Research, Google, the Web, and Beyond

A daily look at Google, research, the Web, the state of the world, and anything at all that interests Harold Davis.

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Spam Bites Man
Publication Date: Jul 28, 2006
I am the first to admit that I do not really understand email spam. What kind of blithering idiot really thinks that an illicit fortune in Nigeria will actually be transferred to their bank account, or that some compound will make their sex organs or mammary glands larger, or that something offered in an unsolicited email might actually be a good idea? Yet these blithering idiots must exist, otherwise spammers wouldn?t bother. On the other side of the fence, what...

Upgrading MovableType
Publication Date: Jul 27, 2006
I wrote a little while ago about customizing the "skin"---or look and feel---of my Photoblog 2.0. Recently I was confronted with a different task with my Googleplex Blog: upgrading from version 2.6 of MovableType to the latest and greatest version 3.31. MovableType is the software that powers this blog. I upgraded not because I wanted some new bells and whistles (I tend to be pretty conservative about that kind of thing) but rather because I had to: security flaws in...

Building Traffic and Making Money
Publication Date: Jul 13, 2006
SEO-the common abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization-is, as I've said before, "a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago." That said, SEO has come of age, along with its slightly more respectable relative, CPC-or Cost Per Click-advertising via Google AdWords (or elsewhere). Any business, no matter its size, needs to include an Internet marketing and advertising...

Berkeley Hills Weblog Makeover 94707
Publication Date: Jun 02, 2006
After 500 blog entries, and more than 1,000 photographs, it was time to update the visual design of my Photoblog 2.0. But like many things software that seem like a good idea when you start, this proved to be much more of a job than I had imagined. Wake-Up Call I was Googling myself, and my recent book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs. Many writers spend far too much time Googling themselves and...

Search Engine Optimization
Publication Date: May 28, 2006
Search Engine Optimization-affectionately called by its acronym SEO-is a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago. In the SEO arena, gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism meets successful marketing techniques (and people who do make a great deal of money), and both meet the nuts and bolts of a technology framework. Like a beautiful spy with...

Help! I've been Flickrwhacked!
Publication Date: May 05, 2006
To googlewhack means to find a search term that returns only one result in Google. To be a true googlewhack, the search term should consist of actual words that can be found in a dictionary. The googlewhack craze has been around a while. It's worth noting that when someone finds a good googlewhack like ambidextrous scallywags, the search term doesn't stay a whack?note the 740 (or so) hits for this term in Google. Now there's a new game in town:...

May the Great eBay, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! Games Begin!
Publication Date: Apr 21, 2006
In a front-page article labeled Behemoths' Dance, the Wall Street Journal reports today that eBay is trying to find ways to lessen its dependence on Google by forming closer alliances with Microsoft and/or Yahoo! Of course, I've seen the AdSense ads for eBay when I enter a search term such as antiques or Nikon D200. In fact, almost any search term query at all that might possibly be something one might buy brings up (among other AdSense search ads) an...

Buh-Bye: Ranting and Raving about Voice Response
Publication Date: Apr 04, 2006
One of my pet peeves is synthetic-voice driven customer support telephone lines. I find myself shouting into these things: "Operator! Person! Someone! Anyone! I WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN BEING!" It is kind of cool knowing I'm talking to a computer, because I can rant, rave, and curse all I like without having to feel remorse at exhibiting inappropriate behavior before a mere human cog in the machine. (Instead, I'm exhibiting it to a machine cog in the machine,...

Easy Travel to Mars
Publication Date: Mar 27, 2006
It can sometimes be problematic finding your way around this turbulent, overcrowded earth. But if you have access to Google, it's now easy to explore Mars. Google Mars provides elevation maps (showing altitude in relief), satellite photos created using a mosaic of visible light images, and views created with a mosaic of infrared photography. As with Google Earth, you can zoom in and out and navigate across the various views. Other features are almost too numerous to list. You can...

How Is a Honda Element Like a Platypus?
Publication Date: Mar 24, 2006
On our way to drop Julian off at school, Julian notices a new billboard that asks the questionWhat does a Honda Element and a platypus have in common? Julian is now reading omnivorously, kind of like a platypus, whose food (not reading) diet consists of platypus insect larvae, snails, yabbies, worms, tadpoles and other fauna and shellfish. Platypi also occasionally eat small frogs, small fish and fish eggs. Yes, "platypi" is a valid plural of platypus, along with "platypuses." A...

Private Wikis As Knowledge Management Systems
Publication Date: Mar 21, 2006
Recently in The Commune and the Scholar I wrote about the conflict between communal information repositories (such as the Wikipedia) and the distinctive voice of lone authority. Several readers have pointed out that Wikis are just as useful-if not more so-in private contexts as they are as general sources like the excellent Wikipedia. Many companies and institutions-from entire enterprises to small workgroups-have replaced complex Knowledge Management Systems with wikis. Wikis can also be used to help share knowledge across organizations....

The Commune and the Scholar
Publication Date: Mar 17, 2006
Everybody who uses the web-whether for fun, research, or profit-knows that much of the best content on the web is supplied by the community. This content is created in myriad ways-but is communal, usually not for profit (other than AdSense revenue!), and usually posted with the barest minimum of structure, verification and oversight. The jeremiads of bloggers rise to the heavens but provide some useful insights. Profiles on MySpace are the kind of superficial self portraits you'd expect of teens...

As the Manichean Google Worm Turns
Publication Date: Mar 15, 2006
I have always been a Google agnostic. I don't love Google, and I don't hate Google. I think Google is a company with good and bad, like most companies, institutions, and human beings. My picture of most "companies, institutions, and human beings"-and this is very transparent with my kids-is that an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Sometimes the angel wins, and sometimes the devil wins. Google cooperates with the Chinese government to censor Internet...

Power Tends to Corrupt and Google Power Corrupts Abso-Googly
Publication Date: Mar 14, 2006
Google the term google and you won't find any ads containing "google" (or "Google"). In fact, "google" is one of the few terms you can search for on Google that produces absolutely no ad results. (A total aside: finding search queries that yield no ads could become another form of Google whacking.) As you likely know, the results you see when you do a Google search are divided into "natural" links-the supposedly objective links the search engine comes up with...

Buyer Beware, Indeed!
Publication Date: Mar 13, 2006
In a recent story, I noted that Craigslist is being sued to comply with the same Federal Fair Housing regulations that apply to newspaper classified ads. According to a recent front page New York Times article, real estate transactions in which buyers have never seen the property have become increasingly common on the Internet, particularly on eBay. It should come as no surprise that a great many of these sales are fraudulent. Any buyer of a house or land who...