Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

For those of you who like to check out new websites where you can make money online, I have another one that I would like to discuss today. It can be easily found at gazhoo.com. The aim of the site is to connect buyers and sellers, this time of documents, like reports, term papers, business, and legal forms, as well as market research forms. If you are in a possession of such documents and you are the original author of them, you can upload your material for somebody to buy it. I think that this website is a great place for writers, and for those who like to write things which they would like to share with others. I believe that there is nothing wrong with getting paid for your articles, term papers etc., as long as you are the author of them. I know that it might sometimes be difficult to recognize whether a person in reality is the author of a paper or a document. However, there are very effective ways on the Internet which enable us to check if the documents or papers are genuine or not. While submitting your work on the website, you will have a chance to set up your own price for the documents. A short description and the number of pages are also required for the potential buyers. The company pays through PayPal, and has a referral program that you can take advantage of.

The technology has been moving forward really fast during the last couple of years. I think that one of the biggest changes there has been was with the Internet, and this includes blogs. When it comes to blogs, there are more and more plug-ins available that you can install, and I have seen many sites displaying how many visitors are currently online on the site. I would like to share with you some of my thoughts regarding displaying the number of visitors online. First of all, I think that it is a useful feature in some cases and has a certain “coolness factor”. If you often have many visitors online, it will definitely look great to display the number of visitors. What you need to take into consideration before you put such a plug-in on your site is why you want this plug-in in the first place. Personally, I would suggest that you only put such plug-ins on your websites if you really have traffic to brag about. On the other hand, if you usually have 0-2 visitors at a time, displaying the number of visitors will not present your site in a favorable manner. What I want to say is that you do not need to incorporate every clever plug-in there is, just because you know how to do it. First consider the advantages and disadvantages.

If you have children or are interested in social networking sites yourself, you might be wondering what the dangers of MySpace are. There are millions of people who have their personal pages at MySpace and access them on a daily basis. If you are a parent, you might be concerned about the safety of your child if it visits such websites often. As wonderful place as MySpace is supposed to be, there is some risk involved as well. Children like to share their personal information like, for example, what school they attend, names of teachers, street address etc. Unfortunately, there are predators on networking sites who are visiting MySpace only waiting for your child to give them some personal information. I am not saying that MySpace is filled with such people, but it is better to be careful.

Another thing about MySpace is that not all people are very nice. Many people there insult each other and are rude, so it is important to avoid such people. Perhaps the biggest danger of MySpace is that people very often are not who they claim to be. In extreme cases a 40 year old man can pretend a 13 year old girl. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about it.

YouTube is a video sharing website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. It seems that YouTube is so popular like it was never before. Billions of clips are being viewed on a monthly basis by millions of unique visitors. Taking into account that Youtube is only a few years old, that is massive success. It seems that nothing can stop YouTube from dominating the market, which proves that Google’s decision to acquire YouTube was justified. When it comes to video streaming sites, on the second place comes MySpace with 85% less traffic compared to YouTube. On the third place comes Yahoo, and on the fourth position is Google Video. It is worthy of note that Google owns two of these websites: YouTube and Google Video. This makes other sites hard to compete with Google. It also proves that Google can achieve dominance not only when it comes to search engines, but also other aspects of the Web.

On the other hand, since this company achieved so much, it has also a lot to lose. One of the reasons Youtube achieved such a success is because it is innovative. Besides allowing people to watch over 100 million videos every day, to keep up with the competition YouTube launched a live channel during November, 2008. This channel allows viewing streaming videos all over the world. This is great news for anyone interested in streaming videos, and it will be also interesting to see in the upcoming years how easy accessibility of live video streaming will revolutionize the Internet.

We can see the phenomena of multiple authors of a blog more and more often. There is something that attracts some bloggers to gather together and co-author one blog. However, maintaining a blog with a few authors can be quite challenging. That is why I would like to give you a few tips on how not to allow this experience to get out of hand:

1. Make sure that you team-up with like-minded people. There is nothing more annoying than having to deal with someone you do not like or understand.
2. Have similar goals. This is definitely an important point, because ultimately each blog has to have some goal. It will be a lot better if all of you work towards the same goal.
3. Be demanding when choosing the bloggers. You want to have the right people for the job, so make sure that you familiarize yourself with their writings before you decide to work with them.
4. Control the quality of the posts. Do not allow any of them to be of a lower quality than others. You need to have some standard according to which you measure the quality.
5. Check if the content is not duplicate. You don’t want to have co-authors which are stealing content. You may use Copyscape for this purpose.
6. Coordinate your schedules from time to time. Plan meetings or maintain regular email conversations.

Games are becoming more and more popular each year. If you take a look at games from the past and compare them to contemporary games, you can clearly see the difference in graphics quality. The exponential progress in technology allowed us to create games with very realistic graphics. I am even convinced that a lot of people play computer games, because they like how their in-game character looks like. They might feel insecure in real life; however, playing a game allows them to feel confident and this confidence might even affect their regular life. On the other hand, someone who tries to lose weight in real life is not going to like the idea of playing an overweight character. Games allow players to escape from reality, and that is why players often like to play a character that looks completely different from how they look like in reality. It is interesting to observe what looks a player’s avatar has. If you had a choice, what avatar would you create?

It is clear that more and more people create their virtual avatars and once more data will be collected, it will be interesting to analyze it and make some observations.

Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites and has millions of files stored on its servers. While you can use the default free service to download or upload files, many people decide to purchase the premium Rapidshare account in order to benefit from Rapidshare even more. Unfortunately, those who bought a premium account are in danger of losing it due to phishing scams. I investigated how you can protect yourself from such deceptive actions and here are my conclusions:

• First of all, if you suspect that someone unauthorized may be using your account, or if you already are a victim of a phishing scam, then change your password as soon as possible and log out. I think this is quite straightforward.
• You can enable direct download from Rapidshare premium account option page. This will mean that each time you want to download something, but will get redirected to a login page, you will know it is fake. Logging on a phishing website can be very dangerous.
• The real link to download Rapidshare files looks like this: http://rapidshare.com/files/12345678/xxxxx.rar. Be careful if someone gives you a link that looks differently as it is most certainly a phishing scam.

Most importantly, be careful whatever you are doing with your Rapidshare account. Do not share your password with anybody, and make sure to make your password as complicated as possible. I always recommend people to have hard to guess passwords in order to avoid any potential hackers.

If you are serious about blogging, you probably understand the importance of backlinks. Basically, backlinks are links originating from other sites that point to your site. Backlinks that come from sites of the same topic are the most valuable. If you have a lot of backlinks, then your site is going to have a high Page Rank, and it will appear in many search results. There are many ways to obtain backlinks; however, I would like to present you with a rather original idea.

Basically, the way it works is that a blogger is going to announce that he is looking for sponsors of each of his blog categories. Such categories can deal with the topics of blogging, making money online, search engine optimization, marketing, or whatever a blog is focused on. Such blog should be updated fairly regularly, and have interesting content. A blogger can encourage his readers to link to his website, and in return is going to link to those readers from his category pages. The readers will be happy that they received a backlink from a popular blog, while such blog will also obtain a lot of backlinks. There are many ways to obtain backlinks so I suggest that every webmaster should experiment to find the most efficient way.

Did you ever try to Google your own name in the search engine? If there are some results which you would prefer not to appear, there are several things you can do. Unfortunately, none of them guarantee your name being removed. Here are some steps you can take:

1. Contact the person who wrote information about you, by sending him an email found on his site. Take into account, that not all people display their email. If this is the case, try to contact that person in some other way. If this will not be possible, you will have to learn to live with it.
2. If the first method failed, use whois.domaintools.com to find contact information provided by the hosting company about the person who wrote about you. This is a more reliable method and can be used to obtain info about a person you are looking for.
3. Trying to outrank pages that display information about you by creating a profile page. You can use services like linkedin.com or plaxo.com. It might be a good idea if the previous methods fail. Such profile pages tend to rank high in search engines, and will give you the edge over those who wrote about you on their websites.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. While the name of it might sound complicated, the purpose of it is quite simple. It is simply a test to tell apart humans and bots. Many websites that use it or used it in the past, for example, RapidShare. RapidShare itself is a very popular file hosting service, which ranks among the top 50 websites on the Internet. Rapidshare had some problems with spammers and bots that were trying to automatically download many files. This resulted in high bandwidth costs for Rapidshare, so the company had to make some steps to stop it. Last year RapidShare introduced a CAPTCHA that in order to download any file you needed to decipher. It was a CAPTCHA that had animals on each letter, and you needed to be able to tell on which letters cats are present. It was very hard to tell, as is was simply impractical. Many people were forced to download their files during “happy hours”, when you could download files without such nuisances. That is simply because they were not able to decipher the CAPTCHA. I think that this proves that while there certainly is a need for CAPTCHAs, we should remember to design them in such a way that all humans should be able to pass the test.