Agriya

To anyone with the foresight to plan their SEO approach right at the start when they think of a website concept, it has to occur at some point to them to wonder – should they go with an international domain name suffix, a .com or the like? If they choose a local domain with their own country’s suffix, will they forever sound to all visitors like they are some kind of a provincial loser? People have been wondering about this for about ten years now; even if the rule has always been clear. A local domain name beats an international .com hands-down any day. If it is all that clear, why do people constantly look longingly after a .com suffix for as if they couldn’t believe they’re really on the Internet until people get to type in a .com to reach them?

Let’s say you live in Madrid, and you are looking for a classifieds publisher where you can put up your used computer for sale. You just type ‘computer classifieds’ into a search engine, and you get results like ‘loot.com’ and also ones like ‘loot.es’. If you didn’t know anything about either site, which would you choose? Since a classified ad is really all about your local region, surely you would think that the .com sites were just too generic to waste your time on. People do tend to gravitate towards local offerings over the generic, because they feel that there would be more relevant information there.

In link building endeavors, other local sites in your region are likely to be better disposed to linking to you if you have the same local domain name as theirs. What is more, there are many local directories that won’t approve of indexing your name, unless you’re local. And basically, search engine algorithms tend to reliably rank you, if you’re local. Sites of the same dot com linking to one another are not all that valuable. Having really different websites linking to one another is. If you split your dot com into many different countries with different suffixes, you stand a better chance. Moreover, it is quite common these days to find hosting in a country other than your own. You would be virtually guaranteed a proper listing and ranking in your own country if you used a proper local domain suffix getting your site served there. And in hours too.

So why do SEO experts still continue to think that a .com suffix is somehow more equal than the other suffixes? It could be that they just use English keywords in their research to test sites they design for search availability. The language barrier is just too great. If people could just move out of their comfort zone and research all the parameters that actually matter, language and others, the local domain suffix, or the ccTLD would always come out the winner.

People can’t stop breathlessly following Bing’s core search share in the US and across the world. Every fraction of a percentage point that Bing gains over Google and Yahoo is noted, analyzed and digested like it was a sports statistic. For instance, Bing is reported to be growing at a faster pace each month than the month before. In December, Bing took an additional half percentage point to bob close to an 11% market share. Following the search engine share battle very closely is serious business; why then should these statistics close the club to Google, Yahoo and Bing? Why ignore the elephant in the living room, namely,China’s Baidu?

Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.

If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.

Facebook has been hard at work trying to really find its balance between privacy, user-friendly design, and open community. The latest instance in its self-discovery occurred in December, when they made some really contentious changes, that reworked everything about Facebook’s take on privacy. Some accuse it of trying to be more like the privacy-free Twitter. If before December’s changes, you went in and used Facebook’s Tool to keep your privacy settings unchanged, you would have nothing to worry about. If you chose to go with the recommended settings in the Transition Tool dialog box though, would you be distressed to learn that you just allowed Facebookto publish all your private information, photos and all, to just anyone?

Anyone at all can see your status updates too, because that is the default position you chose. And if you have certain search settings in place, anyone just searching on the Internet, can see all that information appear in their general search listings too. But to change this to something more sensible is not difficult. You just need to go to the “Profile Information” setting under the Settings menu, and make sure that the Posts by Me parameter is set to Only Friends.

How about getting your personal data off Google? When you bring up the Search Settings page on Facebook, you get a message that tells you that there has been a malicious rumor abroad that leads people to believe that Facebook information is all spilled out on Google. Facebook assures you that this is not true. Nothing could be more misleading. Because Facebook’s Public Search setting in the Search Settings page, lays down what exactly you’re putting out on Google. If you have Allow selected, all information you have on Facebook that you chose to share with “Everyone” goes out on Google. You will need un select Allow to to get a reasonable bit of privacy back.

The forums are on fire with how irresponsible of Facebook it was to throw your personal information so quickly to everyone with an Internet connection. No doubt, quite a few people found their marriages breaking up, and found themselves losing their jobs because information and pictures they thought was private on their Facebook pages, was suddenly all hung out for the world to see.

Attacking computer networks these days, or installing a virus in a fortress of security at a major corporation involves doing more than making clever coding and performing clever digital confidence tricks on company employees to beguile them into clicking on something. A recent survey of hundreds of government agencies and corporations in the US found that nearly three-quarters of all computers in them had infections of one kind or another. These are organizations that spend billions of dollars in computer security every year. What ways do the hackers have of getting past such impregnable defenses?

Usually, it could be something really low-tech, but very clever. One way that has been reported recently, has been this: a hacker designs for good virus, loads it on a pen drive, and silk screens the company logo on the face of the drive. He then leaves it somewhere conspicuous, on the company’s premises, as in the parking lot or an ATM. The hacker hopes that a company employee will discover it, plug it into his company laptop to find out who it belongs to, and by doing this, will activate a virus inside that will steal all the company passwords stored on the laptop. It will then phone home, with its cache of stolen passwords. Most firewalls and other defenses do not count on having a company employee personally bring something in like this.

The Google attacks in China were a twist on the traditional phishing tactic. They were called spear-phishing attacks. They send counterfeit e-mails to people, taking the trouble to design the e-mails with official-looking emblems and stationery, but they aim for a specific person in the organization, and they mention a well-known friend in the from-address section too. It is all about getting past an employee, and having him invite the virus inside by his own actions. They don’t just need anti virus software anymore. They need anti-gullibility behavioral training for their employees.

Cell phones are not such targets for now with hackers so far, because there are so many models and so many different operating systems. But with a very popular model like the iPhone, things could start happening, that would turn the smart phone into a surveillance device that records pictures and audio. They can even tap into an iPhone, to learn exactly where the owner is, with GPS.

In a high-tech world, low-tech is often the way infiltrations take place these days.Often, we are just looking at hoof prints and thinking exotic zebras, when we should be thinking donkeys. We need to think low-tech once again today.

Coca-Cola has its super secret cola recipe, Dolby has its closely-guarded noise reduction circuit design, and Google has… what is it that Google has? For Microsoft, Google or any other software business, the thousands of lines of code, and the philosophy that informs them are their stock-in-trade, their capital. Google has had the Chinese authorities hack into its Gmail accounts recently; if they, or any recreational hacker were to succeed in getting into their system, and to sell their loot to the highest bidder outside, it would quickly bring Google’s search business to its knees. Or if it were the Chinese authorities doing it, or a competing search engine,they could ever-so-slightly modify Google’s codes, to make it less effective, or spy on everything Google did, and lend themselves a better advantage.

This is no longer just a doomsday scenario passed out in a Hollywood movie. This is exactly what Google declares China did earlier this month to it. Google announced that some of its copyrighted code had been stolen, and the code owned by several other companies as well. Google, with help from VeriSign iDefense, when it investigated these attacks, did not even know if it has its original code anymore. They believe that China’s government has possibly inserted alterations in Google’s core coding that will help them spy on Chinese citizens using Google to search for restricted information in China. Why, in Greece, five years ago, hackers inserted alterations to Vodafone’s code, so that they could listen in on conversations conducted by the country’s political and military leaders.

Just as Microsoft has been a favored target for years, Google and Adobe are in the cross hairs today. Adobe’s software is reputed in particular to be deeply flawed security wise; since it enjoys 95% market penetration with one or another of its products, anti virus experts have their attention trained on Adobe now. It is becoming obvious too, that China, a country that first rose to prominence for its cheap knockoffs of reputed branded goods, still retains its knack for counterfeiting. Routers by Cisco, for example, are legally required to include firmware that will allow the government to obtain a backdoor into your information, for criminal investigations purposes. China could easily manufacture counterfeit Cisco routers, that will help the Chinese government look in for more information than a democratically-elected government would ever be allowed to. As it happens, the biggest risk that software corporations face still lies in the way employees can get careless, and open tainted spam when they are at work, at a company terminal.

Dubai was reported to be in financial trouble recently; Iceland is practically in hock, and Greece is waiting in line. In all the countries around the world that have fallen to the financial meltdown, getting a regular job at a factory or at a newspaper office, or selling investments, is the dream that is best abandoned at this point. But people in poor countries still can get enough to get by on, if they have a computer connection at home, and don’t mind doing a little online grunt work. It goes by a more printable name, called Crowdsourcing. This is where you take company tasks that you would normally delegate to some tread- upon factotum at your office, and spread the cheer among a hundred unseen factotum across the world. And you would spend pennies on them for an hour of their time.

Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.

This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.

At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.

Have you ever wondered how it is that when you try to look up the weather on the Internet, all the brand-name weather sites just can’t agree on what the weather is going to be like. Well, Microsoft certainly has noticed this, and is trying to win some points trying to smooth this over for for you. When you search on Bing for the weather in your local area, we will certainly get your usual list of major weather forecast websites; but if you venture further, you can find an automatic Bing Compare laid out for you of what all the other websites say. And to help you decide which website you prefer for your forecast, Bing will even write up a journal for you of what the weather has been like over a period of time. Additionally, Bing will also match up the forecast against what really happened, and over the course of a month or two, to give you recommendations on which forecast service is best to choose.

Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.

All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.

Bing is full of surprises these days in its unending competition with Google. Bing adds new features regularly like the Wolfram Alpha function and mapping tools that are visually stunning. Integration with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine means that they will now be able to interpret what you ask in human terms. If you search for “fast food”, it will give you the usual restaurant information, but also exercise tips and indigestion information. Yahoo has introduced a major search feature too – as of last year. The feature is called Bing. Yahoo is finally throwing in the towel in search; they may have snubbed Microsoft’s $44 billion takeover offer two years ago, but they have other Microsoft-friendly attitudes in place.Yahoo has closed its search business, and is allowing Bing to do the backroom work. They closed down their shopping API as well, and chose to power their shopping site with Price Grabber.

There have been other reports out there wondering if Yahoo is preparing to shut shop entirely; if they don’t do their own search, what is it they do? Yahoo’s management has put out a vehement statement about how it isn’t fair for anyone to consider Yahoo a spent force. The statement claims that Yahoo has a great relationship with its developers and a commitment to open platforms; well, my Log Blog was an innovative service that developers and geeks loved too. And that’s been closed by Yahoo as well. GeoCities recently got the ax, and it looks like Yahoo these days is all about closing down and outsourcing. It would appear that pretty soon, the US search market will be left with just a big two – just like the US auto market when it lost Chrysler.

But Yahoo is still in the search business to all appearances. They take care of all the advertising business on their own site as well as on Bing’s. Yahoo’s plan is to cut costs, of course. But to do that, it still needs to be around, doesn’t it? Yahoo is no longer a website that provides original services; it is just an aggregator. And this makes for the passing of an era.

YouTube is the number one video streaming site out there; and Nielsen estimates that they served 6 billion videos in December. And Hulu at number two, served about a tenth that number. But what if you tried a different polling firm, one like comScore? This company believes that Hulu is at the number two position too; but according to them, Hulu served almost a billion videos last month. Anyone with a little YouTube clone site will be humbled by every number mentioned here; but it makes you wonder still; do these numbers make any sense if they can be so far apart when measured by two different polltakers?

Hulu has always been protesting against the way these polls are taken. It isn’t clear whether one Hulu video that runs for an hour, should count just the same as a YouTube video that runs for just three minutes. After all, YouTube mainly streams short files that are user-uploaded, while Hulu only does regular broadcast content and movies – things that last much, much longer. Should only the main program material be counted, or should streaming advertisements count too? What about videos that are watched off-site, on an embedded player elsewhere? Poorly defined standards of measurements like this, can often cause these discrepancies.

Essentially, these numbers are so impressive when reported by comScore, because they include every streamed advertisement run with a program. Nielsen does not include the advertisements. But there is one thing you can trust; both these survey companies do place YouTube and Hulu at the correct relative places: at number one, and number two. Perhaps comScore does this intentionally; if Hulu’s numbers look much more impressive when reported by comScore, they will love how they can get better advertising rates from their partners. It is somewhat possible, that all YouTube clone sites would choose to be rated by comScore and not Nielsen. It makes them look much bigger to the advertiser.

Everyone is abundantly aware of the kind of stupendous distraction social networking is. Facebook estimates the number at 10 billion man minutes – the amount of time that Facebook’s 350 million registered users spend on the site every single day, taking time away from their homework, their official duties, and their families. Doctors seem to say that these are people who deal with a real and active addiction; and informing support networks to keep themselves in check is often as good of an idea for Facebook, as it is for substance abuse. Many people just close or deactivate their Facebook accounts. Others, form pacts with their friends to help keep them off their habit most of the time. Some people even give over control of their account to a trusted friend (presumably one who is less ravaged by the addiction)who will change their password, and not give it back to them until they feel truly able to control themselves. Parents of Facebook-hooked teenage children certainly seem surprised at the determination they see in their otherwise irresponsible young charges, trying to keep Facebook from running away with their whole lives.

But children on the whole seem to be in better and control of their dependencies than working adults. Businesses in America and the UK are increasingly finding that they need to block access to social networking sites at the company’s server, to keep this habit from lowering workplace productivity. And of course, employees are certainly not taking a hint at this; they and are finding workarounds, such as accessing Facebook through their e-mail. For the less-than-responsible, a service called MoDazzle lets you do this.. You just send an e-mail to MoDazzle, and it fetches you all your latest updates through your e-mail. You can do most of the stuff on MoDazzle that you would get to do on Facebook.

It isn’t just the matter of self-control that Facebook brings up at work and at home. In America, the state of Florida has ruled that lawyers and judges cannot be Facebook friends. There is the matter of being responsible, and then there is something like this that is clearly silly. Lawyers who are friends, are not suddenly going to turn strangers just because one of them got promoted to being a judge.