Mar
8
52

After a good while (I can’t search my Twitter stream) on Chrome I’m switching back to Firefox as my primary browser, and actually uninstalled Chrome. Why? I was getting the “Oh snap” failure page all the time, even on Google’s own Youtube! The only support I was pointed to was this page, and when I followed the instructions there when I restarted Chrome everything was gone. The sentence “copy the relevant files from the “Backup User Data” folder to your new “User Data” folder.” is useless when you consider the folder has 50+ files to sort through and I wasn’t sure which one was causing my previous problems. So back to Firefox, and thanks to Xmarks all of my stuff is there. I’m also using this persona which is pretty sweet. The feature I missed most on Chrome was lame: the ability to click and hold a folder then release on a bookmark I wanted to open. On Chrome you have to click twice. It bugged me. Now back on Firefox I feel like the browser has a large head.

Jan
12
44

Google is taking a new approach to China. This is a big deal, they’re basically implying the Chinese government has been hacking Google accounts to compromise human rights advocates. Interesting the note at the end where they say these decisions and investigations were entirely in the US, it’s almost like they’re trying to protect their employees there.

Jul
28
110

I like Cuil. There’s just something very intuitive about the interface that fels comfortable to me, but I’m not sure how to articulate it. And it’s fast! Going to try it out as my default search engine for the next few days. Downside? Sometimes the images seem completely random, and I do see some spam in the index.

Dec
27
7

WordPress produces a bajillion different feeds for every post, category, search, basically anything you can imagine. For a long time now some of these have shown up in search results next to regular pages, which I imagine was very confusing for people clicking from a search result to a bunch of XML. No longer! From the Webmaster blog: Taking feeds out of our web search results.

Nov
27
22

TechCrunch’s Social Responsibility

Filed under: Spam

Tags: , , , ,

Mike Arrington on TechCrunch did an interesting thing a few days ago, he asked their readers if they should accept advertising from PayPerPost/Izea. Their readers made the right decision and voted that it would be disingenuous to accept advertising from a company that, in Michael’s words, pollutes the blogosphere. He also notes that TechCrunch is being held to a higher standard than most mainstream media would:

The comments that are most interesting to me are the ones that say we’re selling out if we take their advertising. I understand that we are held to a certain standard (and we hold ourselves to that standard), but it’s interesting that we supposed to do things that would never be asked of MSM.

While I’m sure there’s mainstream media which turn away advertisers because of social reasons, the point that we should hold flagship blogs to high standards is a good one.

On that point, I would encourage the crew at TechCrunch to re-examine their advertising and implicit endorsement of Text Link Ads, which pollutes the blogosphere in the same way PayPerPost does, by selling links with the intention of gaming Google. Just as PayPerPost “posties” were recently penalized by Google and Pagerank was one of the criteria that advertisers looked for when choosing which bloggers to give money to, Text Link Ads has been doing the same thing for years, they’ve just been more explicit about it. (And their corporate site has been penalized in Google for a long time.)

I should also note that if TechCrunch decides that the same reasons it decided to not accept advertising from Izea also apply to Text Link Ads, it’ll be operating at a higher standard than Google itself, who even though its business is directly impacted by the search engine spamming both of these companies practice allows both TLA and PPP to advertise via Adwords and Adsense.

Jun
25
13

Google apps now supports importing mail from IMAP, which means for me it just got 1000x more interesting. I have a Gmail account I use purely for archival but I only started a few months ago and so I often just resort to grep for searching the years of archives before that.