BlogAllAlong » Community

Aardvark Spam

Bashar — Mon, 24 May 2010 09:37:46 +0000

Aardvark is a social community site to help people ask and answer questions, easily even through your messenger. Isn’t that great? At least Google thought so when they acquired it. I tried it for one question, got a couple of possible good answers. And then I thought of giving back when I opted to answer an e-mail question.

Consider it noted! So what happened here? A guy is changing his email, sending notification to all his contacts, Aardvark gets the email as a question, and intelligently marks it as e-mail question, and I fall for and try to answer it?

I guess so, and if true, there is no way I’m keeping that thing to spam me.

Seriously Twitter? You Wanna Share My Phone Number?

Bashar — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:31:34 +0000

No really? You wanna share my email address and phone number so that my friends can find me? And you’re setting it to default? Here are two simple words for you Twitter SPAMMERS & PRIVACY.

For the first time Twitter has really failed me. It seems the Google Buzz is doing it’s things already on them.

Smart Ad for Smart iPhone App

Bashar — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:10:42 +0000

Ocarina is an app that will turn your iPhone into a musical instrument. You set your music mode, blow into the microphone and there you are creating music. You can hold down combination of holes, tilt your phone to change vibration and depth, and change keys and modes as well.

Pretty smart? Hell yeah I wanna try it. But they didn’t forget to add the community part to it. Through this app, you can also listen to other people’s music around the world, and share yours as well.

Finally, RSS Links In Sidebar Fixed

Bashar — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:22:44 +0000

For some time now the sidebar RSS Links were not working, as it was referring to

“http://blogallalong.com/”

I didn’t know what’s the problem at the time, and why the PHP code was not being executed. I put it on my long todo list and forgot about it until early this morning. You know how sometimes you wake up from bed for no good reason and launch the editor?

I recalled then I have switched to Widgets sidebar a while ago, and as I expected I used the Text Widget for the Subscriptions box. When I should’ve used the added PHP Code Widget Plugin. I already have it used, but didn’t notice this box has PHP code in it during migration.

I’m not sure why this widget isn’t included by default in WordPress, and as I see it, it’s better to have one default box that handles both Text and PHP code, which is what the PHP Code Widget does. I think I’m gonna stick to it for all text and PHP widgets.

Is the Google hype over?

Bashar — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:42:34 +0000

Google, the company which started 10 years ago as a Phd project, moved into a garage for a while, and then 6 years later went on public offering, turning half of it’s employees into millionaires over night. The company which was chosen as the strongest brand in the US, and best place to work for last year. That same company for the first time is not living it’s glory days from the start of this year, following several events:

Two executives and several other employees moving from Google to Facebook, just as Google did to Microsoft in the past.
Their stock price have gone down below the $450, after it was $700 3 months back. (This could be a right time to buy if you strongly believe in them. Most Analyst still do)
For the first 3 months in a raw, according to comScore, the number of Google sponsored Ads clicks is declining. This ofcourse is Google’s main stream of revenue, that is feeding everything else. So if that goes down, well, Good bye Gmail, Google Reader, and all other great Google services.
Decline of search volume on Google last month. Even though February was shorter than Jan by two days, and all other search engine volumes went down, in fact Google was the least declining from top search engines, analysts still think there is a decline in the amount of search done on the web. Why is that? Social networks? Blogs? Feeds? No answer yet.
Rise of new search engines. Now I know not every new search engine is a threat, in fact most aren’t. And the reason is that, it’s difficult to convince Googlers why your search algorithm is better. You need to find another way to draw their attention. Two new comers actually did and have been turning some heads on the web. One of them is Mahalo, the human-powered search engine. It’s still new, has lots of missing content. I mean, they don’t have pages for ~~Arsenal F.C. nor Monkey Island~~ (turns out they do now :). Where are you Arsenal and Monkey Island geeks! Well, Arsenal might have enough problems right now, but MI fans, quit playing S&M and do some stuff :). Anyways, I was impressed by the spam-free form of it, and the rich content you can find there for items that do have some content filled up. You can go the their main page and browse from their to the hot topics and results on the web. The other search engine that will draw some market-share I guess if they keep going straight is Searchme. The engine is still in private beta, invitation only (except this very moment, they have limited instant accounts, currently 970 left). What’s unique about this engine is the way you browse the results. Instead of getting text based results, clicking a link, waiting for the page to load only to realize it’s spam or useless page, here you browse images of the page instead of text only. So before clicking on any link, you have an idea about how the site looks like and what you could find there. It’s actually pretty similar in nature to browsing file thumbnails on Apple Finder. The engine is flash based and I assume people with low resources and connection will not find it most useful. I was personally very impressed however from how it works, and am looking forward to more from it.

So what now. Is Google going to die? I don’t really think so, but their growth I presume is not going to be the same as last year. I personally don’t agree with what ex-Google employee said after joining Facebook, that social networks are “Google of yesterday, and Microsoft of the past”. You will always need a search engine (or alternative) to reach your information, and a social-network is not the one ofcourse. Also, social-networks are more like bubbles than any other. People follow the hype, join their friends, want to have fun in new ways. Then suddenly, a new social-network comes with new fancy way of doing stuff. People will start jumping there, and the net-worth of the company will run fast down. Especially when their current social-network is controlling too much sensitive information and keeps abusing it. The other point is what some analyst said. People in social-networks are mostly after entertainment and socializing with their friends, and they are less likely to be interested in some ad on the side. On the other side, people are more likely to click on related ads when they are actually searching for that specific topic. After all, it could be what they need. But it all depends on the quality of the link, which Google’s been trying to push for real hard.

BlogAllAlong Shared Items

Bashar — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:19:13 +0000

Google Reader for many is without any doubt the best feed aggregator and reader out there. Giving you the ability to read all your favorite feeds online, from any place, at any time. Using the shortcuts (J, K & S), you can easily browse next, previous, and star your item. This makes it extremely easy to go through the 1000+ items I have queued for me to read forever. The ability to merge all the feeds and browse them together is a feature not available in many other readers, where you usually have to browse every feed separately. Recently also, and finally, they allowed searching through all those feeds, turning your feed reader into a rich bookmark for all items you may want in the future. There is also the newly added ability to share items with your friends and blog readers. Simply mark the item as shared, and all your Gmail friends will be able to read it. So now, and instead of posting about any good article I find without adding any value to it, you can go through my shared items on the side menu, where I will be sharing lots of the useful articles I find.

Online Communities – Too Many Sites, 1 API

Bashar — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:58:08 +0000

More and more community sites come and go. Each has it’s own APIs to develop for. Developers want to reach the widest audience, but for each community site they have to learn and implement according to their own specific API. Any change could happen at any time at any site, the developer has to adjust to those changes as well. Now, Google is trying to come up with an answer to all of this by releasing a set of three common APIs that cover basic community functions of:

User Profile
Friends Information
Activities, like news that are happening

Big names have joined in the launch press including Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Hi5 and others. We should be seeing more of this stuff. Adjusting to each platform by it self just to cover the basics really isn’t practical at all. Ofcourse for specific tasks, you will still have to go back to that specific platform API, but only if you need those specifics. A similar problem I face is when I want to develop widgets. For which platform do I developer? Which one is the best? How many should I support? Universal Widgets API hopefully is the solution here.

Microsoft shakes hands with Facebook – Let the battle begins…

Bashar — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:36:10 +0000

Usually, Google are faster and smarter in closing up deals with new comers, and this is for several reasons. 1) Google are the giants of the web. 2) Microsoft have failed or on purpose buried down many companies they have acquired over the years. I am not saying Google is completely the opposite here. Some bad notes have been taken on them. Nevertheless, the Facebook founder and guru have decided to go with Microsoft this time surprisingly, giving Ballmer for once the upper hand over Schmidt. The deal gave 1.5% of Facebook shares to Microsoft in exchange of $240 million dollar. I heard reasons behind the choice was that Microsoft have stronger global marketing than Google does, which is something true obviously.

The joke made by CNet people was that there are still shares left, and Google could get some of it and set near to Ballmer on the same table. non-sense however, we all know it. Microsoft wouldn’t allow it to happen, and neither does Google want. The war already seems to have erupted as a reported video leak from inside Google have revealed plans by the web giants to build a massive giant social community called Maka-Maka, what kind of name is that?, over it’s broad of services, and mainly the online RSS Reader as it seems. If the news is true, and the execution is done properly, then Microsoft’s worst nightmare was a true prophecy. Microsoft have enjoyed the privilege of dominating the OS for home use, and thus manipulating everything that goes on top of it. They didn’t take good care however of the risk of the net. They underestimated how far it can go, and that in a way, it would be something that replaces desktop apps. Google started with their search engine, best so far, and then kept taking on new grounds. Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Desktop which made Windows search a complete joke, Gmail which quickly became something like default for many, online Google Docs, which feature editing, sharing, collaboration, rich graphs. All that was faced by simple view only Live Office so far. Google also controls big chunk of hte blogosphere with their Blogger. The list goes on and on . If you take a look at the Top Ranked sites at Alexa, you would see they are mainly search engines, or community sites. Almost nothing else. Google has the search engine world firmly in its hands, you can see their stock price stroke $600 and now is less than $2 from $700!. And now, Google wants a share of the community world. Serious one. The possibilities with what they have right now are endless, which is why Microsoft wants to stop Google from taking up new companies like DoubleClick. I am again wondering, shall Google really take bandwidth license and get into telecom, release GPhone, and probably Google OS as well. How much flexibility and on the go services they can give, all bundled under one sign-in. It will be The One Account for all.

I still wonder though how did the video find it’s way to the public. I double checked it’s not April 1st.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Facebook users beware

Bashar — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:05:38 +0000

According to this article Facebook will be allowing Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com to start indexing the facebook registered users profile, so if you don’t like it, your privacy might be exposed to public. To disable this feature you will have to login to your facebook account an adjust the privacy settings there. I tend to find this awkward though. If facebook wants to change their policy and expose my profile to the search engines, shouldn’t there be an email notification of this? Or perhaps they thought that an email warning would alert too many people to disable the feature, thus killing the purpose of it.

The WordPress plugins I use – and recommend

Bashar — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:27:11 +0000

As I have promised one of my friends, here I list the WordPress plugins I am using and what I think of them:

AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple way.
Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
~~Wp-Cache~~: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.

If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.

AboutUs – Another Wiki Wonder

Bashar — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:55:24 +0000

The concept of Wiki, though suspicious, keeps amusing me with it’s success. When I first came to Wikipedia, and I noticed the word Edit hyperlinked, I asked my self what do they mean? I clicked as most people would, and the big question mark float over my head. I can actually edit the site that way without even signing in? Reading about, and digging further into it, I knew how the world’s free contribution has led to a free huge encyclopedia, up-to-date and comparable to Britannica as reports say. There are many projects based on the Wiki idea, like the WikiTravel and WikiCars for example. Today however, I came across AboutUs.org. It does not have the word Wiki in it, so that’s odd. But it’s basically as it says, a website about websites, that you can edit. Upon searching for URL, if it’s not already indexed, AboutUs automatically tries to fetch the site About Us info, displays some snippets from the site, and gives you the option to edit it. There is also the nominated featured wiki pages, based on users recommendations.

A service like this, though is wonderful, at the same time is very tempting for abuse. The larger it gets, the more people would try to manipulate results for their own good, and it will become a marketing battlefield rather than site info. I mean, who wouldn’t want his site nominated now on the list? And as we saw before, even big companies like Microsoft find it worth to buy public opinion on such open community sites. Let’s just hope this site can survive the flood. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write about your site there, just be fair. Give it a shot and see how your site is reflected there, or see how mine looks right now here. Since I don’t have an About Us section I assume, my last indexed blog post has been added as site description.

SearchMash: Google Powered New Search Engine

Bashar — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:46:02 +0000

I did not know about this before I read about it on Google System blog. It’s a very nice decent blog, heavily focused on Google by the way. I thought you may not notice that from the blog name so I told you(!). Anyhow, the article goes through SearchMash.com. A new experimental Google powered search site. What is unique about it is how easy it is to search different types of content. If you search for CAR for example, you would get the web results for that, and on the right side are expandable dynamic menus to browse results for Images, Video (with play option on same page), blogs and Wikipedia. You can give your feedback on every category according to the search results, so it’s building it’s knowledge based on customer satisfaction. To browse for more results, you simply click More Results at the bottom of the page, and new results will pop under right away. This is really cool, but could get bad if your browser is heavily loaded.

I am not sure what the goal of this project exactly is. Is it to gather customer feedback, candidate replacement for the current Google interface, or become a separate search engine for the people with such taste. I don’t know about you, but I would still miss the old interface and I can’t imagine they might take it out, even though the new one is awesome. If we compare it to Live.com, I already like that one more. It is much more faster. There seems to be a slight stability problem with it though. Very often when I search I get the “Oops, an error occurred! Please try again later.” Even when I searched for google. Did you try it? You got results? If yes keep trying several times and you may get it as well. If the search does not return any results also, your search query is not shown so you have no idea what you entered exactly. Not unless you sneak on the anchored data parameters http://www.searchmash.com/search/, which is not trivial ofcourse.

AJAX powered online tools for you

Bashar — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:02:42 +0000

37signals is a privately-held company which was established back in 1999. The company adapted Ruby language, implemented their own framework for their projects, released the framework to public under the name Ruby On Rails and helped increase public awareness of the Ruby potentials.

37signals have launched three very promising online AJAX based collaboration applications, namely Campfire for real time group chatting and file sharing, Basecamp for online project collaboration and communication, and Backpack to organize your to-dos, notes, schedules and tasks online. All these provide FREE limited user access, and for more features and unlimited usage there is a subscription fee. Site claims over 1 million registered users in their system. The 37signals site is ranked among the first 3,000 sites on Alexa as well.
Take sometime to go through the tour or signup for FREE.

Ron Gilbert leading WoW Army

Bashar — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 07:48:01 +0000

Ron Gilbert have started his own Monkey Island themed guild in the World of Warcraft called Threepwood (can you imagine no one used that name?) and is inviting all Monkey Island fans to join the team under one condition, you have to have a Monkey Island character name. Well, too bad I am away from those games, otherwise it would have been fun to act as Murry, the most fearsome demonic skull… Muwahahahahaaa… Sorry I just got over excited a bit.

Anyways, thanks for World Of Monkey Island for sharing the news. And for more, no better than reading Ron Gilbert’s blog for more details.

Blogger Pros & Cons

Bashar — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:03:59 +0000

I have recently transferred my blog from Blogger http://babdullah.blogspot.com to my own hosted WordPress, which is great. Now my experience with Blogger hasn’t been bad at all, and I won’t suggest to all to do the same thing. However, no matter what, a blog hosted by other party must have some limitations. From my short experience with Blogger, I list below the Pros & Cons I came across.

Pros:

Quick setup time: Within few minutes, and without any technical knowledge, you can have your blog site up and running.
Simplicity: The nice formatting editor, ease of uploading and inserting images makes it really convenient.
Quick exposure: Since your blog is hosted by Google Blogger, it automatically gets added to their indexing engine, and the ~~Google News service~~ I think I was wrong here. It gets added to Blog Search only. I have some Google News Alerts setup, and whenever I blog about the same topic, I get the Alert next day in my email. So if people are alerting for a hot topic you are writing about, you can guess how many hits you may get. There is also the links to this post on Google Official Blog. Whenever you write and link to a post on Google official blog, it will be added to their list of Linking In articles. In addition to all of that, many people will start reaching your page from other Blogger pages through the Blogger header if you have it activated. This all cuts things short and easy for you instead of waiting for sites to index and include your site in their News service.
Easy add to Google Personalized Page.
Ability to switch to your custom domain. Though I haven’t tried it, but they give the option to point your registered domain to your Blogger account.

Cons:

Can’t add your own pages and features. Blogger gives you the ability to blog, and have a profile page. It does this so good, but thats all about it. You cannot have other pages like Contact Me or something like that. What people do is they post a blog with very old date, and link to it as Contact page. In addition to that, you cannot add your own features like mailing group, voting, and any other type of dynamic pages.
Pinging restriction: You only get the option to ping (notify) Weblogs.com of new posts, which is not bad, but you may want additional flexibility.
Up time: Occasionally I get 404 response for mine and other blogger pages as well. Yesterday for example both my and Google RSS feeds were not loading, while all other non Blogger feeds were OK, so it didn’t seem like a problem from my side.
No export feature: Sadly, Eric Schmidt have talked about how Google wants to make it easy for the users to take their data and go somewhere else if they like to, but this has not been the case with Blogger. There is no Export feature, and rather I found individual posted workarounds. Unfortunately, those didn’t seem to work as well. They included modification to the template, and the code suggested as a template was not accepted by Blogger because it was not properly formatted. Maybe this is a new checking in the just out of Beta Blogger release. Eventually, I had no choice but to copy/paste post by post and comment by comment. I did not see that feature from WordPress, but as long as you are hosting it, you can always get a dump of the data from the database.
Terms of service: Although their terms are not so strict, but still it will forbid and control your move in the future in commercial terms. So if you are looking for some real strong blog which you can turn into business later on, perhaps you would feel more comfortable hosting the blog your self and not having to worry about any legal terms.
Subcategory: While Blogger makes it extremely convenient to categorize posts with their auto-complete AJAX powered suggestion feature, you still can’t make category parent and child. So you can’t have Ruby to fall under Programming category for instance.

That may seem like I am strongly against Blogger, but the fact is I am not. It depends on your intention from the blog. If you want something to share thoughts, discuss with friends and have fun, Blogger is the only thing I will suggest. If you have no technical background at all, even though WordPress are so generous and offer to do the setup for FREE, I still think you should still stick to Blogger. If you have some technical programming skills, WordPress takes only 5 minutes to setup. It will take sometime to know where all the bits and pieces are and be able to customize it, but as I said, you can customize it! You can also search for the available free plugins on the internet.

I hope this small post helps some of you make their choice.

Zudeo Video Community

Bashar — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 13:05:32 +0000

Zudeo is the code name of the new Azureus project for high definition movies and videos downloading. Azureus is well known for their BitTorrent java based Client for Peer-to-Peer file sharing. Now they have introduced Zudeo, mainly for full length high definition movies. All you need to do is download their small client and start downloading all the movies you want.

The good about the service is that all the movies are full length, well produced with high quality, and its all legally submitted by the content owners. You can’t find any short home made movies, it’s not the place for that kind of stuff. If you are a producer or a publisher of original content, you can upload your stuff through the client for the world to watch.

The bad thing however is that the site is still small in content (this is what happens when you restrict for original stuff only!) and it still needs to get more publicity, which is what I am trying to achieve here. Another bad thing, for me at least, is that once I start downloading anything, the client start eating all my available bandwidth. Theoretically, I have a restriction on the bandwidth for around 25 kb, and I am paying quite a lot for my 256 ADSL Connection. But I still lose it all for a single download, and I find my self forced to shut it down. I am still trying to figure out whether I am doing something wrong, and I sure hope I am.

Still, I like to open it before I go to bed and chose my next morning movie before I head to work. Tomorrow is the first day of our working week by the way, God help me.

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