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Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term: J. C. Penney. The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).
  • J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.
  • the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.
  • TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.
  • But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another. If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.
  • But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.
  • Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.
  • “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”
  • Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.
  • Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.
Weiye Loh

'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on the Web - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3358504575544381288117888.html

Data Marketing Social Marketing Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its "Mood" discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves. It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was "scraping," or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe's private online forums.
  • PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.
  • The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives. The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.
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  • The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.
  • Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.
  • One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.
  • The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.
  • Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."
  • Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11
     
    he market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.
Weiye Loh

Criticism and takedown: how review sites can defend free speech - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...tes-can-defend-free-speech.ars

Criticism Review Law Censorship Libel

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Review sites depend on user trust, and that trust is eroded when businesses are able to manipulate their own reviews. Some, including Yelp, view themselves as passive conduits for their users' reviews. Others take a more active role in fighting against censorship of patients. We think the latter approach makes more sense.
  • "it's scary to be involved in litigation," Levy said. "For many ordinary people, the easiest thing is to move on with your life."
  • Review sites can protect the integrity of their review processes by actively fighting such takedown requests.
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  • review sites could do more. For example, Yelp could have offered to represent Alice itself, or even filed for a declaratory judgment that Alice's post was not an infringement of copyright.
  • According to Yelp spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose, that isn't Yelp's role. "The way we approach this space is that we're a platform," she told Ars by phone. When faced with a lawsuit threat, "some reviewers might choose to take down their reviews, others may choose to leave them intact."
  • Wendy Seltzer, founder of the Chiling Effects clearinghouse, thinks that's not good enough. "It's in Yelp's interest not to let it or its submitters be manipulated by these agreements," she said. "The reading public is going to learn that these things exist and then come to distrust the sites."
  • Transparency is another key weapon against review censorship.
  • Ars talked to Angie Hicks, founder of Angie's List, about the steps her company takes to prevent manipulation by business owners. "Angie's List is positioned very differently in the review space," she said. "We don't accept anonymous reviews. Consumers pay to be a part of Angie's List. And any time a flag is raised about a review, it's reviewed by a human." Angie said that her company actively penalizes businesses who try to use user agreements to censor her users. "Whenever we find that a doctor is asking patients to sign this kind of agreement, we put a notification on that provider's record," she said. "We also take them out of search results."
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11
     
    the mere threat of a lawsuit-even a legally frivolous one-is enough to force patients to take down negative reviews.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » The U.K.'s 'Under-Aged' Socially Networked Children - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ed-socially-networked-children

Social Media Facebook Age Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The study’s authors argue that removing age restrictions from sites like Facebook might actually be the best way of improving child safety online.
  • Elisabeth Staksrud, from the University of Oslo and one of the report’s authors comments that: “since children often lie about their age to join ‘forbidden’ sites it would be more practical to identify younger users and to target them with protective measures.”
  • This flies in the face of what many see as a critical security wall  protecting children from cyber-crime on social networking sites. A report released in January by Internet security firm PandaLabs identified Facebook and Twitter as the sites which are most prone to security breaches. The danger is particularly accute when young children enter their real personal information on their profile. Though, as the new research indicates, children are already lying about their age to sign up for a profile. So from a safety standpoint, the most important measure for children to take is to refrain from entering real information such as their address or where they go to school.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11
     
    The study's authors argue that removing age restrictions from sites like Facebook might actually be the best way of improving child safety online. Elisabeth Staksrud, from the University of Oslo and one of the report's authors comments that: "since children often lie about their age to join 'forbidden' sites it would be more practical to identify younger users and to target them with protective measures."
Weiye Loh

Google's War on Nonsense - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...googles-war-on-nonsense

Search Engine Optimization Google Content Capitalism Advertising Crowd-Sourcing Mechanical Turk

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance.
  • The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.
  • These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.
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  • So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL’s enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he’d write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he’d never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning.
  • Mr. Miller’s job, as he made clear in an article last week in The Faster Times, an online newspaper, was to cram together words that someone’s research had suggested might be in demand on Google, position these strings as titles and headlines, embellish them with other inoffensive words and make the whole confection vaguely resemble an article. AOL would put “Rick Fox mustache” in a headline, betting that some number of people would put “Rick Fox mustache” into Google, and retrieve Mr. Miller’s article. Readers coming to AOL, expecting information, might discover a subliterate wasteland. But before bouncing out, they might watch a video clip with ads on it. Their visits would also register as page views, which AOL could then sell to advertisers.
  • commodify writing: you pay little or nothing to writers, and make readers pay a lot — in the form of their “eyeballs.” But readers get zero back, no useful content.
  • You can’t mess with Google forever. In February, the corporation concocted what it concocts best: an algorithm. The algorithm, called Panda, affects some 12 percent of searches, and it has — slowly and imperfectly — been improving things. Just a short time ago, the Web seemed ungovernable; bad content was driving out good. But Google asserted itself, and credit is due: Panda represents good cyber-governance. It has allowed Google to send untrustworthy, repetitive and unsatisfying content to the back of the class. No more A’s for cheaters.
  • the goal, according to Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, who worked on Panda, is to “provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
  • Google officially rolled out Panda 2.2. Put “Whitey Bulger” into Google, and where you might once have found dozens of content farms, today you get links to useful articles from sites ranging from The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, the F.B.I. and even Mashable, doing original analysis of how federal agents used social media to find Bulger. Last month, Demand Media, once the most notorious of the content farms, announced plans to improve quality by publishing more feature articles by hired writers, and fewer by “users” — code for unpaid freelancers. Amazing. Demand Media is stepping up its game.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system. As a business proposition, they once seemed exciting. Last year, The Economist admiringly described Associated Content and Demand Media as cleverly cynical operations that "aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it."
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.
  • “The key is to roll the campaign out slowly,” he said as he nibbled at seared duck foie gras. “A lot of companies are in a rush. They want as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few hundred in a week.”
  • The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems, are afraid they’ll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites — the kind with low PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site’s quality. The higher the PageRank, the more “Google juice” a site offers others to which it is linked.
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  • Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled entirely over the Web. Publishers can reject certain keywords and links — Mr. Stevens said some balked at a lingerie link — but for the most part the system is on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to publishers is handled via PayPal.
  • You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.
  • “I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”
  • To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.
  • WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess? Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.
joanne ye

Democracy Project to Fill Gap in Online Politics - 3 views

Reference: Democracy Project to Fill Gap in Online Politics (2000, June 8). PR Newswire. Retrieved 23 September, 2009, from Factiva. (Article can be found at bottom of the post) Summary: The D...

human rights digital freedom democracy

started by joanne ye on 24 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Panopticlick - 0 views

panopticlick.eff.org

Ethics Privacy Technology

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Feb 10
     
    Panopticlick Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies. Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. Click below and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web. Only anonymous data will be collected by this site.
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.
  • A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.
  • The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for “dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and the size of each sale, only Penney would know.
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  • in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”
  • Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position.”
  • She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote.
  • MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included cocaman.ch. (“Geekness — closer to the world” is the cryptic header atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel, a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.
  • The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.
  • “You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money.”
Weiye Loh

Sina Qua Non: Chinese Tweet Site Bolsters Social Core - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4231204576405041750625026.html

China Twitter Weibo

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • make it easier for users to define their relationships with other users—such as by labeling those who are real friends, as opposed to those who are just "fans." And there will be special services, like "personal assistants," to help the site's most influential users with technical questions.
  • Social-networking sites have taken off in much of the world, with users across the globe becoming increasingly interconnected. But unlike many other markets, China—which has more than 450 million Internet users, more than any other country—isn't dominated by big U.S. companies like Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. In fact, China's government blocks access to those two sites for users inside the country. MySpace China, an affiliate of the U.S. social-networking site that is partly owned by News Corp., has struggled. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.
  • a host of domestic Chinese companies are competing to fill the space. RenRen Inc., which runs one of the biggest Facebook-like sites in China, raised $743 million in a U.S. initial public offering in May that it is using to beef up its offerings. Rival Kaixin001, held by Happy Networks Ltd., also operates a social-networking site similar to Facebook. Chinese search giant Baidu Inc. is trying to turn its popular message board, Baidu Tieba, or Postbar, into more of a social network, and had its own microblogging service, Baidu Shuoba, or Baidu Talk, which failed to gain traction against Sina and now has been suspended. Sohu.com Inc. and NetEase.com Inc. offer microblogs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Weibo won't be turning into Facebook, Mr. Chao said, but will have more Facebook-like features to allow for "stronger social relationships based on our new applications."
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.
  • Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.
  • In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”
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  • BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”
  • The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.
  • He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.
  • He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months. “Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”
  • You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.
  • Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
  • PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.
  • “Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.” And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
  • At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
Weiye Loh

Facebook kicks off 20,000 underage users a day - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...off-20000-underage-users-a-day

Facebook Children Privacy Law

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • A recent Pew study found that nearly half of all U.S. 12-year-olds use social networking sites -- and privacy concerns in regard to Facebook's younger members have been growing of late. This month, Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) to argue for reforms in the site's privacy measures. "Under Facebook's policy, 13 million users under the age of 18 may be allowed to share their personal information just like adult users," Franken wrote. "These younger users are the most vulnerable to predators on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone."
  • But Franken's figures don't factor in the unknown number of Facebook users under 13. Other sites that are popular with kids handle the issue in differing ways. MySpace also requires users to be at least 13, but like Facebook, it has no practical way to verify that information. Disney.com allows children 12 and under to surf the site, and collects some personal information from them before they're eligible to participate in competitions, for example. Yahoo! doesn't allow kids 12 and under to register without the consent of a parent. Like Disney, it collects some limited idenifying information for participation in competitions and similar interactive features.
Weiye Loh

Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you - Internet - Insight - ZDNet Asia - 0 views

www.zdnetasia.com/eb-is-bad-for-you-62300497.htm

Internet Polarisation Fragmentation Information Search Engine Optimization Social Media Persuasion Rhetorics

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • Invisibly but quickly, the Internet is changing. Sites like Google and Facebook show you what they think you want to see, based on data they've collected about you.
  • The filter bubble is the invisible, personal universe of information that results--a bubble you live in, and you don't even know it. And it means that the world you see online and the world I see may be very different.
  • As consumers, we can vary our information pathways more and use things like incognito browsing to stop some of the tracking that leads to personalization.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • it's in these companies' hands to do this ethically--to build algorithms that show us what we need to know and what we don't know, not just what we like.
  • why would the Googles and Facebooks of the world change what they're doing (absent government regulation)? My hope is that, like newspapers, they'll move from a pure profit-making posture to one that recognizes that they're keepers of the public trust.
  • most people don't know how Google and Facebook are controlling their information flows. And once they do, most people I've met want to have more control and transparency than these companies currently offer. So it's a way in to that conversation. First people have to know how the Internet is being edited for them.
  • what's good and bad about the personalization. Tell me some ways that this is not a good thing? Here's a few. 1) It's a distorted view of the world. Hearing your own views and ideas reflected back is comfortable, but it can lead to really bad decisions--you need to see the whole picture to make good decisions; 2) It can limit creativity and innovation, which often come about when two relatively unrelated concepts or ideas are juxtaposed; and 3) It's not great for democracy, because democracy requires a common sense of the big problems that face us and an ability to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes.
  • Stanford researchers Dean Eckles and Maurits Kapstein, who figured out that not only do people have personal tastes, they have personal "persuasion profiles". So I might respond more to appeals to authority (Barack Obama says buy this book), and you might respond more to scarcity ("only 2 left!"). In theory, if a site like Amazon could identify your persuasion profile, it could sell it to other sites--so that everywhere you go, people are using your psychological weak spots to get you to do stuff. I also really enjoyed talking to the guys behind OKCupid, who take the logic of Google and apply it to dating.
  • Nobody noticed when Google went all-in on personalization, because the filtering is very hard to see.
Weiye Loh

Connecticut Law Tribune: Child Porn Decision Turns On Downloading Intent - 0 views

www.ctlawtribune.com/getarticle.aspx

Law Pornography Internet Child Pornography

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 27 May 12
     
    Generally speaking, when you go to a web site, images are downloaded to temporary storage on your computer - whether it's a personal computer, pad, laptop or certain smartphones. This temporary storage is called "cache." The pictures and video are temporarily stored to make it easier for your computer to display those images from the web site if you go back. It makes the processing time faster. This is an automatic process conducted by your computer's operating system. Yes, that means you or a client can accidentally access child pornography unknowingly. There may be pictures or videos that depict child pornography that you haven't viewed that get automatically downloaded and stored in temporary Internet storage or cache. Yes, that means that even if you or a client accidentally access child pornography and try to delete it, if the police find out about it, they will make an arrest, push to prosecute and the resultant conviction will garner a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration.
Meenatchi

Online Defamation - 0 views

www.koreatimes.co.kr/...202_43363.html

online defamation ethical law responsibility

shared by Meenatchi on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Meenatchi on 18 Aug 09
     
    Interesting Case In summary, the article discusses the court ruling of an online defamation case that took place in Korea. It involves Kim, the victim, who experienced the spread of false articles and defamatory comments that blamed him for his ex-girlfriend's suicide. The final verdict held Internet portals liable for the damages caused by the articles they displayed on their website. This is despite the articles having been provided by external media outlets. The Supreme Court ordered four of the major portals involved in the case to pay a combined 30 million ($22,500) as compensation to Kim. Ethical Question I feel there are a few ethical issues that are at play in this case. One would be if it is ethical to publish sensitive information about an individual without his/her permission on the Internet. This is of more importance when the credibility of the information is dubious. Another ethical question would be if Internet Service Providers can be held responsible for information they did not create. Is it fair to charge them on the basis that they have failed to regulate the content displayed on their sites? Problem The problem with the first ethical question is that it creates a question of individual privacy rights against the freedom of speech for another. Publishing sensitive information that might not even be true about an individual infringes his/her privacy rights. However, it is the right of the publisher to have the freedom of speech to state what he/she thinks. The issue with the second ethical question is that the Internet Service Providers merely provide a platform for people to express their views. They should not be held liable for comments posted by individuals using the website. However, the opposing view would expect the ISPs to be responsible for the content they allow to be displayed on their site. They have to regulate the content to ensure that sensitive or controversial information that would cause irrevocable damage to others
Weiye Loh

Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues - Slashdot - 0 views

search.slashdot.org/...st-Low-Quality-Sites-Continues

Google Search Engine Optimization Paid Search

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 11
     
    "A couple weeks ago, JC Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from 'area rugs' to 'grommet top curtains.' Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google's ranking algorithms. Now, Overstock.com has lost rankings for another type of link that Google finds to be manipulation of their algorithms. This situation has led Google to implement a significant change to their search algorithms, affecting almost 12% of queries in an effort to cull content farms and other webspam. And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely."
Weiye Loh

How I Created My First Membership Site [INFOGRAPHIC] - 0 views

www.bloggingbookshelf.com/...st-membership-site-infographic

Infographic Website Membership Entrepreneurship

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Jun 11
     
    I launched my Infographic Academy membership site on Monday, and I thought you guys would like to know how I went about creating it. And since it's all about how to create infographics, what better way to show you how I did it than with an infographic?
Weiye Loh

Bloggers take legal action over Huffington Post sale | Media | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...arianna-huffington-post-sale

Blog Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Arianna Huffington, her website and AOL were on the receiving end of a $105m (£64.5m) lawsuit by a group of angry bloggers unhappy that she sold the Huffington Post for $315m without them being paid a penny.The class action is led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, who wrote more than 250 posts for Huffington Post on an unpaid basis until he dropped out shortly after the news and comment site was sold to AOL earlier this year.
  • "Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation" and said he was bringing the action because "people who create content ... have to be compensated" for their efforts.
  • The complainant and his lawyers estimate about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis – and argue that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site, the basis of their $105m claim for compensation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A spokesman for the Huffington Post said the lawsuit was without merit. He added: "Bloggers use our platform – as well as other unpaid group blogs across the web – to connect and help their work be seen by as many people as possible. It's the same reason people go on TV shows: to promote their views and ideas. HuffPost bloggers can cross-post their work on other sites, including their own."
Weiye Loh

More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World - By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duf... - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...people_are_hungry_in_the_world

Poverty

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"
  • For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. COMMENTS (7) SHARE: Twitter   Reddit   Buzz   More... But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night?
  • unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor -- they are in what economists call a "poverty trap." Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.
  • But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs's answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly's with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies.
  • The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments.
  • According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.
  • To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials -- similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug -- to understand what works and what doesn't in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we'd have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.
  • Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13 children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2) for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however, had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages, Pak Solhin told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him.
  • Pak Solhin, his wife, and their three children took drastic steps to survive. His wife left for Jakarta, some 80 miles away, where she found a job as a maid. But she did not earn enough to feed the children. The oldest son, a good student, dropped out of school at 12 and started as an apprentice on a construction site. The two younger children were sent to live with their grandparents. Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on fish he caught at a nearby lake. His brother fed him once in a while. In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.
  • Pak Solhin appeared to be out of options, and he clearly attributed his problem to a lack of food. As he saw it, farmers weren't interested in hiring him because they feared they couldn't pay him enough to avoid starvation; and if he was starving, he would be useless in the field. What he described was the classic nutrition-based poverty trap, as it is known in the academic world. The idea is simple: The human body needs a certain number of calories just to survive. So when someone is very poor, all the food he or she can afford is barely enough to allow for going through the motions of living and earning the meager income used to buy that food. But as people get richer, they can buy more food and that extra food goes into building strength, allowing people to produce much more than they need to eat merely to stay alive. This creates a link between income today and income tomorrow: The very poor earn less than they need to be able to do significant work, but those who have enough to eat can work even more. There's the poverty trap: The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer and eat even better, and get stronger and even richer, and the gap keeps increasing.
  • But though Pak Solhin's explanation of how someone might get trapped in starvation was perfectly logical, there was something vaguely troubling about his narrative. We met him not in war-infested Sudan or in a flooded area of Bangladesh, but in a village in prosperous Java, where, even after the increase in food prices in 2007 and 2008, there was clearly plenty of food available and a basic meal did not cost much. He was still eating enough to survive; why wouldn't someone be willing to offer him the extra bit of nutrition that would make him productive in return for a full day's work? More generally, although a hunger-based poverty trap is certainly a logical possibility, is it really relevant for most poor people today? What's the best way, if any, for the world to help?
Weiye Loh

New Service Adds Your Drunken Facebook Photos To Employer Background Checks, For Up To ... - 0 views

consumerist.com/...cks-for-up-to-seven-years.html

Employment Privacy Social Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Jun 11
     
    The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online. For instance, this sample they provided was flagged for "Demonstrating potentially violent behavior" because of "flagrant display of weapons or bombs." The FTC said that the file, which will last for up to seven years, does not violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The company also says that info in your file will be updated when you remove pictures from the social media sites. Forbes reports, "new employers who run searches through Social Intelligence won't have access to the materials if they are completely removed from the Internet."
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