June 12th, 2009 
jimcarter 
I can’t be the only one that is getting sick of these.. Now Facebook & Google are the worst. My favorite is when FB asks me to go through 2-3 of these before it accepts my link, and then half the time ends up having an AJAX error and not posting it anyhow.
I miss the days of webcrawler when the whole internet was spam, but at least we didn’t have to be challenged before clicking submit.
May 19th, 2009 jimcarter One of my favorite blogs of recent is http://failblog.org/ and every once in a while, you catch a gem where it wasn’t met. When I saw it in my email teamed with a Google Ad, this was just too good to resist taking a screenshot.
Google Ads Win!
I submitted it to failblog as an entry, they havn’t gotten back to me yet.
May 7th, 2009 jimcarter In today’s real-time web, searching is king. Google/Live.com/Yahoo/Wikipedia are the new household names, but typically when someone tells you to “google it”, you know what they mean. Where I love the fact that between the four above sites (not necessarily in that order) I can prettymuch anything I’m looking for online, there is still usually a time delay that can range from a few hours to a few months depending on what the site tells engines to do.
For as long as I’ve been in the business this was just something you accept. When you want a realtime search for things based on Blogs, Articles & More you would head to Technorati. But with the rising popularity of Twitter (and specifically their sexy new search), this completely changes things.
As a business owner, you can follow users who are posting about their thoughts on your company or need for your product, as a hobbiest you can see the latest and greatest with what you like to do, and as an average geek you can follow trends and watch what you’re internet rockstar heros care about.. all in realtime. Now with the inclusion of their search also indexing outgoing links, this really shows they mean business. I look at it as the Sprint Now Network of search.
It may seem like a simple thing, but when your mind needs to work like mine as a programmer it opens more doors than the Keymaster in The Matrix 3.
Hey @Google – @Twitter To Start Indexing Links For Search
Twitter Search is easily the most promising aspect of Twitter. People talk about mundane updates, or connecting with companies, or following celebrities — but that’s all small scale. The real power of Twitter lies in its aggregate data. Why do you think Google and every other company out there is interested in them? It’s not just because they are the hot ticket in town right now, despite what some would have you believe. It’s all about the data. And Twitter knows that too — and is apparently on the verge of some interesting moves with Twitter Search that will better highlight that.
Speaking on a panel today, Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, had some very interesting things to say, Webware’s Rafe Needleman who moderated it, reports. The most interesting thing is that Twitter Search will soon begin crawling the links that people tweet out and indexing them. This immediately takes Twitter Search, which is still a very basic service, to the next level. This means that no longer will it just be a stream of textual tweets, but it will include millions of web pages as well — web pages that are more or less already curated by the individuals who tweet them out. Sure, there will be some spam, maybe even a lot of it, but this user curation should help real good content from around the web bubble up.
Apparently, Twitter Search will index the content of these pages as well. Yes, this is what Google does. So it should be no surprise when I say that Jayaram was the former VP of Search Quality for Google.
What are your thoughts on search today, how does something like this matter to you when it comes to things your looking for?
April 25th, 2009 jimcarter I knew it would only be a matter of time for someone to figure out a way to get around these. If they weren’t bad enough I can’t wait to see how much more complicated and un readable (even by humans) they make them. Typically I need to do a few tries myself before i can get it right.
Worm Solves Gmails CAPTCHA, Creates Fake Accounts – Business Center – PC World.
A Vietnamese security company has detected what it believes is a new worm that thwarts Google’s security protections in order to register new dummy Gmail accounts from which to send spam.
Bach Koa Internetwork Security (BKIS) said the worm was discovered earlier this week in one of its honeypots, the term for a computer set up to catch samples of malicious software. BKIS has named the malware “W32.Gaptcha.Worm.”
Once a computer is infected with Gaptcha, the worm launches the Internet Explorer browser and goes to Gmail’s new account registration page. It begins to fill in random names of fictitious users. When confronted with a CAPTCHA, the worm sends the image to a remote server for processing, wrote Do Manh Dung, senior malware researcher, on the BKIS blog.
..continued
I still think that the point I made years ago holds true with the only true way to test for bots: http://noinput.net/2007/failproof-captcha/
September 23rd, 2008 jimcarter The new Android phone has has so much coverage this year it’s crazy. The idea of the “Google Phone” has sort of kept everyone on their toes wondering what to expect, but I’m really not sold yet. Tomorrow they’re holding a press conference in NY to officially introduce it and tonight they leaked the specs. Aside from the fact it looks great, I expected more.
In-store, immediate sales only available in stores within 5 miles of a 3G covered area. If a store is beyond that range, representatives will walk customers through a T-mobile.com purchase
- One touch access to: Search, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Calendar, and Google Talk
- Gmail account and data plan required
- GPS
- 3.1 mp camera, no video recording
- No stereo bluetooth (A2DP)
- Dimensions: 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 in
- Weighs 5.6 ounces
- 480×320 65K color screen
- 5 hour talk time, 130 hour talk time
- Expandable up to 8GB
I guess we’ll see what happens tomorrow, go T-Mobile. T-Mobile G1 specs leaked prior to announcement .
August 11th, 2008 jimcarter Hmm, really? I could have told you that.
Google believes $1B investment in AOL is crumbling – USATODAY.com
SAN FRANCISCO — In an assessment that could lead to a substantial charge against its future profits, Google (GOOG) believes its $1 billion investment in advertising partner AOL is souring.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company disclosed in a quarterly report filed late Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the 5% AOL stake that it bought in 2005 “may be impaired.” Impairment is an accounting term used to describe an acquisition or investment that has eroded.
Unless there is an about-face, the acquiring company eventually must absorb a charge on its books to account for the diminished value of its holdings.
Google acknowledged for the first time that it might have to recognize a loss on its 5% stake in AOL, whose struggles have made it a financial albatross for its owner, Time Warner (TWX).
“There can be no assurance that impairment charges will not be required in the future, and any such amounts may be material,” Google said of its AOL investment.
A Google spokesman declined further comment Thursday.
As the Internet’s most profitable company, Google could absorb a fairly large charge without too much pain. In the first half of this year, Google earned $2.55 billion.
Google bought its stake in AOL largely to prevent one of its largest advertising partners — AOL — from defecting to Microsoft. The bidding war helped drive up AOL’s implied market value to $20 billion, based on Google’s investment.
Some analysts have suggested AOL may be worth less than $10 billion now. Google didn’t estimate in its SEC filing what it believes its stake to be currently worth.
In all fairness, a lot has changed since 2005, including Google and the new paid search realm they dominate. It probably looked like a great deal at the time but well, I guess not even 10,000 free hours could fix.
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