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As the web 2.0 hype continues to become ever more href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/getting-outside-the-frothy-
bubble/">frothy, it becomes more and more obvious that abusing the
inherent ’social goodness’ is not really that difficult.

To take a step back, the big trust in social sites is that most users are
good, and the few that are bad, the good users can easily police them. Not
exactly the same, but even href="http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/just-do-it.html">Larry Page from
Google believed that most users are good. href="http://www.ibegin.com/philosophy/">iBegin’s philosophy (point #2)
clearly spells out that users are trusted to deal with the minority that
are spammers. And (getting to the point now), href="http://www.digg.com/">Digg operates under the premise that if a
story is spam/inaccurate/etc, users will mark it before it gets promoted.
And if it does get promoted and people report it, a little text message
will be added notifying users that the article may very well be wrong.

Now, the abuse of the beforementioned power has come to rear twice on Digg.

The first one was about the href="http://neothoughts.com/2006/08/20/introduction-to-socially-driven-poli
tical-news/">abuses in the political section. Nothing makes people
angry like politics do. So instead of forming mobs and torching heathens,
it was decided to bury all opposing views. Left wingers buried the right
wingers. Right wingers buried the left wingers. Both ganged up on the
libertarian and green party stories. Who had marked what lame? Were they
organized? No way of knowing.

The second incident is the one still being felt today – href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Top_100_Digg_Users_Control_56_of_Digg_s_Home
Page_Content">accusations that the Digg ‘elite’ effectively controlled the
site, followed by href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-friends.html">Kevin’s
promise of change (but lets not forget his href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_diggtheblog_archive.html">e
arlier promise of making the burial process more transparent – still
waiting on that), and finally peaking with the href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_s_Top_User_Says_Goodbye">top user on
Digg saying goodbye.

Digg is interesting because it is the largest of the ‘ranked’ users. Sites
like MySpace and Delicious are also very large (or larger) but do not have
the same problem – they do not rely on users to report ’spam’ (at least in
the same way). But a lot of the new-fangled ‘web 2.0′ sites do rely on
their users. And unfortunately, most of these sites trust the user
implicitly.

So where is this article headed?

Lets take a look at P9 (the top Digg user). While I unfortunately do not
have a link handy on me, once he was accused as ‘gaming’ the system, what
had happened to political stories happened to him. Instead of removing
stories that were at ideological ends with their beliefs, people simply
reported anything P9 submitted. It did not matter what the content of that
article was – as long as P9 was the submitter, it was marked off as
lame/inaccurate/etc, and the article ceased to exist. It got bad enough
that both href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-on-digg-friends.html">Kev
in and href="http://hemphill81.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-ceo-jay-adelson-defends-di
gg.html">Jay (the two leaders at Digg) were forced to respond, asking
people not to do that (a tacit admission that they were unable to stop it).

So while P9 announced a public resignation, he was basically killed off by
his fellow diggers. He had an inverted Midas touch – anything he
dugg/submitted was instantly bombed with spam reports, and the story
dissolved and ceased to exist. Irony at its best – people who had accused
him of gaming the system were doing the exact same thing.

So this was ugly, but an isolated issue … right? But lets use our
imagination. Lets say Person X doesn’t like Digg. It may be because he has
a site like Digg (and no, I don’t mean href="http://www.calacanis.com/">Jason Calacanis). He may simply not
like Kevin. Or he may be demented, like href="http://seoblackhat.com/2006/09/08/sexbaiting/">Jason Fortuny. So
he thinks to himself – how can I mess up Digg? Pretty easy. Get 100
different IPs (not that hard, even if all 100 have different C classes).
Register them on Digg. Have them randomly digg 5 stories a day. Then scrape
the top 100 users on Digg, and add them randomly across the 100 fake users.
Simmer for a week or 3, and then *bam* – start reporting any story dugg by
the top 100 users as inaccurate.

KA-BOOM

Thats the sound of havoc. Instantly the biggest Digg addicts are neutered.
What was a reward in fame and recognition is now an exercise in
frustration. Anything they touch becomes tainted and useless. Repeat ad
nauseum for as many weeks and as many users as you want. After all, RSS
feeds make it easy :)

Now before I get accused of wanting to wreck Digg (why would I? They send
us great traffic), Digg is simply the easiest example. Imagine other web
2.0 sites once they reach enough users. Shopping sites? Would it be
surprising if suddenly the iPod gets knocked off as favorite MP3 player
only to be replaced with a Zen? Or a tourist site – whoops, forget about
the Empire State Building, check out the snazzy Chrysler Building (these
are of course only hypothetical situations).

This is a major issue that web 2.0 sites need to plan and look into.
Trusting users is a good thing. But implicitly trusting users is no good.
If Digg has moderators that approve a story before it goes live on the
front page, shouldn’t they have moderators checking spam reports? Social
sites give so much power and emphasis on users yet a handful still have the
power to wreck these sites. Until these issues are properly addressed,
social sites will continue to be gamed.

Anyone remember the ol’ href="http://www.verisign.com/information-services/naming-services/site-finder-services/index.html">Site
Finder Service from Verisign? Claiming that it was for the benefit of normal end users, it basically wildcarded *.com and threw up a page full of ads when a domain did not exist.

Now, ads on domains are a very large business. We won’t go into details here, but estimates are that this industry (PPC ads on a domain) generate roughly 10-15% of all search revenue for Google and Yahoo. That ain’t no chump change.

Recently, Cameroon(the country) followed suit. There are people, who instead of typing Google.com, accidentally type in Google.cm. Just a few weeks ago, they would throw out of a ‘cannot find server’ error, and the user would know he made a mistake. Of course, with the new change, the Cameroonian registrar is going to be making a lot of money. They even have a friendly FAQ page explaining that what they are doing is very friendly and helpful.

So the latest one to pull this off is CNet and its com.com domain. Realizing that a lot of people were typing in .com.com (for whatever bizarre reason), they wildcarded that too. the reach literally tripled overnight. Looking at the exact Alexa statistics, it already accounts for 16% of the traffic to that domain (and remember, this is for a larger time period than the wildcard has been active).

I now wait for Oman (.om) to wildcard is extension, and Colombia to expand and allow direct .co domains (and then wildcard that too).

And just for a wrapup, the Overture
numbers for Google and MySpace:

Google.com: 4,826,887
Google.cm: 24,240
Google.co: 14,013
Google.om: 24,469
Google.com.com: 1,340

Myspace.com: 13,500,077
Myspace.cm: 27,189
Myspace.co: 12,756
Myspace.om: 48,375
Myspace.com.com: 4,369

To note: Many inside the ‘domain industry’ consider the overture number to be a rough indictator of how much traffic that domain gets per day. Based on that, you can see that Cameroonian industry gets 1,594,299 visitors a month just from Google.cm and Myspace.cm

The Web 2.0 hype machine is in full swing. YouTube is supposedly worth a billion dollars. Fantastic websites are popping up left and right. And for many, you are just a registration away from the gloriousness of social nirvana.

And yet while these massive valuations and VC investment numbers fly around, it seems like finding decent programmers is still a challenge.

I remember reading a gripe about this on the last page of Business 2.0 before, but it made sort of sense. It was extended to large corporations such as UPS and FedEx, so stuck in their corporate ways and accounting mannerisms that the obviousness of this would be lost on them. But the latest wizz-bang 2.0 sites? You should know better.

People are different. Color and colour, while spelled different, are the same. So when you ask for my bloody phone number, don’t just ask for it, have me input it, and then reject it because I didn’t put it in a certain format. Beyond the idiocy that such a site does not even warn me what format it should be in, the 5 minutes of usability/programming required to be able to extract the digits from a string are worth it.

It’s stunning how many sites suffer from this. You are already sanitizing all user input (or should be), extending that to sanitize unwanted characters from phone numbers, postal codes, and so forth is rather trivial.

What spurred me to write this was a job search site I ran across. It actually rejected the postal code with spaces, and demanded you re-enter it without spaces.

With the recent news that FireFox has reached a 16% share in the browser market. Blog Flux, a blog services site, has published the data that has been gathered by their MapStats program. WIth over 20 million unique visitors tracked every month, 25% of these people are using FireFox. The really interesting thing is that all the visitors being tracked are purely blog readers.

The first statistic that I wanted to take a gander at would be browser usage. For October 2005 FireFox had a 25% usage, as did it for June 2006. While it did ebb a bit (dropping as low as 23%), it seems to be relatively stable. Interesting is that IE6 seems to have lost 2%, Safari is stable at 4%, and that IE5 and Opera have been replaced as fringe browsers by IE7. NOTE: the browser #s are for each version. Opera 6, 7, 8, 9 are all tabulated separately, and thus why it does not appear on the list.

Search engine wise it seems like Google dominates by a mile. While in October AOL generated at least 1% of search engine traffic, last month it could not even muster that much. As AOL is powered by Google results, and Google’s share (of 83%) remained stable, AOL’s ability to generate traffic has definitely gone down. While MSN is stuck at 2%, Yahoo did gain a percentage point (at AOL’s expense).

Google also apparently dominated, which was to be expected.

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I’d like to write the first entry in what may turn into a series, however I haven’t decided yet. My first victim is going to be GoDaddy. I’ve never liked GoDaddy. They suck…..hard. Anybody who uses them knows that there administration system is crappy, and the signup process for a domain name is ridiculous because of the amount of advertising that is done along the way. They do nothing but sell sell sell all the way during your purchase. It’s ridiculous. I decided to document the whole GoDaddy experience a little better so people can see what it’s like.

#1. HomePage

What a beautiful homepage(not!). Definitely built for the first time visitor to the site to show off all their wonderful features(because you won’t find about them at all through a domain purchase). It’s loaded with tons of blurbs about their various services and such. Let’s login to an account so we can see the wonderful new interface they present to their regular users.

Read the rest of this entry »

Godaddy Coupon Codes Godaddy hosting SUX but they are #1 Domain Name registrar and they are one of the best. Use those godaddy coupons and get cheaper prices

Just running a quick poll to see what the users here would like to see more content on. Vote now! Thanks :)

Do you ever get bored while doing your business in the bathroom? Well, be bored no longer. There now is a stereo dock with speakers for the iPod that also doubles as a tissue holder. Enter the bathroom, place your iPod on the dock, and waste away hours upon hours listening to music and just having plain ol’ good fashioned fun.

via: bLavish

Digg is 99% fantastic. Fast furious news, troll comments, sites being hammered
to oblivion – its Slashdot for the masses!

So while I was on the site today, I noticed two frontpage diggs for A List Apart. Also a wonderful site, it piqued my interest how both were submitted by
Spit1ire. So I did some digging of mine own (pun intended).

So opening the two pages in separate tabs, I scrolled down to the bottom. The first story looked like this:

The second story looked like this:

Lo and behold, the first sixteen diggs for each story were identical! If we remove bribera from one of them, the first nineteen diggs were identical for both stories. In fact, of the first 24 diggs, only 2 users varied for both stories. Hey, even Digg-founder Kevin Rose is seen there.

The one blog entry for each post was by the same person also, but we can chalk
that up to coincidence.

Interpret as you want.

I just realized that there is no button for people to link to us with, so I used a button maker and created one.

Please link to us if you like our site to help spread the word. Thanks!

Well, we should be able to post again. We moved to a new server and had a few problems, but everything should be back to normal again! :)

Apparently, some computer scientists at the University of California Berkeley have found a way to decipher what your password with a computer, simply by hearing it. When they typed a 10 digit password combination, the computer returned 75 different possibilities. What that means, is that they should be able to break 1 out of every 75 people’s passwords on the very first try. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty frightening. Here are a few articles on the subject.

• Researchers Recover Typed Text
• Careful or they’ll hear
• Each Tap Divulges Secret
• Keyboard Click Now Security Threat

In addition to having your password heard, I also ran across an article from PCWorld from a couple of years ago that discusses security vulnerabilities using a wireless keyboard. From that March edition in 2003, Andrew Brandt states “Input devices that share a radio frequency can also share keystroke information across surprisingly long distances.” Anyway, who would’ve thought that there were a couple of ways like this to have your password picked up by simply typing.

Hot on the heals of gVisit ( href="http://forevergeek.com/geek_resources/gvisit_mapping_visitors.php">previously
discussed) comes href="http://mapstats.blogflux.com/">MapStats, a much more full
featured service. The service boasts a lot of improvements over gVisit,
including 100 cities, real-time cities updates, a lot more information
per user, and a more complete statistics package. On top of all this, it’s free, so go on over and check it out.

We finally know how much the Xbox is going to cost! This is about what I expected.

Xbox 360 will cost £279.99 or EUR 399.99 in Europe, Microsoft has just told an audience at the Games Convention event in Leipzig. That is the main package, including 20GB hard disk, wireless controller, headset, Ethernet cable, high-definition television cable and wireless television-style remote control. The US price is $399.99.

A second package, called the Xbox 360 Core System, will be released at the same time, consisting of the bare bones console and a wired controller, for £209.99 or EUR 299.99. The US price for that is $299.99.

I’ll probably be going with the main package myself. I’d personally want to buy all that stuff it comes with anyway. Only a few more months!

I was reading a recent article on the recent Brazilian bank heist that netted the theives over 68 million US dollars. I was trying to find some more information about famous heists over the past 100 years or so but I couldn’t really find that much good information.

Here is one article though that actually turned out to be fairly interesting. It goes over several fairly recent plots to get rich quick. It comes from the site the Crime Library which is actually a fairly interesting site to browse in and of itself. Anyway, go on over and check it out if this kind of stuff interests you.

This site has a page that shows some very good working examples of AJAX. It has only 1 page of examples, because you can do everything without reloading the page if using AJAX. Some people think AJAX is being overhyped, but not me. I love it. If you’re looking for a few basic good examples, then definitely check it out.

In case you’re not quite sure what Ajax is, read this

.

Now this is one person with WAY too much time on their hands. That being said, this is probably just about the coolest case mod that I’ve ever seen. This person must be a raving HL fan.