Ring Tones, Drugs and the Spamming of Google News

This week in the WSJ.com (subscription only, I’m afraid) I wrote about web spam — the growing penetration of faux websites that ride up the search engines and muddy the Internet for all of us. I based it around the recent case of subdomain spam, well documented by the likes of blogs like Monetize. Briefly … Read more

Watching the World Cup on a Widget

Opera 9 is officially out today, so perhaps now is as good a time as any to offer some FIFA World Cup 2006 plugins: For Firefox there’s FootieFox, which has actually been around for a year or so. Nice and small, it displays any soccer scores (not just those of the World Cup) in your … Read more

A Chip off the Old Flock

Flock, which I wrote about a few months back, is now in public beta (meaning ordinary folks can use it without too much weeping). TechCrunch carries an interview with the folks behind it. What’s so good about it? Well, it’s all about trying to build Web 2.0 into the browser, so the browser isn’t so … Read more

Confessions of a PDF Hater

There’s a lot of discussion about the ongoing spat between Microsoft and Adobe over whether Microsoft will be able to install PDF/Acrobat support in its next version of Office. This should be as straightforward as PDF support in OpenOffice — where you can choose to save (well, print, technically speaking) a file as an Acrobat … Read more

How to be a Press Expert

Interesting post (a bit late reading of it; apologies) On Being a Press Expert and dealing with the media by danah doyd [sic], a PhD student in SIMS at Berkeley and a social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. She makes some good points, and she’s clearly exhausted after three years of becoming sought after (eight … Read more