Who Is Failure? Google not Obama

It seems that someone has Tea-bagged Obama and made his page rank in google for “Who is Failure”.  This type of thing is easy to do: make a page rank for an otherwise uncompetitive term, but in this case it’s followed by an onslought of publicity that is an embarrasment to both the target and to Google.

I suspect that Google will manually take this down soon.  They say they can only rearrange search result pages (SERPS) algorithmically, but we all know that they may consider  if (page = ‘obama’) { rank = 0 } an algorithm.

More on this by Danny

MySQL Command Line Bar Chart


mysql> select date_format( create_time, '%Y-%m-%d') dt, repeat( '#', count(id)/20.0+1) dt from result group by dt;

Comand line stats are addictive. Nothing like real time… enjoy. Thanks to snipplr.

Oracle Boards Sun and Takes MySQL Captive

I’m a little amazed that no-one seems to care that Oracle has bought MySQL through it’s purchase of Sun announced today. MySQL is used by over 40% of developers, and is one of the key backend databases for many of the sites you know and love.

The WSJ didn’t mention it. Nor did CNN. Bloomberg? Nope. Forbes? of course not. The NYT at least mentioned it at the bottom.

Although Oracle won’t own the open source version, they pretty much control the main development path. How would you feel if Microsoft was the lead for the Linux development? I thought so.

@graywolf, @sugarrae and @streko team
up to defeat the Evil Empire.

“its kinda like star wars … when the republic turned into the empire … (hint google isnt the jedi knights)”
– @graywolf

I have nothing to say.  This is a good read.

http://calacanis.com/2008/12/04/the-120-solution/

I agree with all but about 20% of it. ;)

Emulate Humans, Not Robots

In the world of SEO or in the world of Social Marketing, you should strive to emulate humans, not robots.

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I was working on trying to figure out whether to retweet @graywolf‘s post about his new business centered around viral marketing. My thought was that certainly anyone that was following me on twitter would be following him. In order to find out, I wrote a quick shell script to pull down his followers using the twitter api and pulled it into a flat file and grep’d out the users from all the other data.

How do You Find the Intersection of the Files?
To fiind the intersection of the resulting files, I found a simple way to do it on the command-line.

grep -f file1 file2

Done. That’s easy, no?

This takes each line of file1 and uses it as a pattern to match in file2. Grep is a command line application found natively on all linux distributions and mac os’s. You can use it on windows xp or vista by installing cygwin.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.

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Google is slowly replacing Microsoft as the company people love to hate. While I may have a love-hate relationship with Google myself, sometimes it really irks me when mainstream media outlets do it. [editors note: we are not main stream, and with zero readership, hardly an outlet]

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Webroot-Says-Hackers-Exploit-Google-Trends-With-Malware/

This article from eWeek (again, I use mainstream loosely) explains how hackers use Google Trends to figure out what is a timely news article people might search for, then monopolize on the search terms by writing fake blogs.

Is there any reason to mention Google in this article, other than making it worth reading? You could replace “google trends” with “reading the newspaper” and it’s just as plausible. The mere mention of Google is the only reason this article is interesting. Get a clue eWeek.

Oh wait… they have one. They write an article about Google, put GOOG in it and it comes up during a google finance search… remind me to….

Firefox Has Broken a Critcial Browser Feature.

But you need to get your shit together.  Why do you auto-complete itunes when I start out a web site with ‘w-e-b’?  It doesn’t  make sense.  I visit WEBmasterworld.com 10 times a day.

So why did you break it in 3.0?

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