Several web sites I've visited today, including Time Magazine and Planet 107.3, are triggering a malware warning in Google Chrome: The website at www.planet93.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for ... read more

I'm in Woodbridge, Va., this morning about to head out to the Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, a gathering of small web publishers organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google. As a publisher who uses context-based advertising on the Drudge Retort and other sites, I was invited to come to DC and meet with members of Congress to talk about why this form of advertising is important to online media. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has concerns that Congress is working on regulations that would kick ... read more

Dave Winer claims on Scripting News today that Google is playing dirty with RSS in favor of Atom: ... Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, they're going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I don't like this. I wouldn't like it even if I didn't play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldn't like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my servers, and ... read more

Yesterday, the CBS News web site ran a five-paragraph story on the fact that Susan Dey was absent from a Partridge Family reunion: The Partridge Family cast was one member short when they reunited on television Tuesday morning. The cast of the popular '70s sitcom appeared on the Today Show as part of their "Great TV Families Reunited" series, but actress Susan Dey, who played eldest daughter Laurie Partridge, was not in attendance. Danny Bonaduce, who in the years after his child stardom faced drug addiction ... read more

I'm a huge fan of the web designer and magazine publisher Derek Powazek, but I couldn't disagree more with his rant that calls all search engine optimization (SEO) a con game: Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned. ... The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn't work, and it's poisoning the web. I tried to respond on his blog, but he's ... read more

The 11-day-old web site ScottsMoneyBlog.Com is selling an amazing money-making work-at-home business opportunity for only $1.98. "Would you like to make $5,000 a month posting a link on Google?" asks Scott Hunter in an ad I spotted today on the Drudge Report. "Get paid $5 to $30 for every website link that you post on Google. No one needs to buy anything from you or Google in order to get paid." I'm not clear on what Scott means by posting links "on Google," but he's wearing a tuxedo, so he must be rolling in ... read more

For 30 minutes Saturday morning, Google displayed the warning "this site may harm your computer" with all search results, including its own home page. Normally, the warning only appears on sites that Google suspects to be infected with malicious programs such as viruses. A data error flagged every site on the web as potentially harmful, as thousands of people noted on Twitter. The situation became so desperate that people began using Yahoo Search. Even though the problem lasted just a half-hour, that was enough ... read more