Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
A History of App Stores: Apple, Google, and Everyone Else [Infographic]
Captchas are evil and need to go away
img via
Plenty of things annoy me in the online world. Twitter spam bots make me shake my head. Shady Facebook applications get under my skin. But nothing makes my fist clench quite like Captchas.
I’ve been “proving I’m human” for around 10 years now, yet every site I visit still assumes I’m a computer hellbent on world domination.
I would be more tolerant of Captchas if they actually solved a problem, but they don’t. There are a slew of Captcha bypass services out there that any half-brained spammer already utilizes. Most of these services work by relaying the Captcha image to a human in a foreign country, typically India or Bangladesh (One blogger has even called Captcha solving “India’s booming business.“) The going rate can be as low as $2.00 for 1000 cracked Captchas. Other bypass tools work by purchasing millions of Captcha images and matching one of them up with the image the user is served by a website. You don’t have to be a programming expert to use these tools either. Just search Google.
The fact that there is now a burgeoning Captcha bypass industry that employs thousands of people should be a clear signal that the technology is ineffective.
While black hats and the like spend pennies to bypass hundreds of Captchas quickly, the rest of us are left to suffer. The only people that Captchas frustrate are honest Internet users who have better things to do with their time than decipher a mash-up of letters and numbers. The people they were designed to stop don’t seem to mind them at all.
It turns out, though, that things don’t have to be like this. It isn’t 2000 anymore and there are plenty of better solutions than using Captchas to protect a website from spam. Using fields hidden by CSS is a great way to prevent spam without the website user even noticing. Other less annoying solutions like “Uncheck this box if you are a human” are even preferable to Captchas as well.
Facebook Comments and other comment systems that allow users to sign in through OAuth, OpenID or other open standards for authorization can stop anonymous spam at least. As I’ve written before, however, I don’t see these as being good long term solutions because anonymous conversations are too valuable. People are less likely to comment and share when their remarks are tied to a personal account.
Regardless of which method of spam control a website chooses to employ, they need to remember that the burden of spam protection should fall on their shoulders, not on their users and readers. A proper spam protection system should make it easier for well-intentioned humans to comment and more difficult for the evildoers, not vice-versa.
Captchas are very much part of the problem, not the solution. There is no logical defense for Captchas still being prominent in 2011.
The value of the anonymous stranger
Photo by raulc
Around a year ago, I decided I wanted to become a hockey goalie. I’d played hockey for several years, but didn’t know the first thing about playing goalie. I didn’t have any friends that did either. After I ordered some cheap equipment, I had a couple of options. I could either dish out a lot of money for lessons or I could do what I’ve done to solve plenty of other problems in life — I could Google it.
Naturally, I chose the latter and what I found were several communities of goalies from all over the world willing to take time to answer my newbie questions; hundreds of blog posts on technique and plenty of embarrassing stories of 14-1 losses I could very easily relate with.
While Google gets the credit for providing me with information on how to play goalie, among many other things, it is merely a vehicle between the searcher and mostly anonymous strangers.
When most people think of ‘anonymous stranger’, the picture isn’t so pretty; couple it with ‘online’ and it gets worse yet. This is why so many people are happy with the “Facebookization of the Internet.” Mega-blogs like Techcrunch have moved away from anonymous comments to Facebook comments. Increasingly, online locales are requiring people to login in with Facebook or Twitter, or to at least verify their ID in some way.
In the 15 or so years I’ve used the Internet, it turns out these nameless and faceless people who roam the Internet aren’t all that bad after all. In fact, they’ve provided me with a lot more help than harm.
Anonymous posts online have much more substance to them than simply bashing Justin Bieber or arguing about illegal immigration on some unrelated YouTube video. I’ve learned how to play guitar, program in PHP, improve my 5k time and how to best use my DSLR from perusing things such as online forums, Yahoo! Answers and community-edited wikis. I might not have made the Dean’s list in college without the help of these unknown people (Sorry Mom and Dad!).
Accountability is certainly an area that needs improvement on the social web. I get just as frustrated with anonymous trolls as the next guy does. But tools like Facebook Connect that shut out those who wish to post anonymously are not the answer.
In my eyes, one of the greatest strengths of the social web we’ve built is equality. Rebecca Black and David After Dentist have the same opportunity to pull in millions of YouTube views as John Mayer or Zach Galifianakis. Betty from down the street can start a blog in 10 minutes equally as accessible as CNN.com. This ubiquitous equality is what makes the social web so great.
If the “Facebookization” of the web continues, it will kill this equality. All of a sudden, less people care what Betty from down the street has to say because she is, well, Betty from down the street. And maybe a white collar worker in some financial company is a lot less likely to tell me about how he let in 15 goals in his first ever hockey game because he doesn’t want everybody in his office to know about it.
The online anonymous strangers aren’t all like the people your parents warned you about. There are millions of intelligent and valuable conversations taking place online anonymously every single day. Facebook Connect and other ‘solutions’ can continue to gain popularity and perhaps even put an end to trolling. Though with as much accountability as they can provide on the Internet, if they take away even a small slice of some of the great information and discussions that occur without names, e-mails and job titles, it’s a price not worth paying.
10 Tips To Beating Google’s Farmer Update
Search Engine Land notes that nearly 12% of queries have been impacted by the latest algorithm change. If your search engine traffic has dropped significantly from the latest update then it’s time to take action!
Below are ten tips to increase your site’s rankings if they’ve been hit by the Farmer / Panda update.
1. Build a Theme – That’s right, having 5 thin pages on a topic and calling yourself an industry leader simply won’t work. To be considered an industry leader, you need to talk about the main topics in your industry and get down to the nitty gritty! Start generating content (no stealing or borrowing content) that covers the depth and breadth of your industry.
2. Organize – Take your files and put them in folders organized by topic. If your desk is a mess, it’s likely the files on your site are just thrown in the root folder too. Begin to group them just as you would a filing cabinet.
3. Silo Structures – Whether it’s a true silo or a virtual silo, link your content by its relation. If you are unable to move files on your server and URL rewriting is beyond your capabilities, then use a virtual silo to internally link to related pages.
4. Make A Plan – Plan out topics you can write content about and stick to it. If you don’t have the time, then hire a few copywriters and schedule in new copy to be added to your site regularly. Once the copy is in place, be sure to link to it from other related pages to help build a relationship between the related pages.
5. Watch – View your site’s analytics regularly and determine if you see a pattern. Was a specific section of your site hit and now underperforming or was it your site as a whole? Did your site’s overall traffic decline once Panda was released or is it just for broad search terms? Ask yourself these questions to help you determine the best course of action when it comes to creating the new content.
6. Housekeeping – While you’re at it, make sure you have no reason to have any penalties on your site. Wouldn’t it be horrible if you simply had something on your site that you needed to take care of and submit a simple re-inclusion request? Look at your site and see if you’re using your headings accurately, if you have too many links on any given pages, log into Google Webmaster Console and take a look at the error messages and HTML suggestions. When you’re done, simply detail what you did and request a re-inclusion just to be pro-active.
7. Be Pro-Active – Take advantage of all the universal results Google is offering and try to get your site to show up in as many of those results as possible. Be sure you have your Google Places listing and build it out to include images, categories, videos, specials coupons, etc. If you have products on your site, create a Google shopping feed and submit it to ensure your products are showing up in Google Shopping. Images throughout your site need to utilize names that resemble what they are, provide accurate image ALT attributes, create an image sitemap and submit this sitemap to help increase your exposure in Google images. Open up a channel on YouTube and upload or create videos about your products or services. Create great keyword-rich titles and Meta descriptions, apply the proper tags and get them uploaded to be included in Google video. Start a blog and blog about on-topic industry related information and submit your RSS feed to various RSS directories and get your site showing up for results in Google Blogs.
8. Research – Review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure you are adhering to them for content, quality and design. It may not seem like a lot, but taking care of these things to ensure you have nothing being held against you can help significantly in the long run.
9. Sitemaps – Create sitemaps for each themed folder within your site and place that sitemap within the actual folder. For larger sites, create multiple sitemaps to help ensure deeper content gets indexed and properly ranked. Google determines if it will be indexing your site for depth or breadth, and with the Panda update, you need both to succeed.
10. Stay Indexed – Find out what pages within your site are indexed and which are not. Keep an eye out for any pages that are not indexed and resubmit them. Pages that aren’t indexed or are omitted from Google’s results can’t rank, pages that can’t rank can’t help to build you as an industry leader. If you have omitted pages from Google’s results find out why (duplicate titles, duplicate Meta descriptions, very little content, etc.) and make the necessary adjustments. Update your Google sitemap regularly and make sure those pages are indexed.
Making these adjustments as well as continually adding content to your site will help to ensure your site will not only bounce back from the Farmer/Panda update, but that you will be less affected from future index or algorithm updates; helping to build your site as an industry leader.
Social Media: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Feel Your Boobies Foundation
Millions take part in social media every day, tweeting on Twitter, keeping up with friends and family on Facebook and clicking on “like” buttons across the net. People make social media go round, but as with everything, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Good
The Feel Your Boobies breast cancer non-profit campaign to support and raise money for breast cancer awareness was a huge success. Founded in 2004, the Feel Your Boobies Foundation of Middletown, PA used social media to get their message out and as a result received over 243,189 “likes”. What a tremendous success for this non-profit organization with the simple objective of getting women under forty to “feel their boobies” to look for breast lumps or changes when they occur.
On a local level, the Feel Your Boobies recently won the Public Service Innovation award at the 2011 Pennsylvania Technology Awards held last Friday. Congratulations Feel Your Boobies Foundation for an innovative and successful Social Media campaign with a great cause!
The Bad
It’s already quite a snafu to drop an F- bomb in the workplace, but to drop the F-bomb on the official Twitter account of Chrysler?
The unidentified tweeter posted the following on the official Twitter account for Chrysler Group LLC: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f—ing drive.”
Okay, so the Chrysler Group did say the offensive statement was issued by an employee of New Media Strategies, its social media agency of record, and issued an apology that same day. It is said the employee has since been terminated.
The Ugly
And the winner of this award goes to … Gilbert Gottfried! Come on, I think you knew this. Shortly after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, Gilbert Gottfried, the spokesperson and voice for the Aflac duck, posted some seriously horrific comments he calls jokes on his personal Twitter account. Due to the nature of those comments, we surely cannot post them here. This little stunt not only cost him his job at Aflac Inc., but this poor little duck now has no voice.
A new social media campaign has since been launched to help aid in the effort of finding this duck his new voice, along with requirements such as being caring, helpful and charming, while the love of peanut butter is optional.
This has obviously left a void in commercial land, so if you feel you can behave yourself and keep from tweeting ugly comments, be sure to waddle on over to http://www.quackaflac.com/ and post your 30 second audio or video doing the signature Aflac Squawk. But beware, we will be watching you!
Twitter is my favorite search engine
Much has been done with making search more social. Bing has partnered with Facebook to bring Facebook-integrated search results. Google has made several algorithm tweaks to make localized and social results more relevant. Yet both of the major search engines’ social offerings seem to be lacking in some key areas. So far, neither search engine has found the right mix of dynamic, social results and the more traditional SERPs. It is also a challenge to find a social platform to make recommendations or social algorithm tweaks possible. The search engines need a warehouse of social data to pull info from.
While much time and effort has been put into social search by the Big Two, another company has produced a far superior social search engine without even trying.
Twitter’s primary function is to exchange bits of information with your social network, but this model has in turn produced a great search engine. Like any good social search engine, Twitter indexes real-time results (tweets) from a variety of sources (Twitter users). You can pull in ‘results’ from a generous mix of sources including firsthand observers and experts, in addition to completely random Twitter users. Instead of going to Google and finding a bunch of static pages and a few newly published news articles, I’d rather head straight to Twitter to read on-the-fly commentary.
Time for some examples. Here are the two resulting pages for a search of Jerry Sloan, an NBA coach who is expected to announce his retirement today:
It is amazing to me how similar the results are. Google’s algorithm is based on links while Twitter’s algorithm is based on ‘Retweets’, yet both push trustworthy, relevant information to the top.
Let’s look at another example. Say I wanted to see what was going on with the turmoil in Egypt at the moment:
In this example, if you want to see what is happening in Egypt right now, Twitter’s results are much more useful. You have the latest and most important news updates at the top with humor, opinion and other thoughts being constantly updated below. Google’s results are much more static despite the addition of recently published news stories.
As a search engine, Twitter serves a much more niche purpose than Google does, yet is obviously less robust. But nevertheless, I’ve found myself turning to Twitter more and more recently, whereas I would have once turned to Google. The simplicity is refreshing and the large volume of updates coming in by the second is extremely powerful.
Here’s a couple of examples:
McDonald’s recently began offering oatmeal on the menu and I’d like to see how it is. Instead of going to Google and filtering through a bunch of other pages that are not of interest to me, it is much easier to just search for “McDonald’s oatmeal” in Twitter and read what people are saying about it right now.
During a major news or sporting event, I used to search on Google for related blogs or forums to read live commentary. Now a single query in Twitter provides an up to the second glimpse of the world’s thoughts on any particular issue.
This is interesting because Twitter isn’t designed to be a search engine. This functionality is a byproduct of Twitter. Yet it does a much better job at providing the elusive social search that Google and Bing have, generally speaking anyway, failed at for years.
The inherent truth to take away from this is the importance of being engaged in the social conversation. Are you engaged?