Archive for August, 2005
Yahoo sitemaps is out
Yahoo Sitemaps is out. You can point Yahoo to a text file (no XML support yet) containing a list of your site’s urls. You can’t upload the file to them. Yahoo was playing around with this a few months ago, but now it’s public. [via SeoWeblog]
Feed-mail - Email in RSS feeds
Feed-mail.com is an interesting, if quite unusable concept. It’s email sent via RSS feeds. You subscribe to your Feed-mail feed and you get emails that are sent to that feed. Less spam, more secure. But the sender has to login to his Feed-mail account in order to send a message. And there’s no SMTP service either so you’re locked into Feed-mail’s interface. And one thing that irked me was that my password was inscribed into the feed’s url in plain. Major security risk. And I reckon Feed-mail also has the same security problem as receiving Gmail via Bloglines or any public RSS aggregator — you have to ensure that your feed has privacy settings. Feed-mail is still in beta so things might improve on usability.
Rumor: Microsoft, AIM and Yahoo to cut out all multi-IM clients
Over at drunkenblog.com, there is a post that posits the days of Trillian and other multi-IM clients will be over soon. There’s a rumour that Google is planning a multi-IM client so Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have ganged up to introduce new non-backward compatible IM clients for each of their services that shuts out all others. This will probably appear for Windows only and will allow Mac multi-IM clients to still function.
40-60% of Blogspot content is spam
I knew it was bad, but this is an indication of just how bad. Philipp Lenssen did a random survey using Blogspot’s random blog url generator and he catalogued 50 blogs hosted on blogspot. 30 of them were spam blogs. If you are a student fishing for ideas on a paper, I think this is really worth an academic paper with a larger sample.
Preventing inline images from comment posters
Chris Josephes writes in Oreillynet about an interesting method for finding out if an image that one of your visitors is hotlinking is instead sending a substituted image. Hotlinking is often a danger in forums and blog comments where there is no preset control over what is posted.
Chris says:
If any site user makes a posting that inlines images from a third party server, the editing software should retrieve the image twice using the HTTP HEAD method. For the first retrieval, don’t pass a Referer header. For the second retrieval, set a Referer header that would reference the full URL of the page that would eventually load the image. For both requests, the HTTP server headers Content-Length and ETag should return identical values. If they don’t, that means the web server is sending out different files. Make sure the comment poster is aware of this, and give them the opportunity to correct the problem.
This would be really nice if someone used this method in a plugin for blog CMSes.
How to catch a mobile phone thief
This is an interesting post on a forum about how someone had his mobile phone stolen and the funny series of events that led to the capture of the thief. The thief had used the camera on the phone to take pictures of himself, his girlfriend and a amateur sex video. Unfortunately for the thief, the owner had set up an automatic posting routine on the phone. Whenever a photo was sent from the phone, it saved a copy on his Sprint website. So he got an update of all the thief’s activities.
Auto-post to del.icio.us from Wordpress - A bad idea
As soon as I emailed Ozh about a plugin that automatically sends your new posts to del.icio.us, than I find someone has just released one. As soon as I finished reading the description, I suddenly realised what a bad idea this is. Del.icio.us will be flooded with posts from Wordpress blogs — blog spam from this plugin’s users.
Microformats aren’t relevant
Microformats are sets of XHTML standards to present various bits of metadata on websites. They’re usually used for presenting trivial sets of metadata (hence the ‘micro’ monicker). Microformats include the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and the rel=tag attribute for links.
The microformats.org site says that microformats are “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” While I applaud the effort to make a standard to help developers, I’m not sure microformats is terribly relevant. I’d have to argue that humans don’t see the difference between one way of marking up and another, even if they are standardised. So it doesn’t make a difference to the population. You don’t have to look further than the XFN format for evidence of irrelevancy. It was proposed two years ago by Matt Mullenwegg and has yet to become anything more than an interesting idea. Microformats are certainly not “widely adopted”. But having said that, there is one popular microformat — Technorati’s rel=tag attribute. Unfortunately, the only one who seems to be using it is … yup, Technorati.
Newsgator releases their API for developers
Newsgator has just released their API. Developers will have access to the following types of services:
- Complete subscription management capabilities
- Subscription synchronization between all products using the API, including NewsGator Online, NewsGator Outlook edition, FeedDemon, and others
- Post-level status synchronization (read/unread/deleted status)
- Bandwidth optimization by downloading only new content
- Community and individual ratings of feed content
Now I can understand the usefulness of releasing the API for middleware like Feedburner’s API, but I don’t understand the benefit for developers or end users of releasing the API for a client application. The only party I see benefiting from this directly is Newsgator itself.
Hacker Underground Erupts in Virtual Turf Wars
An interesting analysis from Newsfactor regarding the changing hacker culture that produced Zotob and other recent worms. It says there is a kind of competitiveness among hackers that’s driving each of them to be more conservative in their experimentation. They’re starting to draw less and less attention while at the same time starting to see the more strategic side of hacking.
In today’s murky world of digital viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, the idea is to stay quiet and use hijacked computers to flood the Internet with spam, spread destructive viruses, or disgorge e-mail to choke corporate systems. Not only can networks of these compromised computers be leased or sold, experts say, they are becoming more valuable as the number of vulnerable computers slowly shrinks. The viruses of yesteryear, “where something would get on your system and blow away your boot sector just doesn’t happen that much anymore.”
Yahoo launching an ISP service
In the mad dash for GIM, one story got overlooked on Tuesday. Yahoo is launching a DSL cable service. And apparently it was an accidental leak. I got it from an AP story posted to Yahoo News.
For $14.95, subscribers will be able to download Web pages via a digital subscriber line at speeds of up to 768 kilobits and upload data at 128 kilobits. The cheaper service, which requires a one-year contract, offers Yahoo premium services, such as antivirus protection, on-demand music videos and unlimited photo storage, according to an advertisement on Yahoo’s site.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo was expected to announce formally the Verizon launch Tuesday, but an advertisement found on the company’s Web site Monday night detailed the DSL offering. John Reseburg, a Yahoo representative, confirmed the accuracy of the ad.
I can’t find the ad that the article was talking about and I can’t find the link to the registration page. Has anyone else seen it?
FeedBlitz: Import your Bloglet email subscribers for more control
To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.
Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.
So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:
Hey, spammer, back at ya: howto bounce spam
I wrote an article in two parts about taking an active role in spammer rejection by bouncing spam back at them. It’s published at tipmonkies.com.
Hey, spammer, back at ya! Bouncing spam, part 1 and Hey, spammer, back at ya! Bouncing spam, part 2.
Section targeting for AdSense allows you to ignore on-page content
Ah finally, Google rolls out section targeting for Adsense. Just because I’ve got the word ‘blog’ in my title and in my first header, Google always seems to think that it should deliver ads on blogs, even though not much of my content is about blogs or blogging (well ok, except for this post).
Now with section targeting, with a couple of comment tags, I can tell Google to read the content of this or of that to determine what context of ads it should deliver. I can also tell it not to read the blogroll, the menu and the header and the footer so the text in those sections are not taken into context.
Adsense optimised theme and theme-config panel for Wordpress coming soon
Mark at weblogtoolscollection.com is asking if there are any Wordpress themes out there that are optimised for Adsense. Well, there’s going to be one soon. Ozh and I have been working on something for a couple weeks. It grew from an Adsense-optimised design to a full-featured theme with built-in utilities (no plug-ins required).
It does not make sense for themes to come without optimised Adsense positions and colours for two reasons. First, making money from blogs is now more prevalent than not. It is no longer a point of differentiation, it is a point of parity (or at least it should be). Second, there are so many blog advertising services for publishers vying for real estate that designs are starting to look like a cross between women’s fashion magazines (more ads than editorial) and Dr Frankenstein’s pet project.
Theme designers need to take ad-space into consideration and take charge of ad-placement before their theme users get their grubby amateur hands on them. Designing themes with ad space built in will stem the trend of poorly-optimised and ugly ad-placement and re-direct it toward more measured and more aesthetic layouts.
The theme we’re working on is taking a bit longer because now there are so many features (we keep getting ideas for more every day). We’ve even got a single admin control panel to simplify the configuration of everything from the feed url to Adsense IDs. No need to open the theme editor any more. Geez, whoever heard of a theme with a config panel? Bizarre! 
Ozh will probably release the whole thing as a standardised themekit for theme-developers to add the same features to their themes, along with the theme config panel.
Watch this space.
tagifieds.com - an open-ended bulletin board with tags
Written using Ruby on Rails, Tagifieds.com could quite possibly be a work of genius. I haven’t decided yet. It’s still too new and I haven’t seen the full potential of it yet. In the “About” section, the creator insists that “It’s great for online classifieds, recipes, reviews, rants, scrapbooks, and useful information of all kinds.” Yes, it can be used for all those things, but I’m not sure whether this is the perfect format for any of them. It is a bulletin board, but more in the sense of the corkboard kind with all its chaos, not like the online kind which is often known as a forum. All the posts appear on the front page. And without categories, it may be hard to browse for things — you have to use the search function instead.
Most popular feeds at Rmail
Randy has published a list of the most popular feeds that are being subscribed to via his RSS-to-email service. I chuckled when I saw that an RSS blog (Randy’s) is one of the top ten for email subscription. Apart from that rather obvious observation, I can’t contribute much else, except that I noticed significant numbers were subscribed to Chinese-only blogs. This got me to thinking: how many of the popular online RSS feed readers support multi-language interfaces? Bloglines.com is one. Yahoo and MSN of course do (they’ve supported Chinese interfaces long before they had RSS feed readers). But Newsgator.com, Pluck.com and Rojo.com do not.
Godaddy.com has RSS feeds
I’m subscribed to Godaddy.com’s RSS feeds for their domain auctions. Great stuff. I just learned that Portugal.com is up for sale for USD4.5million. And on the other hand the owner of Michaeljacksonisdead.com wants USD175,000 for that. I’m going to keep these RSS feeds subscribed just for their amusement value. As an added bonus, I learned from the sale of thechokinggame.com (USD$500) of a strange new trend that American kids are getting into - choking each other to see who passes out first.
Akamai News usage index
Akamai is tracking the number of people who are consuming news from news sites like CNN and BBC around the world. And its providing the numbers on its news usage zeitgeist page. In the last 24 hours six out of seven news site visitors get their news from American sites.
Online social tagging is not about sharing
A landmark study from the HP research department finds that social bookmarking is less about sharing than we thought. A large portion of the tags on del.icio.us used by the study group to describe documents on the web were self-referencing (ie mycomments) or for self-organising purposes (ie toread). As an example, in the last 15 days, over 30,000 links had no tags in them, suggesting that they were less for sharing than for self-tracking. But this was not a study of motives, but rather of finding out how links were used and how they were being described. Probably the next step is to distribute a qualitative survey via del.icio.us to its users, asking for information to provide insights into motives of tagging.