Creare animazioni con l'interpolazione di movimento di Flash CS4
In questo articolo esaminiamo una delle caratteristiche di Flash CS4 che segnano una differenza importante con tutte le versioni precedenti. Si tratta della creazione di animazioni per interpolazioni di movimento, forse lo strumento più importante... - Easing, orientare gli oggetti sulle traiettorie, copiare e riapplicare i movimenti, anche con ActionScript

Autore: Filippo Dattola
Categoria: Flash

Widestore Big-Wid 50
il pacchetto professionale di Widestore pensato per le PMI: Clicca ora!

Widestore Big-Wid 50
il pacchetto professionale di Widestore pensato per le PMI: Clicca ora!

So che molti tra i nostri lettori lavorano nel settore Information Technology. Un simpatico post del blog di Debugreality fa un elenco dei pericoli nascosti di queste professioni. Diciamo subito una cosa, lavorare negli IT di solito è divertente. Nella maggior parte dei casi vedi cose che gli altri impiegati non possono vedere, puoi vestirti come ti pare (e la cosa non è indifferente nel caso di multinazionali, banche o assicurazioni che obbligano al “cappio” della cravatta) e se ai piani alti hanno un po’ di cervello, puoi cercare di renderti utile proponendo innovazioni tecnologiche di primo livello. Vediamo invece alcuni lati negativi, spesso sconosciuti ai colleghi degli altri reparti dell’azienda.

Esaurimento mentale. Per l’intensa natura dei lavori nell’IT, è necessario essere sempre concentrati per evitare quegli errori che possono impattare su mezza azienda. Nello stesso tempo bisogna essere aperti a tutte le novità del settore, che come sapete non sono poche. Se non siete dei passacarte, e volete fare bene il vostro lavoro, è possibile che alla fine del vostro orario di lavoro sarete KO. La cosa è deleteria quando si ripete tutti i giorni. Il consiglio è di non lavorare costantemente “overoclockati”, se potete.

Pessima salute. L’uomo non è fatto per stare seduto tutto il giorno davanti ad un monitor, ma neanche per entrare/uscire dalla sala macchine con lo sbalzo di temperatura che tutti in estate conosciamo bene. Ma non finisce qui. Chi lavora in IT spesso è costretto ad orari che variano a seconda dei problemi, con il risultato che si mangia e si beve quello che si trova, siano le 11 di sera o le 3 di notte. Per tenersi un po’ su di tono, evitate di consumare la pausa pranzo davanti al monitor, bere troppo caffè delle macchinette: se riuscite fatevi un passeggiata, anche se si tratta di girovagare in mezzo al parcheggio aziendale.

Il computer non è il vostro migliore amico. Questo è spesso sottovalutato: quante ore di vita sociale vi toglie il pc? Non sarebbe meglio uscire e andare a prendere un bell’aperitivo con quelli del commerciale piuttosto che continuare a chattare via Skype con i colleghi delle altre sedi? “Spegnete” i soliti contatti e cercate di uscire con persone che non si occupano di IT ne a livello professionale ne a livello amatoriale, v i farà bene.

Stress. Qui apriamo una porta aperta. C’è lo stress di chi dai piani alti vi chiede vi fare qualsiasi cosa senza darvi i mezzi, c’è lo stress derivato da dover prendere ordini da chi confonde l’XML con l’XLS, e quello di dover passare il tempo a tappar buchi semplicemente per la negligenza e l’inettitudine altrui. E lo stress continua anche dopo l’orario lavorativo, con schiere di famigliari, amici e amici di amici che vi telefonano o peggio bussano direttamente alla vostra porta, perchè il loro computer è andato in “tilt”. E non importa che voi siete il Dio dei mainframe, perchè per loro siete semplicemente quello che “lavora nei computer”.

Mi fermo qui, ma penso che qualcuno di voi si sia riconosciuto almeno in una di queste situazioni. Per una volta, se volete, usate i commenti per un sano sfogo collettivo nei confronti di chi non ci apprezza e di chi proprio non arriva a capire quanto sia importante il lavoro dell’Information Technology.

Foto | Flickr

Scarsa disponibilità dei nuovi processori Intel per soluzioni notebook: Acer avrebbe piazzato ordinativi piuttosto consistenti

Widestore Big-Wid 50
il pacchetto professionale di Widestore pensato per le PMI: Clicca ora!

Il linguaggio, sia esso orale che scritto, è uno strumento di comunicazione assolutamente potente ed estremamente efficace, tuttavia, capita spesso che vi siano delle cose, soprattutto le emozioni trasmesse da un’opera d’arte, un balletto o una rappresentazione operistica, che difficilmente possono essere trasmesse tramite una pagina scritta o una “semplice” fotografia. Molto meglio utilizzare un ...
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Autore: Giuseppe Cutrone
Tags: video sharing, wikipedia

Una classe in PHP 5 per poter gestire Twitter. Parte prima: connessione all'account e invio del primo post
Twitter è un noto servizio online che mette a disposizione funzionalità per il micro-blogging e per il social networking; iscrivendosi, ogni utilizzatore avrà la possibilità di aprire un account tramite il quale di pubblicare e condividere dei post...

Autore: Claudio Garau
Categoria: PHP

There are many ways to market your business through Facebook. Some are obvious, and others not so much. One thing you can pretty much count on is that there are incredible masses of people on the social network that you can potentially reach, and in ways that will allow them not only to engage with your brand in a comfortable setting, but with other Facebook ecosystems they are already engaging with.

A perfect example of this was recently demonstrated by Microsoft in one of the company's many marketing strategies for its "decision engine" Bing. I sat in on a Bing panel this week at SXSW, where some of Bing's marketers talked about a variety of ways they have used social media to gain users. One of these ways was through none other than Farmville (if you're a Facebook user, and don't live under a rock, you've at least heard of it).

More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That's why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result:

- Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
- 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
- Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
- In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep

Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to:

- Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property)

- Add depth to Bing's personality

- Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other.

- Yield passionate or emotional response from people

- Be intimate and/or scalable (can we be both)?

Bing's Farmville experiment achieved all of these. However, the point of this is not that you should go out and immediately start a campaign through Farmville (although maybe it's worth looking into if you think it's a fit). The point is that there are more ways to harness a massive social network user-base (Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for the week), according to Experian Hitwise). That's a pretty impressive feat. Also consider that consumers favor brands who are on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent study.

Really, it's not even about Facebook or Twitter. It's about getting out there wherever people are, and this is where they happen to be at the moment. That may change by this time next year, or the year after, but the principle will not. We're at a point in history where it's never been so easy for consumers and brands to engage with one another. Perhaps even better for brands, is that it has never been easier to reach customers in places they choose to entertain themselves, and I don't mean just get in their faces, but actually reach them and get that engagement from them.

An undersea cable that Google helped finance is almost finished, according to a new report.  Indeed, the completion of the Unity fiber optic cable, which will connect the U.S. to Japan, is supposed to be announced next week, and then Google and the company's Asia-based users should start seeing the benefits soon after.

Tom Krazit wrote this afternoon, "[T]he Pacific undertaking will allow the company to link its data centers in the U.S. and Japan with one of the fastest pipes on the planet, ensuring that Google services will be delivered quickly and cheaply to Asia."

And more specifically, Krazit also stated, "In return for its investment--the amount of which was not disclosed--Google is entitled to 20 percent of the overall capacity for its needs, according to partners involved with the project."

This should help keep Google competitive in most of Asia for quite a while.  All the more so if it pulls out of China, too, since servicing that large market could otherwise claim a lot of resources.

One last important note: the other partners in the Unity Consortium are Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, meaning Google has made friends with some very important international corporations.

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt doesn't understand much of the criticism geared toward his company, which Time Magazine columnist Dan Fletcher refers to as "the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut." I attended a panel at SXSW this week in which Fletcher and Rosenblatt discussed Demand's content strategy that has become the basis of so much controversy (Read here for more background).

Rosenblatt thinks it's just a case of a new business model getting picked on because it's not understood yet. He compared it to the early days of other successful companies like Amazon and Netflix.

Is Demand Media's strategy just misunderstood? Share your thoughts.

Demand Media evidently gets more traffic than the digital properties of ESPN, Time, or Disney. They claim to have more videos on YouTube than anybody. This isn't spammy content though. It's content created based on what people are looking for, or what a combination of Demand's algorithms and staff determine people are looking for based on extensive data analysis.

An audience member referred to a video she came across that was simply not the type of quality Demand Media wants its content to be known for. Rosenblatt acknowledges that there may be some of this out there, simply because the company began with a different model, but they are working to eliminate this, and only implement content that has gone through the company's exhaustive editorial process.

One huge misconception that Rosenblatt went out of his way to clear up is that of Demand Media's content being taken as news. He doesn't see what Demand Media is doing as journalism. Journalism is news, and this isn't news, he says. It's stuff that makes you laugh, solves your problems, etc. "Only the journalists call us journalists."

A great deal of the criticism that has been aimed at Demand Media is based around the notion that the company is somehow taking advantage of Google's algorithms, to get its content placed higher than other sources (isn't this what SEO/SEM is all about anyway?). Rosenblatt basically made the point that if Google doesn't think it's good enough content to be there, than it won't be there.  To change an algorithm to not give an answer just doesn't make sense, he says.

"If people aren't looking for it on search, we're not there," he added. Demand properties like eHow often appear in search results for queries about how to do things. Well, that's exactly the kind of content that appears on eHow, and the mantra of the industry has always been "content is king" right? Demand simply wants to wear that crown, and make money doing it.

"We are driven by an economic model," Rosenblatt said. The company is focused on "evergreen, longtail, commercial content." They're focused on stuff they will make money from.

Rosenblatt says a lot of people think their content is auto-generated. "That's just wrong," he says. One criticism that Rosenblatt does think is fair, is that some of the company's content "could feel mechanical." In other words, some may lack creativity. "We need to learn, and we're trying to," he says. A lack of creativity does not necessarily mean a lack of accuracy, though, and through Demand's editorial process, there is a lot of fact checking going on. At least that is the impression Rosenblatt gave.

He says they have different models for different categories. With something especially important to the world, like health, he says they make sure professionals are writing the articles. With health, fact checking would also go to doctors.

If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we're not talking "news" here. We're talking information, and in other cases entertainment.

Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.

This should make publishers wonder about their business models. Should they spend thousands paying reporters and editors to create quality content for their users or should they simply create a content farm that pays little for bulk quantities of articles and videos but gets lots of Google love?

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches ... but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

The issue of Google's own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media's practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they're just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they're making a killing doing it.

Tell us what you think about it.

The majority (86%) of young people in Britain go online to find help with personal problems, instead of seeking advice from a family member or friend.

The findings come from a poll of 1,000 people under 25 commissioned by Get Connected, a national helpline line in the UK, and conducted by Maximiles Surveys.

Online one third of young people would turn to their mother to discuss a problem and just 5 percent would speak to their father. Fifty percent did say they would be likely to talk to a friend.

More than half (53%) of young people who have surfed the Internet to search for help with a problem found the information actually made them more concerned they were before. Only 18 percent said they would double check any information they found online with another source like a friend or parent.

"These results show that there is a need for young people to be able to verify the information that they find online, and in many cases that the vast amount of information available on the Internet seems to exacerbate their personal worries further," said Andrew McKnight, Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Get Connected.

  "As a society we have become increasingly reliant on the Internet as a first point of reference for a lot of information, and it is crucial that we make Britain's young people aware of exactly where they can turn to for dependable information and support. Get Connected is the safe gateway to these services."

Young people's preference for using the Internet to look for advice is reflected by the continued increase in incoming contacts online to Get Connected over the past year. Since the launch of its Web chat service in 2006, almost one in ten (8%) of all enquiries are now made via instant messaging. More young people (13%) are also choosing to contact the charity for help and support through email.

"Young people in Britain have grown up with the internet and mass communication engrained as a part of their daily lives," said Fiona Clark, Chief Executive, Get Connected.

"Beyond their family and friends they need trusted sources to help them make an informed choice, whatever the problem may be."
 

I sat in on the Future of Music Delivery Keynote interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and author Eliot Van Buskirk on the last day of SXSW Interactive. Buskirk's covered the digital media industry for ten years in various publications. This keynote was not nearly as crowded as the Evan Williams one was at the beginning, but definitely kept a lot more people hanging around through its entirety.

The first part of the keynote was essentially a product demo for Spotify, and I can't imagine that an hour of that would've kept people around (nothing against the service itself), but things got more interesting once it turned to more generalized conversation between the two on stage, about where digital music is going (if Spotify is in fact where it's gong). 

Spotify is quite popular in Europe, but has some licensing issues to work out before it can work here in the U.S. Ek says there could be slight changes made to Spotify for an American release if that happens. They are working on the next generation of Spotify, and pre-install deals will likely be key for the service's continued success. Ek says right now, you can go in and pick up a smartphone, it comes preinstalled with Spotify and you can get three to six months.

With the exception of the iPhone, most lack really good media players, says Ek. A lot of people use Spotify as a media player on Android/Nokia handsets, he says, and if you're a BlackBerry user, you want it to work with that too. "We want to enable your library on all of these devices," says Ek. "We want to make music like water."

One of the more interesting parts of the keynote was when Van Buskirk took a question from someone on Twitter about Spotify's advertising - something along the lines of if somebody listens to a lot of down-tempo music, will Spotify start filtering ads by mood?

He says they have targeting, and they continue to learn more about users, and more and more brands are discovering Spotify. "We've seen a lot of promising results with advertisers who have included artists," says Ek. He says click through rates have been 3, 4, and 5%. "If you look at traditional metrics, that's super high."

As far as the question asked, Ek says, "that's definitely something that we want to do."

You can figure out brand preferences, and if people are in the same demographic (like live in same place, listen to the same kind of music), they might get a different ad if they drive a BMW vs. an Audi, he says. He also says the ad model's "getting better every month."

On another note, Ek thinks playlists are the new mixtape. With Spotify, among other services, they can be shared with others. Spotify users (of which there are seven million), he says, have a hundred million playlists, and about thirty percent of playlists are albums. "A lot of people say the album is dead," says Ek. "I disagree  - maybe pricing needs to be adjusted..."

All in all, the future of music delivery, according to Spotify, appears to be that users should be able to access their music libraries from virtually any device (through the cloud), share playlists with friends, and they can subscribe and/or get highly targeted advertising.

A lot of work remains to be done as far as making this all a universal reality, but in a nutshell (at least with Spotify), this seems to be the vision for what's to come.

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone's availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We'd rather schedule dental appointments.

On the Google Calendar team, we've noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like "I'm trying to find a time" or "let's search for a new date." We wondered what would happen if we treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, we hoped we could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting.


Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you enable the Lab, you can find a new time for an event simply by clicking on a link. Our schedule search algorithm will return a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times based on the calendars others have shared with you. You can read more about it on the Gmail Blog.

So next time your boss says "We need to reschedule," just smile and say "I'm feeling lucky."

Posted by Ken Norton, Product Manager

Per meglio comprendere come l’evoluzione dei social network possa influire, positivamente o meno, sul modo di fare informazione, viene in aiuto un interessante riflessione di Enrico Pedemonte, comparsa nel pomeriggio di ieri sulle pagine de L’Espresso Blog. Secondo il giornalista, il boom di questi servizi sta modificando radicalmente il modo con cui i netizen fruiscono del ...
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Autore: Cristiano Ghidotti
Tags: enrico pedemonte, Facebook

Con un annuncio comparso martedì sul sito ufficiale dell’azienda, Canon ha reso noto di aver avviato la procedura necessaria per l’acquisizione del dominio di primo livello .canon. Se le pratiche non incontreranno ostacoli nel corso della loro approvazione presso l’ICANN, l’Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, il produttore potrà usufruire del nuovo gTLD a ...
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Autore: Cristiano Ghidotti
Tags: canon, domini, icann

Sarà festeggiato oggi con una festa a base di musica e molto altro, come si addice a tutti gli avvenimenti più importanti che è sempre bene ricordare. Si tratta di un giornale americano, il Seattlepi.com, il quale ha la particolarità di essere il primo, e finora unico, giornale ad aver abbandonato l’edizione cartacea per concentrarsi unicamente ...
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Autore: Giuseppe Cutrone
Tags: informazione online, seattlepi.com

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... - Seconda parte: stili e abbellimenti

Autore: Meagan Fisher
Categoria: Web Design

Il social network Facebook è senza dubbio il più frequentato a livello mondiale e, probabilmente, per tale motivo gli hacker sembrano piuttosto interessati al sistema e ai suoi utenti. Un nuovo pericolo minaccia, da martedì, i suoi fruitori: è infatti stato reso noto un nuovo tentativo da parte degli hacker, più grave rispetto a quanto avvenuto ...
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Autore: Floriana Giambarresi
Tags: Facebook, malware, McAfee

Il MIX10 di Las Vegas si è rivelata un'occasione per conoscere i dettagli su Internet Explorer 9, la prossima versione del popolare browser. Nonostante l'introduzione del ballot screen in Europa, è ragionevole ritenere che il programma possa riconfermarsi tra i più utilizzati, in parte per la capacità di aderire agli standard internazionali e in parte per la familiarità acquisita dagli utenti con le precedenti versioni. Figura 1. Installazione Platform Preview IE9

Autore: Marco Mattioli
Categoria: Download

Metodi e tecniche per applicare questo popolare effetto alle nostre foto
In questo tutorial tratteremo del cross-processing con Photoshop CS4. Il cross processing era una procedura utilizzata nella fotografia analogica in cui la pellicola di un certo tipo veniva sviluppata con una soluzione chimica adatta ad un altro...

Autore: Simone Catania
Categoria: Grafica

Since announcing the latest Google Chrome beta earlier this month, we've been excited to receive feedback from our beta users on the browser's new translation and privacy features. Today, we're introducing these features in the stable channel, so that they're widely available to everyone who uses Google Chrome on Windows.

Google Chrome’s translation feature is the latest step in the evolution of translation tools across Google. Just a few years ago, Google’s translation tools consisted of a site where you had to copy and paste text into a box — and it only worked for a handful of languages. Today, our translation technology works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. Chrome's translation feature automatically detects if the language of the webpage you're on is different from your preferred language setting, The browser will then display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated using Google Translate. With one click, you can instantly translate the page, and all of its text will appear in your preferred language. Here's a demo of Chrome's translation feature:



Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page. You can read more about how this feature works on the Google Translate Blog.

In addition, we've introduced new privacy features in this stable release to give you even greater control of your privacy while helping to protect the information that you do decide to share online. You can now manage Chrome's privacy settings via the browser's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up rules to allow cookies exclusively for sites that you trust, while blocking them from for untrusted sites. For the in-depth scoop, check out google.com/chrome/privacy or watch our video series on privacy and browsers.

For those of you who already use Chrome, go raibh maith agaibh! You'll soon be updated with these new features. And for those of you who haven't yet tried Google Chrome, download it at google.com/chrome.

Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich

Over the past year, we've highlighted companies around the world who have switched to Google Apps. And that means more than 25 million people have "gone Google", including those at such globe-trotting organizations as Jaguar Land Rover and National Geographic. (You might have seen their Gone Google messages in print.)

Recently we visited one of our newest customers, Konica Minolta, to learn about why they decided to join us. Here's their story:



For those considering a switch to Google Apps, this updated resources page offers a variety of info such as customer testimonials, white papers, links to webcasts and more. Be sure to visit the Google Enterprise Blog and visit google.com/appsatwork, too.

If your company is already using Apps, join the Gone Google community. Put yourself on the map to share your experience and see who else has, yes, gone Google.


After you add yourself to the map, grab a laptop sticker that you can personalize. We're giving them away free for a limited time*. More details here.

*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!

Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise Team

At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while we’re still working on the shoelaces thing, we’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android.

To learn more about how code.google.com has come alive over the past five years, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

Webmaster Level: All

Members of the Google Search Quality Team have participated in site clinic panels on a number of occasions. We receive a lot of positive feedback from these events and we've been thinking of ways to expand our efforts to reach even more webmasters. We decided to organize a small, free of charge pilot site clinic at Google in Dublin, and opened the invitation to webmasters from the neighborhood. The response we received was overwhelming and exceeded our expectations.

1. I have 3 blogs with the same content, is that a problem?
   
   If the content is identical, it's likely only one of the blogs will rank for it. Also, with this scattered of an effortwith this scattered of an effort chances are your incoming links will be distributed across the different blogs, instead of pointing to one source. Therefore you're running the risk of both users and search engines not knowing which of your blogs is the definitive source. You can mitigate that by redirecting to the preferred version or using the cross domain canonical to point to one source.


2. Should I believe SEO agencies that promise to make my site rank first in Google in a few months and with a precise number of links?
   
   No one can make that promise; therefore the short answer is no, you should not. However, we have some great tips on how to find a trustworthy SEO in our Help Center.


3. There are keywords that are relevant for my website, but they're inappropriate to be shown in the content e.g. because they could be misunderstood, slang or offensive. How can I show the relevance to Google?
   
   Depending on the topic of your site and expectations of the target group, you might consider actually using these keywords in a positive way, e.g. explaining their meaning and showing your users you're an authority on the subject. However if the words are plain abusive and completely inappropriate for your website, it's rather questionable whether the traffic resulting from these search queries is interesting for your website anyway.


4. Would you advise to use the rewrite URL function?
   
   Some users may like seeing descriptive URLs in the search results. However, it's quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs. That's why, generally speaking, we don't recommend rewriting them. If you still want to give it a try, please be sure to remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL and have a close look at our blog post on this topic. And if you don't, keep in mind that we might still make your URLs look readable in our search results no matter how weird they actually are.


5. If I used the geo-targeting tool for Ireland, is Northern Ireland included?
   
   Google Webmaster Tools geo-targeting works on a country basis, which means that Northern Ireland would not be targeted if the setting was Republic of Ireland. One possible solution is to create a separate site or part of a website for Northern Ireland and to geo-target this site to the United Kingdom in Webmaster Tools.


6. Is there any preference between TLDs like .com and .info in ranking?
   
   No, there is none. Our focus is on the content of the site.


7. I have a website on a dot SO (.so) domain name with content meant for the Republic of Ireland. Will this hurt my rankings in the Irish search results?
   
   .so is the Internet country code top-level domain for Somalia. This is one factor we look into not pointing to the desired destination. But we do look at a larger number of factors when ranking your website. The extension of the domain name is just one of these. Your website can still rank in the Irish search results if you have topic-specific content. However, keep in mind that it may take our algorithms a little bit longer to fully understand where to best serve your website in our search results.

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.

If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.

Preparing for global websites

Planning multi-regional websites

• ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
• gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.

Geotargeting factors

1. Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
   or
   Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
2. Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
3. Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

URL structures

Dealing with duplicate content on global websites

Webmaster Level: All

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�:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Webmaster Level: All

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

Webmaster Level: All

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.

Sean Harding, Software Engineer

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:

1. Use an online tool such as Web-Sniffer. It’s pretty easy to use and is somewhat close to an actual crawler.
2. 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:
   

   Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

   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.

3. (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:

Nofollow?

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:

Try it out on a page with nofollowed links!

By the way, this bookmarklet also works in Opera & Firefox (but there are simpler ways to handle it in Firefox).

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:

• wget - a tool to download copies of web pages
• 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 ):

1. Open a command box or terminal window (on Windows, hit Start / Run ... and enter "cmd")
2. Go to or create a temporary folder
3. Run the following command to mirror your site:

   wget --mirror --accept=html,htm,php,asp,aspx http://domain.com/

   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.

4. 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:

grep -r "meta name=.description" *.*

What would you like to search for today?

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:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P NewProfileName

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.

Stay safe!

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Harmony for Google Docs, Forgotten Attachment Detector, Outlook Temp Cleaner: tre add-on per migliorare l'utilizzo di Microsoft Outlook.

USB GO! Link Cable è un dispositivo che consente la trasmissione diretta di dati tra due personal computer.