Archive for January 1st, 2005
Slashdot has an article about how to stop phishing attacks, and it seems that the author is onto something.
What if below your Amazon login box it told you the last time you’ve logged in?
It’d stop phishing sites dead. They wouldn’t be privy to the real customer information that the legit site has.
Of course, slashdot readers got TOO technical and figured this would have to be done as a browser extension or what not, but it’s not that complicated.
Just set a cookie. Sure it won’t work for users who delete their cookies, but it WILL work for the majority of users; the same ones who fall for phishing scams.
Listen up future web2.0 companies. Don’t show me the standard login form, customize it for me! It’ll add personalization, value, and stop phishing.
January 1st, 2005
Please, for the love of God, anybody who’s thinking about implementing the next web2.0 or social website, do NOT include a “tell your friend” feature.
I’m so tired of getting the “XXX wants to be your friend”, “YYY wants you to join this website”, “here’s that picture i took of you last weekend, but you gotta join this site to see it”, and “ZZZ has invited you to be a member of” type emails.
I’ve recieved 70 of them since 1am when I went to bed, and 8:00 am when I opened up my email.
MySpace, it’s time we stop making it a competition to gather friends. Take away that little “Ryan has 21 friends” message, and don’t tell me how many friends I have.
That will stop all the little kids from adding complete strangers and accepting the friend invites from 40 year olds too. Kids judge each other by how many friends they have. Take that away and there won’t be any incentive to add people they don’t know.
Won’t that make the web better for everybody?
January 1st, 2005
Does anybody know if there’s any guidelines one has to follow for calling a product “low fat”? Does it just have to have less than the competitor?
Ever wanting to not lose my girlish figure I bought some low-fat pop tarts this morning for breakfast.
I thought, cool.. I normally eat 2 regular poptarts and a diet coke every morning, now I can have 2 low-fat ones. I feel good, I love life.
As it turns out, a low fat poptart has 1g less fat, and 10 less calories than it’s regular counterpart.
What’s the point?
Can I make a 15oz beer and call it “low carb” *compared to a regular 16oz beer.
Maybe I could sell it for more too.
January 1st, 2005
As Web2.0 continues to evolve, it seems more and more sites are going towards a user created content model.
It works great from the webmaster point of view: Simply put up the infastructure and let your users create your content for you, and collect advertising revenue.
In fact there seems to be an influx of these type of sites. Fark, Delicious, and Digg are the 3 big ones that come to mind. Then there’s craigslist and google groups which are a whole different idea all together.
But there’s a flaw here. What’s in it for the user? Why should they submit content to you?
In the case of Craigslist and Delicious, it’s because the sites provide a valuable service without the obtrusive ads.
But what about the smaller sites? the Digg, the Shoutwires, the Farks of the internet? What motivates a user to contribute to them?
Theoretically, wouldn’t that user be better off posting his original content on his own site with his own ads?
As blogs become more omnipotent, and everybody and their mother gets one, I think web3.0 is going to take the selfish attitude of “what’s in it for me?”
January 1st, 2005
With the recent plague of news articles about sexual predators on MySpace it’s easy to place the blame on dirty old men.
The growing American anti-personal-responsibility trend makes it even easier to point the finger. I’ll assume we’re all tired of hearing about the 14 year old who met a 19 year old, had sex, and then sued MySpace for failing to protect her right?
In fact, some have even gone so far as to characterize MySpace as a bunch of hot teens looking for a hookup, predators looking for hot teens, and cops pretending to be hot teens to look for predators.
Then there’s the predators pretending to be hot teens to look for hot cops pretending to be hot teens to look for predators pretending to be hot teens.
You might want to re-read that. You might not get it now, but you’ll be in bed later and be like “ahh.. haha good one.”
Anyway, not a day goes by anymore where I don’t read a news article about MySpace and predators, and part of me seems to think we’re ignoring the real problem.
What about the kids who think it’s cool to play games of “Bait the Pedophile”? What about the kids who knowingly seek out and meet people twice their age, then give them their phone number, and sometimes go as far as flying to another country to meet them?
When did it become socially acceptable for a 16 year old girl to be sexually interested in a 40 year old man but not the other way around. If you ask me, there’s something wrong with both parties involved.
So how do we fix MySpace? Yeah I know we could do without the background music, animated gifs, backgrounds colors that match the text, horizontal scrolling, and other 1996 style issues, but those aren’t really hurting anybody.
I say it’s time we build personal responsibility into MySpace. Currently, if Joe TeenRaper wants to find a “hot teen hookup”, he searches for a profile and makes a friend request.
For some extremely dumb reason that can only be comprehended by the brilliant “I know what I’m doing” 14 year old mind these girls actually accept the request. Why? Who knows, but that’s the problem right there.
No matter where you go in life, be it MySpace, the mall, or even your church picnic, there are going to be older men who prey on younger girls. I don’t even want to get into the causes of that; they’re irrelevant.
So why not cut it off before at the . MySpace is currently planning on not allowing anybody over 18 to contact anybody under 16 unless they know the person’s full name or email address, but come on, how hard is that? That’s not going to stop anybody.
Why not do it in reverse? Why not prevent anybody over 16 from requesting any friends under 16? Make the minor initiate the friend request.
This helps in 2 ways:
1.) It makes the minors actually search out the older men if they want to be friends, not the other way around.
2.) It puts the responsibility and blame on the shoulders of the minor. Now, it’s their own damn fault if something happens. They shouldn’t be looking for older men in the first place.
Granted it doesn’t stop old men from creating fake profiles, but if you look at the news most of the cases don’t involve fake profiles. That’s right, in most of the cases the girls knew the guy’s age and still went to meet him.
It’s time we hold teens (and their parents) responsible for their own actions. Can you really blame the shark if you jump into it’s tank wearing a brand new fish gut swimsuit?
Let’s shift the burden of initiation onto the minor, hopefully it’ll stop us from having to read the same articles every day. I’m getting tired of them, aren’t you?
January 1st, 2005
Ok, Spamming my Free Text Message site with VOTE to the 1-800 numbers on Idol, will only result in annoying me and getting your IP baninated. I needed to remove about 7 or 8 spammers… one person even sent 740 (failed) messages trying to vote for Taylor. (all the spammers were trying to vote for Taylor)
Also, unless his cell phone is an 866 number, he didn’t get your comments. Sorry.
Oh yeah, Read This Article
Update on the Bin Laden Search
Washington seems to be limiting their Search to only Google… Guys, I don’t think you’re going to find him there…. Try MSN… there’s no age filter there..
January 1st, 2005
For the first time ever, both Katherine McPhee AND Taylor Hicks have won American Idol.
At least that’s what Canada.com says.
Note to web developers: It’s ok to pre write your stories, just don’t put them live.
January 1st, 2005
Belle Tire is running their commercials offering nitrogen in tires.
A lot of people are skeptical as to the benefits, so I offer you this:
NitroNize Your Tires – FAQ This answers the common questions and even tells you how much you could save on gas mileage.
Do the research and decide for yourself.
January 1st, 2005
Don’t Google Image search at work. Even if it’s for something harmless like Aeon Chair.. you never know what you’re going to find. Of course, turning safe search on might have fixed that… owell now I know.
Also.. don’t try playing hockey with a broken wrist.. it’s hard enough to type like this.. the cast randomly hits spacebar for me, and it hurts to type the letters m n y h p o and any numbers.
January 1st, 2005
I really didn’t want this to turn into an SEO blog, but it’s fun to talk about, and people seem to like to discuss it.
Today I want to tell you a simple truth that many webmasters and business owners can’t grasp: Your Site Sucks
Well ok it doesn’t suck, but it’s not as good as you think it is. One of the hardest things to do in SEO is to look at your site from the perspective of a searcher. That’s why it’s a great idea to hire a 3rd party company, they’re not attached to your site in any way; they have no feelings to hurt.
I wanted to talk about a company who fired me after I said I couldn’t make their “contact us” page rank for a software related term, but I feel it’d be better if I use a fictional example.
John owns a chimney sweeping company, and he’s really frustrated that he can’t get on the front page of Google for “chimney sweeping”.
John’s done his SEO, he’s traded links, got listed in all the good directories, put out press releases, wrote articles, has a blog and a newsletter, updates his content frequently, and has a good pagerank, and even an affiliate program, but he just can’t crack the top page of Google.
Eventually John gives up and buys adwords, then swears it’s a Google conspiracy to force him into buying adwords. He even makes a post on Matt Cutts blog accusing Google of unfailry not raking his “useful” site.
The problem here is that while John’s site IS useful, it’s NOT useful to somebody searching for “chimney sweeping”.
Let’s look at the top results, and we see this: National association of, how to, training school, job profile, and how to find a chimney sweep.
These are useful sites. Why? the term “chimney sweeping” implies that the searcher is looking for information about the topic, NOT a chimney sweeping company. If they were, they’d have searched for “chimney sweep boston” or “chimney sweeping company” etc etc. These are the terms John should focus on if he wants to show up on page 1.
Since John never did his research, and couldn’t look at his site from the perspective of a searcher, he wasted months optimizing for terms that he really shouldn’t be a top result for.
That’s what SEO is about. It’s not about tricking the search engines or writing code to make your site better than others. It’s about anticipating what somebody is searching for, and then building a site that is relevant to that search – from the searcher’s perspective.
January 1st, 2005
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