New Google Strategy to Stop Effective SEO’s

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The Anatomy of a Digg Silent Bury

There has always been a shrowd of mystery surrounding the bury feature at Digg. What percentage of buries are necessary to put a story to rest? Are the different types of buries (lame, duplicate, spam) considered differently? Is there an internal bury system for Digg employees? The latest in this series of questions that needs to be brought to light is what I call the “Silent Bury”. This is a unique set of circumstances where Digg removes the story from the listings (neither in upcoming or popular), but leaves the story on the site, and accessible via direct URL or search. This method effectively destroys the chance of a story succeeding, but does not seem to rely on the traditional bury methods that would also make a story difficult to access via...

StopBlock

So, the debate has raged on whether Ad-Block is ethical or moral or whatever word you would like to use to describe it. Regardless of your personal opinion, it has given some publishers so much angst that they have chosen to block all Firefox users (Why Firefox is Blocked) because of an inability to exclude visitors using the Ad-Block extension for Firefox. Well, suffice to say, there is a fairly simple bit of code that can be used to determine if a person is blocking advertisements on your site. The Ad-Block extension not only blocks ads, it hides them. This means that the space previously consumed by an advertisement will disappear. So, the simple solution is two put two elements, in my case 1px by 1px images, above and below the advertisement. I then use...

Why Not Pre-Install World Community Grid on Ubuntu?

I have been using the World Community Grid as my default screen saver for quite some time. For those of you not familiar with the project, it basically creates a massive computing network (your computer and everyone else using WCG) to solve some of the most difficult problems facing science, such as curing AIDS. The software is available on a wide variety of platforms, including Linux. There is even an Ubuntu Linux Team (my distro of choice). Yes, you can create teams and track how much good you and your friends are doing! What blows my mind is that, with all of the crappy, cheesy screen savers built into operating systems, World Community Grid hasn’t been. If WCG were the default screensaver for every Ubuntu release going forward, what kind of difference...

The Genius of Microsoft Windows

So here I am minding my own business, uninstalling old programs from a company computer, and what happens? I get a nice little popup: Hm… Wonder which I should choose…. P.S. And no, that’s not an altered screenshot No tags for this post.

Ad Blocking is Immoral

After a terrible write up claiming that Ad Blocking is Moral made the front page of Reddit, I felt obliged to respond. First, a brief response. For lack of a better word, (actually, this is pretty much the perfect word), the piece is drivel. It cases the ethics of Ad Blocking (visitor) and Ad Serving (publisher) in terms of effectiveness, relevancy, and business modeling. While these may all be useful arguments of whether a publisher ought to use advertising to generate revenue, it does not create a meaningful ethical statement on whether subverting advertising efforts is moral. Examples: Sarcastic Response: “In other words, people should support bad business models because it’s more convenient for the businessmen.” Not supporting a bad business...