Internet & Search
OpenDNS should Offer a Homepage Redirect to get your IP
My 11 years old sister just started using the computer and the Internet independently. This achievement is a great for a computer-nerd like me. While I am proud of her, I am also worried about all the perverts who may bother her on Messenger or Skype, or the porn/questionable-content that she may innocently find online.
For the IMs, I restricted the possibility of anybody to message/add her, if he/she is not already in her “friend” list. In this way she can communicate only with her friends (we added them together) and the rest of my family (which I added).
For the browser, I relied on OpenDNS. Their FamilyShield product is free, very easy to setup (just force the DNS in your wireless router) and offers a decent protection against spam/adware/porn sites.
OpenDNS offers another Free product called OpenDNS Basic, which offers more customization on the sites to block/unblock and produces a few reports on what the user does on the Internet. I would like to switch to that solution, unfortunately it requires a software to be installed on the PCs to keep your IP address updated in their servers (so they know which profile to apply).
I think there is a much better/easier solution to this problem: they could just provide a form where you can specify your browser homepage (e.g., www.google.com) and provide you a link (e.g., opendns.com/homepage/<secret_user_key>) to use in your browser’s homepage settings that will (a) tell them what your IP is and (b) quickly redirect you to the homepage you selected.
Since nobody will/can block opendns.com, the link is guaranteed to work no matter who is the user. In addition, this allows companies to deploy the setting/homepage on multiple machines and update all of them from a single console.
Seems simple and effective. I wonder why they do not do it. I will email them.
How to Integrate Skype and MythTV
One of the things I am really confident will happen in the near future is an integration between our TV and phones. In the past years Skype and VoIP improved significantly but yet we have to see an example of seamless integration between those technologies.
In my living room I have a big flat screen TV connected to Linux MythTV server, which I use for recording and watching TV and DVDs.
Thanks to the long weekend I had some time to attach a webcam (VF0415 Live! Cam Vid. IM Ultra) to that computer, mount it over the TV, and make it work (nothing to do, really) with Skype.
It works great, but I still needed to get out of MythTV and use mouse/keyboard to access Skype and make calls. I am sure it would not be that hard to create a proper plugin to make MythTV work with the client-side Skype API, but it probably makes little sense now that they are about to release their SkypeKit platform and I am sure someone will just convert the good SIP plugin for that.
Here is how you can add an entry in the Main Menu of MythTV to start Skype:
- Find and save somewhere on your disk a reasonably sized Skype logo in PNG format
- Add to “/usr/share/mythtv/themes/<your_theme>/menu-ui.xml” an entry like the following
<state name="SKYPE"> <imagetype name="watermark"> <filename>watermark/skype.png</filename> </imagetype> </state>
- Add to “/usr/share/mythtv/themes/defaultmenu/mainmenu.xml” an entry like the following
<button> <type>SKYPE</type> <text>Skype</text> <description>Launch Skype</description> <action>EXEC /usr/bin/skype</action> </button>
Clearly you will have to change <your_theme> with the name of the theme you use (I use “Retro”), “watermark/skype.png” with the real location of your Skype logo and “/usr/bin/skype” with the location of your Skype executable (try with the command “which skype” if you do not know it), but everything else should work.
Restart MythTV and your new shiny Skype entry should appear at the bottom of the main menu. Clicking on it will stop MythTV and launch Skype. At first launch, maximize the Skype window with the mouse, then it will do it automatically. When you close Skype (for real, right-click on the systray icon and click close) it will go back to MythTV.
I am also fiddling with Lirc to allow to completely control Skype with the remote. It should not be too hard. I will update this post when/if I manage to do it.
Google Reader tells Google what you Like and what to Index
While most of the Facebook‘s generation kids who populate the Internet nowadays have no idea about what RSS feeds are (but likely “follow” CNN on Twitter), there is still some percentage of tech-savvy people (me included) who take a look to their favorites feeds every morning before starting their day.
Not many RSS feeds reader product exists, and the few are pretty much all the same. The most widely used online RSS aggregators are probably Google Reader and Bloglines.
While Bloglines is clearly supported by online advertising, why do you think Google created its own for free? Yes, you guessed it: to get your traffic information.
They probably use the number of people subscribed to each RSS feed and the frequency of their visits to Google Reader to optimize the frequency of refresh (i.e., when and how often they should recrawl it) for that particular feed/domain. Then, they look at how many people open each post/link and use that information to make decisions on its priority in the crawling queue or ranking of those pages.
I bet there are a lot of subscribers to the CNN feed and some of them log in pretty often. This probably makes its RSS feed refresh rate very high and the number of clicks that each article receives indicate their priority in crawling and has some influence in their PageRank. After all, if 10,000 people looked at a the title/snippet of a piece of news and followed through, it must be interesting no? Conversely, if everyone skipped it, it must be not.
In addition to this, with every click that you do (or do not) they learn something more about you and which kind of content you like. Since Google Reader is hosted on the same domain as all the others Google product (i.e., www.google.com) the cookies that they setup after your login will follow you everywhere there are Google ADs.
They will know even more about you and show “better and better” contextual advertisements.
Facebook will use the Like Button to Personalize Search and Improve ADs
There has been a lot of chatting around the new Facebook’s Like Button. Some people believe it will be great for SEO, other that will increase distribution on Facebook, etc…
But Facebook is smarter than that: they want to create a great search engine, possibly a personalized one, and improve their ADs platform.
Traditional search engines spend a lot of time crawling the web, discovering new pages or updating old ones, and computing the pagerank of each one. What if you could have a graph of the web, updated in real time, with the counts of how many people have been on each page?
This is what Facebook is aiming to do. They do not care if you click that button or not. When the browser renders the page (the button is in a iFrame), it sends a request to Facebook’s server telling them a lot of info about you (e.g., your browser, which page are you on, which language you understand, your IP, your screen resolution, …) and possibly even who you are (e.g., because you logged on Facebook and you still have the cookies around).
Since plugins for the Like button are already widespread for popular content management softwares (e.g., WordPress, Blogger, …) I am sure there will be a wide adoption by content creators.
Facebook will know in real-time about all the new pages created, how many people are visiting them, and who they are (even if you do not have a Facebook account since your browser information are pretty unique). This will allow them to prioritize the crawling and refresh of the pages, compute the ranking based on the popularity (discounting the click on their search results) and also personalize your search results (e.g., ranking higher results visited/liked by your friends, neighbors, etc…).
Augment that with their geo-location project and you also have a pretty good platform for behavioral ADs targeting. They already have a profile of you (you wrote it!), they are about to know where you are (geolocation), and with this they will know the sites that you and your friends visited. This is heaven for the ADs folks.
Google Collected Wifi Data for Geo-location Purposes
In the past days there have been a lot of discussions about the public admission of collecting Wifi data from Google. This has been labeled as “mistake” but do not you wonder why Google was collecting those Wifi data in the first place? They were collecting MAC addresses and network SSIDs for geo-location purposes.
Since wireless networks are pretty popular, and the combination MAC/SSID is unique, associating those with the car’s GPS coordinates allowed Google to create a pretty detailed map. This map could then be used to figure out your coordinates given the MAC/SSIDs around you. The technology is generally called Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS).
A possible use of that is the Google Maps application. If the device does not have a GPS, it uses GSM cells triangulation (cells coordinates have probably be obtained in a similar fashion) to figure out the location. While it generally works, it cannot be very accurate and often has a 2 miles range approximation. However, if some wireless networks are detected in the surroundings, they can be used to produce a much better estimation of the location.
These data are probably also sold/used by the Automatic Geo-Tagging feature of the Eye-Fi memory card. Not surprisingly, those cards are sold in promotion with Google Picasa.
