Flickr has just chalked up its two billionth photo.
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Monthly Archives: November 2007
Single point of failure
Steve Rubel points out on his Micro Persuasion blog an outage on TinyURL, a five-year-old service which offers small, easy to handle URLs which replace to long URLs full of ?s and so on. He points out the vulnerability this implies as more and more sites are using the service as a convenience to users. What happens when all those URLs stop working?
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Facebook users rise up
Facebook users in their thousands have signed a petition to protest against Facebook’s new ad network Beacon. The system automatically tracks what users are buying on affiliated sites and displays the information on Facebook home pages. However, users are worried that Beacon is an opt-out not opt-in service.
Forrester analyst Charlene Li has even deeper worries, as she points out in this post. The cookie-based approach means activity on one PC can be ascribed to an individual wrongly – and that could be quite damaging, she argues.
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How to get Sitelinks
ProBlogger has an interesting post about Google Sitelinks, those additional links which sometimes appear under the main site link on the top result of a Google search. Apparently, as yet, there is no way to tell Google what or if to create links as it is done by algorithm. You can now remove links which you think are inappropriate.
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Top blogs
Bloglines has produced its list of the 1,000 top blogs in the blogosphere. Top of the list is Slashdot, followed by Dilbert and Engadget. The criteria are a bit hazy but they say at the heart of the ranking is how many active subscribers a blog has. And, by the way, if you look down the list, the definition of blog looks a bit loose, too.
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Google pageranks crash
There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a change to the Google algorithm which has resulted in a large number of sites’ page ranks falling several points. Google isn’t officially commenting.
MySpace joins
MySpace, the world’s largest social network, has given a huge boost to Google’s open social network platform by saying it will join, according to eWeek. The move is intended to combat Facebook’s growing dominance of the social application development space. Google’s initiative aims to allow all applications to work interoperably on all platforms.
Google bigger than TV
According to paidContent Google’s UK advertising surpassed ITV1, the largest commercial channel in Britain, in Q3.
Technorati tags: advertising Google
Friends Reunited goes free
In response to the onslaught of free social networking sites MySpace and Facebook Friends Reunited, bought by ITV for £120m in December 2005, is dropping its £5 subscription price, reports paidContent.
Technorati tags: social media
Do-not-track the next big thing?
Interesting news from AOL (via Lifehacker) that it is introducing a do-not-track list for those people who do not want to be targeted by advertising.
AOL says it will direct consumer directly to the opt-out lists of the largest advertising networks, according to the New York Times.
Such lists will not reduce the number of ads that people see online, but they will prevent advertisers from using their online meanderings to deliver specific ad pitches to them.
AOL will try to persuade consumers that by parting with some personal data they will find more relevant, appealing ads than by remaining anonymous.
Technorati tags: advertising privacy