Grasshoppermind

First there was Blog and Ping. What was initially a legitimate method for informing blog indexes (such as Technorati) of new content, was rapidly morphed into an automated and dubious technique used by some internet marketers to drive their websites up the Search Engine page rankings. And this worked (for a while) until Google et al. caught up and altered their ranking algorithms.

Blackhat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques often involve the creation of huge blog farms of autogenerated pseudo content all linking back and forth to each other. These useless (to the reader anyway) blogs have become known as Splogs= Spam+Blogs.

Another technique which will be recognised by anyone who has run a genuine blog for any time are Spam Comments - again designed to create backlinks from authoritative page ranked sites to the website that was being SEO’ed. Indiscriminate use of specifically written comment spamming programs has resulted in this widespread nuisance - which because most people now use REL=NOFOLLOW for their comments - no longer provides any benefits to the users of this technique.

Now we are beginning to see exploitation of Web2.0 tagging in the drive for higher search engine rankings. Automated Tag and Ping programs have been developed and released(and no I’m not going to link to them). Now we will see the automated poisoning of tagging which will reduce its effectiveness and lead to greater amounts of Splog in our feed readers.

Will we see a new round of Splogs using this method? I believe that we will, because the short term gains will appeal to the ‘get rich quick’ mindset that makes up one segment of the Internet Marketing community.

Ultimately another round of countermeasures will be produced which will reduce Tag and Ping effectiveness… and so the cycle will continue.

Using this little utility from clustrmap you can add a small image to your website that shows where your visitors are from. I’ve only added it to this particular post for now, but it’s easy to add to the main page of your website.

Registration is free (for low bandwidth users) and of course in best Web2.0 fashion it’s a beta.

How does this work? well the people who created it don’t give a lot of clues on their website, but my best guess is that they look up the location of the IP Address of each visitor to your site using a technique known as geolocation .

Found via Trendhunter Magazine

The British Computer Society just announced the creation of a Specialist Group for all things Geospatial.

The increasing ability to integrate geospatial technology into a wide range of IT systems, and the increasing visibility of it to business and the public, makes this an appropriate time to form a specialist group within BCS so that members may be well informed and understand the issues and best practices associated with the technology.

It has often irritated me to see the contrast between the American and British approaches to geographical data. So much American data is free. So much British data is very expensive and it’s usage severely restricted by license in some way. So it’s great to see resources like Openstreetmap and Freethepostcode taking a grassroots approach to addressing the issue.

Openstreetmap is enlisting the help of enthusiasts armed with a handheld GPS to create an opensource, freely available, streetmap of the entire world.

This may take some time.

Especially as their homebrewed server rack oftens creaks under the strain and this makes editing a somewhat frustrating affair. But this is the early adopter zone and these issues tend to go with the territory (pun intended) .

Dan Karran and I have launched our own attempt to map the Isle of Man and to get the data onto Openstreetmap, so any Isle of Man readers who would like to assist, please get in touch.

Every UK reader with a GPS should visit Freethepostcode at least once and put in your Postcode and your Latitude and Longitude coordinates. Do your bit to create a free UK postcode coordinate list.