lackofmeds

With Only 14 Accident Free Days At Google, Should Google Health Come With A Warning?

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Google Factory: 14 accident free days. For now.Often times in factories around the country, looking up on the wall you can see a chalkboard or a sign boasting of how many consecutive “accident free” days those on the job have enjoyed. These are placed there as a form of encouragement for workers to be careful, to encourage healthy competition between departments, and are often coupled with a sense of pride and accomplishment as the number in the display rises day after day. If and when an accident occurs, that day the number is reset back to zero.

Were the Google Factory to have such a sign on it’s services

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Network Solutions: Not Just Thieves and Hijackers, Now Using Tactics That Can Get Your Site Banned From Google

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Keep your money, wallet, keys, and car... but give me that subdomain! Network Solutions apparently wasn’t happy just being slimy in the domain purchasing arena (see: WARNING: Do not check domains at Network Solutions by John Honeck for background on that one), and have now moved into the realm of not caring if they damage your existing sites as well.

According to TechCrunch, NetSol is now engaging in the practice of Hijacking Unassigned Sub-Domains, which put simply means

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Advanced Web Usability: 5 Important Lessons Learned From Digg

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You too might grow up to design the next Digg.comIn the early days of the Internet, one of the biggest attractions was the fact that absolutely anybody was able to sign up for a free email account, and with it get their very own webpage. No design experience whatsoever was required for this… and it showed. Gaudy was vogue, and if you doubt me spend some time on the Internet Archive to see what I am referring to. With continued ease of use and the advent of cheap hosting, this trend continues even today. However, fortunately for those of us who are in fact design-challenged (and yes, in general I do include myself amongst the masses when it comes to a lack of graphic arts talent) in modern times we have leaders in the industry we can emulate when we want to learn how things should be done. Today let us turn to one of the Internet giants for our lessons in usability, to none other than Digg.com itself.

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Pulled Post…

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Today I posted a piece that made fun of online romances, something that I generally always take with a grain of salt due to having observed them in all of their forms over the many years I have been online. The one thing that they all have in common is drama, and an abundance of it at that. So from my point of view I regard them as digital Dr. Phil episodes at their best, and Geraldo Rivera exposes at their worst… and open to commentary and examination when publicly conducted.

With this particular post, however, I named names

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Official Sphinn Standpoint: Infomercials Are *Not* Spam

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Traditional Insomniac Entertainment Last Friday, poking around, I came across an article that had been submitted to Sphinn at the beginning of the week entitled “1:1 Interview With Search Marketing Authority and Visionary Hamlet Batista”. In the description it is billed as “a great interview where Hamlet discusses his introduction to SEO/SEM, touching on his immensely successful projects”, so I click through to see what he has to say. There I am greeted, no doubt whatsoever, with…

… an infomercial. That’s right, this “great interview”

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All Humor Aside, Here’s Why Matt Cutts Statement About AdWords Above SERPS Is BS

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Sometimes, as geeks, we forget how the non-geek mind works. Things we take for granted as being obvious aren’t always so to the untrained eye. Yes, when most of us who live on the Internet perform a search on Google, we know without even thinking what is sponsored and what is not. Most of us probably won’t even see the ads in front of us, aside form the habitual scan for competitors when performing queries that might relate to our own sites.

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Matt Cutts Says: Paid Ads *Are* A Type Of Search

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As many of you know, Andy Beard has been out of the posting loop lately, due to being preoccupied with moving. Luckily he did manage to get in a much needed review of Matt Cutts post on paid links.

I stumbled across the post last night, and I saw a quote by Matt Cutts that caught my attention a bit:

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Newbs, ‘Science’ Spinning, ‘Teesway One Nine Nine’, And A Saturday Meme

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One of the sites I own happens to involve electronic poetry. On that site, on the bottom of the pages, I incorporated a news feed. Nothing fancy, just shows a few stories, their headlines, links, and brief snippets. Occasionally, for news stories with very few results, someone will stumble across my site when researching the topic. The site doesn’t have a ton of ranking power, and it is in no way optimized around the content of the news stories. They are just there to give the readers access to more sites to browse through, should they want to.

Occasionally, I will get an email from someone relatively new to the internet, wondering why my site shows on a search for the title of a poem they wrote, or a speaking engagement they performed at, but they do not see anything about it on the page. I will write these people back, explaining that they need to look at the cache of the page, since the news feed is of course dynamic, and the stories indexed when Google went there are usually not the same ones that are there days later. Most say thank you, and wind up understanding just a wee bit more about the internet.

All of them are for the most part just curious, knowing that they don’t know that much about the internet, and all of them are generally speaking quite polite. Until, that is, this peach involved with some obscure work, “Teesway One Nine Nine”.

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Microsoft Starts Covering Their Ass On Rogue Bot Intrusions

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A quick update to the Microsoft Rogue Bot Fiasco. It looks like now they have correctly DNS’d the IP range that they are sending these bogus requests from. Previously, all of the IP’s (which I first mentioned were all coming from the 65.55.165.* block) reverse DNS’d to names such as bl2sch1081901.phx.gbl. They have apparently changed this, so the IP’s are more readily identifiable as coming from Microsoft, reverse DNS’ing to the Live.com domain, eg. livebot-65-55-165-99.search.live.com.

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