Experiments in Cyberspace

I had been expecting the claims guy from my insurance company to come by my work yesterday and check out the damage on my vehicle from the accident I was in on Friday. I was expecting to have to be assertive about having a homebirth so I was kind of nervous. The pregnancy books say its more and more common towards the end of pregnancy, but man am I having trouble in this department lately!! Arthur is putting a little foot on my ribs more and more often now, so I guess he has run out of other places to stick it! Im still pissed off about the other day, and I really, really, really hate Toby Keith even more now. "What Should I write about?" was the question I asked to my blog drone after a long hiatus. It muttered something along those lines above.

Life is a good teacher. Up to now, it has never occurred to me a short domain name could be an advantage. I have always assumed, because I do it that way, people could bookmark a site when they like it regardless of the length of its name. Though I do not use it, social networking sites like Twitter changed my mind. I suddenly realized how difficult it must be to write a tweet about an article on this site without the aid of URL shortener services. Just writing the part "experimentsincyberspace/2009/04/" with the protocol prefix consumes 52 characters. I am not saying you will not be found. I am talking about the extra step, often tedious, of the necessity of shortening the URL. A very good idea could be having a short URL handy beneath or above your articles so that people can easily use it. Rather than having your visitors do it, you can take the extra step and place a short link yourself. In addition, keeping your URL intact can be a marketing and branding advantage. ...

After Google's April 2009 PageRank update, there has once again been a commotion and confusion about the issue of links in paid-for-posts and how they affect PageRank. As far as Google is concerned, their stand is crystal clear. Their webmaster guidelines dictate a nofollow attribute on such links as Google's Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye explain , Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users. If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by cau...

It is no secret that I am not a big fan of social bookmarking . Don't get me wrong, I love sharing stuff with friends. I simply missed the train of stumbling, twitting and whatnot; or to put it more correctly, I had gotten used to a system of my own long before social media services were scattered all around the web. Yet, they have been a fact of our lives. I have just added a few bookmarking buttons here in the hope that they will be useful to those who are accustomed to the phenomenon and can't live without it. I hope I did the coding right. I included a few bookmarking sites which I thought to be popular and beneficial. The real purpose of this post, however, is to thank the developer Joost de Valk of Sociable , a popular Wordpress plug-in. I sort of shared his styling and ported here. I really do not like others where, after an accidental mouse over a pop up springs up, an event I find highly distracting. Others make a call home and if there is a problem there, your...

I have made a small experiment for the last two days. I visited some 50 blogs yesterday and bookmarked only the ones that I had no desire to read for any reason. Today, I revisited them. To my surprise, at least 10% of them turned out to be very good. This led me thinking, how come did I miss them? The following video in which a corporation is assigned to design the traffic stop signs we all love to see might help: Believe it or not, I have been to such a meeting!

As readers of this blog are aware, my view of using social media is not mainstream, or should I say it is unorthodox. I strongly believe that achieving higher ranks in search engine results will yield more positive returns in the long run, as opposed to getting to the front pages of social media sites. Although this opinion is based more on intuition rather than raw data, I do have some statistics albeit limited in depth and scope. I paid a visit to an internet cafe whose owner is a friend of mine. After a full day's observation, here are my preliminary findings: From a total of 54 customers, none visited a social media site. 60% of those said "yes" when asked if they had made a query using a search engine that day. The most popular application was MSN's instant message service. I will go on and speculate that, a considerable percentage of social media users is made up of bloggers themselves and commercial site owners. For any blogger who wants to target casu...

Hamilton is a beautiful island off the coast of Queensland, Australia and some might even call it a paradise. This little island is looking for a blogger to be employed for six months. It looks like a good opportunity for the adventurous bloggers with a wage of usd 25,000 per month. If you can fulfill the following requirements, go and apply for the best job in the world : Good swimming skills must be able to use snorkel efficiently tolerance for flexible working hours adventurous in spirit be able to post an article every two weeks (this must be tough) feed the tortoises observe the whales The successful candidate will be given a fully furnished 3-room condo with an ocean view and no, it is NOT a joke.

In a recent Entrecard forum thread about advertising and rejection of ads on the basis that they are not topically related to the blog where the ad will appear, Texas Wanderer has given the best explanation: Smart advertisers don't look at YOUR blog. They do some forward thinking about who would be visiting your blog, and is that someone that would click on their ad. I've chuckled many times here on EC when I see someone say, "I declined their ad because it had nothing to do with the theme of my blog". These people, while having every right to expose only "relevant" ads on their blog, don't really grasp the basics of marketing. Their blog has nothing to do with why the ad was posted there, it has to do with their readers. A good example is one of my old web customers that sells artwork by a Christian artist. If I made them an EC card, I would NOT advertise on "artwork" blogs, yet that would be the most relevant place. Instead, I would ...

With no intention of upsetting numerous bloggers - some of which I closely follow and benefit - who advise on how to make money on line, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics that was recently published in Edge can be an eye-opener. In his analysis of the latest crisis of the banking system, Taleb says, When I was a quant-trader in complex derivatives, people mistaking my profession used to ask me for "stock tips" which put me in a state of rage: a charlatan is someone likely (statistically) to give you positive advice, of the "how to" variety. Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a book on "how I failed in business and in life"—though the second type of advice is vastly more informational, and typically less charlatanic. Indeed, the only popular such ...

Analyzing the crisis of journalism and whether blogging or independent on-line journalism can take the place of media reporting as we know it or not, are not easy issues to tackle. The difficulty stems from the fact that, public's right to access to information, ensuring public's safety, personal and privacy rights, safeguarding the bloggers and anonymity, upholding copyright and patent laws  are all intertwined in a beautiful mixture of a soup we call Internet. Since the topics are huge and will provide enough material to write for many years, I am going to start at a random point. Unlike many though, I do have a proposition to solve most of the problems of today, but to present it gracefully requires time; so it will have to wait. Today, I would like to give three seemingly unrelated news and want you to focus on not who is right or wrong but on the mechanics of them, i.e. how things operate or unfold. First, we have the report of Committee to Protect Journalists, ...

I have partially covered some of the social networks you can use . Now, let us focus on making the most of them. I will recommend a slightly different strategy for you to follow. After you have made your own experiment and decided on which networks you will concentrate your efforts, here are some tips for you: Do not rush submitting your own posts Do not try to game the system in vain. Instead, give your readers the opportunity to bookmark and/or submit them. This will be a new experiment with which you will measure what percentage of your subscribers take the time to bookmark and share your posts. Think how you can improve the submission rates Most probably, the initial results will be discouraging, that's good! Now, reread your posts and note how you could have written them better, especially the titles. Check if your bookmark links function properly and if they are clearly visible. Do you encourage your readers to share? Use comments to your advantage When answering a rea...

No, I am not obsessed with speed if you have mistakenly got the impression after seeing this post and how to design an efficient blog . I live in an unfortunate area with an Internet connection averaging around 8 Kb per second, which is 1/13 of those who live 10 kilometers to the east and west of me. The tel-co will supposedly make some infrastructure improvements only after January, 2009. Well, at least that is what they claim. I can handle a slow connection but it is really annoying to wait for my own blog to load for 40 seconds. So I decided to make it leaner for my own sake. Before writing this post, I pulled down various statistics of the site (home page only) to help me improve a bit: Total HTML: 19,899 bytes, compressed; Total images: 53,785 bytes; JavaScript: 230,649 bytes; CSS: 8,417 bytes; Total CSS imports: 4. Looking at the above figures, it is apparent that there are only two areas I can make some improvements: JavaScript and CSS imports. I focused on cutting bac...

A common concern for all bloggers new and old is reaching a wider audience. They start with their family members and a few friends, and they write their feelings, thoughts, experiences etc, hoping to gain more subscribers in the wild wild web. Sooner or later, they direct their attention to the so-called social networks as getting traffic from search engines is difficult, at least initially. I will briefly touch upon my experiences with some of them and sincerely hope you will find this review useful. Before we go on, however, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: Do you enjoy using them? Your answer to this is the KEY CONCEPT here. If you think a particular network will bring you readers just because you manage to throw in a post or two, or any number of them, you will soon discover you are wrong. The buzz word is, and has always been the user experience , and you are one of those users. If the network(s) of your choice helps you find interesting blogs, good articles an...

Einstein was a great scientist and without exception all physics students new to his work are introduced to his use of Gedanken Experiment or thought experiments. Gren Ireson, a lecturer at Loughborough University, UK, where his research interests include quantum philosophy, physics of sport and learning and teaching physical sciences, contests that a thought experiment has three requirements [PDF]: It is carried out in the mind (however one cares to define 'mind'). It draws on experience. It allows the experimenter to see what is happening (perhaps a better term to use than 'see' is 'imagine' or 'form a mental image').  I see a lot of blogs announcing they do follow comments lately, so I will humbly use Einstein's technique to shed some light on do follow commenting today. Let us start with a definition first. Google's Matt Cutts speaks: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives web masters the ability to modify PageRank flow ...

According to Los Angeles Times, Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, is offering free blogs to laid-off journalists via their Journalist Bailout Program : Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you. We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported on-line journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence. But I did not read the story from LAT first. While Times focused on how generous was Anil Dash's (from Six Apart) offer and the difficulties of making money on-line, it was Graham of Entrecard who truly got to the bottom of the real...

For me, that is! Every once in a while I stumble upon a blog that mentions about these sexy, classy, fashionable, affordable, high quality, smart (yes-sir, smart), high profile designer frames (with variable dimensions) and eyeglasses using the latest modern materials, manufacturing and marketing systems. Apparently, buying a pair is a must if you want to acquire an aura of Zen.Ni-Cad batteries may not last but the effect of these eyeglasses with a wide range of patterns and prices will. In doubt? It is even in the news, you dumb foxes! After seeing these words a hundredth time, I have almost started to believe  Jason Calacanis, who announced his retirement from blogging . But what hurt me most is this analysis of the Economist:[1] The rest of the world may well have missed the unfolding of his tragedy. Behind it, however, is a bigger trend. Blogging has entered the mainstream, which -as with every new medium in history- looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the ea...

Excluding its simplicity, a big plus, Blogger has some disadvantages over other free blogging platforms. It heavily relies on JavaScript (this quite plain site ships 100,034 bytes of JS) rather than server side scripting, i.e. PHP or Perl, it claims to be XHTMl 1.0 strict, yet the very first script Google flushes breaks the validation, resulting in 461 errors, 164 warnings for this very site. These problems inevitably slow down loading of the pages and design concerns for running an efficient blog become even more critical. Now, I can live with extensive use of client side scripting (JavaScript) and 461 errors because there is nothing I can do about them and modern browsers are really fault tolerant (which makes them less secure, too). But I can not live without Comment Luv. It is the coolest, sweetest idea in the whole blogosphere. It is trivial to install it on a, say, wordpress blog. When I found out that there was a Comment Luv plug-in for Blogger , I had to try it. And I di...

Since this seems to be a popular topic, let me throw in a post in the early stages of this fresh blog of mine. It is popular because everyone and his dog have written something about it. Now, hear what this cat has to say. Why do you blog? No, I am serious, think about it. What is your aim, your target? What do you want to achieve? This is the single most important factor that will have an impact on designing an efficient blog (you noticed the emphasis on efficient, didn't you?). Here are some thoughts: You want to spread your ideas, i.e. you want to be read. You want to sell your products, crafts, etc. on-line. You want to make money from advertising or similar. If you consider the above, you will see that: First group needs readers or subscribers; Second, customers; Third, targeted visitors. You should evaluate your blog, from top to bottom, taking into account what type of visitors you expect. Without further ado, excluding the third group (there is a plethora of ar...