Last week, we reported that Facebook wanted to hire two people in Washington, D.C., and then dissected the official descriptions of the positions as best we could. Still, the bullet points left a lot unclear, so it's noteworthy that Facebook provided some clarifying paragraphs today.
Adam Conner was the first member of Facebook's D.C. team, and a post he wrote for the company's internal blog was actually promoted to its public blog this afternoon. Conner - who also deserves applause for being a Conan supporter - did a good job of explaining some of his responsibilities and favorite moments.
Here's one excerpt that reveals just how politically connected Facebook may be: Conner wrote, "The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours. I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts."
As for the more day-to-day stuff, Conner described his duties by writing, "I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn't an option anymore."
It sounds like the social network's well on its way to being omnipresent in Washington, then, especially as it adds two more employees.
YouTube Partners are, pretty much by definition, some of YouTube's most important users. They create original content, don't violate copyright laws, and have huge audiences. It makes sense, then, that YouTube is now looking hard for ways to improve its Partner Program.
The hunt has taken the form of a crowdsourced project. Just as the Ideas Page for YouTube was created not too long ago for the sake of the whole site, the new Product Ideas Page for the YouTube Partner Program covers this single subject. People can submit ideas and vote on which ones they think are best.
It's an effective process. On the YouTube Biz Blog, Filipe Lima noted with respect to the first effort, "It was a success, receiving almost 3,000 ideas and more than 300,000 votes. We even launched a few features that directly addressed some of the requests - namely, an HTML5 Beta (there were many HTML5 advocates who participated) and a sneak peek of our new cleaner video page (some desired a 'less cluttered' YouTube)."
So now we'll see where round two takes us.
The deadline for both new submissions and votes is April 12th. If you have any suggestions, get them in earlier, though, for the sake of giving them more time to become popular.
Users of the mobile version of Google Product Search can now see if items are in stock at a local store from select retailers. These retailers include: Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm.
Product listings from these retailers will have blue dots that can be tapped to see an "in stock nearby" link, which takes you to a seller's page where it will either say "in stock" or "limited availability". In addition, these pages will show you how far away the store is from your location (assuming you have My Location enabled or have manually specified your location).
The feature is available for iPhone, Palm WebOS, and Android users in the U.S. Users can hit the "more" link, and select "Shopping" or find the "Shopping results" section in Google's Universal Search results when searching from Google.com.
Google offers a form for retailers who are interested in participating in this program. Google says to make sure you have your Local Business Center data up to date and to ensure your Product Search data is in "great shape."
More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.
On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube.
Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website Change for Equality, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.
Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.
At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President David Drummond said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”
David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the Global Network Initiative. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”
Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy
Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:
Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.
At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.
On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.
We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.
Finally, we’ll be seeing you at as many parties as we can go to at one time, including Bikehugger’s Mobile Social, where representatives from the Google Maps team will be handing out schwag and dishing dirt on how they built bike directions, the Blogger/Reader party, where you’ll have a chance to chat with members of those teams about newfeatures, and (last but not least) the SXSW Film Closing/Music Opening, co-sponsored by YouTube and VH1.
You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!
Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team
Gowalla is a service that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. If you're not familiar with it, it's a location-based social networksing service that comes in the form of mobile apps. Gowalla announced today, the availability of Gowalla 2.0 for the iPhone 3G and 3GS platforms.
Gowalla highlights the following new features with this version:
- Design – Gowalla developers have created a fresh new experience that is more flexible, readable and usable.
- Photos – Gowalla 2.0 gives users the ability to not only check in and create new spots; they can also upload a photo after checking in, browse photos from friends and see photos taken at that spot.
- Checkin Commenting – Now when a friend checks in someplace, other users in the community are able to tell that friend what they think.
- Multiple checkin messages – Users now have more opportunities to add messages even after they’ve left a checkin spot. Skipped typing a message? Come back and add one.
- Hot spots – The most popular spots nearby will be highlighted for users in a particular area to discover.
- Browse friends – and friends of friends. Browsing friends’ bookmarked spots and creating trips are two new features put in place by Gowalla’s developers by popular demand.
- Facebook, Twitter and web links – Building your Gowalla network is easier than ever with more ways to stay connected with friends through Facebook, Twitter and web links.
- Spot details – Address, phone numbers, Twitter names, Facebook pages and website will now be available in several checkin spots.
Gowalla will be heavily involved in SXSW (of which WebProNews will be covering the Interactive portion). Gowalla has updated its SXSW mini-site that details all of the SXSW initiatives the company will be rolling out, including: real world rewards, competitions, challenges and events.
A Google exec recently said, "In three years' time, desktops will be irrelevant." That's debatable, but there's no question that mobile use will have grown much more than it already has. Based on comments in a recent keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to think PC use is going to drop too much, but he did say, "Mobile queries are just going to keep going up and up and up."
A study released last month found that the number of mobile phone subscribers is on track to increase from 4.6 billion to 5 billion globally by the end of 2010. Another study found that consumers are getting more comfortable with mobile shopping.
Mobile Search
Google has dominated the search market for a long time, and while this still continues to be the case, it's important to note that search in general changes with mobile. People are searching in different ways than just using their favorite search engines. They're using different apps. They're using their voices. They're scanning barcodes for instant access to product information. The number of ways people are finding information with their phones is only going to keep increasing. On mobile, it's not just about Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
That's not to say these three aren't still incredibly important to mobile. In fact, the search share among these top search engines may even become more greatly divided as time goes on. We're seeing different mobile carriers and manufacturers making deals with these companies, which affect the default search options for various devices. As we discussed before, mobile search engine use may be largely dictated by device popularity, which is (in my opinion) one of the biggest things Bing will have going in its favor in terms of market share - Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 phones will come with Bing hardware keys, meaning the most convenient way to search on these devices will likely be to hit a single button taking the user to Bing. If these devices become popular, it could be huge for Microsoft in search.
As far as Google indexing and mobile sites goes, Google's Matt Cutts says, "If you can find a way where your existing site will work well in mobile browsers, we're not worrying about supporting two completely different sites."
When it comes to AdWords, Google says to create separate, mobile-focused campaigns so you can optimize keywords, ad text, and landing pages for people using mobile devices. Google shared an interesting case study this week looking at Razorfish's mobile AdWords approach. They shared the following details:
- The Razorfish team started by duplicating the existing desktop campaigns and switching the settings to target mobile devices with full internet browsers.
- Since their client had a well-known brand name, they focused on branded keyword terms with enough traffic to help them learn quickly about what was working best for their campaigns.
- To measure performance, they tracked several conversion metrics including whether a mobile user looked up the brick and mortar store location or downloaded a coupon from the website. Right away, they saw a 7.5% lower cost per conversion on mobile devices, encouraging them to test ways to optimize their mobile campaigns.
- Razorfish tested whether variations in the campaign's landing page would affect conversion rates. The team hypothesized that mobile users might be looking to take a specific action, and by starting the user's experience closer to that action, the client would see better results. As it turned out, for this client, they saw much higher conversion rates when the user was directed to a landing page that showed nearby store locations.
- Finally, they tested variations in the ad text. Four versions of ad text were tested, including the original copy used in desktop campaigns. Each of the three new versions provided over 9.3% lift in conversion rate over the strongest performing copy in their desktop campaigns.
When it comes to Yahoo and Microsoft search advertising, things are about to get more appealing here in general, and presumably, that includes mobile. Microsoft and Yahoo advertisers will have the audiences of both search engines to view ads once Yahoo and Bing get their integration done.
Wrapping Up
One of the most important things any search marketer can do with regards to a mobile strategy, is to simply keep up with the latest mobile trends and innovations. This space is rapidly evolving, and new apps are released frequently. Pay attention to hot apps, and how your target audience is engaging with them. What devices, operating systems, and browsers are hot? Monitor studies and surveys that delve into demographics. Try to stay ahead of the curve.
Do you have a mobile search strategy? What suggestions do you have for improving in this area? Comment.
In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.
The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:
Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
Customizable colors, fonts and more
Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:
Gli attacchi di phishing sono diventati, nel corso degli anni, sempre più frequenti e pericolosi e hanno coinvolto in maniera piuttosto importante soprattutto il Web 2.0.
Ai piani alti del noto servizio di microblogging Twitter, hanno di recente lavorato per trovare un metodo efficace che riesca a prevenire tali tipi di aggressioni attraverso un servizio anti-phishing ... Leggi tutto Autore: Floriana Giambarresi Tags: Phishing, twitter
Quando nel 2005 Rupert Murdoch e la sua News Corporation acquisirono MySpace, con una transazione economica quantificata in 580 milioni di dollari, non avevano di certo previsto che il loro social network sarebbe stato di lì a poco messo in ombra dalla repentina crescita del neonato Facebook.
In un lustro il panorama del Web 2.0 si ... Leggi tutto Autore: Cristiano Ghidotti Tags: myspace
Usare il browser invece di Photoshop per la creazione dei primi bozzetti grafici di un nuovo sito Questa è la traduzione dell'articolo Make Your Mockup in Markup di Meagan Fisher pubblicato originariamente su 24 Ways il 24 Dicembre 2009.
"Non progettiamo copie di pagine web, progettiamo pagine web". Andy Clark, via Quotes on Design
Come...
Lo hanno definito uno “storico accordo” e forse, una certa portata storica ce l’ha veramente. Parliamo dell’accordo tra il Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Google che porterà circa un milione di testi che hanno fatto grande la cultura italiana nel database di Google Libri, il servizio di digitalizzazione di testi di Google.
Grazie a questa ... Leggi tutto Autore: Giuseppe Cutrone Tags: google books, Google Libri
DVDVideoSoft è una software house leader nello sviluppo di programmi per l'elaborazione audio e video, la quale ha recentemente inaugurato la versione italiana del suo sito Internet: www.dvdvideosoft.com. Peculiarità di quest'ultimo è di rendere disponibile un'ampia gamma di applicazioni gratuite rivolte allo svolgimento di numerose attività , quali masterizzare, editare, convertire e rippare contenuti audio e video.
Il software sviluppato da DVDVideoSoft spicca per intuitivitĂ e immediatezza d'uso, aspetti da tenere in particolare considerazione durante la gestione ...
Lawrence Lessig, il fondatore di Creative Commons, è indubbiamente uno di quei personaggi che della Rete, e dei suoi rapporti con la conoscenza e l’accesso ai contenuti, hanno scritto la storia.
Oggi sarà presente alla Camera dei Deputati, dove terrà una lectio magistralis organizzata da Capitale Digitale dal titolo “Il Web e la trasparenza tra ideali ... Leggi tutto Autore: Alfredo Bucciante Tags: conferenze, lawrence lessig, libertĂ
Realizziamo con Photoshop un effetto che simula la presenza di riflessi realistici sull'acqua Quando ci si appresta a fotografare l'acqua, non sempre la moltitudine dei riflessi viene resa in modo ottimale dalla macchina fotografica. Per ovviare a questo problema, basta confidare sulla propria creativitĂ e su Photoshop CS4 che, in modo...
The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.
To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.
Google Apps Script has been available to Google Apps customers since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.
To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”
I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blogpostsandarticles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.
Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.
We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!
Tipizzazione dinamica, parametri opzionali e nominali varianza e interoperabilità con COM Ogni versione passata di C# è stata caratterizzata da un particolare aspetto, prima di esaminare nei dettagli le novità introdotte dalla quarta edizione del linguaggio, ne ripercorriamo brevemente la storia.
VersioneData di... - Parametri opzionali, parametri nominali e varianza
HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.
Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.
Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of “L’Amourita Pizza”:
<div> <h1>Review: L’Amourita Pizza</h1> Written by Bob Smith Jan 15, 2010 Rated <b>4.5</b> - Excellent </div>
Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author and date of the review, and the rating:
Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.
As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support -- including which item types and item properties are understood by Google -- is specified in our rich snippets documentation as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to ensure a great user experience.
Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.
Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:
Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry
Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)
After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)
Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.
After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.
We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!
Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools
Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.
In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.
Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from Webmaster Tools or the Verification home page). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.
There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with Google Accounts. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!
We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.
How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.
Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.
The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.
We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.
Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:
These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:
We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
The last time I wrote about a hacked site, it was using a redirect that sent some users to a different site. This kind of hack is pretty common (even though it’s usually not as complex as mentioned in that post), it leverages the sad fact that users are often easy to trick and not browsing with protection (or a current browser).
A different angle of attack is to redirect only search engine crawlers to a different site. By doing this, they can make it look like the pages of a website moved to a new domain name. In general, when search engines find redirects like that, they will more or less pass the “value” that a page had on to the new URL — that generally also applies to PageRank. So in a sense, they are trying to steal the value that a webmaster has built up over time.
In this particular case, a “massive amount” of sites were hacked and likely redirected through suomi.co.in.
The webmaster generally doesn’t notice this kind of hack because there’s nothing that would alert him to a problem. Only search engine crawlers would get redirected, normal users (including the webmaster) would see the page normally.
The first symptom that you would see is hard to interpret: URLs from the website are just not indexed anymore. URLs not being indexed is something that could happen because of any number of reasons, so how do we find out more?
One of the first things I like to do in a case like this is to access the site with a search engine crawler’s user agent. This gives you a rough look at how the website reacts to a search engine crawler (although it’s not complete, it’s often pretty close). There are two relatively easy ways to do this:
Use an online tool such as Web-Sniffer. It’s pretty easy to use and is somewhat close to an actual crawler.
Use FireFox with the User Agent Switcher plugin. If you use this plugin, you’ll have to add the user agent yourself. I usually use the current Googlebot user agent string:
Note: if you use Firefox for this, make sure that your Firefox installation is up to date and locked down properly in case you run into a site serving malware like this. Sometimes it even makes sense to use a virtual machine for this.
(I wish there were a half-”li” ) There’s also “wget”, which is easy for those of you who prefer use console tools. I usually use the above user agent string with wget.
If you access the site using one of these tools, you’ll often be able to spot these redirects (or other issues that a site might be having with regards to being accessed by search engine crawlers). It’s rare that someone uses cloaking by IP address for things like this. In a recent thread in the Webmaster Help forums, “webado” spotted the redirect using Web-Sniffer.
In this particular case, the URL was redirected to http://suomi.co.in/ , from where it was redirected to a page that they wanted to promote with the original site’s “value”. I’ve seen the same kind of redirect going through http://ahtung.co.in/.
The webmaster responded with a note from his hoster in the thread:
Note from my host server (support @ hostgator.com)
I have removed the file “.htaccess” from the directory /home/aceuropa which was causing the redirect. The logs show a massive amount of .htaccess files being edited over the last couple of days. I would highly suggest changing your password to something more secure. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.
(It’s great to see a hoster act so quickly!)
There’s another way to spot this kind of hack with Google Webmaster Tools: When you submit a Sitemap file, Google will show warnings for URLs that redirect. By design, you should be listing the final URL in your Sitemap file, so if the URL is redirecting for our crawlers (as in this case), we’ll show a warning in your account.
Here's a simple trick to view nofollow links in Google Chrome. Just drag and drop the following button to your bookmark bar and hit it whenever you want to see links with the rel=nofollow HTML microformat:
This bookmarklet inserts a tiny bit of CSS into the top of the page you're currently viewing. The CSS is similar to that which is used in other nofollow highlighting methods:
Here's something from my mailbox - someone wanted to know how he could crawl his site and confirm that all of his pages really have the Google Analytics tracking-code on them. WordPress users have it easy, there are plugins that handle it automatically. Sometimes it's worth asking nicely - let me show you how I did it. As a bonus, I'll also show how you can check the AdSense ID on your pages, if you're worried that you copy/pasted it incorrectly.
This is pretty much cross-platform, but as a Windows-user you'll have to grab and install two files first:
UnxTools - a collection of popular Unix/Linux tools for the hacker in you
Extract the ZIP files, copy the contents somewhere where you can find it and make sure that the appropriate folders are in your "path" (the files you'll need for UnxTools are in "...\usr\local\wbin"). We'll need to access these tools through the command line. I have a feeling I may need to elaborate on that for Windows users -- let me know if that's the case.
First, we'll mirror our site on our local machine (this assumes that your site is crawlable; if it isn't, then fix it first ):
Open a command box or terminal window (on Windows, hit Start / Run ... and enter "cmd")
This command mirrors pages with .html, .htm, .php, .asp and .aspx extensions on http://domain.com/. It'll create a folder for the domain and put all the files in it. Dynamic URLs will get adjusted so that they can be used as file names.
Wait ... until it's all downloaded ... if it feels endless, you might have endless URLs, perhaps an infinite calendar script or something similar? It's worth fixing!
Alrighty, now that we have a copy of your site, let's check things out.
Finding pages without Analytics
We can find pages without the Analytics tracking code by listing all pages which do not have certain content in them:
grep -r -L "google-analytics.com" *.*
This command goes through all subfolders (the "-r" option) and lists the files that do not contain a match ("-L") for "google-analytics.com". That could be extended to just about anything .
How about pages that don't have a "description" meta tag?
grep -r -L "meta name=.description" *.*
The "." (period) matches any character -- in this case, it is used to match the " (double-quote).
Finding pages with AdSense (and the ID used)
Finding pages that contain a certain text is even easier:
grep -r "google_ad_client" *.*
Note that all we did was drop the "-L" (and change the text, obviously). It will show the lines that match this pattern in all of your pages, which includes the AdSense ID.
Similar to the earlier check for missing "description" meta tags, assuming you have the contents of that tag all in one line, you can easily find all of these meta tags with:
Sometimes it would just be great to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time. Some web applications just love to eat memory in Firefox, some web pages go crazy if you have JavaScript enabled and sometimes you just want different sets of cookies to let you manage two accounts at the same time.
I've been trying to do that for years and did the most exotic things to make it happen. I've used four different browsers in parallel and I've even used a virtual PC running within my PC (that kind of defeats the desire to use less memory, but it feels neat anyway). In the end, a collegue in the office, who happens to use emacs as his main web browser , pointed me into the right direction.
Now I have three completely independant instances of Firefox running at the same time!
So what's the trick?
Firefox has command line options to let you start multiple profiles and specify a certain one. In our case, we're going to change the command line to:
To get started, check the name of your current profile. On Windows you can find it in "c:\Documents and Settings\[user-name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles". It will generally have a few characters and numbers, a period and then the profile name (in my case it was something like "36fc232a.default"). Use this to adjust the settings of the icon you use to start up Firefox. On Windows, right-click on the icon and select "Properties"; you can add the options in the field called "Target":
If you click on that icon now, it should start up Firefox just as before (ok, this is not the neat part yet ).
Now make a copy of the icon (I right-click drag it into a folder and select "Copy") and change the command line options (and file name) again, only this time choose a different profile name. If you want to use a copy of your existing profile (with all cookies, bookmarks, themes and add-ons), you can do that by going into the folder where your profiles are stored (mentioned above) and copying your default profile. Now when you start up Firefox with that icon, it will bring the profile manager since it can't find that new profile. Create a new profile and use the exact name you used in the options. You will then have a choice of either creating a completely new profile or using an existing profile folder.
Now you have two instances of Firefox running at the same time. They're completely separate, so if one crashes, the other will continue normally. If one starts using too much memory, you can close it and restart it without impacting the other one. If you have conflicts with add-ons or want to use different cookie sets, just use a separate instance.
Since the various instances will generally look the same and be hard to keep apart, I just applied different themes to them. The "Safari-style" theme is my private one, the blue one is used for all my work-apps and the normal one is used for all kinds of testing.
This trick should work on all platforms with Firefox, not that I tried it out so try it at your own risk . Now if only I could migrate my IE profile back to Firefox ...
All of the websites I put together at the moment are used for playing around and testing things. It's fun to set up a site, try some things out, delete it or just let it sit and then - usually much later - start over and try something else. The only problem is that by the time I am ready to start over, I have forgotten my password. I can find my user name, it's in the FTP client and visible in my hosting control panel, but the password is not visible anywhere. The secure way would be to just pick a new password, but let's assume you need your old one . The following will also work for email passwords stored in your email client, by the way.
What we'll do is "sniff" the connection that your FTP client builds up, we'll take a look at the packets sent out and received. Remember that other people can do this as well - say if you're on an insecure wireless connection on the road -- use secure connections and protocols whenever you can!
You'll have to get a copy of Ethereal (freeware), a universal network analysis tool (there are many similar tools available, I like the flexibility of Ethereal). Download it, install it and start it up.
To get started, select the menu item Capture and Start, then choose your ethernet interface (WLAN, cable, etc) and let it start. You are now recording your complete network traffic, you 1337 self-h4x0r . Depending on what you're doing at the moment, it may record a lot of traffic. We'll filter it later on, so don't worry about that.
Now start up your FTP client (make sure you're not using a secure FTP connection) and connect to your server. When you connect to your server like that, you will send your user name and password over the network and Ethereal record that for you. Once you have that, you can stop capturing in Ethereal.
If you scroll through the data you collect like that, you'll quickly notice that there's a lot going over those wires. Let's just look at the data going to and from our FTP server. You'll have to get the IP address of your server (which you can usually do in a shell/command box by typing "nslookup ftp.yourservername.com"). In the filter box on top, enter: ip.addr eq nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn (where the "nnn's" are the IP address of your server).
Once you only look at the data going to and from your server, you'll see the authentication information right away:
Now that you see how easy it is to hack yourself, make sure that others can't do the same with your account:
If you're using a wireless connection, always assume that others can listen in (even if you're using your own access point with WEP or WPA encryption).
Make sure that you use a secure version of FTP. In general, they will encrypt your authentication information so that it will not be readable on your network. Double-check it with Ethereal, if you want to be sure.
Change your FTP/email passwords after you have used them on an insecure connection like a hotel or airport wireless.
If you use a web-based email service, make sure that you are accessing the site with HTTPS and not HTTP. Most web-mail services allow that (though they may not activate it by default since it is a bit slower and is usually not needed on your home network).
Even if your FTP (or email) client encrypts passwords in the settings, they can still be read with the right tools.
Napolitano ha bypassato i canali tradizionali e ha usato la Rete per rispondere direttamente ai cittadini in merito alla firma sul Decreto salva-liste. Alcune considerazioni.
Una dozzina di nuovi script per aggiungere stupende gallerie fotografiche sul proprio blog, creato con script sempre disponibili sul sito ed infine script per facilitare la creazione di applicazioni
Pubsubhubbub è il nuovo protocollo open source sviluppato da Google per l''aggiornamento e l''indicizzazione in real time dei contenuti sul motore di ricerca.
Google AdSense consente agli Editori di donare parte dei guadagni ai terremotati di Haiti
Scritto da Federico Albani
Google ha lanciato una funzione di AdSense, che consente agli editori di AdSense donare i propri guadagni per i soccorsi Haiti terremoto.
"Siamo attualmente accettare donazioni da publisher AdSense con un saldo non conto attraverso 31 gennaio 2010", spiega Google Elizabeth Ferdon. "Per vedere che cosa il vostro saldo del conto è gratuita, si prega di visitare la pagina della 'Storia Pagamento' all'interno del tuo account.
Vostri guadagni gennaio pubblicherà nei prossimi giorni, quindi sentitevi liberi di fare riferimento alla 'Rapporti avanzati' la pagina per una stima guadagni fino al questi sono finalizzati ".
Gli editori possono donare sia una parte o la totalità dei loro saldi non pagati a partire dalla fine di gennaio. "Come ci si aspetta, ci sono alcune restrizioni alla donazione, e tutte le nostre politiche normali applicano ancora - quindi, anche se si sta donando, si prega di non chiedere ad altri di fare clic sui tuoi annunci, al fine di aumentare i tuoi guadagni", dice Ferdon.
Google non tratta le richieste di donazione da editori la cui richiesta di donare più di loro saldo non attraverso 31 gennaio, o se sono soggetti ad imposta alla fonte, il suo account è stato disabilitato per attività illecite o di altre violazioni dei termini e condizioni, o se la loro conti visualizzare i messaggi: "si prega di inviare i tuoi dati fiscali", "inserisci il tuo codice PIN", oppure "si prega di verificare il tuo numero di telefono".
Partner in Sanità è l'organizzazione che riceve le donazioni. Andranno a proivde aiuto medico.
Qual è il sistema migliore per contattare un numero elevato di persone in poco tempo e con dei costi ridotti? L'e-Mail!. Ma come trovare contatti qualificati e targettizzati in base alla Tua attività? Scoprilo!
Google ha lanciato una funzione di AdSense, che consente agli editori di AdSense donare i propri guadagni per i soccorsi Haiti terremoto.
"Siamo attualmente accettare donazioni da publisher AdSense con un saldo non conto attraverso 31 gennaio 2010", spiega Google Elizabeth Ferdon. "Per vedere che cosa il vostro saldo del conto è gratuita, si prega di visitare la pagina della 'Storia Pagamento' all'interno del tuo account.
eBay è stato occupato annunciando cambiamenti e alimentando speculazioni circa altri. Secondo il WSJ il mercato online è tornare alle sue radici, come un "mercato delle pulci internet", così come il passaggio dal modello di vendita al dettaglio che Amazzonia possiede e concentrandosi maggiormente su PayPal. Un sacco di roba in corso durante il periodo post Meg Whitman, eh?
Il software professionale di Adobe scopre una nuova inclinazione consumer e diventa un editor di fotografie digitali online, completamente gratuito. Photoshop Express offre uno spazio per utente di 2GB e diversi filtri per ritoccare le immagini, ma soprattutto un'interfaccia semplice.
Quando si muovono i leader, spesso si nascondono importanti tendenze. E così, dopo le strategie incrociate nella produttività d'ufficio — con Google che cerca l'offline e Microsoft che integra online – ora è tempo di rete anche per la fotografia digitale. Il colosso della grafica Adobe lancia oggi una nuova versione – gratuita e online – del celebre software Photoshop, strumento obbligatorio per chiunque parli la lingua del webdesign e del ritocco fotografico.
Parole chiave: gratuito e online Dopo un anno di chiacchiere e di voci, finalmente vede oggi la luce la beta pubblica di Photoshop Express; il software professionale si riadatta per il web e si piega all'uso di un pubblico consumer amante della fotografia digitale, ma senza troppe pretese. Dimenticate quindi livelli, alpha e curve di Bezier: Photoshop online è più che altro uno spazio per archiviare foto e per creare slideshow, un po' come Picasa o alle altre applicazioni di photo-sharing. Registrandosi gratuitamente al servizio web si hanno a disposizione 2 GB di spazio per raccogliere le foto, addobbarle con qualche effetto e filtro, condividerle con i contatti amici o semplicemente inviarle via email. Un altro punto in favore del nuovo prodotto Adobe è l'annunciata integrazione con siti di terze parti, come per esempio Facebook, che permette un rapido scambio di file con pochi clic.
E’ ormai una pratica diffusa quella di cercare online ogni riferimento che Google può trovare a riguardo di una persona che abbiamo conosciuto o con cui dobbiamo intrattenere rapporti di lavoro. In America ci sono stati diversi casi di rapporti di lavoro non andati a buon fine per quello che è uscito fuori associato al nome di quella persona.
Volete creare una di quelle fascette che se ne stanno agli angoli del vostro schermo e che servono per mettere in evidenza un link o un evento da promuovere?
è l’ultimo di quei servizi web che permette di generare elementi grafici di questo tipo con facilità, selezionando colore, stile, testo e link a cui rimanderà la fascetta.
Supponiamo che siete a casa, con la dispensa semi vuota e dovete preparare qualcosa da mangiare. Il ricettario della nonna non aiuta, la prova del cuoco oggi non andrà in onda e non potete chiamare vostra madre per chiedere consiglio. Come fare?
La soluzione è a portata di click: accendere il pc, aggiungere un pizzico di connettività internet e condire il tutto con abbondante web 2.0.
Quando tempo ci vuole a creare a mano un file .htaccess? 30 secondi, un minuto…? Sicuramente pochissimo, a patto di ricordarsi a memoria tutte le specifiche di questo tipo di file. E quando magari viene il dubbio ad esempio di come impostare il RewriteEngine, c’è sempre Google, giusto?
Mi stavo giusto destreggiando tra ErrorDocument e RewriteRule quando su Google mi è apparsa la soluzione che in pochi istanti mi ha permesso risparmiare tempo prezioso. Il sito in questione si chiama htaccesseditor.com e lo slogan recita “Applicazione online per creare .htaccess files”. Diciamo subito che le lingue disponibili sono 9 tra cui, cosa rara, l’italiano.
Dopo l’era dei BarCamp, eventi organizzati dal basso e tanto amati dai blogger italiani, sono sbarcati in Italia anche i MiniBar.
Si tratta essenzialmente di microconferenze, mono argomento e spesso molto tecniche, che servono a ricercatori, sviluppatori ed investitori ad incontrarsi per cambiarsi informazioni e creare piccole sinergie per far evolvere ulteriormente il web.
Sempre più spesso ci troviamo a navigare attraverso il cellulare o il palmare e notiamo come molti siti siano poco ottimizzati per l’utilizzo sui piccoli schermi. Facendo una ricerca in rete per capire come ottimizzare i siti per i dispositivi mobili, ho trovato il sito Ready.mobi che offre un utile servizio per gli sviluppatori ed i gestori di siti web (e gli appassionati) che potranno così analizzare dettagliatamente le caratteristiche e le modalità di fruizione del sito da analizzare.
Non sarebbe bello poter editare le pagine di un nostro sito “al volo”, direttamente da internet? Typeroom è un’applicazione Web gratuita, sviluppata da una società californiana chiamata Los Gatos, che promette proprio questo: l’editing di siti già esistenti… “on the fly”. Se siete interessati vi consiglio subito di andarvi a prenotare per la Beta perché tra poco sarà disponibile una prima versione Beta dedicata a chi ne fa richiesta.
Il funzionamento, dicevamo, è abbastanza sorprendente e innovativo, ed è utilissimo per i siti non gestiti da Cms.
trasforma i dati in intelligenza,
- Design – Gowalla developers have created a fresh new experience that is more flexible, readable and usable.
As far as Google indexing and mobile sites goes, Google's Matt Cutts says, "If you can find a way where your existing site will work well in mobile browsers, we're not worrying about supporting two completely different sites." 
) There’s also “wget”, which is easy for those of you who prefer use console tools. I usually use the above user agent string with wget.
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Google ha lanciato una funzione di AdSense, che consente agli editori di AdSense donare i propri guadagni per i soccorsi Haiti terremoto. 
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Dopo l’era dei BarCamp, eventi organizzati dal basso e tanto amati dai blogger italiani, sono sbarcati in Italia anche i 
Sempre più spesso ci troviamo a navigare attraverso il cellulare o il palmare e notiamo come molti siti siano poco ottimizzati per l’utilizzo sui piccoli schermi. Facendo una ricerca in rete per capire come ottimizzare i siti per i dispositivi mobili, ho trovato il sito 
Non sarebbe bello poter editare le pagine di un nostro sito “al volo”, direttamente da internet? 
