Twenty-five assorted websites, some with a student audience, are participating in a computer giveaway between 12 August and 9 September. I have no connection with any of this, except my friend in NZ Mauricio Freitas of GeekZone has put up a convenient website BacktoSchoolGiveaways that will let you reach all the participating sites. Each site will devise its own competition, so if you are keen, you should visit them all in turn during the period of their contests and try your luck.
The prizes look quite tempting – each site has a prize bundle that includes a laptop, an operating system, some software and a backpack. Good luck.
If you have a non-business fax machine, as I do, you may get unwanted spam faxes from businesses who use UTBox, which is based in Sydney. UTBox has a “fax opt-out facility” which is after the fact, i.e. you can “opt out” after you have received the unwanted fax. The press release says:
To make it easier for those marketers who wish to utilise an online fax broadcast opt-out mechanism we have introduced dontfax.me. dontfax.me is a website where receivers of un-wanted faxes can register their wish to opt-out.
This is not accurate. If you go to http://dontfax.me, you get this unhelpful screen:
Enter the URL? Isn’t this where one can opt out?
I have no idea if there was an intention to provide an opt-out form there, but the source code of the home page is bewildering. Yes, there is nothing else in the code than what you see below:
<table cellpadding=10 border=0>
<tr>
<td>
<img src=/images/logo.jpg>
</td>
<td>
Please enter the URL with the company name included
</td>
</tr>
<!--
<tr>
<td colspan=2>
Tired of wasting paper with your fax machine? Try an <a href="http://www.utbox.net/fax_by_email/">internet fax solution</a> so that your faxes come directly into your email.
</td>
</tr>
!-->
</table>
So far I have received unwanted faxes from the following companies. If you want to avoid getting faxes from them, use the URL next to them to supply your fax number:
(Nameless entity, advertising 7 Nights Bali Accommodation) = Phone 1800 851 184. In spite of using the nofax.com.au service below to opt out, they spammed me again. Tried to opt out again on 14 September 2009, but note that this form accepts any random, made-up number and tells you that the number was removed. I found their website – Bali Getaways – the domain is owned by Agora Commerce ABN 20782712830. Contact details can be fetched via the form at AusRegistry. Allegedly successful attempt to unsubscribe
Other Fax Broadcasters
The following don’t appear to use UTBox:
EC Credit Control = Fax 1300 361 080
Why Do They Spam?
Simple, as with email spam, as long as enough suckers buy, it is worth the trouble. I have disconnected my fax/printer from the phone line, so it won’t get any more spam. For those of you who need to keep the fax connected, just hope that the technology will be obsolete soon. That date is overdue.
Heard via Mashable that a married man saw an ad on his FB page offering a “hot singles” date with his own wife. Fortunately for him, his wife Cheryl Smith (pictured in the ad on the right) understands technology and both have a good sense of humour. To avoid this happening to you, change your Facebook privacy settings as follows:
15 Year Old Says Teens Are Abandoning Twitter: Where’s the Proof? – http://bit.ly/87uJ2
The article refers to a report by Matthew Robson, a 15-year, 7 months old intern at Morgan Stanley UK about teens abandoning Twitter. Good link bait. This reminded me of another post by Peter Corbett earlier this year entitled 2009 Twitter Demographics and Statistics Report.
Quantcast estimates February 2009
Quantcast estimates June 2009
Quantcast Stats
Quantcast.com stats for Twitter are estimates and we know that people don’t always supply truthful data to social media sites. That out of the way, it would seem that the percentage of teens has actually increased from 1% to 5% since February.
My unscientific survey of my two children is that the 18-yo does not have a Twitter account and the same goes for her friends. My 21-yo and his friends do.
StumbleUpon (SU) is a recommendation (rating) engine. Its users “stumble”, that is, vote for a web page they like. The theory is that most people will recommend pages that most people will consider to be interesting. The reality is that most people who use the web have probably not heard of SU and the ones who have are likely to stumble their own pages or those of their clients. SEOs and anyone who fancies themselves as a social media consultant are heavy users of the SU toolbar, which makes it easy to recommend or thumb down a page while you are looking at it.
So what’s the point to SU? I am not entirely sure, but eBay bought it for US$75M in 2007 and sold it in 2009 for an undisclosed sum back to its founders and some VCs. That was great for the founders but what about the web surfer population? I still don’t know.
When I enable the SU toolbar (I have to login), SU knows my surfing patterns and probably stores the information. If I am the first to flag a site, I get to write a review, but this is always an option for subsequent surfers. I have stumbled fewer than 40 sites, usually when I am reminded about SU by some tweet. SU links are no-followed, so there is no SEO value in the exercise, but there is some traffic value if you get enough votes and rise to the top.
My mind isn’t so vacant that I need the SU toolbar to find me a random, cool site to visit, but I believe there are many people who need such guidance. Each to their own.
BlogCatalog Group
Hartley B. Singer of Winnipeg is (for a few more hours) the administrator of a BlogCatalog group called Stumble. I am not a member of that group. A few hours ago Hart announced that he is closing down the group because SU suspended his account indefinitely. To quote Hart’s post at BlogCatalog in part:
Your StumbleUpon account privileges have been restricted and the account is under review.
When I enquired to WHY I was under review and my account privileges have been restricted .. I received this reply:
Your account has been suspended for a violation of our TOS, which may be viewed here: www.stumbleupon.com/terms/
A list of the most common reasons for an account being suspended may be found here: www.stumbleupon.com/help/What_caused_my_account_to_be_suspended/
I have reviewed the account in question and must advise you that the suspension will remain in force indefinitely.
You may find it useful to share a link to our Terms in this group – www.blogcatalog.com/group/stumble/ – since other members may also find themselves in breach of our Terms, and their accounts subject to suspension.
Threads from the soon-to-be-defunct Stumble group at BlogCatalog
It’s fine for SU to set whatever TOS they want and most people will agree that getting votes artificially doesn’t help anyone. SU doesn’t want its asset to be devalued by spammy votes. Fair enough.
However, I consider their approach heavy-handed and tantamount to bullying (stronger words come to mind). What happened to the friendly-but-firm approach of sending a warning email?
So, the SU accounts of about 4,592 people are under review and possible suspension just because they joined a BlogCatalog group? What do you think?
I will let the pictures do the talking here. I looked at Bing Maps for my childhood home in Bombay, India, which is in the area known as Thakurdwar, South Bombay. Compare the Bing map on the left with the Google one on the right. Click the images to enlarge.
Look particularly at the streets in the Bing map and see how they seem to go through houses seen in the satellite image overlay. Queens Road (Maharshi Karve Marg) goes through the sports gymkhanas near the ocean! Other roads are also figments of someone’s imagination, perhaps drawn from memory?The little lane that skirts the little SK Patil Udyan (Garden) is Badod St, shown as Badod Galli (Lane) in the Bing map which barrels for kilometres through numerous houses in a straight line!
Many of the streets shown are in the wrong places.
Check out for yourself at Bing Maps. (Annoyed that it forces the .au domain on me) Some of the other errors I noted:
Queens Road goes through the gymkhanas.
Apollo Bunder is near Regal, i.e. inland.
Salsette Island is near Flora Fountain and also near the Hanging Gardens.
Colaba has fallen into the ocean.
You get a Churchgate and a Church Gate.
Nariman Point has also moved Inland and Fort has moved south of it.
Khet Wadi also has a second clone.
There is a fixation with all these Wadis on the map, as if they are major roads.
The Google map doesn’t have these problems. The street names are not spelt correctly but are near enough.
I don’t know if similar Australian stats have been published yet, but I just compiled them using the same Facebook source – compose a dummy ad, then you get the screen where you can view statistics by selecting or unselecting various parameters.
I was unable to see the Interests data but I have placed Peter’s latest data to the right of the Australian figures. While Peter’s total count of the US user population is almost 72M, today I see just under 70M for the US. Did 2M close their accounts within the past five days? Were they fake accounts that were cleaned up? Just in the past 30 minutes the US total has shot up by about 300,000 people. What gives?
Australians on Facebook
About 6M Aussies are on Facebook or at least have opened an account. The gender breakdown is almost identical to the US. The age distribution in the US steadily increases between 18 and 54, whereas Australia peaks in the 25 to 34 range.
The user distribution among the Australian cities follows roughly the population distribution patterns, but we have a large number of Unknowns (and/or country residents). When you look at the small size of the San Francisco user population you wonder if these locations are based on what the user selected (I believe this is the case), or Facebook knew which locations to group into the closest metropolis. In most social networks I enter “Melbourne” as my location, not my suburb; however, if I were entering my postal address (at some trusted site and I could see some point to it), then the stats would be more accurate. In Australia, few people live in the central business district, which bears the name of the city, so that may explain Australia’s large number of Unknown locations in FB.
We are either coy about our education or are less educated than the Americans. The spread between singles, marrieds and in a relationship is almost equal, but those currently engaged seem to have very little representation on Facebook.
Bear in mind the probability that some people enter bogus details at such sites, and some nations more so than others. So treat the analysis accordingly. In my limited experience of my own network, Facebook users interact largely with their real-world friends and are less likely to fake too much.
Check out Peter’s post for a detailed insight into the US figures.
As of today, you can search for your next house on Google Maps. To do this, begin at http://maps.google.com.au. Click the link to the right of the Search Maps button, labelled Show Search Options. Once you do so, the link will change to Remove Search Options and you will see a drop-down menu, where you should choose Real Estate.
You can refine the search by the usual controls you see at a traditional real estate site, such as Rent/For Sale, type of dwelling, type of bedrooms, number of bedrooms, car parking spots, area, and so on.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpSoAue9bf0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmaps.google.com.au%2Fhelp%2Fmaps%2Frealestate%2F&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
If you are browsing, just enter a street or suburb and you will see balloons indicating properties for sale. When you drag the map, the listings on the left will change to reflect the map window. You can explore any of them.
Google Maps real estate search
Clicking More Info in the speech bubble leads to detailed information about a specific property. Google has partnered with numerous real estate agencies to obtain the listings. Undoubtedly, the incumbent real estate website companies will be wondering how their traffic and revenues will be impacted by this Google innovation.
So how does this unknown (to me) person presume to give advice to the A-list of SEOs? Read his post for the details, but he has WordPress Codex on his side. It says:
For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.
The permalink structure of this blog used to be:
/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html
So, this was not the optimum URL structure according to the WP Codex, as the code would waste time evaluating whether a URL is a post or a page. Now this blog is not heavily visited enough for me to care about fractions of a second, but I like to use best practices. I have opted not for the advice of Weberz-Rob or the WP Codex, but the following:
/%postname%-%post_id%.html
I agree with Andy Beard‘s comments in that post and have also settled on the filename ending in .html because I’d like an easy .htaccess solution for my indexed pages that would otherwise lead to 404s. Removing the %category% from the URL was easy.
Revised .htaccess
This is what my .htaccess file looks like:
Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([^/]+)\.html$ https://www.netmagellan.com/$1.html [NC,R=301,L]
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
</IfModule>
Heard via Mashable that a married man saw an ad on his FB page offering a “hot singles” date with his own wife. Fortunately for him, his wife 
I was unable to see the Interests data but I have placed Peter’s latest data to the right of the Australian figures. While Peter’s total count of the US user population is almost 72M, today I see just under 70M for the US. Did 2M close their accounts within the past five days? Were they fake accounts that were cleaned up? Just in the past 30 minutes the US total has shot up by about 300,000 people. What gives?