What separates Blogs from other Social Media?

The taxonomy of social media is complex. Social media usually refers to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other sites. But in its widest sense social media can be any site that networks of people, including newsgroups, listservs and sites such as YouTube. YouTube is still primarily a file sharing site but with the addition of comments they are now more social media than file sharing sites.

Blogs are also part of on-line social networks but are different from the other social media sites in two ways. One person may have several blogs, each focusing upon a different topic but it rarely makes sense to have multiple Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. The second is the concept of time. In social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, it is the NOW that matters. Businesses may care to keep a record for legal purposes but most users rarely care about what was communicated 24 hours ago (if not 24 minutes ago). Whereas, with blogs, the continuity of posts matters. They are not focused upon the here and now.

All strategies used in attracting clients and consumers must focus first and foremost upon these two aspects, especially the concept of time.

Where's Dilbert when you need him?

What not to do.

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs: Part II

Adding to the previous post there are two additional potential problems when using dynamic URLs.

Search engines have problems indexing URLs that contain session IDs. I would only pass session IDs in the URL in areas of the site which are not to be indexed -- such as password protected areas or shopping cart pages.

Session IDs cause problems with the SE bots. The session variables are different each time the bot lands on a the "page," giving the impression that the page has a new URL every time it is visited. This appearnace of duplicate content causes numerous problems, simply put Session IDs must not be visible to search engine.

A second problem with Dynamic URLs come in parameter ordering. The coders must be careful to order the parameter the same way each time else the search engines will have to juggle which "url" to use to go to the same content.

All in all dynamic urls are fine as long as no session variables are used in indexed pages and if the coders are consistent with their parameter ordering.

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs

Too many people still think that search engines have trouble indexing dynamic URLs. For the most part this isn’t true. Search engines still have problems indexing URLs with more than three parameters. This happens because there are so many combinations that the bot gets stuck on the site and has to abort. This problem will lessen as computing power increases. In general URLs with one or two parameters provide no problems. They are spidered and indexed just fine.

Malicious Javascript and SQL injection attacks

From The H:

According to an analysis by Websense, the malware tries to exploit a total of eight security holes to pass malicious code to the visitors of the pages unnoticed, for example via the VML hole already patched in January 2007. F-Secure has monitored attackers who tried to break into .asp and .aspx web pages by submitting the page parameters in an encrypted SQL query:

DECLARE%20@S%20NVARCHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x4400450043004C0041005200450020004[...]

Once decrypted, this is an SQL query designed to find all the text fields in the database behind the web page and inject JavaScript code into them:

DECLARE @T varchar(255)'@C varchar(255) DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR FOR select a.name'b.name from sysobjects a'syscolumns b where a.id=b.id and a.xtype='u' and (b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35 or b[...]

Both code snippets are only the beginning of the request. Administrators of servers delivering .asp or .aspx pages (like Microsoft's IIS) are advised to check their log files for similar entries and if necessary search their databases for injected links.

Ah, the ingenuity of mankind. It is impressive isn't it?

Mosaic's 15th Birthday

I suppose it's official. I'm an old-timer now. I was infatuated with the possibility of the internet when there were still only Gopher sites. Archie and Veronica were the cool search tools of the day. As with other "pre-Mosaic" techies this day, 15 years ago today, was when the world changed. Mosaic, the first graphical browser was "officially" released.
I learned HTML that summer, and for me, my life changed.

Launching New Windows: Part II

Almost a year ago I wrote that I thought that users would soon be comfortable with sites that launch new browser windows. When a link takes the user away from the current site to completely new information there are times it makes sense to open a new window. An example of this would be an intranet where a user is tasked with learning a new product line. There are times when it is expected that the user may click numerous times while exploring the new product line. After finishing examining the product how will the user get back? Back links do not always work as there may be numerous places from which the user came. Will the user click the back button 20 or 30 or 40 times? Will we expect this user to go into his history and find where he was? That's not necessary if the other window is still open. Opening new windows is analagous to someone opening up yet another book on his desk and flipping through this second or third book while still having the first book opened.

It is possible to come up with another method aside from opening up a new window? Yes we can pass a parameter with the "original" page and add it to the navigation. I struggle to see how this is a better method. It would not be. Even expert users would get lost in an ever shifting navigational schema. Following the "open book" metaphor opening a new window, making it smaller than the standard window to stand apart is a clear and simple means of providing distinct data to the user.

And yet a year later I still see intelligent, highly educated, but unsophisticated computer users getting lost using tabs and not using tabs to organize their browsing. As of now Jakob Nielsen's warning regarding the user of new browser windows stands.