The Great Search Engine Hypocrisy
The clearest, most consistent opinion voiced by the major search engines to webmasters is this… Show the bots what you show your users. It is a fairly simple proposition that has been applied to the vast majority of grey and black hat search technologies: cloaking, ip-delivery, doorway pages, and keyword stuffing. Essentially every type of search spam, even link spam tangentially, relates to this premise. So let’s look at the latest incarnations of search engine hypocrisy waged by both Google and Yahoo. 1. The NoFollow Tag. Originally, webmasters were held accountable for each and every outbound link. The industry even developed a name for the unfavorable sites which webmasters should avoid linking: “bad neighborhoods”. While websites were...
New Digg Feature = Friend Spamming: Proof of Concept
Update: Ive added like 200+ friends. This is ridiculous. – Story Buried at 46 Diggs. Hmmm. Who would have thought? Maybe they wouldn’t be able to handle the #of friend requests if it had hit the front page… – Here is my Befriended List – You have to be logged in to Digg for the exploit to work In what has got to be the stupidest move in the history of community features, Digg has created a URL-powered friend-adder. Basically, all you have to do is visit the url http://digg.com/invitefrom/{username} such as http://digg.com/invitefrom/russvirante and you automatically add them as your friend if you are currently logged in to Digg. So, why is this royally stupid? Why should the inventor / everyone who thought this was a good idea go...
Cache Wars: Responses to Popular Redditor Comments
Language Issues: Please read this first, or you will sound like an idiot when you comment. First, no one, in any court case (please prove me wrong), has sued on the basis of having their content “cached”. The issue is caching+redistribution. Most importantly, it is caching+redistribution on another site, often a for-profit site with advertisements, without consent from the author. In terms of search engines, we will use the word “indexing” to the simple act of “caching” a page. When I refer to “caching”, I mean the redistributed cache of the page or the process of copying and redistributing the page. Finally, let’s quickly acknowledge the similarity between “quotes” and “paraphrases” in...
Digg: 9 New Stories, 8 Duplicates.
The success of an online community is, in many ways, based on the willingness of its members to abide by some level of accepted rules. In the world of social media, this normally means no duplicate submissions. This, apparently, is not happening over at Digg. Just a recent snapshot of the top 9 stories in the Political News section, 8 of which are story duplicates. The highlighting points out which of the stories are duplicates and to what extent. (Lighter = less duplicate, darker = more duplicate). To be more precise… 8 of 9 are about the same story. 6 of 9 say the same thing about that story. 3 of 9 are identical to at least 1 of the other stories. This is definitely improvable: Solving the Duplicate Submission Problem No tags for this...
Rails Programmer Throws Down the Gauntlet: PWND by PHP!
If you did not know already, I have a particular distaste for Ruby on Rails. Honestly, I really just have a distaste for the grotesque amount of buzz it has received relative to its ability to impact the web. Nevertheless, I did find a recent exchange on the web 2.0 site Dzone very humorous. An Rails nut writes Here’s something that really shows how Rails can shine. Don’t want to start a war, but show me that in Java or PHP! about a 1-line world time server clock using Ruby on Rails. He fails to mention that… It really takes 3 lines It requires installing an additional library In beautiful irony, another user posts this response. The same thing, in PHP, that really only takes 1 line of code, and requires no additional libraries. Sweet Sweet PHP...
Asked and Answered: A Digg Widget for Blogs
** Thanks for the Bugg Fixes Everyone! WordPress Mangled the Code, But Everything Works Now! Just Copy-and-Paste ** A recent story on Digg requested that a digg widget be created for bloggers to add to their sites. Digg already provides a javascript list of stories dugg, but it does not offer things such as how many diggs it has received, nor does it offer links to the actual stories themselves (just to the page on digg). So, without further adieu, a Digg Widget for everyone else. <script> // YOUR USERNAME var username = "your user name"; // NUMBER OF STORIES TO SHOW, MAX 11 var stories_to_show = 5; // DATA TYPE: dugg, submitted, or commented var data_type = "dugg"; document.write('<scri','pt...
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