Articles in “February 2009” from Datamation Blog

By Tom Dunlap

Charles Cooper over at CNET has keep his New York roots alive, thankfully, and today he filed an excellent blog about Facebook, the state of newspapers, and about neighborhood blogs in Brooklyn.

I used to work with "Coop" at ZDNET and CNET in San Francisco. The rabid New York Knicks fan has always written an insightful column or blog and kept his newsrooms lively, despite his questionable taste in sports teams.

At the bottom of his Coop's Corner blog today, he slips in a note about the New York Times' plan for local blogs. Cooper links to an article on the Brownstoner blog that all journalism watchers and serious bloggers should pay attention to:

Starting mid-day on Monday, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include "cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the 'SoHo of Brooklyn.'"

Each site will be helmed by a writer/editor from the paper, a Times official told us, but will draw upon contributors from the neighborhood as well as some free labor from the CUNY journalism program.

It sounds like a potentially interesting plan to me, if the Times can keep the quality of the blogs up. Perhaps vibrant neighborhood blogs are the real future of local journalism.  But a comment on the Brownstoner blog should also be heeded: "Another attempt by the Times to stay relevant, in the face of their implosion."

I'm not being self-effacing, just honest. The truth is, no one really knows how the changes being implemented by Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, will affect the fortunes of the troubled Internet pioneer.

But that won't stop the professional speculators from speculating professionally about the moves announced by Bartz today in a blog post. It's what they do. It might make for entertaining reading, and part of me is tempted to join in, but I'd just be making it up, like them. Instead, I'll pass along the news as reported by David Needle of internetnews.com, and maybe later throw in the writing equivalent of an arched eyebrow:

Yahoo's expected management shakeup landed with a splash today. In a blog post, new CEO Carol Bartz confirmed the widely rumored management reorganization taking place at her company, outlining several dramatic shifts and personnel changes.

The news arrived around the same time Yahoo made a surprise filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today that its Chief Financial Officer, Blake Jorgensen, will resign.

A surprise filing? Hmm. (Arching eyebrow now.)

The one-paragraph filing noted that Jorgensen will continue as CFO during a transitional period while Yahoo seeks a replacement.

News of the planned departure comes amid a wider reshuffling this week that saw the head of Yahoo's news division resign, as well as the departure of the executive leading the company's mobile group.

Meanwhile, Bartz explains in her blog post (I may as well go right to the source here) that her goal is to simplify and streamline in order to make Yahoo more responsive and nimble. She also promises the company will be less insular:

I've noticed that a lot of us on the inside don't spend enough time looking to the outside. That's why I'm creating a new Customer Advocacy group. After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you.

I'm singularly focused on providing you with awesome products. The kind that get you so excited, you have to tell someone about them....And that takes a real understanding of what you want/need/love/hate, how you're using our products, and what you find simple, intuitive, easy and fun. Who wants innovation for innovation's sake if it doesn't make your life easier, more efficient, more productive?

Well, that's easy: Geeks! Of course, Yahoo's customer base goes way beyond geeks, hence the changes. Will they pay off? I told you, I'm not going to play that game. But I agree with Bartz that "people want Yahoo to succeed." Now we'll just have to wait and see whether these moves will accomplish that goal.

 

Getting accurate statistics regarding the total number of Twitter users is nearly impossible. The company doesn't release numbers, leaving various twitter "experts" and tracking sites to offer educated guesses.

For example, an interesting blog called Twitter Facts reported last September that Twitter had surpassed 3 million users, citing data from another site called Twitdir.com (which is down for the moment). But Twitter Facts noted that another blog, by German digital researcher Benedikt Koehler, ballparked at the time that there were between 3.5 million and 4.5 million Twitter users.

Earlier this month, Compete.com estimated that Twitter had nearly 6 million users (unique visitors). I've also read figures as high as 12 million.

Again, it's all guesswork as long as Twitter keeps the data to itself. But I noticed a trend myself recently based on data I see on a site called Twitter Grader. First, a disclaimer: the main draw of Twitter Grader is, shall we say, slightly frothy. The site enables Twitter users to see how they "rate" compared to other users, on a scale up to 100. Grader takes into account how many people a Twitter user is following, how many followers they have, how many "tweets" they've posted, and a few other mysterious data points. 

Really, it's an arbitrary "scorecard" designed to get Twitterers to constantly visit the site to see their ranking. And it works, so I'll give credit to Internet marketing company HubSpot, which runs Twitter Grader, for creating a "popularity contest" marketing tool that's also fun for users. Still, anyone who takes their "Twitter Grade" seriously is losing perspective.

But Twitter Grader also includes a user's overall numerical rank relative to all other Twitter accounts. For example, DatamationBlog's rank as of this moment is 28,848 out of 1,402,143.

So Twitter Grader counts 1.4 million Twitter users (if that figure represents something else other than total Twitter users as estimated by Grader, maybe someone from HubSpot can explain it to me). As to why that total is so far below what Compete.com and others estimate for total Twitter users, I don't know.

But I do know this: According to Grader, the total number of Twitter users reached 1 million on Jan. 16, less than six weeks ago. Now it's past 1.4 million. That's fast growth.

On an anecdotal level, I've noticed a marked increase in DatamationBlog's number of unsolicited followers in recent weeks. In other words, more and more people are starting to follow our Twitter account without us first following theirs. Is it because we're becoming more visible? Is it because there are more new Twitter users entering the fray? Are companies catching on to the craze and imploring employees to join so they're not left behind?

Beats me, but I welcome all new followers and will gladly follow most of them back. I enjoy using Twitter and I believe we're in the early stages of sharp growth for the microblogging site. And I promise I'll never really care what my "Twitter Grade" is.

By Tom Dunlap

The worst-kept secret in the newspaper world is that the San Francisco Chronicle has been bleeding money for years. We all knew big cuts were coming, but I was still stunned by this statement yesterday from the Hearst Corp., which bought the venerable paper in 2000.

"Survival is the outcome we all want to achieve," Hearst officials said in a statement. "But without specific changes we are seeking across the entire Chronicle organization, we will have no choice but to quickly seek a buyer for The Chronicle, and, should a buyer not be found, to shut down the newspaper."

It's impossible to imagine that city without The Chronicle. My heart goes out to my friends there, and I fear for my former profession.

The newsroom woes continue to mount across the country. Earlier this week, owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer filed for bankruptcy protection, following an example set by Tribune Co., owners of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News faces closure unless a buyer can be found.

The newspapers barons long ago gutted what was once San Francisco's other great daily, the Examiner, (for which I got my first professional bylines in 1987.) The Examiner is now a plucky tabloid, but it lacks the panache the paper had when it was run with guts by Phil Bronstein and when it featured gutsy content, like a great column by the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Today I'll say a prayer to the ghost of Herb Caen, slam down an Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista, and hope the Chron survives.

By Tom Dunlap

Google's latest embarrassing Gmail outage has me wondering about the company's ambitious cloud computing imitative.

The Gmail service was down for two and a half hours worldwide this morning, starting at 1:30 am. Google was at first slow to respond to the problem, then later apologized in its blog. 

The problem is this: The search giant is pushing its cloud computing plan, which calls on consumers to store all their data -- from spread sheets to documents -- on the company's servers and then access that data online.

But if you're about to put your mission-critical data in Google's cloud, and then that cloud rains on you, what kind of trust is that going to foster?

Here's some of what the search giant had to say about the outage, along with its apology:

Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in what's called a 'CAPTCHA' which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step -- it's just to verify you are who you say you are.

The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

Obviously we're never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.

There's a fascinating article in Sunday's New York Times about "a new breed of technologies...that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web's hidden corners," far beyond what even Google can do today.

It's creating quite a buzz on Twitter, where links to the article have been "tweeted" seemingly hundreds of times today. If you're not on Twitter, trust me: That's a sure indication that something is having a great impact. (I've included a blog post and several comments below from Twitter users who want to share their thoughts. They're worth a read.)

Google, as we all know, is the dominant search engine of our time, with the ability to search more than a trillion web pages. Take it, NYT's Alex Wright:

But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web. Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can't provide satisfying answers to questions like "What's the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?" The answers are readily available -- if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Search engines rely on programs known as crawlers (or spiders) that gather information by following the trails of hyperlinks that tie the Web together. While that approach works well for the pages that make up the surface Web, these programs have a harder time penetrating databases that are set up to respond to typed queries. ...

With millions of databases connected to the Web, and endless possible permutations of search terms, there is simply no way for any search engine -- no matter how powerful -- to sift through every possible combination of data on the fly.

One project, called DeepPeep, has set a goal of crawling and indexing every database on the web. Run by Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, DeepPeep essentially begins by shooting off sample queries to get a sense of what's in a particular database, in the same way that a space probe is sent out to get preliminary data from a planet or solar system. Once it receives answers allowing it to get its bearings, DeepPeep then "fires off automated search terms in an effort to dislodge as much data as possible," according to Wright.

Of course, Google didn't get where it got by being slow-footed, so naturally the company is working on its own Deep Web technology, which involves developing a predictive model based on search returns to specific terms it queries within the context of a database.  

In a way Google is in a tough spot. It currently reigns supreme in search and thus would prefer not to see the market paradigm change. But in one form or another, Deep Web searching -- or the Semantic Web, the web of linked or interconnected data -- is inevitable, so Google has to experiment and be willing to change a formula that has enabled it to become an Internet giant. But what happens if the company can't do Deep Web or semantic search as well as a competitor? Anyone remember Alta Vista?

Here are thoughts on the Deep Web from several Twitter folks:

Sam Han @caughtintheweb: Why the name "Deep Web" misses the point

@dataspora: NYT muses on the 'Deep Web,' but in a shallow article leaves out most (all) of the important players.

@stakats: NYT on "deep web" ignores even "deeper web"of commercial and otherwise gated data stores

@chadskelton: Thinking if Google figures out how to index the "Deep Web" that's good news for database journalism.

@asktonyc: @LLiu The deep web is like dark matter in our galaxy: huge, full of material that can have an impact on our lives, FTW!

By Tom Dunlap

One of the hats I wear is managing editor of a site called Semanticweb.com, The Voice of Semantic Web Technology.

Many technologists, researchers, entrepreneurs, academics, and journalists know about this realm, called one of three things: the linked data movement, semantic web, or Web 3.0. Some know the history of this movement and Sir Tim Berners-Lee's involvement. My company is also hosting the upcoming Web 3.0 Conference in New York.

But the vast majority of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I drop "semantic web" at a cocktail party. They are finally starting to understand and use Web 2.0 technologies. They've never heard of, don't understand, or have no use for things like unlocking data that's sequestered by disparate applications and organizational limitations. No interest in tagging data or the future of search technology.

Which leads to today's poll question.

What Do You Know About Semantic Web or Web 3.0?

To Vote in the Poll

1. Click the Watch Now arrow below.
2. Look for the small Vote Now link and click it
3. A box pops up. Vote, and you'll see your vote tally in real time
4. You can also post a comment

Google makes web analytics so easy and cost-effective (what's more cost-effective than free?) that it's hard for cash-strapped enterprises to imagine using anything other than Google Analytics.

But researcher CMS Watch, which evaluated 20 web analytics platforms in a 470-page report released this week, says enterprises would do themselves a favor to look at companies other than the well-known market leader.

CMS Watch specifically cited Yahoo; not exactly an unknown, but far behind Google in web analytics market share. David Needle of internetnews.com reports:

Last spring, Yahoo bought Web analytics company IndexTools and converted the company's service to its own under the name Yahoo Web Analytics. CMS Watch said with the conversion complete, Yahoo is slowly ramping up promotion and further development of the service, but it already offers several advantages over Google Analytics.

Both services are free, though actively marketed by resellers who offer consulting services to help companies implement them.

"Google has more customers than anyone else," CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne told InternetNews.com. "The difference at a feature level between Google and Yahoo isn't very much if you're a small to mid-level size Company, and those customers might prefer Google's slicker interface. But when you start talking about bigger sized companies with big Web site issues, Yahoo is more relevant."

Other web analytics vendors cited by CMS Watch include Coremetrics, Omniture, Visible Measures, and WebTrends.Here's a link to the full list of companies in the report. Also, you can go to this page to fill out a form and get a free 30-page excerpt of the report, which costs $895 to $2,795, depending on which edition you buy.

CMS Watch says on its web site that it works for buyers, not vendors, and thus maintains neutrality and objectivity.

That was a quick cave-in.

Just yesterday my colleague Tom Dunlap was blogging about the controversy over social networking giant Facebook's change to its Terms of Service (ToS) that had members in an uproar.

The change, as reported by internetnews.com's David Needle, essentially gave Facebook full and perpetual rights to use whatever content you post on your Facebook page -- including, presumably, any pictures of you and your friends drunk or taking a bong hit. Even if you quit Facebook.

The change in the ToS was made early in February, but didn't come to light until Monday when it was reported by the Consumerist web site. Today Facebook posted this messsage on its site:

"Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."

 Judy Mottl at internetnews.com has the details.

By Tom Dunlap

If we ever needed another example of the adage, "What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet," this week's Facebook announcement is it.

Facebook's new terms of service have sparked a firestorm of angry comments, and it all centers around this question: Does Facebook command ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it?

My colleague David Needle, the West Coast bureau chief for InternetNews.com, has the story. He writes:

Facebook moved quickly this week to assure users they are still in control of the information they post to the popular social networking site. But the company did not say it would make any changes in its Terms of Service (TOS) agreement at the heart of the current controversy.

At issue are changes Facebook made a few weeks ago to its TOS, the online contract users agree to in order to join community sites such as Facebook. In a Feb. 16 blog post headlined, "Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit," the Consumerist Web site noted what it called "a seemingly slight but very important (and disturbing) change in Facebook's terms of service regarding user-generated content." ...

The post from the Consumerist (a not-for-profit subsidiary of Consumers Union) noted one stipulation of the TOS in particular that led, presumably, to the response Monday by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: The TOS notes that users grant Facebook "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to use, adapt and distribute "any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service."

Read Needle's full story here.

Of course, this isn't Facebook's first controversial privacy issue. The site's ill-conceived Beacon service automatically placed ads in members profiles based on their activities -- and received much criticism in 2007. Facebook later apologized and pulled the service in response to users' outcry, but Beacon still resulted in a couple of class-action lawsuits.

You have to wonder if Facebook is doing this because they are about to be purchased, or mulling such a deal.  Zuckerberg has so far famously held off selling the scorching hot social networking service. Or is the policy change a massive "cover you ass" plan for another reason. Time will tell. Meanwhile, watch what you put on Facebook.

By Tom Dunlap

Twitter is having a heck of a week.

In case you've been living in a cave, Twitter is the social networking and "microblogging" service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (aka "tweets"), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters.

It's a phenom that's growing by leaps and bounds, with hundreds (thousands?) of new users every day. Even President Obama is a tweeter. Speaking of that word, "tweeter," one of Twitter's little triumphs is spawning all kinds of cute or groan-inducing nouns, verbs, and adjectives, like "what a tweetheart," "marketing twool (sic)," and "I'll see you at tonight's tweet-up."

Early in the week, at the User Generated Content Conference in San Jose, tech impresario Guy Kawasaki called Twitter the best marketing tool ever. Today, that view is getting major backing from a Pew study, as reported by Kenneth Corbin of InternetNews.com:

The microblogging phenomenon is inching a little closer to mainstream.

Researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project polled Internet users and found that 11 percent are using Twitter and similar short-form online message services or status updates.

Pew conducted a similar survey in May 2008, asking Internet users about their usage of Twitter and other microblogging services such as Yammer. The recent survey asked respondents if they used Twitter or any other online service that allowed them to update their status, a common feature on social networking sites.
"Facebook and its ilk are clearly playing a big part here," Amanda Lenhart, a co-author of the report, told InternetNews.com.

The most recent survey, taken in December, found a sharp increase in uptake of Twitter-like services.

Check out the full story here. If you're not yet following -- that's Twitter-speak for reading our tweets -- the Datamation Blog Twitter feed, sign up here.

Microsoft has had its share of bad ideas (and code) over the years, but I can totally get behind the software giant's offer of a huge cash bounty for bringing to justice whoever unleashed what one security pro called "a savage Windows worm."

From Information Week:

Beset by malicious worms after failing to convince enough server administrators to take its out-of-band Security Bulletin, MS08-067, seriously, Microsoft is taking computer security to the streets: It has formed a cybersecurity posse to dismantle the Conficker/Downandup worm's infrastructure and has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the outbreak.

Microsoft warned last October that a vulnerability in its Server service could be exploited by a worm. Cybercriminals heard that warning and made the threat real, infecting as many as 9 million computers by mid-January. At that time, Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, estimated that between 25% and 30% of vulnerable systems remained unpatched.

And the problem continues more or less unabated today. Symantec said in the past five days it had seen an average of almost 500,000 infections per day with W32.Downadup.A and over 1.7 million infections per day with W32.Downadup.B.

We can bash Microsoft all we want for shipping shoddy code, and I've done more than my share of it (you're reading the words of a Vista owner). None of that justifies the actions of cyber-sleazebags who capitalize on these security flaws in a way that punishes millions of innocent computer users and networks.

There's simply no place for it in a civilized cyber-society. The writers of malware are punks, losers, vandals, criminals, scalawags and soulless sociopaths. I'm all for the equivalent of a cyber War on Terror against them. I don't care if it takes bounties, torches or pitchforks. Enough is enough.
 

Internet and network users all have their own tools that they swear by and think "are the best" of any particular genre. I'm no different, but I usually shy away from making the "best" claim because I usually assume (correctly, most of the time) there's something out there I'm unfamiliar with which trumps my awesome networking tool.

So I was quite pleased to find this article from a couple of weeks ago in WinPlanet that shouts the praises of FileZilla, an open source-based file transfer protocol (FTP) client I've used for a year or so.

I only use FileZilla for simple FTP uploads, but the freeware can do a whole lot more, as author Adam Stone explains:

FileZilla is a cross-platform FTP, FTPS, and SFTP client. It is fast, easy to use, easy to configure, and best of all, reliable. It runs on Windows (XP, 2000, and Vista), Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X and is available in a variety of languages. A Windows-based server edition is also available.

Downloading FileZilla is easy, requiring only a few simple clicks. Installing a new version over an older version will not alter existing settings, and a recent addition to the application allows for the choice between All Users and Owner during installation.

I can vouch for most of the above. I run it on seamlessly on Vista (which right away gives you an indication of FileZilla's reliability) and had no problems with the initial install and upgrades. I've tried two or three other FTP programs on a trial basis -- ones that you eventually have to pay for, mind you -- and FileZilla was easier to understand and get up and running than any of the others.

Adam writes that the latest version of FileZilla fixes some bugs that I never noticed and goes on to explain some more advanced features I've yet to explore, including a multiple-transfer function and this:

If multiple threads aren't enough, FileZilla will go you one better by allowing multiple instances. That is, more than one copy of Firezilla can be up and running at the same time. In practice this offers the possibility of uploading to multiple FTP servers or connecting to a single FTP server as more than one user.

FileZilla has a few minor quirks that Adam mentions, but his overall impression -- and my overall experience -- is that this freeware compares favorably to FTP clients for which many people pay up to $50.

If you want to check out FileZilla, you can download it from here.

By Tom Dunlap

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- "Twitter is the best marketing tool ever."

That was among the pearls of wisdom delivered by Guy Kawasaki this morning in a wide-ranging, insightful, occasionally salty keynote at the User Generated Content Conference and Expo (UGCX) at the convention center here.

Kawasaki, a founding partner of Garage Technology Ventures and the author of eight books, provided some unique views on Twitter, which you might expect from a man who has 62,000 Twitter followers.
 
Regarding those followers, Kawasaki said that, as a rule, he preaches following the followers. He has a tool that automates the following process, he said, just one of his Twitter tools.

"Whoever follows you, you follow them. ... It's an act of courtesy," Kawasaki told the audience of about 400 at the first UGCX show.

He said there are only two kinds of people on Twitter. There are those who are obsessed with how many followers they have. Then there's the other kind, who lie about not caring how many followers they have.

Kawasaki lamented that he used to be in the top 10 of total number of Twitter followers. "Then
Britney joined. Then Lance joined. They pushed me down. ... Obama has 275,000 followers," he said.

Regarding President Obama, a question from the moderator about Obama's campaign -- which used social  networking tools effectively -- sparked some interesting comments from Kawasaki about Internet marketing.

He started by explaining his "Guy's Golden Touch" theory. "It's not, whatever Guy touches turns to gold. It's whatever is gold, Guy touches."

He when on to say that when people ask him for advice about a social networking strategy, or search engine optimization, his rule is, "Have good s***. ... Aggregate good s***."

"At the end of the day it's about good content. Obama is good content," he said.

But Kawasaki is not what you might consider a traditional social networker. "I don't know how to use Facebook well yet," he said, (echoing what many of us feel.)

He told the story of recently learning some of the Facebook rules. At one point, 5,000 people
wanted to be his Facebook friend. This worried him, he said. He wondered if there was a way to
mass-accept them all, or he wondered if he should hire someone to do the accepting for him.

Then he learned there was a 5,000 limit on Facebook friends. Later, he found out that you could have far more "fans" than friends. That led to "the law of unintended consequences" regarding "friends" and "fans."

"When you have 5,000 friends, you think 'I am so popular.'" But then he discovered that some people, like the actor Adam Sandler, have 2 million fans, which Kawasaki said was a "very depressing day."

Later in the keynote, he returned to the theme of Twitter's marketing power. He said there are two theories of marketing. The first theory is that you "suck up to the leaders." For instance, in the print world, you suck up to the likes of Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, or John Markoff at the New York Times.

"I believe that's bulls***," Kawasaki said. "It is my theory -- you don't know who will be the next
marketing hub for your next product. You have no idea which nobody could be a big somebody for you."

He said you have to broadcast what you do to many places and "hope that person finds you."

"Marketing on the Internet is about drilling lots of holes," he said. He later equated this to two
recent movies. "Instead of seeing '300,' you should see 'Holes' [the Shia LaBeouf movie.]"

Regarding why he thinks Twitter is the best marketing tool ever, he said this: "You get to them free, fast, and often. Can you get that from a Super Bowl ad?"

An article in today's Wall Street Journal discusses how feng shui masters in Hong Kong are becoming popular among wealthy investors in the wake of massive bank losses over the past year. Here's how the story begins:

About 170 investors with a net worth of at least $1 million each crowded into a ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel to hear Alion Yeo's views on the markets for the coming year. The audience, clients of European bank ABN AMRO Private Banking, peppered him with questions.

"The incoming U.S. president and [Treasury] secretary were both born in the Year of the Ox," said one client. "Is that a problem?"

Mr. Yeo's answer: Yes. The pair of oxen in charge of the U.S. economy could be an accident waiting to happen. Hold out until after January 2010 before investing in the U.S., he advised.

Around the world, many people have consulted masters of feng shui -- a Chinese system of beliefs in the influence of stars, geography and the location of objects on people's lives -- for advice on how to maximize their good fortune and well-being through home decor.

Naturally, I wondered whether anyone has applied the principles of feng shui -- the main focus of which is positive energy flow, harmony and balance -- to web site design. Not surprisingly, someone has. In fact, a number of people have.

The site with the best (or at least most appropriate) feng shui-related name I found is Web Shui, which promises to create "web projects in harmony with today's business standards." Not sure if that means it will help you ask for government bailouts, but among its recent projects are bainbridgechamber.com, MyWritingMentor.net and kvintners.com, if you want to see what a feng shui-based site looks like. And while Web Shui offers free consultations, there's nothing on the site that spells out how the company applies feng shui to its work.

Fortunately, I found another site that does. Webworksite for designers includes a detailed article explaining how web sites can incorporate feng shui in their design. Among them:

1) the logo in the top left corner and it's usually linked to the home page or a home link is provided on all pages

2) the primary navigation is across the top or down the left side of the pages. If buttons are used for primary navigation, text links are duplicated at the bottom of each page.

3) there is a visual balance on most pages of curves and corners with a pleasing color scheme

4) headings are larger than content text and information is concise for skimming the page while providing the user with an option for more information if desired

Much of feng shui seems to involve basic common sense, which clearly is harmonious and balanced. Nothing wrong with that. Then I found another site, where things got a bit, um, interesting. This article offers the following advice:

The first feng shui tip can be use in choosing the name of your domain. You must never have a domain name that has a hyphen in it (e.g. feng-shui-tips-today.com). Besides the obvious fact that hyphens takes a little more effort to type on the keyboard, the hyphens represent mini poison arrows slicing through your website name. This is very inauspicious and extremely bad feng shui.

Mini poison arrows? Pretty dramatic imagery. Nonetheless, if you're interested in how to apply feng shui to your web sites, this link is a good start. But maybe you shouldn't listen to me. I was born in the Year of the Goat, and I've read that 2009 could be pretty rough for my type. Best stay clear.

The biggest user in the news these days might be Michael Phelps, but users of another sort with descend on San Jose next week to partake in another kind of recreation.

Next week is the User Generated Content Conference and Expo (UGCX) at the San Jose Convention Center. (Disclaimer: My company is hosting the conference.)

Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark, a notoriously soft-spoken guy, is one of the keynoters, as is Guy Kawasaki, a founding partner Garage Technology Ventures.

I'll be there covering the conference, as will many of my colleagues from Jupitermedia.
 
What's UGCX all about? User-generated content is a rapidly developing revolution in media. Regular Internet users now wield power over online content, and new business models are emerging in response to this shift. UGCX is the first conference and expo organized to bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in various fields to examine how these worlds collide and what the future holds.

UGCX is part trade show, part educational conference program. Conference program sessions will include case studies and business models in four tracks: social content, photography, video & gaming, and music.

It's a major trend: By 2013 nearly 155 million Americans will consume UGC, according to eMarketer. The folks doing the content creating will also keep rising, eMarketer contends, rising to 114.5 million in 2013.

Check this blog and other Jupitermedia sites next week for full coverage of the conference.

Contrary to the opinion of some cynics, you can get a lot of valuable information on Twitter besides, "Time for another cup of coffee!" This morning on Twitter I saw a link to a fascinating site that grades other web sites on their mobile-readiness.

This is a huge deal these days, for the proliferation of mobile devices is changing how people consume Internet content. It's ironic in a way, because the spread of smartphones comes just as manufacturers are turning out larger and higher-definition computer monitors. In fact, it's perfectly common for someone to log off his or her computer (with its 19-inch monitor), get in a car or on a train and, minutes later, be perusing the same web sites on an iPhone or BlackBerry. This increasingly bifurcated Internet experience is creating major challenges for web developers.

The testing site, ready.mobi, is run by mobiForge (formerly dev.mobi), which bills itself as the "world's largest independent mobile development community." mobiForge is a service provided by dotMobi, a Dublin, Ireland-based non-profit funded by 14 mobile players and whose stated purpose is to promote mobile web development and best practices.

Using ready.mobi is simple. Anyone can check an individual page by typing in the URL. To check an entire site, you need to register for a user account. This takes just a few minutes. Then you have to add a crawler to your site. Also quick and easy. Depending on how many pages the site has, the crawl can take awhile. When either the individual page or site crawl are through, you get a number grade from 0 to 5. Warning: Results may be sobering.

Hat tip to Twitter friend @HighTechDad (Michael Sheehan), a tech evangelist at cloud computing company GoGrid, and @SimonJGreen (Simon Green), network manager at British web site design firm Bluhalo, who first "tweeted" the ready.mobi link.
 

One of my sites, Intranetjournal.com, has launched its annual product of the year awards, and I'm pleasantly surprised by all the new entries. Just a few of the nominated software tools were in the mix last year.

The way we run the competition is like this: The editors select categories, then readers nominate products. We vet the products according to our guidelines, then hold a final rose ceremony, I mean ballot (too much reality TV lately). The final ballot went up yesterday on Intranetjournal.com.

If I had to guess which of the categories will feature the tightest voting this year, I'd go with these three: 

Semantic Web Application

Calais by Thomson Reuters
Expert Systems' Cogito Focus
Semantic MediaWiki
Vialect Noodle
Yahoo SearchMonkey

Blogging Software

Adenin IntelliEnterprise
Blogger.com (includes Blogspot.com)
Movable Type
Traction TeamPage
Vialect Noodle
WordPress

Document Management/Collaboration Product

Adenin IntelliEnterprise
EMC Documentum ECM 6.5
FatWire TeamUp
Sorce Intranet
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0

Intranetjournal is just one of many sites in the Jupitermedia constellation that holds product of
the year awards. For a complete list, go to this site. We'll announce winners later this month.

Usually when an Internet or network security-related news story breaks -- dangerous malware, hacker attacks, etc. -- you read a bunch of quotes from "experts" issuing dire warnings of more to come or offering advice on how to prevent similar threats.

Sometimes these opinions are solicited by journalists and bloggers, and sometimes the "experts" actively look to get quoted to raise their visibility. Both parties, in a way, are trying to capitalize on the "scare" story in question. It's how the information ecosystem operates, and to a certain extent many of these follow-up articles should be taken with a grain of salt.

But I don't think that's the case here:

The contracted Fannie Mae engineer indicted Tuesday by the Justice Department for allegedly planting a logic bomb represents the beginning of a trend of insider attacks responding to layoffs and job insecurity because of the weak economy, experts say.

"To me, this is the tip of the iceberg," said Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of security company Cenzic. "If a small percentage of these IT workers are going to the dark side, they could potentially cause a lot of damage."

Federal investigators indicted Rajendrashinh Makwana, 35, a contracted Unix engineer for mortgage finance company Fannie Mae, for allegedly embedding malicious code known as a logic bomb in the mortgage lender's computer network, which was set to detonate on Jan. 31, 2009.

Had the attack been successful, the malware could have destroyed the entirety of the data on all 4,000 of the mortgage finance company's servers and shut down the company for a week, experts say.

The malware in Fannie Mae's servers was thwarted when another engineer detected the malicious code, embedded with legitimate script.

However, experts say that in many other cases, malicious code planted from the inside might not be so easily detected, especially in smaller and midsize companies with limited IT personnel and resources.

According to the ChannelWeb article, Makwana was fired last Oct. 24 for a scripting error he made earlier that month. The error was determined by investigators not to be malicious, but Makwana's reaction to his dismissal was, they allege.

Here's the first big lesson for enterprises: Makwana was told he was fired at 2 p.m. that day, but didn't leave the building until 4:45 p.m. Even more amazing, his server access wasn't terminated until 10 o'clock that night! Who knows whether it was a simple oversight, whether someone decided they had more important priorities at the moment than to follow through on termination procedures, or whether Fannie Mae's termination procedures were lax. To me an eight-hour gap between firing someone and cutting them off from the server is incredibly dumb -- especially when that someone has the skills to do some real damage.
 
We can speculate endlessly about whether Makwana's dismissal was justified or insensitively handled. Indeed, several commenters to the ChannelWeb article have taken the opportunity to complain about how poorly tech workers can be treated, how their anger is justified when CEOs and other fat-cats continue to siphon off money in bonuses while the global economy melts down and layoffs reach epidemic proportions. You'll never hear me argue otherwise. My point is that as the economy continues to spiral downward, enterprises have an obligation to protect themselves from retaliation damage. That means putting termination policies in place and following them. If they don't, and the result is a blown-up network, it likely could mean more jobs lost.

But don't take my word for it. Listen to the expert quoted by ChannelWeb:

"I bet there's a lot more malicious code and a lot more hidden back doors that are being exploited," Khera said. "We'll hear about some of the big ones. We won't hear about a bunch of them that will never get caught."

This is one "scare" story I believe.