Last Friday I spent the day “working from home” because I was anxiously awaiting my new iPhone 4S. It arrived around 1:30 PM Central and activated after about five angry hours. iOS 5 has some nifty new features, many of which where previously available if you got them by jail-breaking your iPhone. The hows and whys of which are a little outside of the scope of this post. Here’s a keen video about why you’d want to jail-break your iPhone, in case you live under a rock or haven’t been paying attention. Continue reading
teh interwebz
6 posts
China’s been up to some shenanigans this week, no? Actually, China’s up to shenanigans every week but it doesn’t usually make the news. Regardless, it’s a good time to review your internet security practices! Kind of like when the neighbor’s house burns down and you go through your apartment checking all your smoke alarms and fire extinguishers for the first time in two years.
So today, let’s talk about passwords. We all have them! Probably far more than we’d like to have. They’re also just about the only thing standing between us and A Great Big Bad Day. Getting your online accounts hacked sucks. Just ask Anthony Weiner. Continue reading
Last week, one of our faithful overlords gave us an article about a simplistic method for Canadians to figure out their true political leanings.
Once we got into the comments, however, someone piped up that a tool for evaluating the same in America would be nice to have. Dogs, ever the helpful one, gave us that link, and we had some fun with it in that thread.
We learned that Ethnology Nerd is almost definitely a red, and that at least a few of us think some (probably small number of) folks really do deserve to go to jail for the eternity of their time on this planet.
In the end, I thought it might be fun for a bunch of us to take the test, (linked above) and see where we fall as a group. The test only takes about 10 minutes, and if everyone posts their results here in the comments, I can round them up in a few days and do a little analysis, and then we can get to work on taking over the world from a more pragmatic perspective. I’m sure certain tendencies will reveal themselves, but I expect to see some interesting results.
If you already did this in the previous post, and have a second to repost your results here, it’ll make life easier for me from a collection standpoint.
The bearded and bespectacled Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky has announced he’s leaving the fourth most popular blog in the country. He gives no reason and says he has a few fantasy projects he might work on. That translates to I have been fired and have no new job.
Engadget has been owned by AOL since 2005 when the founders sold the blog group Weblogs, Inc. for a reported $25M. In that time they have had steady growth and are well regarded. So, what changed? AOL purchased HuffPo and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL blog empire which also includes the Techcrunch group of blogs. It seems strange timing for the editor to “leave” unless Arianna wants to put one of her own in charge or Topolsky didn’t want to go along with the AOL Way. This comes in the same week that AOL laid off 200 people.
Source and photo Engadget.
J.C. Penney, one of the oldest and most trusted institutions of commerce, was recently caught bumping up their search rank in Google by using deceptive tactics.
Google has been around since 1998, and ever since they came online, people have been trying to exploit its algorithm to make it so their pages appear first on Google’s listing. Have you ever gone to a website and seen a bunch of terms at the bottom of the page, or sometimes hidden (only visible when you highlight them with the mouse)?
The site was trying to artificially bump its search ranking. Google has “robots” that search the web and extract pertinent words. Loading your site up with descriptive words is one of the oldest tricks to try to get in to Google’s index. Google keeps their search algorithm secret, but they do disclose some information about how their bots work.
J.C. Penney exploited Google’s search algorithm through site links. Lets say you’re selling tires. If a bunch of automotive-related websites link to yours, Google takes that in account and assume that your site’s content is highly relevant and deserves a high rank. The more sites that link to yours, the better.
Google is smart enough to rank sites in terms of overall importance, so a link from someone’s tiny blog might give you +2 points, but if a site like Walmart links to you (they’re big, and get a lot of traffic) – you’ll get +10 points. The more points, coming from relevant sources, means a higher rank. You’re probably thinking “who cares if you’re #1 vs #2 on Google’s search ranking?” but the exact position matters. A lot. Researchers have done studies that say most people are proportionately more likely to click on the #1 link. If you’re a business as big as J.C. Penney, millions of dollars are at stake.
J.C. Penney decided to hire a shady SEO (search engine optimization) company to register thousands of websites whose sole purpose was to link to J.C. Penney. The SEO company would fill these sites with commonly-used search terms, and links. For an example, here’s a link to a Huffington Post “article” that was published before the Super Bowl:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/05/what-time-superbowl-start_n_819173.html
See how most of the “content” is short, simple paragraphs which seem to be factoids (at best)? This site is designed to be indexed by Google so that someone searching for “What time does the Superbowl start?” will be directed to the HuffPo page. This is way more advanced than J.C. Penney’s stunt. (Their pages are so un-interesting they’re not even worth linking to, unless you like looking at lists of household goods.) This HuffPo page isn’t really an article, it’s not really a “listicle” … its a page designed to drive traffic to the site.
Simple tricks like this have been vetted by Google since its inception. Since Google relies on bringing pertinent search terms to people, they really frown on stuff like this. A couple of years ago BMW in Germany decided to post a bunch of invisible text on their website (terms like “cars, auto, which car is the best?” etc) and Google de-listed them. They removed BMW from any and all Google searches! (BMW changed their site and got re-listed.) Every couple of months someone will come up with a “super ninja SEO technique” to drive traffic to websites. Generally any “super ninja SEO technique” will work for a couple of weeks, until Google changes up its algorithm. (Look in the “computer” section of Craigslist, and you’ll find all sorts of ads from people with “super secret SEO techniques.” It’s mostly bullshit.)
In response to J.C. Penney’s deceptive tactics, Google changed its search algorithm. Sites that used techniques like J.C. Penney lost a ton of traffic. In fact, Google came out and said that approximately 12% of their search rankings have changed in the past week. That’s a ton of upheaval!
Here’s another thing: Web users should be aware of how search rankings are calculated. The number one link in Google might not be the best result for you. If you run a website, its really deceptive to get traffic like this. As someone who buys a lot of stuff online, be wary of links!
With the demise of the open threads over at Gawker, some of the more industrious geeks have decided to create their own boards. In the few days following Gawker’s Meg Ryan-like reconstruction, Twitter was ablaze with people pimping their own sites, and recruiting the better commenters to join them. It was like a commenter free agency. When the dust settled, most people frequented two sites, yippayap ( http://yippayap.com/ ), and ATGAR ( http://atgar.dailyentity.com/ ). Both now have a de facto #whitenoise in them, with yippayap even going so far as to call its corresponding page whitenoise, and yippayap also has the relocated #groupthink. I haven’t ventured into groupthink, because it’s not really my demographic (straight male who blogs while he poops), but the whitenoise pages are pretty interesting. They’re like some sort of anthropologic study in how something like 4chan came to be. There’s no censorship, no threat of banning or destarring, and as a result, they have become a center for ridiculous memes, and fake commenting accounts. Also, those who I Could. Not. Fucking. Stand. are there. I ain’t going to either of those sites, which is a shame because #whitenoise was where I began my open thread career. Now that’s gone. Looks like I’m with you guys until BMC decides to revamp this site.
P.S. I have no idea how to use wordpress, so I’m just guessing on the shit below where I type this stuff. If I fuck it all up, my apologies.