Smackdown!
As far as CAPTCHA’s go, I think that the one that Digg.com uses for story submissions is fairly reasonable. It’s monochrome, decent contrast, and doesn’t try and get too fancy with out of focus characters or exotic fonts. Of course I have a preference for my own PuzzCAPTCHA as far as usability goes, but for mainstream CAPTCHA’s I think Digg’s in intelligently done.
Maybe a little too intelligently, actually. I think that it might be trying to send me messages. I logged in to submit
I was looking through Digg the other day, when this image ad caught my eye for some reason. Something about it caught my attention, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was, so I took a closer look at it. It was subtle, and hard to figure out at first. The copy on the ad itself was unremarkable, and went like this:
FLASH NEWS: Pam Scott, N.Y., made $1,000,000 on FOREX!
19 y.o. housewife, using $99 Autotrading program-robot, made $1 million in only 2 weeks! READ FULL STORY..
The copy itself was bad enough to make me simply ignore
On Friday I wrote a piece on how it looked like Google was testing AJAX results in the main serps. Some discussion followed as to whether, if this change were to become a widespread permanent one, this would affect Firefox plugins that existed (definitely some existing ones would stop working), break some of the rank checking tools out there (they would have to be re-written I’m sure), and even some people asking if it would thwart serps scrapers from using serps for auto page generation (not for long, no).
While those things would definitely be affected in at least the short term, there is a much greater impact from Google switching to AJAX. All of the issues mentioned involve a very small subset of the webmastering community. What actually breaks if Google makes this switchover, and is in fact broken during any testing they are doing, is much more widespread. Every single
