Buzzword Chasers

In a country driven by the internet, where a good book or a delicious pizza are just a click away, it is hard not to take our freedom to search the web for granted. However, some countries do not allow their citizens the same liberties we cherish when it comes to online searching.

On January 12, Google made the surprising announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China. Unfiltered results are banned by the Chinese government because they can lead to banned topics.

The Original Plan

Reluctant to say no to the potential business generated by over a billion people, Google had originally agreed to operate a censored version of their search engine in China.

Google’s rationale was that allowing limited access to content is better than not allowing any access, and plans were moving forward to launch the search engine and supporting websites in censored versions conforming to Chinese government stipulations.

A Rude Awakening

Google’s aims at diplomacy were retracted, however, when it learned of Chinese hackers’ attempts to steal corporate software code and invade Google mailboxes of human rights activists in China.

The Chinese government is denying the cyber attack allegations, but Google’s lawyers are hopeful that the dispute will be resolved in a few weeks. Although in the midst of discussions with the Chinese government, Google claims it will pull out of China unless online censorship becomes less extreme.

Regardless of the outcome, internet and computer analysts believe the conflict marks the beginning of a new era in online censorship: an era in which websites and users will be technologically advanced enough to work around government filters.

The rising amount of reports on social media as an avenue for advancement on others’ identities has become a serious concern. So serious, in fact, that Facebook has created a Safety Advisory Board as part of a commitment to increase awareness and improve online safety.

As the user base has expanded to young children and the elderly alike (not only college students as it first started out), privacy is among the top of many weary parents’ concerns.

What ever happened to ‘Don’t talk to Strangers’?

A recent study conducted by IT security firm Sophos revealed startling details about current Facebook users. Two fictitious accounts were created with profile pictures of a rubber duck and another with two cats on a rug.

Each ‘user’ sent out 100 friend requests in the same age group. Surprisingly, 95 people confirmed, and 8 others added the profile containing two cats as ‘her’ main photo.

With the many users across the world providing date of birth, town or suburb, IM screen name, college or workplace, and even their phone number, it is no wonder identity theft has increased. Users are willing to connect with strangers despite warnings of this occurrence.

Hence the creation of the Safety Advisory Board.

Made up of five Internet safety organizations, WiredSafety, ConnectSafely, Common Sense Media, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), the board joins MTV in its campaign to protect social media users from online predators.

First, the Safety Advisory Board plans to revise the safety information offered through the online help center. This will provide more safety information for parents, children and teachers.

In another attempt at tightening safety in May 2008, Facebook signed a deal with the attorneys general of 49 states to enhance protection of minors through measures such as automatically warning them when too much personal information is given out about themselves.

It’s everywhere on the web, and you dread the day it appears on your site. Spam. There’s even a whole email folder dedicated to the horrible advertisements and nonsense.

The random comments and posts that show up on blogs and forums are a result of a webmaster trying to boost their site’s page rank. He or she exploits an innocent site, by posting links like “Try this for free,” or “Take a vacation of a lifetime” in hopes to get users to click and view their site.  

But little do these spammers know that this kind of technique is very bad for business. A once- reliable web page is loosing credibility with each spam post and the quality of the World Wide Web is dwindling.  No one wants to read random comments or message about free getaways or prescription drugs when searching for recipes or garage door openers.

 What Spam Looks Like

Links in comment sections on blog or forum pages that are unrelated to the site are most likely spam. Random comments (posts that are short, impersonal and generic) and hyperlinks about prescription drugs, exercise tips, hair loss techniques, vacation getaways and etc. are probably spam as well. If after you leave a trustworthy comment on a site and a quick response with a link pops up, then this site has been infected with spam.  These spam ads are just hoping to get clicked on, to get some attention and bring some viewers to their homepages. Don’t give it. Nothing good will come of this. 

Promote your site…without using spam

Believe it or not you can still promote your site without becoming a hated spammer.

Improve your site. Display informative, original content that will benefit an audience. Utilize good search engine optimization strategies so your site shows up in Google and Yahoo. If your site is user friendly, appealing and optimization with keywords and phrases, users will take notice of this. People will link to your site over time.

I don’t want spam on my site

Because comments and messages are a vital piece to any website-they bring users together, ideas are shared and improvements are made-it’s crucial these sections are made secure. To help eliminate spam and retain your site’s integrity, try taking some quick action: 

• Don’t allow anonymous posting
• Use a comment moderation
• Refuse hyperlinks in comments

Already been infected…

Don’t fret. Take some time and energy and clean up your site and get rid of the spam posts that made it your site. Also, you can enlist some of the security measures mentioned in the above list to stop the spam.

Guilty of spamming?

If so, click on the “your site on the web” section. Look at where you’ve posted your link. Are there any suspicious messages posted on blogs or forums? If so, delete them. If this doesn’t work try and contact the site manager for that page to get rid of it.

Windows 7 has been a long time coming, but finally went on sale today. Windows 7 is now available on new PCs as well as available as an upgrade on some old ones. No shock to anyone, it is rapidly becoming one the most talked about topics on the web.

Everyone is talking about it on Twitter. Everyone is searching on Google and so far, everyone seems to love it!

According to several PC vendors, market acceptance of Windows 7 is already high - much higher than it was for Vista. This is good news for the new PC market and good news for Microsoft!

What are your thoughts on Windows 7, have you checked it out yet?

The mobile web is growing rapidly, and will only continue to grow. The mobile data traffic for AT&T alone has increased by 4,932% over the past three years. By 2013, there is expected to be over 1 billion heavy mobile data users.

There are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month for Wordpress blogs, proving that your site needs to be mobile-ready.

To make your site render better on mobile devices, Wordpress has launched two new mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when compatible mobile phones attempt to access your site.

Smartphones with top notch mobile browsers (i.e the iPhone) will have a tweaked version of the WPtouch theme. WPtouch comes complete with all the standard Wordpress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos, and more. It also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel. It even includes custom header image scaling, and AJAX commenting and post loading.

Other devices will sport a variation of the Wordpress Mobile Edition, which is a plugin that portrays your interface specifically designed for a mobile device. It a viewer do not have as sophisticated of a browser, this mobile theme will help sites load faster and display as much relevant information on the blog as possible.

Verizon Wireless just launched a pretty aggressive new TV campaign directly attacking Apple’s iPhone.

It airs every weakness of the iPhone and plays on Apple’s ad campaign “I,” by saying things like, “I don’t have a real keyboard,” and “I don’t take pictures in the dark.” At the end of the commercial, the caption says, “Everything iDon’t…Droid does. November.”

Although we are suddenly made aware of all of the things the iPhone does not do, we are not really sure what exactly the Droid does. At first glance, it seems clever, but after viewers start to think a bit deeper, they are a bit confused.

At the end of the ad, you are prompted to the microsite, droiddoes.com. The copy reads, “Don’t you wish you had a robot sidekick that moved at light speed, could get you out of any problem and lived in your pocket? Soon you will. Input your email address and Droid will notify you when compromise has been deactivated.”

You then see some of the features, including high speed, hi-res, 5 megapixels, speech recognition, notification panel, directions, video, tunes, 10,000+ apps, the network, and multitasking, as well as a Verizon Wireless logo at the bottom. That’s where things start to come together.

Before this whole social media revolution came about, if you have ever been stuck waiting at an airport because your flight is delayed or you’re sitting on the runway waiting for your plane to take off, you probably had no choice but to wait it out or vent to the person sitting next to you right? But that’s not what one woman at JFK was about to do. She actually did something about it, the social media way!

LA based blogger, Jessica Gottlieb and her 3 children were sitting helplessly on the tarmac at JFK airport waiting for their flight to take off, when she reached for her iPhone and decided to Tweet about her situation.

She wrote, “Dear Virgin Air, My children have been on the tarmac for one hour with 90 more minutes to wait. I am at JFK gate b25. Pls RT.”

Pls RT meaning that she wants her over 10, 000 Twitter followers to “retweet” her posting. And just that they did! With only a few minutes passed by Virgin Air had called Gottlieb to reassure her that her kids would be fine.

“They contacted the gate agent manager and explained to us the entire weather situation,” she says. “Within 20 minutes of that conversation, the plane took off.” Gottlieb said.

This goes to show, social media sites that allow people to interact in the moment are changing how travel companies talk to their customers — and how their customers talk back.

The end result, the way you travel is improving.

For whatever reason, people are reluctant to switch browsers, even if the new one is noticeably faster. 

With all of the new browsers that have come out and are available to us today, it is mind boggling that people are still using Internet Explorer. It is poorly supported, lacks security, does not support PNG transparency, CSS v2, HTML5, and much more. Browsers are free, so naturally, we should all have the best right?

We’ve always known that most people are afraid of change, but they cannot be in this situation. The new browsers (Firefox, Opera, and Safari to name a few) are so much better; but, unfortunately Internet Explorer is still the most popular web browser, holding down 25% of the market.

On a site specifically made as a result of frustration, www.ie6nomore.com states,

“Enough is enough. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in late 2001. For its time, it was a decent browser, but in 2009, it is still in use by a significant portion of the web population, and its time is now up. As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6’s support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and holding the web back.”

Google created another site, whatbrowser.org, to educate people on what a browser is, so that they can move on. 

Now all we have to do is hope people are listening.

Good Ideas With Room For Improvement:

Although a mountain of good things can be said for this site, certain components exist as flaws, leaving a field of space for development and enhancement. We have already created an extensive overview of Compete.com, including its basic functions, a review of its features and the pros of the site. There is always room for improvement though, with several existing factors only needing small additions, while others could significantly change the statistics (and amount of users) of the site.

IF IT WERE TO GO GLOBAL: COULD BE DRASTICALLY IMPROVED

Complete.com searches only U.S. internet traffic while Google Insight analyses and compares the interest levels of Google searches across the globe and can focus in on individual countries to see where high traffic is on certain sites or where Apple is most popular due to amount of searches. Compete only is available to US traffic.

INTERESTING ENOUGH (BUT MAKES LITTLE SENSE):

Users are able to search sites that are completely unrelated, though conclusions cannot be made on the unique visitor count per site. Users with specific goals in mind may find this useful, while others looking to make direct comparisons will have little conclusions to make if their keywords or sites in their searches have little to nothing to do with one another.

For Example: In a Target and Walmart comparison search, the results were strikingly similar, two sites geared with similar products. Google and Yahoo also were extremely similar, although Google’s graph typically showed millions of users more.  A clothing site and a plastic surgeon’s site would, on the other hand, not have anything to do with one another yet still produce results with ‘comparable’ numbers.

IMPROVING THE TRIAL VERSION: GOOD WITH ROOM FOR CHANGE

Things that can be done with the Compete free trial plan:

• Compare up to 5 sites at one time
• Tag sites and explore tag clouds
• Export data and run your own analysis
• View subdomain data

A plentiful amount of data is unable to be reached with the simple trial version, and of course the creators won’t make any money if they show all their cards upfront, but a little more info in areas that further demonstrate Compete.com’s power can enhance the visitors desire to purchase.

Thus:

Provided that the trial version were adjusted accordingly so that users would be able get more complete information, they would be more likely to upgrade to a paid account.

COMPARISONS CANNOT BE MADE: COULD BE BETTER

Under the “Tag Profile” option, users cannot compare tagged sites. I tried a comparison for the tag “electronic” at Target, Bestbuy and CompUSA. A graph was not made, though it does show ‘amount of users’, and it only gives a graph of Unique Visitors.

COUNT LOG: A NEW PROCESS OF HEAD COUNT COULD BE BETTER

Unique Visitors are extremely hard to track! Some characteristics make you independent, including an IP address. The idea of ‘Unique Visitors’ is more about the location a user is coming from (IP Address), demographics aside. Statistical data relating to particular groups within the population have nothing to do with the way Unique Visitors gets its ‘headcount,’ as it only credits a user with one visit in a given month rather than a pure count of how many times the site was actually visited (even by the same user) in a given month. Specifics should be looked at and perhaps a new method could be developed.

SHOWN DATA: NOT BAD

On any given site profile, unique visitors, visits, page views, and Compete rank statistics are shown.

THE IMPROVEMENT:

The rest of the site makes you type in each time on the different pages when you want the rest of the information. If it were all to go to the bottom of the search page as information does on the ‘Compare’ page or ‘Site Profile’ page, it may decrease time spent searching and increase user satisfaction.

The Compete Wrap-Up

Overall, Compete.com’s user-friendliness, unique capabilities and statistical data have been an interesting research project and not too much of a task to comprehend. With an easy to follow overview, how-to manual and lists of the positives and the improvements to be made, this all-inclusive blog series delves into Compete.com from various angles.

At its peak, Compete tracked 6.5 million visits, though 2.4 of these visits were from Unique Visitors. My guess is that a significant number of Uniques are repeat users, and Compete cannot track the amount that these users actually are on the site. This says that the same group of users were repetitively getting data from the site rather than a number of various users, posing a problem to the validity of statistical data across the site.