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…..”
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!
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…
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…
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!
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…
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:
Friendfeed seems to be doing little more than gathering dust, following Facebook’s acquisition. Even their most highly followed user, Robert Scoble, has said; “I can’t keep focusing on a site that isn’t getting developed. Sorry. That’s not what I do.”
Is this the end of the line for Friendfeed or a new beginning?
CNN’s poorly-advised coverage of the balloon boy hoax story, could mark a change in the way mainstream news is reported. By trying to take on services such as Twitter, by releasing ‘news’ super-fast, the reliability of stories is suffering. Here’s what I think is happening…
Once again, hundreds or maybe thousands of people, attending the SAME event at the SAME time are ‘live blogging’ the SAME content to (mostly) the SAME people. So-called ‘live blogging’ was once a useful practice, where a small number of people attending an event, would send key messages via Twitter, to their targeted followers.
However, today – when almost every attendee at these events is tweeting everything they hear, live blogging has become (at best) a nuisance for Twitter users.
Gary McKinnon is to be sent by the UK government to the United States for trial, following the failure of his latest appeal against extradition.
McKinnon has a form of autism, which his legal team and doctors claim will lead to “disastrous consequences” for his health, including possible psychosis and suicide; if he is extradited. He faces a 60 year prison term if found guilty – read on…
So, bloggers failing to declare that they are taking money or freebies for writing reviews / posts, could soon be fined up to $11,000. Whilst this may stop a few smaller blogs writing undisclosed posts for PR firms, it’s hardly going to stop the big blogs – which are rewarded very highly for the coverage they give certain favoured brands. Here’s why!
Cisco’s report into global broadband speed has been published and the findings confirm what many users know; that typical broadband speeds in their country are crap.
The top 10 countries for broadband quality are:
When Matt Mullengweg announced that Wordpress.com was installing RSS Cloud on it’s 7.5 million blogs, something amazing happened!
All of a sudden, blogs on the Wordpress.com platform became almost real-time. In other words, posts will be broadcast almost immediately; allowing bloggers to both deliver real-time content to their RSS subscribers AND potentially share real-time comments with their readers. Here’s why I think this is such a big deal!
Blogging is experiencing (yet another) resurgence it seems. However, this time, it looks like the very sites that were accused of killing blogs, are now responsible for making them more popular than ever.
That’s right: Twitter, Facebook and co are actually making blogs more popular than ever before. Read on to find out why!
