Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

If you have been follow the news, last Monday Microsoft hit a nerve when it announced in Fortune magazine on that Linux and other open-source software infringed on 235 of the company's patents. Microsoft cut a licensing deal with Novell last November to resolve intellectual property claims. Monday's announcement has made other members of the Open Source community a little on edge -- or even hostile.

Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy and director of Microsoft's work with open-source projects, spoke with the IDG News Service on the effects of the declaration on the open-source community. In the interview Hilf stated that the Fortune magazine article was blown a little out of proportion.

I said again, "Don't look at Fortune magazine as the manifestation of the Microsoft strategy." It's the same strategy we've had. I think [the effects of the story] will be short term as people realize that it looks like Microsoft is on the attack. I think longer term it will be fine and the work will continue on.

... What we heard back after the Novell deal was "Give us more transparency. You say that there is IP involved, give us an understanding of what that is." So the attempt was that if we give a number and category of where these things fall, maybe that will help people get an idea of the scope. We are very much calling out to commercial companies to license this stuff and resolve these issues. This isn't like a trivial invention. There are a couple hundred significant patents here.

An edited transcript of the interview can be found at Computerworld.

Labels: linux, microsoft, novell, open source, patent

In a recent experiment, security researcher Didier Stevens bought a Google ad to test user awareness of what they were clicking on. The ad was designed to be somewhat blatantly suspect and said "Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!" and 409 people clicked on the ad.

In the six month experiment, the ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times -- a click-through-rate of 0.16%. The Google ad campaign cost €17 ($23), or succinctly put, €0.04 ($0.06) per click to potentially compromise a machine.

Had Stevens been a real-world hacker bent on installing malware on computers thru Google AdWords, instead of a security researcher -- then the results are pretty alarming.

Equally interesting however was the relationship of browser types when the click-thru rate is compared to the market share.

According to Net Applications, Firefox now holds 15.4 percent of the browser market, while Internet Explorer has 78 percent.

Having 80.5% of the click-thrus(335) in the experiment coming from IE users is very comparable to Net Applications market share estimates.

Firefox represented 12.5% (52 click-thrus). The difference in click-thrus vs. market share for Firefox tells me that for the normal public at large, discounting the large savvy base of geeks, designers and techies who use Firefox -- the stats are saying that people are just as oblivious regardless what browser they use.

Labels: adwords, Firefox, google, microsoft, security, spam

Here we go again, shades of Nigritude Ultramarine. If you all remember the SEO contest from the past, which is probably one of the major reasons for the adoption of the Nofollow microformat -- it looks like there is another one on the horizon. Actually it is coming from another horizon, Indonesia, and it is called Ngadutrafik 2007 and there close to 95,000 results in Google right now.

I just spotted it in the Technorati WTF not more than a few minutes ago, and it is hitting the Hot List. Preliminary checking shows others are setting up profiles there, and looking at the SERPS a number of blogs are being set up as I speak.

There is also an entry in the Wikipedia announcing the contest, which started last April.

Ngadutrafik 2007

* Dates: 22 April 2007 – 30 July 2007
* Keyword: "Ngadutrafik 2007"
* Sponsor: www.masterseo.web.id
* Target Ending:Ngadutrafik 2007 is the topic of an SEO contest held by Adsense-Id Forum members. Ngadutrafik 2007 is a non-prized activity that challenges the members and Indonesia SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s)
* SEO Ngadutrafik 2007 Championship SEO professionals and amateurs to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s).

One blogger with a hosted WP.com account has been suspended by Matt. Evidently a gal named Nenda ratted him out, citing abuse of the service. The controversy between the two and the aid of another blogger calling attention to it, did not hurt Nenda in the least -- her blog took a steep hike in visitors during that period

What gets me, is if these people are SEO's -- don't they know about Nofollow? Or will Nofollow really matter. They are hitting Technorati, which is nofollow. Some of the blogs they are setting up, they are actually commenting in. All of which have nofollow links. At any rate, this contest may just show us how effective (or ineffective) it is for combatting spam and whether it will curtail it or not. This will be a great opportunity to see them all out in the open like this.

In the meantime, I suggest you keep an eye on your commenting areas, forums too. It may be time to batten down the hatches before the main force blows ashore.

Labels: blogging, google, microsoft, nofollow, seo, spam, technorati, wordpress, yahoo

I disappear from the Web for a couple of years and come back to this Nofollow thing from Tom Christensen.

"... a lot of SEO types were posting about nofollow again. The new twist is they’re trying all sorts of plugins and gadgets to selectively pass or bar following links from their blogs for PR.

People, this is getting really old. And really stupid. Just turn the damn thing off already."

I am going to have to agree with Tom on this. It is really stupid.

Also, the whole Wikipedia decision to add Nofollow to outbound links is stupid. And Andy Beal's campaign to Nofollow Wikipedia is stupid, even though it looks like he is Following their lead when it comes to trackbacks and comment links. Not quite calling the kettle black, but close to a very dark grey.

Carsten Cumbrowski opines:

The hope is that the return for spamming Wikipedia will be so low that it does not even make any sense for those spammers that don’t need much return to be happy.

You can live perfectly fine in India for $1 a day for example. If Spamming Wikipedia reduces that down to $0.25, the spammer will probably look for other targets. And those other targets will also go away eventually, but that is a complete different story.

Well isn't that special! Keywords here are "other targets" (eg: You, Me and Dupree). And just how will those other targets eventually go away?

And why is it a completely different story? It is the story. Wikipedia effectively kicked the spammers out of their yard and they are coming to a neighborhood near you. Is it just me, but how does this combat spam?

Its okay to follow NoFollow. Follow?

When Google first suggested Nofollow back in 2005, it didn't take long for a spec to be drafted up by Technorati. MSNSearch and Yahoo!Search jumped quickly on board supposedly, along with scores of blog software developers and proponents.

The spec abstract has nothing to do with not following a link, just applying no weight to the link itself:

By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.

When the big three of search come out and say "they will respect Nofollow", what does that mean really? After reading dozens of comments to this regard, I am under the impression that spiders can and will follow the links if they so choose ... they just will not apply any weight to the link. A link is a still a link then.

Is SPAM the cholera epedemic of the Internet?

Should we burn down an entire village of Wikipedia huts just to eradicate a plague, only to have that plague show up in somebody elses village? Where does it stop? I think with all the Doctors and Chemists at Google General, they can come up with a better cure than this.

My hat goes off to Slashdot who use heuristics, karma and other factors in combination with nofollow to combat spam. Also, to Blogoscoped for their "fading nofollow" policy. And to other like minded bloggers who are just saying NO to NoFollow.

This is the kind of responsible forward thinking that we need to be doing, not to mention doing the SE's job for them to boot. It seems to me that any SE should have the ability to differentiate between a blog post and a comment and not apply too much weight to the comment anyway. Why should we have to tell them this?

Labels: blogging, google, microsoft, nofollow, spam, yahoo

Server Farms are cropping up across the country. Google has a few farms along the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. Upstream in Quincy, Microsoft has opened its first of six planned server farms, a mammoth 474,000 square feet and surrounded on three sides by fields of potatoes, beans and broccoli. The mighty Columbia has been a source of cheap electricity for decades and it isn't any wonder why this area was chosen.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Cisco are investigating the possibility of establishing server farms in Iceland powered fully by renewable energy. The power comes from both geothermal and hydroelectric sources and is so cheap that in the wintertime some sidewalks in Reykjavík and Akureyri are heated.

Google is also building a massive server farm near Eemshaven in the Netherlands, where 100,000 servers will have access to 30 megawatts of power, some of which will be delivered by windmills.

And what if you cant find cheap electricity? Then you have the Iowa State Senate pass a bill that gave Google a tax break on the sales tax from utility bills and a property tax break for the site of the center itself.

There is not just the cost of electricity that is an issue here. Larry Page cares about the polluting effect that Google may have. Apparantly the Internet is not a very clean industry, and mega-coms like eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google are partly responsible for global warming for the server farms are hardly "carbon neutral". Here we go again ... Google is evil, bad Google.

Labels: google, microsoft, search