Connect 2400

Getting Firefox to Recognize Your GoDaddy SSL Certificate

From searching the web for a solution to the issue of Firefox displaying a scary warning message when visiting one of my sites that uses an inexpensive GoDaddy SSL Cert, I can see that the solution is out there but I want to make sure it's in at least one more place! Hopefully this post can save someone the searching time I spent.

Firefox needs to see an Intermediate Certificate. To get this Cert, visit the GoDaddy certificate repository.  In my case, the problem was with IIS, so I downloaded the very last file listed, right before the  CRLs: "Go Daddy PKCS7 Certificate Intermediates Bundle (for Windows IIS)

Once I got that file on my web server, I opened MMC, which in my case has the Certificates Snap-In already loaded. Add it if you don't - make sure it's set up for the Computer Account. Drill down on the Certificates, go to the Intermediate Certificates, right click, and do an import on that file I reference above.

The scary message should not appear after you have installed the Certificate Intermediates Bundle.

Slashdot Incorporates Social Tagging

From the horse's mouth:

"We're going to build the next generation of moderation on top of tags. That means we're going to poach your namespace. Some tags will have a substantive effect on the system right from the start (or very soon). Our article tagger will know about tags like "dupe" or "typo". When we roll out tagging on comments, we will teach it "troll" and "informative". These tags can have a meaning in the system. And when you come up with ways of using tags that we haven't anticipated, we will bring them into the system.

Currently open only to Slashdot subscribers, these tags are apparently going to be observed closely for any emerging behaviours, which could be integrated in to the Slashdot system! Slashdot, perhaps due to its popularity, is subjected to frequent complaints about its moderation system. I personally find that in the right topics (i.e. non-flame topics) the moderation system is fairly robust. But to see where they take this, using tagging to influence and augment content moderation, will be pretty exciting.

CmrdTaco goes out of his way to spell out that this is highly experimental and he doesn't know what direction it will take. But he states in no uncertain terms that the tags will be used meaningfully, as opposed to other systems where anything goes.

The full blurb: http://slashdot.org/faq/tags.shtml

Google Page Creator

Google has launched its latest service: Google Page Creator. The concept is a good one, breaking free of blogging constraints and creating a browser-based WYSIWYG HTML editor. By signing in with your Gmail account, you can create web pages in your browser which will be hosted at <gmailname>.googlepages.com. 

I'd post more information, but the service gave me an error message when I attempted to agree to the TOS. Once the service is working correctly (is anything Google makes ever out of Beta, other than News?) I'll be taking it for an in-depth test drive.

It's True: Yahoo Acquires del.icio.us

As first reported by TechCrunch and now echoing throughout the web, Yahoo! has purchases del.icio.us, the leader in social bookmarking. There's no word on how this will integrate with Yahoo's other services, but done right, it could be huge.

Yahoo has already purchased photo tagging site Flickr, and unveiled its own tagging platform MyWeb 2.0. With Amazon getting in on tagging, the momentum seems to be increasing in this area. While search technology is (hopefully) getting better at semantic analysis, these tagging sites may provide additional insight into words, meanings, and the sites that we browse.

I think of a "tag" as a semi-reliable label on an arbitratry grouping of objects. Semi-reliable because anyone can tag anything with any word they like, which introduces noise to the system. However, humans do noise filtering and disambiguation all the time using their brains and it seems inevitable that we will be modeling that activity to some extent, improving the search and retrieval of information. While systems today seem to make good suggestions, the addition of more and more layers of context might continue to improve the user experience and the value we get.

Could machines become intuitive? One of the most intuitive things we humans do is use language. We draw understandings and make new creations without knowing how we do it at the time; it's a fully intuitive process that occurs below conscious awareness. Can we model this process in such a way as to create analogs in information systems? If so, we have a growing corpus of text, and relationships between texts through hyperlinking and tagging.

While many think of Google as building the ultimate information system, we would be foolish to overlook Yahoo, quietly building an aresnal of highly-addictive social internet tools bound to tap into the intelligence of group activity which may emerge if the right mix of constraints and freedoms is implemented.

IBM jumps into Web 2.0 with Public Image Monitoring Solution

Internetnews.com reports on IBM creating (drum roll) RSS aggregation and web reputation monitoring:

IBM (Quote, Chart) today introduced new software that monitors and analyzes blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups and other community-generated content to keep tabs on their image.

The Public Image Monitoring Solution is a response to two developments, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technology strategy and innovation, said at a news conference at the company's research offices here.

I would love to get my hands on this software, just to see what kind of value it adds. RSS is simple enough to work with that simple scripting can go very far, and there are free scripts out there for scraping all kinds of content into RSS. Perhaps the allure is that it's a commercial offering with support and all, but I suspect there's more to it- perhaps some kind of killer organization of all the information.

Schedule TiVo Recording from Yahoo!

Users of Tivo who either have or are willing to sign up for a Yahoo! account can now schedule recording remotely from any web browser. While there is some lag time due to the way that the Tivo device polls the Tivo service for information, I can see how this would be extremely useful.

An article on ZDNet implies that further content sharing might be in the works, such as weather, finance, news, etc. But what I find interesting is that now a certain populations TV viewing habits are potentially linked to their online habits. TiVo always had the capability to observe their users' viewing habits, and Yahoo of course has the ability to track web surfers' habits throughout the Yahoo properties (and eventually through sites in the Yahoo Publisher ad network?). It seems like a reasonable idea to begin building marketing profiles based on this linkage. Have the online ads served to a user be congruent with the messaging delivered via television advertising and vice versa.

The one-to-many communication model of broadcasting does not lend itself to that kind of tracking and customization, but we're entering the age of one-to-one communication models. Online sites are getting intelligent enough to target individuals as well as populations. Now, with PVR/DVR and VOD applications coming into an increasing number of homes, watching television becomes a two-way communication process.

As I've pointed out before, you can't not communicate. Companies such as TiVo and perhaps Comcast have a huge opportunity to begin listening to the communications implicit in channel surfing behavior... done right, this could greatly enhance the television viewer's experience in ways similar to how Google is credited with helping web advertising along with contextual ads.

I'm not just talking about logging what programs are watched at what times. The conversation could include how quickly someone skips past a channel when surfing the dial, what specifically is showing when the channel is changed, whether a program is viewed in its entirety and if not, precisely when its turned off and from there, the users' destination channel, volume settings getting changed, etc.  These behaviors might not make any kind of easily discernable pattern when observed at an individual level, but taken in aggregate there might be patterns emerging, just as we've found with online habits. Even Google has discussed the possible implications of microbehaviors (even typing behavior!) to web marketing.

The continuing trend to make television two-way, combined with online profiling, could target advertising well enough that in the same way Google has increased ad effectiveness through less annoying, context-sensitive ads, so could Yahoo!/TiVo do something similar with more relevant television advertising.  We're a long way off from that (as TiVo merely records what ads are broadcast already by television networks) but it seems to be technologically feasible and if the money's there, perhaps inevitable.

What Made Opera free (as in beer)

Source: http://gigaom.com/2005/09/21/google-made-opera-browser-free/

Blogger Om Malik discovers how Oslo-based Opera was able to maintain revenue while making their browsers free (as in beer):

Well, little digging around, and hounding the Opera PR team, I found out that the decision to give away the browser came after the company struck ìcompensation dealsî with some of the search engines. Apparently, the premier tenant for browserís built-in search window, is Google. ìThe current most important deal now is with Google,î company spokesperson Eskil Siversten wrote in an email. The company indicated that it has similar referral-for-dollars agreements with the likes of eBay and Amazon.

Opera is a very nice browser. I don't know anybody that uses it except for webmasters and people using the mobile version on their PDA/phones, so perhaps the zero-cost will help drive adoption up for this browser with a history of innovation.

Sun Microsystems' Edgy New Ad Campaign

Sun Microsystems has been making noise lately, directly taking on Dell in their new ad campaign.
Their site features bold ads, and includes an amusing section showing advertisements that
were actually rejected by the magazines in which they attempted to place the pieces.
This buzz is surrounding the launch of several new products featuring x64 processors
that can run Linux, Solaris, and Windows, with the low-end model starting at $745 US.

See their page http://www.sun.com/emrkt/rejected/index.html to view these edgy adverts, including
"100% More Bitchin Than Dell", "Now That's What We Call An Ass-Whoopin", and "Benchmark Studies Prove
That Dell Sucks." The site even solicits new ad slogan ideas along these lines.

Google Secures WiFi for Windows

John Batelle, among others, mention that some telling Google URLs have been floating around. http://wifi.google.com/faq.html
being the only one that doesn't redirect you to the Google search page, proves most informative.

Many have been speculating about Google using its newly-acquired dark fiber network to create a second Internet,
or to launch its own nationwide free wifi service. While I believe the simplest explanation for that dark fiber is the most
likely - they need that fiber to move their massive datasets around - there is a faint possibility of something very exciting coming
out of it.

Enter wifi.google.com with its beta (of course) download of Google Secure Access. From reading the FAQ, I think the rumor-mill is missing
the point on this one. This IS a relevant, exciting development in and of itself! Secure Access appears to be a simple VPN or encrypted proxy client meant for
users to employ on their laptops when using public, and therefore untrusted, wifi networks. This really is huge because of the security vulnerabilities inherent
in public wifi acccess. The FAQ states that a Google employee used his 20% time to develop this app, which tunnels traffic through a Google proxy server via an encrypted
connection. Does this remind anyone of the Web Accelerator? Let's put privacy implications aside for one moment and trust that Google won't be executing man in the middle attacks
against our data... this could help drive the adoption of public wifi usage, especially for security-minded businessfolk.

Google Secure Access is also reminiscent of the older peer-to-peer proxy networks designed to secure traffic against prying corporate
firewalls. But for those who don't want to be running a P2P traffic app on their machine, thus providing free bandwidth to unknown entities,
the public encrypted proxy model becomes more attractive.

Although it seems that Google does in fact have a few public wifi networks in operation now, and this client is meant for use there specifically,
the FAQ does state that the Secure Access system should work with other networks. It would certainly be exciting to see a large-scale deployment of free wifi,
but for now, let's recognize this small but greatly significant development for its own merit.

Google Alerts Employing Clickthrough Tracking

I haven't seen this discussed in the forums I frequent so I'm not sure
how long it's been going on. I receive several different Google Alerts
and the majority of them list out, in the email, direct links to the
page they are publicizing.

Today, however, I received an alert whose link was to a redirect app at
Google! The url contained several cryptic numeric parameters, along with
a parameter spelling out the alert's keyword search and of course the
destination URL (how else would a redirect work but to know the
destination).

Could Google Alerts be learning about site relevancy in this way? If
that's the case, does it apply back to regular search results? Surely
there must be an article somewhere...