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.
Useful Twitter tools – roundup
There are many desktop programs that make using twitter easier. Whether for managing multiple accounts or tracking comments across many social media sites, these apps and programs can make the experience of using twitter/facebook/tumbleupon etc. more efficient.
Here’s a website that scans your website/tweets for word frequency and creates art in the form of a “word cloud”. While not strictly useful, this site can be used to scan a web page and find the most popular words for SEO keyword purposes.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Another website, Appstorm, gathered together over 50 Mac twitter apps/programs/clients.
An important fuel to this fire is the remarkably open Twitter API which has allowed developers to create a plethora of beautiful and incredibly convenient desktop applications that connect with every facet of the service. This article is dedicated to all you readers who, like me, are completely addicted to two things: Mac applications and Twitter.
Google cleans up low-quality “content farms”
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.
How Egypt’s government choked off the country’s internet access
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.
A “Kill switch” on the internet is very real in most countries
A “Kill switch” on the internet is very real in most countries; there’s only a few choke-points to exploit. What we’ve learned from the censorship in Egypt.
Common Windows Vista error message
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.
Gap Needs a New Logo
The visual design profession has long battled the undervaluing of its craft by companies seeking “work on spec” — meaning, “you designers make a design for me and I’ll pay for the one I like.” Given that no other industry operates this way, designers are right to be boycotting such attempts to extract free work.
Recently, the GAP clothing company introduced a new logo design. Customers promptly disliked it, and in an attempt to mollify them, GAP offered an invite to designers to “crowd-source” an alternative logo.
Some prominent designers rebelled. MULE design posted a great response.
And that time and effort was used to make sure I delivered something that actually met your needs and objectives. You guys have numbers to meet. (I imagine at least a 10% increase to last year’s $14.5B in revenue, and $967M in net income.) And plans for the future based on meeting those numbers. So do I.
And for the sake of full disclosure I should let you know that I’ve also frequently shopped at your stores. You sell good stuff. But never in my experience has any of your employees offered me a free pair of pants because the ones I was wearing looked bad. I wouldn’t expect them to. Their job is to sell me clothes.
My job is to sell design.
I believe we understand each other. I anxiously await your call and look forward to negotiating a fair value for the greatest logo on Earth.
Brilliant. Read more of the backstory.
And as a final update, GAP has returned to its original logo. Power of the crowds, indeed.
Being bad to your customers is bad for SEO
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.
How to permanently opt-out from Double-Click and Adsense
To keep the google theme going: Google has a page describing its advertising cookies. You can permanently opt-out from Double-Click and AdSense tracking by cookies.
You do clear your browser’s history and cache every week, right?
Google Browser Size Lab
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/