Posted September 30th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology| Web 2.0

If your blog has been deleted suddenly by WordPress.com, DON’T PANIC!  …that is, unless you use your blog for phishing scams or spam-commenting or anything else that brings down the experience of other people on the Web and/or makes it harder for people to find the information they need.  In that case, panic.  Scream and cry.  I hope your blog is permanently deleted, and everything you eat for the rest of you life tastes horrible. The Web is our garden!  

Assuming you are an ethical participant of The Cloud, pretty soon you should get an email from WordPress.com explaining the nature of the take-down.

[Anyway, my blog is back, obviously.  I guess I need to start backing up my blog? Jeeez.  What a hassle.]

[begin story]

I regularly blog about scams/spam on the Web.  It’s a way for me be discovered by, and to provide guidance to, people who happen to be googling around about some questionable content they find or are emailed.

One example of this is this search result for “paypal-cgi.com,” a site that mimics PayPal in order to trick people into handing over their paypal login info.  I come up number one for the search, and the title of the result makes it clear that you shouln’t trust PayPal-CGI.com… If you click thru to my post, I explain why these things exist and how to detect this kind of crap.

You see, I’m actually doing something good here.  And it’s good for me too.

Anyway, recently I encountered some scam crap on craigslist and blogged about it. And since my blog post contained a link to the spam/scam site I was exposing, WordPress.com’s evil-detectors went ape shit and my blog got automatically removed by wordpress.com.  

I was in the middle editing a post and suddenly my category selection buttons stopped working.  And there was a thing saying somethin like “you do not have permission to edit this..” or something like that.  When I refreshed the page, I got “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available”

…and my blog had been completely removed leaving only this scary screen saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”

Ironic. I got banned for merely exposing something malicious.

Current Spam-Filter technology isn’t context-aware. This is a slippery slope: Using words or links alone, without regard to context, to define what is untrustworthy content.

See the post in question for yourself HERE: 

Fortunately, about an hour later, I got a message from WordPress.com: 

from: Anthony – WordPress.com:

Hi,

Your blog was automatically flagged, as links to overnightcashexplosion.com were detected (and these are certainly not permitted). The blog is back – please remove all such links.

Best,

Anthony

Automattic | WordPress.com

I responded with:

if it’s a url in text, is that different in the eyes of your spam defenses from an actual link?  I’d like to leave the url if possible so I can still come up in searches for that url. 

WHat’s your take on that?

Thanks for communicating with me.

-A

Anthony from WordPress replied:

Hi,
Sure, you can leave it – I understand the context.

Best,
Anthony
Automattic | WordPress.com

So, there is a layer of discretion here?  That’s good I guess.

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Posted September 30th, 2008, in: Art Etc| Intellectual Property| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Music Industry| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

(just an idea I had in the middle of the night… maybe it’s a good one?)

It just occurred to me that what artists like me, who are non-label, totally independent, need is a tracker/directory site for us to upload out torrents to.  A tracker that’s 100% legal music.  

I’m thinking since when you launch a .torrent file, depending on the client, you can select what files you want to download, artists can include in one torrent, a few different versions of their releases.  For instance, I could include a flac version, and two different mp3 bitrates, all album artwork bundled with each compression scheme  separately, and each version in it’s own folder.  

The user selects the one torrent, launches it, selects the folder for the version they want, and they get what they want.  

*Artist is distributing without needing a central server…

*Fans of indie/niche music are getting what they want the way they want it. And there’s a central place  for hard-to-find and/or totally legally-distributed-via-P2P music. 

There may also be advantages to creating a recommendation engine that excludes major-label music:  Maybe major label music obscures the analysis of music taste in some cases?  Just a thought.

I wrote a letter to the peeps at The Pirate Bay.  Maybe they’ll read it and write me back.

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Posted August 8th, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| New Media| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0

Comment I left on zaproot‘s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…

Here’s the Video I’m responding to:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dag]

I love me a good conspiracy theory.

I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).

Are there other sources?

I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.

I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.

Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228

Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…

I just want my skepticism to be smart.

Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.

The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.

Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?

You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.

Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?

This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!

If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew

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Posted July 31st, 2008, in: Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Intellectual Property| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| The War on Free Culture| Videos| Web 2.0

Kevin Kelly gave this talk at TED in 2007.  It’s worth watching.  

He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil‘s “Sigularity.“ 

He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand.  This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation.  Thought I’d share.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYCf4ONh5M]

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Posted July 30th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Data Portability (DataPortability)| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

Here’s my dilemma. I have a ton of bookmarks on my Del.icio.us account.  I love using an online bookmarking system. But still, Delicious and others’ systems for organizing bookmarks don’t really help with a need I bet most users have: Tag-Optimization.  

Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild

On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far.  It’s just too much work.

Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.

I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it.  At some point down te road,  maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.

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Posted July 29th, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Videos| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0

I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head.  Get it together, people!)

MP3 of interview HERE

Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man.  Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.”  In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines.  The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.

Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement.  He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”  

He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.   

Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around.  What do you think?  I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).

Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.

This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQa-ibNOKM&NR]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bOug1d20c]

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Posted May 15th, 2008, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

Update… this was actually news back in January.  Coincidentally, today it was announced that Comcast is buying Plaxo.  Goodbye Plaxo.  Nice knowin’ ya.

Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)

Plaxo? Are you listening?  Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps.   You’re better than them!  Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more!  Don’t turn to the dark side!

Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough…  Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.

Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this.  Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.

Seriously.  

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Posted May 15th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology

You know about using quotes to get an exact text string including spaces between words.

You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.

And there’s site: url 

And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.

But there are tons of these things.  You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.

A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com  

One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected.  Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them.  You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras!  And move them about!

Here’s a myspace blog entry where this guy lists many examples of this.

Here are some example google queries from the post.

• google – inurl:”view/index.shtml” – Axis Network Camera
• google – SNC-RZ30 HOME – Sony network cam
• google – inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis – Axis Video Server(cam)
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” – AXIS Video Live Camera
• google – intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” | inurl:view/view.sht – AXIS Video Live View
• google – intitle:”The AXIS 200 Home Page” – AXIS 200 Network Camera
• google – intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl – Canon Network Camera
• google – intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu” – Mobotix Network Camera
• google – intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page” Or inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” – Panasonic Network Camera
• google – intitle:”QuickCamPro WebCam” inurl:webcam – QuickCamPro
• google – intitle:”SiteZAP WebCam Control” – SiteZAP WebCam

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Posted May 14th, 2008, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user.  The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats.  Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser.  We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff.  Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way.  But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.

Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.”  Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.”  I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup.  So let’s do it!  

Quotes from the Article I mentioned:

“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”

“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”

I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog.  My response:

I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.

If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…

The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.

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Posted May 12th, 2008, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

A weekly roundtable discussion about the DataPortability Project in specific, and efforts involved in data portability in general. The show is produced and hosted by J. Trent Adams and Steve Greenberg.

PodCast is HERE

I recommend Episode 7 

QUOTE:

We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.

 

We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.

The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.

Danny regularly posts on the following sites:

• Talis: N2 Blog
• Talis: Nodalities Blog
• This Week’s Semantic Web
• DannyAyers.com
• DataPortability & Me Video

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
• Talis: Semantic Platform
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
• Tabulator data browser

 

Planet RDF

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