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...
Click Fraud Assistance – Yahoo Dupes Google
Looks like Yahoo! one upped Google once again in launching their Traffic Quality Center several days (8 to be exact) before a weak attempted launch by Google at the same thing. To Yahoos merit they have created a web site with more “bling” which explains what efforts they are taking to battle the prevalent click fraud issue surrounding cost-per-click programs and more importantly what you can do to prevent it as well. To put it bluntly; Google’s Ad Quality Resource Center is fairly lame. Aside from being a usability experts wet dream, Google’s center consists of a couple sheets put up by someone who probably got called into the manager’s office for a good talking to. While this project may be expanded upon, there is obviously a...
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
Exclude-by-Keyword: Thoughts on Spam and Robots.txt
Note: This solution is for spam that cannot be filtered. There are already wonderful tools to help with comment / forum / wikispam such as LinkSleeve and Akismet. However, this proposed method would prevent the more nefarious methods such as HTML Injection, XSS, and Parasitic Hosting techniques. Truth be told, I rarely use the Robots.txt file. It’s functionalities can be largely replicated on a page-by-page basis via the robots META tag and, frankly, we spend a lot more time on getting page into the SERPs than excluding them. However, after running / creating several large communities with tons of user-generated content, I realized that the Robots.txt file could offer a lot more powerful tools for exclusion. Essentially, exclude-by-keyword. The truth is,...
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...
Google’s New Algorithm: if($domain==’wikipedia.org’){$rank=1;}
I decided to take my last look at Wikipedia a little further to see just how much Google had sold out to everyones-favorite-online-encyclopedia. Does Wikipedia really deserve the rankings that it receives? Or, as many suggest, are single Wikipedia entries receiving the benefit of the doubt by Google’s algorithm because of the strength of the domain? While merely anecdotal evidence (I have yet to run a complete check as I did before), I wanted to take a look at an example where Wikipedia recently took the #1 position. I chose the keyword Entrepreneurship This simple test looked at the number of inbound links pointing directly to the page currently ranking in Google. Instead of looking at site-wide links, we look at the page that ranks itself while excluding...
Google Misses Earnings: Is Anyone Surprised?
It blows my mind that forecasters, including Google’s internal forecasts, did not more clearly take into account the impact that their June attack on arbitrage would have on their earnings. Google, bowing to pressures of general advertisers and searchers, decided to bite the hand that feeds it – the masses of Adsense publishers and Adwords arbitrage experts who poured money into Google. While their campaigns were targeted and only directly affected a handful of publishers and advertisers, the ripple effect (damn those ripple effects) spread throughout the industry sounding the bell tone: “if Google will go after Arbitrage, eventually, they will go after Made-For-Adsense”. I would love to see the defection rate of this past quarter compared...
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