Bad Stats are Holding Back Web 2.0

I use “stats” generically here because, at its simplest meaning, what is holding back web 2.0 is bad statistical planning. You have to ask the right questions with the right controls to get the right answers so you can make the right recommendations. The napkin business plan generation apparently has not learned its lesson in the web 2.0 sphere, with new sites and communities launching by the dozens. Unfortunately, web 2.0 communities commonly make the following assumption: massive data, regardless of its quality, is sufficient. What we need is a more complete measurements (questions) and common, controlled subjects (wines). To illustrate this point, I would like to identify 3 wine Web 2.0 communities (Corkd – BottleNotes – TasteVine), 2...

Simplest Trick to Optimize Body Content

So, the general rules of thumb for body content are this… Keywords in important tags (h1, h2, h3, b or strong, em, maybe alt tags) Unique content as close to the top of the page as possible. The first issue is quite easy to handle, and has been spammed to death across the internet since the inception of search engines. However, moving unique content to the top of the code while maintaining an attractive, Google-guidelines-compliant page has proven more difficult. Let’s take a look. Headers, advertisements, navigation and more normally precede the really unique content on the page. But how much code and duplicate content does that create? In the case of FindArticles.com, we are looking at nearly 370 lines of code between the body tag and the unique...

Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million

It was bound to happen. Many people have pointed out the link between the tech crash and today’s Web 2.0 venture frenzy. It always seemed backwards (traffic -> venture capital -> make money). In the “real world”, businesses are expected to prove their worth before they get venture backing. You know, actually posting profits before getting funded. Well, it has happened. iContact (formerly intelliContact by Broadwick) has managed to do just that. With over 11,000 clients, the company turned itself to Web 2.0 by building RSS / Blogs and Syndication into its already hugely successful Opt-In Email Marketing Platform. Updata Partners recognized that, for once in the history of the world, a young, successful, profitable company was able to seamlessly...

XSS Hole in Reddit Allows Gaping Access: Proof of Concept

Fixed by Reddit. So, a few months back Digg added a new feature that allowed users to invite and add friends more easily. Unfortunately, as I reported then, this hole allowed a site to automatically add friends if the visitor was still logged into Digg. This story did quite well in Reddit, often considered rivals, actually out performing the story on Digg which was, unsurprisingly, quickly buried. Nevertheless, an XSS hole in the handling of non-existing 404 pages has created a gaping hole which can allow a site to perform almost any site function we would want. To be fair to Reddit, I figured the Proof of Concept should mimic the same one as I did for Digg, an auto friend adder. If you are reading this page and are logged into Reddit, assuming the hole has not...

96.6% of Wikipedia Pages Rank in Google’s Top 10

While everyone has noticed Wikipedia dominating Google’s search results, this is a little outrageous. After grabbing 600 random pages from Wikipedia (using their special:random link), I conducted searches in Google for each of the titles of the Wikipedia entries. Out of the 600, 580 were in the top 10. Wikipedia Entry Top 10? Czechoslovakia at the 1960 Summer Olympics yes Jefferson Park yes Unity Day yes St. John Vianney High School (New Jersey) yes Veil of Darkness no Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission no Al-Fakik (crater) yes Group key no Driver Hearing yes Black Lips yes William Shakespear yes Comparative government yes Robert J. White yes Lila Bell Wallace yes William Dodd (Congressional candidate) yes Star (glyph) yes...