Click to enlarge the image

oogle Earth is a project which strongly impresses me. I got hold of a Windows machine where Google Earth had been installed and grabbed a few screenshots of streets around Manchester, UK.

Given the satellite data, this technology is not overly innovative. All that is required are mappings of existing satellite images onto a sphere, then relying on OpenGL acceleration. The real issues to be faced are bandwidth and Google’s progress on 3-D geographical data acquisition.

What screenshots cannot show is the excellent real-time interaction with the scene. Roads, street names and other details can be toggled on/off. There is also some highly continuous motion when hovering from one place to another. To get a better impression, you may wish to view this gallery with more sample images.

hen I first registered schestowitz.com, I registered it for 10 years — until 2014 — that is. At the time, I could not imagine that search engines would favour sites that are committed to a long-term future. But guess what? It turns out they do.

Paying your host for domain renewal annually is a poorer choice; furthermore, it is undesirable if your site has real potential. As unfair as it may seem, Google definitely favour sites which are registered for many years and will position these higher in the SERP‘s. This helps in identifying sites that are serious about their vocation and might rule out spam sites or scrapers (site that steal content for fast, artificial growth).

There are important factors when selecting a domain name, which is a very influential choice. A domain name needs to be:

• Short
• Memorable (to distinguish from “short”. For example, m3d4n8sm.com versus feedsync.com)
• Decent and trustworthy

If you struggle to think of a good name that is also available, have a quick look at the enormous list of deleted (i.e. registered, then neglected) domains in the ICANN-inclined whois.net.

Changing of a domain is far more problematic than people imagine. Change of bookmarks, loss of SE ranks, update of links (where still possible) and loss of identity are all involved in such transition. A domain change can be a bitter, cruel and highly effort-consuming process, which makes the initial choice of a name very crucial.

schestowitz.com: rising from ~20 to ~1,000 daily visits in less than one year

Getting just the valuable data from pages

eeds have definitely revolutionised the way we use the Internet. We can efficiently seek and exploit content without having to undertake laborious navigations in sites. The content is delivered to the user so there is no need to actively obtain it or ever spend time re-reading segments of text.

I have just finished brushing up the script I developed for syndicating static pages that do not offer feeds. Windows users can use it under Cygwin; Mac and Linux user can use it at much great ease. All details and code are contained in the more comprehensive page.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

n item I have just come across (hat tip Justin Moore) speaks about excluding MSNBot based on poor performance. MSNBot (and Yahoo! likewise) consume a great deal of bandwidth, but are barely used as search engines by the Internet audience.

From Justin:

• Exhibit A – MSNbot Crawl hits = 9561
• Bandwidth used = 124.43 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ Google = 683* [sic.*]

• Exhibit B – Googlebot Crawl hits = 3415
• Bandwidth used = 51.74 MB
• Visits to wantmoore.com as a results from searches @ MSN = 41 [sic.*]

…

So, effective immediately:

  User-agent: MSNBot
  Disallow: /

* Order of the visits is wrong and should be reversed.

I spotted similar statistics on my domain, with Google as the top referrer at almost 20,000 visits/month. MSN remain at a miserable 200 and take almost as much bandwidth as Googlebot. I have plenty of bandwidth to spare; So, I might as well let Microsoft spend crawling time in vain.

Flexbeta have published some Internet Explorer 7 screenshots, which were taken in a recent demonstration. RSS will apparently be well-integrated and sit in the core of Longhorn.

Microsoft seem to be catching up and perhaps it is not too late given that Mozilla Firefox has captured only around 10% of the market. A question lingers on in many people’s mind: how can Microsoft ‘inject’ Internet Explorer 7 to the public? They have had a hard time persuading businesses to upgrade their operating system.

One final nugget: Microsoft are trying to break software of their competitors by actually ‘extending’ RSS.

Windows Longhorn: will it sell or perish?

ZDNet Australia writes (on behalf of Secunia) about potential phishing attacks which affect all major browsers.

How does this exploit work?

• A user arrives at a malicious site
• The site re-direct the user to a trusted site while opening a pop-up
• The user gets fooled into entering a password in the pop-up
• While the user believes that the password reaches the trusted site, it actually reaches the malicious one

Pop-up windows, JavaScript and their nasty siblings again take the blame, but if someone is foolish enough to log in via pop-ups, perhaps the flaw lies within the user. Very few sites, if any, will use child windows to request details. It is understandable that many surfers are unaware of that, but they probably ought to stay away from malicious sites to begin with, or at least disable some browser functionality.

ry comparing news feeds from CNN against those from the BBC. I am subscribed to various feeds from both and in CNN no descriptions are bound to the titles. Why even syndicate if the subscriber gets 2-word provocative titles? The BBC is different, possibly because it has no commercial interests. It also opened its news API to the public recently, which was inarguably a wise step.

The ‘greedy feed’ attitude will possibly change due to Google’s embedment of adverts in feeds. This, in turn, is likely to set a precedent and motivate competitors (e.g. Overture) to do likewise. The official Google Factory Tour includes a preview of AdSense in feeds; see the picture at the bottom-right corner of the page.