News

Google Still At The Top

Neilsen Online has released search share rankings within the U.S. As expected, Google is leading the way with over 4 billion searches. Over half of those searches are shared while 37.9 searches were attributed per searcher. Yahoo! came in 2nd place with 1.2 billion searches, 17.7% of those were shared while there were 22.4 searches per searcher. The lesson here is that Google is till at the top of their game when it comes to search. Especially when you consider, that the figures of Yahoo combined with MSN/Windows Live Search still don’t compare to Google’s numbers.

searchmarketshare

Do You Verify For MyBlogLog

Verify MyBlogLog

This is what happens when you don’t have your feed reader open every day. Some things end up slipping by. At any rate, MyBlogLog looks to be starting a Verification process. This verification process will be visually displayed by a green checkmark. This checkmark signifies a “seal of approval” that let’s the reader know, that specific MyBlogUser has spent a few minutes verifying to MyBlogLog that they have write access to the blog in question.

As it stands, this seal is nothing more than a visual indicator, but MyBlogLog plans on using similar methods to provide various levels of “trustworthiness“.

To verify your site, check out your MyBlogLog community page and click on the “Verify my site” link.

After you verify your site, it will look a little something like this:

VerifiedSite

How it works

When a site owner begins the verification process, we give them a bit of code to put onto their site that only someone with edit rights to the site can put into the page. Verification happens by putting the code on your site, re-publishing, and clicking the “Authenticate” button on the verification page. MyBlogLog then goes out to the site to check for the code. If it finds it, verification is complete!

Once you complete verification, you can remove the code from your site.

What it means

The verified checkmark on a community page is an indicator that the community owner has completed the verification process. Verification can only be done by authors and co-authors of a MyBlogLog community. Community pages that have been verified will flagged as such in our database and this flag will be used in the future to provide more visability and other special mojo powers.

WordPress Meetup In New York

Looks like there will be a WordPress meetup in the New York City area on Saturday, February 16th 2008 at 4:00 PM. The date and where the event is taking place is subject to change so be sure to keep an eye on the official event page for more information.

Other WordPress related conferences/meetups are as follows:

Nicholas Carr Interview With Wired Mag

While reading Wired Magzine, I came across this interview with Nicholas Carr who answered questions related to the future of computing. This article really struck a chord with me because of the following quote:

Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr on the Terrifying Future of Computing The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick’s vision wasn’t that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We’re beginning to process information as if we’re nodes; it’s all about the speed of locating and reading data. We’re transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.

With the inclusion of myself, I’ve already noticed people beginning to think, act, and live as if they are a computer. For instance, if I ask someone a question, they don’t bother to think of the answer on there own, they Google It. Gee, just think how it would be if you were able to hook up a device to your brain that allowed you to browse through the net in real-time and allowed you to come up with answers to perplexing questions that you no longer needed to actually store in the brain. Why bother remember or learning anything when it’s all archived in the cloud, that can be accessed within seconds?

Do you look at the prospect of being nothing more than a node exciting?

Simply Basic Releases WP Plugin

Simply Basic Logo

Blogging buddy John Kolbert has released his very first WordPress plugin called Admin Favicon. Not long ago, John published an article on his blog that explained how to give your WordPress admin area it’s own favicon so that you could easily discern the WP Admin tab in your browser from all of the other tabs. As it turns out, each time you upgrade WordPress, the hack disappears. That problem is solved with this plugin.

When you install the plugin, a new entry is created within the OPTIONS page of your administrative backend. Click on Admin Favicon and you should see a box where you can type in a custom URL where your favicon will be stored.

Favicon Setup

After setting the URL to your icon, click OK. It might require you to restart your browser before the icon is detected but usually, all you’ll need to do is browse a few pages in your Admin area until the icon is detected.

This is another example of how open the WordPress code is. A simple problem solved with a simple solution. And thanks to John releasing this plugin, other people who have noticed this similar problem, now have a solution in which to use. Thanks John.

For support or inquiries regarding the plugin, check out Admin Favicon.

Email – Most Desired Service

A survey conducted by online usability and accessibility expert Webcredible has identified email as the most desired service for mobile phone users. When asked ‘Which service would you use on your mobile/cell phone if speed & quality weren’t an issue?’, 33% stated that email would be their number one priority. Social networking followed closely behind with 25% of the votes.

20% of those surveyed also highlighted a preference for using their phone to access local information about their surroundings and a remaining 13% said that they would use their phone to obtain travel and route planning information.

Trenton Moss, director, Webcredible commented, “The ease of use with regard to accessing email via Blackberry and PDA devices has certainly caused a ground swell in consumers who want the ability to email on the move through a basic mobile device. What I find interesting though, is the speed with which social networking is becoming a must have function on mobile.”

“Over the next six months I see a continued increase in the number of people demanding social networking functions through their mobile against those who consider email to be the most important. One of the driving factors in enabling this will be the usability of the site and the skill with which site developers transfer from PC format to mobile format. Facebook has already developed a very accessible and usable mobile version of their site, ensuring its members get their daily Facebook fix.”

Interestingly, just 9% said that they would like to be able to shop online.

Moss continues, “I think this is an unsurprising statistic. There are two main reasons why mobile users are skeptical about shopping via mobile. Firstly, usability is a massive function and one which is difficult to overcome if shoppers want to view a good quality image of what they are buying. Secondly, there is still great uncertainty among the public about data security of shopping through mobile phones.”

Webcredible surveyed 1010 mobile phone users and achieved the following results:-

* Social networks – 254 votes (25%)
* Travel information/planning – 135 votes (13%)
* Email – 335 votes (33%)
* Local information/whats around you – 199 votes (20%)
* Online shopping – 87 votes (9%)

CLIQ To Be Taken Down

Cliqin Logo

Well, if you haven’t taken down the CliqIN widget by now, you’ll be forced to. I received word today that on January 31st, Cliq will be taken down indefinitely. All members that have registered with the Cliq website will be notified this week. Personally, I thought CliqIN was a good idea. However, it never seemed to garner a lot of press and it never took off like BlogRush did. As for the reason why Cliq is shutting down?

As it turns out, CLIQ was a client of Offermatica, INC and was built as a way to extend their story into the social media space. Well, Offermatica has since been acquired by Omniture. Omniture already has a number of projects within the social media space and therefor, it makes no sense for them to continue development and funding for Cliq.

It was a decent ride I suppose. I’ll never understand why the bloggers who fell for BlogRush didn’t get smarter and move to something like CliqIN which gave the user full control over their blogging network. If you still have their widget published on your site, now would be a good time to remove it.

D-LINK Goes Custom

Dlink Router With Skin

D-Link and Skinit now offer customers the option to customize their routers with some 3000 designs, including fashion designs, sports teams, colleges, tattoo art, initials, symbols, and corporate logos, as well as the ability to import a personal photo using the Skinit custom design tool.

Skinit’s skins are personalized, high-quality vinyl covers specially designed to fit a broad variety of consumer electronic devices. Initially, D-Link and Skinit are providing personalization solutions for the following routers:

D-Link® DIR-655 Xtreme N™ Gigabit Router, DIR-625 RangeBooster N™ Router, DIR-615 Wireless N Router DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router, DGL-4300 Wireless Gaming Router, DGL-4100 Gaming Router and the DI-624 802.11g Wireless Router.

Click here for more info

Revver Updates WP Plugin

Revver WordPress Logo

Revver has updated their WordPress plugin today. The plugin mostly consists of more customization and greater support to users.

The plugin has always required that your host allow cURL access. Unfortunately for some users, certain hosting providers such as GoDaddy required additional configuration settings that would have required updating the plugin code. To remedy this, we added a field in the “Revver Configuration” tab where you can add a proxy server that does support cURL (sounds a little mumbo jumbo-y, but all you need to do is copy and paste a URL and you’re good).

Instructions for installing for the first time or upgrading an existing install can be found on the quickstart guide page.