Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
We don't allow Google Chrome to be used at Foliovision.
There's a couple of reason.
Chrome as a browser sends a lot of information back to Google.
Even worse you need to install and leave installed the Google Pack Updater, which is constantly monitoring your computer and sending encrypted date back to Google.
As spyware, Google Pack Application updates is almost unprecedented.
On the other hand, we do allow the use of Chromium and quite like it as an alternative to Safari or Firefox.
The problem is home page of Chromium only offers links to the instructions for building Chromium from scratch. Not fun. Very time consuming, restricted mainly to programmers.
chromium source code link on home page no binaries
There is a nightly build, though, Dorothy. Google keeps moving it around. It used to be here:
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/
For some unaccountable reason, that URL 404's now (don't Google know about 301 redirects?).
Google Chromium link in search 404
The real download URL for a Mac build is now here:
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/index.html?path=Mac/
Enjoy a modern, fast, open-source browser without spyware. The open source community is good that way, keeping the spyware out of apps.
News bulletin: alternative download link - http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/snapshots/Mac/
Your guess is as good as mine which will go dead first.
By Alec
IT, SEO |
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
I was getting very tired of some rather obtuse discussions in the LinkedIn groups and in particular WordPress.
I decided to change my primary address in LinkedIn so this nonsense would end up in my secondary email account (non-time critical items and newsletters).
Still getting endless groups updates on my main email address.
So I decide to remove my main address altogether from LinkedIn.
Still getting endless emails from LinkedIn.
I submit a support ticket.
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/20/2011 05:41
Hi,
I've removed from my account as I couldn't stand the incessant emails from groups anymore.
I'm still getting notifications to this address despite being my primary address now.
Please help stop the emails to
Making the web work for you, Alec
A nice enough support person by the name of Darci offers a polite but vague reply:
LinkedIn Response
06/20/2011 14:53
Hi Alec,
Thank you for contacting us.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.
Please know that we are fully aware of this issue and have a team of dedicated, highly qualified individuals who are working diligently to resolve this.
I appreciate your patience and support as we attempt to resolve this matter.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
When I start to hear about dedicated, highly qualified individuals, I start to get nervous. It makes me think about McDonalds dedicated restaurant crews. So I ask Darcie for a bit more precision:
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/21/2011 08:40
Hello Darci,
Thanks for your email.
When do you expect this issue to be resolved?
I do not have hooked up to LinkedIn in any way now, so effectively you are spamming me.
Making the web work for you, Alec
Apparently vague promises are fine but resolution is not.
LinkedIn Response
06/21/2011 10:23
Hi Alec,
I'm sorry but I do not have a time frame that I can give out. We are working on the issue, and will contact you as soon as we know anything further. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
No time frame is really not okay. LinkedIn has hijacked my primary email address and won't let go:
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/21/2011 11:33
Hi Darci!
No time frame is not acceptable.
Please remove from your servers completely. I do not want any LinkedIn messages to that address at all.
Thanks.
Making the web work for you, Alec
The situation is worse than I thought. LinkedIn will really spam me until the ISP's block their pipes:
On 21 Jun 2011, at 17:23, LinkedIn Customer Support wrote:
Subject: Still receiving LinkedIn emails on after removing it from account
Hi Alec,
I'm sorry but we have a bug in our system at this time that is not releasing email addresses that were entered into it at one time and now removed. We have a team working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this is causing, but there is nothing further I can do at this time. We will contact you as soon as the issue has been resolved.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
I'm not happy about sitting around, waiting for LinkedIn to stop spamming me.
Moral of the story
I'm very sorry to have given LinkedIn a primary address in the first place. I recommend you don't.
Where LinkedIn get marks is for having a customer service department who respond to emails at all. That's a big improvement over Google or Facebook.
Now I really know why I'm not on Facebook. I'm sure it's far worse over there if you want to stop the deluge.
Practical Advice Before You Close Your Account
Several readers have written to complain that closing your account doesn't stop the LinkedIn Spam:
I am so upset I put my primary email address on Linkedin (which I didn’t do on Facebook). I joined both of these social websites to keep in touch with actual groups I am an active member of but LI quickly wore out my welcome mat. I’ve tried to remove my welcome mat but LI ignores my closed account still to this day. Hopefully anyone reading this is smarter than I was and takes these warnings to heart and uses a throwaway email account to subscribe if at all. WARNING: You will not be able to unsubscribe no matter what their website states!!!!!
Here's what you must do first, before you close your account.
Be sure to change your email address to one which you can verify and then turn off. Give it a week or two for the new email address to take before cancelliing your account.
Be sure to unsubscribe to email updates from every group you've ever joined. While I know unsubscribing to email updates works, I'm not sure that unsubscribing to an active group before unsubscribing to email updates actually works.
Further Practical Advice on how to get LinkedIn Shut Down as Spammers
There's a service called SpamCop.net. Sign up and report your LinkedIn messages there. If you use Google, Hotmail, MSN, AOL or Yahoo there are huge spam buttons there.
Report every LinkedIn email. While LinkedIn has some corporate protection (as one of the big boys club), if even half the people getting their unwanted emails complain about it, LinkedIn emails will be reclassified as spam and forced to change their policies.
LinkedIn Management and Reid Hoffman
It's a pity LinkedIn management are such wankers. The service would be valuable if they had any respect for users/clients. I don't know if Reid Hoffman has any idea about how much hatred his lazy/deliberate spamming policies would generate on the net. Hoffman was a founding director at Paypal (perhaps the web's most hated company, although Paypal appear to be trying to clean up their act somewhat now, before regulators do it for them), so perhaps no surprise Hoffman has no respect for users.
Hoffman is also responsible for setting up the first round of angel investment in Facebook. Again no surprise about the lack of respect for users. Hoffman again was a first round investor and director at Zynga, well known for spamming Facebook and other users and for scam ads.
Generally Hoffman is a fat rude prick with no respect for users. He has a consistent background of involvement with the net's worst spammers. This is the man who has rough ridden users to $3 billion net worth. Report his spam mercilessly and shut him down.
Who says crime doesn't pay? Unfortunately, crime often leaves its traces on your body and your face.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Friday, January 7th, 2011
If you don't know about this, here's a great Google tip. Change your search settings to allow 100 search results. It's much easier to go through a lot of search results when they are on a single page than to go through ten at a time. Google has some very good compression so loading 100 results doesn't take much more time than loading 10.
One of our principal areas of business at Foliovision is SEO. So when I upgraded to Apple's Snow Leopard on my main work computer (I only upgraded since Leopard 10.5 won't run on a Macbook Air 11": still prefer Leopard and its quiet reliability), I was horrified to see that I could only get 10 search results from Google in both Safari and Omniweb.
So I thought the problem was with Safari 5 or webkit as Snow Leopard forces an upgrade to Safari 5. I tried the latest version of OmniWeb. Same issue. Impossible to get 100 results. Now I was really unhappy. My work life was about to become miserable rooting through Google search results ten at a time.
I had just installed Chromium* to see how it compares in memory usage with a lot of tabs open as I have just dropped from 8 GB of RAM to 4 GB of RAM and was feeling the pinch. Safari 5 uses a lot of memory with 40 tabs open - what is disappointing is that when you close all the tabs, Safari hangs onto a lot of the memory. Chrome creates a separate mini-application for each tab using even more memory than Safari but when you close a tab it gives back all of its meemory.
So I decided to run the Google results test on Chromium. No problem to get 100 results with Google Chromium.
Google Instant 100 search results in Chromium
Considerably more research alerted me to a solution: turn off Google instant in Google's settings and Safari would yield 100 results again.
Strangely I could get 100 results with Google instant on Google's Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. So the issue is not with compatibility between 100 results and instant (I thought perhaps it was a bandwidth issue).
It looks more like a deliberate crippling of Safari and Omniweb to give Chrome a leg up in the Apple browser wars. Even more diabolical, you have to save your settings twice in Safari after turning off Google Instant to get your 100 setting back.
Google wins our Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish award of the month for their attack on Safari and other webkit browsers.
"Don't be evil." Maybe. Apparently, a little bit wicked is completely fine. See footnote for evidence of outright evil.
* Note: Don't ever use Google Chrome, it's spyware which will not even run without an admin level updater application on your computer! Get the latest build for Chromium for OS X here: cherish that direct link, Google hides it.
By Alec
IT, SEO |
Friday, December 19th, 2008
We've just had to move another client's old site to a new one.
There are lots of inbound links but the page URL structure has completely changed for the better.
The client wants to rank right away.
What do we do?
301 the old site is the traditional answer.
Not so fast says Eric Ward who is one of the masters of link building, having built links by hand for longer than almost anyone else on the internet and for more large corporate clients than any individual I know (there are some SEO companies working fairly stealth with portfolios of almost 100 big names):
I wouldn't 301 it yet. First I'd run a backlink analysis on the old site and then visit each site linking to the old site, and for those that look exceptionally trustworthy and legit, ask them personally for a hand edit to change the link from the old site to the new site.
Painful.
Slow.
Tedious.
Effective.
Frankly for a website with thousands of backlinks, that's just not a realistic option. Well for Walt Disney or some of Eric's other clients perhaps it is. But what should the rest of us do?
Keep reading How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Have tech companies gone blue chip: no risk, little reward?
Over at purveyor of dubious business advice The Wall Street Journal, Mean Street says it is so:
The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.
Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.
The bad news: Tech stocks are the blue chips. Lower risk means lower reward. Are tech investors mentally prepared for the 10% equity return including a 2% dividend
Those are amazing numbers. Tech companies are bigger than banks. Curiously tech - and entertainment and weapon systems - seem to be the only products in which the US is a world leader these days.
Despite the huge market cap of the top tech companies, I think Evan Newmark is off base on the future of tech.
Keep reading Low returns, safe investment in Tech? No, it's the dawn of a new golden age
By Alec
Business |
Friday, January 4th, 2008
One of my clients recently moved to Google Apps as their full time email solution.
I had my reservations at the time, but more on privacy grounds than technology ones. It turns out there are technology issues as well. My client was very excited about improved spam filtering from Postini. After the move he told me right away that he was getting a lot less spam.
This same client runs an insurance business with online application forms. Those forms go to special unfiltered email boxes. Of course those addresses aren't released publicly.
So they get all their forms and don't have to worry about miscreant insurance filters (most of my other clients are in real estate and we have filtering issues in real estate and mortgages as well).
Over the holidays, we couldn't figure out why Adwords was sometimes claiming more completed applications than the client was receiving. My tests were working. Finally we compared lists.
My client wasn't getting all the completed applications that were going into the database.
It turns out that Google Apps/Mail were deleting quotations (even though they were coming from his own domain).
What's the solution?
Keep reading Losing Mail with Google Apps
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
What is an idea worth?
What is the value of consulting services?
If you say nothing and everything - you'd be exactly right.
One of Paul Graham's startup essays explains the difference:
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.
The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.
On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.
Or had Google put the right people on their project - Google Video - they could have stolen YouTube's fire before it lit.
Unfortunately normally we don't know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven't used it before - we run our entire office schedule on it, and it's a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).
So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year - the dilemma with consulting services, is that it's still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.
Obviously startups are the way to go. But it's damn hard work.
Creating a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it's cost me dearly.
Am I ready to give up?
No.
When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.
By Alec
Business |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
It's official - Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.
What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.
Keep reading AdSense Arbitrage Coming to an End - Internet Marketing
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
