Current Location: Home / 2009 / Archives for October 2009

WordPress Exploit Scanner

October 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

If you are like me, you want to make sure that the software you run is as secure as possible.  My partners and I even subscribe to several third party services that actually scan our servers looking for exploits that could be taken advantage of by hackers or script kiddies.  Since one of the most frequent CMS solutions we use is WordPress, this plugin caught my attention.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner is a plugin that searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. While it won’t stop someone hacking into your site, it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker on previous attempts.  It can also help you identify any weaknesses that you might have so you can harden your installation.

Here’s a little bit more on the Exploit Scanner plugin if you are interested:

When a website is compromised, hackers leave behind scripts and modified content that can be found by manually searching through all the files on a site. Some of the methods used to hide their code or spam links are obvious, like using CSS to hide text, and we can search for those strings.

The database can also be used to hide content or be used to run code. Spam links are sometimes added to blog posts and comments. They’re hidden by CSS so visitors don’t see them, but search engines do. Recently, hackers took advantage of the WP plugin system to run their own malicious code. They uploaded files with the extensions of image files and added them to the list of active plugins. So, despite the fact that the file didn’t have a .php file extension, the code in them was still able to run!

You can download this plugin here: http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

WordPress Exploit Scanner

Filed Under: Wordpress™ Tagged With: , , ,

How Bing Will Rank Your Tweets

October 27, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I blogged a few days ago about Microsoft Bing and Google’s announcement that they were both going to start incorporating our Tweets into their search results.  There has been a lot of speculation as to how these Tweets are gong to show up in their search results. I have been following all of this pretty closely as it is going to directly impact our industry. I blogged earlier today about how Google’s new Social Search is going to work but I think Bing might be a slightly different animal…

Apparently Bing is going to weigh tweets according to follower counts.  For instance, if you and I both tweet similar things, and I have 1000+ followers and you have 300 followers, my tweet is going to have a higher ranking.  Granted, this is not the best method imaginable, but for the time being I think that is how it’s going to be.  Of course, these search algorithm’s get tweaked a lot and all of this is subject to change before you even realize it, but that’s the word that I am getting right now.

I think that all of us are anxious to see how Bing and Google both are able to weigh what’s good content versus what’s bad content using only 140 characters…

Filed Under: Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

How Google’s Social Search Works

October 27, 2009 By 3 Comments

google-labs-logo Google announced their new Social Search product this week on their blog.  Google Social Search is still in the experimental phase but it looks promising. Once you factor in Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a Blog, most of us publish a lot of content.  Some of this information can be useful to others, and even though they are connected to you socially (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and subscribe to your blog, they currently aren’t able to pull up this information very quickly. In the case of a web search, it’s highly unlikely your posts are going to show up on the first page for whatever topic they are looking for, but this is where Google Social Search is going to come in handy. 

Here’s a scenario where this could be pretty helpful.  Let’s say I have dinner at a great Mexican Restaurant in Little Rock and I post a note to Twitter raving about the food.  Let’s also say that a few of the people who follow me on Twitter reply to me with favorable reviews of their own.  Follow me so far?  Okay, let’s also say that 2 months later one of my friends is thinking about trying this restaurant but hasn’t talked to anyone who has been.  He does a quick Google Search for the Restaurant to see some reviews and my Tweet shows up in his search results!  Since he knows me as a trusted source, knowing first hand that I have excellent taste when it comes to food, a good review from me is going to trump any review website that he would have ordinarily based his decision on…

Here’s a better description from the Google Blog as to how the social search feature is going to come in handy:

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place. That’s why today we’re rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social."   Here’s a good video demonstration of Google’s Social Search:

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our help center article or watch this video:

This feature is an experiment, but we’ve been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We’d love to hear your feedback. Oh, and don’t forget to create a public Google profile to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you’re looking for (including that New York blog).

If you are interested in testing the Google Social Search Experiment, click here.
Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!

Filed Under: Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

Remembering GeoCities (1995-2009)

October 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

geocities-logo I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the fact that Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities today.  If you are wondering what GeoCities was, my best guess is that you weren’t around in the 90’s.  Before social networks were all over the place, and before there were even web development firms and hosting companies all over the web, there was GeoCities…

GeoCities existed as a place where you could go on and host your free website, of course they were covered up with advertising that you had no control over, but it was a free website nonetheless.  One of my fondest memories of GeoCities was all of the animated gif files that seemed to be synonymous with every page, and if you saw one that you didn’t have on your page, you became instantly obsessed with stealing it and calling it your own before any of your friends beat you to it.

I can remember having one of the guys that helped out with my computer business set me up a GeoCities page for the business somewhere around 1996 or so, it was extremely new at the time.  Of course, as business websites go today, this was not what you would call a “business website” but to us, it was awesome!!!  I think we even registered a domain name from Network Solutions (they were the only game in town at the time too) and we pointed it to our page to make us look even more professional.  I wish there was some kind of way to go back in and time and see that page and see just how far we have come, it would be like the first chapter in a history book.

I can also remember having my own personal GeoCities page which would lay the foundation for the website you are on right now.  I can also recall meeting some pretty intuitive pioneers online back in the day that were using GeoCities for everything from sharing their hobbies to pornography, the web was wide open back in the day, a lot less restricted than today in a lot of ways! 

Sadly enough, I don’t think that GeoCities ever had a business model that would have worked, and probably the only people that ever actually made any money off of the project was probably the group that sold it to Yahoo back in the day.  Once Yahoo took over the project I don’t think they ever did anything with it either in terms of making any money.  I know that hindsight is 20/20 but had they had the vision of social networking before anyone else, this might be a completely different world we live in.  There was a time when Yahoo was king, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of Google, most people didn’t have a clue what it was, there was also Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista, DogPile came along later as well.  It’s a shame that they weren’t able to keep this running but I am not too sad about it all.  There comes a time where sometimes things have to go away to focus on new and more viable products, and I guess in the end this is what happened with GeoCities.

Just for old time sakes, here are some of the funny animated gifs from back in the day…

 

What are some of you favorite memories of GeoCities? 

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: ,

Be Careful What You Say on Facebook & Twitter

October 22, 2009 By 3 Comments

In case you haven’t heard this already, Google and Microsoft (Bing) both announced that they will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook in their search results.  Now for the most part I know that most of us already exercise caution in what we put out there, but I honestly believe that there are going to be a few “less cautious” people that are going to be caught off guard when all of this comes to fruition.  You probably know exactly what I am talking about too, it’s not just the expletives and profanity, but I think that element is going to be the most fun to watch and read about.

For as long as I have been working in this industry, I have always worked under the assumption that anything I put out there is going to live forever.  I also try to keep in mind that there could come a day where my clients or my mom might actually read my tweets or blog posts.  I think that a lot of us in this business long enough already know this, but I am concerned as to whether everyone has come to this realization yet…

Your Social Brand Reputation is More Important than Ever!!

Honestly though, I think that the biggest result that we will see from the search engines incorporating these “social nuggets” into their search results is going to be even more emphasis placed on social media by corporations.  Especially in the realm of customer service and dispute resolutions.  I think that companies will realize quickly that their customers bad experiences are showing up in Google and Bing (CEO’s and Marketing / PR People are always googling themselves and their companies in their spare time, after all the perception falls broadly on their shoulders). 

One recent situation came up with a friend of mine who had his luggage lost by one of the major airlines and it took a few days for him to get the airlines to work with him.  This all played out on Twitter, and for the most part I think all of Central Arkansas heard about it (and rightfully so, good for him! I even retweeted him a few times myself).  Granted, the airlines that I am referring to already has a Twitter account, but I think they could have jumped on this opportunity and handled it better and more efficiently than they did.  Well, take this into consideration, not only is this bad experience going to live forever inside of Twitter, but now it’s also going to be archived w/ two of the most widely used search engines in the world. 

In case you missed what I was trying to say through all of this, here it is in the nutshell; Your brand’s social reputation was already important, but now it’s a lot more important than you can imagine!!  I recently did a presentation related to this topic, you can find that here along w/ my slides…

How’s All of This Going to Be Rolled Out?

Honestly I don’t have all of the details.  I do know that each of the search engines are probably going to have their own policies for including peoples social content.  I suspect it will be some sort of opt-in model, but that’s probably still up in the air right now.  I also envision the social networks themselves adding another layer to this equation, probably an opt-in model in this case as well.  You will likely see a checkbox in Facebook and Twitter that will say something like, “include my status updates in search engines” or something along those lines.

My Prediction for Facebook and Twitter

I honestly don’t think Twitter is going to have near as many concerns going into this model that Facebook is going to see.  For the most part I don’t think that Twitter users look at Twitter with the same concerns that they do Facebook.  I think Facebook users think that they have a lot more invested in Facebook (20 year old school yearbook photos, baby pictures, vacation photos, relationship statuses, etc.).  All of this to say that I think Facebook users are going to be a lot more guarded on this issue once they figure out what’s going on.  You just thought the Facebook terms of service issue was a biggie, wait until someone’s inappropriate status update shows up in Google underneath their employer’s listing… Whew!!

My Predictions for Google and Microsoft (Bing)

I think that both of these search engines are going to see some positives for adding this content to their search results.  I am anxious to see how it is presented, I have some ideas as to how they could do this if anyone from either of these companies wants to give me a shout…

I also think that by doing this that search engines in general are become even more useful and relevant than they were before.  Unless of course, you are looking for Kanye West’s concert dates, they are going to located on page 100 or so, tucked neatly behind all of the “you suck” tweets he got after the VMA’s.

More on this Topic:

There has been a lot of coverage since these announcements were made but there are a couple that I recommend checking out, Dan Zarella actually saw this in his crystal ball, and PC World did a nice piece on this story here.  I also like Web Worker Daily, they covered this story here…

What Are Your Thoughts?

I would be interested as to what some of you are thinking on this topic, hit me back or leave me a comment and let me know…

Filed Under: Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , ,

SEC Suspends Officials from Arkansas-Florida Game

October 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I made the comment to someone today that I don’t think that I have ever seen a more pathetic job of officiating than I did this past weekend when Arkansas got cheated, on several occasions, by the officiating crew.  I am not for sure if these guys were extremely bias towards Florida, or maybe have some sort of man-crush on Tim Tebow, but combined with our missed field goals, it was enough for me to almost go nuts!

I am not for sure if I can remember any other instances where officials were actually suspended by the SEC, wonder why they didn’t just go ahead and fire them?  Do they think that with some encouragement that these officials might not be stupid or bias next week?  Give me a break!  At least they did do something about it, had they not taken some sort of action I would have been dissapointed.

Here’s an article from Today’sTHV about the story:

The SEC announced Wednesday afternoon the SEC crew that worked the Arkansas/Florida game has been suspended.

The officiating crew from Saturday’s Arkansas at Florida football game will be removed from its next scheduled assignment on Oct. 31 and will not be assigned to officiate as a crew until Nov. 14, Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive announced Wednesday.

"A series of calls that have occurred during the last several weeks have not been to the standard that we expect from our officiating crews," said Slive. "I believe our officiating program is the best in the country, however, there are times when these actions must be taken."

Following each weekend, the conference office reviews games from the previous week, using video replays as well as interviews with officials, coaches and administrators. "While only a few calls have been identified, the entire crew shoulders responsibility for each play. I have taken this action because there must be accountability in our officiating program," added Slive. "Our institutions expect the highest level of officiating in all of our sports and it is the duty of the conference office to uphold that expectation."

In addition, there will be an impact on eligibility for post-season bowl assignments for the crew. Arkansas head football coach Bobby Petrino issued a statement following the Southeastern Conference’s announcement.

Coach Petrino said, "We took the appropriate steps to address any issues we had with the league regarding this matter earlier in the week. Our focus as a football team has been and remains on this weekend’s game against Ole Miss."

Let us know what you think about the suspension by voting in our Hog Zone poll. Click here to cast your vote. Just scroll down and the poll is on the right side of the page.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,

My Computer Associates Technical Support Rant

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

ca Okay, so I run CA Security Software on my test server in my office, well recently I have been having some issues with it not wanting to automatically update itself.  I have configured my firewall until I am blue in the face and finally decided to explore their support options tonight (my last definitions were downloaded 14 days ago).  After digging around to find my original purchase receipt for the software I finally located my order number as well as their support link.

I went to the support site and found their telephone support options.  Basically there are no options, there is a $19.95 per incident telephone support fee.  Since I have already exhausted all of their online resources I decided to go ahead and spend the 20 bucks and get a live human on the phone that can help me get this resolved.  Well, once I got through, I got a lady on the other end of the phone that may has well have been Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher.  She and I could not understand a word that the other was saying.  I immediately thought that maybe I might have hit the wrong option for Spanish or something but it never asked me before connecting w/ her.

After we talked for about 10 minutes (if you want to call it that), she finally determined that someone was going to have to call me back.  Now, this phone call is going to cost 20 bucks and I have to sit around the phone for the next 2 hours (that’s the window they gave me) for someone to call me back to help me resolve this issue.

I know that telephone support is almost extinct these days, especially in the software industry, but for 20 bucks I would have thought that I would have at least gotten someone immediately that I could speak with.  I am a little aggravated and had to vent, so thanks for letting me share…

——————————-
Just a note though, I really do like CA’s security products, it’s just a shame they can’t put as much effort into their technical support operation.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

First Impressions of Google Wave

October 20, 2009 By 7 Comments

Google-Wave-logo Okay, so I finally got around to checking out Google Wave today.  I have had the invitation sitting in my inbox for a while now and just haven’t had a free moment to check it out until today.  My first impression of it wasn’t all that great until I was able to wrap my head around the big picture.  I will be the first to admit that I am still learning all of the bells and whistles so bear with me…

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that it’s an actual live conversation, as opposed to email which is lot less dynamic in theory.  Some of my friends from the Central Arkansas Refresh community (Keith Crawford, Bryan Jones, Rob McBryde, Arlton Lowry, and Greg Henderson) had already included me in a few waves that they had going so I jumped in to see if I could get the hang of it without actually watching the tutorials or reading anything.  Not so much…

Spend a Few Minutes and Get Up to Speed…

One of the first things I did out of the box was stick my reply in the wrong place and it hosed up the whole works.  No, I didn’t really hose up the works, but for someone as OCD as me, it was devastating.  It took me a few minutes to learn how to properly reply in between waves, and watching this video on YouTube sure helped out a lot too…

The Playback Feature is Cool…

One feature that I really think is neat is the playback feature, it allows you to get up to speed a lot faster than you normally would if you were working with email that was being passed around between several different people, all replying to various elements of a communication.

Sluggish Out of the Box…

As you might expect, Wave is not perfect in it’s current state, there are some bugs naturally.  One of the things that I noticed was that in Firefox I kept having issues w/ the page refreshing or getting locked up.  Someone suggested that I try Google Chrome and immediately that seemed to help out w/ the performance issues I was having.

Final Thoughts…

I am still playing around with the application right now, and have only spent a grand total of 30 minutes with it so far, but my initial thoughts were that Google is going to face an uphill battle rolling this solution out to the general public.  For the most part I think that our clients find email to be intuitive and easy to get up and running with out of the box.  With Wave, it’s going to be a lot different.  I’m not saying that I am a genius by any means but I can usually take a web application that I have never seen before and get up to speed with it pretty quickly, without having to watch a tutorial or read a manual.  I honestly had to take a step back and wrap my head around wave.

Now, do I think it’s a viable product?  Heck yes, I think it’s going to definitely find it’s place into our daily lives at some point, when I am not sure.  In the business realm we are looking for ways to increase efficiency and boost productivity.  Since Google Wave resembles a conversation more than it does an email, I think it’s going to relevant for sure.  I am anxious to see what the future holds for this product…

What is Google Wave?

If you are curious as to what in the world I am talking about, Google Wave is the latest tool from Google that is currently in preview mode right now for people to try out.  You have to have an invite to get into to try the software right now, I am not for sure how much longer that is going to be the case.  Here’s an explanation of Wave that I found on Google’s website:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

By the way, if you are currently using Google Wave, you can connect to me at: cotton.rohrscheib@googlewave.com.

Filed Under: Email Solutions, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With:

Some Thoughts Regarding the FTC Disclosure Rules

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

ftclogo I have been out of pocket the past few weeks and haven’t had a chance until today to go over the FTC Rules for Disclosure as they apply to Bloggers.  I know that this caused a serious uproar inside the blogger community, ShoeMoney (Jeremy Schoemaker) even called an emergency town hall meeting on TinyChat to discuss these new regulations. You can get ShoeMoney’s scoop here…

I have had a chance to read over the information initially released as well as the supplemental PDF explaining the rules today and for the most part I think most of us are not going to be affected by any of this.  The obvious focus of the rule is to go after the fake news and endorsement sites that are out there.  Personally, I think it’s going to be really tough to enforce. 

There are some points that I want to bring up regarding the new rules that I think you should consider.  The first being that if you receive compensation of any kind for promoting someone else’s product on your blog you had better do a full disclosure to let your readers now that.  For instance, I recently reviewed a product for another company and received compensation for it.  While the compensation wasn’t monetary (it was an Amazon Kindle) I still received compensation for my post.  Fortunately for me, this rarely ever comes up. In the instance that I referred to earlier, I honestly was going to do a review of this product anyway and the fact that they sent me a free gift, while it was nice, it still didn’t sway my review one way or the other.  Had the product sucked, I would have let you know, I promise…

In Forbes magazine, the FTC said that they were also going after employees of companies who blog as well:

The FTC also plans to crack down on company employees posing as citizen bloggers, a practice known as “astroturf marketing” because of its fake grassroots style.

As far as I can tell, neither of these documents addressed affiliate marketing, monetization, or paid links.  I might be wrong, if I skipped over something, someone please be sure to let me know!!  Oh, and by the way, if you are caught in violation of these rules, the penalty is $10k. 

If you blog, do yourself a favor and spend an hour tonight going over these regulations if you haven’t already.  Also, ShoeMoney brought up some good questions that I wanted to share w/ you as well:

I am curious where we stop? Lemme give you a few scenarios:

1) I do a paid $5000 paid post from Google about AdSense
2) I do a paid post from Google where I get paid $100 per new user I get to sign up for AdSense.

Those 2 posts could be written completely different. Maybe disclosing the exact amounts paid is where we are headed?

Again for instance if a certain Google employee making 100k/yr is blogging about his company on his personal blog thats one thing.  But if that same Google employee has stock worth hundreds of millions of dollars then perhaps that should be disclosed since he can single handily move the stock price up or down, do you think he is every going to blog negatively about his company.  Where is this going? How in the world are they going to enforce this? I am guessing we will not see 1 case come from this.

Filed Under: Monetization, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

#RefreshCA Meeting – October 27th

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Our October Central Arkansas Refresh meeting will be on October 27th this month, we usually get started around 6:00 or so but don’t worry if you come in late.  Last month Rob McBryde did a presentation on Joomla and it was awesome!  If you missed out on Rob’s presentation, you can find the video and the slides on our website here…

This month Arlton Lowry is going to do a presentation on Elgg, an open source social networking & social publishing platform.  If you’re not familiar with Elgg, here’s some information from their website:

Elgg, started in 2004, is an open source social engine which powers all kinds of social environments – from education to business and sports such as rugby. If you are looking to create your own social application or want to build and run a site for your organisation, Elgg is a great choice as it provides the building blocks you will need.

You can RSVP via Facebook right now, or we will have a Twitvite soon for the meeting, so be sure to follow @RefreshCA on twitter and RSVP so we can get an idea as to how many people we are going to have on hand.  Also, if you need directions to the Flying Saucer, see the map below: (we meet in the basement)


View Larger Map

Our meetings are open to the public so be sure to bring a friend!  Looking forward to hanging out!!!

Filed Under: Central Arkansas Refresh, Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts