Google

Tracking Click Pings with PHP/MySQL

Earlier this week, Mozilla Firefox developer Darin Fisher announced that test builds of the browser include support for click pings, an experimental new HTML feature that makes it easier for web sites to track clicks on outgoing links: I'm sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get ... (read more)

2006/01/20

Worst New Word of 2005: Popesquatter

The American Dialect Society has declared that pope-squatting is the new term least likely to succeed for 2005, rating it ahead of the acronym GSAVE (global struggle against violent extremism) and Brangelina, the nickname given to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The society defines the term as a verb that means "registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it." This would exclude me, since I donated BenedictXVI.Com to the ... (read more)

2006/01/16

Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs

I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank. SportsFilter jumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result. A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins with www and one that doesn't -- for the ... (read more)

2005/10/19

Throw the Book at Google

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright. I'm not so sure. If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright? Selective quotation of a book is fair ... (read more)

2005/10/01

Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit

The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda is taking heat over criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted a thoughtful response that shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs. This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice of pimping pagerank is becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links on SportsFilter, a ... (read more)

2005/08/24

Googlemilk: And Then They All Blamed Me

Alex Pareene, who describes googlemilking as "thinking of a great setup, and letting the internets provide the punchline," offers this contribution to the game: "and then they all blamed me." The phrase reveals scapegoated sex club workers, abuse survivors, drug addicts, and a Canadian who blogs about flatulence: i guess all this talk of gas has had its effect on me. last night i had two dreams and in each one i 'let one go' while i was around other people and they all blamed me and i denied ... (read more)

2005/06/17

I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon: Chasing Mark Felt How a 19-Year-Old College Student Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999 cadenhead.org/workbench The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, ... (read more)

2005/06/02

I'm Totally Straight, But ...

A few weeks ago I invented a new game dubbed googlemilking -- looking for a phrase in search engines that lends itself to hilarious, off-color, or unintentionally self-revealing results. The game was covered by the Scotsman newspaper yesterday, and you can find players by searching for the first googlemilk: "I'm totally straight, but ...": Just as you know that any sentence beginning with the words "I'm not one of those racialists but ..." will end in a diatribe about immigration, it is obvious ... (read more)

2005/04/14

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move. Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm. Google's support for a ... (read more)

2005/01/19

I'm On Board with RSS

I've accepted an invitation to join the RSS Advisory Board, the group that evangelizes the RSS 2.0 specification. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, RSS 2.0 isn't owned or controlled by vendors. The specification has been released under a Creative Commons license and the format it represents has no trademark or copyright claims. My new job has very little actual power associated with it, sadly enough, and only one groupie. The Advisory Board's primary task is explaining why the ... (read more)

2004/05/12

Read More Entries