AVG 8.0 Link Scanning Threatens Web Analytics [Best of June '08 #2]

June 16th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

This week was relatively slow, must have to do with all iPhone 2.0 chatter. A few interesting posts this week though (June 9-15 2008):

  • I've been using the free anti-virus software AVG for a year or so now and found it lightweight and non-intrusive. The last month, however, a message keeps popping up requesting me to upgrade to the new version 8.0. Apparently, some 20 million people world-wide have made the upgrade, to much annoyance to web site owners. As it turns out, the new version contains a link scanner, that pre-visits the search results from Google and Yahoo searches, masquerading as a real user. The Register reports that last month the number of visits had doubled on certain pages, thanks to the link-scanner robot. At first thought, this might seem as a good thing for site owners, but actually it is not. The fake traffic jeopardizes the web statistics, increases the bandwidth cost, and slows down all other legitimate internet traffic. As the Register writes: "[It] could destroy web analytics as we know it."
    Imagine a scenario where the top ten results of all web searches were pre-scanned. This would theoretically lead to an overall ten-fold increase in web traffic. One cannot help but think that it is up to the search provider, Google or Yahoo for example, to provide safe search results, instead of relying on an external service scanning all results. The link scanning can be disabled by disabling a browser plugin, but that's probably to advanced for the average user.
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  • The Swedish blog search engine Twingly went public this week after a couple of months in private beta. Bravely, they claim to be spam free, though I think it will be hard to maintain in the long run. Aim for the stars — or what do they say.
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  • Reblogging own comments made on other blogs has become popular since my own comment on comments piece. Both Tim O'Reilly and Fred Wilson have recently done the same. In a follow-up post Fred concludes that there is no difference between a great comment and a great blog post, and as he says: "Comments are often way more insightful than blog posts."
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  • Google Reader has an easter egg in the form of a Konami Code (Hit ↑↑↓↓←→←→ba). All software should have an easter egg.
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Twitter is Cooling Off, but Noise is Heating Up [Best of June '08 #1]

June 10th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

Some of the interesting posts this week (June 2-8 2008):

  • The much hyped messaging/micro-publishing service Twitter is losing in interest among its users, partly due to the frequent and prolonged outages of the service. Dave Winer, for example, writes that Twitter is a ghost town:

    [...] the upward momentum is gone, the new idea every 24 hours that so inspired us is a distant memory. Now we're going the other way. When I log onto Twitter these days, it's empty, quiet, a ghost town.

    Though a recent announcement from Twitter infused Dave with some hope for the service.
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  • Marshall Kirkpatrick has an interesting article about noise in news, and why it might be a good idea not to filter the flow of information coming at you. For example, a study by Sanda Erdelez shows that "the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future." Marshall also refers to a post by Hutch Carpenter, who defines people as "signalists" or "discoverers" based on whether they "filter in" or "filter out" information with a certain content. For example, a signalist would read only content about Apple, whereas a discoverer would read all content except about Apple, for example.
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  • Marshall at ReadWriteWeb listened to my request last week for a comment policy, and wrote a post about how to comment without being spammy. In short: Be transparent about who you are, be super humble, and add value to the discussion. Then it's OK to provide a link to your own business.
    Regarding the question of comment ownership, Dave Winer weighs in, and suggests that "I own the collection of comments on my blog, and you own the comments you've placed on my blog and all others," which is in line with my opinion on the subject.
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  • Facebook released part of their platform code as open source this week, and hardly nobody notices. A reason could be the unusual choice of license, CPAL (Common Public Attribution License), which Mike Gunderloy at the OStatic blog gives a good description of. CPAL is based on the more familiar Mozilla Public License, with a couple of modifications. One being an attribution requirement, which acts as a "poison pill" according to Mike.
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  • Mike Gunderloy in another post reports on Wikia Search, which promises to be a truly open search engine, with not only the underlying software being open source, but also the search results themselves being open to editing. A paradise for black hat SEOs and spammers as it sounds, but hopefully that could be fought back with a strong community. After all, Wikipedia manages to be fairly spam free, despite the open editing features.
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  • Alex Iskold writes about Zemanta, a "lazy man's" semantic blogging tool that automatically suggests related content – images, articles, videos and links as you type. Fred Wilson currently tries Zemanta, and I decided to try the provided WordPress plugin too. I had some issues with the service updating too frequently, which hangs the UI temporarily and makes the experience frustrating. It would be really nice to be able to disable the automatic updating.
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Zemanta Pixie
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Virtual Worlds are Hot with Companies Again [Best of May '08 #5]

June 3rd, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

A few interesting posts this week (May 26 - June 1 2008):

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A Comment on Comments

June 1st, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

A couple of days ago, Josh Catone had a post up asking "Who owns all these comments?". The post was inspired by an article by Hank Williams asking "Who has comment copyright ownership?". On ReadWriteWeb's comment policy Josh writes:

Whenever someone leaves a comment on this blog, I think the assumption is that while we may not own the comment itself (we won't try to stop you from posting it elsewhere), we at least have been granted full publishing rights to use it as we please. We've always reserved the right to republish comments in other posts (with attribution), as well as remove comments we felt were offensive or inappropriate.

This sounds like a sound policy. A bit discouraging though that he writes that he "think[s] the assumption is ...". Anyhow, I was inspired to comment on Josh's article, and I repost my comment here in its entirety:

An interesting subject that urged me to comment. Here some random thoughts:

If you write a comment, I think you own it in the same way as you own the content of a blog post you write (assuming you post it publicly, provide a feed etc.) That is, others, including the site owner, has the right to link to it, publish an excerpt, or even republish the whole comment, as long as he or she gives proper attribution and does not change the wording of the comment.

If you intend to republish the comment to monetize it in a direct manner, like selling a book, maybe you should ask for permission if the comment is significant in terms of length and/or originality.

Since the comment lives on someone else's site, the site owner has the right to remove it if it's offensive, breaks some law, is spammy etc. But here it becomes interesting where to draw the line of what's ok and what's not. Should you allow comments that are only insignificantly related to the subject of the post, is clearly intended to just promote some other content, or maybe seems to be relevant, but is just cleverly disguised to promote something else?

I think that you should be cautious in removing comments that are not clearly spam, unless you explicitly state on your blog or site that certain types of comments will be removed. Otherwise, if you remove some legitimate comment, you effectively practice censorship, and could (or should) be publicly blamed.

My two cents, perhaps slightly off topic, let's see if it gets removed.
/Jonas

This comment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. :-D

As I point out, I think it is a good idea to have a clearly stated comment policy on your blog, especially for larger blogs that get lots of comments.

Hosted comment service Disqus also joined the discussion and suggested a few points of a "Commenter's Bill of Rights", including a commenter's right to edit and remove his comments, access to all of his comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog, and the right to use his own comments as blog posts. As for publishers, their rights should include whether or not someone is allowed to comment on their blog, to delete a comment, and to modify a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent. All of these I think are valid points and in the interest of both commenters and publishers.

I don't get many comments on this blog, though I got some on my Web 3.0 posts. I remove comments that are clearly spam or totally irrelevant, but otherwise I'm quite liberal, adhering to a generous policy I hope.

Commenting for me, on a larger blog like RWW, is a way to get a few a more readers than I get here, and might even lure some occasional readers to this blog.

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Nerds Make Money, Geeks are Cool [Best of May '08 #4]

May 26th, 2008 by Jonas Bolinder

Some of the most interesting posts this week (May 19-25 2008):

  • Robert Scoble writes about the real PR secrets: "PR now stands for 'Professional Relationships'." That is, you should build personal relationships with influential bloggers and journalists to be successful in PR. Obviously this doesn't scale, and is out of scope for most people. Luckily, as Robert writes: "You don’t need PR at all if you have a great product." Loic Le Meur points to the importance of participation and building a community.
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  • A serious security flaw was recently detected in the OpenSSL library of the Debian an Ubuntu Linux-based operating systems, affecting several applications involved in secure communications across the Internet, the Apache web server included. The flaw was introduced in the key generation code, effectively reducing the key length from 128 to 15 bit, making a brute force attack very feasible. The flaw has been around for about two years, affecting millions of systems which ever have used the key generation mechanism of the affected operating systems.
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  • On the distinction between a nerd and a geek writes Brad Feld, who concludes that "nerds are geeks who make money." David Brooks outlines the history of the words nerd and geek, dating nerd back to 1950, and writing that "At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades." But later, geeks got higher status: "A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked." Coolness seems to be a characteristic of a geek, which might explain why you so often see people describe themselves as geeks, but less frequently as nerds. Brad Feld, by the way, describes himself as a nerd. Geeks are cool and Mac users for the most, I guess. I'm a PC guy, and probably more of a nerd than a geek. It just remains to make some serious money to become a real nerd (like Bill Gates).
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  • Dave Winer says that to him "Twitter is a publishing medium." Having 9644 followers, Twitter is a useful publishing medium, not so useful however with just a handful of followers. I'd like to use Twitter as a publishing medium, but I gotta build a community first, following the advice of Loic Le Meur.
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  • Steve Rubel presents 9 future trends, broken down into three categories based on the likelihood of hitting: Faint Signals (more likely): The Cut and Paste Web, The Attention Crash, Digital Curators, Super Crunching and Collaboration. Watch List: Living Room 2.0 and Geek Marketers. Hallucinations (less likely): Digital Nomads and Data Leaking.
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