This is funny. I have read on several sites that sitemaps are the best way to let Google know how to search and index your site. No clue yet which perspective is true. My guess is that sitemaps really do help.
Warning: Do Not Use Google Sitemaps!!
- By: DaveN [privmsg - website] On 18th Aug 2006 In Business Issues
If you haven’t seen this yet .. google groups
basically one guy blames Sitemaps for the end of the world ..
Source: Warning: Do Not Use Google Sitemaps!! | Threadwatch.org
Categories: feature
This looks like a cool set of RSS services. I wonder what Mr. Winer thinks. I will play with these a bit and tell you what I think.
xFruits Teaches Your Feeds New Tricks
xFruits is a suite of RSS services that teaches your feeds all kinds of new tricks. For example, you can use xFruits to create a PDF from your feed, roll up several feeds into one, add a mobile feed or even post to RSS via email. It also rolls all xFruits users into a community.
Technorati: 3 links to this item • Email this • Add to del.icio.us • Track co.mments
Source: Micro Persuasion: xFruits Teaches Your Feeds New Tricks
Categories: feature
I guess I will have to play with Yahoo Answers a bit. I have some burning questions. One is not–is Elvis still alive?
Yahoo Answers Impresses
I posted two questions on Yahoo Answers yesterday. The answers are extensive and timely… this is truly impressive. Best of all, it’s free*.
After reading through all the answers from users (who create their cartoon avatars from a variety of custom design with the fun Yahoo Avatars tool), you can select a best question, which will then move towards the top. I awarded the best answer to my first question to Michael, a “level 3” Yahoo Answers user with 214 answered questions so far. Here’s his reply:
Q: Why haven’t we visited by aliens yet?
A: It is probable (but not definite) that civilizations evolve at different rates. The hominid species spent a good million years just running around like an animal before we developed the mutation that allows us to imagine the future and make decisions that are not instinctual. So, even if civilizations were to develop on many different planets, they could be separated in TIME by a few million years easily.
On top of that, before you send out an expedition to a planet in search of life, you’d want to receive a signal from them. We’ve only been broadcasting into space for some 40 years now… and 40 light-years is pretty small in the grand scheme of things. Even if another civilization received our signals today, it would take them 40 years minimum to respond, barring some faster-than-light communication technology, and probably much longer to actually get here. With our current rocket technology (~40 miles/sec exiting Earth’s sphere of influence), it would take us a good 4500 years just to get 1 light-year away. I think the nearest star is about 4 light years away – so that’s a long time!
Source: Yahoo Answers Impresses
tags: yahoo+answers
Categories: feature
I would never be guilty of this, I always read the whole thing!
Do Digg Users Read Past the Headlines?
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. As an editor and Web writer, I tend to agree. Anything that gets attention for my articles and sends traffic my way is a blessing. That’s why we at Technology Review are always pleased when users of news-aggregator and discussion sites such as Slashdot and Digg post links to our pieces.
It’s an especially lucky day when we get mentioned at Digg. Technology Review articles that win enough diggs to rise to the front page of Digg’s technology section routinely get two to ten times more page views than average.
Source: Technology Review: TR Blogs
Categories: feature
I understand their thinking. In reality, spreading the music around is probably the best thing for the artist. To witness the work Tony Steidler-Dennison is doing at roadhousepodcast.com. He gives exposure to musicians that have a Sysuphian up hill climb to recognition.
Teenagers don’t think copying CDs is a crime
Aug 18, 2006 8:00 AMThe majority of young people — even those who refuse to download pirated media — see nothing wrong with making a copy of a CD or DVD to share with friends.
A new poll by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News found that among teens ages 12 to 17, 69 percent said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original.
By contrast, only 21 percent said it was legal to copy a CD if the friend got the content for free. Similarly, 58 percent thought it was legal to copy a friend’s purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19 percent thought copying was legal if the movie wasn’t purchased.
The survey results angered the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. Both contend such sharing — they call it “schoolyard piracy” — is illegal and now a greater threat than peer-to-peer downloading.
Evan Collins, 15, expressed his view of the issue: “I think you’re allowed to make, like, two or three copies of a CD you bought and give them to friends,” Collins told the LA Times. “It’s only once you make five copies, or copy a CD of stolen music, that it’s illegal.”
Categories: feature
This makes me unhappy. I wonder what is going to be done to plug this little honey pot! I will keep watching.
RSS Feeding Attacks
Hackers are constantly on the lookout for newer methods to perpetrate attacks. Security researchers have to keep one step ahead and ferret out possible avenues that are prone to attacks, and that’s just what Robert Auger is doing.
The SPI Dynamics security engineer has identified Rich Site Summary (RSS) and ATOM feed technologies as platforms that can be exploited by hackers to steal keystrokes, cookies and user credentials. By injecting malicious code into the feed, the hacker can succeed in compromising all the site’s subscribers in one stroke.
Based on the popularity of a particular feed, thousands to millions of people are left open to denial of service attacks, command executions and SQL injections. Auger says that local RSS readers can also be used to access file systems, scan the local network, and then be used for relay attacks.
Categories: Uncategorized
Doc keeps telling me how important a headline is. He is a master of headlines.
Titles That Tell a Whole Story
12:34 pm | Copywriting, What’s Your Story?, Headlines
Sometimes, in those rare special cases, you’ll have subject matter so captivating that a simple straight-forward statement of the relevant words is enough.
No formulas, templates, or linguistic trickery is necessary with these types of titles and headlines.
They are stories in and of themselves.
How else can you explain the magic of these four simple words?
Categories: feature
26 million viruses blocked in July alone! Don’t tell me virus protection isn’t important.
Viruses Virtually Run Riot
The Internet is a virtual ocean; while its benefits are huge, there are also debris floating around that contributes to pollution on a high scale. Viruses, worms, spam, phishing attempts, Trojan horses – these are a few malicious inhabitants of the worldwide web.
We all know they exist and that they should be dodged, prevented and killed, but do we know how many possible attacks are being foiled even as I write this? The numbers are staggering, from the Monthly Message Security & Management Update from Postini, for the month of July.
According to the California-based Internet message management company, it processed more than 26 billion SMTP email connections and staved off 62 percent as Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs) and messages sent to non-existent recipients. Around 77 percent of messages scanned were found to be spam; if this is unbelievable, hold on, there’s worse to come.
Postini blocked more than 26 million viruses in July alone; no, don’t rub your eyes in disbelief, the number’s right. The top five virus attacks were from Bagle, Netsky, Mytob, Mime and Mydoom.
Source: Network Security Journal: Viruses Virtually Run Riot
tags: virus, virus+protection
Categories: feature
I haven’t received any comment spam on WordPress yet, a little on the Manila site, but the Manila site has 10,000 gambling sites registered. Yikes.
Add up against WordPress comment spam
Filed in archive anti-spam tools by Ivy on August 16, 2006
If you’re running a WordPress blog and get comment spam by the tons, there might be an easy solution, and a nifty one on top. As the admin from Internet Tech Blog discovered, one man is fighting off spammers by teaching them to add.
Steven Harod devised an easy to use plugin for WordPress blogs which asks of commenter’s to sum up two numbers in order to submit their comment. As he puts it:
“You see a spammer is playing a numbers game, he wants the maximum impact for little effort. If he is going to spend an hour finding a way of cracking your side when there are another 1000 he could be off spamming, he’s probably going to give it a miss.”So, the only thing you have to do is download Steven’s did_you_pass_math anti-spam plugin and say bye-bye to nasty spam comments. You can also help Steven translate his nifty spam fighting tool by contacting him (you’ll find the details on the download site).
Source: I got Spam?!: Add up against WordPress comment spam
tags: wordpress, comment+spam
Categories: feature
I am a big fan of StumbleUpon. I had no idea it was driving that much traffic. I should spend a little time seeing what is happening over at my stumble site.
StumbleUpon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic
Posted by
randfish on Wed (8/16/06) at 4:06 PM to Web 2.0
I’ve been a fan of StumbleUpon for almost 6 months, and here’s why:
The above image shows the traffic stats from the StumbleUpon toolbar to SEOmoz since the beginning of the year. While these numbers are by no means overwhelmingly large, my impressions of StumbleUpon is that the traffic is fantastically well-targeted, savvy and looking for viral content. Stumblers tend to have accounts at Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and others and more than once, I’ve seen Stumble traffic lead to a re-surgence of traffic to a particular site or page that Stumblers have given high marks.
Source: SEOmoz Blog | StumbleUpon’s Fantastic Ability to Drive Traffic
tags: StumbleUpon, web+traffic, blogging
Categories: feature
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