Category Archives: Net

Will Twitter’s new embedded tweets lower your Google search rank?

Twitter has announced the launch of a feature called embedded Tweets.  This gives bloggers the chance to paste a short piece of flat-HTML into a post and BOOM – you have a clickable tweet right there on your site. It’s going to make life a lot easier. So, smart idea, right? Well, maybe not! Google…

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Yahoo chief Carol Bartz explains where Google is failing!

Carol Bartz, head of Yahoo, has some business advice for Google.  It’s unclear why Ms Bartz thinks Google NEEDS her advice, but in a weird interview with The BBC, Ms Bartz said that Google is heading for problems, unless it takes her advice.  She explains: “Google is going to have a problem because Google is…

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Tom Merritt leaving Cnet for Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network

As you may have heard, Cnet’s Tom Merritt has joined Leo Laporte’s TWiT network.  This move raised more than a few eyebrows when it was announced recently, as Cnet are one of the biggest technology content providers in the world and Laporte’s TWiT network is a 5 year old business, run from his home, with…

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Google Analytics gets an upgrade – Limited functionality on March 2nd

Google Analytics users should note that on Tuesday (March 2nd) Google will be upgrading their analytics system. Between 7am -11pm (US Pacific Time), users may experience limited functionality. In this message on the Google Analytics blog, Trevor Claiborne explains;

“This upgrade is to further increase the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics to meet the demand of an increasing number of enterprises using Google Analytics…..”

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British Library Web Archive Confusion?

The BBC news announced today that The British Library wants to archive every British website, for posterity. This GREAT IDEA has been dedicated quite a bit of air time on TV and radio – as well as coverage on the BBC website.

The coverage is all about how important it is not to lose these websites, as they are a part of the Internet’s heritage. They say that we don’t want to lose these sites for ever – Good point.

But – The service already exists!

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20 popular and easy to guess passwords!

f you want to protect your online accounts from hackers, rule number one is to select strong, hard to guess passwords.

However, a recent report by the guys at Internet security firm Impervia, suggests that Internet users are still relying on the same kind of predictable passwords that they used a decade ago.
Password strength

Impervia released a list of the top 20 passwords, which were found when RockYou.com was hacked last month. According to Impervia, these were strikingly similar to the passwords used on Hotmail.com, when that too was breached almost 20 years ago!

Starting with the most commonly used, the 20 most popular passwords were…

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Finland offer 100 meg broadband to everyone

The government of Finland has just announced plans to offer a 100 megabit broadband connection to every home and business in Finland!

This follows on from their declaration last year; that a broadband Internet connection is a human right – and that every home in Finland will have a minimum 1 megabit per second connection.

100 megabit connection by 2015…

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The Tech News Blog moves to Headway

As regular readers will notice, the Tech News Blog has changed a lot this week.

Originally, the blog was on the Thesis theme; which is one of the cleanest looking Wordpress themes on the planet. However, I found Thesis way too hard to adapt and modify myself.

For a few months, I tried using a glossy looking theme, but it looked way too glossy; like a technology website (CNET / ZDNET) – rather than a tech news blog (Scobleizer / LouisGray.Com)

Whilst I wanted the clean simplicity of Thesis, I needed a theme that gave me 100% freedom to design, tweak and modify the blog myself – without having to learn HTML/CSS or hire a expert. So, I decided to use Headway (I’m now an affiliate) instead.

Here’s why!

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Twitter.com about to get stickier!

I was reading this post on mashable earlier, from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Jennifer Van Grove. It’s about a new ‘tweet notification’ feature that Twitter are planning to add, for people who use the Twitter website to tweet.

Twitter business model to include advertising?

This got me thinking. In recent weeks, Twitter has made a number of significant improvements to the functionality of the main Twitter website. Most recently we saw the addition of the superb Twitter Lists feature, but Twitter are ALSO working on a new retweet feature too. These improvements have one thing in common; they render web-based apps like Tweetdeck and (my favourite) Seesmic Desktop less and less essential.

Here’s why this matters…

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Friendfeed’s Paul Buchheit confirms no more features coming to Friendfeed!

Friendfeed’s Paul Buchheit has just confirmed to me that the next ‘big’ new feature coming to Friendfeed, will be the last! This comes a day after Buchheit issued a confusing statement about the future of the platform he co-founded.

Here’s Buchheit’s message in full:

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