uto-responders, also referred to as “vacation messages”, are a valuable feature of E-mail accounts. These are not only helpful when an account gets checked irregularly, but also when it becomes deprecated.

Auto-responders can be invoked by the E-mail client (e.g. recent versions of Outlook), but they require the computer to remain switched on. This, in fact, is the big con: the method unnecessarily consumes electricity in cases of an actual vacation. The computer needs to stay on for days or weeks at a time. Messages can be checked upon return, assuming the computer has not crash beforehand.

Alternatively, autoresponders can be handled at server level. It is worth noting that this will not always be a supported feature, especially when you do not have ownership of your E-mail address’ domain. The exception are Web-based mailing systems that support the feature fully, e.g. Yahoo Mail and CommuniGate Pro.

There is an ad-hoc alternative to autoresponders, which I adopted since I was able to set up a mail forwarder, but not an autoresponder.

• Set up a forwarder to a meaningful but non-existent E-mail address, e.g. I_am_away_at_the_moment@no.domain or This_account_has_been_intentionally_terminated@no.domain.
• Since the account you forward mail to resides on an address that does not exist, the message will bounce, though often not immediately.
• Subsequently, a delivery error will reach the original sender. Budging by the odd E-mail address that triggered an error, the message sender will receive information regarding the situation rather than assume that the recipient stayed silent.

To sum things up, forwarders to made-up addresses can guarantee that in the absence of auto-responders, all correspondents will receive meaningful feedback.

Scrapers: where is the original content? Left or right?

everal companies including Google have devised mechanisms so as to avoid becoming the hosts to spammers. It is broadly agreed that spam blogs (also referred to as “splogs”) and spam-generating E-mail accounts can easily damage the reputation of the ISP or the on-line service which provides the bandwidth. Consequently, Google have reacted to spam blogs in a variety of ways and required Google Mail subscribers to be invited by another existing member (“friend brings a friend”), thus establishing trust. Moreover on the issue of spam, content spam can finally be reported and feedback acted upon.

The brand-new WordPress.com, a service similar to that of TypePad and Blogger, takes the same approach as GMail and distributes “invites”. A limit on the number of invites helps the battle against spam over HTTP. While their mechanism appears similar to that GMail invites, it serves a different puspose and has different implications. With spam blogs being endemic, one needs to gain control over who creates blogs, as well as how many. The requirement for a referral from a friend is a novel idea, which can result in a highly-reputed network of blogs. It would attract the best bloggers from ‘junk networks’ characterised by plagiarism, hotlinked (sometimes stolen) graphics or content that provokes hatred and intolerance.

Where else can this idea of invites be used? Virtually in any domain which involves public account instantiation, e.g.:

• E-mail accounts
• Blogs
• Webspaces
• On-line bookmarks such as del.icio.us

Many other services are moving online (possibly reaching out for on-line operating systems), so we shall see spam hitting many other types of services in the future. Not so long ago I wondered if there would be a place for invites trading on eBay. I guessed it was only a matter of time. Links and PageRank likewise. It was a few days that a WordPress invite ended up in an eBay auction, much as I had predicted. That means that people earn money for subscription to services they do not own! So, under certain circumstances, spamming appears to be substituted by scalping.

Only months after the release of Google Desktop, the much richer Google Desktop 2 has been announced. This native desktop software, as well as indexing and searching one’s hard-drive, incorporates a controversial sidebar. This sidebar contains RSS feeds, a virtual Gmail inbox, news headlines and more utilities and plug-ins like a scheduling toolset.

Will this truly provide the infrastructure to what might become a Google homebred Web browser? This kind of browser would make the Google-centric application everything that you will ever need. Would such strategy move all the users’ data on-line, namely mail, schedule and settings? Will this make our lives even more portable? Surely there is potential for this vision, which is not baseless. Google have strong ties with the Mozilla Foundation and they may have pondered the possibility of a Google browser in the past. Some sources claim they have.

Related items: Google OS – What if?, Towards On-Line Operating Systems

oogle’s PageRank mechanism refelects on popularity estimates in most engines and directories, which presently adopt similar ranking methods that are based on the notion of citations (links).

The average webmaster would fall victim to an illusion. It always appears as if the majority of other sites have higher ranks. A question then springs to mind: how come most pages being visited have PageRank 4 or higher, for example, if they are only a small minority? The matter of fact is that much of the Web, including one’s own site have much lower ranks. That remote part of the Web is often virtually invisible to the errant surfer.

Let us recognise the fact that Google, Yahoo and CNN, for example, receive far more traffic than other sites. Their traffic is many orders of magnitude higher than that of the average site. To visualise this, I drew two exponential curves. Some figures suggest that the curves I drew for illustrational purposes should be far steeper. Some would suggest that at any level of PageRank the number of sites may be 3 times smaller and the traffic 3 times greater than that of the previous PageRank level.

The number of sites with PageRank 10 is tiny when compared to the number of sites with PageRank 0. Conversely, traffic is largely centralised in sites with a high PR.

To give an idea of how vast the World Wide Web actually is, the number of sites is slowly approaching 100 million (all registered global domains, as well individual parts of the world). At present, PageRank 0 may fit 50 million sites (some are not identified, not listed, or parked), PageRank 2: 5 million sites, PageRank 4: 500,000 sites and so forth. Of course this rough guess does not lead to the true numbers, which end up at just dozens of sites with PageRank 10.

In conclusion, always remember that the vast majority of sites is on the left-hand-side of the figure above, whereas some of the far more popular pages are on the (comparably) tiny number of pages on the right, e.g. the Google’s search page, the BBC front page or the W3 consortium pages.

ethods exist for fetching weather forecasts as XML (RSS feeds). Weather Underground is the international giant, but its feeds are not sufficiently extensive. It reflects on current conditions in various places in the world, but provides no forecast. To subscribe to such feeds, go to Weather Underground, search for your town/city and identify the button (presently at the top-right of the resulting page).

For more extensive and useful details, make use of the brand new XML’d information from the American National Weather Service:

• Watches, Warnings, and Advisories
• Current Weather Conditions
• Forecast Database XML Web Service

The folks in the United Kingdom can enjoy the BBC Weather RSS feeds, which are in fact scraped from BBC Weather They are not quite legitimate, but they provide a concise yet detailed 5-day forecast.

Maybe purely by mistake, or maybe intentionally so, Wikipedia Stats pages are available for public viewing.

Interesting figures to notice:

• Internet Explorer’s share among Wikipedia users/visitors is 70% (it gets around 52% on schestowitz.com)
• Referrals by search engines:
  • Google: 3082040
  • Yahoo: 1156329
  • MSN: 263755

This implies that certain search engines favour Wikipedia more than others (judge for yourself). It also suggests that Firefox users tend to like Wikipedia more than Internet Explorer users.

he Computer Business Review reports that Yahoo will soon join the VoIP market and target the hugely popular Skype. VoIP, which has become synonymous with Skype, is a method/service allowing telephone calls to be made over the Internet, making such calls virtually free. With a standard telephone connected to a standard line, call fares are very low too. In the latter case, international call fares equate to these of local calls.

Yahoo is planning to become a full-service VoIP provider, but declined to give a timeline on new product announcements beyond “coming months,” said spokesperson Terrell Karlsten.