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September 03 2010
September 02 2010
This Spam Infographic About Spam Infographics Makes My Head Hurt
Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post of Internet memes, wins the “more meta than thou” award for making “An Infographic Backlash Infographic” inspired by the tragic tale of a guy whose job it was to game Digg back when Digg had enough traffic to make it worth gaming.
Okay Buzzfeed, just because you understand recursion, doesn’t mean you have to rub it in our face all the time. Aside from the Greyhat SEO tricks, your anti-infographic infographic and the post that inspired it are actually just describing successful web-writing and content creation. It’s like…there’s a reason people are clicking on it.
From the Digg gamer’s playbook, which is really interesting if you care at all about how people used to build website traffic.
“Spam other sites with it too for bonus points. Email large blogs, etc. to try to get them to run with it too.”
From the Buzzfeed “community manager,” in our Tips inbox today:
Thought this might be up your alley -
a couple of days ago someone posted on Reddit about how he been paid to game Digg and other influential sites by creating infographics (those goofy, badly designed images with stats and pie charts called “everything you ever wanted to know about boobs” that keep turning up on content-sharing sites) and then loading them with keyword-spam embed tags once they start spreading.
today, we posted an infographic about how the system works: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographics
and within a few minutes, dozens of new fake accounts were created on our site to defend the practice.
the whole thing is pretty fascinating!
Well I do find it fascinating … But wait, didn’t you guys just tell me I shouldn’t link to infographics? Fortunately the spam infographic has some helpful suggestions for what to do when you’re in this kind of a situation. “If you do include a link to a spam infographic include a no follow tag in the html.”
Which is exactly what we did. Thanks guys! Hi Jonah ;)
(via cosplaygirl, cosplayinspiration)
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HUGE: Facebook Testing New "Subscribe To" User Feature (Nick O'Neill/All Facebook)
Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:
HUGE: Facebook Testing New “Subscribe To” User Feature — Facebook is in the process of testing a new feature which lets you subscribe to all the actions of a specific user. In other words, you can receive notifications anytime a specific user takes an action on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg Is On iTunes Ping — But Only One Is Real
Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple and Facebook are having a little bit of an issue at the moment. Despite launching with Facebook Connect integration yesterday, it’s now nowhere to be seen on Apple’s new music social network, Ping. And that’s too bad because even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed up to try out Ping yesterday, we hear.
While Facebook Connect will no longer help you find Zuckerberg there, if you do a simple name search, there he is. Well actually, there he is twice. Hmm. Which one to choose?
One has 46 followers, says he’s into “Dance, Hip-hop/Rap”, and has no picture. The other has 74 followers, doesn’t list musical preferences, but has a picture. So it’s gotta be the second one, right?
Nope. As tempting as it is to think that Zuckerberg actually filled in his profile to say “It’s true, I invented Facebook,” this is a fake account. The one with no picture and less followers? That’s the real Zuck. He follows two people, Katy Perry and Bret Taylor. One of those is a famous pop singer, the other is Facebook’s CTO. I’ll let you sort that out.
Who cares? Well, it’s sort of interesting that anyone can create a fake account of someone else on Ping. Sure, you need an iTunes account, but there are undoubtedly many people who have no interest in using Ping and are happy to create fake accounts aplenty. As another example, here’s The Beatles. No, it’s not the group (iTunes doesn’t play nicely with them, remember?) — it’s someone who made their name “The” and “Beatles” and put an album cover picture in there.
These fake account could potentially lead to users who believe them getting tricked into making purchases that they think their idols recommend. Zuckerberg didn’t actually recommend Those Darlins, for example — Fake Zuckerberg did.
Seems like there’s an identification system that could potentially help with this. Oh yeah, Facebook Connect.
In The Coming HTML5 Browser Wars, The Markup Should Remain The Same
On Monday, Google made a big splash with a customized Arcade Fire video page that showed off all the cool things HTML5 can do, from video, animations and 3D rendering to gorgeous fonts and choreographed windows. It’s all cutting edge stuff as far as what is possible with a Web browser goes, but there is one very big problem. It doesn’t work so great in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead. I received the following message on Firefox:
This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again.
But wait, isn’t Firefox one of those “modern browsers” that supports HTML5? This isn’t the first time there have been issues with HTML5 compatibility. The problem is that HTML5 is so young that the standards have not been hammered out yet across all browsers. The markup language required to produce the same effect is different for different browsers.
“The Arcade Fire thing . . . they are writing to the browser,” points out Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft general manager in charge of Internet Explorer. “They use proprietary Javascript.” HTML5 “done right,” he contends, would be using the same markup language across browsers. Seems reasonable. That is what the open Web is all about. It is why we have standards. But HTML5 is so new that we are getting flashbacks to the late 1990s with sites refusing to accept certain browsers.
To illustrate this point, Microsoft has an HTML5 test page set up that changes the border around a block of text. Inside the block of text, it shows the markup code required to create different effects such as animating it or creating dots instead of a solid line. Here is what the code looks like in Chrome:
And here is what it looks like in Firefox
What’s wrong with these pictures? One takes 16 lines of code, the other takes four, and they are completely different. Even the dots that are created don’t match (Chrome’s dots are square). A different set of HTML5 code is required for IE9. ”We want to make the same markup work everywhere,” says Hachamovitch. ”If you have to write that differently for every browser it is kind of missing the point.”
Microsoft is working with the standards bodies, as are all the other browser makers, but what is really needed is better definitions and a thorough set of reference examples for every possible HTML5 feature. It’s a lot of work. Eventually, we will get there. But until then, expect to see grandstanding about which browser does HTML5 better. When you hear that, just ask yourself, which version of HTML5 are they talking about.
The Gathering (via panic-embryo)
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Ping Averts Its Gaze: Apple's New Social Network Doesn't Really ... (Peter Kafka/MediaMemo)
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Ping Averts Its Gaze: Apple's New Social Network Doesn't Really Want to Know Much About You — Steve Jobs says Ping is supposed to be a “social music discovery” service: You share your musical taste with friends and vice versa. But if you really want to share, you're going to find it harder than you think.
Make group video calls with up to 10 people with the new beta version ... (Peter Parkes/The Big Blog)
Peter Parkes / The Big Blog:
Make group video calls with up to 10 people with the new beta version of Skype for Windows — Today we've released an update to Skype for Windows. The second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a number of changes both outside and in - most importantly, you can now make group video calls with up to 10 people.
It's officially over. After Dell pulled out of the running this morning, HP has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data storage company 3PAR, for $33 per share in cash, or a value of $2.35 billion. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies. This morning, HP upped the ante with an offer worth $33 per share or $2.4 billion. 3PAR accepted HP's bid and Dell withdrew.
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Walkman outsells iPod in Japan for first time (Agence France Presse)
Agence France Presse:
Walkman outsells iPod in Japan for first time — TOKYO — In a rare victory for Sony over arch-rival Apple, the Walkman portable music player outsold the iPod in Japan in monthly sales for the first time in August, a survey showed Thursday. — Sony's share of the Japanese market …
Facebook Testing “Subscribe”, Their Version Of Follow — Well Sort Of, Maybe
I feel like all I’ve written about the past few weeks is Facebook’s need for a new social dynamic. Specifically, I want Facebook to break their social graph into two: those people who you are friends with, and those who you follow — for sharing purposes. It seems that Facebook may be testing something like that out — well sort of, maybe.
Facebook appears to be testing out a new feature called “Subscribe.” A source who supposedly has it enabled, tells All Facebook that “by subscribing you don’t miss any updates from people you subscribe to.” While on the face of it, this would seem to be a lot like the idea of “follow” it’s not clear from that wording if you actually already need to be friends with a person in order to follow them.
In other words, this may just be another mechanism to ensure you see updates from people you really care about. But if that’s the case, this just adds more confusion to Facebook’s social graph because you can already create lists for that purpose. Though, as All Facebook points out, these update will apparently appear in the notifications drop down.
Instead, what I’m hoping is that this is a proper follow feature that allows you to see other users public updates even if you’re not subscribed to them. And vice versa, obviously. I would love to allow people to subscribe to stuff I share publicly (and have it appear in their stream), but have the option to still share stuff with my actual friends.
But still, maybe that is in the works as well. Baby steps are probably wise here for Facebook so their users don’t lose their minds and scream bloody murder — which will happen anyway.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on this to try and get more clarity on the feature. They’re currently “looking into it.”
Update: Here’s Facebook’s comment:
This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes).
“Friends” appears to be the keyword there — as in, this is still only for people you are connected with. But I’ve asked Facebook to clarify that further just to make sure.
Update 2: As expected, Facebook has confirmed that you need to be a friend of someone (or a fan of them) in order to get these notifications. These notifications go into the tab up top and also get sent as an email to you, I’m told.
In other words, no proper “follow” just yet.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
