Tagged: Web search engine

How do you find helpful information on the Internet and ignore the rest?

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02:  Robots play foo...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Make the Internet Smarter at Helping Us | Both Sides of the Table – StumbleUpon. This article discusses some ideas how to read review sites, considering bias, balancing sources, and the relative importance of opinions. It seems clear as well that only a user-programmed AI for what is important to them is going to help with the increasing clutter of information. Right now tags, categories, and google searches/alerts are too crude.

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Removing the www. in your domain | Locomotion

Everything about domain names
Image by Emilie Ogez via Flickr

Removing the www. in your domain | Locomotion. I removed the www in my domain as well. It confuses people who aren’t familiar with technology. So far I haven’t noticed any traffic difference (better or worse) for doing so. The link above explains the reasons and how to accomplish this.

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Blogs that are short and spammy here at WordPress

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Image by Muy Yum via Flickr

In the last 24 hours I have seen a proliferation of blog posts that are exactly the same as one another. Sometimes the blog post which is only a few sentences is repeated word for word with as many as 10-20 different blog names/authors. This has to be an automated operation and abuse of WordPress.

I let WordPress know that this is occurring but its a hard problem for them to fix. Everyone is free to scrape content, but I imagine its hard setting a hard limit of scraping that you can enforce. For example, one webpage called techmeme I think used to make it very easy to submit things to your blog/Twitter feed. It has some interesting stories, but because it is so easy lots of people were using it. I noticed that on Twitter and stopped using it. There is no use to repeat something that hundreds of people are already repeating.

So I have decided that creating original content really is a better way to build an audience than sharing educational resources I find. I have learned many things reading other websites, but not everyone seems to appreciate less common resources. To me, if something is worth learning about it is easy to motivate yourself to learn. However I see that other people sometimes prefer to be led through learning something. So that is a change I am going to do in editorial content here.

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Congratulations! You have helped me test Google Website Optimizer

WordPress.com
Image via Wikipedia

Information that I will gather will result in an article about its possible usefulness for WordPress.com blog. This is the same page as the original one in all ways but two. It has more outbound links, and more post tags.

Sorry folks. This isn’t going to work. Apparently you need to install javascript on the pages and that is something that WordPress.com does not allow. If it was self-hosted then I could do this.  Perhaps there is another service that will accomplish this functionality.

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