One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using “link farms,” sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This “spamdexing” technique is based…
One of the best parts of December, regardless of whether you believe in Christmas or that it belongs in December, is the fun of the advent calendar. As a kid I used to look forward to jamming a new piece of creche-themed chocolate (chocolate stablehand, anyone?) into my mouth every…
In an effort to help educate the general public about its browser, Chrome, and the web in general, Google released an online “book” called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Done in the style of an illustrated children’s book that allows readers to flip through the pages,…
Today Opera Software released data about how users of its Opera Mini mobile web browser use the web. Opera does this periodically to give some insight into how its users may be surfing, but what we don’t know is how much Opera Mini users correspond to the web in general.…
I finally get to eat. Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite. In addition to a…
Yesterday I covered an example of lawsuits sparked by teachers unions and school boards over social media policies. Today I’ll carry it a little further with another case involving unions as well as a professional association. Complaining about Your Job An employee at an ambulance company, faced with complaints on…
Back when I first started pitching the idea of developing a social media policy for an organization, it was really two-fold. The first part was the key part to me — outline a process and rules for your organization to communicate using social media. Having a process for responding to…
It’s like I’m running out of novel titles or something. With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant…
This is one of those posts I started back in mid-October and sat on, suspecting that there would be more follow-up, backlash, challenges, and general bickering. There has been some, but then it died down a bit. And then I remembered I should post this. The Yahoo Developer Network posted…
If you are in the United States and not dead, it’s kind of hard to miss all the chaos leading up to election day next week. Surprisingly, not a lot of people seem to know where their voting place is or even if they are registered to vote. Conveniently, Google…
The history of the web is littered with unexpected patent claims that feel frivolous to nearly all. These are driven partly by a terrible system for reviewing and awarding patents and a litigious society that sustains a business model of lawsuits in the hopes that some will just pay.The latest…
Perhaps you’ve seen the news, read the tweets, heard web developers shouting from rooftops (which is a heck of climb from the caves in which they are usually kept) — Microsoft Internet Explorer, the browser that has caused developers so much strife, has dropped below 50% market share. It’s looking…