Posts filed under 'Main'
I wanted to blog about Google Apps Permier Edition (GAPE), but after seeing it mentioned on so many other sites, I had a better idea. Instead of talking about GAPE, let’s look at how a news story spreads across the internet.
- innocently Feb 18th – ZDnet talks about the possibility of the product
- 10:00 pm Yesterday – Google Blogoscoped mentions the feature is coming.
- 1:30 am – Google officially launches Google Apps Premier Edition
- 2:00 am – First mention of it by bloggers on blogspot
- 6:00 am – Robert Scoble mentions it
- 9:50 am – Search Engine Land carries the story
- 10:00 am – Slashdot has picked up the story
- 11:00 am – Techdirt replies with an editorial about Google Apps competing with Microsoft.
- 11:11 am – News.com publishes their version of the story
Who’s next? Wired? Fark? Digg** Where are you guys at?
* – Some of these times are estimates based on Google News finding the story.
** – The story has made it to Digg, but only in the upcoming, and only had a handful of diggs at the time of this writing – not significant enough to count as “on digg”.
Update: As predicted, Wired chimed in with the story late at 11:52 am.
February 22nd, 2007
I was just reading this article about a California judge who was sentenced to 23 months in prison for possession of child porn. That’s not the part that upsets me though.
It seems the judge was caught when a canadian hacker named Brad Willman installed a trojan on the judge’s computer and started reading his filed. Brad then turned the child porn over to authorities and they arrested the judge.
But what about Brad? Brad wrote and distributed a virus. He installed software onto the judge’s machine without his consent, and viewed all of the judge’s files. This no doubt includes confidential information only meant for a judge. In addition, Brad had to have downloaded the images to his machine to view them – if only temporarily.
It seems to me that while his actions ulitmately captured a creep, Brad should be charged with a lot more crimes than the judge.
Catching a bad guy is one thing, but do we really want vigilante justice to rule? Do we want to send a message that it’s ok to spy on your neighbor, trespass into their property, and illegally access their computers to make sure that they’re not breaking any laws?
February 22nd, 2007
Back in college I had a professor who would dock off points every time he saw the word float in our code. He never really told us why, but from then on we all started using double any time we needed a decimal.
It’s been a few years since college, but I think I’m finally closer to understanding what he meant. Take a look at the following PHP code. What do you think it does?
echo (int) ((.1 + .7) * 10);
It’s a basic PHP math operation. It should add .1 and .7 to get .8, then multiply that by 10 to yield 8 right?
Not so fast, what’s that (int) doing?
For those of you unfamiliar with PHP, it’s a dynamicaly typed language. That means unlike c++, you don’t have to declare a type when you declare a variable. PHP will look at how you’re using it and decide what you meant.
The (int) is a cast. It tells PHP to take whatever that result is and make sure it’s an integer. It’s very seldom used, but there are a few examples I can think of where it’s a good idea to cast your variables. I’ll save that for a later column though.
Anyway, run the above code. What happens? Do you see 8? No! It outputs 7!!
Take the (int) cast away though, and you’ll see your expected result.
So what’s going on here? The simple answer is that it has something to do with the way PHP handles floating point numbers. The long answer is, it’s the reason why the data from one of my applications never added up correctly.
February 20th, 2007
I think one of the coolest features of Gmail is its ability to identify tracking numbers in emails and provide me with direct links to track my package. Here’s an example:
Amazon sent me an email with the following text:
If you notice, Amazon wants me to click the link, and login to their page to track my package. They don’t even tell me what shipper is sending it, so the tracking number is pretty useless to me.
Fortunately, Google picked up on it right away. Have a look:
This is just one of the really cool features that makes Gmail my main email client.
As a side note to E-Commerce sites. It’s important to nurture the customer relationship after the sale. Marketing may think it’s a good idea to draw them back to your website, but it’d be much more useful in this case if Amazon provided me with a direct link to track my package instead of forcing me to go through their interface. It may cut down page views, but I’ll be willing to bet it would increase brand loyalty.
February 20th, 2007
As family members keep asking me for more Who Dey updates, I keep feeling obliged to provide more and more pictures and such. If you don’t regularly read my blog, Who Dey is my new bengal kitten. You can catch up by reading and here, and here.
Ok, on to the new stuff:
Nobody seems to believe me when I say that Who Dey plays fetch, so I decided to get a little bit of proof. Here’s a picture of Who Dey bringing me her mouse to throw for her:
Of course, in today’s modern age we all want video… so, here’s a couple videos of her fetching. The first one is short so that you can see I actually threw something. The second one is about the longest distance I have in my house. Enjoy:
Apparantley WordPress won’t let me embed a video nicely, so you’ll just have to view them by clicking the links:
Short Fetch
Long Fetch
P.S. if anybody knows a good video capture card that has RCA inputs, and is really really cheap, please let me know. I have a pretty old camera, but I’d love to be able to somehow get some videos online.
February 18th, 2007
The first question I ask myself when I come across a website asking for my email address is “Why?” What’s in it for me?
It might sound selfish, but it’s true. With all the spam I get lately, there’s just no way I’m going to enter my email address into your form without seeing a direct benefit of doing so.
If you’re designing a website, this is a good rule to keep in mind. A good question to ask is: “Am I asking for this because I want it, or because I need it to deliver more value to the user?” If you don’t have a good use for information, you shouldn’t be asking for it.
Let’s look at some examples:
Just the other day, I needed to download a program called wikto. Upon clicking the official download link, I recieved the following message:
lthough SensePost releases this information at no cost, we do ask that you submit your email address and contact before downloading. This allows us to get positive feedback from the community. It also allows you, the reader, the opportunity to contribute to our research. You will be re-directed to www.sensepost.com and your username and password will be emailed to you shortly.
Reading their disclaimer you’ll see that they not only require me to enter my email address, but all the reasons they list are for their benefit. Why do I, the end user, care about giving them feedback or contributing to their research? That sounds like more work to me. I did what a lot of you might do – I created a throwaway email address to get my login information and got rid of it after that.
So how could they have improved it? For starts, offer me some value. If registering gave me access to a members only support forum, or put me on a list for upgrades and new release notifications I’d have probably given them my email address.
Let’s look at another example. This time let’s visit domaintools.com – a WHOIS site. Domaintools (formerly whois.sc) is (in my opinion) one of the best sites around for looking up domain information. It offers all kinds of powerful tools – for free!
It’s not until you perform quite a few lookups that they ask you to register. They give you a tease by offering a daily limit, and offer you unlimited lookups in exchange for creating a free account. I didn’t mind registering here, because I’d already grown accustomed to the service and I saw its value.
The trick here is to look at things from the customer’s point of view. If they see value, they’ll gladly provide you with their contact information. If you don’t really need it, then don’t ask for it.
February 18th, 2007
Fat Thursday? I thought it was fat tuesday? You’re right, in the US we celebrate paczki day on the first Tuesday before ash Wednesday. Start stocking up on donuts, because Tat Tuesday is coming up on the 20th.
In Poland, they do things a little bit differently. Fat Thursday is the Polish feast that marks the last Thursday before Lent. It’s very similiar to Mardi Gras. Today is a day of gluttony that we fat kids have been looking forward to for a long time.
The best part is that being of polish heritage, I can celebrate today and Tuesday!
February 15th, 2007
Michigan is about to start adding a tax onto services as well as sales. The tax would include things like cable tv, veterinarian services, home improvement, lawn care, bowling, concerts, movies, video rentals, and lawyer fees.
Do they have this in your state? How does it work out?
Personally, I’m feeling ripped off that we the taxpayers have no say in this matter whatsoever.
Perhaps maybe it’s time to re-consider the fair tax?
February 14th, 2007
There hasn’t been much said over the past few months about the case of Belgium newspapers suing Google. If you haven’t been following the case, here’s what’s happening:
A group of Belgium newspapers has sued Google over its Google News service. The papers claim that both Google’s website cache, AND it’s snippet of articles are a violation of the country’s copyright laws.
It was announced today that Google lost the case.
It’s that these newspapers fail to see the value of being included in Google news. After all, Google doesn’t show the whole article, so it’s only acting as a method of driving traffic to the newspaper websites. That’s not even the main point of this case that astounds me.
The point I fail to understand, is why did this even come to trial? Are the newspapers unfamiliar with the robots.txt standard?
It seems to me that if they didn’t want their stuff being included in Google, they could have just told Google not to index it. Am I missing something, or does that just make too much sense?
February 13th, 2007
Bill Platt recently wrote an article for SiteProNews talking about the GoogleBomb algorithm update. Being a sitepronews subscriber, I got this little gem in my email.
It looks like sitepronews is letting just anybody with a theory go ahead and write articles now. This one seems to throw out some off the wall theories. Let’s take a look.
First, he quotes Matt Cutts on the googlebomb change.
according to Matt Cutts of Google, the changes in the GB update
were all completed within the Google algorithm. Cutts has always
said that Google does not like to manually rearrange the search
engine results, so an algorithmic solution to the GoogleBomb was
in order. A few of the Google engineers worked together to find
a solution to the GoogleBomb issue
Then he talks about his own research.
Here’s what he claims:
What I have been able to take from the results shown above is
that Google may have targeted only “negative links”. If you want
to review what is shown above, all of the Google Bombs that are
now gone had negative connotations to them. All of the Google
Bombs that survived can be construed as having positive, or at
least non-negative, connotations to them.
Is anybody else shaking their head when reading this? Negative vs positive links? You’ve got to be kidding me.
If he really did his research, he’d have found Matt Cutts comments here that say:
I think this algorithm does successfully minimize the impact of Googlebombs as we define them here at Google. Many of the sites that probably wouldn’t want to rank for these Googlebombs no longer do.
as well as the comment on Google Blogoscoped that really hammers the point home.
Matt says:
The litmus test for a Googlebomb is whether the site in question wants to show up at #1 or whether other people are pushing it up. If a site *wants* to show up, that’s SEO rather than a Googlebomb.
So from the examples you give, [Waffles] would be a Googlebomb, but [french military victories] would not.
So, from the Google Guy himself… the new change seems to focus on whether or not the page actually contains the text that it’s being linked to with. It has absolutely nothing to do with positive and negative links.
Nice try Bill, and congrats on getting your article out there in the newsletter – but next time, please do a little bit of fact checking first. There’s no telling how many SEOs out there digest these newsletters and believe them as gospel truth.
February 12th, 2007
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