When did you last check your blog’s subscriber numbers? It’s been quite a while for me. But, this week, I decided to take a quick look at my Feedburner stats. Seems that Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase are all doing rather well. In fact, the former two are doing a lot better than expected…

…which was worrying. Visitor rates had not changed much. Traffic has gradually climbed over the last few months and individual posts occasionally get retweeted or bookmarked on various social media sites. However, the leap for Sciencetext specifically since the last time I checked was enormous – a doubling, in fact. Was this simply another example of the Feedburner feedcount myth, yet another example of Google’s shoddy handling of the system since it took over or something else?

Well, it appears that Feedburner now takes FriendFeed subscribers into account when totting up your subscriber numbers. Now, so Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase all seem to benefiting from subscribers who follow me as “sciencebase” on FriendFeed. But, those are all the same subscribers, so if I were to add up the individuals following all three blogs, would I simple have a massively overlapped Venn diagram? I suspect so…rather disheartening, really. I wish I’d never looked.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Feedburner Feedcount

I’m a Facebook slut. I keep LinkedIn for parallel monogamous business connections but will friend almost anyone on Facebook. It’s all about reaching out, after all. I want as many friends as possible on Facebook, I want to share and poke and comment on their walls and I want them to reciprocate. You got a problem with that?

Thought not.

But, something odd is happening. At the time when I had fewer than 100 Facebook friends, it was rare that I’d have any friends in common with new pokers and pokees. Occasionally, a new contact would have one or two mutual friends, but never more than three. Now that I have almost 600 “friends” on Facebook its seems that whenever I look at the new friends suggestions offered up by the system, almost all of them share at least 40 or 50 friends in common.

To me this suggests that Facebook is becoming a closed circle in which almost all my friends and potential friends all know each other. It’s becoming an almost fully interconnected network. Forget six degrees of separation, Facebook looks from this point of view to be two-degrees of separation.

Now, that’s not a good thing, really, is it? It means that your friends are all my friends, and my friends are yours and no one new is joining the inner sanctum, our almost closed circle of acquaintance. Maybe it’s just me, but do you see it too in the putative friends with whom Facebook suggests you connect? I’d be interested to know.

I’d also be interested to know how to break out of this inner circle and take my Facebook promiscuity to the next level. I’ve had enough of this virtual inbreeding, I want fresh blood…

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

On being a Facebook slut

People rarely go shopping together online. Okay, occasionally I’ll show my wife that I can buy some item or other we need cheaper online than at the mall, but that’s usually just to save the car journey.

Online shopping is essentially a solo occupation, as are many other internet activities. Fundamentally, there is none of the social side of window shopping with friends, of trying outfits, of the Stadtbummel Germans apparently enjoy so much, and no opportunities to stop off for a skinny iced cinnamon dolce latte café and check emails at a wi-fi hotspot.

And, apparently, this angst regarding the lack of the social when it comes to ecommerce is the same the world over from Canada to China, according to Khaled Hassanein and Milena Head of DeGroote School of Business, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario and Chunhua Ju of the Science and Research Office, Zhejiang Gongshang University, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, PR China.

They explain how earlier research studies have shown that website design elements, such as text and pictures, can be manipulated to increase the perception of Social Presence (SP) among online consumers, which can have some impact on perceived trustworthiness, usefulness and overall enjoyment of the online shopping experience. However, they have now found that perceived usefulness and enjoyment are affected by SP the same in Canada and Chine, although trust seems to be a different matter.

“The traditional offline shopping experience includes a wide range of emotions involving various types of social interactions with humans,” the researchers explain, “In contrast, the online shopping experience may be viewed as lacking human warmth and sociability. Online vendors can try to overcome the more impersonal, anonymous and automated stigma of online shopping by making their virtual storefront socially rich.”

How this enrichment is carried out, perhaps by using design elements such as emotive text and socially rich images, and whether it works or not is open to debate, but it is just possible that the ultimate success of ecommerce hinges on this very question.

Khaled Hassanein, Milena Head, & Chunhua Ju (2009). A cross-cultural comparison of the impact of Social Presence on website trust, usefulness and enjoyment Int. J. Electronic Business, 7 (6), 625-641

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Socializing online shopping

A few weeks ago, I heard about a new antispam plugin called Cookies for Comments. After a couple of months of testing, I confess that it’s the most impressive plugin for blocking spam on a Wordpress blog.

I was reluctant to mention it here, for fear of alerting spammers to its existence and offering them insight into how it works and how they might circumvent it, but a few days ago it was publicized more widely, and I reasoned that stealth and obfuscation really isn’t a defense.

Cookies for Comments works by adding a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. That means you have to be actually reading the blog post in your browser before you leave a comment, spam bots don’t do that…

You can even add a couple of lines to your Wordpress folder’s .htaccess file that will prevent bots from even getting anywhere near your comment form and so cut down on bandwidth leeches.

You can set Cookies for Comments to drop any spambot comments right into your spam folder or else delete them immediately. It’s so powerful that, to be honest, there’s really no need to run any other antispam plugin. Indeed, I’ve gone out on a limb with Sciencebase and have opened up comments to immediate approval rather than moderation and am yet to see a false positive.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Cookies for Comments

Without copyright protection creative types would not create. That, apparently, is one of the defenses put forward by the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA. These organizations chase after file sharers and attempt to gain millions of dollars of recompense each year from people who swap music and movie torrents. But isn’t this defense simply justification for a whole new industry that could outgrow the music and movie industries themselves?

It’s fairly well documented that many recording artists in the past were offered draconian record company contracts and received little compensation for their creativity compared with the company profit lines. There’s also the almost forgotten fact that decades of music charts were hyped as company A&R staff bought up their label’s records to boost chart placements. There’s also the pricing concept associated with a manufactured music disk and accompanying liner notes and the virtual download version of an “album” and how that somehow should cost the same instore and online.

Brazilian musician Denis Borges Barbosa who recently published a critique of the state of copyright in the world of music, also points out that the prime defense of copyright protecting creativity is a fallacy. In his critique he suggests that we take a look at the plight of composer-musicians stretching back to the Baroque period to see just how ludicrous a claim that is.

Eighteenth century composer Georg Philipp Telemann, for instance, is the most prolific composer in history. A lawyer by training (oh, the irony) he was simultaneously a public servant, a publisher, a concert promoter, a conductor, and a performer, and wrote some 8000 opi. There was no copyright law to protect his works. Likewise, Vivaldi composed over 500 concerti, 43 operas, published 100 opi. Handel (who also started law school) staged 50 of his operas and 23 oratorios. Beethoven produced 849 opi (eight concerti and nine symphonies). Mozart and Bach we incredibly creative and prolific too.

Barbosa suggests that it was the total lack of any copyright protection that made these famous names such workaholics; they had to slave away at their staves simply to keep ahead of the competition. However, by the twentieth century, long after copyright laws had been laid down, the likes of Gershwin and Bernstein received amazing plaudits, awards, and no little reward for much more modest levels of musical output.

Gershwin wrote a mere 19 classical pieces, 35 Broadway shows and contributed to 22 other plays, and seven films, while Bernstein wrote just three symphonies, two operas and five musicals. All amazing stuff, but not the hundreds or thousands of their classical predecessors.

It seems that copyright laws, while protecting vested interests have simply stifled creativity. Looking at the statistics for modern composers Bernstein, Gershwin, and their contemporaries and comparing them with those of just one Telemann or Vivaldi suggests that the public has been massively deprived of the full potential of such composers. A lack of copyright protection may have seen Bernstein et al working even harder and producing an even greater musical legacy.

“The example of the 18th century composers who thrived both in cultural and market terms sheds some doubt on the dogma that without effective copyright the output of symbolic goods would diminish on a significant level,” concludes Barbosa. He suggests that a system that sidesteps intellectual property rights and copyright [Creative Commons, Copyleft, Open Source, for instance] could be more conducive to high levels of creativity.

Of course, such a suggestion would remove the members of the RIAA and MPAA from the equation, leaving the artists and creators with a direct connection to their listening and watching public. Perish the thought that artists might be able to talk direct to their public with no intermediaries to cream off a percentage.

Denis Borges Barbosa (2010). On artefacts and middlemen: a musician’s note on the economics of copyright International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, 4 (1/2), 23-44

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

What’s wrong with copyright?

Some time ago, the NYT’s David Pogue ran a feature with a bunch of tech tips that seemed obvious to him but that he was shocked to discover a lot of people didn’t actually know. Like Control-L taking your cursor straight to your browser address bar, and the space key scrolling down a page at a time…there were lots of tips, so here are a few more highlights:

* An unexpected or badly written e-mail from eBay, Paypal, any bank, Amazon, Google Adwords, or basically any company from whom you wouldn’t expect to receive an incorrectly addressed email with poor grammar is likely to be a phishing scam. There’ll be a dodgy link in the email that tells you that you must click it and verify your details. Don’t. It’s a scam, a “phishing scam” and the sender will use it to steal your username and password. If you must visit a site, type the address in to your browser yourself, never click through from an email, regardless of how genuine it seems.

* Nobody is going to give you half of a multimillion dollar bank deposit to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire in Nigeria or Nice, not in Burundi or Bournemouth, not even from Liberia ir Liverpool, or anywhere else.

* When someone sends you some shocking e-mail alert or emotive charity appeal and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed that it isn’t just a scam or a chain letter. Best place to check? snopes.com. Snopes is one of the Internet’s best authorities on email myths and online legends. Snopes will help you filter out all those scammy get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and the stories of infantile cancer victims collecting baseball cards. The child in question never did and he’s 64 now, anyway.

* Unless you and your contact are on some major league uber email system, don’t waste your time trying to send more than one or two email attachments at a time if they’re larger than 1 or 2 megabytes. They’ll just bounce back. Instead, if you want to share photos use iPhoto, Picasa, flickr or a drop box type site for other files. There are big mailers out there too, about which I’ve written in the past. You can even send 500 megabyte emails with some of them.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

You knew that, right?

If the wife of FBI boss Robert Mueller has allegedly warned him not to use online banking because his incompetence on the computer could leave them open to online fraud, then is there any hope for protection for the rest of us. This is especially true given the recent news that usernames and passwords for tens of thousands of people who use web-based email services, such as Hotmail, Google Mail, and Yahoo were compromised.

Such happenings have done nothing to quash concerns about so-called phishing scams that trick users into giving away their login details via malicious websites, fear of zombie botnets, and general worries about identity theft and fraud.

Now, a research study by Susan Sproule and Norm Archer of McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada, suggests that more and more of us are abandoning online bank accounts in favor of more traditional financing.

According to their research, one in five Canadians have stopped or reduced the amount of shopping that they do online while almost one in ten are no longer carrying out banking online, or have reduced the amount of online banking that they do because of fraud worries.

That said, in the UK at least, postal strikes mean postal banking could become hideously slow, while the closure of high street banks means online is the only viable way to handle your money these days for many people fraud fear or not.

Phishing for logins is not the only problem. Credit card skimming, insider theft, and counterfeiting of digital information, and ID “trafficking” are on the increase. I suspect that most customers never hear about the banking frauds against them, as the banks don’t want the bad publicity and so simply absorb the losses and gloss over the problem.

“These findings are of concern to business and government,” Sproule says, “since, if consumers stop doing business online, the productivity benefits of e-business will not be realized.”

The researchers have modeled such crime and defined ID theft and fraud as two distinct but related problems, which could help legislators to do their job better and arm law enforcers with appropriate tools to pursue and convict of cyber criminals.

Incidentally, other researchers are refuting the accounts of Google and Microsoft as to how all those tens of thousands of login details got hijacked. They’re suggesting that something more insidious than phishing occurred and that a botnet keylogger may actually be to blame. Moreover, with Microsoft/Sidekick losing data and backups for thousands of users of that mobile device and releasing its security essentials program just recently, perhaps there really is something else sinister going down…

Susan Sproule, & Norm Archer (2010). Measuring identity theft and identity fraud Int. J. Business Governance and Ethics, 5 (1/2), 51-63

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

First Online Banking…then what?

Sometimes trying to improve something is doomed to fail. I wanted to give Sciencetext readers a better experience when reading posts and leaving comments, so I installed various plugins one after the other that are supposed to boost discussion and increase the options available for commenters.

I tried Disqus, which took an age to stall on importing comments, so I have up.

I tried IntenseDebate, which was fast to import, but then timed out on page load.

I tried ChatCatcher, which works on Sciencebase.com but spewed up errors and failed on Sciencetext.

I tried Gravatars, which worked briefly and show up in the comment dashboard but default to the default icon throughout the site proper. FAIL.

Obviously, I uninstalled each system after trying one at a time. And ran Clean Options and then did a database repair and optimize via phpMyAdmin, just to make sure everything was back to normal. Of course, it wasn’t. Comments were not working at all. Readers trying to comment simply got a 404 error for the file wp-comments-post.php instead of seeing their comment displayed below the others on the post…

This is where things start to get frustrating. I doubled checked the comments files and configuration files in Wordpress for spurious blank lines at the start and end of each file. Somehow these can get added in error and blank lines at the top or bottom of a php script will break it. None of those were to blame.

So, was it the Theme, did my tinkering with all those plugins and addons some disrupt the site? Seems not I tested the site with the default theme and comments still failed.

Final step was to check the site’s .htaccess file (a root level configuration file) and lo and behold…up top a single spurious line totally unrelated to any of those plugins but linked to an anti-spam system now in place on Sciencetext. This spurious line was redirecting the wp-comments-post.php to nowhere, wrongly, of course.

Once I had removed the redirect line commenting was immediately back to normal…so please do take the opportunity to leave your thoughts below. Also, if you want to know more about the spam filter we’re using (which blocks all spam bots, 100% with no false positives ever) then send me your email address.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Blog Comments Fail Fixed

Did you get an email with the following text recently, or something similar, claiming to be from DHL:

Unfortunately we failed to deliver the postal package you have sent on the 11th of July in time because the addressee’s address is incorrect. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our department.

It had a subject line of “DHL Delivery Problem Number 95744″.

At the it came through, I was expecting a major delivery from DHL so my heart sank at the thought that there’d been a communication breakdown. It’s always the same, drives you insane…

But, of course, I kept a level head and was within a nanosecond suspicious of the email as this was supposed to be a delivery problem regarding a package I had sent. I hadn’t sent anything.

I googled the the text in the email and hit a German website where the headings and stand out words made it obvious this was a known spam/scam/trojan. Here’s the machine translation, which gives you the gist of what to watch out for:

DHL Spam with Trojaner D25a0335d.zip: Who receives DHL Delivery problem of NR and an attached number combination since this morning enamels with the lines for reference text, this should leave please unopened and ideally immediately delete. Naturally these enamels do not come from DHL, but times again of any criminal Spammern, which try, you a nice Trojaner to under-be jubilant… thus ask caution! Our virus scanners do not have in the packed file D25a0335d.zip threat seen, however after that unpack emerged the alleged Excel document of D25a0335d.exe very fast as the actual harming code of the DHL Trojaners…

Weirdly, there wasn’t actually an attachment to the alleged DHL email I received, so nothing to Trojanize my computer, thankfully. But, it’s another phish to watch out for.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

DHL Trojan Spam

Hands up: who clicks through on banner ads and popups? That many of you, really? Interesting…

You may be surprised to learn that banner ad click through rates are very low. That could be a bad thing from the point of view of web users as much of the content on the web is paid for through advertising. As the web matures and particularly during an economic downturn, there is growing pressure from shareholders for content providers to start charging for their wares and at least offering a premium model.

The fundamental problem is that banner ads and popups don’t seem to be paying their way and are, to a huge proportion of web users, nothing more than an annoyance. To the savvy user with the right browser and appropriate plugins (AdBlockPlus and NoScript on Firefox), the annoyance becomes invisible as the software flicks away the popups and de-renders the banners.

Marketing expert Matthew Bunker of the University of Northern Iowa, USA, working with doctoral student Darrell Bartholomew of the Spears School of Business in Stillwater, Oklahoma, point out that researchers have barely touched on the question: why are banner ad click-through rates so extremely low?

One of the main issues that needs to be addressed if advertising is to provide a sustainable business model for countless websites is that users simply don’t trust popups and banners. So often, the computer security industry and its pundits warn against clicking such entities for fear of contracting a virus, spyware or becoming the victim of scams and spams. Moreover negative word-of-mouth means that many, many users regard ads with suspicion and yet they are only too happy to visit a shortened URL via a social networking site such as Twitter or Facebook only to be presented with some video clip or “amusing” graphic created by marketing campaigners hoping to make their product go viral.

In the heady days of 2007, before the credit crunch and just as web 2.0 went mainstream, internet advertising revenues almost peaked at $10 billion for the first six months of that year. Static banner ads accounted for about a fifth of that revenue while rich media, ads with animation, sound or interactivity accounted for about 7% of the revenue. Hearsay and anecdotal evidence suggests that those figures are not being repeated in today’s market. However, even at the revenue peak, click-through rates had fallen from 7% in the period 1996-2002 (which spans the web 1.0 dot.com bubble) to a tenth that rate at 0.7%

Marketeers, ad account managers, and brand management agencies will always tell you that there’s more to a campaign than a click-through rate but brand awareness is simply not as important as bodies on seats, when we’re talking about the bottom line.

Bunker and Bartholemew explain that other research has shown click-through rate literature to be determined by users need to maintain social relationships, to relax and pass the time, to satisfy their curiosity, and to show an interest in the product. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a banner ad as a way to maintain social contacts, isn’t that what the phone, the pub, instant messaging, SMS, and Facebook, even, are for? Moreover, I’ve never, in an idle moment felt the urge to click on an animation advertising some obscure product and certainly not to relax…

In the early years of the popular internet, banner ads were a novelty, so perhaps people were clicking through out of curiosity. But, novelty wears off pretty quickly and once the web had reached a critical mass and diversity it seems that there would always be yet another site to visit that didn’t require a curious click on an ad. It’s different, of course, if you’re shopping online, you are then far more likely to be inclined to click an ad if it’s for something you’re planning to buy.

One bad experience early on in one’s net surfing career, however, will turn the vast majority of users off from clicking any ads. This is especially true if they start receiving spam and other unsolicited communications or if that innocent popup delivered an unwanted malicious payload, such as a spyware program, or ingratiated itself on their browser favorites or bookmarks.

“Distrust appears to be a strong antecedent for active avoidance behaviour. This is especially true in the internet environment where uncertainty remains high for most consumers,” say Bunker and Bartholemew.

They point out that trust seems to be the key to sustaining a relevant, non-negligible click-through rate with users of trusted sites more keen to click through banner ads. Of course, in the days after the New York Times website was duped into running an ad carrying Trojan code, even that notion may have changed for yet another portion of the net populace.

“Mistrust is an important variable to investigate in the internet environment due to the vulnerability that occurs with each click of the mouse,” the researchers conclude. If content providers are to be sustained by advertising, they had better become more vigilant in controlling the advertising associated with their brands not only on their own sites but on the sites on which others advertise. Only then will users do the sensible thing, click through the ads, and help keep content free.

Of course, if you’re using NoScript, AdBlockPlus and SkipScreen it’s probably been quite a while since you saw an ad at all…then again, apparently no more than 8% of Americans know what a browser is and certainly see no distinction between a browser and Google, according to a recent strawpoll…

Matthew P. Bunker, & Darrell E. Bartholomew (2009). A multidimensional framework of web browsers’ trust and distrust of banner advertisements. Int. J. Business Information Systems, 5 (1), 19-33

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Who clicks on banner ads?