Yesterday there was a tragic incident involving a lone gunman attacking the U.S. Pentagon. According to reports, the man intended to carry out this attack with 2 handguns and “many magazines” of ammunition.
It probably would have worked, too, except
lackofmeds
Scientology Suspended For “Strange Activity”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but for some reason I find this oddly poetic. 🙂
(Click to enlarge.)
For those who can’t read it, it’s from http://twitter.com/scientology, and states:
Sorry, the profile you were trying to view has been suspended due to strange activity.
Yeah, like that’s a surprise!
Apparently Jason Calacanis Knows He’s Spamming – He Just Thinks It’s No Big Deal
Last month Jason Calacanis wrote a rather sarcastic post aimed at Aaron Wall, which I am assuming was written in response to Aaron’s post, “Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White!“. In it Aaron discusses how sites that are composed largely of nothing more than auto-generated pages wrapped in adsense can get accepted and even gain authority in Google if they have enough financing and press. In Jason’s rebuttal to this was a claim about rankings that Mahalo had “earned” (and I use the term loosely) for “VIDEO GAME walkthrough”. I originally misinterpreted what he was trying to say, and thought that he meant rankings for that exact phrase. I commented how that wasn’t exactly a great accomplishment before realizing that what he actually meant was rankings for [{insert video game name} walkthrough], and that Mahalo has a couple top 10 rankings for that genre of search phrases.
Jason sent me an email to correct me on what he was talking about. We replied to each other back and forth a couple times, and a few very interesting things were revealed in that conversation:
On Freedom Of Speech And Social Media (A Quick Note To Anonymous Commenters)
I understand that on occasion people like to give fake emails when posting a comment. If you are using your real identity and just paranoid that I am going to spam you (which, by the way, I’m not) and leave a false email address, well… it’s not like I am going to verify it anyways. If it happens every so often so be it. I’d rather you use a real one, of course, but I get it.
I also understand that sometimes people don’t want to use their real names when having discussions on the web. Most, in fact, go by some handle or another the majority of the time. When they do they usually use it pretty much everywhere, but if they like to switch it up for some reason or another here and there
Is Google Referrer Spamming Too Now?
Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a section of her traffic logs that were showing some odd information. According to what was recorded there her brand new, as of yet unlinked-to website was ranking on the first page of Google for the single keyword, [free]. If she actually had managed to rank for that phrase it would be an amazing feat to say the least. The competition for that single word is enormous. Unsurprisingly, when performing that actual search her site is nowhere to be found. The site in question is barely one week old, and hasn’t even been launched yet.
What is surprising, to me anyways, is that it appears that the traffic is actually coming from a bot at Google… a bot that is cloaked, sending fake
Google Fails 5th Grade Math Test
So, I think I finally discovered the cause of global warming. No, for reals. From what I can tell, miss Mother Nature started using Google Calculator in helping her figure out what kind of weather she should serve up to us. Now, if she were trying to bake a cake, or perhaps get driving directions, I am sure Google would have worked just fine. But for doing math involving temperatures…? Not so much.
I was playing around with the functions on Google Calculator last week, when I noticed some of the calculations weren’t quite right. Maybe Michael Bolton from Office Space was involved
Why The Renewed Interest In The Linkscape Scams And Deception..?
Yesterday a friend of mine, Sebastian, wrote a post titled, “How do Majestic and LinkScape get their raw data?“. Basically it is a renewed rant about SEOmoz and their deceptions surrounding the Linkscape product that they launched back in October 2008, a little over 15 months ago. The controversy is based around the fact that moz basically lied about how it was exactly they were obtaining their data, which in part was probably motivated by wanting to make themselves look like they were more technically capable than they actually are.
Now, I covered this back when the launch actually happened, in this Linkscape post, resulting in quite a few comments, and there was more than a little heated conversation in the Sphinn thread as well. This prompted some people, both on Sebastian’s post and in the Sphinn thread on it, to ask why all of the renewed interest?
It is not extreme, its just that it isn’t new. The fact that they bought the index (partially)? That was known from the beginning. The fact that they don’t provide a satisfying way of blocking their bots (or the fact that they didn’t want to reveal their bots user agent)? Check. The fact that they make hyped statements to push Linkscape? Check. {…} I don’t get the renewed excitement. – Branko, aka SEO Scientist
Well, I guess you could say that it’s my fault. Or, you could blame it on SEOmoz themselves, or their employees, depending on how you look at it. You see, the story goes like this…
Back when SEOmoz first launched Linkscape, it would have been damn near impossible for a shop their size to have performed the feats they were claiming, all on their own. Rand was making the claim “Yes – We spidered all 30 billion pages”. He also claimed to have done it within “several weeks”. Now, even if we stretch “several” to mean something that it normally would not, say, 6 (since a 6 week update period is now what they are claiming for the tool), we’re still talking a huge amount of resources to accomplish that task. A conservative estimate of the average website, considering only html, is 25KB of text:
30,000,000,000 websites x (25 x 1024) bytes per website = 768,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (768 trillion bytes, which is 698.4TB)
(698.4TB / 45 days of crawling) x 30 days in a month = 465.6TB bandwidth per month
Now, I know that one of the reasons that Rand can get away with some of his claims is that most people just don’t grasp the sheer size
Quick Poll… Who Here Wants To Bing Jessica Biel?
Today CNN wrote a piece about the “‘Most dangerous’ celebs to search for online”. The article discussed which celebrity searches that were most likely to lead to sites infected with spyware. It was an interesting enough story, but what caught my eye were the two opening sentences:
Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.
Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with
Win A Date With Pedobear? WTF??
I was checking out a link a friend of mine Stumbled on tonight, when I see this ad for what looks like a teen dating site. Like most of the adult version dating sites that you see plastered all over the internet these days, the banner ad featured profile pics of the girls you could supposedly wind up hooking up with. The service advertised is not some small time website thrown up by amateurs with a very low budget… it is owned by Hearst Teen Network, the same guys who own Seventeen.com, CosmoGIRL.com, and a bunch of other teen oriented websites. I am not exactly sure who the hell their advertising team is targeting with this one, however. The ad features profile pics of two cute girls… and Pedobear:
I mean, seriously… wtf??
Is Plagiarism Ok… If It Was An Accident?
Last year I wrote this handy little script named EasyWP. It makes installing WordPress much easier for those without Fantastico or shell access, and is many times faster than having to upload all of the files individually. It’s very useful, especially if you install WordPress on a regular basis, or if you need to do a complete WordPress reinstall for whatever reason. Lots of people use and enjoy the script.
Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:
