Blogcritics Sci/Tech Opinion

Google's Search Engine Optimization Start Guide and Why It's Bad for Innovation

Jeremy Gin — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:58:06 EST

Only by kicking Google out of its comfortable position atop the search market will the Internet realize its innovative potential.
Google has always been coy when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). And understandably so. Google must balance its need for Web sites to be formatted such that they can be properly crawled and indexed with its need to keep people from manipulating the search process. The result is muddled. Other than basic documentation on its Webmaster...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Things I Don't Like About My Mac

Raoul Pop — Thu, 7 Sep 2006 13:50:11 EDT

I've had an iMac G5 for just about a year now. I've been patient, and I gave it time. I considered extenuating circumstances as well. But after a year of experiencing the same problems, over and over again, something needed to be done. Having also experienced some of these problems on other Macs I've used, I can fairly safely say they're not limited to my iMac, and furthermore, they're the sort of problems that could be easily fixed by Apple engineers. I sat down to write this list in the hope they'll read it and act on it for the sake of future Apple users. First, let me specify this: my computer is up to date with the latest patches and downloads from Apple. It has no viruses, it hasn't been hacked into by spammers, no hard drive sectors are corrupted, it's fairly new and fairly fast. It also has plenty of memory. Specs: iMac G5 2.0GHz/1GB RAM. In short, it's a good computer that should work just fine. iPhoto is slow, and crashes just about every time I download photos from my digital camera. No, it's not my camera, I connected three different models, from different manufactures, and it crashes regardless. The photos get downloaded, but somehow when it's time to close the connection between it and the camera, it freezes. I have to Force Quit it. Also, when I use it to browse my photos, it'll crash unexpectedly and close. It does this every once in a while. Shouldn't it be more stable than this?Burning DVDs and CDs is a real hassle. It's fairly easy to get the burn process going, but finishing it is another matter. That's because the software is unreliable -- and I'm using the built-in software (Disk Utility, Finder). About five out of every ten CDs or DVDs I stick in there, my Mac spits out because of "communication errors" with the drive. This is a ridiculously large number of errors. Having burned CDs and DVDs on my PC, from the same brand, and even the same batch, and never having gotten disc errors, I can say that this is clearly a Mac problem. Furthermore, these are good CDs and DVDs (Memorex, TDK). They weren't made by some cheap, fly-by-night operation, so they're not to blame. You may think, big deal, DVDs and CDs are cheap, they're only 15-25 cents apiece. Maybe so, but the error rate is still unacceptable. And have you thought about DL discs? I recently bought some, and they came out to about five dollars per disc. I tried burning a big file onto a disc (about 6 GB), only to have my Mac spit it out, again because of a communication error. I'm not happy when my Mac wastes my money like this. How about when Blu-Ray or HD DVDs come out? They'll be $35-50 per disc. Would you be happy when your Mac spits one out during burning because of a communication error? That disc will be unusable, and you'll be left with a hole in your wallet.Reading and writing to CD-RW discs is problematic as well. Simply put, my Mac spits out certain CD-RW discs without even bothering to read them. Why? I don't know. When I stick them in my PC, they work fine. They're not scratched, they have files on them, they're usable. Or, it'll sometimes read them, but it won't let me erase them. I can erase them on my PC.iDVD is a joke. It's not a real application. It's got to be the most un-intuitive piece of software ever created. I tried using it several times, I tried reading the help files, but no use. I just can't figure out how to use it. And I've been using other video editing software on both the PC and the Mac, as well as DVD-burning software. iDVD I just can't figure out. Plus, it has this ridiculous restriction on the size of the video files. If, by its own estimation, a video file's size exceeds its own burn limit on a DVD, no matter if its actual duration is less than what would normally fit on a DVD, it won't burn it. It'll say I need a DL DVD. That's silly! It should compress it to fit it onto a single layer DVD. I, for one, am not going to waste a DL DVD to burn half an hour of video. It just doesn't make sense to me. The video file size is smaller than 4 GB (actually, it's under 1 GB), the video duration is under 30 minutes, yet I can't burn it onto a standard DVD with iDVD because it's too big. Does this make sense to you?I like iMovie, but the movie exports (to movie files) are slow. Plus, it could stand to be easier to use. My benchmark is EyeTV. It's incredibly easy to edit movies there. Wow, is it ever easy! That's how easy iMovie should be, especially considering that Apple is positioning itself as the leader in multimedia hardware and software.Mac OS X crashes. Yes, as unbelievable as that sounds, it does happen. And when it crashes, unexpected things occur. Like files on external drives get corrupted. Why, I don't know, but I wish it would stop. I lost plenty of precious files this way, and I don't like it. When Windows crashed, it may have warned me that files may be lost, but somehow the files were always fine.Quicktime Pro is one slow piece of software. I tried using it to export movie files to different formats, but when it takes 24-36 hours to convert a two hour video file from DivX or AVI to H.264 or MPEG-4, it's a little too much time for my taste, and I daresay, for most people's tastes. Yes, I tried this numerous times, with different movie files, and conversion to different formats. Slow, slow, slow. Oh, and another thing. I buy Quicktime Pro for $30, and when I want to open .mpg files, I find out I need to purchase another $30 codec. I don't remember having to do this on my PC. As a matter of fact, .mpg files were playable (and still are) right within the standard Windows Media Player.Have you tried to use Mail to import your emails from Thunderbird? Have you noticed it just doesn't work, that it crashes every time? Yes, it's Apple's fault. Why? Because a single person was able to take care of this problem with a handy app, somewhat misnamed, but wonderfully effective. It's called Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, and it'll automatically import Thunderbird and Eudora emails into Mail.This is not entirely a Mac problem, Microsoft has plenty to do with it too, but PowerPoint freezes a lot, on many .ppt files.Video play in iTunes is jumpy at best. I mean, yuck, why enable video play directly in iTunes if it's going to be horrible? Doesn't matter which videos I play, whether they're from the iTunes store, or MPEG-4 files from video podcasts, videos take precious seconds to load, video play stutters, pauses in mid-play, skips over frames -- in short, it's just not good enough. My iMac is no slouch. It should do just fine. And no, the solution isn't to buy a newer Mac, a "dual core". I'm not going to buy a new computer every year, although I'm sure Apple would like it if I did. Remember what Steve Jobs said not too long ago? That people need to buy a new iPod every year in order to keep up with the changes? (!)I have an external iSight, and it's unreliable. It stops working unpredictably, and I have to unplug/re-plug it into my iMac when it does that. I tried recording a video of myself on the iSight through Quicktime, and 20 seconds into it, the iSight froze. Tried it three more times, with the same result, then gave up. Seems to function okay with iChat AV, Skype and Yahoo Messenger though, but its microphone isn't any better than the internal iMac one. I still have voice echos when I use it. I should probably mention that this is a replacement iSight. The original one that I bought with my computer wasn't centered -- in other words, I stood dead-center in front of the computer, the camera was pointed at me, yet on screen, I appeared on the left. I had a really "nice" time getting Apple Support to replace it.My Bluetooth mouse was/is a battery hog. You know how batteries in these Bluetooth mice last about a month. Apple estimates it at about that, anyway. Well, the Bluetooth mouse shipped with my iMac ate through its batteries in a week, and sometimes in just a few days. It took over six months to get Apple Support to believe me and ship me out a new one. The new one seems to take about two or three weeks to go through its batteries, but I'm not going to waste my time calling Apple again. Yes, I have the Three-Year Apple Care Plan, but I guess Apple just wants me to pay for it and not use it, because they balk at replacing defective parts every time I call.The Shared folder -- you know, the one where you're supposed to be able to "share" files among the users on a computer -- just doesn't work as it's supposed to. You see, it keeps the user permissions on the file when you move stuff into it, so when my wife wants to re-name or move or delete a file I've shared with her, even though she should be perfectly able to do this, she can't, because that file belongs to me. She has to authenticate herself, as an Admin (if she weren't an Admin, she couldn't do anything at all), and only then can she do something with that file. And she has to authenticate for each file she wants to work with. This is an absolute hassle, and it's not the way a Shared folder should work. Apple, this is one time when you need to copy Microsoft. The Shared Documents folder on PCs works great, and just as expected. When you move a file into it, it inherits the permissions on the Shared folder, which means all users can work with that file and do whatever they need to do with it. This is logical. Apple's way isn't, and needs to change.Hey, did you notice there's no easy way to have common iPhoto and iTunes libraries for the accounts on one computer? You just can't do it with a few clicks of the mouse. You have to hack things. Seems to me that a husband and wife who have two accounts on the same computer ought to be able to share their photos and music libraries, and have single copies of each, not duplicates. There's no "official solution" for this on the Mac. You have to find your own, which is what we did. We went into the prefs for iTunes for each account, and pointed it to a common location in the Shared folder. Of course, we had to call Apple Support to get the privileges reset, because there was no way to figure out what in the world the user groups were, but that's another story. With iPhoto, it was harder. There's no way to change the library location, iPhoto won't let you. But you can hack it by using shortcuts in the expected location in each user account that point to a common location. We chose the Shared folder again, and again we had to reset privileges. But this should be easier, much easier! With a few clicks of the mouse, we should be able to say what libraries we want to share among user accounts, get them re-located on the fly, and also specify which user accounts have permissions to what.What sorts of user groups are there in Mac OS X? You have to be a UNIX geek to figure them out. When we needed to adjust privileges on folders and files (see bullet point above) we were at a loss. What in the world is "wheel", and so on and so forth? Why not something intuitive, like "Administrators" and "Users"? Windows has Apple beat on this one.Why is FTP mode set to Passive by default? And why can't it be changed from within FTP program settings (you know, apps like Fetch or Cyberduck)? Because it can't. You have to go into Terminal to change it, and you have to know what to type in there. This was confirmed with Apple Support, who also couldn't help me and had to transfer me to Advanced Support so I could find out what to do in Terminal.For those of you who are going to misunderstand this post, let me clarify things. I'm not trying to explain my way into using a PC instead of a Mac, because PCs are that much better -- they're not. A Mac has certain advantages over a PC, and every Mac user knows them, including me. That's why most Mac users can't see how they could go back to Windows. But, I'm sure most Mac users have also experienced plenty of frustration with their Mac, and think Apple could do a better job with things. This article was written for this purpose. It's a list of suggested improvements gathered over the span of a year by a fairly typical Apple user, and I realy do hope Apple puts my list to good use.

I'm a web developer, blogger and photographer. I write daily about technology, photography, travel and other interesting things on my site. I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow my work.

Digg Faces New Accusations Of Censorship: An Inside Look

Phillip Winn — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:53:55 EDT

The Blogosphere has erupted with accusations against Digg.com, claiming voting fraud and then censorship. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, has responded, and so have others.I know a little bit about how this works, having gone through a lot of drama with Digg myself and having talked to Kevin Rose several times to resolve it. For some time I was also convinced that Digg was saying one thing in public ("Digg is a community-driven site") and another things in private (banning users and entire sites without warning or reason). I've since come to see things a different way, and the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle.My Story:I'm an owner of a site called Blogcritics: this site. We've had a number of articles submitted to Digg. Some by random readers, but many by our own editors. For some time we instituted a program we called "Red Alerts," where articles we thought would be a good match for Digg (and several other sites) would be submitted by an editor and then the URL listed on the article page so that registered Digg users could more easily vote for the article.We also sent out emails to our writers via a group we use for site-related communication, inviting them to read the article and vote for it if they found it worthy. I personally voted for many, but not all, of the articles "red alerted" in this way. I'm not entirely sure how many votes it takes to reach Digg's front page, but I'm quite certain we never bullied our way on to it.At most I believe we had around a dozen people I recognized as site members voting for articles, and it takes at least three times that to make it on to Digg's front page. What those votes from multiple people did do, however, was raise the profile of the submission in Digg Spy, which is where a lot of people look to try to filter through the tons of submissions. Every time someone votes for an article, it pops up in Digg Spy, and people scanning the list get another chance to click and check it out for themselves. Most of the articles we submitted never made it to the front page, but some did.Then came a series of articles from an exuberant young writer about two prominent companies well known among tech blog readers. While his first article was clearly speculative and interesting and not unreasonable, subsequent articles in the series (there were four) took the writer increasingly farther out on a limb. I protested the red alerting of the last one entirely, but -- and this is an important point -- even as a site owner, I don't have control over everything that happens related to the site. It was red alerted, some people voted for it, and because it involved two popular companies, lots of people completely unrelated to the site also voted for it. All four of these stories made it to the front page, infuriating many people.I should stop here and make sure that people understand that nothing we did was or is against the Terms of Service at Digg. We never created fake accounts, we never voted using other people's accounts, we never did anything but vote for articles we liked. I'm personally a Digg user anyway, and read and voted for lots of articles that had nothing to do with Blogcritics, but some people didn't. That's their choice, and again, not against the rules then or now. Whenever you allow voting, you will eventually attract "voting blocs," and while we weren't the most organized or consistent of blocs when compared to, say, Congressional caucuses, we did tend to vote in groups. Here is where things get interesting: People assumed the worst - not Kevin Rose, not Digg staffers, but commenters and readers: Digg users. They accused the writer of those articles of attempted stock manipulation, prompting him to add disclaimers to the articles that he didn't stand to profit in any way and owned no stock in any of the companies involved. Many people refused to believe him even then.Digg users generally misunderstood the function of Blogcritics.org as an online magazine with more than 1200 writers, and seemed to believe that Blogcritics was the personal blog of the writer of those articles. Digg users noticed some of the same names showing up among the first twenty or so diggs on each of the four articles and assumed that zombie accounts were being used (they weren't), and that the votes were fraudulent (they weren't). And here's the important part: they acted. They reported the articles as Lame and Inaccurate and Spam and any number of other things. Digg seems to have been in the process of developing some of these features just as this was happening, so for those of us who had been Digg users for a while and had never seen submissions disappear before, it appeared to be censorship. When Digg staff investigated and saw widely divergent IP addresses and voting patterns and so on, they quickly realized that nothing untoward had been happening, but Digg users didn't believe the public statements of Kevin Rose and Jay Edelson and others when they stated that there had been no violation of Digg's TOS. And as a result of the negative reports on the article, the article disappeared. I wasn't too concerned about that article, because I wished nobody had ever submitted in the first place, but I was very concerned about what happened next.Shortly after that, someone submitted another Blogcritics article and sent out a Red Alert email, and some of the usual crowd read the article and liked it enough to vote for it. While Digg staffers considered the previous issue resolved and felt we had done no wrong, Digg users felt differently, and reported the article, the site, and all users voting for it, getting each banned. Please note, I believe Kevin Rose when he assured me that this was all automatic and all driven by the users of the site. He seemed genuinely sympathetic to our plight, and un-banned the site and all users upon request, but stated that because Digg is a community-driven site, our challenge was to convince Digg readers not to report us and trigger the automatic bans.That remains our challenge today, and since I wasn't particularly impressed by the perceptiveness of many Digg users then, I'm not sure I have a much higher opinion today. Many, even most, Digg users are extremely intelligent people, but it only takes a few people reporting an article, site, or user to trigger a ban. So I certainly don't know that there was no fraudulent voting going on with the articles from A List Apart, and I understand that the lock-step order of the votes raises alarms, but it is easily for me to believe that it is coincidence. Unlikely? Sure, but that's the nature of coincidences.It is also easy for me to believe that the banning of ForeverGeek.com and all users who voted for stories from ForeverGeek.com was driven by users and not Digg staff. I didn't believe it at first when it happened to me, either, but subsequent conversations with Kevin Rose changed my mind. A certain unknown number of reports results in an article being "buried." A certain unknown number of articles from the same site being "buried" results in that site's URL being banned. Users who have voted for a certain unknown number of "buried" articles (and perhaps haven't for a certain unknown number of balancing un-buried articles) are automatically banned. And so on.Digg's ChallengesDigg's challenges, as I see them, are three-fold: The first Kevin Rose has already addressed, and it is transparency. Since submissions are currently buried without notice, and sites and users banned without warning or indication, people can easily assume the worst. Secondly, the problem is with Digg users. As I've just mentioned, many of them seem to assume the worst. Or the best. Like a herd, they vote by the hundreds, even thousands, for articles based on titles alone, then turn in a moment to report the same stories without thinking any more than they did in the first place. They make many assumptions, good and bad, and act too zealously to protect Digg's reputation (and their own) at the expense of transparency. That leads to the third problem, balance. As things stand, spam and inaccurate stories can be buried by users, but there is no check or balance for deliberate attempts to bury perfectly good stories. Voting blocs for a story (or site) can be countered, but voting blocs against a story (or site) cannot. Digg can solve the first problem, and maybe the third, but the second is, I think, inherently an issue with community sites. They can never rise above the level of the community, and communities are like very large committees: it is mediocrity that ends up being celebrated most.

Phillip Winn is the Chief Geek for BC Magazine, and a blogger since 1995. He may currently be found and followed on Twitter.