Stuart Homfray The Weblog

Google Flight Sim

Goggles, by Mark Caswell-Daniels, is a fantastic little flight sim utilising the satellite pictures from Google Maps. There’s a number of cities around the world to choose from, and you can even fire at the scenery! :)

This is a SERIOUS timesink - great stuff Mark!!

Google Stops Badware

“Google warns on ‘unsafe’ websites“, “Google offers malware warnings“, and “Google launches ‘neighbourhood watch’ malicious website warning system” - just three of the many reports today on the announcement that Google will work with StopBadware.org to help protect us from the dangers of those scummy sods that fill our computers up will all sorts of spyware-type crap (also see StopBadware.org’s original announcement: “Safer Searching“)

Great news - it’s just that I’ve tried it out and it’s not actually working yet… :(

Update Wed 9th Aug 2006: it’s working… OK! The search I used to retrieve SERPs containing dodgy sites was ’serial numbers’. Clicking the second result gave me an interstitial page informing me that the site you are about to visit may harm your computer. To be honest, though, this should have applied to more of the results…

Cameroon Domain Shenanigans

All your typos are belong to us!

CircleID highlights the issue of Cameroon exploiting mis-typed urls. I’ve just tried apple.cm, microsoft.cm and google.cm, and yes, all those pages look pretty similar!

I don’t agree with the author’s opinion that OpenDNS should redirect .cm typos to their search page (if you’ve not heard of them, OpenDNS is a nifty little service that speeds up domain name queries). This might prove problematical, as the .cm top level domain does contain a few useful sites (Google returns around 486,000 results with a site:.cm search!)

EDIT: Almost forgot about John Levine’s blog entry that lists the actual hosts of this Cameroon typo page!

Message From A ‘Distinguished SEO Outsourcing Company’

Generally, spam’s a real pain in the arse, isn’t it? But when companies take the trouble to fill out my contact form in order to spam me, well, that REALLY winds me up! And when they’re trying to impress me with their poorly-written, fake business spiel… what can I say - that doesn’t exactly help matters! (Note: the word ‘fake’ is important here, as you’ll soon see).

RST Web Solutions, an Indian web services provider that would be glad to consider our company as an extension to serve you for the overflow of your work(!) have done exactly that - pasted a load of their marketing gobbledegook into my contact form and hit ‘Send’. I’m unhappy, I don’t like it, so rather than emailing them and taking the risk of giving them an email address, I thought I’d point it out to everyone!

Back to the use of the word ‘fake’. One of the statements they make within their ‘message’ is:

“Our company i.e. RST Web Solutions (www.rstwebsolutions.com) is ranked top among the key phrases like: SEO company, expert reciprocal linking services, content writing company, SEM company India and link building offshore company.”

So, being the sort of vindictive soul that I am, I decided to test this out in the ‘Big 3′ search engines (I only checked the first couple of pages of results - you might not consider this exactly ‘exhastive testing’, but it is lunchtime and anyway, how many of us would look below the first two pages of results for SEO services?!) :

SEO company

Google.com - not in the first 20. MSN.com - not in the first 20. Yahoo.com - not in the first 20.

expert reciprocal linking services (now there’s a term you don’t hear every day!)

Google.com - not in the first 20. MSN.com - not in the first 20. Yahoo.com - not in the first 20.

content writing company

Google.com - not in the first 20. MSN.com - not in the first 20. Yahoo.com - not in the first 20.

SEM company India

Google.com - not in the first 20. MSN.com - not in the first 20. Yahoo.com - not in the first 20.

link building offshore company

Google.com - not in the first 20. MSN.com - not in the first 20. Yahoo.com - not in the first 20.

Guys, it’s not looking good! Even if I take the SEM company India keywords and search your own rstwebsolutions.com domain, only Google returns a result!

So what am I saying here? Well, “please don’t spam me again in this manner” would be the main thing. But, if you are going to spam me again - at least have the sense to check your facts first! After all, I’d love to bask on all the advantages of offshore development and avail the exemption of overheads, administrative, facilities, and human resource costs as I know you strive to achieve values through these services!

Best of luck - and feel free to post a response!

Netvibes - a Great Service (With Great Service)

I think it was around the beginning of this year when I came across Netvibes - an excellent Web 2.0 service allowing you to create a personalised homepage containing RSS feeds and many other external web services. I must admit, I really love it - especially as I have to start my day with a feed-reading frenzy!

Anyway, yesterday all my feeds disappeared, each one displaying a solitary ‘Loading…’ message and very little else! After waiting for a few hours (Netvibes is still in beta, after all) I fired off the feedback form highlighting my problems. Only 10 minutes later, I received a response from Tariq at Netvibes, and after a couple of very polite emails, they came up with a fix!

There’s lots of online RSS reader services out there (which I’ve tended to avoid as I’ve been happy with Thunderbird) but I dunno, Netvibes just seems to feel nicer. I can separate my feeds into self-categorised tabbed panes, I can include my Box.net online storage, various POP/Gmail/Yahoo email accounts, support for online iCal calendars, to-do lists, and notes (and new features are added all the time) - it’s just GRR-R-EAT! (as a wise cat once said!)