User-generated ranking systems are increasingly important these days. Would you buy something on eBay without checking the seller’s feedback rating? Would you rent an unfamiliar movie at Netflix without glancing at the number of stars it earned from Netflix members? Driven by the dogma of Web 2.0, today most major sites have a way for users to make themselves heard – ratings, comments, reviews, etc. Many of these have commercial implications – a well-reviewed product will sell better, while people will shun a hotel that has bad reviews by past guests. Where there’s commerce, there’s money… and where there’s money, there’s spam. The current issue of WIRED magazine is now online, and it contains an interesting article by Annalee Newitz, Herding the Mob.
School bullies probably date back to the origin of schooling children. Some kids will always be bigger or more aggressive than most of the class, and will choose to torment others. The concept of cyberbullying is new, though – the idea of using website postings to harrass other students began in earnest when MySpace and other social networking and web community sites became wildly popular with teens. The factors sparking the growth of cyberbully activity include the ease of posting content, the ability to register and post anonymously or using false information, and the increasingly large audience available on popular sites. The rapid increase in cyberbullying is perplexing to both school administrators and lawmakers, who are trying a variety of approaches to reduce the practice. Continue reading »
Google is rolling out a major upgrade of Google Apps that seems squarely aimed at the business market. Continue reading »
Anyone who operates an online community knows how quickly flame wars develop. Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, has written an interesting article for the New York Times: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior. Continue reading »
Lots of homes have routers these days, most of them combination wireless access points, switches, and routers that allow multiple computers to easily share an internet connection. Setup for these devices is easy enough that even a non-techie can usually do it. It turns out that one step is too easy – on many of these devices the user is not forced to change the default password. According to ZDNet reporter Joris Evers in Hack lets intruders sneak into home routers, researchers at Symantec and Indiana University have figured how to attack the major brands of routers from a single web page and change the router’s DNS settings. Continue reading »
Toyota’s fledgling NASCAR entry crashed and burned, figuratively speaking. In the midst of preparations for the Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip, owner of the new NASCAR team that is racing three Toyota Camrys, was tagged by NASCAR officials in what is probably the organizations biggest cheating scandal. Four other teams were also fined. Details are sketchy, but it appears that NASCAR found evidence of an unauthorized fuel or fuel additive in Waltrips car; the substance was related to jet fuel. Toyota is clearly not thrilled by this turn of events.
OK, that headline isn’t true… but Google might want to think about investing in cheap power capacity. According to reports like IT-related energy consumption doubles, demand for electricity to power servers is growing rapidly: Continue reading »
Yahoo has launched its Pipes tool, and at first glance it’s a bit mind-boggling. In short, Yahoo Pipes lets you combine data from both similar and dissimilar sources, process it, filter it, and output it. One can combine feeds, data from sites like Flickr and deli.cio.us, Google Base data, and other sources to produce novel and useful combinations that can be used personally or shared with the world. You can prompt for inputs, so that, for example, an available apartment mapping tool can be set to look in a particular city, and have a set proximity to some type of map feature, etc. Best of all, you can see exactly how each pipe is constructed and even clone it for your own use and modification. Continue reading »
We see a lot of “virtual” business these days – Web meetings, office workers who work from home some or all of the time, and even virtual companies with no permanent office. As bandwidth gets cheaper and more available, and as more tools become Web-based rather than hosted on a local server, we’ll certainly see more of this. VoIP is a big factor, too – it makes it easy to keep the same phone number but to take and make calls wherever there’s an Internet connection. Some posts at Cruise Ship News have us intrigued, though, by an even more outrageous form of virtual office. In Techno Cruise Ship, they note that Celebrity has outfitted the Century with WiFi connectivity in every cabin.
The 2005 Super Bowl showed GoDaddy to be a skillful marketer. A combination of well-publicized ad rejections, a sexy, funny ad that aired only once, and Internet-only versions of their ads combined to create a cost-effective win. For the cost of one Super Bowl ad (their second slot was taken away by network censors), GoDaddy created a mountain of publicity and website traffic. That’s great marketing - don’t just show your ad once in the costly game time slot, but instead leverage the exposure with pre-game and post-game publicity and web traffic. The 2006 Super Bowl ad from GoDaddy wasn’t as strong, in my opinion, but drove plenty of web traffic to GoDaddy’s web site (a bigger traffic leap than any other Super Bowl advertiser). It even confounded brain-scanning neuromarketers: Super Bowl Ads: GoDaddy Girl 1, Neuroscientists 0.