What You Haven’t Heard — a guest post by Carlos Nazareno, an interactive media artist... in sum, "HTML5 is just as bad, if not worse than Flash." And besides, just use CloudBrowse, an app for your smartphone that browses for you.
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	The war of wits and accusations heats up: If Flash is to be consigned to the recycle bin, then what technology will replace its amazing animation capabilities? Apple is disingenuous in only focusing on the video-playing aspects of HTML 5. In other news: SEO -- Forget PAGE RANK: Google tells us to forget about it.
2010	Why should you add "nofollow" to your CMS or comment system? Google describes it well... decide to whom you give Page Rank; dissuade spammers.
2010	Twitter has just become more high stakes... there are firms out there measuring your influence on twitter... like this one: http://klout.com/twitter/influence/. So, marketers are soon going to focus on high-influencers in their efforts. Move over SEO, here comes TWEO (Tweet Optimization). You heard it from PDG first ;-)
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. Did you see Apple's presentation? Streamed here.
2010	flash cookies and consumer privacy and A pilot study of the use of 'Flash cookies' by popular websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are using it to 'respawn' or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users. Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking. http://billmullins.blogspot.com/2009/09/lso-flash-cookies-serious-attack-on.html There is a major advantage for an advertiser to employ Flash cookies, not the least of which is; they are virtually unknown to the average user. Equally as important from an advertisers perspective is; they remain active on a system even after the user has cleared cookies and privacy settings. To call this a deceptive practice would be a major understatement. Crooked, immoral, fraudulent, illegal, are just some of the words that come to mind.
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	New on-demand video rental platform — new way to offer rentals for your videos. Once Dynamo launches, anyone who owns a video they think people would pay for will be able to rent it to them via Paypal, for whatever amount of time they want, at whatever price they want, with no charges up front. The video owner immediately gets 70 percent of that revenue, while Dynamo will keep 30 percent — simple. Creators can set prices anywhere from $2 to $12 for viewing windows ranging from six hours to seven days. But the main reason video creators of all stripes, be they independent, pornographic or whatever, might want to use Dynamo’s solution instead of or in addition to YouTube (both contracts are non-exclusive) is that they can control more of the user experience – everything from the domain name to the design of the website where their video appears. Read More at wired.com
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	Why did Google acquire Admob? Oh no! Advertising on my smartphone's apps? To infiltrate Apple's iphone? Hmm. image from google's press release
2010	2010 Browser share statistics are in. In brief: Internet Explorer is dropping (even with IE8), Google Chrome is growing, and Firefox is dropping.
2010	This essay by the band OK Go had a well-written description of how "going viral" works. Here's a quote from the original article: Embedded videos — those hosted by YouTube but streamed on blogs and other Web sites — don’t generate any revenue for record companies, so EMI disabled the embedding feature. Now we can’t post the YouTube versions of our videos on our own site, nor can our fans post them on theirs. If you want to watch them, you have to do so on YouTube. But this isn’t how the Internet works. Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face. The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account. It's a good read; check it out, and consider how your website's content can be embedded in other sites and blogs, and whether it's worthy of being shared.
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.