Category Archives: Internet

Big Fish Games In The Clouds

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big fish games

As the Vancouver Sun tells us this morning, Big Fish Games tests B.C. waters. It is a cute headline about a fast-growing U.S. video game company that is opening a studio in Yaletown in Vancouver.

Seattle-based Big Fish Games, one of the fastest-growing video game companies on the continent, has opened a Vancouver studio.  The Yaletown office has just four employees so far, but has room for almost 50.

Big Fish Games reported revenues of $8.6 million in 2005, $24.1 million in 2006 and $50.8 million in 2007, and employee numbers have grown from 35 to 310. .. The company has found a vast audience partly because it markets to groups not generally associated with video-game playing, including women and seniors.

As it happens, Big Fish Games in the clouds is a much more apt title.  Cloud computing is the current big battleground for the majors like Microsoft and Google.  It is all about SaaS, or Software as a Service if the acronym is new to you.  No longer do you need to download programs to your computer.  All you need is the cheapest of laptops or even a netbook to give you access to whatever programs your favorite supplier is willing to offer.

prize room

By coincidence another online game service is also making the news today.  That is Prize Room and this one gives you your online games completely free. 

PrizeRoom provides what other methods of Internet marketing are truly missing: a new way for consumers to actually interface with sponsors’ products.  In addition, all the in-game content can be branded, changed as often as desired and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  PrizeRoom gives users not only chances to play dynamic and entertaining games incentives, but also offers opportunities for them to qualify to win great prizes and earn valuable incentives from some of the top brands in the world!

It is free because the marketers would like you to spend some time in a place where they can send their messages to you.  That is the kind of Free that Chris Anderson promotes.  You are really paying for whatever you receive by giving them your time.  Perhaps that is the most valuable currency you can offer.

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The Physical Internet

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If you think cyberspace is already mind-blowing, then Cherise Fong of CNN has news for you.  She is looking forward to the day when we all will be Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time.

Vint Cerf, the original Internet evangelist, on the official Google blog has written, "If we can imagine it, there’s a good chance it can be programmed.  The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric."

This will all be possible through the magic of RFID (Radio Frequency Identity) technology, which allows things to be "read" by an NFC (Near Field Communication) scanner, bar-code-style, as well as to store information about themselves and their relationship with their environment, over time.  The reason why RFID is often called next-generation bar code is that the technology is more accurate, scanners can read more objects with less directional contact, and smaller chips can contain a larger quantity of information.

That CNN article is a very worth-while read. Just think of putting a small chip on almost everything and from then on knowing where it is and what has happened to it. As is said, the possibilities are endless.

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Twitter is the eye of the needle

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if your Bible reading is a little rusty, you may not remember the eye of the needle quotation. It reads as follows:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)
For the last two centuries it has been common teaching in Sunday School that there is a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle through which a camel could not pass unless it stooped and first had all its baggage first removed. After dark, when the main gates were shut, travellers or merchants would have to use this smaller gate, through which the camel could only enter unencumbered and crawling on its knees! Great sermon material, with the parallels of coming to God on our knees without all our baggage.

As the text goes on to say, it is a lovely story and an excellent parable for preaching but unfortunately unfounded!

Nevertheless the quotation came to mind on hearing that GasPedal is presenting the BlogWell Seminar on How Big Companies Use Social Media – October 28th, 2008. The seminar features Cisco Systems, Graco, The Home Depot, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Wells Fargo and Walmart.

Twitter is perhaps the epitome of a social system. It is simple and direct and with only 140 characters and spaces, you have got to keep your message simple. It struck me that this is an extension of the process set in hand by the ClueTrain Manifesto. That leveled the playing field and has meant that consumers have much greater power relative to suppliers in this Internet age. Of course the suppliers could arrange to have very complete websites to try to wow the customers. It’s much more difficult to do that in 140 characters and spaces. That is how the Internet is evolving. It is all about two-way communication rather than one-sided monologues.

BlogCouncil

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the Blog Council.

The Blog Council is a forum for the heads of corporate blogging and social media at the largest corporations in the world. The Blog Council brings together all of these people to explore issues and share best practices with one another in a productive and private environment.

With the increasing democratization of the Internet through all of these social media, those heads of corporate blogging and social media have quite a challenge on their hands.

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MRN

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MRN is Right on Time

MRN, now what might that be? Hopefully not just confusion with MSN. Off the bat we should mention that it is not Market Research News.

One must be very careful with acronyms as Marty Weintraub points out: Think SEO Before You Name Your New Company! He illustrates the difficulties with the acronym MRI.

The business is called “Masters Recording Institute.” Cool name right? Let’s take a more careful look. From an SEO services perspective, it’s a classic search engine optimization blunder. To start: everybody loves initials. From our experience, a good percentage of future direct brand searches could occur on the initials “MRI.”

It’s possible that the curious are already referring to the company as such. Sadly, searches for “MRI” result in harvesting all sorts of information about “magnetic resonance imaging,” which is useless in this context. Needless to say, ranking on the average search engine results page (SERP) for the keyword MRI might take a team of link-building-specialists months – and perhaps cost quite a bit.

He is so right. Thankfully for MRN, the competition in a Google search seems less ferocious. Here are some of the top runners.

The other meaning of the acronym MRN is Marketing Right Now. Surprisingly there are few heavyweight contenders for this acronym. One that caught my eye was MRN – Morgue Reference Number. It does not seem all that popular despite the morbid interest that so many people seem to have in programs like CSI and Bones.

This all gives comfort that the acronym MRN can be used as a shorthand for Marketing Right Now. Hopefully Google will confirm the rightness of this choice in a little while.

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Google Chrome Manual

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John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:

People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.

Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?

Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.

Google Chrome

By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.

Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.

It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

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Someone is wrong on the Internet

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Someone is wrong on the Internet

Matt Cutts of Google has an intriguing slip in his post, Something is wrong on the internet!. He is referring to this cartoon by xkcd.

Matt Cutts said something rather than someone. He went on to say:

That comic sums up the internet in one sentence: the scrum of jostling opinions on the web and the optimism that truth can still win out. I was reminded of that comic when someone asked me about a particular way that someone recently tried to get links.

His spam group is perhaps one key way human intervention comes into the Google search process. So his comments later in the post are particularly interesting.

If a website claims to have high-quality information and then deceives the user and serves up malware or off-topic porn, Google considers that spam and takes action on it. Likewise, if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn’t have to trust the links to that site as much.

I really don’t view Google’s role as judging the truthiness of the web. … But if someone is sloppy enough to get caught (or to admit!) making up a fake story, I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either.

It sounds very much as though Google will be acting as the judge. This prompted me to add the following comment to his blog post.

This all seems to be shaking out as it should, Matt. It raised one question in my mind. You did say I don’t think Google has to blindly trust those links, either. I believe Google’s policy is to try to do everything in its search process by computer algorithms since this is scalable. Human intervention should therefore be very limited. Your spam group does that human intervention with an on/off button, I presume, as it applies to clear spam content.

I’m sure many would be interested to know how you treat websites you are no longer blindly trusting. Do you apply the off button for these with a reminder to check again in say six months? Or is it more like a volume control where you apply a down weighting factor? Or again, is it one of those minus X penalties in the SERPs that some talk about?

Since Google is now suggesting it will be more open than it has been in the past, I hope we will get some clarification on this.

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Tag Clouds To Guide You

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The box you see at the top of the right sidebar, which is labeled Popular Tags, contains what is called a tag cloud. All the SMM blogs are now displaying such a tag cloud since, as explained elsewhere, Tags Attract Eyes.

Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.

Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.

Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.

Some Tag Clouds Are Only Word Clouds

Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).

To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.

That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.

Tag Clouds That Get You There

Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.

The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.

We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.

Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA

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Spirit Show

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A Show of Spirit for Greeks

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

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RSS News Feeds Awareness Day, May 1

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RSS news feeds ping on May 1

Spread the word, it’s RSS News Feeds Awareness Day. Although the International Labor Organization may currently be the biggest group celebrating May 1, that could change. Perhaps Daniel Scocco had forgotten about the ILO in coming up with the idea of designating May 1 as RSS Awareness Day. However given that RSS newsfeeds unleash the communicating power of the Internet, the word can spread very fast. I learned about this from the RSS news feed of Andy Beard, who had blogged about it. As we all tell our readers about it, then the momentum becomes unstoppable.

RSS news feeds have been around for many years. It’s the fastest way to be aware of what the BBC or CNN is reporting on. In order to subscribe to the RSS feeds of such favorite sites, all you need is an RSS reader. Here are three web-based and free RSS readers that you can use. All work well and it’s a question of what works best for you:

Once you have your RSS reader working you can just head to your favorite website and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

RSS Awareness Day
Courtesy Andy Beard

Another important way of staying on top of breaking news is with Google Blogsearch. It went through a rough spot during recent months but it’s now back functioning well to alert you to Hot News Items. That too is relying on RSS news feeds. All in all, it’s good to be aware of the power of RSS news feeds. If making May 1 RSS News Feeds Awareness Day can help spread the message, then let’s all ping away.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

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How WordPress Blogs Are Hacked

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The previous two articles in this series have suggested ways to combat the ever-increasing hack attacks that WordPress blogs are receiving. In this final article, we will discuss some real-life examples and what can be learned from them. As a disclaimer, it should be noted that some hackers are very skilled and are continually improving their methods. These are anecdotes from the past and the future will undoubtedly be very different.

Typical Hacking Exploits

For specific details of typical hacking exploits, the following accounts are particularly good:

The methods used in these cases are probably all the work of one hacker, by nickname goro, who may well have been one of the commenters on the first of these three posts.

We will not go into the specific details here (since they will undoubtedly evolve), but rather discuss the bigger picture associated with these exploits. In the case of the hacking done on the SMM blogs, there were some clever refinements. The mechanism inserted on the domain generated hundreds of random, unique blog post web pages, which included links to online pharmaceutical web pages. Since the websites were well ranked in Google, many of these hundreds of blog posts were served to the search engine spiders as they made their visits. After a period of hours, the mechanism then stopped. This may have been to avoid a huge spike in traffic, which would have been more easily detected.

How Google May Have Rewarded Their Efforts

During the last two or three months, Google has been giving much more rapid visibility and higher ranking to blog posts in its regular web search. In the latter part of January, blog posts appropriate for particular keyword searches would appear within a small number of hours in the regular web search. The algorithm may well be using the RSS news feeds associated with the blogs. This gave particular prominence to the blog posts generated by the hacking mechanism. They would almost always appear among the top five positions on a search for particular online pharmaceuticals and often in the first position. Presumably this gave a significant economic advantage to the hacker.

Although the hacking mechanism was removed within 36 hours, the false and now non-existent blog posts still persist in the Google index over 3 weeks later. In some cases the cached versions of the false blog posts are still available.

An interesting parallel development during this time is that Google Blogsearch now has a delay of a few days in displaying new blog posts. Until recently such a new blog post might have appeared within an hour or two, since it was triggered by the pinging of the RSS news feed. Whether this is a reaction to a large volume of blog posts generated by hackers one can only surmise.

How To Repair The Damage

Hopefully this series of articles has sensitized you to the dangers of hacking. This should prompt you to maintain a constant vigil so that any hacker intrusions will be spotted rapidly. You should also as Wayne Liew suggests regard WordPress Upgrades as a Must. The continuing improvement in security may not serve to keep out hackers but at least it may encourage them to attack an easier prey.

If your WordPress blog is hacked, it can be quite a challenge to find out what has been changed. Sometimes the hacker may have modified files deep within folders that are not normally touched in upgrading, such as the images folder or the wp-content folder. Checking the size in bytes of particular files compared with versions in the most recent backup will reveal suspicious differences. Sometimes the .htaccess file may have been modified to create additional and inappropriate mechanisms. In such cases, you’ve got to make sure that you eliminate all such additions to the website. If you have backed-up a clean version of the website recently, it might be better to take down the website and replace it with a clean version.

Related:
Blogs Take Center Stage For Marketers And For Google
How to Remove WordPress.net.in Spam Injection

Previous articles in this series:
WordPress Blog Hacked
Guarding Your WordPress Blog

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