Microsoft trickles out Bing search engine

SEO 1 Comment
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Microsoft Bing Logo

Microsoft launched Bing today. The home page leads to a video and not a lot more.No search box. It will be fully deployed worldwide on 3 June 2009.

However, a check of http://www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html reveals some detail. A Reviewer’s Guide and some screen shots are at the PressPass site. Another great resource is Discover Bing.

Features include:

  • Best Match
  • Quick Preview
  • Instant Answers
  • xRank
  • Quick Tabs
  • Related Searches
  • Rich Listing Results
  • Sentiment Extraction
  • Travel info
  • Instant Answers
  • Search Refinement
  • Hotel Rate Key
  • Health info

Some people – a lot of them – still use the Yellow Pages

Directory 3 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s fairly easy to check that I work at the Yellow Pages® or that I am not their public spokesperson, so this is just my opinion, FWIW.

Being a search marketer, I use Google/Yahoo/Live much of my working day. I have Google and SocialMention alerts for “yellow pages” and “Sensis” to see what is happening or being said about my industry.

Most days, I get alerts about some American who feels the need to blog or tweet about receiving a stack of unwanted directories. They make the mental leap that just because *they* don’t use them, *everybody* must surely think the same way. Many take interesting photos of the directories and share them with the world. Here is the usual one about using them as a door stop. OK, a few US publishers are in strife, but Australia’s an exception.

I can’t justify a data plan on my Nokia N95 mobile, so I don’t just pull it out to Google something or tweet about my emotions while standing in line at Starbucks. OK, the work mobile has a data plan, but anyone who uses a Nokia 6120 to type a URL or SMS deserves a medal.

I frequently travel to the US through my volunteer activities and always look for the local Yellow Pages directory in my hotel room, as I’m looking for the nearest mall or restaurant. I’m not paying some crazy 24-hour wireless Internet fee to use a browser for five minutes! At home, we care for the environment and don’t have a PC left switched on 24/7, so the directory comes out when I can’t be bothered to walk to the other end of the house to turn on my PC.

Although I seem to use less than 50 pages in the directory, it seems that other Aussies are using other pages and enough advertisers clearly see an ROI. This might not be the case forever, but it’s working at the moment, so please don’t put me on the dole queue yet.

So what prompted me to write this?

Earlier last week, two ex-colleagues from another company were pitching their own PPC and SEO services in the news media while rubbishing the Yellow Pages. Now I know it’s a mistake to pull out of the Yellow Pages.

Next, another SEO tweeted:

Now google AU gives Sensis listings priority over LBC listings. What gives?

Sheesh. I’m trying hard not to wear a sales hat, but Yellow ads are retweeted, er, syndicated to Google Maps, so advertisers get found in Google Maps, Google Search via good old SEO, Google Mobile, Yellow Mobile, assorted city council pages, via other search engines etc.

Probably why advertisers still advertise in the Yellow Pages.

Then it was a tweet by a fellow Aussie (link added by me):

Sensis just won best new entrant in the corporate responsibilty awards – what? – they still pump out millions of hardcopy yellowpages!

Later, she tweeted (typo hers):

apperently 96% of yellowpages are recycled – this is good – but still why produce them in the first place…?

Er, because enough Aussies still use them and because enough advertisers think it is a good use of their money? And some of us hang on to them for a full year, use them, then recycle them.

On Thursday there was a tweet by someone else:

As seen in an email sig: “Sensis cares for the environment – think before you print.” Says the biggest paper spam company in Australia.

which was followed up by my colleague Jeremy Mawson:

it couldn’t possibly be anywhere near the paper wastage of http://www.salmat.com.au/

The OP didn’t give up:

@Synesso Salmat too, but no sig hypocrisy there. Also, many people DO read shop specials, a lot more than paper phone books I’d wager.

So I am working for a spammer?

Now the suburban newspapers I get are surely spam :^) (tongue firmly in cheek) because *I* don’t read them (yes, therefore nobody else does). Stacked up, I estimate at least one, perhaps two directory books’ worth turfed each month. Surely they will be extinct soon. But Rupert, another American, does not agree. Thank god for Rupert.

To opt out of the Sensis print directories, see this page.

Added: Here are links to later articles at other sites. I will keep adding below as I find them:

Writing Devanagari in WordPress

Grammar 2 Comments
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There are some old posts elsewhere that tell you how to view (and write) Devanagari posts in WordPress. Mostly they say you should enable FireFox as follows: Tools > Options > Content > Default Font Times New Roman > Advanced > Western > Default Character Encoding = Unicode (UTF-8) If only it were that easy today (WP 2.7.1). My problem wasn’t the above – I could view other blogs containing Devanagari words but my post below was not saving the Devanagari contents. Here is my How-To:

  • Use the Google Indic Transliteration tool to write in Devanagari. But you have to copy/paste the text into WordPress.
  • Install and activate the Google Indic Transliteration WordPress Plugin. This adds a check box in the WP post editor. (You have to be in HTML edit mode.) If you check Hindi, you can type in Hindi directly within the post. It does not have Marathi, e.g. ळ so the Google tool is better.
  • Edit wp-config.php to replace the line below with the one after it (copy it and place // to make the original line a comment)
    //define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
    define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ”);
    (Those are two single quotes after CHARSET’,)
  • Open the MySQL database with phpMyAdmin (supplied with cPanel) and check the Collation language – usually it is latin1_swedish_ci.
  • Select the Operations tab and scroll down to Collation. Make it utf8_general_ci. This will suffice to enable Devanagarifor new posts.
  • Old posts prior to the change will need to be re-edited. You can do it in phpMyAdmin. Choose from the left menu the table called wp_posts. Then select the Browse tab and find the post you want to edit. Click the pencil icon, make the changes and save. That’s it! सकसेस

V or W?

Pronunciation No Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Indian languages (at least the North Indian ones) have only one letter “wa” (व) to cover the letters V and W, therefore many Indians mispronounce words that contain the letter “v”.
The “wa” sound is made with the lips forming a circle as you open the mouth.
The “va” sound requires you to place your lower lip behind the upper front teeth and release the lip as you say it.
In Marathi, the V sound is transliterated as व्ह (“vh”) – no idea why, because it causes people to inject the “h” sound when none exists.

Maurice Jarre – What Wikipedia hoax?

General No Comments
Reading Time: 2 minutes

The ABC (Australia) reported on 7 May:

Student’s Wikipedia hoax dupes newspapers: report

Posted Thu May 7, 2009 6:01am AEST

An Irish student’s fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reported on Wednesday.

The ABC article has attracted comments criticising reporters as being lazy when they use material from Wikipedia. One commentator Toby9000 asked, “OK, so which “major British, Indian and Australian newspapers” are we talking about here?”

If you searched Google for the phrase (note quote marks and the negative term Fitzgerald to ignore recent articles about the hoax):

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear” -Fitzgerald

You won’t find many newspaper results in Google around the time of Jarre’s death. I found only one from a newspaper – the Sydney Morning Herald. The Google snippet looks like this:

Life was one long soundtrack | smh.com.au
He had said: “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.” Telegraph, London;. Guardian News & Media …
www.smh.com.au/national/obituaries/life-was-one-long-soundtrack-20090331-9i7f.html?page=-1

Here is the link to the SMH article, but you won’t find the quote in it anymore. The pages are not cached. As if to fend off a MediaWatch story (as another commentator had hinted), the quote has been removed.

Almost. The Irish student’s quote included this snippet, “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack.” The title of the SMH article still reads, “Life was one long soundtrack”. :neutral: Hoax or not, that’s a great attribution for the late composer.

The Guardian obituary of 31 March has been amended with this acknowledgment:
This article was amended on Friday 3 April 2009. Maurice Jarre died on 28 March 2009, not 29 March. We opened with a quotation which we are now advised had been invented as a hoax, and was never said by the composer: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life.” The article closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered,” said Jarre. “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.” These quotes appear to have originated as a deliberate insertion in the composer’s Wikipedia entry in the wake of his death on 28 March, and from there were duplicated on various internet sites. These errors have been corrected.

Norton Security Roundup 2009

Anti Virus No Comments
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Over the years, you may have heard of or used computer security programs from Symantec under the Norton brand. At one time you needed only an antivirus program. Later came firewalls and antispyware programs. Touch wood, I have never been affected by a virus, Trojan or other nasty program, but of late I have found an increasing number of alerts from websites that look normal. Google staff have warned about an unprecedented increase in malicious files that will harm you or someone else through your computer. When I browse Google search results, I see these warning signs every day, thanks to Norton Internet Security 2009, which I have been using since last November. Recently I had the chance to check out the other two offerings.
Which Norton security program is right for you? Symantec offers three:

  • Norton 360 Version 3.0
  • Norton Internet Security 2009
  • Norton AntiVirus 2009

Here is an abbreviated list of the main features and differences between the three products:


To get a better idea, please see the complete list of features at Symantec.com: http://is.gd/uCrv

Symantec Norton products have been unpopular in the past for being resource hogs. This changed with the release of these 2009 versions. Everything they do is quicker – system antivirus scan time, email checking, downloading an update – you name it. In this review, please check the chart above to see whether the feature is included in a given program.

Requirements

You need Windows XP SP2 or later or Windows Vista. For email scanning, you need to use a mail program that can handle the usual POP3 and SMTP protocols. Both Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 2.0 or later browsers are supported.

Installation

The programs all installed in about a minute, which made me wonder if something had gone wrong. This is by design – Symantec built their own installer instead of using Microsoft MSI code. Although you only install once, it shows that all parts of the programs have been revamped.

User Interface

For most people, you are going to configure some settings once and then you will not see the user interface until a problem is reported.  The default settings are probably fine for most people – I didn’t need to change much, so the main message is that they are all easy to use.

Home Network View

You can view other computers in your home network and determine their security status. You have to go to each PC and enable it to be seen from the other PCs.

PC Security

PC Security is the heart of the application suite. It covers the following essential tasks:

  • Protect against viruses, spyware and other risks.
  • Act as a smart firewall to block intrusions over the network and the Internet.
  • LiveUpdate, which fetches the latest updates for Norton 360.
  • Email scanning, which checks incoming and outgoing email for dangerous attachments and infections.
  • Checks your Windows Update settings.
  • Scans your instant messenger attachments for dangerous payloads.
  • Checks for weak passwords.
  • Checks your browser for vulnerabilities.
  • Checks your network addresses for possible hijack.

Norton Internet Security has fixed a few problems on this PC

Identity Protection

  • Norton Safe Web. You are protected when you surf the Web. Many websites contain infected pages or links to infected programs or files. If you go to such a site, you get a warning telling you to leave this site immediately. If you are looking at a page of Google search results, you will see a red or orange mark next to each entry, signifying a serious problem with the site. Untested sites show a question mark.
  • Antiphishing. If you were to click a link in a phishing email from what purports to be your bank, your Norton-protected browser will try to stop you from visiting a known phishing site.
  • Identity Safe. You can save your passwords and personal information in this electronic safe

PC Tuneup

  • Startup Manager. You can see information about the programs that start with your PC and either turn them off or delay their start. This is great news for people like me with dozens of programs that I don’t need to run immediately upon startup, or at all.
  • Diagnostic Report. You can generate an extremely detailed report on more than you want to know about your PC and every program on it and view it in a browser, so that you can save its contents to a file for later reference. This report also includes the dates when you installed and uninstalled a program and when the PC performed a system checkpoint.
  • File Cleanup. You can delete temporary files created by web browsing and while installing programs.
  • Disk Optimisation. You can re-arrange fragmented files and speed up your PC.

Backup & Restore

You can back up your files to a CD, DVD, USB drive or an external hard disk, including mapped network drives. You can even back up to Symantec’s Web-based drive, with a limit of 2 GB. You can restore from those locations should the need arise.

Norton Insight

The file-checking programs do not scan all files on a PC based on community-based whitelisting. If thousands of other people are using a certain file without any problem then it is whitelisted and omitted from a scan.

Anti-Spam

The anti-spam feature works with Microsoft Outlook Express and Outlook but not with Windows Mail, which you get with Windows Vista.

Free Technical Support

Norton technical support is now free, something that is rare with commercial software. You are expected to exhaust online help and then fill out a contact form before the phone number is revealed. I noticed something interesting about the 366-day duration of the licence. I installed Norton 360 on one machine three days after installing it on another PC and saw that it had only 363 days left. This is because the product key is the identifying factor, not the PC. This is not surprising or unreasonable, but if you get a product with a 3-PC licence, install them all on the same day to get the full coverage. When I last reviewed Norton 360 in 2007, there were three product keys. I imagine this is to deter three friends buying a three-pack to save some money.

In Use

Once configured, the Norton programs can be left to do the job. I found a few infected files on the home PCs although they had not been activated. If I visit an unknown website to download something, I don’t open the compressed file until Norton 360 has scanned it.

Availability

You will get the Norton 360 3-user pack from various outlets around the $130 mark including GST. Norton Internet Security 2009 sells for about $85 for one user but only $95 for three users. A single-user copy of Norton AntiVirus 2009 sells for about $44. The programs are available in several pack sizes to suit small offices and sole users. You can also buy them from www.symantec.com.au and other online stores.

Conclusion

As you can see, Norton 360 gives you all the features, but Norton Internet Security is the minimum level of protection you should get. Norton AntiVirus can be used for PCs where you have already purchased other software for the missing features.

Windows 7 XP Mode

Software 1 Comment
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I will be writing a review of Windows 7 in due course, but here is a preview of a key feature that will interest many readers.

Windows XP Mode
Windows XP Mode is aimed at small business users who wish to run their Windows XP-era applications on their Windows 7 desktop. They might have avoided upgrading to Windows Vista owing to an incompatibility with their old programs or the simple reason of “Windows XP does the job.” However, as they buy new computers later this year or by January 2010, they might find a copy of Windows 7 included with the purchase, or they may have other compelling reasons to upgrade.

An exciting optional feature that was kept under wraps until recently was Windows XP Mode (XPM). This feature will work in certain editions but is an additional download.

Key Facts

  • Windows XPM is included with Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise customers.
  • Windows XPM combines Windows Virtual PC and a pre-installed virtual Windows XP environment to enable users to run many older applications.
  • Windows Virtual PC enables users to launch virtual applications from the Windows 7 Start menu.
  • Windows Virtual PC includes support for USB devices and is based on a new code base that includes multi-threading support.
  • Windows XPM is pre-configured with the Windows XP firewall and can apply updates automatically from Windows Update. It is not pre-configured with anti-virus or anti-malware software, which need to be sourced separately.

IT Professionals
Windows XPM is not recommended for corporate deployments. Wait for Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V) Version 2.0, which will be released as a beta 90 days after the general availability (GA) of Windows 7.

  • MED-V v1 is currently available for Windows Vista and it enables Virtual PC deployment in larger organisations. It provides centralised management, policy-based provisioning and virtual image delivery.
  • MED-V v1 builds on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to help enterprises with their upgrade to Windows Vista when applications are not yet compatible.
  • MED-V v2 will add support for Windows 7 (both 32 bit and 64bit) and Windows Virtual PC.

Windows XPM is for SMBs
Windows XPM stand-alone is intended for small and medium business (SMB) users who can install their XP applications themselves and who might not have IT Professional staff. Each PC has its own virtual Windows XP environment that is controlled and managed by the user.

Windows XPM is best suited for older business and productivity applications such as accounting, inventory and similar software. These applications tend to conform to the basic Windows Application Programming Interface (API ).

Windows XPM not for Consumers
Windows XP Mode does not have 100 percent compatibility with all Windows XP software. It is not aimed at home users because many consumer programs require extensive use of hardware interfaces such as 3-D graphics, audio, and TV tuners that do not work well under virtualisation today.

In Use
After installation, XP Mode is available from the Windows 7 Start menu. It displays a regular Windows XP desktop and you can install your old software from there just as you would on a Windows XP machine. Thereafter, those programs appear just below the Windows XPM menu item.

Requirements
Of course, there’s always a catch. Not all CPUs will support Windows XPM. You need hardware-based virtualisation (go and check your CPU specs now). Intel and AMD have CPUs that have this feature but don’t assume all recently purchased CPUs support hardware virtualisation. See these sites for more information.

My PC is about six months old and has a Core 2 Quad processor – the Q6600 chip. I checked this Intel page to confirm that I’ll be able to test this feature when I get my hands on it:

The next thing to check is for BIOS support on your motherboard. I have an Asus P5K SE/EPU and its user guide mentions Vanderpool support is enabled by default (you can turn it off). Vanderpool was the code name for Intel Virtualisation.

While Windows XPM isn’t for everyone, it will certainly address the need of some businesses that need to run legacy applications.

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