The patent says: “User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc).”

Sue Charman of online campaign Open Rights Group said….

“Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people – we’ve already seen the American federal government going to court over data from companies including Google.”

And no I wouldn’t want to be giving my profile out to Google or any other corporation.

I could easily see this information as being open to subpoena, even hidden subpoena.

I try to use Google not logged in these days.

Continue reading Google Profiling Technology | Threadwatch.org at uncoy.

I’ve been doing some domain research lately for Foliovision.com. One of the great sources of information for the domain industry is an online publication called DNJournal which does a weekly roundup of the top domains sales.

Very useful information. DNJournal also publish a number of interviews with top domainers (people whose primary economic activity is buying and selling domain names).

Imagine my curiosity when I came across this piece:

Just 2 years after entering the industry, AL-Ghanim has amassed more than 12,000 quality domains, including jewels like media.com, multimedia.com and fm.com. He has thriving websites like mp3.tv, dj.net and oxide.com and he has just purchased a major ICANN-approved internet registry that will be located on another showcase domain, i.net.

No wonder domain industry forums are buzzing with questions about “Elequa”, a childhood nickname the 32-year-old internet phenomenon uses for his online identity.

Continue reading Reality call to DNJournal.com: What’s with the puff piece on Future Media Architects? at uncoy.

If anybody has a robust Toronto based proxy I could use, I am still looking.

I would like the Toronto proxy to work with both Google and Yahoo search.

Continue reading Looking for a robust Toronto based proxy at uncoy.

• to look good
• to include clickable links which work in both Acrobat and Mac OS X preview
• to be navigatable from the table of contents and/or index

The only PDF I’ve ever owned which got all of these things right (apart from a couple of manuals from Apple for high end programs like Final Cut Pro – if Apple couldn’t get it right for a $1000 application there’d be no hope) – is Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.

SEOBook is the best selling and best book on SEO. What’s great about SEOBook is that is based on real world experience and Aaron has no particular axe to grind in favour of any single SEO technique.

Continue reading SeoBook – Aaron Wall’s PDF woes properly formatting an eBook at uncoy.

One of the banes of the modern web are Flash advertisements. They are popping up all over the place, from the New York Times to our beloved MacSurfer.com. I have nothing against advertising but I don’t like anything which makes it impossible to read or difficult to work on one’s computer.

I’ve been searching for a way to easily turn flash off yet keep my computer stable. With the amount of Flash video turning up on the web, I am not as tempted as I used to be to just rip the Flash code right out of my plugin folder.

In any case, for work reasons, I have to keep Flash around just to see what other people are doing with their sites.

Until two weeks ago, I still hadn’t found anything lightweight to kill Flash in either Safari or Firefox, my two primary browsers.

Continue reading Turn Flash Off in OS X: NoScript for Firefox and SafariBlock for Safari at uncoy.

There’s some good advice on styling images in WordPress over on Pearson’s Cutline Theme*.

I’m glad you asked! Cutline has been constructed so that images that do not have classes applied to them will still be styled. In fact, they’ll receive the same styling as any image that receives the right class, meaning that the image will be right-aligned with a frame. Oh, and text will wrap around the image, just like it does here. See? You don’t even have to go out of your way to be fancy with Cutline, and that’s how we like it.
Update: As of September 28th, 2006, Cutline has been revised so that unstyled images no longer receive default styling. This is a move that I hated to make on many fronts, but I also realize that it’s just really inconvenient to have every image styled by default.

Continue reading Styling Images in WordPress at uncoy.

The guy over at SiliconCloud.com which is just a two-month old weblog went through Jakob Nielsen’s old lists and a couple of other lists floating around out there and chose twelve items which web designers/owners are still doing.

Here’s just one example: Forms.

From Silicon Cloud’s 12 Ways to Irritate Your Visitors:

7) Unnecessary Questions – Ensure that the subscription form to your ezine or newsletter spam contains at least 36 questions more than needed. Why stop at the username and email address when you can ask them for information such as their mailing address and at least 3 different phone numbers (home, work and mobile). By adding other pointless questions such as age, sex, hobbies, religion and inside leg measurement is a sure-fire way to prevent people ordering your product or subscribing to your mailing list.

Continue reading Web 2.0 Spam: Advanced Content Recycling | Manipulating Digg at uncoy.

Introduction: WebCEO
review updated 1 June 2007 to cover current services and software status!

This is a comprehensive review of the full version of WebCEO 5.6, a.k.a. the Professional edition. There are two other versions of WebCEO, a Small Business edition and a Free Edition. The distinctions between different WebCEO versions can be found on this page. Basically, the Free Version can’t do much while the Small Business and Professional Edition are almost indistinguishable. The Professional Edition makes creating self-branded reports easier and spiders the anchor text from backlinks.

WebCEO Ad: It’s more or less correct
Check bottom of the page for cost-benefit analysis

Normal price for the Professional version is $389, promotional price (about twice a year) is $249. Normal price for the Small Business Edition is $189, promotional price is $149. The Free Edition is free.

Continue reading SEO: WebCEO review at uncoy.

Now this is a curious business model. Buy one of the best web anlytics software suites in the world. Repackage it and release it for free on your own servers.

I checked the terms of service. They don’t seem to suggest that Google is free to use their data for their own analysis but I haven’t looked carefully enough – I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

I am very happy about this as I had been very unhappy with my stats package from my existing host and the otherwise excellent statcounter (paid version) doesn’t give good historical analysis (the last week or ten days are very well covered on the other hand).

As it is javascript-based, I suspect Google web analysis won’t help with spiders either.

Continue reading Urchin Reborn: Google Web Analytics at uncoy.

Continue reading Google sitemap software at uncoy.