Clockwork Active Media Systems

BMW Germany De-listed from Google

posted on 2/5/06 by Matt Gray

BMW Germany's website has been removed from Google for deceptive SEO practices. (Coverage is available from BoingBoing, Digg, and the original scoop from Google Blogoscoped.

Allow me to explain what's going on here. The BMW.de site employed a technique known as "doorway pages". These doorways were stuffed with tons and tons of keywords that BMW felt were relevant to its website. Regular users, however, never saw those pages; a JavaScript redirect was embedded to whisk humans way to the normal BMW.de site. Web robots do not process JavaScript, and therefore read the keyword-stuffed page. This is a deceptive practice designed to artificially boost Google rankings, and is specifically against Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Matt Cutts briefly discusses the issue and provides screenshots of the doorway pages in his write-up and confirmation of Google's action. Let this be a warning against overzealous search engine optimization (SEO). No cheating!

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AOL and Yahoo To Charge Postage Fee?

posted on 2/5/06 by Nancy Lyons

AOL and Yahoo both recently announced a special email delivery service with an associated postage fee. For a penny per email both services will deliver your mail to the intended recipient using a 'certified email system' that bypasses the recipient's spam filter. The thinking is that businesses relying on email communication might be willing to pay to end spam confusion and ensure that their legitimate messages are never mistaken for spam again. Is this the start of something much bigger? Will all of those urban legends about paying a required per-email delivery fee finally come to pass? I doubt it. A precedent has been set and the public has an expectation around how email service is accessed and used. The public will likely demand that spam filtering be improved, spammers be forced offline, and AOL and Yahoo go back to improving the high quality services they're already commited to delivering as part of their existing agreements with customers. Continue Reading | Add a Comment

Money for nothing...

posted on 2/8/06 by Martin Grider

Here's a quick link to Wired's recent piece on "Making a living in Second Life". For those who haven't heard of it, Second life is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), but without the trappings of many of the other popular role playing games. In second life, most of the content is created by the users themselves, making it a perfect breeding ground for entrepreneurs. Of course, it helps that Second Life encourages this sort of thing. Continue Reading | Add a Comment

Why the phone should never die.

posted on 2/13/06 by Zach Drew

Last night, The Sum of All Fears was on the telly. At the climax, Washington and the Ruskies are IM'ing each other after a small nuclear device is set off by fascists on U.S. soil. The fascists are attempting to provoke the Russians and Washington into a nuclear war. If they would have read this Wired article perhaps they would have picked up the phone and avoided the awkward, seconds-to-destruction nuclear snapcount. Comfirming what is obvious to many, textual communcation poorly conveys emotion. It seems that people are no better than chance at correctly picking up the tone of an email. Which brings us to our word of the day: Egocentrism. Continue Reading | Add a Comment

Mac on a PC

posted on 2/14/06 by Michael Koppelman

Slashdot has an article on hackers hacking the new Mac OS X to run on a normal PC. It just befuddles me why Apple would not want to market their software to the other 95% of the computer-using world. If 80% of those people steal the software, the revenue from the other 20% will dwarf their current revenues by an order of magnitude or so. One thing I've learned is that Steve Jobs is smarter than me. I'm guessing that in the next 24 months or so we will see OS X running on PC's in an official manner. Either that or I am smarter than Steve Jobs. Either way, it looks to me like we are about to see further increases in the OS market share for Apple. Continue Reading | 1 Comment

Opera for Nintendo DS

posted on 2/15/06 by Martin Grider

As someone who carries their Nintendo DS with them at all times, I would really like to see Opera for Nintendo DS released in the US. I hope it's not terribly expensive, however, because I am also used to getting my web browsers for free. Continue Reading | Add a Comment

Cell-phone Sized Projector Using Lasers

posted on 2/15/06 by Matt Gray

Light Blue Optics is developing a miniature laser-based projection system that could allow you to project anything from your cellphone onto a wall. The technology supports resolutions up to 2048x1280, making the projector suitable for HDTV.

The current prototype uses a monochrome laser and a holographic micro-screen to create an image via diffraction. A PowerPoint presentation on the device is available from this press release.

There are example images inside this presentation, though they have been cropped in the presentation to hide some laser edge effects. Perhaps these distracting lines and dots are part of the technology? The uncropped originals are reproduced below:

Via Slashdot.

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Security for Mac OS X

posted on 2/17/06 by Michael Koppelman

Mac Geekery has an article about Mac OS X security. One cool thing they point out is that the Keychain Access application has a cool little password generator built into it. The days of Macs being immune to malware are over. Continue Reading | 1 Comment

Clickin' on the Real World: Contextual Searching Through Camera Phones

posted on 2/18/06 by Chuck Hermes

Imagine yourself stuck in traffic on a bustling Tokyo street. You see your destination, the movie theater on the next block. Why not save some time and purchase your tickets while you wait for the light to turn? Now it is as easy as pointing your camera phone at the theater, click to display the theater menu, click again to purchase your tickets. With Mapion Local Search, users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects such as buildings, shops, restaurants, banks, historical sites and instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone. Just like one uses a mouse to click on an object on a computer screen and retrieve information, now users can Click on the Real WorldÂ® using their mobile phone. Press Release Continue Reading | 1 Comment