Webhead

I've been looking at and watching webinars about Google Wave the next thing from those every so nice people that brought us Gmail and Calendars and other handy little gadget. "The Wave" is the "personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google amidst much applause at the I/O conference on May 2009 (see the abridged video below)

The Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. The plan is that it will be supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages amongst others.

The preview hit the wild on September 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite up to twenty additional users. If its as successful as Google plan, it could be a major rival to things like Facebook and Twitter providing the sort of real time collaboration and communication that the others have yet to achieve.

Watch this space folks!

With many countries less than happy about American control of the internet, Washington has said it will allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system. ICANN – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet, said it was ending its agreement with the US government.

Icann has previously been operating under the direction of the US, which dominated as the birthplace of the internet and home of the dot com domain name.

The changes will see other countries take a deciding role in the future in the shape of the net. NOMINET - the British organisation that handles the day-to-day running of .uk domain names - said that Icann had started a trend for companies with internet influence to appear more open and accountable.

The new agreement, replacing the 1998 agreement comes into force today.

Strapped for cash or cutting edge technology? The Conservatives have launched a new campaigning website, claiming it the most advanced of its kind since the pre-election Obama site.

MyConservatives.com,aims to simplify the campaigning and fundraising process so that members of the public will find it easier to support the party.

MyConservatives.com, was developed by web agency LBi, and is run by Sam Coates a speech writer for Cameron.

'Micro-fundraising', popular in the charity sector through websites such like Just Giving, will be an important part of the site. Users will be able support local candidates and issues or wider national campaigns. The site will house tools to allow people to set up telephone canvassing systems from home, connect with other supporters, set up campaigns or recruit other activists.

The Conserverative overhauled their web site last year for the first time in some years.

On a similar theme, what's the feeling about moving to Google's premium services instead running an office server etc...

Just to add to this a little a quick vox pop elsewhere has come out in favour of Gmail but added the caveat that there is a lot to be said for Exchange as well. I suppose my initial thought would be does Exchange play nice with Linux and OS X otherwise its a bit of a non starter in the mobile stakes...

Now that Windows 7 is out in wild, I would be interested to know what people think - good and bad - of the new OS from Microsoft? Comment to this post and let me know.

If you need a form online, you should give Jotform a try. I was a bit wary when I started, suspecting that the java based platform would be slow and clunky. You can imagine my surprise to come face to face with a surprising vestile and easy use form creator. Its drag and drop user interface makes form building doable for anybody that wants to do it.

Anybody with an Internet connection can use Jotform and you can link directly to it by email and URL. No need to know anything about web design or HTML coding to use it either! I knocked out the basic layout of a quite complicated form in about 20 minutes.

JotForm supports all standard web form field types. Also allows you to use new and intuitive fields in your form such as Date Time Picker, Star Ratings, or CAPTCHA checks. If it has a problem its that you have to work out what you need in advance and with all the features that Jotform presents you can end up with a radio button, drop down field and text fields all over the place. You can make contact forms, document uploaders, surveys and just about any form of data capture you can care to think of. Check them out at http://jotform.com/

For those of you that rely on your Google ranking to bring in the trade SEO is more than just an interesting exercise, it's a essential element of your business plan and discovering that Google has penalised you for over use of keywords can quickly move from an irritation to a disaster in terms of visits. I am aware of at least one PC repair firm that which habitually was in the top 5 for certain search strings suddenly vanishing only to reappear 50 entries down from number. For the company involved and given that people seldom search after the first or second page, this was a disaster. This disaster takes on 70s all star movie proportions when the webmaster tries to put things right only to find that they are still way down the lists.

Background: The site has excellent content when I looked at it, but past version of the site definitely suffered from more than a degree of keyword stuffing. Competitors were close but could not match this site's content, but on checking out the backlinks, I was surprised to find that there were very few. I trawled through the site pages and quickly found although the company had tried to deal with the key word stuffing, some pages still held examples and urgently needed to be cleaned up.

The site's initial reputation was built on some excellent content but the over-optimisation of the site using key words, specifically using the same key word too many times - key word stuffing had resulted in the Google bots taking a dislike to the site which in its turn had caused it to sink down the rankings.

Once the site was penalised, the reputation of the site was effectively negated and the next ranking consideration were the site backlinks, the competition had more backlinks and so they rose while our company sank. The practical result of this will be that for an unknown period of time the company's will fluctuate wildly in the rankings - there is no limit for the amount of time this penalty will continue to be imposed.

So what do you do if you and your company find yourself with a similar problem?

1. Get rid of key word stuffing and make sure you clean the entire site and not just the index page. This will means that that there will be an end in sight to the penalty eventually.

2. Build ongoing links, these links will be the foundations of your new credibility, incoming links from quality site will also help.

3. Check out Google Webmaster Tools and look at the errors/alerts/warnings for your site, also build a new sitemap so that new content and the lack of keyword stuffing will be clearly flagged.

4. Freshen content - write some of the article and add others - this will provide activity which Google cannot ignore.

5. Be patient. It could take a while, something to remember the next time you are tempted to do a little keyword stuffing

Get the local time anywhere - not quite a hack, but a useful little tool regardless. Enter simply 'what time is it to get the local time in big cities around the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like 'what time is it hong kong' to get the local time there.

Flying. Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box to get the arrival and departure times right inside Google's search results.

Currency, metrics and other guffin: Google's powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out, convert measurements, show how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro).

Compare items with "better than" and find similar items with "reminds me of". The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you're searching for.

Use Google as a free proxy: Google's cache to take a peek even when the originating site's being blocked, with cache:example.com.

Remove affiliate links from product searches by using -site:ebay.com -siteizrate.com -site:shopping.com operator.

Find related terms and documents: Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.

Make Google recognize faces: A special URL parameter in Google's Image search will do the "Add &imgtype=face" to the end of your image search to just get images of faces only.

Worried about Internet security? But possibly using BT as your provider, after all British Telecom is practically an institution, one to trust right? Er...wrong, with a capital W and a big "rong" attached for good measure. The European Commission has started legal action against Britain over the online advertising technology Phorm. Phorm claims its technology is "fully compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives".

OK I am guessing readers are saying, all well and good Wanderjahre, but what's this got to do with me. Try this one on for size, information courtesy of those nice people at The Register. BT admitted last year it had tested Phorm's technology on its network with thousands of customers without asking for their consent or informing them of the trials. It later carried out further trials of the service, which it markets as Webwise, with the consent of users.

More than ten million customers of the UK's three largest ISPs (BT, Tiscali and Sky) will have their browsing habits sold to a very dodgy company who are rumoured to have kicked off their time on the net as spyware. BT’s servers were secretly passing data on subscribers to its "new" advertising partner as long ago as last summer. At the time, BT and its partners refused to acknowledge any relationship at the time.

The Register, usually pretty sound when it comes to matters like this have devoted a big chunk of their websites to have the issues around Phorm have developed. They claim to have the full technical info on what Phorm is up to, check out their site for more information. Anti-virus companies have said that in their opinion Phorm is Spyware pure and simple. Now some users will not be alarmed by this but if the UK's inadequate internet laws permit its existence, do you really want your browsing habits scanned to provide "targeted advertising" For myself I am quite capable of finding what I want on the net without having some company or other throw their ads at me! If I am hooked into a company's VPN what guarantees do I have that Phorm cannot be exploited to enable some unscrupulous type to check out the data I am sending and receiving. Or does anyone including the Phorm truly believe that something like this cannot be exploited by the hacker brigade.

From the legal standpoint the issue centre around whether users have given their consent to the technology A spokeswoman from the commission told BBC News that the EC wanted the UK to ensure there were procedures in place to ensure "clear consent from the user that his or her private data is being used". "Technologies like internet behavioural advertising can be useful for businesses and consumers but they must be used in a way that complies with EU rules," the EU's Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

Phorm's works by "trawling" websites visited by users whose ISPs have signed up to the service and for whom the technology is switched on, and then matches keywords from the content of the page to an "anonymous" profile.

Users are then targeted with adverts that are more tailored to their interests on partner websites that have signed up to Phorm's technology. The technology differs from other behavioural advertising systems which tend to use data only from partner websites visited by users, and do not work in conjunction with internet service providers. The service has proved controversial for some campaigners who believe it breaks UK data interception laws.

Last year, Phorm received clearance from the Home Office and police closed a file on BT trials of the technology which looked into their legality.

The UK government have said thatthe technology could only be rolled out if users had given their consent and it was easy for people to opt out, although its worth bearing in mind that BT went ahead with trials without consultation. The European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications requires member states to ensure the confidentiality of their communications and related traffic data. States must, it says, prohibit interception and surveillance unless the users concerned have given their consent.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group said: "There are big legal questions surrounding BT's use of Phorm, so we welcome the EU taking the government to task. "BT should respect everyone's privacy and drop their plans to snoop on the internet before they damage their own reputation further. Websites should protect their users and block Phorm now."

BT have declined to comment on the EC's actions.
Firfox users should check the Phorm addon here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=phorm&cat=all

Google Hacks – Part 1

Essentially, there are two types of search engines, the first is called the searchable subject index. This type searches only titles and descriptions of sites. The other type is the full text search engine which uses "spiders" pieces of code to index billions of pages across the net. These pages can be searched by title or content, making for a much more efficient search application. Currently, on the Internet it's Google which is the prime exponent of this type of search.

The Google search engine is probably one of the most useful tool ever spawned on the Internet and anyone who uses it to simply check on a website based on key word(s) is hardly using a fraction of what it can do. Lets start that exploration with some of the terms you can use to add a bit more power to your search.

Google will search for all words in a string the default, but by using the operator OR you can specify one term or another

Search: cat, dog generates all the pages that mention "cat and dog"

Search: cat OR dog generates all the pages that mention "cat" and all the pages that mention "dog"

Search: food (cat OR dog) comes up with the terms Cat or Dog along with the word food in Google OR is often replaced with the programming character “ | ” (called pipe)

In addition to simple site search, Google uses a special syntax called “inurl” to let you search the contents of any URL on the net, this will dig down below the main domain into the sub-domains of the site for the content you specify. This is perfect for searching domains with a lot of subs and also perfect for locating useful indexes. Have a look at the examples below.

Try typing the following into your Google address bar

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.mp3|.wma) ""

This search term will generate a list of website with indexes of MP3 and WMA files and you can browse and download to your hearts content. But say you want to search for a specific file

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.mp3|.wma) "Peter Gabriel"

To find the file of your choice just replace “Peter Gabriel” with the artist or band of your choice. Looking for applications, try this search

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.exe|.zip) ""

For a specific application try:

-inurl: (htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(.exe|.zip) "googleearth"

Here we have searched for the GoogleEarth application.

Need to find a torrent file? Here I have asked Google to search for all Linux torrents

linux filetype:torrent

But you can replace the “linux” search term with whatever you want. Google provide a handy search tool which you can download to your own desktop have a look at http://code.google.com/p/googlehacks/

More on Google Hack next time.