Gmail now rocks even more

I had the unfortunate experience recently of having to access a Yahoo account. Could I work out how to do some simple tasks? No, not easily.

Yahoo seem to be on a self-destruct bender with a badly received homepage redesign and increasingly dodgy search results containing paid-for entries.

And don't get me started on the horrors of Hotmail.

Gmail - in sharp contrast - just gets better and better.

I just added a bunch of useful stuff to my set-up from Gmail Labs. To find them go to settings > labs.

Such as? Auto non-English message translation, signature tweaks (this places your signature before the quoted text in a reply and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures), 'Canned Responses' (save and then send your common messages using a button next to the compose form), quote selected text (just text you have highlighted when you reply to a message), a tweak which lets you specify starting and ending dates for the out of office autoreply, adding a Mark as Read button, Undo Send functionality, and a tweak which allows insertion of images into a message body.

As well, Gmail now lets you automatically unsubscribe from mailing lists when you hit 'spam' for a message.

Like with Firefox, I just love this type of functionality personalisation. Why use anything else?

HT: Craig Elder/thenextweb.com

Why suicide prevention charities are idiots

Another rubbish piece of web reporting from the BBC (and now all over) - only because it has a medical/doctor aura it's accepted as gospel.

People searching the web for information on suicide are more likely to find sites encouraging the act than offering support, a study says.

Researchers used four search engines to look for suicide-related sites, the British Medical Journal [BMJ] said.

The three most frequently occurring sites were all pro-suicide, prompting researchers to call for anti-suicide web pages to be prioritised.

'Frequently occurring ' means bugger all. The vast, vast majority of searchers don't get past the first ten results and most of those don't get past the top three

I cannot know what exactly their methods were because this information isn't in the public domain - it's behind a payment firewall. (NB: Postscript below - terms and full research is now available)

So unless they send me the research, I (or joe/jill public) has no way of countering this biased reporting and what appears to be shoddy research except what's in this article and what we can guess happened.

The researchers, from Bristol, Oxford and Manchester universities, typed in 12 simple suicide-related search terms into the internet engines.

They analysed the first 10 sites in each search, giving a total of 480 hits.

Altogether 240 different sites were found. A fifth were dedicated suicides sites, while a further tenth were sites that gave factual or jokey information about suicide.

Meanwhile, 13% of sites were focused on suicide prevention while another 12% actively discouraged it.

Well I just did a Google search - 70% of UK web searches, mostly to google.com rather than google.co.uk - on 'suicide' (NB: with 'safesearch' off) and Wikipedia was #1, as usual. Yes, this includes a link to a 'suicide methods' page - it's an encyclopedia. It also has a page about torture and one on necrophilia. What do they propose to do about that? Have Wikipedia be filtered through a charity? Or the government?

• the next result directs people to the Samaritans
• next is suicide.com, run by an author called Melody Clark - doesn't appear to be 'encouraging it' from what I saw
• then news sites links
• then Mind's website
• then Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• then a page from kidshealth.org
• then a page from SOON Ministries (anti)
• then a Times article
• then netdoctor

Alongside this were a number of text ads from suicide prevention charities, including Samaritans but mainly small or religious ones, and one business ('Cremated ashes made into glass: "Keep the memory"'). I scanned Yahoo and MSN - almost exactly the same.

On google.co.uk, Mind is #1, some smaller charities appear as well as the BBC but otherwise it's similar to google.com. The Samaritans are way, way down - they need the text ad - and Sane not in the first 100 results.

The article isn't telling me what the other terms used were. But I can run a keyword suggestion tool. That gives me (for UK market) the number of daily searches for the particular keyword :

suicide 7788
suicide girls 4921 - a band
suicide girl 438 - fans of that band
teen suicide 429
how to commit suicide 408
suicide methods 375
assisted suicide 349
suicide poems 237
teenage suicide 205
physician assisted suicide 190

As you can see, searches on the simple term 'suicide' are far more prevalent and this list is almost identical to the USA's. As I don't have the details on these 'twelve terms' they researched I don't know what the prevalence/total number of searches on them actually are, let alone if that can be broken down by age group by any method. But I can guess that metric didn't feature in the research.

'How to commit suicide'

Again, Wikipedia, news and religious sites make up the top ten for 'how to commit suicide' on google.com. Only at #9 do I get a website about suicide methods. And this is a very long tract by anarchists. Further down there's the Hemlock Society and some others

These top tens change. Particularly because 'freshness' is more of a consideration than it used to be - hence news results. These researchers don't mention video, but that is now prominent in Google results (the ones in results are all jokey).

Notably, no UK charity like the Samaritans and with the exception of Mind shows up until way down the list on that search term on google.com or google.co.uk.

On both google.co.uk and google.com the Samaritans and some smaller charities and businesses advertise and survive.org.uk appears also in top ten search results on google.co.uk though these are dominated by news.

Lead researcher Lucy Biddle said that because of the law, self-regulation by internet providers and the use of filtering software by parents were the main methods used to try and prevent use of pro-suicide sites.

But she added: "This research shows it is very easy to obtain detailed technical information about methods of suicide."

Yes, if you are determined to find it you will find it. Doh! Just like bomb making recipies and rants against the Chinese government if you are Chinese in China. Filtering software is notoriously about sales and fear and only really 'works' with white lists or massive over-blocking/policing ('Great Firewall').

Her research did not demonstrate that finding pro-suicide websites is "very easy". Contrary to assumptions, I haven't seen evidence that shows that kids and teens are that much better, if at all, at finding things online using search engines than anyone else.

What I can say is that searches for 'suicide' are going down. This is a Google Trends search using the terms 'suicide -attack -Iraq -Afghanistan' to roughly exclude suicide bombers (I checked common keywords in news reports).



This does not include the press coverage of the Bridgend, Wales suicide cluster from earlier this year tied to peaks, because that volume is too low to display in that graph, but would likely be responsible for the early 2008 peak. See 'Bridgend' vs 'suicide' below.



For general searches for 'suicide', the general trend appears to be clearly down. Some good news you won't read in reporting.

Apart from no numbers on what the actual usage is of 'pro-suicide' sites, another point is whether the websites which charities and government create are actually helping kids and teens. I don't know but I'd like to - there's obviously nothing about that in this research, why some kids and teens might be turning to these sites they want to ban in the first place instead of 'official' ones.

She said internet service providers could pursue strategies that would maximise the likelihood that sites aimed at preventing suicide are sourced first.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, agreed something should be done.

Well

• how about running your ads next to more search terms than just 'suicide'. (Only Sane isn't doing any in the first place.)
• Or employing some Search Engine Optimisation specialists to make sure that your pages come up first. They might even do it for nothing or just the publicity.
  
• Or working with other charities to make sure you cover every possible term and intervene via content and ads on other sites or through social networks (simply creating a page on Mind's website, already high-up results, which is titled 'How to commit suicide' would immediately help).
  
• Or fixing your own website where the first result on a search for 'suicide' is 'The National Suicide Prevention Strategy report'.
  

Here's the beef - I would class the actions of such charities in making NO effort to ensure that their pages turn up tops on such search terms as 'How to commit suicide' as IRRESPONSIBLE. There are no excuses and to behave as if this is someone else's responsibility - let alone ISPs - is childish and pathetic PLUS it lets down kids and teens. Yes, this makes me very angry!

"We remain deeply concerned about the possible influence of the internet on suicide rates, not least the ease with which information about particular methods can be found with a simple web search."

"These sites are preying on vulnerable and lonely people."

And you, Marjorie Wallace, are not doing your job properly, you are failing the very kids and teens you claim to be helping and you are simply looking for someone else to blame.

As for the BMJ and these so-called researchers ... and as for the BBC. Who the heck do they think this actually helps? This is badly researched scare mongering.

This is exactly what happens when you set up walled gardens and fail to relate to the wider web - I am not seeing the NHS or government portal directgov anywhere in these results and that 'can't be bothered' mentality dominates the charity sector as well.

Hardly surprising when the 'National suicide prevention strategy for England' contains no mention of either the web, the internet or even chatrooms.

The same goes for health information for teens and kids on a wider scale than just suicide prevention - we're looking at an abdication of responsibility online and a willingness to blame others.

What Sane and other charities should do:

1. Talk to the search engines, they are very interested in getting results right and can and do 'tweak' them. They won't 'censor' sites or stop indexing the whole web but they will help and advise on improving positioning.
2. Don't talk to the ISPs! Talk to the search engine experts such as the Search Marketing Association.
3. Talk to social networks about teaming up with them and others to create widgets and other tools so kids and teens can help others.
   

As well, these people would probably do it for free or cheaply. It would be very straightforward to out-manoeuvre the sites you hate online. What resources do they have vs. what resources do you have?

But for kids sake stop behaving with fear and horror about the web and start using it rather than expecting someone else to do your job.

I am afraid that none of these people are listening, though, (the news media is already known to be a bigger encourager of suicide than the web). What they are developing is an righteous effort, like has happened in Australia, which will result in a censored Internet for all of us - and no real help for those they claim to be helping.

~~~~~

Postscript: I have submitted a response to the BMJ, pointing them to this blog post. I have also written to Marjorie Wallace of Sane pointing her to this blog post and making plain that I would freely offer my help and contact others willing to help them improve their search positioning and online help for the suicidal.

Postscript: An anonymous commentator says that the 12 search terms were:

a) suicide; (b) suicide methods; (c) suicide sure methods; (d) most effective methods of suicide; (e) methods of suicide; (f) ways to commit suicide; (g) how to commit suicide; (h) how to kill yourself; (i) easy suicide methods; (j) best suicide methods; (k) pain-free suicide, and (l) quick suicide.

And those showed:

Top 4 sites were Alt Suicide Holiday, Satan Service, Suicide methods.net and wikipedia. In that order first 3 were catigorised as pro suicide wikipedia as Information site: factual.

But as you can see from the keyword search numbers above only 'how to commit suicide' and 'suicide methods ' are frequently used search terms and both are dwafted by searches on 'suicide'.

The daily search numbers for 'how to kill yourself', 216. But for 'suicide poems', not a term they used, 237. 'Suicide sure methods' (Used), 0. 'Most effective methods for committing suicide', 0. 'Methods of suicide' is exactly the same term as 'suicide methods'. 'Ways to commit suicide' 158. 'Easy suicide methods', 11. 'Pain-free suicide', 0 (But 'painless suicide methods', not used, 53). ' Quick suicide', 4.

'Suicide', 7788.

If these are indeed the variants, by what method were those twelve search terms picked? It doesn't appear very scientific, unless I'm missing some additional information.

And none of this lets charities (or government) off the hook because churches and others are already in there topping results by generating links and picking page titles which put them at the top for terms which are searched on.

Postscript: The full text of the article has now been made available on the BMJ website.

This says:

Search strategy
We sought to replicate the results of a typical search that might be undertaken by a person seeking information about methods of suicide. We conducted searches using the four most popular UK search engines and 12 broad search terms—a total of 48 searches. The terms entered were those likely to be used by distressed individuals, determined partly from interview data collected in an ongoing qualitative study of near-fatal suicide attempts and by using search suggestions provided by the engines upon entering terms such as "suicide."

There isn't any further detail on just how they could know what search terms were actually entered 'by distressed individuals' as opposed to ones without distress or how relevant 'interview data' would be in working that out. My look at keywords suggests that they picked the wrong ones anyway and to include both 'methods of suicide' and 'suicide methods' is just inept.

I repeat that the conclusions of the study don't match any real data on what 'distressed individuals' might search on, let alone which terms are most frequently used (a metric which was clearly irrelevant in this study), let alone what we know about search patterns - the sort of information which has been researched to death because it has commercial value, let alone which search engine they probably used. The tenth in a top ten of search results is far less likely to be clicked on than the first, just to pick one example, yet their 'results' are predicated on them having the same value. There is clearly very little understanding of search behaviour by these researchers and this renders all the rest of the study entirely meaningless.

If they had even bothered to ask some of the search marketing/search optimisation specialists probably around the corner from them, or possibly even within the same universities, they would have realised that their methodology doesn't show anything. But as a result of this article being in the hallowed BMJ we now have headlines around the world.

I would suggest that this article devalues the BMJ itself as a source of scientific information unless it is withdrawn. There was nothing scientific about this study.

This is not to say that analysis of how search may contribute to actual suicide isn't valuable, but it needs to be done by specialists who can use the tools established by the industry to track and analyse which sites are the most dangerous and where the traffic to them is coming from - it may well not be primarily search. That could be done. As well, as I have explained at length, the best course is a concerted effort by charities and government to direct 'distressed individuals' to websites which can really help them.

Postscript: I actually got Google search share wrong. It's not 70%, it's 86%. And most of those are to google.co.uk rather than google.com - which has changed dramatically from the last time I looked at this, presumably because Google is getting better at presenting more relevant results and presenting .co.uk because it knows that's where you're searching from.

Postscript: In a comment, Graham Jones who runs the Internet Psychology web site, says that he met some people who were connected to the research and "they were suitably embarrassed in private when I pointed out the simple flaws in the research". Another critic of the research is John M. Grohol, Psy.D. at the PsychCentral website.

Huff Post beats Drudge

Arianna's baby has grown up:

In February, The Huffington Post drew 3.7 million unique [American] visitors, according to Nielsen Online, for the first time beating out The Drudge Report, the conservative tip sheet with which The Post is often compared.

Silicon Valley Insider says that comscore has her beating Drudge in February too. It also notes that:

The outside measurement data is all over the map

Which it is, as I try to double check those numbers. But a trend is a trend!

The New York Times feature says it's worth $200m, which values each visitor at $50 each. Article says it's developing an international news section too, which will be interesting - that's a major gap. They say the aim is to be - good phrase - an Internet curator. Not just a tip-sheet à la Drudge.

This tells a story too:

Staff members also credit much of the growth to moves that have made the site’s commentary more prominent on search engines like Google and Yahoo. More than half of traffic now comes from nonpolitical pages.

As does this:

Despite its number of visitors, it still has a high “bounce rate,” referring to users who visit one page and then leave the site. Drudge still records seven times the monthly page views of The Huffington Post, meaning that readers are frequently refreshing for the latest headlines.

Not enough loyalty then yet. And the growth's presidential campaign driven. Big numbers but it's not the biggest single [American] blog though.

Techcruch beats it on links via Technorati scoring and TMZ on visitors (8.1 million).

NSFW: Clinton 2.0: She's F**king Obama

The coming 'tracking' storm

Greg Sterling has an excellent analysis of the coming storm over online tracking by advertisers - prompted by a first legal move in the New York State Assembly:

Here’s where we are today:

• Traditional media are less and less effective because of audience fragmentation
• Agencies are still largely clinging to traditional media because of “inertia” and familiarity
• The Internet is where huge audiences are today but they’re harder to effectively reach
• Arguably search is the most effective online ad medium
• Brands generally don’t want to spend money on search
• Taking the lessons of search to heart, display advertising — where most of the brand advertising is seeking to go online — is tapping behavioral targeting (BT) and other, similar strategies to make display more “relevant”

After reading about how Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising, one New York assemblyman said there ought to be a law — Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the sponsor of a New York bill to limit how companies collect data on computer users.

And because it would be extraordinarily difficult for the companies that collect such data to adhere to stricter rules for people in New York alone, these companies would probably have to adjust their rules everywhere, effectively turning the New York legislation into national law.

From a legal standpoint this law wouldn’t survive a court challenge because, assuming it passed, it would violate the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which doesn’t allow individual states to regulate “interstate commerce.” Of course there are exceptions one can find but this wouldn’t be one of them.

What’s significant here is that it represents a first step in what is sure to be an ongoing legislative and regulatory discussion of consumer privacy. This is analogous to what happened with Click Fraud only more extreme: the search engines failed to “get out in front” of the issue from a PR perspective until they’d been repeatedly hammered in the press.

He's right. Web companies aren't good with PR. I can see the Panorama 'expose' now ... maybe written by the 'ubiquitous' Nicholas Carr, who goes all paranoid again in this post about a new Google ad-serving patent.

• paulcanning: Nicholas Carr goes ballistic

Save Madhi Kazemi

A web site has been set up for the campaign here - www.madhikazemi.com

Please circulate this if you can.

Donations are urgently required to support Madhi's legal case.

• email gayasylum.donations@yahoo.com

Support via money 360 vouchers available online or at any pay point outlet.

Also O2 credit vouchers are required as we are going though loads at the minute as you can imagine.

Web oiling US campaign, not so much in London

Techmeme's sister site Memeorandum watches the flow of news - and dirt - across the blogosphere and beyond

The Times recently ran a story about the 2008 US Presidential race being 'the Internet election'.

It's not quite.

All the main presidential campaigns "think that the internet is just a slice of the pie ­ they don't realise it's actually the plan", as Andrew Rasiej, the founder of TechPresident, which has been following the online race for some time, puts it.

The campaigns tend to view the Web as a "direct mail for the 21st century, an exercise in top-down control where they create the message, tell us how to vote and where to send the money", he says.

The idea of 'the list versus the network'.

The online success of the libertarian GOP candidate Ron Paul is actually nothing to do with his campaign - his supporters have generated his out-of-proportion 'presence' on the web themselves. not really surprising given that so many libertarians have driven the web's growth.

That online sucess has got 'offline' votes for 'Dr Paul' and for Obama. The media's just not paying much attention. This caused Paul supporters to resort to parading down the Las Vegas Strip last Saturday surreally shouting

'We’re not just the Internet. We’re flesh and blood.'

Nevada is fertile territory for Libertarians, according to the Guardian. And Paul did well in the Republican caucus. They pounded for the Dr.

None of the other GOP candidates have shown much interest in the Web. Commentators have suggested that this may have something to do with the make-up of typical party members.

What the Democrat campaigns have done is simply hire from the same youthful pool - often those who ran Howard Dean's ill-fated 2004 campaign, which first showed the power of the web as a political organising and fundraising tool, especially with new voters.

TechPresident has been detailing how the 2008 campaigns have tended to corral and be slightly afraid of letting supporters loose.

Talking about a just issued question and answer video from Hillary:

Instead of asking supporters to upload videos of questions, or to text or IM them — which would have been a natural thing for young voters to do — she asked them fill out a web form. Thanks to the closed nature of web forms, once participants hit “Submit” their questions went up the stovepipe and couldn’t be shared among other supporters. Not a very networked, webby way to behave, and typical of Clinton’s top-down style.

I actually find this video a tad patronising. I'm sure the kid whose music video I posted earlier would be better 'pissing inside the tent', but I can't imagine Hillary's tight campaign 'reaching out'.

Both main campaigns have been using social networks but, again, in this tightly controlled way. Edwards has picked up attention for making early, wider use of the web, using sites such as Eventful ('find and post local events anywhere in the world') to get the online to actual 'fleshmeets'. But now everyone is doing the same.

What the campaigns do appear to have spawned - I think that's the right word - is various organising sites that double as attack-sites. Hillaryis44 is one such site, fingered as a focal point for dirt aimed at Obama.

Allen points to Webb aide, Sidarth, referring to him as "Macaca" ^[18]

He would be right to have something to fear, as the web finds cracks and burrows it's way in at the wavering and acts as an amplifier for lies. Bad news gets out, quickly. Remember 'Macaca'?

The web is driving the election in that way - as a news source it's unrivaled. I've watched stories head from blog buzz to TV mainstream. Like the Obama= Madrassa/Muslim Manchurian Candidate meme.

Currently it's an attempt to link Obama with black radical Louis Farrakkan via Obama's church. Another lot is trying to tie him to Kenyan election violence. Smears can work but they can also backfire.

• Memeorandum, is a good place to watch this unfold.

NB: One interesting bit of data about the web and the race, just put out by Yahoo, is that Clinton’s “Buzz Score” — “the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read” — similar to Google Trends —went up and up in the runup to the New Hampshire primary. At the same time, Barack Obama’s score spiked downward. NH was where the polls got the result dramatically wrong, but they missed the change as they were a couple of days old.

In the run-up to Iowa webstats service Hitwise, similarly, picked up spiking online Obama buzz.


~~~~~~~~~~


Despite us having a similarly high web penetration, the UK is way behind this game. Politicians have very little clue as to how to use the web and look likely to continue to be blindsided.

Try googling 'Boris for Mayor' or 'Ken for Mayor' or 'Brian for Mayor' — you'll only see Boris in there with his mates. Ken is nowhere, neither is Paddick.

Boris' web presence will earn him lots of London Mayoral votes I predict!

The Tories in the UK have by far the longest web involvement and a lot of smart people ready to start 'piling in' - as Boris' would undoubtedly put it.

Ken, by contrast, has a problem with the Mayoral Site being his sole web presence - it's not really his, it belongs to the office and that'll restrict him. Plus his mates aren't defending him online. So he has zip web presence as far as I can see.

Does this look like a campaign website?



One whole section is devoted to 'Statements'.

And Ken's got problems.

The New Statesman's TV company is about to publicise alleged "astonishing and shocking" drinking habits and being "a law unto himself", via Channel Four, then YouTube and virally.

London's paper the Evening Standard has four attack stories on its website last Friday.



He'd better get his web-act together.

Huge proportions of the London electorate now get their news via the Web and things like video of Ken knocking back the booze and endless sleaze stories circulating online cannot be just laughed off any more.

Polls currently show it too close to call.

• Postscript

Dictatorship 2.0: Bloggers as targets

Reporters Without Borders 2007 Worldwide rankings — done on their website as plain, flat web pages and hence very easy to find useful info — have highlighted a number of countries slipping down the index because "of serious, repeated violations of the free flow of online news and information".

A decade ago, regime opponents in Vietnam or Tunisia were still printing leaflets in their basements and handing them out to fellow militants at clandestine meetings. Independent newspapers were no more than a few hastily-stapled photocopies distributed secretly.

These days, “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary” material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become “cyber-dissidents” and “online journalists.” Most of them know how to create a blog, organise a chat group, make phone calls through a computer and use a proxy to get round censorship.

New technology allows them to receive and share news out of sight of the authorities.

The Web is also a blessing for human rights groups, which can now build a file on a political prisoner with a few mouse-clicks instead of over weeks and sometimes months.

The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators too have entered the world of Web 2.0.

According to the group at least 64 people are currently imprisoned worldwide because of postings on the web, eight of them in Vietnam.

They flagged up the case of Abdel Kareem Soliman, an Egyptian blogger jailed for four years after he used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university, and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.

The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.

More and more governments have realised that the Internet can play a key role in the fight for democracy and they are establishing new methods of censoring it. The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.

In Malaysia (124th), Thailand (135th), Vietnam (162nd) and Egypt (146th), for example, bloggers were arrested and news websites were closed or made inaccessible.

China maintains its leadership in this form of repression, with a total of 50 cyber-dissidents in prison.

Talking about Burma:

The Burmese government’s Internet policies are even more repressive than those of its Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours. The military junta clearly filters opposition websites. It keeps a very close eye on Internet cafes, in which the computers automatically execute screen captures every five minutes, in order to monitor user activity. The authorities targeted Internet telephony and chat services in June, blocking Google’s Gtalk, for example. The aim was two-fold: to defend the profitable long-distance telecommunications market, which is controlled by state companies, as well as to stop cyber-dissidents from using a means of communication that is hard to monitor.

During the recent crisis the Net was, of course, a huge boon for journalists, but then the regime (like the Chinese) turned the tables, undercutting whether the Net makes any real difference:

Several Burmese journalists confirmed that the security services are circulating photos of demonstrators taken by citizen journalists or foreign reporters in police stations and among police informers. Scores of people have reportedly been arrested on the basis of these photos.

The same photos sent over the Web, before the regime shut it down.

The Internet was not designed to protect message confidentiality. It is fast and fairly reliable but also easy to spy on and censor. From the first mouse-click, users leave a trail and reveal information about themselves and what their tastes and habits are. This data is very valuable to commercial firms, who sort through it to target their advertising better.

The police also use it. The best way to spy on journalists a few years ago was still to send a plainclothes officer to stand outside their house. This can be done more cheaply and efficiently now, because machines can spy, report back and automatically prevent subversive conversations.

Cuba has installed spyware in cybercafé computers so that when users type “banned” words in an e-mail, such as the name of a known political dissident, they see a warning that they are writing things considered a “threat to state security” and the Web navigator then immediately shuts down.

China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users and spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment and hires armies of informants and cyber-police.

It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector - such as Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems - to do what it wants them to, and all have agreed to censor their search-engines to filter out websites overcritical of the authorities.

China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key-words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?

It has become vital to examine new technology from a moral standpoint and understand the secondary effects of it. If firms and democratic countries continue to duck the issue and pass off ethical responsibility on others, we shall soon be in a world where all our communications are spied on.

• Google Board rejects shareholder challenge to its ethics

Why is the UK press ignoring Bebo?

NMA today:

[UK owned] Bebo has overtaken search giant Google as the most viewed web site in the UK, according to new research [ComScore] out today.

The news comes in the same week that Bebo signed a deal with Yahoo! that will see the internet giant sell advertising for the social network, integrate Yahoo! answers within its platform and develop a Bebo-branded browser toolbar.

Here's Bebo Vs MySpace in UK Google Search traffic Vs. UK Press coverage (Google Trends):

The thin blue line at the bottom is Bebo's UK Press coverage.

One can speculate why this is the case but it's so huge that it's rather an indictmentof UK Press coverage of the Web in general.

Google loses it and other musings

I've posted before about removing widgets because the servers serving them were too slow - and holding up other content. Well add to this the widget being reprogrammed with no warning and disappearing.

That's what Google just did with Reader. Changed something so one aspect of the service disappeared, in this case my 'what I'm reading' widget - vanished. Fortunately, I spotted it because someone else did and alerted me, I thought to check whether I could redo it and I could.

Crap customer service from Google - adding to the accumulating bad image they have in that regard - as sending me an email alerting me to it changing is dead, dead simple. Automatable, even.

Because I figure it's a one off (hah!) I did a bit more and withered my feeds and put them through the Reader widget.

Availability is very important! Google Maps is a real alternative to expensive alternatives not just because it's free but also because it's available, it's reliable. MS Live Local isn't, it's slow. Haven't experimented with Yahoo Maps yet but I prefer their interface and they're fast, so there is a Google alternative.

I also removed the Technorati 'tag cloud' widget because it wasn't picking up my tagging — Blogger has 'labels' rather than tags, the cause I believe. You clicked 'environment' and it gave no results. I haven't seen an easy to use 'tag cloud' widget yet (I may now go look, they're the best way to organise content :).

I really dislike how Technorati's changed and I haven't seen much development in areas like widgets with them for a long while (Read/Write Web has more about Technorati's woes).

Blogger does seem some way behind WordPress, which appears to be the cogniscienti choice, having used that elsewhere and seen what else it provides I see why. I just find myself defaulting to Google products because it's easier and quicker and the negatives aren't crucial.

Yahoo bests Google for once

Interesting. From ClickZ:

Yahoo rates higher in terms of customer satisfaction than Google. That's according to the annual e-business report released by ForeSee Results and the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

The e-business sector experienced a 1.7 percent dip to an overall score of 75.2 on ACSI's 100 point scale. The e-business category includes search engines, portals, news, and information sites.

Google's score sunk from 81 last year to 78 in 2007; a 3.7 percent decrease. In the same period, Yahoo raised its score from 76 to 79, up 6.8 percent.

"While Google does a great job in search, which is what they do, but [consumers] are seeing Google the same as three years ago," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

Freed said Google's word-of-mouth marketing earned the search engine success in search, but hasn't effectively promoted applications like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Google Earth. "It might be time to step back and grow the market share in these applications."

Valleywag:

Google's basic, utilitarian design -- the hallmark of its appeal in the past -- has become stale and in need of a refresh, analysts suggest ... Web users choose search engines more by habit than anything else, and the Googling habit is well-ingrained. And advertisers make ad buys based on traffic and results, not customer satisfaction, making these results little more than a feather in the also-rans' caps.

Great Firefox add-ons

I'm a big fan of Firefox and have started using a new add-on which is just brilliant.

Using SEOpen, from one right-click, I can check a page's:

• Yahoo Backlinks
• Pages in Yahoo Index
• Google Backlinks
• Google Cache
• Pages in Google index
• Google Translate to English
• Google Related
• PageRank Check
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages in MSN Index
• Alexa Overview
• Alexa Traffic
• Alexa Related
• Alexa Backlinks
• "Mass Check" multiple sources at once
• Check DMOZ Inclusion
• Keyword Density
• Page Size Checker
• HTML Validator
• Server Header Viewer
• Wayback Machine
• Check robots.txt
• Whois Info

Fab.


This is a bit specialist (ahem) but some of the other add-ons I love can be useful for everyone:

TinyUrl Creator
Very easy copy'n'paste for a shorter URL

Tabbrowser Preferences
Useful things like retrieving closed tabs, copy tab URL

Snipshot
Edit images easily, simple crop, resize

Show Screen Captures
Displays thumbnail screenshots next to external links on a web page, this one I think I'll disable

ScrapBook
Extremely useful to clip pages or text but be even better if I was saving to my web repository, not my hard drive

Plain Text Links
Lets me open a URL from text

Menu Editor
Edit right-click menu

Image Zoom

IE Tab
Shows a page as it would appear in IE

Groowe Search Toolbar
Combines Google, Wikipedia (I use that a lot), Yahoo, de.li.cious etal

Greasemonkey
Great developer tool. More >

Advanced Dork

DOM Inspector

LinkChecker

ColorZilla
Copies any colour from a page.

DownThemAll!
Speeds up + manages downloading

deskCut
Puts a shortcut on your desktop

Adblock Plus
Blocks ads (except those served from the site, which some do)

What am I missing?

Bytes · Women online - Google seeding - cool videowall

TechPresident: Morra Aarons: Women Online: Facts, Figures, and the 2008 Election

• After sleeping or spending time with family, the Internet is women’s favorite leisure activity (Yahoo/Starcom report 2005). But women surf around less than men: they like to frequent trusted sites and communities. This is important for campaigns to remember.
• Even females who don’t self-describe as “political” organize and raise money: A recent survey by BlogAds.com found that of the “mommy” blog readers surveyed, 46% have contributed to a cause or campaign.
• Women talk differently online: "This is a huge generalization, but men use the blogosphere as a podium, e.g., 'This is what I think.' Women use it as a dialogue," Janet Eden-Harris, Internet firm Umbria's CEO, recently told the Denver Westword News. "The number of words that women use on a blog far exceeds that of men," she said. More later this week…

Anyone who follows politics knows this: For 40 years, more women than men have voted in elections .

<>

As women go, so will the White House, which is why it is important to cover not only what campaigns and organizations are doing online to sway women voters, but also to observe what women say and do in their own networks, blogs, and online communities.


~~~~~~~~~~~

• Dave Briggs points me in the direction of docstoc.com
  

  Similar in concept to Flickr.com (for photos) and YouTube.com (for videos) Docstoc.com will be the online community for sharing all types of documents.

• Something similar which I just discovered is SlideShare (I used it in an earlier post).
  
  
• The World In One City is a great new blog:
  

  Our aim is to prove that London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, by endeavouring to meet and chat to a citizen from every country in the world who currently lives and works in London.

  
  So far they've got 144. The Guardian did something similar in 2005:
  

  Altogether, more than 300 languages are spoken by the people of London, and the city has at least 50 non-indigenous communities with populations of 10,000 or more. Virtually every race, nation, culture and religion in the world can claim at least a handful of Londoners.
  

  London: the world in one city
  Interactive: Use our scrollable map to see which ethnic communities live where in London.
  View this map as a pdf
  Key to the map

  London by religion
  Map: Counting the capital by religion.
  London by religion: analysis

  London by ethnicity
  Map: Counting the capital by ethnic group.
  London by ethnicity: analysis

  What the maps don't show
  Factfile: Tower Hamlets has the lowest proportion of ethnic Indians of any London borough; 5.1% of Kensington and Chelsea's populatino are Americans. And many more facts and figures.

• Sydney Morning Herald: The YouTube election
  That's John Howard on the right and ALP leader Kevin Rudd on the left
  

  • John Howard's fake MySpace page
  • A Little Beef - Howard/Bush mashup by Red Symons
  • GetUp's ad starring Max Gillies as Howard
  • GetUp's site for spoof election ads
  • What's in the Box? (spoof ad)

• Mark Tillison detects other motives in Google's extension of their hosted online office tools from educational to non-profits:
  

  · The educational sector is pretty communal, there’s lots of sharing of ideas and word of mouth, so plenty of organic growth.
  · It’s a very large, well defined sector that will create a large user base very quickly.
  · Most importantly, what do we trust most as users? We trust what we know. As human beings, we don’t typically like change. When we’re getting educated, we use the tools we’re presented with because we don’t know anything else. When we leave education, we want to use those same tools that we’re comfortable with.
  
  This strategy, often called ’seeding’, produces exceptional results in the medium to long term, but you need a lot of funding to survive the investment period (like Google, for example).



~~~~~~~~~~~




• 2008 Presidential Wire Videowall is a brilliant mash-up with Yahoo Pipes and Google Video by a former Guilliani advisor, Patrick Ruffini:
  

  The videowall aggregates all the latest YouTube videos about the ‘08 candidates in a full screen total immersion experience. I’ve found it very useful in tracking down debate clips, anonymous oppo hits, and other cool stuff I’ve missed. Voter generated content is mixed in with media clips and official candidate videos to provide a 360 degree view of the campaign.

  Does take time to load :/
  

Bytes · Web2.0 distracts - Fat Long Tail - Climate myths

catch up ..

• icommons: Get wikifying! 10 of the best, most interesting wiki communities
  
  
• Search Engine Land: Key Differences Between Yahoo Search Marketing & Google AdWords
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  Jakob Nielsen to BBC: Web 2.0 distracts from good design.
  
  Etre agrees:
  
  

  That said, we've also seen some Web 2.0 design patterns put to good use, for example making the consequence of an action more explicit, thereby helping users to understand the effect of the various options presented within an interface. However many of these effects were achievable using ol' fashioned JavaScript in the days before Web 2.0 was shrink-wrapped, badged and sold as the latest in trendy technology (see "They've rebadged it you fool!").

  ~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  Duncan Riley on TechCrunch reports that The Long Tail Is Getting Fatter
  

  Although this fattening of the Web 2.0 marketplace makes it more difficult to stand out from the crowd, the marginal cost and ROI potential has now improved.

  
  
  However the background as disussed by Richard MacManus on Read/Write Web is of The Shrinking Long Tail - Top 10 Web Domains Increasing in Reach
  
  Nicholas Carr: He found that between the end of 2001 and the end of last year, the number of Internet domains expanded by more than 75%, from 2.9m to 5.1m. At the same time, however, the dominance of the most popular domains grew substantially. At the end of 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31% of all the pages viewed on the net. By the end of last year, the top 10 accounted for fully 40% of page views. There are more destinations online, but we seem to be visiting fewer of them.
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  PSF has more on the DirectGov research previously mentioned:
  

  
  The national study commissioned by public services supersite www.direct.gov.uk questioned parents, teenagers, over 50s, motorists and disabled people.".
  
  We requested this research and received this data-heavy 100-page survey report of 2,000 people that you can download from our site here. The evidence for Directgov's claims is not particularly convincing, with those wanting online services very much a minority group. Of those questioned, our survey said 8% of motorists wanted to be able to report a bad driver online, 10% to check their car's carbon emissions online and a relatively high 23% of parents wanted to be able to have online truancy alerts.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  Bill Higgins says interface designers are in the midst of a "technological paradigm shift". "Emulated user interfaces" are turning into "desktop app in a web browser" with consequent issues. He likes GMail.
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  New Scientist Online has an excellent, new-ish section 'A guide for the perplexed' on climate myths - a selection:
  
  
  
  • Human CO₂ emissions are too tiny to matter

  • We can't do anything about climate change

  • The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong

  • Chaotic systems are not predictable

  • We can't trust computer models of climate

  • They predicted global cooling in the 1970s

  • It's been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?

  • It's too cold where I live - warming will be great

  • Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans

  • It’s all down to cosmic rays

  • CO₂ isn't the most important greenhouse gas

  • The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming

  • Antarctica is getting cooler, not warmer, disproving global warming

  • The oceans are cooling
  
  • Higher CO₂ levels will boost plant growth and food production

  • The cooling after 1940 shows CO₂ does not cause warming

  • It was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England

  • We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age

  • Warming will cause an ice age in Europe

  • Ice cores show CO₂ increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

  • Ice cores show CO₂ rising as temperatures fell

  • Mars and Pluto are warming too

  • Many leading scientists question climate change

  • It's all a conspiracy

  • Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming

  • Polar bear numbers are increasing

  
  

The effects of global warming are already being felt worldwide. The Larsen-B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula collapsed over 35 days in early 2002, prompted by 3°C of warming since the 1940s. (NASA image by Jesse Allen, based on MODIS data.)

Clearing search pollution?

Now here's an interesting proposition ..

Today I'm thrilled to announce the Mahalo Greenhouse, a place where the public can build search results that-if accepted by our Guides-will be included in the Mahalo search index.

Oh yeah, if we accept your search result we will pay you $10 to $15 per search result (the range is based on how many search results you've completed: more here).

Now, if you're a disciple of Yochai and you absolutely will not work on a web-based project for money, we've got an amazing proposition for you: make the web better by writing spam-free search results and we'll donate your fees to the Wikimedia Foundation. So, you can make the world better 2x: first by making clean, spam- free search results and second by helping keep the Wikipedia running (those server bills ain't cheap!).

We've earmarked up to $250,000 in donations to the Wikipedia this year.

I love Wikipedia. They've got me already. Have lost several hours in Wikimapedia, which is brilliant and growing. I just tried 'Paradise garage' and got nowt though ... it'll grow..

Web Guru, Dan Gilmor, loves it. He blogs that Maholo founder Jason Calacanis, at the NMK event in London this week, called for wide efforts to rid the Net of the pollution he says threatens to choke off all of the value.

Calacanis hates SEO, calling them 'one of the worst polluters. (Click on his slide, left, to see a trajectory of decline.).

But, he says, blogs have so far responded fairly well with antibodies. (The “blogs” slide at right has a happier ending.) Naturally, he pitches his new company as an andidote for part of the problem.

There’s no question that the major Internet companies (read Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al) have not done enough to curb the pollution. But do we really want to toss out the part of this that machines handle so well? I don’t think so.

Gilmor is reminded of the Open Directory Project, which ironically is a pillar of Google - "but this time with payments for the editors. Not a bad idea."

As I said, not a bad proposition ...

Google and privacy. And?

Following John Battelle on Google's big slap (BBC etc) on privacy:

The original release from Privacy International (yow, that's not good).
The Media Story. (ouch, wow, says Average Joe Newsreader, Google sucks).
Danny (the counterintuitive Google defense).
TechCrunch.
Scoble.

In the end, this is only going to play poorly for Google. Sure, folks like us might read Danny or TC and realize the story has more than one angle. But two or three orders of magnitude more folks will only read the Media Story.

Google, get out in front of this one....

According to GMSV:

Google has countered that the PI report misunderstands its services and is based on inaccurate information. Google also apparently pointed out that a member of the PI advisory board works for Microsoft and therefore the watchdog group has an anti-Google bias, which drew an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from PI Director Simon Davies demanding an apology.

Battelle suggest I read Donna Bogatin (her of the 'Inside Chatter'). She thinks:

Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy

She mainly has a go at Matt Cutts, one of Google's Bloggers.

Google defied the {Department of Justice] DOJ not in solidarity for its users, but in defense of its business model and competitive stance.

In any event, Google may not even be able to find its users data to comply with all of the DOJ’s demands! I recently discovered a “reason” for Google’s inconsistency in its privacy and data practices: Google apparently does NOT readily know where its users’ data is in the Google cloud, according to its top privacy point man!

Peter Fleischer indicates that Google doesn’t automatically know where user data is. So what, he nevertheless suggests. Fleischer is Global Privacy Counsel for Google and, as Google proudly declares, sits on the Board of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

And ... ?

It is surprising then that he cavalierly declares “Your data is in the cloud,” somewhere.

Surprising? Not only does this expose the real lack of depth of understanding by PI but also the - frankly - luddism.

As Bogatin constantly returns to, Google's interest is itself.

And ... ?

There are gawd knows how many companies who would have to say - “Your data is in the cloud”. What's it with Google, eh?

They have no interest in breaking the basic bond on privacy with their customers. That would end their business (the Googlers would get terribly upset for one thing ...). Do they actually want Google to stop producing stuff like Maps and Earth until they approve it?

Here's Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land:

Privacy International’s report is based on quite a bit of secondhand information there. “Overall, looking at just the performance of the best companies PI found shows that Google measures up well–and thus ranking it the worse simply doesn’t seem fair,” he writes. “But the bigger issue is that the report itself doesn’t appear to be as comprehensive or fully researched as it is billed. Frankly, about the only thing saving Privacy International from many more companies or services being upset over this report is that they singled out Google as the worst. That’s almost guaranteed to make players like Microsoft and Yahoo shut their mouths and point at this silently as vindication they aren’t so bad.”

I just Googled 'Google and privacy' and look what's top:

News results for Google and privacy - View today's top stories
	Group Criticizes Google Over Privacy Practices - FOX News - 3 hours ago Defending Google's approach to privacy - Guardian Unlimited - 9 hours ago Google Maps aids terrorists, NY lawmaker warns - Register - 3 hours ago

Google as Big Brother

Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets ... www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html - Similar pages - Note this

Google's Privacy Policies

UPDATE 2004-07-18: A new California law, the Online Privacy Protection Act, went into effect on July 1, 2004. Google changed their main privacy policy that ... www.google-watch.org/krane.html - Similar pages - Note this [ More results from www.google-watch.org ]

Google balances privacy, reach | CNET New